The Half-Made World (57 page)

He’d have stopped and fought, and maybe won—if he had known their numbers, he would have known whether he could win for sure, but they hulked on the edge of his vision among the rocks and the snowdrifts, and maybe there were ten and maybe there were a thousand.

This was their sacred place—or maybe just their home—and he was an intruder in it, of a particularly loathsome variety. He saw their point; he
was
loathsome, and his master was worse. He preferred neither to kill them nor be killed. Better to run. Besides, there was the girl’s safety to consider—that innocent fragile softness, pale skin stung a raw needy red by the winds, blond hair stiff and rimed, clinging to his Gun-arm, unmanning him. He’d not let any further harm come to her. . . .

Her name had been Rose. She was silent, almost mute, in the mountains—dumbstruck most likely by fear, though Creedmoor liked to imagine it was awe at the beauty of the mountains.

Back down in the material world of smoke and business and dirt and noise, Rose had been a chatty little thing, precocious, you might almost say spoiled. Her father was Alfred Tyrias of the Tyrias Transport Trust, the largest meat-transportation concern in that part of the world. She was an heiress, though she was too young to understand what that meant. She’d spent her life in TTT’s concrete compound, living like a princess, waited on not only by a doting father but also by every dried-up craven old suit or ambitious young brownnose in her father’s employ; and she was innocent enough still to think it quite normal.

And waited on also by Creedmoor, who entered the household as a tutor in writing and elocution, under the name John Cadden.

That had always been one of Creedmoor’s talents: the ability to insinuate himself into the company of the good, and the decent, and the respectable. It was a rare talent among the outlaw cohorts of the Gun. It came easy to him, he liked to think, because he was himself only indifferently evil, only halfheartedly a monster.

And he was good with children. Though he, like all the Gun’s Agents, was infertile, would father no children himself, he had a natural rapport with them, little half-formed creatures that they were. Rose soon adored him. He was a lax tutor, and he amused her.

Rose had put up no struggle when Creedmoor took her, in the middle of the night, and carried her out past the guards, who he’d dispatched in a bloodless manner to spare her innocent eyes, and out over the roofs and the fence and into the wild scrub and woods outside. She’d thought it was an adventure—perhaps even a dream. She’d
giggled
.

The Gun had ordered her kidnapped because of her father, of course, who had been thinking—so the intercepted correspondence said—of throwing his fortunes in with the Line. Father Alfred had been thinking in dollars and cents, shortsightedly, thinking that if the Line ran across his territory, he might lease space on the Engines, might save himself money on each cattle run, might be free to pay a stingy severance to his teams of horse back drovers and simply hand the stock over to the machines, which would run cheap and reliable—but that would only be the start of things, would only be the first intrusion of the Line on that unspoiled territory, would be the first tremor of a quake that would flatten and swallow all of father Alfred’s world, and reduce him ultimately to less than nothing. . . .

Or so Creedmoor’s masters had briefed him; admittedly, in all his weeks bowing and scraping and charming his way into the household’s inner circle and the child’s innocent affections, Creedmoor had seen no sign of any such intention on father Alfred’s part, and he had come to wonder if the Guns were not running some deeper and darker scheme than they were letting on to him—offense
was
more in their nature than defense. But grand strategy wasn’t Creedmoor’s business.

Creedmoor took the girl from her bed at night. And he would have gotten clean away had there not been men of the Line spying on the compound from the hills with their telescopes, and had those men of the Line not wired up the woods with tripwires and alarms and bombs, and had they not had troops waiting. As it all shook out, he ended up cut off at the bridge, fled north into the mountains instead of south toward the waiting haven, and fled up and up into the snows, where the Linesmen, fat slow-moving earthbound black-lunged creatures that they were, fell behind; and then he’d have been free and clear had he not blundered across the caves the Mountainfolk called home.

“Keep them away,” Rose cried into his chest. “Don’t let them get me.” That was when she was still strong enough to speak. He promised her he’d keep her safe, he’d always keep her safe. . . .

—You cannot keep that promise, Creedmoor.

—I can and I will.

—Do not forget what you are, Creedmoor. You are not a good man.

The Mountainfolk chased Creedmoor for days. Howling and drumming, bashing their long, long arms on the ice in outrage and loathing. Night came and went; the girl slept from time to time in his arms. He wasn’t sure when she slept or when she was awake—the trembling was the same, and after the first few days, she was always silent. He broke from the shadows of the rocks and out across a vast glacial plain, a sea of ice that shone in the cold white sun so that he might have been running on air. The Mountainfolk followed behind him. The cold was so terrible as to numb all but the finest and purest feelings, of love and joy and pity and awe. Bit by bit Creedmoor stripped himself almost naked so as to wrap Rose as warmly as possible in his clothes, so that she became a formless mass of leather and linen and denim, while Creedmoor’s own ugly body was exposed to the sun and the ice, and he was scoured by the cold until he looked as raw and wild and alien as the Folk pursuing him. He was kept alive only by Marmion’s fires. He crossed the plain and ascended the shifting slopes of a peak that was carved square and steep like a church tower. Higher and higher . . . He was sure-footed; he’d kept his boots on, at least. And he leapt across a crevasse that was deep and black as death—and so wide that to clear it, he had to call upon all the strength Marmion had to spare, and he hung in the air over the depths for so long, it seemed he was falling or flying—and in so doing, he left the raging First Folk behind, and could continue through that elevated world in peace. The mountains were a skin of ice and air over pure thoughts. . . .

But soon enough the girl died anyway, days before he was able to make it back to the warmth of the world below. Cold, or hunger, or terror—who knew? Perhaps simply the thinness of the air, which was near-unbreathable—unlike Creedmoor, little Rose still needed to breathe. He suddenly felt her body become heavy in his arms—like the stone that sank in his gut.

But of course, it was better that way. Better that her soul vanished, sublimely, into the light of the mountains—better that than that he drag her back down with him and pass her over into the care of his masters. Probably it had not been painless, but she had at least remained
innocent
.

That was a dreadful, sickening thing to think; it reminded Creedmoor what he really was.

He scraped up snow to cover the body—he couldn’t bury her in the hard earth with his bare hands and his own strength, and Marmion wouldn’t aid him. Marmion only said,

—You failed us, Creedmoor. The girl was valuable.

Then he lay down in the snow beside her and waited to die. Waited for Marmion to tire of him and remove its protection from him, so that the cold would take him.

—We will not abandon you, Creedmoor.

—Let me go.

—Your life is not yours to throw away.

His limbs stiffened and went numb, but not frostbitten. His skin wove itself into the ice so that it was agony to tear away, when finally he recovered the will. And in the end, it was the boredom that got to him. He could lie not-dying in the snow for only so many days and nights before his boredom grew greater than his guilt. Until he began to feel
ridiculous
.

—This is pathetic, Creedmoor.

—It is. Oh, it is.

The episode of poor Rose was just another fact about himself he would have to get used to. Drink or drugs or women would help.

He stood, and he walked down out of the mountains, naked but for his boots.

—Never call on me again.

—We will if we choose. And you will come to heel.

As it happened, they didn’t call on him for another six years—not, in fact, until his current mission, with the General, and the Doll House, and poor Liv—not till this latest stage in his headlong descent into disgrace and damnation.

On the other hand, there’d been the episode in the mountains at Devil’s Spine seven years before, which had been a glorious success from start to finish; and last time Creedmoor had been in that country, they were
still
singing ballads about his daring and cunning, though admittedly they got his name wrong. . . .

In a ditch between four sharp rocks, the monster had made another cache of corpses. Mostly bones and horn; some red and stinking meat. Predominantly the bones were from the local deerlike animals—but what caught Creedmoor’s eye was the fairly fresh corpse of a human male, whose red jacket was torn and bloodied and had been patched a dozen times with fur but was nonetheless recognizably the uniform of an officer of the Red Valley Republic.

—Well, well. What do we make of that, then?

There was still no answer.

CHAPTER 39

LOWRY’S DUTY

Lowry wandered among the oaks. Where was he? Where was the enemy? He had no slagging idea. All he knew was shadow and sun and the hideous sound of dry leaves ceaselessly cracking and rustling, and—lately—Subaltern Collier’s whining.

“Sir. Acting Conductor Lowry, sir . . .”

Lowry marched and Collier followed behind him, complaining. Collier put an emphasis on the word
Acting,
which at first Lowry had found insulting, but after a while ceased to interest him.

“Sir. We have no goal. No purpose. Sir . . .”

There wasn’t anything much Lowry could say to that, so he ignored it. It was true; they were lost. They had no means of tracking the enemy. They had nowhere near enough provisions for the journey home, and even if they had, they had no idea where home was—they were going in circles.

“Sir,” Collier said patiently, “we’re going in circles.”

Well, yes. Under the oaks, there was no way of knowing what direction they were going. The sun was only occasionally visible, and had not set for what felt like several days, and generally could not be trusted. A few sleeps ago, Subaltern Gauge had had the bright idea of hacking marks into the trees so that they could
confirm
that they were going in circles, but the marks
vanished
—and yet their bootprints in the soft dark mud did
not
. So if it was a trick, it was a stupid one—malevolence for the sake of malevolence—the oaks
wanted
Lowry to see the trick, and know their hatred for him. He’d ordered charges to be placed on the trunk of one ancient mossy oak and detonated the horrible thing, let loose a dreadful hammering of noise and weight that blasted the wood to splinters and sent the leaves scattering in a panic. That made a mark. Soon it was swallowed. They didn’t have enough charges to blast a path. They didn’t have enough of anything for anything.

“Sir, Subaltern Gauge has deserted.”

Lowry stopped and turned to look at Collier’s bearded filthy face. “Has he?” He was quite surprised.

“Yes, sir. Not sure when. He took ten men with him—they’d been lagging behind for a while and—”

Lowry shrugged, kept marching. Gauge’s was neither the first desertion nor would it be the last. Lowry was no longer certain how many men were under his command. Roughly 150. In addition to the desertions, there had been suicides.

“Sir,” Collier said. “I must insist we turn back. Additional forces will be coming behind us, sir, we can rejoin—”

“No,” Lowry said.

“Sir—”

“We do our duty. The enemy may waver in his loyalty, but we do not. Not made that way. Don’t have the parts. We can wish that we did, but we don’t. We go on.”

“Sir—”

“We go on.”

Lowry wasn’t a superstitious man or an imaginative one, but under the timelessness of the oaks, it was impossible not to entertain premonitions of one’s end; and he saw himself falling in his tracks in a drift of leaves, or dead of a fever or starvation, or twisting and breaking his leg on a root so that they’d have to shoot him, or . . . The one thing all his visions had in common was that his death would be meaningless and anonymous, and he would be quickly forgotten. Therefore, it was very important that he do his duty now.

“Sir. I
insist
that we turn back.”

Another possible end, of course, was that Collier might finally screw up the courage to mutiny, at which point the first Lowry would likely hear of it would be the bayonet in the back; and then Collier would be Lowry, interchangeable, each equally adequate or inadequate for the task, and it would be
Collier
who’d fall exhausted into the leaves. . . .