The Half-Made World (78 page)

Liv climbed to the top of the dune and looked back east. In the night, she could see nothing but more dunes; the horizon was close and constricting.

She said, “Are you watching me?”

“I can’t see you, Liv, not from down here—you’d have to untie me—”

“I wasn’t talking to you, Creedmoor. Don’t speak. You’ll open your wounds.”

She looked west. In the distance, the mad clouds roiled, glowing, forming and unforming. She recalled the General’s words:
beneath their warrens there were beautiful and ancient cities.

“Ku Koyrik. You let us pass. Why? Did you mean for this to happen? Did you mean for the General’s secret to come to me? Is this accident or design? What should I do?”

There was no answer.

She knelt, somewhat self-consciously. She stretched out and pressed her ear against the earth, feeling suddenly the great rightness and sanity of that action—but though she remained there for some minutes, she heard only her pulse pounding in her head. There was no message for her.

If she’d had a coin, she might have tossed it, but she didn’t, so the choice had to be hers.

She made her decision and acted at once. She slid down-slope to the ash where Creedmoor lay, and knelt to saw through the oily rags that tied his hands.

He was silent for a long moment. Then he sighed and said, “Thank you, Liv.”

He sat up, stretched his stiff swollen fingers, and winced.

“Hurt less when they were bound. I ask you, does that make any damn sense?”

“Be still, Creedmoor. Let me look at your leg.”

“Ah, Doctor. Doctor. You’re a very wise woman.”

“Never forget it, Creedmoor.”

EPILOGUE

ONE: ENGINE SONG

~ SIX MONTHS LATER ~

The Engines go thundering back and forth across the continent, on scar tissue of tracks raised over the plains, in hideous scarp-sided canyons cut and blasted through the hills. They drive through tunnels and their Song echoes in the darkness, drums beneath the earth, comes crashing out the tunnel mouth into the light in a booming, belling note. New tracks go down, opening new routes. Humboldt to Gloriana, over the wetlands; Antrim to Dryden, obliterating the hills and the villages there; Firth to Coffey. The mesh closes tighter. Lines converge. The tracks are like fences: no one dares cross them. Children come out from towns by the new tracks and stare in awe at those lines stretching into the distance, into the future that waits downline for them. On clear nights, the Engines’ Song beats and drones out over the prairies. Everyone hears it. Everyone, everywhere, knows what’s coming, unstoppable, implacable. . . .

But there’s a new sound in the Song. Something off. A beat that stumbles. A tiny, brittle wrong note. Nothing any human ear can pin down—not in the brief moment of the Engine’s presence, as it comes howling out of the East and receding into the West—but something that’s always there. An impossible impurity. The Linesmen shift uneasily at their posts. They have sleepless nights—they look grayer even than usual. Their hands shake. Construction falters on the new towers of Harrow Cross and Archway. Wiring goes astray and papers are misfiled. Beatings are ordered but morale does not improve.

The Engines sing to each other:
Lowry has failed. Lowry has failed. Months go by and no return. Lowry has failed. The trail is lost. What will come out of the West? What will come?
The sick note is fear, is not-knowing when their end may come. The continent shudders with it.

T
WO:
J
EN OF
T
HE
F
LOATING
W
ORLD

The Floating World overlooks Jasper City from up on the bluffs. By day it’s invisible among the trees. In the night they hang paper lanterns on the branches, and gaslight glows from behind the crimson silk curtains in the girls’ rooms, and the Floating World hangs over businesslike buttoned-up Jasper like a lurid dream.

Strangers come and go by cover of darkness. The girls of the Floating World are famous far and wide, but not all the strangers are there for the girls, and there’s more than one kind of business goes on in the Floating World. Everyone in Jasper knows that, and knows to keep their mouths shut: too much curiosity about those strangers can be fatal. . . .

Knoll comes in after midnight, slamming the door open and letting in the cold, slamming it shut again and rattling the lanterns and making the girls jump and scatter. The patrons look at their feet, sidle out of the room. Knoll’s furs stink. He’s big as a bear, and filthy. Hanks of matted black hair sway from his belt. Hillfolk beards. He collects them. He serves the Gun these days—as the monstrous sledgehammer-sized rifle slung over his back, riding him like a dumb animal, plainly shows—but his masters don’t begrudge him this recreation, so long as he does what’s needed when they Call.

Jenny, scarlet-haired Jenny, smiling Jenny, Jen to those who know her well, madam and proprietor of the Floating World, greets him over by the fire. She claps her hands and her girls scatter, leaving Knoll and Jen alone. He looms over her like a storybook ogre. He shifts uneasily in his tree-stump boots. He belongs in a
cave,
Jen thinks. Jen laughs, and he bows to kiss her gloved hand, and she keeps laughing as Knoll remains stiffly stooped. Under her scarlet skirts, on her thigh, there’s a Gun silver and sharp as a needle. Jen of the Floating World thinks,

—Knoll.

—Ma’am.

—You look different.

—Never seen you before, ma’am. They don’t let me in places like this.

—I should think not. But I didn’t mean you. I meant your weapon. Or what rides it. It used to belong to a friend of mine.

—Yeah? Dead now. Mine now.

—You’re a crude one. A lot of the young ones are crude. These are crude times. I hear you’re a tracker.

—Yes.

—There’s work for you. The Lodge is close, here. Look into the fire, Knoll. Listen. They speak to us in the flames.

Knoll kneels by the fire, and the flames leap. There’s a bloody blackness at their pulsing core. A voice sounds from a great distance, both familiar and deeply, perversely strange.

—Knoll.

—Master?

—This is not
your
master. You may call me
Marmion
. I blaze bodiless now in our Lodge. Creedmoor bore me into your world, most recently.

—Who’s Creedmoor?

—He is
not
dead, Knoll. We would feel it. Thirty years he served us, sometimes well though never faithfully. We would feel it. He is not dead, and yet the months go by and he has not returned.

Jen thinks,

—He should’ve come here, Knoll. I was the contact. He should have come here
if
he was coming back to us.

—Who’s Creedmoor? Never heard of him.

—He has not come back to us. He has
betrayed
us. That woman has led him astray.

Knoll furrows his brow:

—Master?

The one that called itself Marmion said:

—We need a tracker, Knoll. We need a simple man.

—That’s me.

—I will come with you. I am
angry
, Knoll.

T
HREE:
R
EBIRTH

Mr. Waite, leader of the Smilers of what used to be New Design, and is now
New
New Design, finds his faith in a sunny disposition and a positive attitude sorely tested these days. He was never suited to leadership, but the town’s handful of survivors turned to
him
in those dreadful cold months after the Battle, first to keep their spirits high with singsongs and improving homilies, and then, when no better candidate emerged, to be their President.
No, no,
he said,
we must keep the secular and sacred functions of government separate;
and it was pointed out to him that the people of the Republic now numbered 233, and were long past caring for matters of principle; and in the end, how could he say no?

After the winter, they numbered an even two hundred. Leadership in such times is a terrible burden.

He married Sally Morton so that her unborn child might have a father. It came out wrong—marked
in utero
by the Linesmen’s bombs. It came out thin, and gray, and silent, and cringing, and habituated to fear. Another child is on its way, and Waite is cautiously hopeful.

Waite’s face is no longer smooth or boyish. Leadership has hardened him. He looks a lot like the old General, now, thin and severe. He smiles only for good reason.

New New Design is built in a river valley, a few miles east of the ruins of the old town. The survivors wintered there in the caves. Now Waite goes walking, once a week, in the ruins. It’s part of his new routine.

He tells his people that he goes walking in the ruins so that he can absorb the wisdom of their dead comrades, and also so that he can scavenge for useful tools. In fact, he goes there mostly to be alone.

He stops among the razed barns on the west side to remember how rich New Design was—how finely engineered a society it was—what a remarkable and generous achievement! And then he thinks that he has no notion of how he might go about building such a thing, and he sits with his head on his hands on a heap of charred timbers.

New New Design is rebuilding again. It’s spring. New houses cut from fresh logs are going up. The children, who number ninety-eight, are being schooled. A schoolhouse was the first thing they built. It’s Waite’s job to rebuild the world. No wonder he needs to be alone sometimes.

He watches birds settle in the rafters.

On the scorched floor, trapped beneath the timbers, is the skeleton of a Linesman, wrapped in a slick gray coat that does not rot and wearing a singed gas mask.

Waite unstraps the gas mask and kicks it with all his strength. Which is not inconsiderable—he used to be a fine athlete. The mask sails, flapping its straps over the ruins of poor dead Mr. Digby’s barn, and lands with a splash in a water-logged bomb-crater.

There’s an answering
crack
from the earth under Waite’s feet, and he jumps and puts his hand to his gun.

The crack repeats. It sounds like a stone being broken with hammers, by roots. It repeats again. It sounds like a man cracking his knuckles, over and over. It sounds like barking; like laughter. The earth shudders and quakes.

Waite feels warm and cold at once. He starts to laugh.

He stops laughing when a white arm shoots up out of the roiling earth of the floor of what used to be Mr. Digby’s barn.

The arm is terribly long and thin, like a bone-white sapling. It
stretches
. What follows, lifting itself up and shaking off earth and laughing, is the maned form of a female of the First Folk, rising from death.

She looks Waite’s way with brilliant ruby-red eyes, and he slowly moves his hand
away
from his gun.

She looks all around her, head cocked, listening. She seems troubled. She climbs up the timbers of Digby’s barn and looks west.

She tumbles loosely back to earth, and opens her fist; it’s full of stones. She scatters them. She pokes among them. She seems unhappy with their answer.

What she’s doing, Waite thinks, is very nearly like
shaking her head
. Or
drumming her fingers nervously
. In her troubled uncertainty, she suddenly seems remarkably human. Her gestures are nearly human gestures. She might even be beautiful.

She looks Waite’s way again. With a crackling of joints and a shifting of her mane, she shrugs her bony shoulders as if to say,
What can you do?
and she smiles.

Waite turns and runs from the ruins, and he never goes back. When Sally asks why, he tells her it’s time for a fresh beginning.

Her second child, born in summer, is healthy.

F
OUR:
G
OOD
-B
YE

And when the letter finally arrived at the Academy of Koenigswald, it bore the stamps of a dozen postal services. Between the House Dolorous and the Academy, it had crossed the continent with the uncertain dithering flight of a butterfly. It was addressed to one Dr. Grundtvig, who had retired several years ago, and so it gathered dust in a pigeonhole that no one checked anymore, until one of the porters noticed it, opened it, called for silence, and read the highlights to his colleagues:
It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that Dr. Alverhuysen was taken from us . . . the responsibility is ours . . . no ransom demand so far . . . an Agent of those Powers that bedevil our land . . . we must now presume her dead . . .

In one of those coincidences that are so impressive and terrifying to the weak-minded, but are in fact inevitable in the nature of things, it was a mere two days later that the enormous mental defective Maggfrid showed up at the Academy’s August Hall—banging on the great doors in the dead of a rainy night, bellowing to be let in—and confirmed the sad news. He was unable or unwilling to explain how he’d accomplished his return across the world, beyond the words
I fought.
There was something wild and savage in his bearing. He resumed his janitorial duties, but now a certain glamour attached to him, and the students sought his conversation.