The Half-Made World (38 page)

He wrapped a surgical rag around her mouth and dragged her by her arm. When she struggled and moaned, he took a little green bottle of chloroform from his pocket and waggled it significantly in front of her eyes. She stopped struggling. Dragging them by their arms, poking them in their backs, he herded Liv and the General down the hallway.

The stooped form of Mr. Root Busro stepped into Creedmoor’s path from an adjoining corridor and turned sad eyes in Creedmoor’s direction. Busro looked neither frightened nor particularly surprised. Creedmoor gestured him out of the way, and he stepped mildly aside.

Creedmoor stopped in passing. “If I shot you, Mr. Busro, what would happen to me? And all the other things in your head? Where would we live if I unhoused us?”

Busro shrugged.

“To break the world. It’s a tempting proposition.”

—Kill him or don’t, Creedmoor. We have places to go.

“Ah—go on, then, Busro. Keep yourself well, for all our sakes. Come on, Doctor.”

Busro wandered away, and Creedmoor dragged Liv and the General down the stairs, down the hall, and toward the stables.

Aha! Footsteps, rushing; then at the other end of the hall, a half dozen men came running or, in some cases, limping.

Renato was at the fore. He wasn’t stupid, Renato: he sized up the scene quickly. Renato was an old soldier, Creedmoor recalled—Renato, too, had probably dragged more than a few women struggling away from their homes in his time.

“Cockle, have you gone mad? Let her go. The old man too.”

“Or what, Renato? I am armed and you are empty-handed. I
will
be passing through.”

Renato looked so disappointed! Or so Creedmoor thought; it was hard to be sure, with the scars on Renato’s face, and the red domino covering his maimed mouth. But Creedmoor was well familiar with other people’s disappointment.

Renato folded his arms and stood in the middle of the hallway. The other men stood beside him. Arms folded—those who had two arms—they blocked the hallway. They stood calmly.

Renato sighed. “You may’ve gone mad, Cockle. But you’re not a fool. You know the rules. You know what would happen if you fired. But you won’t. Put it down. Let’s talk.”

—Kill him.

—Must we?

—Of course. He is dangerous.

The gun fired, and the greater part of Renato’s head burst bloodily across the wall.

—Did I do that or did you?

—It makes no difference, Creedmoor.

The other men fell to the floor, hands over their heads, and waited for the Spirit to strike.

Nothing happened.

Nothing happened—because of what the Kid had done, a little over an hour previously.

Creedmoor had given him the master keys to the House.

“From the office of the Director himself. Consider yourself honored. Now, go do it. As we discussed. Quickly.”

“What about you?”

“Smashing their rifles. Administering sedatives to their horses. And so on. Two-man operation. Quickly, quickly, poor Daisy’s funeral can’t keep them busy forever, and it isn’t every day a much-loved vegetable dies.
Run!
Or your best approximation. Go
on.
”

Panting, cursing, the Kid limped from door to door, knocking and calling the occupants out. The keys gave him a certain authority. Besides, the inmates needed little persuasion. They were always eager to see the Spirit.

Some of the near-catatonics and depressives had to be dragged out and damn near shoved down the corridor, but the Kid was determined; he was deadly keen to prove himself to Creedmoor.

The Kid collected some thirty or forty of them. Creedmoor had said that should be more than enough.

The Kid led them down through the hallways and the basement corridors and into the tunnels in the rock, where the wheelchair-bound had to be lifted and carried over the shoulders of their fellows.

As they neared the Spirit’s cave, some of the more eager of them ran or limped on ahead.

The Kid
loathed
them: their crippled flesh—their craven need—their cowardice and ugliness.

They crowded past him and into the Spirit’s cave. They sat or slumped in reverent silence around its pool. They bathed in its soft red light, the gentle
drip-drip
of the waters.

The Kid felt the Spirit’s touch as a softening in his bowels; a coolness in his mind; a warming pleasant itch in his scars and his stump. He resented it; he was damned if he would let that
thing
feed on his essence, lap at his wounds, steal his bitterness from him. He gritted his teeth so hard, he opened the stitches on his face and his wounds dampened. He stood at the entrance to the cave, leaned on his stick, scowling, ready and eager to force his fellows back in if they tried to leave. They did not; they sat there. Most of them had their eyes shut. The light bathed them all.

“Get in,” he said.

They looked nervous.

“Go on. All the way in. Why not? No one’s here to stop you.”

They waded in. Two of them first, then another, then another, then a stampede. They laughed and moaned as the water lapped at them.

After a while, the Kid thought maybe the light was dimming—guttering—thinning—sleeping. The constant drip of the water lost its rhythm, and then went silent.

It went dark. The Spirit was sated. It slept. The Kid turned and limped as fast as he could back up the tunnel.

—Kill the rest of them.

—No.

Creedmoor strode right through Renato’s men and past them, dragging the General with one arm, pushing Liv in front of him with the other.

—Do not do that again.

—Do not make it necessary, Creedmoor.

The stables were not far away; a left turn and a left again.

“Can you ride?”

Liv shook her head, then, looking terrified into Creedmoor’s cold eyes, seemed to change her mind and nodded her head
yes
. Creedmoor wasn’t sure what to make of that—and anyway there was only one undrugged horse left in the House—the others standing now drowsy and trembling—and so he had her sit on the same big bay horse as him and the General. Creedmoor snug in the middle; the General in front, lanky bird-boned body held tight in Creedmoor’s lap; Liv behind, holding tight to Creedmoor if she knew what was good for her. So awkwardly arranged—it would be bearable for just long enough—they rode out into the gardens, where the funeral was breaking up in confusion, and what was left of the staff ran for cover at the sight of Creedmoor’s little band. One or two of them tried to shoot—they’d gone and grabbed their rifles from the armory—and their weapons clacked dully and did nothing.

They fled.

Creedmoor turned his attention to a purple-flowering bush not far from the fence, from under which poked out a pair of expensive and well-shined shoes that could belong only to Director Howell.

“Mr. Director, sir! Yes, you; come out of that bush, sir. You dropped your spectacles; take a moment to pick them up. There. There you go. Stand up straight. Will you do me a kindness, Director? Will you open the gates?”

Creedmoor tossed the keys; the Director fumbled the catch and picked them up off the ground. His face was scratched and his neat vest was torn from the thornbush he’d hidden groveling in. He hunched for fear of Creedmoor’s Gun—
fair enough! fair enough!
—and scuttled over to the garden gate, the House’s rear entrance, and unlocked the bars and bolts, and sidled crabwise away. Creedmoor considered shooting him—it seemed unfair that the man who made his career from the House Dolorous was himself unscarred. Marmion urged,

—Kill him. He may still organize a force to pursue us.

. . . and it gave Creedmoor enormous pleasure to spite it.

So Creedmoor rode out of the gardens of the House Dolorous, with the General and Liv balanced precariously before and aft. The hoarse and desperate shouts of the Kid echoed distantly in his ears—the Kid stumping along on his stick after him crying: “You promised! Take me with you! You promised!”

Creedmoor rode out and into the rocks and dust of the canyon. Not as fast as he would have liked, with the woman and the old man to hold on to; but he spurred on the horse a little anyway, in a moment of high spirits. Liv moaned but did not dare let go.

Behind them a wind was gathering and the dust was rising and the pressure was building. The Spirit was perhaps waking from its sated stupor, hungry again for
more
pain,
more
sorrow. . . .

Liv looked back. Out of a blue sky, gray rain clouds formed over the House, and it seemed they swelled and settled into the form of fat haunches and shoulders and pendulous arms reaching out desperately after them. A sad giant; a baffled god. A wheeling flock of birds formed its hair. Its eyes were glimmers of sun, and it wept light as it reached for them.

It tries so hard,
Liv thought. She felt it tug weakly at her soul, and her soul answered.
It tries so hard, but it cannot heal everyone, cannot protect everyone, not in this terrible world.
The horse jolted beneath her.
It cannot cure the world
. Creedmoor yelled something. We
woke it! We made Gun out of our spite, and Line out of our fear, and this poor thing out of our sorrow.
Liv was very afraid for herself, but for a second, as she prayed for it to reach out and save her, she was able to pity it.

. . . but they’d left it too far behind; they were too hard to reach, and it let them go, and recoiled into its lair. The clouds dispersed. The birds moved on. The gray form unraveled. And the overburdened horse came up over the edge of the canyon and onto the red plains. The sky was very wide and blue and cloudless; the sun hung so high and golden, it was like it was daring Creedmoor to steal it. He breathed in dusty air deeply.

“Once upon a time,” the General said, “there was a high tower, where a young girl was visited by white birds. She . . .”

Creedmoor laughed and let the old madman ramble.

Two roads led off into the hills. From the west road there was the sound of roaring engines, coming closer. Wheels and shouting men and clumsy weapons being readied. No surprise; of course they had been waiting and watching for this moment.

Creedmoor felt Marmion’s dark burning strength in his veins; he felt the world go slow and cold and brittle around him while he grew faster and hotter and more terrible with every second.