The Half-Made World (53 page)

The General turned in Creedmoor’s arms and mumbled through his beard, which was wispy and dry again. He was asleep.

With a nod of his head, Creedmoor beckoned Liv back over. She came laughing and crying in relief to take the old man from him.

They left the giants behind in little more than an hour. The valley began to curve sharply south, and the giants were lost to view.

Ahead the sun was setting, and the valley flooded with red light. Creedmoor shielded his eyes from the glare and stared south down the valley ahead, then west up the jagged tree-lined slopes.

“What do you think, Liv? South, sticking with this valley where we’ve had such fun, or strike out west into the heights and the forests and who knows what?”

She stood behind him. The General hung limply on her arm.

“How would I know, Creedmoor?” She shook her head, too tired to think. “Where are the Line? For all I know, they never existed.”

“I haven’t lied to you lately, Liv. A few days behind us still. A little to the south.”

She shrugged. “West, then, I suppose.”

“I agree. West it is. We should be atop these slopes by nightfall. I’ll take our friend.”

“You certainly will.” She passed the General like a sack of meal into Creedmoor’s arms.

“Shall we go?”

“What happened back there, Creedmoor? Why did they let us pass?”

“We may have violated some by-laws of the locals. I had words with their representative. I told her,
I am John Creedmoor, how dare you bar my path!
And she turned tail and ran.”

“Then don’t tell me. And what happened before? When you held your head and—”

“My master is gone.” The words came out abruptly, and his face closed behind them. He paused, as if waiting for a blow that never came.

“For now,” he added.

“Creedmoor . . .”

He kept staring west.

“We’ll talk later.” He glanced back at her. “I have to think.”

He started out bounding up over the rocky banks and up the slopes and into the trees, the General slung over his back. Maybe he was telling the truth about his master’s absence, and maybe he wasn’t; what was clear, though, was that his horrible strength and speed were not significantly diminished. Liv followed as best she could.

CHAPTER 35

THE SHADOWS

Lowry breathed deeply in the freezing fog, and clutched his gun with the same tight panicked grip one might use when riding on the outside of an Engine as it swerved hugely around high mountain passes. . . .

He counted the shadows around him.

“Mr. Collier?”

“Yes, sir. Sir, I—”

“Who’s missing, Collier?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“Come here. Stay close.”

There was motion in the fog. Black and gray bodies, swinging arms and legs, waving arms, heads a vague bobbing blur. Shadows at work. Lowry thought again of motion pictures, like
We Too Play Our Part,
with its great scenes in the foundries of Harrow Cross, the screen a mass of moving black-and-white shadows, five thousand tiny soot-blackened men in clouds of smoke, moving like pistons. . . .

Five bodies came running up out of the fog and revealed themselves to be a bunch of privates Lowry didn’t recognize—each of them unshaved and filthy and a general disgrace but under present circumstances a beautiful sight—and Lowry said, “You men. Stay close. Follow me.”

And he thought of
Victory at Logtown!
which he hadn’t seen for twenty years, but he still remembered vividly the battle scenes, the grainy flickering shadows of the screen hiding a thousand mercenaries of the Gun, who were, in fact, played by Linesmen as decent and upstanding as Lowry himself but who were transformed by the shadows into nightmares of depravity, savagery, and wickedness. . . .

He pressed forward. Two bodies came toward him through the fog, the first waving an arm as if the fog were smoke that could be cleared away, the second following a step behind.

The first figure proved to be Subaltern Thernstrom, who lowered his arm and met Lowry’s eye with palpable relief.

“Sir, there you are—sir, this fog, some of the men—”

The figure that stood behind Thernstrom stepped forward, then, and though it seemed to emerge from the fog, it brought the fog
with
it, because where there should have been a face under a black cap with the plain honest features of a Linesman, there was only shifting gray dust.

Lowry stood and watched with baffled horror as the figure in Thernstrom’s shadow reached forward and yanked Thernstrom’s knife from his belt and—as Thernstrom said
some of the men are missing
—drove it up into Thernstrom’s back. Thernstrom convulsed and jerked suddenly forward, and a good quarter pint of shockingly bright red blood splattered from his open mouth.

Lowry shot the thing behind Thernstrom in its head. It dissolved to the ground in dust. Thernstrom’s body slumped beside it.

“Collier. You men.” Lowry turned and scanned their pale faces. “Are you all men? All right. All right. You’ll do. Stand back to back. Follow.”

He knew where he was now. A battlefield. This was enemy action; whether it was the Folk or the land itself or somehow some horrible trap the Agent had laid for them was beside the point. The field of battle was always the same, differing only in the particular arrangement of bodies and forces and fortified lines and vectors and inclines—details varied, but the problem posed was essentially invariant.

Two shadowy figures in Lowry’s path were locked arm in arm, wrestling. Collier acted smartly and shot the shadowier of the two in its leg, and the whole eerie shapeless half-made creature burst into dust, leaving a very grateful Private (Third Class) Plumb alive and breathing heavily.

Moments later, Collier stumbled over another dead Linesman and fell forward onto his hands and knees. A figure came running up out of the fog and proved at the last minute faceless just as it swung an arm holding someone’s pistol like a club down at the back of Collier’s head—Plumb drove his bayonet into it. It fell apart. Collier got to his feet covered in a shower of reddish gray dust but otherwise unharmed.

Lowry barked orders, gestured. But in fact, discipline was already reasserting itself, with or without him. The men of the Line fell into their places unbidden, automatically. Weeks of exhaustion and disorientation and despair and confusion blew away like dust, and the steel beneath was revealed. Lowry’s squad came stumbling out of the fog to find that Subaltern Slate had already organized some one hundred men into a line, back-to-back, fifty on each side, against which the shadows and dust devils that came running and sneaking out of the rock charged and burst harmlessly. Slate’s line passed through, taking slow methodical steps, and Lowry’s squad was wordlessly integrated.

Lowry, for a moment, lagged behind. He watched the line pass away into the fog. Muzzle flashes sparked in the gray, marking its path. The fog echoed with the crack of rifles. No screaming now.

By Lowry’s side, the fog eddied, convulsed, and a brief tiny whirl of wind like a drain in reverse lifted dust and grit and shards of flint up from the ground and spun them like potter’s clay into a form that was roughly human. Lowry shot it.

He hurried after Slate’s line and fell in.

Afterwards, he wrote in clumsy longhand a report that would almost certainly never be read, but which he nevertheless felt was necessary.

The confrontation persisted for roughly two hours. In the first minutes with the advantage of surprise and disorder 110 casualties were sustained. However, the discipline of the Line could not be broken and only six men were lost in the following two hours, mostly to friendly fire. It is probable that this action was a tactic of First Folk who claim this wilderness as theirs. Their tactics are as always ineffective against good order and training and the will of the Line.

There are now 219 men fit for duty including myself. Subalterns Thernstrom and Drum were among the dead, and First Signalman Sinclair. Gauge and Mill have been promoted to Thernstrom’s and Drum’s place. No artillery or munitions were lost. However, the Signal device was lost to friendly fire. Therefore First Signalman Sinclair will not be replaced. We can no longer listen to or track the Agent. We now operate without orders or directions or realistic hope of success. Morale is low. Nevertheless we push west.

BOOK FOUR

A LAND FIT FOR HEROES

CHAPTER 36

THE ROSE

Liv sat in a silent sunlit clearing, her legs folded beneath her, studying a rose.

The floor of the clearing was soft dirt and leaves, interrupted by occasional crests of grass. The clearing was about the size of a ballroom. It was bounded by a stream on one side, and on the other a fallen ancient oak, its shape blurred by decades of moss and decay. There was a low mound of earth in the middle of the clearing, and a single rose grew from it. The rose was the only thing visible anywhere that was neither green nor brown nor the blue of the vast sky overhead; it was only natural that it drew Liv’s attention.

What color the rose actually
was
was unclear. At first glance, it had seemed to be an intense sunrise red. As Liv came curiously closer, its petals had flushed shyly, shifting down through the spectrum, purpling. By the time Liv sat beside it, it was a deep pulsing amaranthine. She suspected that if she turned her head away, it might change again.

It was also not strictly speaking a rose, though of all things of the made world, it most closely resembled a flower, and of all the flowers Liv knew, it most closely resembled a rose. It was more like a sketch of a rose, perpetrated by a person who’d never seen one; or, more precisely, it was like the product of processes that would, in the made world, have resulted inevitably in a rose, but out here were not so narrowly constrained.

Its petals formed a corolla that was roselike, yet iterated over and over, whorls within whorls, past the point of ordinary botanical possibility. Nor was its pattern simply a matter of spirals; there were regularities and irregularities and repeated themes within its architecture that Liv could not begin to describe. The whole thing was no larger than the palm of Liv’s hand, but it appeared to have vast starlike depths. Liv had a sense that it might at any point slowly begin to turn.

It smelled of electricity, and slightly of motor oil; and in its heart, where a flower made more rigorously to the standard specifications would have had soft anthers and filaments, this one had a delicate crisscrossing of golden wires, enclosing something minute and fleshy that pulsed with a steady beat.

With each beat, the petals shivered as if in a breeze.

The thing was hideous. It was ridiculous. It was beautiful. All those things at once, and none of them. It was not meant for her, and her opinions of it were beside the point. It would have been both futile and insulting to classify it; it was neither a rose nor a relative of the rose. It was perhaps in part the
potentiality
of a rose, or an
alternative
to the rose, or more likely something with no meaning at all. . . .