The Half-Made World (74 page)

They kept walking. The ashy plain rose steadily into the west. Liv dragged her feet through it. Her legs were numb and stiff. The sun blazed behind them. They walked in silence—Creedmoor rebuffed every attempt at conversation, and the General had fallen mute. By midday, they were far from New Design. The sky was full of swirling ink-blot clouds.

Six Linesmen followed behind them. They followed at a distance, not daring to come too close. The plains were broad and treeless, however, and every once in a while, the Linesmen came close enough that even Liv could make them out—a row of black specks on the horizon. On one such occasion, Creedmoor suddenly turned and fired, and then there were five. Creedmoor holstered his gun again and kept walking.

“What’s the point, Creedmoor? Why are they following us? There aren’t enough of them to fight you, they must see that.”

He shrugged. “No point. They have their duty.” He turned an awful cynical smile to her, and she understood, immediately and without doubt, what she had to do.

Her palms began to sweat and her gut twisted with fear. But she kept walking, following Creedmoor, and apparently he noticed nothing different in her stride or her expression or her scent; or at least he kept walking, too, his back to her, his head down.

Toward the late afternoon, they began to see lights on the horizon, behind the western hills, where storm clouds massed over the nameless sea. Not quite colored or quite colorless, the lights made Liv think of deep willow green, and blood red; very faint, so that they could only be seen from the corner of the eye, or for a second as one lifted one’s gaze from the earth underfoot. They towered and leapt as if they were dancing the world into being out of the thunderclouds.

Behind them the Linesmen crept closer. Creedmoor seemed to ignore them.

Toward evening, the flatness of the plain was interrupted by dunes, mounds, of the stuff that was like ash or sand or grit; at first they were little pockmarks, knee high, but soon the surface of the plain rose and fell like a frozen sea, and the General had to be dragged up the shifting side of ash-waves taller than Creedmoor and Liv put together, and progress slowed.

And near nightfall—as they crested, with great effort, a dune of unusual height and obstructiveness, each of them holding one of the General’s arms, dragging his limp legs, Creedmoor snarling and cursing as his feet slid and stumbled through the ash—Liv understood that there would likely never be any better moment, and so, in an instant, made her decision and acted.

She cried out,
“I cannot
do
this anymore!”
and she let go of the General’s arm and fell to her knees. Naturally the General fell, too, limp as a rag doll, and Creedmoor nearly followed them both down. He grunted in annoyance as he tried to maintain hold of the old man while keeping his footing on the shifting ash-slope. The General chose that moment to twist in Creedmoor’s arms and he staggered back, bracing his feet wide as he slid. And Liv, saying,
“Sorry, Creedmoor, sorry, I’m just so tired,”
stepped up behind him and put a hand on the small of his back as if to steady him, so that he grunted thank you, and with her other hand she drove her knife into him.

He made no sound of surprise.

She forced the knife up into the muscle of Creedmoor’s back, under his ribs. It was surprisingly easy. Sighing, Creedmoor fell backwards onto the knife and his own weight forced it in to the hilt. He let the General go, and the old man slid face-forward then in a tangle of limbs down the slope of ash. Blood poured from Creedmoor’s wound all down Liv’s sleeve. His arm spasmed, groping for the Gun at his side, so she twisted the knife and drew it, sawing somewhat through muscle and sinew and bloody fat, across Creedmoor’s side and out through his flank.

Even as she cut, the flesh seemed to close hungrily around the blade, as the power of Creedmoor’s demon set about mending him. She’d known that would happen, and the sight of it horrified her perhaps less than it should have; she felt very numb. She did not intend to let it stop her.

She gripped Creedmoor by the sweaty back of his collar and set about widening the wound so that it would not heal. She was no surgeon, of course, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t, in the course of her medical education, practiced with cadavers; and though she’d never excelled in that sort of work, she knew how to handle a knife. She concentrated on her memories of long-past lectures and examinations and tried to forget what she was doing. Blood soaked her.

Creedmoor’s arm worked its way to the Gun again and fumbled it from the holster, so she removed the knife and drove it back in under his armpit, slicing sinews, stripping the flabby meat of the underarm from the bone. The Gun fell in the ash with a soft thump and then a sudden echoing crash as it discharged pointlessly into the air, which Liv hardly noticed, because her ears were full of Creedmoor’s astonished bellowing. The Gun slid heavily down the slope, making sideways slithering marks in the ash like a snake in desert sand.

Liv laughed for no reason she could clearly understand, and in a moment of inspiration recalled the delicate operation of the tendons in the back of the leg, and sliced smartly at them, twice back and forth. Then she drove the knife twice more between Creedmoor’s ribs, her arm weakening, her hand shaking—and then again. Then, laughing and sobbing, she put her hands on Creedmoor’s ragged bloody back and shoved him down the slope.

He lay in the creeping shadow of his own blood. He was not yet dead, and already he was healing; he pushed himself up on his elbows as if to crawl, then fell again. He still made no intelligible sound. Liv’s hair had fallen soaked with sweat in her face, and when she pushed it back, she covered it with blood—which appalled her—so she took the knife and sliced away great handfuls of bloody hair—until the whole notion began to seem absurd, and she dropped the knife and laughed, and then sobbed, and then with great effort controlled herself. She could not straighten her clothes or her hair, because her hands were wet with blood, and she could not quite stop them fluttering idly at her side; but close enough, close enough.

Beneath her, Creedmoor was healing rapidly, but she no longer had the will to hurt him further. The moment had passed. She could not and would not do it again. Her heart pounded and her legs were unsteady. She went sliding down the slope to retrieve the General.

The General lay tangled in the wet ash. His shirt was torn and soaked with blood. There was a neat tiny bullet wound in his side. His breathing was labored, and there was a little blood in his eyes.

“. . . How?”
she said. Then she remembered how the Gun had fired as it fell, and she’d thought nothing of it at the time.

Now the weapon lay a little way away, and it was still.

Creedmoor moaned, wrestled his torn and broken arm back into its socket, and sighed with deep satisfaction. He held up his hand as if testing the fingers; they spasmed. He tried to sit up but failed and coughed blood.

“I’m sorry, Liv,” he said. “But what did you think would happen? What did you think my master would do? If we cannot have the General, no one will.”

“He is not dead yet, Mr. Creedmoor. The bullet passed through. He may live.”

Creedmoor rolled his head to see the body. “He won’t.” He looked away again, up at the sky. “I’m sorry.” Creedmoor attempted to sit up again. It seemed to Liv that something important in the muscles of his back or belly had been damaged and not yet mended, because he only twisted and fell and swallowed ash.

Liv sat by the General’s side. She brushed his forehead and made it bloody.

Creedmoor spat the ash out; he said, “The murder was well done, Liv.”

“Thank you, Mr. Creedmoor.”

“You’re not finished yet, though.”

“I have lost the taste for it. I cannot and will not do it again. I refuse. Are you not in the most tremendous pain, Mr. Creedmoor?”

“I’m used to it.” He laughed and gurgled blood. “Oh, Liv, that’s a lie, of course; my master takes the pain from me. I am a terrible coward.”

“I know.”

The General stared up into the clouded sky. His breathing came loud and painful. He seemed to be trying to form words.

Creedmoor spoke again. “What was your plan, Liv, if I may ask?”

“I thought I would kill you, Creedmoor, and take the General away from you. Perhaps we might find survivors in New Design, who would help us back east into the world. We could bring his secret back, if he ever had one, and . . . I think I began to have heroic notions.”

“I know how that is, Liv, I know how that is.”

“If we couldn’t go back, I thought we might walk together into the west, into the sea, and be unmade together. No one would have him; not you, not the Line.”

“A good plan. Better. Simple, decisive, wise. Suicide is often the best course of action. If I tell you how much I sympathize with you, you will not believe me. And now no one
will
have the General’s secret, because he is dead.”

“Not yet.”

“Soon. What will you do now?”

“I am not brave enough to go into the sea alone, Mr. Creedmoor. What will you do?”

“I don’t know. I’m healing, which means my masters have not yet decided to dispose of me, despite this debacle. Maybe they’ve gone to their Lodge to debate what tortures to visit upon me.”

He grunted as he twisted his left leg back into place, and held a hand to the ragged tendons at the back of the knee. Pain, despair, relief mingled on his face.

“More likely they’ll forgive me. The Great War goes on. With Fanshawe gone, and Abban, there aren’t many of us old dogs left. I’ll go home, I guess. Back to work.
I
had heroic notions that I might break free, but I guess that’s all over now.”

From over the edge of the dune, there was the sound of stomping, sliding footsteps; shouting; grumbling; the rattle of packs and cans and weapons.

“Or perhaps not,” Creedmoor said. “Perhaps not.”

The footsteps came closer. The voices of Linesmen carried on the empty night air.

“My Gun, Liv,” Creedmoor said, trying to stand, and failing. “Hand me my Gun, please, Liv.”

But Liv was already off, and running, over the dunes.

Liv fell to her belly—standing, running, would only expose her to the Linesmen’s rifles. She crouched and slithered and crawled through the ash, through the hollows between the dunes. She put some distance between herself and Creedmoor and the General. Lying on her belly, she lifted her head a few nervous inches over the crest of a dune and looked back.

She saw them coming.

Five men. That was instantly clear, though all Liv could see were tiny silhouettes against the spoiled dawn. Short, heavy, heads down, not running but gracelessly stamping forward. A row of distant chimneys squatting the skyline. They went up and over the top of an ash-dune and were gone from view. When they reappeared, they’d grown larger, and she could see the black of their uniforms, the hard jut of their weapons. Two of them carried some kind of heavy box between them; as they came closer, they threw it away and started jogging.

When they were close enough that she could see the gas masks that elongated their jaws into inhuman forms, she slipped down out of sight and slid away. The ash whispered beneath her shifting body and she froze, inched forward again, froze again. She crept away with nightmare slowness. She heard gunfire.