The Half-Made World (46 page)

In the morning, some instinct prompted Creedmoor to shake out his boots; and indeed, there was a scorpion, glistening and white and red and heavy-coiled like a dead thing’s intestines, hiding in the heel of the left—or, as he observed to Liv, the
sinister
—boot. “The world is very full of treachery,” he said. She flinched, and he smiled to show he bore no grudge.

In fact, scorpions always reminded Creedmoor of his youthful days in a backwoods scorpion-handling cult in Gacy. (The trick was to be so unrighteously drunk, the creatures would disdain to touch you.) The little beasts now afflicted him, not with fear or distaste, but with a kind of affectionate embarrassment. He stamped on it anyway.

The river’s empty gorge stretched on for another day, and they followed it. Dry mud gave way to a loose and shifting sand. The gorge narrowed and sharpened. The sun rose behind them; all morning their shadows stretched long and dark before them.

The hills on either side of the gorge were purple with heather and sage. Round rocks—strange molten shapes, the rock of ancient fires and eructations—swelled up out of the purple—like an army of trolls out of the myths of old Koenigswald.

At midmorning, Creedmoor—who was in fine form—called a halt to their progress. Two beautiful birds—white breasted, golden crested; powerful, regal, remote—circled and swooped across the valley. Creedmoor said that he wanted to watch them, for a moment, only for a brief moment. He seemed sincere. To Liv’s surprise, he did not kill them. At first she watched, skeptically, Creedmoor’s face; soon she, too, was watching the birds.

When she returned her gaze to the earth, Liv shrieked and put her hands to her mouth in shock.

The hunched rocks on either side of the river had faces and glittering red eyes; and they were looking coldly down on her.

Their shoulders were covered in long black hair that fell to the ground. Beneath the hair the rock was now bone-pale skin. They hunched and crept forward on through the heather. Their legs were too long, overarticulated, which should have made their gait awkward; somehow it was not. They carried stone spears, stone axes.

There were a hundred or more of them; their ranks stretched up into the distant hills.

Creedmoor put a hand on Liv’s shoulder and said, “Steady.” He drew his weapon. She flinched to cover her ears, expecting the flash and the thunder; but he did not fire. Instead he held the weapon by its barrel, at arm’s length, as if it was a talisman.

Creedmoor called out—and now Liv did cover her ears, because his voice was impossibly, inhumanly loud—“We do not dispute your ownership of this valley. We do not wish to challenge its spirits. We are passing through. We do not want to do you harm. But if you try to stop us, we will surely destroy you. My demon is stronger than any of yours.”

Creedmoor’s voice rose in volume throughout this speech; by the end, it boomed and echoed off the rocks like an avalanche.

He spoke again, in a different language, guttural and choking; and again, in a deeper and harsher tongue that Liv recognized as Dhravian, and he boomed out the words yet again in the nasal Kees-tongue. Liv turned away, her hands clamped over her ears, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the rocks were only rocks and the valley was still and quiet, save for the wind and those circling distant birds.

Creedmoor was staring darkly into the middle distance.

“Were they really here or was that a trick of the valley? Will they let us pass?”

Creedmoor said nothing. She approached carefully.

“Creedmoor. Will they let us pass? Creedmoor—if they will not let us pass, we must go around them—you cannot take the General into—”

Creedmoor shook himself. His eyes cleared and he smiled. He gave her shoulder an avuncular pat and said, “They’re only playing a game with us. I wouldn’t worry yourself overmuch.”

—The First Folk. These lands are not ours yet, so they’re theirs still. I have never seen so many free and wild. If they decide to make themselves our enemy, it may go badly for us. Their powers will be terrible here, where things are loosely made already. The earth will serve them.

There was no answer.

—Listen. If they decide we are an enemy and they
should
decide we are an enemy if I were them I would decide we were an enemy then we are likely dead or dead if we are
lucky
; I hear tell that when they torture a man they have it in their power to keep him alive for eternity as his entrails are wound on a spear; they are very curious about our workings. They want revenge. I know you understand
revenge.
They will drag us down under the red rock where there is no time and no dying. They are before us and the Line is behind. What shall we do?

He waited.

—Your deliberations cannot take this long, or consume your attention so fully. You are not deliberative creatures. You lied to me. You cannot reach out here. Or you have abandoned me.

He was alone in his head.

—Well, then.

He reminded himself that he was happy to be alone.

There were no further incidents that day, or the next. Sage gave way to shimmering terraces of ash-white leafless aspens, then to a thick dark forest of some stout evergreen neither of them could name. The riverbed widened then narrowed again, and continued westward. There was a tremendous noise of rushing water from the south, over the hills, but the gorge continued dry. The sun set early the first day, and the moon was swollen as if it were crashing to earth. The next night, it seemed the sun would never set at all—though it seemed, even while the sky was still hot and blue, that the stars were crowding impatiently at the edge of vision.

The General did not speak all day, despite Liv’s efforts. She read to him from the
Child’s History,
she questioned him regarding his system of Virtues and his theories of politics, she criticized his tactics, she talked gently of nothing in particular—he didn’t respond.

They had no idea of time. Liv’s golden watch was still not working; Creedmoor was used to telling the time by the sun, which was proving itself unreliable. So they stopped when they had to—that is, whenever the General could take no more. It usually fell to Liv to remind Creedmoor of the old man’s frailty. Creedmoor grumbled but deferred to her expertise.

Water came and went, according to no rhyme or reason that Liv could discern. Some days the valley walls glittered with a bright web of spring-water rivulets and there were clear pools at their feet. Some days the valley was dry as old bones, the parched earth hard as paving stones. Sometimes days went by waterless, and Liv could share just a few rationed sips of stale water each day with the General, who sickened. . . . Creedmoor’s devil pact sustained him, it seemed, and he went without water with no obvious ill effects save, after the third day, a reddening and contraction of the pupils and a darkening of the skin toward the shade of old blood. But if they pressed on, the water would return, and there would be enough and more than enough, and plant matter to eat, and sometimes a rabbit or thing sufficiently
like
a rabbit. Water’s secret currents pulsed and gathered in the earth, sometimes receding, sometimes surging with life. It came to seem as if
time,
too, surged and receded—the moon overhead sometimes full and ocean blue, sometimes a narrow slit of ice—as if sometimes the riverbed valley remembered its youth, and sometimes it sank into bitter old age. Some days it was a friend and some days an enemy. There was nothing to be done about it but to press on and hope for the best.

“Interesting,” Creedmoor observed.

Light spilled down the valley from a red sun in the west, risen early and hung defiantly low. Long mountain shadows lunged out to meet them. The dry riverbed burned like brass in the sun; the cracks in the mud were a stark lacework of shadow. Even Creedmoor, who could, in normal circumstances, stare into the sun till the damn thing set, had to cover his eyes to look down the valley ahead. “Interesting,” he repeated.

Liv, eyes screwed half-closed and downcast, did not respond. Creedmoor appeared somewhat annoyed, and went silent.

It was another hour’s trek before Liv could see them. First as four long black lines of shadow running down the valley floor toward them. Then as four bleached-white sticks poking up out of the mud in the middle of the valley. Lastly, when they were almost on top of them, as five rough wooden grave-markers.

The markers were wrist-thick branches, cut and stripped white. Three still stood straight. One tilted. One had fallen and was half-buried by dust. Beneath the markers were five shallow mounds of mud and clay.

Three were draped with medals, most of which had fallen on the ground when their ribbons rotted through. On one the words
MOTHER
and
WIFE
and
DAUGHTER
and
TEACHER
were carved; there was a silver necklace wound round it, held in place by rusting wire. An old yellow book, flayed almost to chalk or dust by time, lay beneath a fourth grave.

“These are not Hillfolk graves.”

“No, Liv. We’ll make a frontierswoman of you yet. In fact, the Folk do not exactly bury their dead as we do, but take them deep into their warrens under the rock; I do not know what happens next; I’ve had dealings with them, but no outsider sees the Rebirth.” He lifted a medal off one of the sticks and tossed it up and caught it. “These are the graves of men and women of the Red Valley Republic. We passed another grave site a few days ago, but it was unmarked and I saw no reason to trouble you with thoughts of death. I imagine those graves were of the same party. We are not the first to explore this valley.”

“Clearly not, Mr. Creedmoor. What were they doing here?”

“Deserters, perhaps. Though the Republic’s was not an army much plagued by deserters. I suppose this valley recommended itself to them just as it did to us—as a clear path west, and away from the world and its wars.”

“Maybe they fled the Republic’s fall.”

“Maybe. In the years after the fall, there were purges. I would have fled.”

“When did they pass?”

“Ten, twenty years ago, perhaps?”

“Are you sure? So long ago?”