The Half-Made World (29 page)

He sat back and breathed deeply. The telegraph machine sat heavy and still. The Engines waited on his word. Soon they’d get it. There would be a change in the rhythm of their pistons and wheels, too subtle for gross human senses to perceive but nonetheless real, and that would be their thoughts, their Song, turning to him. To Lowry. Then they would cast their presence across wires and air and all the vastness of the continent, and spark the telegraph into life, and the tent would echo with the Song of the Line.

Subaltern Drum brought Lowry a tin cup of cold coffee, and he sipped it gratefully. He planned to work through till morning.

CHAPTER 18

PLEASANT INVESTIGATIONS

Creedmoor stood near the top of the second staircase in the East Wing. He was surrounded by buckets of blue paint, and his white work clothes were stained with dribbles and splotches of blue. He was painting the wall with great cheerful messy swings of the brush. He whistled and grinned at passersby.

He said to himself:

—Last night I got talking to a
very
charming young nurse.

—We know you have, Creedmoor. We were with you.

—She tells me little things. She is talkative, afterwards.

—What you know, we know.

—If only it worked the other way around. Who is this man you are looking for?

—A General. The enemy destroyed his mind.

—I know. You told me. A name, please? There are half a dozen inmates here who the staff call
General
. Dozens more who have no names at all. Play fair. Are we looking for a black fellow or a white one? Fat or thin?

—He is darker-skinned than you. He is old. All men look much the same to us, Creedmoor.

—Very helpful. There are a great many old dark men here.

—Creedmoor, finding the man will do us no good; first we must find a way to kill the Spirit that guards him.

—Killing will come. Meanwhile, my friendly young nurse tells me that the Alverhuysen woman, the Doctor from the north, has taken a dusky bearded old man into her care. She is repairing his brain. She has strange and terrible sciences from the north, electric cures, drugs, mesmerism. Perhaps he is the one?

—Possibly. You must investigate. Creedmoor, if he is the one, and she extracts the secrets buried in his memory, she must be killed.

—We’ll see. But with my luck, the man in question will be in the last place we look.

—Not true. You always have been lucky, Creedmoor. It is why we have tolerated you for so long.

Creedmoor slapped a last wide streak of fresh blue across the wall.

“Good enough,” he said. “I think I’m due a break.”

He’d joined a game of cards. Not purely for recreational purposes—his fellow players were important men in the House. Sichel was Head Cook. Renato had for fifteen years wandered all over the northwest, collecting patients for the House, and now ran security at the south fence. Hamsa was a doctor, one of the few to have a real education, being a graduate of Vansittart U, back in Jasper, which Creedmoor understood to be quite fancy.

On his way down, he stopped by a dormitory on the second floor.

—A whim occurs to me.

A young man lay on his back on the bed by the window. He had only one leg. While the right side of his face was exceedingly handsome, the left had been melted, kind of like ice cream. His remaining eye stared up at a pipe in the roof with vicious intensity, as if trying to burst it.

Creedmoor leaned against the window.

“Kid. Hey, Kid.”

“Fuck you.”

If the young man had a name other than the Kid, it wasn’t known to anyone at the House. That was what he’d written in the ledger, and he answered to nothing else. In fact, he hardly answered to anything at all. He’d come in on the last ambulance party to arrive, three days after Creedmoor. He was intensely bitter about something, presumably something related to his injuries. He rarely left his bed. When he did, he limped down the hallways, shouting and snarling and threatening nurses, and was generally thought to be a hairsbreadth from doing something that would cause the Spirit to flatten him once and for all, and he would not be missed.

“Hey, Kid. You play cards?”

“Which idiot are you? Cackle, right?”

“Cockle. John’ll do. You play cards?”

“What’s the point?”

“What’s the point of anything?”

The Kid turned his head to glare at Creedmoor.

Creedmoor shrugged. “Some of these idiots have money for the taking. But if you’re busy . . .”

—Why, Creedmoor?

—I like him. He reminds me of me at his age.

—He is maimed. Useless. We would not take him.

—Not useless. Not useless at all. Just not sure how to use him yet, that’s all.

They played down in one of the basements under the East Wing, in a vacant operating room. The afternoon was cool down in the tunnels—the walls were moist and prone to lichen, which had to be scrubbed off. Sichel brought whiskey from the kitchens. They sat on hard wooden stools, around an operating table.

“Bad news out of Kloan,” Sichel said.

“A tragedy,” Creedmoor agreed. “I blame the Line. Naked aggression. But no changing the subject, Sichel, my friend; let’s see what you’ve got.”

Sichel scowled—which made his scarred and empty left eye socket crumple in something like a wink. He tossed his cards on the table. His hand was mostly Engines, bad numbers.

“Curse the day you came here, Cockle.”

“Now, now. This is a welcoming House. The Spirit forgives all. Even luck with cards.”

Creedmoor reminded himself to start losing again. They talked more freely when they thought they were winning.

“It certainly does,” Renato agreed, dealing. “It forgives everything.” Solemn as ever. Renato slurred his words because parts of his jaw were gone; he wore a red domino over his face. His hand was mostly Guns, Creedmoor thought, and pretty good.

“It does at that,” Sichel said.

“Bullshit,” said the Kid, who sat on the far end of the table, by himself.

“Now, now.” Renato shook his head. “Now, now. You just need to give it time. Lie back. Let the Spirit work on you and—”

“I got nothing to forgive,” said the Kid. “It’s those fuckers who did this to me who need forgiving, and I don’t plan on forgiving them. I don’t plan on sitting around here like a coward and rotting. I’m going to—

“That way you’ll get yourself killed,” said Sichel.

“So what?”

Renato said, “Listen. You were a soldier, right? So there’s something to forgive right there. Doesn’t matter what side. Let me tell you a story. So twenty years ago . . .”

Creedmoor stopped listening. Twenty years ago, Renato had fought in the army of one of the richer and more inbred southern Barons, a Baron who’d allied himself with the Gun and whose lands and, more important, oilfields now belonged to the Line. Renato was a great storehouse of war stories. All of them had a moral at the end about forgiveness, and healing, and above all of the importance of turning to the Spirit, which would take up one’s burdens onto its own metaphorical shoulders and bear them away. . . .

Creedmoor caught the Kid’s attention and rolled his eyes.

Sichel started in with his own story, something about a woman, a camp follower, who’d died at the battle of Gabbard Hill. . . .

Dr. Hamsa interrupted with a confession about how, as a student back in Jasper City, he’d had problems with drink. The old soldiers didn’t seem too impressed, but let it pass.

To keep himself in practice, Creedmoor told some lies about his own old soldiering career. He pretended repentance for unspecified and imaginary sins at the battles of Pechin Drift and Huka’s Mill. Renato and Sichel listened solemnly.

The Director of the House Dolorous was a Smiler. He believed very strongly in the virtue of open and honest talk and confession; and though the House’s staff were not required to share that faith, the Director’s habits trickled down to them. Sometimes the whole House was like one big meeting circle. So much
talking
!

My name is John Creedmoor, and I would like to confess my crimes. Hope you all weren’t going anywhere this week.
 . . .

He’d invited the Kid mainly in the hope that the other players would want to lecture him, which they were, but it was taking altogether too long, and Creedmoor had an appointment with a pretty nurse.

“. . . and sometimes I still see their faces,” Sichel said. “But the Spirit took the pain from me, same as it took the pain where my arm had been, and now—”

“Bullshit,” Creedmoor interrupted, hoping to get the conversation to its point, which was the Spirit.

“Kid,” he said, “I don’t know what these fellows are talking about. I’m a simple man. In my experience, it’s only time that heals wounds: forgetting and time. Try drink if those don’t work.”

Renato shook his head patiently. “There’s healing here, Cockle, if you’ll ask for it.”

“Ever heard of a place called No-Town?”

“Sure, Cockle. Drifters talk about it. Old soldiers, too. Of course I have.”

“Where it rains whiskey, and the women are easy, and no one has to work, and old soldiers and the lion and the lamb and even old Agents can find peace.” He drew a card from the table. Engines. Useless to him. No-Town! He hadn’t thought about No-Town in years. “And my point is that that’s bullshit, too. No such thing. You’d have to be desperate to believe in it.” Well, that was the truth, wasn’t it?

Renato wouldn’t be goaded. “You’ve never seen the Spirit. It’s the real thing.”

“I saw it smash a Vessel from the sky. I saw it guard our gate. I’ll admit it exists. I don’t know about healing. Where’s the proof?”

Renato shrugged. “You just have to feel it.”

The Kid snorted and threw his cards across the table. Engines, Guns, Folk, Women. “I’m done with this shit.” He remained sitting.

“Not sure whether I do or I don’t,” Creedmoor said. “Tell me this, then: Why does it do what it does? What’s in it for the Spirit?”

“Not everything has a reason,” Renato said with infuriating priestly solemnity.

“I’m out, too,” Sichel confessed.

Hamsa stood. “I have patients to see.”

“Everything’s got a reason,” Creedmoor said.

“Maybe,” Renato said. “Maybe not.”

That was all Creedmoor could get out of him. Soon Creedmoor was out, too, and Renato took his winnings and went back to his post.

That left just Creedmoor and the Kid sitting at either end of the candlelit table.

“Well,” Creedmoor said.

“Fuck you,” the Kid said, and limped away.

The House had a fair number of female nurses. Most of them came from nearby towns, mainly Greenbank. Quite a few of them were pretty. It seemed the Director liked them that way.

—I could stay here forever, my friend. I like this work.

—Most of the other men here are cripples, Creedmoor. No wonder they like you. You have no reason to be proud.

—I like the company of nurses. I need a lot of care in my old age.

—You will get bored soon enough.

—Never!

—Question them.

He met Hannah in the afternoons in the bushes behind the herb garden; he met Ella in the north tower in the evenings. Other assignations were less regular, but not infrequent. He charmed them with stories of the cities back in the world. He had, it was true, a certain animal vigor that was rare in the House, and much appreciated. So far he had somehow managed not to make any of them hate him.