The Half-Made World (48 page)

The next morning there was a great crashing from the south slope; the trees threshed and shuddered and tore. Birds barreled up from the branches in terror. And three immense bears—black and frothing at the mouth—a wedding-dress froth, thick and swaying and glistening—came roaring out of the forest.

They had the most terrible red eyes. They had claws like stone spearheads. They were covered in something that was not fur but long, swaying, heaving black hair, oily and liquid.

They were, but for the Engine that had carried her West, the largest and most terrible creatures Liv had ever seen. They could not possibly be natural-born animals.

She stiffened her spine and refused to look away—another illusion, another horrible trick of this horrible valley!

Creedmoor fired three shots.

The first caught one of the bears in its great head, as it reared. The skull was obliterated: the black body swayed and shuddered and flung ragged bloody ropey spew from its vacant shoulders. The second shot caught another bear in its side and opened up the architecture of its chest so that Liv could see the curve of its bloody bones and the bright pumping engines of its organs. It ran for a few yards farther then fell with a thud. With the third shot—it was as if Creedmoor, having experimented, had found the precise minimum of force to expend—though all three shots had been fired within a fraction of a second—Creedmoor caught the third bear in its left eye and that wild red orb burst into a brief neat spurt of blood, then blackness, and the body slumped limply to the ground.

It was all over before Liv could scream; so instead she breathed deeply and sat down on the mud.

Creedmoor holstered his weapon.

The bodies of the bears did not disappear. They did not neatly resolve themselves into rocks or shadows. They did not in any way confess their unreality. Instead they lay pouring out blood and stink and very quickly attracted flies.

“This game,” Creedmoor said, “is rapidly ceasing to amuse.”

CHAPTER 32

LIBERATION

The next night was freezing cold. Creedmoor built a fire out of stacked branches and stones, like the pyre he’d built for his dead comrades, and stared into it, hat pulled down over his eyes.

It had been some time since Liv had thought of her nerve tonic. She recalled the sweet metallic scent of it suddenly—something in the fire’s smoke triggered the memory—and for a moment, she felt a deep sad craving. It passed quickly. She set the thought aside. Her nerves felt—oddly—quite healthy.

The General had been in good form during the warmth of the day. His tongue was loosening somewhat as they went west; Liv thought the fresh air and activity were doing him good. He’d even responded to some of her questions, albeit only to weave her words into the nonsense of the fairy story he was telling. (A bird; two squabbling brothers; an endless journey into winter.) It made Liv smile and laugh to see it; she held him and he wheezed with what seemed to be happiness. Creedmoor was distant all the day, lost in thought, and Liv and the General were alone, and almost happy. But when the cold came suddenly down, the General went silent. He curled himself up in simple animal pain and whimpered at the outrage of it. He flinched at Liv’s touch, and her heart broke. She withdrew from him and huddled by the fire and rubbed her legs—which were thinner now and wiry, like the legs of a stranger who’d led a harder life than the one she was meant for.

This, too, is a trap,
Liv thought. Her growing affection for the poor old General was irrational. Its causes were obvious: first, loneliness and fear; and second, displaced guilt over her unintentional-but-nevertheless-painful abandonment of Maggfrid. It would bind her to Creedmoor’s side, prevent her from running. She could not stop it from happening.

She sat by the red wounded throb of the fire and attempted to harden her heart.

She started a little when Creedmoor spoke.

“Have you ever heard of a place called No-Town, Liv?”

“No-Town? Never.”

“No.” He poked at the fire. “Why would you?”

He was silent for a while. Liv waited.

“You asked when I came to the Gun. When I signed up. That’s a short story. I was drunk at the time—the end. I’ll tell you instead about an earlier occasion, when I was still very young and innocent; the first time I set eyes on an Agent of the Gun, and as far as I know the first time the Gun turned its attention to me. Or who knows? Maybe they watched me in the womb. Their ways were mysterious.”

Liv stayed quiet. Creedmoor looked down into the fire and kept speaking. “It was in a town called Twisted Root. Far east of here, far north of the Deltas, on a dusty plain, away over the Opals, a frozen range on which I once nearly died. There’s hardly a wild place left in the world where I haven’t nearly died. This was thirty-some years ago; when you get to my age, you lose count. Thirty-two. I was there on behalf of—”

The Liberationists. That was his cause at the time. The Liberation from bondage and oppression of the First Folk, who never seemed grateful for the Liberationists’ attentions; but virtue was its own reward, and futility only a spur to greater sacrifice. . . .

A stocky bespectacled young man, with a pale face and shaggy black hair. He still had the accent of a boy from rainy and distant Lundroy, which was the home he’d run away from. He stood on an upturned crate in Twisted Root’s market square and shouted his message of Liberation in singsong Lundroy tones, his voice straining and cracking over the noise of the market.

It was the hot season, late in the day. The sun, descending, burned the world a raw-flesh red. The market was noisy with cows, and traders, and goats, and half a dozen blacksmiths, and occasional gunshots as gun merchants showed off their wares, and men on horseback—and red-coated
soldiers
on horseback—forcing their way through the crowds. And the buzzing of the flies!

John Creedmoor preached Liberation. The Hillfolk, the objects of his charity, stood silently in their pen, chained by their bony ankles, pale as bone and black-maned and stiff as pines. Iron chains; the Hillfolk could work stone like water, but iron pained them. Iron made them biddable. Iron shaped them into tools.

Ten feet away, a hunched old man of maybe forty-five stood on a tree stump hawking cheap yellow novels and ballads and picture books of the adventures of Henry Steel, Slavoj the Ogre, Springknife Sally of Lud-Town, and other rogues and killers and bank robbers and Agents of the Gun. And the slaver himself, a little rat of a man called Collins, in a tattered fur hat and a threadbare suit, stood by the Hillfolk’s pen and shouted out the praises of his stock.

And Creedmoor raised his voice again, and scattered his own pamphlets into the crowd: copies of
The Chain-Breaker,
house organ of the Liberationists. No one moved to pick them up. The farmers of Twisted Root looked at him with dull dislike.

A man’s voice shouted, “Go home, boy!” Not angry, yet—just bored. It wounded Creedmoor’s pride. He was the kind of young man who’d rather be hated than ignored.

He read from
Chain-Breaker
Number 22, Volume 3. It was the text of a recent speech given by one Mr. Ownslow Phillips, back in Beecher’s marbled City Hall.

Gentlemen, ladies, be not afraid of
TRUTH
; be not afraid nor too proud to look the monster
SLAVERY
boldly in its face. Be not too blind to see the cruelty you do to your brothers, to those simple folk whose land this once was. Is it any wonder that our earth sprouts the monsters of
GUN
and
LINE
to rule over us, when we water it hourly with the blood whipped from the backs of innocents, when we . . .

Liberationism was a new cause for Creedmoor. Six months ago, it hadn’t ever occurred to him to give a damn for the Hillfolk’s well-being. A year ago, he’d been a pious shaven-headed devotee of the Virgins of the White City. And the year before that, it’d been Free Love, and the Consolidated Knights of Labor. Cause after cause, each one a disappointment. And until a few months ago, he had frittered away his time on Self-Improvement, attending a meeting circle of Smilers in Beecher City.
My name is John Creedmoor, and I know that I have been a frightened man, a willful man.
 . . . All that shit. A meeting circle of two bakers, a wheelwright, three bank clerks, and a haberdasher’s assistant; the mediocrity of it embarrassed him still. He’d given not one moment’s thought to the Hillfolk, not until he’d skipped meeting circle one morning and wandered by drunken mistake into Beecher City Hall, where Mr. Ownslow Phillips had been speaking. The grand speechifying and the organ and the stern determined songs echoing from the rafters—electrifying! And more electrifying still was the sight of Phillips, that noble white-haired old man, being dragged from the podium and beaten bloody by the thugs of some slaving-trust. Creedmoor had charged into the riot, laughing, fists swinging, and broken a slaver’s nose.

And six months later, he was out in the backcountry, in Twisted Root, all on his own, being ignored by dumb farmers. Laughed at.

And another voice called,
Go home!
and another, and the crowd started up a dull hooting at him, which he struggled to rise above with dignity.

The slaver Collins relaxed, leaned against a fencepost, and watched the proceedings with a rueful smile.

Creedmoor had been dogging this slaver’s steps for two weeks now, from town to town. When Creedmoor and Collins first met, in Far Peck, Collins had owned twenty-six Hillfolk; by the time they got to Twisted Root, he had ten. Business had been good. Creedmoor’s pure loathing of Collins had not diminished with familiarity. Collins, however, sometimes got avuncular; he sometimes talked to the younger man as if they were friends, casual rivals, players of the same rough game. He caught Creedmoor’s eye and shrugged, as if to say,
Some you win, some you lose.

Creedmoor kept preaching.

“It’s a fine thing,” Collins shouted, “that in the cities a young man has leisure enough to develop such tender feelings for these dumb brutes! Will
he
do your work for you, with his soft hands?”

Creedmoor kept preaching, and the hooting rose to an angry chant, and the first thrown stone came soon after. It hit him in the shoulder and even though he was expecting it, he still dropped his pamphlets. The crowd laughed as he bent to pick them up. Another stone, and a handful of dirt, and then a hail of stones and dirt and muck. Creedmoor shouted even louder, and the crowd hooted back, and the market’s dogs started barking. Another stone hit Creedmoor on his forehead and he stumbled and the wooden crate tilted beneath him and he went down in the mud, on his hands and knees, looking for his spectacles.

A soldier of the Red Valley Republic saved him.

A shadow fell over him, and he looked up, and up, to see one of the red-coated soldiers astride his horse, looking down.

The mob withdrew.

The soldier’s red coat—red was for the Republic’s officers—was very fine. He had golden trim on his shoulders and a field of golden medals on his breast; a rifle on his back, a sword at his side; a proud black mustache and long black hair to his shoulders.

In those days, the Republic was at the height of its glory. Under its President Iredell and its great General Enver, it had won a sweep of brilliant victories and negotiated a series of grand treaties, and was carving out an empire in the heart of the West. It bowed to no inhuman Power—it fought the massed legions of the Line on one front and the mercenaries and bandits of the Gun on another. It was one of the few great causes Creedmoor had never been interested in; he found them self-righteous and dull. He didn’t see the romance of them until a few years later, after the Republic was smashed at Black Cap Valley and the cause was doomed, and by then it was too late.

The soldier’s arm was outstretched to help Creedmoor up.

“You’re a long way from home, son.”

Creedmoor stood without taking the officer’s hand. The officer shrugged; smiled; rested his hand again on the reins. “By your accent and your aspect, I reckon you’re a Lundroy-man, born and bred. Far, far from home.”