The Half-Made World (49 page)

Behind him the mob was watching, waiting.

“You’re a long way from home, too, Officer. What business does the Republic have here?”

“No business of yours, son.”

Hanging from the officer’s saddlebags like strange fruit were three black iron canisters, roughly cylindrical, but jutting with sharp-edged protrusions: gears, teeth, wheels, hammer-locks. Bombs. Weapons of the Line, mass produced in factories, like the Linesmen who carried them. The officer must have won them in battle.

The officer wasn’t much older than Creedmoor. Creedmoor envied and despised him and suddenly craved his respect. But before Creedmoor could say anything, the man leaned down and in a low flat voice told him, “Now, go home. Go to your lodgings. If these farm boys take it into their flat heads to show you violence, I ain’t going to help you.” He straightened again in the saddle. “It ain’t my mission here to make trouble. Sorry, son. Go home.”

What
home? Creedmoor passed the last of the afternoon out in the fields, under a tree—hiding, sweating, wretched. He stole back into town in the evening. The market was over.

There was one main street in Twisted Root and two bars: Kennerly’s and the Four-and-Twenty. Kennerly’s ran gaming tables for traveling quality and advertised wines shipped in from Juddua and the farthest old-world east; the Four-and-Twenty had sawdust floors and smelled like an out house. Creedmoor sat alone in the shadows of the Four-and-Twenty and drank, and drank, and shook with anger, and watched the door with eager dread for the farmers from the market to show their faces.

There was a card game going at the next table. He avoided eye contact.

He drank the cheapest stuff in the house—money was tight. His pamphlets were gone, trampled in the dirt. He’d paid for the printing of them himself, and he didn’t have the money to do it again. Actually, he’d paid for the printing with stolen money—with money he’d borrowed from a trusting bank clerk from the Smiler meeting circle back in Beecher City, who’d been eager to invest in Creedmoor’s new business plan, a plan that did not, in fact, exist. Creedmoor could be charming and persuasive when he was lying—it was only when he tried to tell the truth that he got himself into trouble. He’d told himself the money was for a good cause, and it was; but now it was gone.

None of the farmers who’d assaulted him came through the door. The whore who worked the house flounced her skirts over to him, saw the look in his eyes, and swished swiftly away again. She sat and laughed with the game-players. A couple of snaggletoothed grave-digger-looking gentlemen sat at their own table, silently staring past each other. Some old traveler in a long black wax-coat sat in the far corner, in shadows, under a wide-brimmed hat, in still silence—save that every few minutes, he muttered to himself. The bartender read—lips working slowly, one finger tracing the page—one of the hawker’s lurid pamphlets:
Regarding the Bloody Adventures of the Agent Henry Steel (Who Carried Both Hammer and
GUN
) and His Terrible Death Ground Under by the Wheels of the Line.

When the slaver Collins darkened the doorway, Creedmoor froze stiff in his chair.

Collins was alone. Weaving and smiling; already drunk—he must have been made welcome at Kennerly’s, Creedmoor thought. He must have done good business.

Collins’s eyes lit on Creedmoor and he winked and laughed. “No hard feelings, son.” Then he sat down at the game table, put a hand on the whore’s voluminous skirts, and waited to be dealt in.

Creedmoor half stood and loudly slurred, “Collins. Collins. You make me sick.”

The bartender put down the pamphlet and reached below the bar. The man in the long coat in the corner mumbled something to himself. The two men who might be grave-diggers watched with what might have been professional curiosity.

Collins turned calmly to Creedmoor—“You’re young, son. You’ll learn how things are”—then turned back to the game.

Creedmoor clutched the bottle by its neck and leapt over the table. When the bottle connected with the back of Collins’s head, there was an explosion of glass and whiskey and noise and a shock ran down Creedmoor’s arm. Every nerve in his body sang. Whiskey and glass sprayed the table and everyone who sat at it. Collins fell from his chair. What was left in Creedmoor’s quivering hand was a broken bloody bottleneck. Blood spread on the floor. It had an odd oil-thick sheen in the candlelight. It soaked into the sawdust and became a dark blot. A gathering stain. Irregular. A valley traced in the dust by the scrape of a chair leg flooded and became a river. Long cracks in the floorboards made lines. Creedmoor stared transfixed at the map of violence growing at his feet. He felt numb—frozen—drained, as if it were his blood on the floor. He looked up past a dozen shocked and outraged faces and saw the old man in the long black coat watching with a casual smile on his face, and sharp blue eyes, one of which winked. Creedmoor said, “What?” There was something so strange and familiar in the old man’s eyes that Creedmoor hardly noticed the yelling of the mob, or the hands on his shoulders, two hands, four hands, more hands seizing his arms, a fist in his back, in his kidney, one in his gut bending him double, still staring numbly as they dragged him away.

The crowd dragged him out into the market, where there were stalls and poles and stages and the makings of a gallows. They hunted around drunkenly for rope. The bartender was with them, and the grave-diggers, and the cardplayers, and the whore. Creedmoor had daydreamed for years of what it would be like to hang, how he’d spit defiance and roar with laughter and make a speech that would make the crowd weep—now that it came to it, he was too astonished to say a word. He’d been a thief for a long time, but he was genuinely surprised to find himself a murderer. Two men held him roughly against a post and shouted in his ears, but he didn’t care. They cinched the rope around his neck and pulled him up onto a box. He didn’t struggle. The rope was looped over a crossbeam, but they couldn’t work out how to make it taut, Creedmoor noticed, and they’d left his hands untied, possibly an oversight, certainly no kindness. They were still shouting nonsense at him. He looked around for the man in the long black coat—

Who came ambling quite leisurely down the street and across the red dust of the market. Now that he was standing, it was apparent that he was extraordinarily tall. He seemed to be keeping up a cheerful conversation with the night air. A shake of his head; a full-body shrug; a laugh. He took off his hat and held it in one hand, revealing long gray hair. With the other hand, he drew from his coat the most beautiful gun Creedmoor had ever seen, breathtaking in silver and black, heavy and ornate as a sacred icon. A thrill of fear shot through the crowd, who were suddenly only a handful of little men and women standing drunk in cow dung in an empty market square, fumbling with frayed ropes.

“A promising young man!” The man in the long black coat spoke in a booming voice, actorly, amused: a voice of utter command. “It’s a lucky young man,” he said, head cocked, over his shoulder, as if he was talking to the weapon in his hand, “who has a higher power watching over his shoulder.”

There was a shot; Creedmoor didn’t see the man’s hand move. He fell over backwards. The rope was cut. The crowd scattered, stepping over him. Someone was foolish enough to draw a weapon and there was another shot, and more blood.

There was more shooting. The man in the long black coat—who seemed to ignore bullets as if they were flies—walked casually past the makeshift gallows and gave Creedmoor, who still lay in the dirt, an appraising glance, and said, “Not yet. But you’ve got promise. Maybe later.”

Up close, it was obvious that the man was drunk.

Then he kept walking, past Kennerly’s, where red-coated soldiers spilled out of the doors shooting at him, and down the street, and—kicking the doors open—into Twisted Root’s little bank.

Creedmoor ran. There was fire behind him, but he didn’t look back.

That was Creedmoor’s first murder; that was how he first came to the notice of the Guns.

“I never learned the identity of the Agent who saved me. I imagine he died. We have a tendency to do that. But two years later, I walked full of pluck and resolve and despair into an opium den in Gibson City, where one Mr. Dandy Fanshawe was known to be a regular; I was drunk and angry, but that’s no excuse; and I . . .”

Creedmoor was silent for a long time. Eventually Liv spoke.

“And?”

He glanced warily up. “And? And nothing. What happens after that is inevitable.”

“You were an idealist.”

He shook his head under the brim of his hat. “A very poor idealist.”

“And did your service to the Gun—?”

“Liv. You’re a fine listener, Liv. A professional skill, I assume. And I’m too fond of my own voice. I’m a vain man. I know it. It’s not the least of my flaws. And the Guns are silent out here, Liv, the echoes of their Song cannot reach us, and so I have a great deal of time to devote to my thoughts, and so—”

He pushed back his brim and gave her a sudden unshadowed grin. “Dangerous notions, unsafe even to think. Good night, Liv.”

“Creedmoor—”

“Good night. The General needs cleaning, I think.”

CHAPTER 33

FORWARD THE GLORIOUS PURPOSE

If the Doctor’s signaling device could be trusted, then it seemed the Agent had taken the low road west. There wasn’t much out in the uncreated world that could be trusted, but Lowry’s faith in Line engineering hadn’t entirely deserted him yet; and besides, it seemed
right
. The Agent had found a valley—a cut, a cleft, a crevice, a ditch, a gutter—a
sewer
—and was squirming wormlike along it out to the Western Sea. Disgusting.

Lowry took the high road—that is, he led his men along the heights, the clifftops, high over the valley, where he hoped he’d be hidden from the Agent’s wolflike ears and eyes. This required some self-sacrifice on the part of Lowry’s men—the winds up on the heights were terrible. They froze, burned, stung. Sometimes they carried improbable scents—salt, spice, engine oil, fire—things Lowry couldn’t name—things that woke powerful homesick emotions but, in fact, were only meaningless—misplaced and drifting scraps of creation.