The Half-Made World (51 page)

A chill mist filled the valley, hiding its walls from sight. It coiled and shifted like cigarette smoke. It brushed damply against Liv’s face. It was a thick whiteness shot through with the faintest, eeriest hint of red. Creedmoor strode through it confidently, and it flowed around him and drifted together again to put its fingers on Liv, struggling along behind him, her arms around the General’s hunched and shivering body.

“Not too much farther,” Creedmoor told her. “Bear up.”

“I thought we were going to the ends of the earth.”

“I hope not! I sincerely do. Our enemies lag behind. Some days I can hardly hear them. Soon the wilderness will grind them down. They’re made of cheaper stuff than us.”

“And then what?”

He shrugged. “Set up a little place together in the wilderness. I’ll build it and feed us, and you can care for the young ’un. How is he today?”

“He’s freezing, Creedmoor. We should stop, make a fire, if you’re so confident the Line are lagging behind.”

“We’ll see.” Creedmoor whistled for a moment, then lost the tune. “I am sorry to bring you out here, Liv,” he added. “But these things happen. Great forces contend for our souls; we are dragged helplessly along. Is this not perhaps what you expected, when you came west? Perhaps even what you
wanted
?”

Was it? She could no longer remember. She listened to the meaningless tick of her golden watch and was unable to answer.

“You have no children, Liv, is that right?”

“No, Mr. Creedmoor. I do not.”

“An enviable state. Unattached and without responsibilities. Free as a bird. You were married, were you not? I should have asked these questions sooner, I know.”

Creedmoor was only half-visible in the thickening fog, and his voice was muffled. For the first time, she didn’t want him to stop talking. Horrible as he was, he was better than the ghostly white silence.

“I was married,” she said.

“He died?”

“He did.”

“I thought so. No sane man would let you go, if he was not torn from you by death.”

“
Please,
Mr. Creedmoor.”

“Old habits. Beg pardon. May I ask how he died?”

“Of a heart attack. He was—ah—he was carving the roast at dinner, for the Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and his wife, and the Bishop of Lodenstein, and others. And the effort, and the occasion, were too much for him. He swelled up in his shirtsleeves and burst. He fell with his mustaches in the gravy.”

Creedmoor laughed and Liv felt ashamed of herself.

“He was an older man, then, Liv?”

“He was close to your age, Mr. Creedmoor.”

“Ah, but I keep myself fit through clean living. You have no aged parents to care for? No grizzled father to feed and nurse? No poor old mother?”

“No, Creedmoor. None of those things.”

“When did the poor old fellow die?”

“Three years ago. Three and a half.”

“Alone and unencumbered for three and one-half years. I picture a perfect and respectable life, laboriously constructed, all fallen apart, and you alone. That soothing green fluid, your nerve tonic, you called it; I think you took it every day when I first met you. Did you take it every day during your marriage? I imagine your husband as very tiresome; pompous, gray-bearded, both fussy and slovenly. Am I unfair to him? I picture you making sacrifices of your health to maintain that wholesome and perfect life. Am I correct? Do correct me if I’m wrong, Liv.”

Liv didn’t answer.

“Some of us are not suited to domesticity. Some of us, fight it though we may, are not suited for reason; we must make our peace with madness. We can hardly be blamed for our defects. That’s my diagnosis. You were bound to come out here in the end, I think. I recall the day I came out here. I was a Lundroy boy, as I may have told you, a boy of the mists and the bogs and the mire and the
songs,
Liv, the bloody awful old songs. . . .”

A wind had picked up, and the whine of it made Creedmoor increasingly hard to hear. Whatever he had been about to say was lost when a sudden whirling gust blew dust and damp leaves into their faces, and blew away the mist, and revealed a slate-gray sky and a valley that was greatly and magnificently transformed.

The dry riverbed had widened and was now interrupted by sharp black rocks, tree-tall, mountainous. The last ghosts of the mist drifted on the ground between them. The hills on either side sloped more sharply than ever, treeless and rocky, red and flinty and so sheer not even a goat would dare them, but—and it was no wonder Creedmoor had stopped, and tilted his head back, and back, and whistled and removed his hat—someone had
carved
them.

The scale of the work was magnificent, barbaric, inhuman.

Two immense statues stood on either side of the valley walls. They were hundreds of feet in height, and stretched so far into the distance overhead that their extremities were almost invisible. They had no legs; their upper bodies leaned forward from the valley walls far overhead, as if they were rising from water, or stepping through a curtain. One on the south slope, one on the north: two gigantic Hillfolk. Their manes seemed to stream out behind in steep slopes of flint. Their hands were empty, outstretched, reaching toward each other, meeting at the tips of long many-jointed fingers.

Eagles nested in the hollows of their eyes.

The slopes behind them were painted with swirls and arabesques and jagged angles of stark red. Each of those intricate swirls was—Liv reckoned—maybe five feet wide, maybe twenty feet apart.

It was perhaps the most beautiful and absurd thing she had ever seen. It thrilled and terrified her.

Creedmoor was pacing excitedly back and forth across the riverbed underneath the two giants. He had removed his hat and was swinging it from side to side, banging it dustily against his knees, and he was laughing.

Creedmoor’s beard, it struck Liv suddenly, was growing quite wild now; he had been clean-shaven and impeccably groomed in the House, but out here, now, he was well on his way to savagery.

“Wonderful things! Wonderful monstrous things! Who would have thought we’d ever see the like! Look at ’em, Liv! Look at ’em, Marmion. Are you there, Marmion? Do you see these things? We’ve seen a thing or two in our time, but
this—
”

Liv thought:
Marmion. It has a name
. She knew at once who—what—the name belonged to. She was suddenly more scared of tiny capering Creedmoor than of either of the looming rock giants.

“This is a sacred place. This is one
fucker
of a sacred place. No wonder they’ve been trying to scare us away. No wonder! Who can blame them! Marmion, suppose strangers came blundering into your sacred Lodge—how would you deal with them? How much more bloodily would you deal with them than the spirits of this place have seen fit to deal with us! How . . .”

—Creedmoor.

—How much more—? You’re back.

—Yes, Creedmoor. We have found our way to you. It was difficult. This place is not yet ready for us.

—How do they manage out here without you, I wonder. Look at this!

—Shut up, Creedmoor.

Pain filled Creedmoor’s head, and a stink of burning, sweat, gunpowder, fear. Red-hot fingers probed and dug into his memories.

—You do not know how we have suffered, Creedmoor. You do not know the agonies of terror and uncertainty, the screaming and weeping in our Lodge. Weeks in the wilderness. We did not know if you had failed us. Creedmoor, what’s this?

—What’s what?

—What have you been telling the woman? What lies about us? How
dare
you? You profane our mysteries with your chatter. You give up our secrets. You—

—It gets lonely out here. No harm—

—You think of betraying us.

—I do not!

—We know you better than you know yourself. You
coward,
Creedmoor. You must be brought to heel.

Creedmoor fell silent. His face flushed, and he clutched his forehead, and he grunted, suddenly stricken. He stood there, head in his hand, and his hat dropped limply to the dusty ground.

For a moment, Liv considered going to him—asking him if he was well, if she could help him, as if he were not a monster. . . . Instead she held the General by his arm and watched.

Creedmoor stumbled two steps forward, then half a step back. He shook his head and moaned.

Liv fumbled in her smock for the arrowhead. She clutched its shaft tightly and thought carefully.

A cold touch against her calf—something rough and wet scraping against her bare flesh—distracted her.

The mist drifted around her legs. Eddies of it thickened, congealed, acquired a strange slippery solidity. Only a few feet away from her—distracted, Liv let go of the General’s arm—a white wisp of mist flicked fish-tail around a rock.

Another wisp slipped from behind and touched against her, and this time it was quite clearly wet, and scaled; and what was more, there was no doubt that it was moving. She shrieked and spun around to see it course past her, squirming over the dry earth, and it leapt into the air like a salmon at spawning, and shone for a moment, then blew away.

She turned back—the General was talking again, but she wasn’t listening—and saw that the white mist poured now down the valley all along the miles of riverbed behind them and all the way back to the place where the river bent around a distant rockslide, two days back—and the mist rushed urgently past her legs, up to her knees now, leaping and full of purposeful pulsing shadow-life.

More solid now, flickering, sinuous, some tiny and darting, some of them heavy and long as her forearm. All white, save for their eyes, which—rushing past so quickly they were like shooting stars—were a pale blue. The tide was up to her waist now, and still leaping; one flicked just past her ear—she could see for a second the precise intricacy of its scales—and she gasped. The ghosts of all the life the river once held? They were weightless and insubstantial; nevertheless, she staggered and nearly fell.

Then they were gone; all gone past. Her legs, Liv noted with horror, were bleeding; whether from the rough touch of their scales or from the needles of their teeth, she could not say, but tiny trickles of blood ran down her calves.

There was no pain.

Blood trickled thinly onto Liv’s boots. It trickled onto the riverbed, which was no longer dry cracked red earth, but was now mud. A loosening, thinning mud, in which her feet sank.

Water trickled up from the earth to meet her blood. It pooled, clear and glistening, at her feet. It pooled all around her, in the mud; the pools overspilled, and tiny rivulets crawled searching through the mud, joining in a bright tracery that was soon washed away as the water rose everywhere—there was a whistling sound, a rushing sound, a faint sound of drumming in the distance—and suddenly the river was rising all around her.

An inch deep. Soon it was two. The river’s rock released its memories of water.

Liv, screaming, scrambled, feet slipping in the muck, for the nearest bank.

She was nearly there—just reaching out to pull herself up onto the rocks—before she thought to turn back for the General.

The water was maybe a foot deep now. It was still, but eddies of white froth swirled here and there on it. The General was on his knees and bending over; his hands were cupped and he seemed to be drinking from the water, or washing his face; his long gray beard dangled wetly in it.