The Half-Made World (17 page)

On his way back from the boardinghouse—his clothes somewhat singed; mopping ash, dust, and blood from his face with someone else’s neckerchief—Creedmoor stopped by the stage and what remained of Sloop’s medicine show. The crowd was long dispersed from the square; even Kloan’s cow-slow folk had figured the score by then. Sloop was dead of a bloody chest wound. The muscleman lay beside him with the back of his head open. Professor Harry Ransom was laying out the bodies and cleaning them up, but he up and ran at Creedmoor’s approach. Ransome’s white suit was ruined, of course, and his apparatus didn’t seem to have fared much better, because the stage now was scattered with broken glass and wire.

—Never know what it did now, I guess. Shame.

The showgirl was on her knees sobbing, her feather boa trailing in the blood and glass. Creedmoor paid her what seemed to be a fair price for two bottles of her dead master’s tonic water.

—It is grain alcohol and curry powder. I can sense it. You will be lucky not to go blind, Creedmoor.

—Nevertheless.

The showgirl’s trembling fingers half closed over the bills.

He said, “You keep your clothes very nicely, considering the rough country you travel in. Do you have needle and thread?”

The baobab tree was a blazing crown like some awful prophecy.

Over by the burning boardinghouse, half Kloan’s folk were passing up buckets from the well. Mostly the women. Their efforts were not going well. The fire spread to another and another house, and meanwhile many of the men were eyeing Creedmoor angrily, nervously—this interloper who had brought down horror upon them—this dealer with devils, this Agent of the Gun. Some carried pitchforks and knives and hatchets; a few clutched old muskets; one or two had hunting bows.

He could have killed them all. But what would be the point? Kloan was a pretty town. And besides, one lucky shot might always end him. It happened, sadly, even to Agents of the Gun—only last year, Red Molly had died in similar circumstances. Though she had, of course, been ragingly drunk.

Creedmoor’s horse was dead, slumped and bloody by the hitching post to which he’d tied it. The animals nearby were panicking and screaming and rearing against their ropes. He took another from over the other side of the square.

The men of Kloan edged closer, murder-minded. Creedmoor stared them down from horseback. “Your town is burning. See—your women are fighting for it. Go help them, you fools.” And he spurred the horse round and thundered out of town before Kloan’s folk—not so peaceful or simple anymore!—could start shooting.

The War had been bound to come to Kloan sooner or later. Still, Creedmoor felt just awful that he’d been the one to bring it, and he rode out in grim silence. Naturally his master, sensing his mood, set out to worsen it.

—We warned you, Creedmoor. You defied us.

—I did.

—Never again, Creedmoor. Next time you defy us, we will put the
Goad
to you. You have a
mission
.

He went west into lands that were still peaceful—rough and hilly and broken but not yet marked by war. An hour later, he’d put some good miles behind him, and the smoke was no longer visible.

He spied a fast rider in the distance, tearing out of Kloan along a route southwest of and near parallel to Creedmoor’s own, raising dust.

—Spare us embarrassment, Creedmoor. Keep this story from the newspapers.

Only a short detour was necessary to bring the rider within Marmion’s prodigious range—and Creedmoor didn’t miss. He never missed.

A crack. The rider silently tumbled into the dust.

Creedmoor shook his head.

—Damn fool. Should have stayed home where they needed him.

—The Line knows we are here. Get to work, Creedmoor.

Creedmoor began to scour the trails and back roads of the hills. Twenty-four hours later, he picked up the trail of a procession—he could
smell
them—a dozen men and women, on foot, slow moving, some of them wounded, scents of pus and bandages and iodine.

—The House’s men. And the walking wounded. A harvest of the sick and the mad for the House Dolorous.

—Yes. They will suffice. Finally we can begin. Faster, Creedmoor.

CHAPTER 10

GLORIANA

To enter the Gloriana Station was to leave the ordinary world behind. It was to enter into a world of noise and din and stink, in which even the light was different—because there was no real sunlight in the Station, only the cold glare of spotlights and the glimmer of industrial fires, and those few shafts of natural light that crept through the filthy windows and the dust-laden air were altered by their passage, stripped to the bone. To descend the broad black iron staircase onto the Concourse was to enter the bowels of the earth; to walk out onto the white stone of the Concourse itself, beneath the high arched roof and the sweeping acetylene searchlights, was like walking on the moon. Liv held tight to Maggfrid’s arm, and breathed deeply, and clutched her ticket in her hand, and came into the presence of the Gloriana Engine. . . .

Gloriana was the most extraordinary structure she had ever seen. It dominated the horizon like a mountain; she rode into its shadow.

The Station itself was perhaps four or five times taller than the highest part of the Academy. Low sheds and warehouses sprawled to left and right, a mess of tin and concrete and wire. Pistons and windmill-sized gears rose out of the rubble. Chimney stacks vented. Gray blocky towers, some windowless and others bristling with blank eyes, buttressed the Station, whose black iron arches soared up at severe angles, forming distant peaks. It reminded Liv of a cathedral; it also reminded her of the vultures she’d seen here and there by the roadside, squatting inside the ugly arch of their shoulders.

It
moved
. From a distance it appeared to be rippling. Only when she came closer did it become apparent that the structure was covered in cranes, which swung monotonously back and forth from tower to tower, and in gears and cable cars and elevators and . . .

Behind Gloriana Station was the town in which the Engine’s servants lived—a hive, a maze of shafts and towers. The populations of Burren Hill and Monroe and Barrett and Conant together couldn’t have filled half of it.

The whole black mass sat on the open grasslands, roaring and smoking, casting a jagged sundial-shadow over the plains. It appeared to have been placed at random, or dropped from the heavens. Something about it suggested a vast indifference to the natural world. On all sides of it, as Liv approached, there were blue skies; only the Station itself was wreathed in smoke.

Gloriana was the northeasternmost endpoint of the continent-spanning network of the Line. Only one track left it—behind the Station, leaving high overhead on a raised iron bridge, and disappearing into the hills.

There were thirty-eight immortal Engines in the world. The Line bound them together—a great continent-spanning nervous system. Each Engine had its own Station, and its own anonymous masses of men and machines. Every few decades another was born—another demon risen from the earth to settle into a body of iron and coal. Gloriana was one of the smallest of the Stations, and the Gloriana Engine was one of the younger of its kind.

To approach the Station—to approach the Station was to queue. For hours.

Liv and Maggfrid had walked south from Conant in the company of a local guide. A half day out from the Station, they had come upon the road. It was black, and wide, and straight, and the rolling grasslands appeared to have been flattened for it. They weren’t alone on it. As they got closer to the Station, the road got more and more crowded. There were pedestrians like themselves, some carrying baskets of goods on their backs. There were horsemen and carts. And every so often, there was a great coarse
honking
sound, and the roar of motors, and a staff car or troop truck would come barreling down the road, stuffed with pale Linesmen in their black uniforms, bristling with rifles and bayonets, and every time Liv had to pull Maggfrid aside, because his instinct was to stand squarely in the road and not be moved.

And in the shadow of the Station itself there were crowds—shifting masses of men—and a number of roads led up to the Station’s various gates. Little men shouted and directed traffic.
That way! You, that way!
Liv stumbled along with the crowd and pulled Maggfrid with her. She found herself in a long line, the distant end of which slowly moved through an arched gate in the south wall of the Station. She asked, “What are we—?” and the man in front of her answered with a grunt and a shrug. Someone pressed a ticket with a number on it into her hand. She said, “
Excuse
me . . . ,” and was shushed, angrily. She’d never been in the presence of so many people, and it threw her badly off balance; she felt almost physically compelled to follow the slow-moving line ahead of her. She kept quiet and looked at her feet. The queue lasted for what felt like hours. When she got to the front of the Line and the clerk in the gate’s little booth questioned her about her purpose, and her identity, and her intentions, in the rudest possible manner, she was too cowed to answer back. Only once she’d been fed through into the interior of the Station was she able to stagger into a somewhat empty corridor and turn to Maggfrid and whisper, “These are the most
awful
people.” But Maggfrid’s face was flat with terror. . . .