The Rise of Ransom City (16 page)

The horses had panicked and run the wagon into a small ditch so that it stood lopsided and some of my scant possessions had spilled, and the horses had stumbled and struggled to rise and for all I knew might have been lamed.

There was a clack-clack-clack and some cursing as Creedmoor reloaded.

The remaining wolves watched us from between the trees. Then they silently turned away.

Miss Harper struggled out from under me and from under the wolf, and sat in the mud, covering her face with her hands and breathing deeply. Mr. Carver wiped blood from his beard with his sleeve, succeeding only in smearing it all over and making himself look quite mad. John Creedmoor’s hands were shaking and he dropped another bullet on the ground again and cursed violently, and in the end left the pistol on the ground as if it had disgusted and disappointed him and went to the back of the wagon, where I had allowed him to keep a shotgun concealed in a blanket. I sprang to my feet and ran jumping over the dead wolf and picked up John Creedmoor’s abandoned pistol and turned it on him, then Miss Harper, then on John Creedmoor again.

“Don’t be a damn fool,” Creedmoor said, and continued unwrapping the shotgun from the blanket.

I fired a wild warning shot, putting a bullet into the ground and raising a little spray of mud. Creedmoor cursed and jumped back and raised his hands.

The pistol had kicked more than I expected, and the bullet had gone nowhere near where I had intended, but I tried not to let either fact show.

“Mr. Carver,” I said. “Come here.”

Mr. Carver ambled over, scratching his beard with one hand and holding the ax loose in the other. He stood beside me.

“This is the end,” I said. “I know who you are. John Creedmoor. I read what you did at, at, well I don’t recall—”

“You want me to list my crimes for you, Professor?”

“No. No Mr. Creedmoor I do not. I want you to go your own way and I will go mine.”

“Hah! Gladly and good riddance.”

“I want no part of your plans. I’ll tell nobody what I know. Just go.”

Miss Elizabeth Harper stood. She dabbed at her face with a handkerchief. I turned the gun on her and said, “Both of you. Who are you, Miss Harper? Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Just go.”

“Wolves,” she said, to John Creedmoor, not to me.

He nodded.

“No accident— there was nothing natural or ordinary about that— they’ve found us, then.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course. You, Professor, shoot me if you’re going to or else let me arm myself.” He went back to the blanket and took out his shotgun and I did nothing. He glanced at me with contempt then looked out into the woods, shotgun held ready.

“If I were what you think I am you would be dead, Ransom. I told you I am no longer that man.”

“What do you mean— you quit? Is that what you’re telling me? You just—”

“I’m not telling you anything, Professor. You’re smart, figure it out yourself.”

“John,” Miss Harper said. “Who is it?”

He shrugged. “The Gun. Its Agents. They have our scent.”

“Yes,” she said. “But who? Do you know?”

“No. How would I? One of the ones who talks to wolves. It’s a vulgar trick and not uncommon. I am not a fucking encyclopedia. Ask Professor Ransom, he reads the story-books. I knew an Agent once who called herself the Witch of New Rochelle and she talked to wolves but she’d be a hundred and ten if she still lives. A hundred and twenty. Dogs love Scarlet Jen the way everything else with a dick does but she never leaves Jasper City— from what I hear she rarely leaves the Floating World. Are you taking notes, Mr. Ransom? Abban the Lion fancied himself a brother to all predators but the Line got him last year at Greenbank. We were more rivals than friends besides, even before I turned traitor, and he would show me no special consideration, so what does it matter? We come and go. We die young. Could be somebody new. A tracker. Maybe one, maybe more, doesn’t matter. One is enough. Could be this big son of a bitch who I hear was seen in Carnap making a spectacle of himself and likes to torment the Folk. I don’t know. I was one of the greats. Who the fuck is he? Nobody. In the old days I would have sniffed him out before he sniffed me. I would have heard the whispers and known his name. Does it matter? None of it matters. They have our trail now. We are dead.”

This was by far the longest speech I had ever heard from him.

“Huh,” said Mr. Carver.

“We have to go on,” Miss Harper said.

They discussed the weather awhile, and the road ahead, and agreed on how it was cross the mountains before the snow came or maybe not for weeks or even months. Meanwhile the gun grew heavy and my hands began to shake

I said, “What do you mean— turn traitor? And who has our scent?”

“Thought you said you didn’t want to know,” Creedmoor observed.

“I changed my mind. I have the gun, you should understand that, Mr. Creedmoor. Tell me.”

“Harry,” Miss Harper said.

“Don’t tell him,” Creedmoor said. “Let him mind his business.”

“Harry,” she said, “we are not what you think we are.”

“I don’t even know what I think you are anymore.”

“We should have gone our own way back in Clementine,” she said, “and again at Black Cut, and I’m sorry you’re in this too but if you turn back they will find you and question you. We have to keep going.”

Creedmoor turned away from the woods and inspected the wagon.

“We need to move,” he said. “Stay or go Mr. Ransom but the wagon and what’s in it comes with us. You can keep your damn fool Apparatus.”

I was outraged. I looked to Mr. Carver for support but he looked away. He would not meet my eye. His expression was uncertain.

“Harry,” she said. “I’m sorry. But it’s important, it’s so very important. It sounds mad but nothing is so important as that we get back east, and away.”

Creedmoor emitted a bitter despairing
hah.

I kept the gun on her though my arm was trembling.

“Let him go,” Creedmoor said.

“They’ll question him.”

“So? He can’t tell ‘em much. He knows nothing they don’t already know better.”

“I was thinking of the danger to him, not only the danger to us.”

“I know what you were thinking. What do you think I think of Mr Ransom’s well-being?”

I felt I should remind them that I was there, and who exactly was holding the gun. I said, “Who
are
you?”

“You heard the rumors,” she said. “The Line is here and the Gun is here because they are hunting someone with a secret. A secret, a weapon, something that can destroy them both and end the War.”

“I’ve heard that said. It’s the kind of thing desperate people say.”

“It happens to be true. Harry, do you know the history of the Red Valley Republic?”

I said I knew a little.

“They had a weapon,” she said. “It was lost before they could use it. It was a thing the Folk made, or a thing they had from an earlier age of the world. There was a deal between them. You’ve heard that the late General of the Republic had an ally among the Folk, who—”

“Everyone out here with some unlikely story to sell blames the Folk. Bad weather, good weather, charms against influenza. I’ve done it myself.”

“Shut up,” Creedmoor said. “Listen or don’t.” He put the shotgun down and tried to lift the wagon’s wheels out of the ditch.

Mr. Carver shrugged and went to join him. “Here,” he said.

“Your servant’s got the right idea,” Creedmoor said.

Mr. Carver told Creedmoor what he could do with himself. But they both put their shoulders to the wheel together. It moved slowly.

“I’m listening,” I said.

Creedmoor stepped back from the wheel.

“I was an Agent of the Gun,” he said. “I have done terrible things. They sent me out here last year to bring back that weapon. To destroy it, maybe, or use it themselves. They never told me the truth about anything if they could help it so I don’t know. The— Miss Harper was an innocent who had the misfortune of crossing my path. One thing led to another and I turned on my masters and set their business aside.”

He said that last thing like it was not so difficult to do for a man of his quality, like he wanted me to be impressed by his daring, which despite myself I was.

“My name is Liv,” Miss Harper said. “I was a doctor in another life.”

She approached the horses, speaking softly to calm them. “Huh. What kind of doctor?”

“A psychologist. That means I studied madness and delusion.”

“I know what that means. I am an educated man.”

I shoved the pistol into my belt and went to help with the wheel. “So what is this weapon?”

“I don’t know,” Creedmoor said.

“I like to call it a cure,” said Miss Harper— Liv. She put a gentle hand on Mariette’s flank. “The Guns and the Engines are a kind of madness, in my opinion. I don’t know how it works. It’s something the Folk left; that’s all I know. The General Enver tried to claim it— instead it fell to us. That’s how life is, I suppose.”

Carver grunted with effort as the wheel slid in the mud.

“A cure for the world. What does it do?”

“Even the Powers fear it,” Creedmoor said. “You know— hold there— you know that the Engines cannot be killed. Nor my former masters. Like a bad idea the bastards keep coming back. This thing kills them for good.”

“How?”

“That’s all I know. That’s all anybody told me. I was never privy to the deep secrets, even when I was somebody.”

“You don’t know?”

“Do I pry into your secrets, Professor?”

“On the count of three,” I said, and with a heave we got the back wheel righted.

“We know
where
it is,” he said. “And that alone is enough for us to be hunted all over the world. Line wants it and Gun wants it and we don’t intend to let either of them have it.”

“You’re an altruist, then. No— a profiteer, maybe. So where is it?”

“Buried.”

“Somewhere back east,” I said. “You said you were going to Jasper, but not stopping there, so further east. Past the Tri-City Territory? And Folk country, right, well, maybe—”

“Shut your mouth, Ransom.”

“Maybe you don’t know. Maybe I think you don’t even know—”

“Maybe you should think more and talk less. Now all right. On the count of three. One, two, push.”

Liv reported that the horses were unharmed.

I was not sure whether I believed them or not. Their story had the ring of delusion. I did not have to be a Doctor of Psychology from back east to know that— I was self-taught, having encountered more than enough maniacs on the road to recognize the symptoms. But Creedmoor was who he was, and the incident with the wolves admitted of no ordinary explanation. I did not know what to think.

I tried to catch Carver’s eye again to ask what he thought we should do, but when I succeeded he just shrugged and clapped black mud from off his hands.

I asked what they would do with this thing if they found it, and Creedmoor interjected that they would not, because his former masters were on our trail and we would all be dead before another sunrise. He said that it was only his damn fool pride that stopped him from just lying down in the mud and waiting for death. And Miss Harper said some things about Peace and the end of War and sweeping away the cobwebs of history and waking from the nightmares of the century gone by, and about the promise of the future and all the sort of things that I was used only to hearing from the less scrupulous kind of preacher or the more ambitious kind of con-artist. It seemed she was sincere, but then I often seem my most sincere when I am only trying to make a sale.

It was a handsome town. It was halfway up the mountains that in that part of their range are called the Opals, on the western side. There was a little comma-shaped mountain lake with piercingly blue water, and houses scattered around that, and a winding Main Street, and then more houses rising up rocky slopes and into the pines. Everything was made of pine. There was a pine school house, a pine court house, and a pine church run by a nun with a face as hard as wood and green needle-sharp eyes.

White Rock was joined to the wider world by two forms of commerce—one that sold, one that took. First, it was a logging town. Second, it guarded the pass across the Opals— travelers coming across the Opals from the east stayed a night in White Rock or re-provisioned there or even if they did not stay it was a rare traveler who got out without paying certain unexpected fees or taxes. Sometimes in the summer rich men from Jasper City or Gibson City came up out of the Territory and into the mountains to hunt or take the air, and though it was winter when we got there White Rock was not so rough or remote or uncivilized as you might expect.

We already knew that we were doomed. Snow had started to fall the day before and the road up to White Rock had been a struggle. When we got to White Rock there was snow drifting in the air, and heaped between the trees and bending down their branches, and the sky was bone-white, and you could not see far in any direction. I will not say that we heard wolves howling in the mountains, because we did not, but there was a sharp wind and with every strange sound of it we imagined the worst. The first man we spoke to in White Rock informed us that the road east was impassable. Snows had come unseasonably early and unseasonably heavy and we were too late. He saw our faces fall but mistook the reason. “I know,” he said, “I know. It’s bad for business all round. I have lost money because of it myself.”