The Half-Made World (35 page)

Thernstrom coughed.

Lowry got to his feet. “What are we waiting for? Let’s move.”

He strode out across the fields. The crops were dead. Now Kloan’s fields sprouted huge new tuberous growths: motor trucks and flatbeds and earthmovers and Heavier-Than-Air Vessels and armored cars of various hulking kinds and the jutting stalks of heavy mortars.

He climbed into a truck. Thernstrom followed. He banged the sides. “Let’s go. Let’s
go.
”

He watched the assault through a telescope, from an elevated position, at a safe distance, under heavy guard.

The day before, one of the Heavier-Than-Air Vessels had reported sighting a camp in the hills a few miles south of Greenbank. It contained at least two men and one woman. They were concealed from casual detection by the shelter of a tall arch of rock and a stand of pines; they were not well hidden from aircraft. Each of them was armed. They had no cattle, no cargo, no other signs of legitimate employment.

Lowry had not doubted for a second that they were Agents of the Enemy.

He ordered no further approach. Nothing that would spook them. He’d dispatched troops and Ironclads to cordon off the roads in all directions, at a distance from the camp of a mile or more. He’d had Heavier-Than-Air Vessels moved into positions where they could strike quickly at all possible points in a mile’s radius around the camp’s location. He’d had mines and barbed wire laid, mortars readied.

Now the targets were on the move, heading northeast across open country, and Lowry watched them. They were specks on a vast empty red brown landscape, until he tightened the scope’s focus and was delighted and revolted to see them close up—he could see the sweat stains on their clothes.

They suspected nothing. They strolled idly through the hills as if out on a holiday. There were four of them. He recognized two from their photographs in the Black File. The tall Dhravian hook-nosed arrogant-looking bastard was the Agent who went by “Abban the Lion.” The leathery young spike-haired woman was Keane—just Keane. There was also a surprisingly fat man in a double-breasted brown suit, with long greasy blond curls; and there was a wiry vicious fellow in battered blue denim, with a bald scalp and long lank white hair in back. Keane was arm in arm with the fat man, and laughing.

Lowry said, “Begin.”

It began with the Heavier-Than-Air Vessels. Four of them approached, two from the south and two from the north, converging on the enemy’s position. They roared in at all possible speed, leaving huge black trails of smoke across the sky. The Agents, of course, heard, spun, opened fire. Two of the Vessels went down before they could launch their noisemakers, smearing themselves in flame all across the hillsides. Two made it into range and delivered their weapons. They wheeled around and fled. One made it to safe distance.

The Agents ran as the noisemakers landed. They were impossibly fast. Lowry had a glimpse of the woman, Keane, bleeding profusely from her nose, hands clamped over her ears, before she
leapt
directly up and out of his view. . . .

“One down, sir. There.”

It took him a moment or two to find the body. The fat Agent, lying still on the dirt.

“Good. Someone better know where the others are. I have no fucking idea.”

They were three dots on the red hillsides, diverging west, east, north, at such speed that they raised clouds of dust behind them. The mortars launched more noisemakers, but they landed harmlessly in the Agents’ tracks, or were shot from the sky.

They launched poison gas, too. The noisemakers arced and fell like thrown stones; the gas rockets were more complex in their operation, and Lowry preferred them. They climbed into the sky with a tense shriek until their fuel was nearly exhausted—at which point, they used their last strength to silently burst, stabbing sharp white lines of lethal dust down to more or less random locations on the ground below. Soon it looked like there was a white dawn mist hanging over the hills.

“There, sir.”

Lowry had the pleasure of seeing Keane down on her hands and knees in a cloud of white gas. Black trucks surrounded her, disgorging dozens of shadowy masked Linesmen.

She staggered to her feet.

Lowry felt a moment of sick terror and, quite irrationally, lowered the telescope, as if somehow it made him vulnerable to her. By the time he’d pulled himself together and found the position again, there was nothing left to see but burning trucks and Linesman corpses and the survivors surrounding something on the ground and bayoneting it over and over.

Distant sounds of artillery and smoke on the horizon indicated that either Abban or the white-haired denim-clad Agent, or both, had encountered one of the cordons. Lowry didn’t get the satisfaction of watching those fights.

In the end, all four bodies were recovered.

CHAPTER 23

THE GENERAL IN HIS RETIREMENT

Creedmoor and Renato stood out in the rocks and dirt, south of the south fence. They leaned on their shovels, panted, and sweated. They were grave-digging.

“You’ve got a gift for this, Cockle.”

“I’ve had practice.”

“I bet you have. You’ll have more. These are bad times.”

Five of the House’s patients had died in the last two days. An infection had swept the East Wing. Renato had volunteered to dig their graves. He seemed to regard it as a kind of penance for his various sins. Creedmoor had offered to help.

He was about ready to make his move, any day now, and he was wondering if there was some way he could arrange things so that he wouldn’t have to kill Renato, who he’d discovered he rather liked. He thought it unlikely.

“I’ve known worse,” Creedmoor said.

“Not in these parts. What happened at Kloan . . .”

News of the massacre at Kloan had reached the House a few days ago. Fortunately, no coherent description of Creedmoor had emerged. The House had sent out parties to collect the wounded, and been turned away by Linesmen. Rumor had it that the Line had entirely devoured Kloan. Worse, it was said that the Line was asserting its authority over Greenbank and all the House’s other neighbors; and Line forces were patrolling the roads, searching and harassing all travelers to or from the House.

“Where the Line is,” Renato said, “their enemy won’t be far behind. And the War will come here.”

“And it will move on. We’ve seen it happen, you and I. The House will survive.”

Creedmoor happened to know for a fact that there was at least one Linesman up on the canyon’s edge as he spoke, hiding among the rocks, looking down at them with his long spyglass. They knew that he knew they were watching him, and he knew that they knew. He couldn’t kill them and they couldn’t kill him, but his shoulder blades itched, waiting for the sniper’s bullet. . . .

He laughed. “Bad times. Good times. Even the good times are bad somewhere. Where’d you learn to dig a grave?”

Renato thought for a moment. He rubbed at the red domino that covered his maimed jaw.

“The Hawsy Range,” he said.

“For me, it was the siege of Huka’s Mill,” Creedmoor lied. “I wasn’t there as a soldier; I’d quit soldiering, in fact. On private business. But no one was neutral when the armies came. An infection arose from the shit-pit; you could almost see the black stink of it rise like a dark Power. They gave me a choice: shovel or rifle. Dig graves or fill them. I chose the shovel.”

Renato nodded. “Right. Good choice. So. We were chasing a force of men from the garrison at Fort Hawsy, and
they
were chasing after some Agent’s band, who were chasing after one of those armies from the old Red Republic that went bandit after Black Cap, who were chasing after who knows what. I tell you, I don’t even remember anymore. And we went up into the mountains. . . .”

Creedmoor stopped listening.

Together they lowered the white-wrapped bodies into their graves. Creedmoor held the legs.

“A day’s wages,” Creedmoor said. “That old Mrs. Fraction in the South Extension goes next.”

It was impossible to tell if Renato was smiling, but his eyes looked amused.

“With that cough? No bet, Cockle. Tell you what, I bet you old Root Busro wakes up one morning and finds he’s vanished up his own fundament and gone from this world at last.”

“Busro’s the gentleman who tells us all we’re all just figures in his dream? Infuriating. I bet you someone shoots him, Renato, before he learns to vanish himself.”

“No chance, Cockle; the Spirit preserves his infuriating ass. Now here, I got one: a week’s laundry duty says the Kid shoots
himself
before the year’s out.”

“Ha. Could be. Could very well be. How about . . .”

—Creedmoor.

“How about the old General, surely he’s due for retirement at last.”

“The world would be a better place without Generals. But which one, Cockle? Narrow it down.”

“Ah, you know the one I mean. The old—”

—
Creedmoor
.

—What?

—Abban the Lion is dead.

—What?

“Cockle? What’s wrong?”

—Abban the Lion is dead.

—Impossible.

—Abban the Lion is dead. Keane is dead.

—Who the fuck is Keane?

—Was. She was with Abban, they were preparing—

—I know who she is. Was. One of the new ones. A child. I knew Abban for thirty years, the things we saw and did together—

—He is dead. Keane is dead. Hang-’Em-High Washburne is not dead but lost to the noisemakers. Drunkard Cuffee is dead. Abban took by far the greatest number of the Enemy with him. Drunkard Cuffee fled and nearly escaped.

“Cockle? Are you listening? Are you sick?”

—What do I care how many he killed? They were to be our protectors on the road home. Now we must go alone.

—You will not survive alone. Not taking the General with you. The Line’s forces are very strong here. They have moved faster than we anticipated. You have taken too long, Creedmoor.

—I’ve taken too long? Fuck you. Fuck you all.

—Fanshawe remains alive in Greenbank. We have more Agents not far from here. Tonight in darkness they will move. Soon they will join Fanshawe. You must be patient.

—
You
tell
me
to be patient? What—?

“Cockle!”

“Yes! Yes. It’s the heat. Excuse me. A touch of . . .”

He let go of the corpse’s legs and walked back to the House.

The truth was, Creedmoor thought, that he
had
been idle in the House, too comfortable, too slow to move, enjoying his clever little puzzle and his card games and his lies and his pretty rustic nurses, and now a trap had closed around him. He could not bear to be trapped.

He stalked back through the corridors of the House. He made for the kitchens and took two bottles of whiskey from a shelf.

Sichel the cook said, “Cockle, what—?”

“Put it on my account. Get out of my way.”

He felt like gnawing his own leg off.

He headed up to the roof.

On the way, he bumped into the nurse Hannah, who put a hand to her mouth in shock and said, “John, what’s wrong?”

He looked her up and down critically. She seemed a great deal less pretty and pleasant than he’d previously thought. He pushed past her without a word.

In the upper corridors of the House, he passed Dr. Alverhuysen’s pet idiot Maggfrid, who stood in his way and seemed too confused to get out of it, and it took all Creedmoor’s strength to restrain the urge to kill him.

“I
beg
your pardon,” he said.

He climbed out a window onto the roof and started drinking.

Linesmen watched him through their spyglasses from the edge of the canyon. They hid among rocks and anthills. No ordinary man would have been able to see them, but Creedmoor could.

—They may fire on you. Go back inside.

—They will not risk it. Battle here might awake the Spirit; might kill the General.

—We would risk it.

—They are not us.

—No.

He drank and watched the sun slowly turn red and set.

—It was Black Casca who introduced me to Abban. This was back in Gibson City, thirty years ago.

—We recall.