The Rise of Ransom City (51 page)

I can tell you that it was the Agent Rattlesnake Renner who burned the Senate down. He was caught in the act and executed by hanging without delay. Of course his demon master could not be killed, the Linesmen not having either Liv’s weapon or mine to hand— its vessel could be smashed, but the thing itself returned to the Lodge of the Guns, beneath the earth or up in the sky or out in the far unexplored west or wherever it is, if it is a place— returned to wait and brood until it was ready to take a new servant and return to the world.

“That’s where you come in, Ransom,” said Mr. Lime, who was as cheerful and friendly that day as any Officer of the Line has ever been.

“One day we’ll burn down their Lodge itself, Ransom. One day. And that’s where you and your Bomb come in.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. That is the only time I have ever been touched in a friendly way by an Officer of the Line and I did not know how to respond.

“We’ll settle business with the city soon enough,” he said. “Then we’ll get to work.”

I’ve heard all the rumors about how in the last days of the fighting Liv and John Creedmoor showed up to join in the excitement. According to some accounts they had an army of Folk behind them, armed with sharp spears and strange magic, with storm and madness and evil eye, with dreadful old-world savagery, with a sound of terrible drumming. Some accounts say that it was their dreadful weapon that destroyed the Senate, or the Floating World. “Jasper will not fall to the Line,” John Creedmoor said as he stood on the Senate’s steps and wound the handle of his secret weapon, “it’ll burn first,” as the lightning struck on all sides of him and the Senate’s roof cracked open like an egg, “This is the end of the world.”

Well, none of that is true. I don’t know where they were but they were not in Jasper City. There was enough destruction without them and nobody needed their help.

A troupe of Swing Street actors in Folk masks of white wood and horse-hair manes were mistaken for the real thing and that started a panic that ended in arrests and the closure of Swing Street by order of the Archway Engine itself— the Street was cordoned off at all entrances by barbed wire. By that time the Linesmen had taken just about the whole city and they were cordoning off streets as they pleased, and defoliating the parks.

The fighting did not last long. The whole Battle of Jasper lasted less than two weeks. That was thanks to the excellence of the Engines’ planning, Mr. Lime assured me, but in a small way it was thanks to me. By stepping into Old Man Baxter’s shoes and lending my name to the cause of order, he said, I had helped to smooth over what might have been a significantly more troublesome transition.

If I had done things differently then who knows, maybe Jasper would have fought back and won its freedom. Mr. Lime did not think so but maybe he was wrong. Maybe Jasper would have fallen anyhow, only more people would have died. I believe that I did what seemed best at the time, under difficult circumstances.

Gentleman Jim Dark fled the city like a rat from a burning building as soon as things went south for him. He rode out on the road west at evening, with a Vessel in pursuit and the last few gold bars from the sack of the Jasper City Bank in his saddlebags, and he spent the next six months drifting from town to town on the Rim, boasting of how he may not have won the Battle of Jasper City but damn it he’d let the bastards know they were in a fight.

Scarlet Jen was made of sterner stuff. I guess the way she saw things Jasper City was hers and had always been hers and she would not leave it, she would rather die when it did. I admire that.

In the Linesmen’s files I read all about how she’d been in the Floating World for sixty years, seventy, or more, collecting secrets and scheming and blackmailing and what ever else Agents of the Gun do. The demon that rode her gave her long life and it made her beautiful. Don’t think it didn’t make her dangerous too. She cut her hair short and she wore trousers she’d taken from a dead employee of the Baxter Detective Agency and for ten days, even while the Linesmen’s trucks roared into the city along every road carrying men and machines, she roamed free. Unlike Gentleman Jim Dark she had no mob and she didn’t give speeches or pose for photographs or talk to the newspapers. Nor did she make demands or offer justifications or claim that right was on her side. She just killed.

Mr. Lime had a map made on the wall of the Big Office showing the place where she’d shot an officer from the rooftops, and another place where she’d murdered a whole checkpoint, and the place where she’d somehow cracked an Ironclad’s shell and the place where a lucky Private Second Class had shot her in the leg and she’d limped away bleeding, cursing out loud for her demon to heal her. It didn’t take a genius to see a kind of spiral drawn on that map, starting out across the river but coming in over the bridge to Fenimore, and around and around the outskirts of that occupied island, constantly probing and testing the defenses arrayed around the spiral’s central point, which of course was Baxter’s Tower.

Mr. Lime folded his arms behind his back, studied his map, nodded. “She’s coming for you, Mr. Ransom, sir.”

“I guess she is, Mr. Lime. I’m flattered.”

“Well, too late, isn’t it? They’ve lost. You’re with us now.” I waited in the Big Office for days and I watched them make marks on the map as incidents were reported in— always closer and closer— an inch here, an inch there. I’ll confess that I was rooting for her to make it all the way.

She didn’t.

“Good work, everyone,” Mr. Lime said. With his thumb he pushed one last pin into the map, then stood back and examined it with satisfaction. “Good work.”

My sister Jess survived the burning of the Floating World too, though I did not learn that for many months— not until long after Jasper City had fallen. The barricades had gone up and gone down again. The rest of the world called it the Battle of Jasper but in the language of the new administration it was the Recent Emergency, and what ever you called it it was over. I was so well settled into my new employment that I no longer started when an Officer of the Line called me
sir
, and whole days went by when I thought neither of escape nor suicide. Every morning I sat at the old man’s desk— my desk— and I answered my correspondence— some days I no longer needed the Officers of the Line standing at my shoulder to tell me what to write.

I guess it must have been a mistake that the report regarding miss jessica hite, neé ransom, was sent across my desk. The Line makes more mistakes than you’d think. Maybe it was a friendly power, still looking out for me in spite of everything. Anyhow the report said that Miss Hite had been seen down in a place in the Deltas that I won’t name, under an alias that I won’t write, and asked “whether action should be taken to retrieve her.” I tore the damn thing up and ate it. That small act of rebellion gave me the strength to go on for another six months. I was still a prisoner but knowing that she was alive gave me the strength to start thinking again.

Neither the author of the report nor I had any notion how she’d escaped the burning of the Floating World, not to mention the military cordon around Jasper City. Maybe the world is not always as hard a place as it pretends. I never tried to track her down. That was the best thing I could do for her.

To my way of thinking the Battle of Jasper City ended on the day when Scarlet Jen died at a checkpoint on Zelda Street. As I write this that was four years ago almost to the day. It is not an occasion anybody ever celebrates or mourns, not even back in the Territory, maybe because since then so many places have fallen to one side or the other and then fallen back. Ever since we brought our secret weapons and our rumors of weapons and the Bomb into the world there has been a whole lot of History, more than anyone can remember. More than I could write down even if I had forever, and I do not.

Nobody in this country would remember the date anyhow— out here Jasper City is just a rumor of something ancient and magnificent back east, like how people in Jasper City thought about the old countries back over the mountains. They hardly even know who I am. I guess our visit to these parts must be the strangest thing they’ve ever seen.

We are far out on the Rim, not far from a little town I won’t name and by the edge of a big west-flowing river I won’t name either. It is not the same river I mentioned in Chapter Twelve. We are striking the boats.

The Beck brothers turned out to be first-rate boatsmen. They had told me they were boatsmen when they joined up but I had thought it was only bravado, because in addition to boat-handling they are fist-fighters and crack shots and they know what do with horses and sheep and rope and how to read direction from trees and stars and how to tell if there is gold in a river and Josh Beck even says with a wink that he knows a bit of Folk magic. Ransom City is lucky to have them.

By the by the boats were bought for us by Mr. Lung, who after Amaryllis died left the city and struck out north-west and to make a long story short he ended up making his fortune in Melville City, which has now put itself on the map as the Cleanest City on the Western Rim. He was in a coffee house in Melville City a couple of months back when one of his acquaintances among Melville’s business elite handed him one of my letters. It was the letter that began: to whom it may concern to whoever picks this up to all free-thinking men and women of peace and goodwill i invite you to join me in the city of the future.

And et cetera.

He sold up fast and headed south— by motor-car at first— and he caught our trail near the county of Nabilac. His wife is a beautiful and spirited young woman from Melville City who was active in the Six Thousand Club there and who is eager to build our city too, though our goals will be more modest at first. Along the way they met up with Mr. Angel Langhorne, who had not prospered so well— as a matter of fact he spent most of the years since the Battle of Jasper in prison on the Rim for fraud, and some of them in an insane asylum, and when he met up with Mr. Lung he possessed only one shoe. He still shakes and stutters and cannot look you in the eye and smells of sweat and burned hair, but none of us are perfect. His rain-making device does not quite work yet but he assures me that it is showing promise as we get further out west, where the skies are bigger and the clouds are wilder and stronger kinds of animal. I believe him. We need not fear for lack of water in Ransom City!