The Half-Made World (24 page)

William came and sat by him like an eager dog. Creedmoor ignored him for as long as he could.

“Mr. Creedmoor?”

“You should sleep, William.”

“Where are we going, Mr. Creedmoor?”

“To the House Dolorous. A romantic name! I believe it comes from a song. I’ll spare you my singing voice. To the Doll House, William. To a house of healing, where perhaps one day you, too, may be healed and whole.”

“Why are you taking us there, Mr. Creedmoor?”

“Because I am a kindly shepherd, William. Because I cannot bear to let injustice stand or suffering be.”

“You feel scared. Is someone chasing after you?”

“Could well be, William.”

“Is there someone talking to you?”

“Don’t we all hear the voice of conscience, William?”

He led them shuffling through the hills and westward. After five days’ trek, they found a well-trodden trail that switchbacked laboriously down into a canyon of red rock. The canyon was deep as the ocean floor, wide and flat as the widest triumphal avenue in Jasper City or Morgan. It wound and curved, following the course of some long-dead waterway. The rock walls were rough, striated, and marked with signs of Folk carving and painting that Creedmoor didn’t have time to inspect, because his master said:

—Faster. Quick. We hear the Enemy’s wings overhead.

In the afternoon, they came round a corner and saw the House Dolorous spread out before them, hidden in the canyon, a weird freak of architecture, a huge homely sagging eggshell-blue monstrosity. . . .

A tall wire fence ran from side to side of the canyon, and the House was on the other side of it. The fence had a single gatehouse, a little left of center, with a gleaming brass warning-bell beside it. Half a dozen lazy crows perched on the fence around it.

There was a small group milling about at the gatehouse. Among them, Creedmoor noticed a number of men in white jackets, several of whom had rifles on or near their persons, and he took them to be the House’s guardians. No sign of any mysterious Spirit, of course. There were also a couple of individuals who Creedmoor assumed were newcomers to the House, same as him: a big bald oaf with a simpleton’s face, and an acceptably attractive and intelligent-looking woman in a white dress, with her blond hair tied in a bun. They had a large number of suitcases.

It crossed Creedmoor’s mind for a moment that they might be fellow toilers for the Cause, in which case he’d be
extremely
unhappy to be dragged halfway across the world to be some other bastard’s backup—but then as he approached, he caught the woman’s eye, and her innocence was obvious, indeed almost touching.

He smiled at her.

The guards took one look at him and raised their rifles.

CHAPTER 14

THE GUARDIAN AT THE GATE

“Steady, gentlemen, steady.”

Creedmoor spread his arms wide so that his dusty coat hung open. He stretched out and wiggled his fingers like a stage magician, but what he produced from his open coat was no rabbit; it was
nothing
. His belt was empty but for a small silver-clasped knife.

“My name is John Cockle. Hear me out.”

The guards at the gate relaxed a little, but kept their rifles rudely trained in Creedmoor’s direction.

There were four of them. They wore white: white shirts, white slacks, white belts. They had commendably neat hair and clean teeth. Each was in some way wounded—a missing eye, a missing ear, a hunch, half a leg. Their faces were shiny with sweat—Creedmoor imagined them sweltering all day in the guardhouse, going mad with boredom and duty. He favored them with his smile.

He gave a wink, too, to the blond woman in the white dress with the heavy luggage cases. She was a little too old for his taste, of course, and lacked the rosy-cheeked plumpness he liked, but one could never have too many friends in a strange place. She raised a skeptical eyebrow.

The guards said, “Who are you?”

And, “Where’d you get these people?”

And, “We’re not expecting any
John Cockle
.”

And, “What do you want?”

He turned back to them and stretched his empty hands even wider.

“I understand your caution, gentlemen. I applaud you, in fact. A man who is not wary out here in these days is a dead man soon enough. A case in point is your poor friend who was leading these men through the wilderness here to be healed; oh, he looked all around for bandits and Hillfolk and bloody-handed Agents, sure enough, but did he look
down
? He did not. And a snake got his ankle. There in the hot sun I found him, slumped against a red rock, raving.”

The guards spat and swore and angrily kicked at rocks and dust. “Who? One of us? Shit. Who?”

“Mr. Elgin. He clutched my hand as I bent over to hear his last words and told me his name. Poor man. The black swell and the stink of his poor ankle, gentlemen! The flies, and the carrion-eaters overhead, circling!”

He whirled his hands dramatically to indicate the circling of vultures, and watched the guards go pale.

“I knew from a mile off I would see some horror beneath those terrible birds; I was not wrong. I am no doctor, and I could not save him.”

He gingerly lowered a hand, to gesture at a bloodstain on his shirt, courtesy of Kloan, which he’d noticed the guards taking an interest in.

“I bled the wound, but I fear I may have only hastened his end. A blunderer like me is worse than no doctor at all; my respect for your vocation knows no bounds, gentlemen. I’d like you more were you to lower your rifles, mind.”

They didn’t.

“Here!” Creedmoor produced from his coat—moving slowly—the dead man’s papers. He waved them in the air until one of the white-clad men snatched them away. “He clutched my arm and said,
Save them
.
Promise me.
I did. I could not in conscience leave these poor creatures out in the wasteland to die. What sort of monster would I be, to do that? What else could I do but to take up their rope and lead them to you?”

They remained wary. They whispered to each other.

“Where did Elgin die?”

He told them.

“Long way from anywhere. What were you doing out there?”

“Isn’t it obvious, gentlemen? I’m a traveling poet. Song, jest, good humor, and so on and so on. A clown, I guess. I’d juggle this instant if I did not fear you might shoot me. And, being good with words, I also do a little lawyering—I’ll draw up your contracts or argue your case if you’re in the unlucky situation of needing me. And perhaps I’d been traveling with the good Dr. Sloop and his emporium, you may have heard of him, and Professor Harry Ransome and his electrical apparatus, and there’d been a dispute over the affections of the dancing girl, and I struck out on my own in unfamiliar country and frankly, gentlemen, got lost as all hell and—”

“What do you want?”

“I’ll get to the point, shall I? I hope to be paid for my efforts. Your charges would have died in the wilderness if not for me. I am not a young man, and I’ve walked for days. Will you not at least give me a bed for the night for my troubles?”

Liv stood close to Maggfrid. She did not know what to make of this strange man. He was handsome in an awful sort of a way, though not young. He unnerved her. His skin was leathered and his clothes were torn and filthy, and in Koenigswald, he would have been taken for a vagrant and accommodation would have been made for him in an institution. But out here, things were different, and who could say what he was? He had the confidence of an aristocrat. His eyes were laughing.

Liv noticed that her guide was not nervous, or even interested; he stood by the asses smoking a foul cigarette and idly counting the money she’d paid him. The guards at the gate were wary, but they had been wary of her, too. They were wary people here at the House Dolorous.

Cockle grinned at her; she nodded politely but guardedly.

She watched the men haggle over Cockle’s payment. She coughed once, politely, to ask if she might perhaps be allowed to enter; they had already seen her papers. . . . Cockle threw up his hands and disavowed most fulsomely any desire to interrupt the lady’s business; he assured all present of his basically chivalrous intentions, notwithstanding his desire to be
paid,
on which subject he felt regrettably that it might be best if he were to speak to these men’s superiors, intending no slight to them, of course, it was only that . . .

Liv sighed and walked away. Her dress dragged in the dust and tore on a sharp rock and she nearly swore. She’d kept a white dress packed safely away all this time so that she could approach the House respectably attired; already it was ruined.

Weeks
of travel, and her entrance had been entirely upstaged by this . . .

Cockle kept talking. Now the guards were laughing along with his jokes. His voice rolled and echoed. Some mad people of her acquaintance could talk like that—quite cheerfully, endlessly, without ever saying a meaningful thing.

She busied herself studying the poor souls Cockle had brought with him. Her patients-to-be, her new experimental subject matter. They looked half-starved, and their skin was peeling from the sun, but one of them gave her a lopsided smile. “I’m William, ma’am,” he said. She offered her hand, and he stared at it blankly, then mimicked her gesture with his hand hanging limp like a dead fish. She gave him her name, and he issued a little wheezing giggle.

“William,” she said. “Do you know where you are now?”

“The Doll House, ma’am.”

“What happened to you, William?”

“Ma’am?”

“How did you get here?”

“A man came.”

“Why are you here, William?”

“They say I’m not well.”

“Why do you think you’re not well, William?”

She was so engrossed in her subject matter that she hardly heard the approach of the Heavier-Than-Air Vessel. She didn’t sense it until after even William’s dull senses had caught it; she followed his nervous rheumy eyes up and saw it hanging in the sky. It was made of brass and iron and defied gravity and sanity. A man in black sat like an oversized fetus in a glass womb. The beating of its dreadful blades drove dust into the air and into her eyes, and she blinked away tears. The gate guards were shouting.

Creedmoor fell silent and considered the situation.

The Heavier-Than-Air Vessel hovered just within the rim of the ravine; the thrum of the spinning wing-blades and the rattle of its clockwork echoed from the rocks on either side. The black coal smoke from its engines climbed out of the canyon and into the sky.

The pilot leaned out from his glass-and-brass bubble and surveyed the scene through a spyglass.

Creedmoor bowed his head and tried to look frightened. It wasn’t entirely a pretense.

His instinct was to reach for his belt; but of course, there was no weapon there—he’d given it to William for safekeeping, strapped under William’s rags, for what gate guard would bother to search William? That was more or less the whole of the plan, in fact, now whirled away like leaves by fucking ’thopter blades. Now what was he supposed to do?

If he took back his Gun and fired on the Vessel, he had little doubt he’d be able to bring it down. But then the guards would know what he was; and, if the stories were true, then the Spirit, which did not tolerate violence, would strike him down.