The Half-Made World (54 page)

There were gentle creatures among the oaks that in many ways resembled deer, though they weren’t. She’d taken to calling them
deer
anyway.

“Name nothing,” Creedmoor had warned her. “It’s poor form out here to name things.” She saw his point.

All around the clearing rose tall silent oaks. The light that fell through them was golden. Anywhere Liv looked, there might be something equally as strange and beautiful as the thing that she was conscientiously trying not to think of as a rose.

The oaks were peaceful—a surprise. Liv had expected, when she and Creedmoor and the General first struck out west beyond the valley, that they would be walking into growing chaos and horror. And indeed, there
had
been bad days—as they climbed through broken hills with ditches and ravines that ran with what smelled like blood and looked like bile—as they forced their way through thick yellow grass among which hid huge black ticks that beat like a heart—as they struggled through forests of bamboo, and mangrove, and trees that had no name but were nightmarishly immense, their branches riddled with hollows like big-city tenement blocks in which lived golden-furred monkeys that Creedmoor pronounced
good eating
but screamed like children when he shot them—and trees whose hollows were fleshy and vulval—and they had climbed cold rocky slopes into windy heights and camped for a night watching the stars fall and wheel and deliquesce in waves of green and blue that surged like a sea.

“The Western Lights,” Creedmoor had said. “Or the Western Sea, toward which we are heading. Sea, sky, land, day, night, indistinguishable, not yet separated. Where creation begins, or maybe hasn’t happened yet. How many explorers have come this far? Not many. One day we may come to the shore and make our stand there against the Line under the light of its mad energy. They should write a poem about us.”

Then Liv and the General had caught a fever, and Creedmoor reluctantly let them stop for three full days, and Liv thought she might die, but didn’t. When they were strong enough to move on, they went down again into forests and soon they were among the oaks, which were peaceful and beautiful and still and silent as a library and restful and seemed to go on forever, day after day, perhaps all the way to the ocean. So the western wilderness resisted her expectations again.

Creedmoor returned to the clearing. He carried one of the animals-that-wasn’t-a-deer over his back, and he threw it down into the dirt not far from where the General lay curled up asleep. He went and sat on the fallen oak at the clearing’s edge, toying with his knife.

The not-rose closed itself. Liv sat up straight.

“Well done, Creedmoor. Give me the knife and I’ll clean it.”

“Thank you, Liv.” He didn’t move.

“Are we still alone?”

He waved vaguely. “Our friends from the Line are still behind us, of course.”

She strongly suspected that he was lying; in fact, she suspected that they’d lost their pursuers days or weeks ago. Creedmoor had, seemingly without noticing it, let the pace of their westward flight ease, then come almost to a standstill. Hours would go by when he simply sat in silent thought, or walked off by himself into the forests to
hunt
or
scout
or just to
think
. It seemed that he recalled their pursuers and the need for haste only when he wanted to cut conversations short.

“And the creature?”

He shrugged. “Signs. Spoor. The usual. Nothing more.”

Liv considered it symptomatic of Creedmoor’s generally poor mental health that he didn’t find the oaks restful. Even the General seemed happier under the oaks—but not Creedmoor. Peace and calm unsettled him. At first he’d insisted that the oaks were only the eye of the storm, that in a matter of days they’d be replaced by lakes of fire, or poison swamps, or something else equally awful. When that didn’t happen, he became slowly convinced that they shared the oaks with something monstrous and predatory. He deduced its existence from claw marks on trees that looked to Liv like nothing at all, faded spoor-scents that Liv couldn’t smell, the yellowing bones of not-quite-deer.

“And—”

“And my master has still not found its way back to me, Liv.”

He continued to play with the knife. He quite clearly very much wanted to be smoking.

“And you?”

“The General is well enough. He talks but says nothing. Today I encouraged him to walk unaided.”

“That helps, does it?”

“Probably not. He fell.”

“Oh, well.” Creedmoor sheathed the knife. He looked as if he were about to stand up, but didn’t.

In fact, the General
had
been showing signs of improvement in recent days, or at least signs of change. He was calmer. He didn’t shake so much, or roll his eyes. He talked more—it was nonsense, of course, but it suggested some activity going on within—and his voice was firmer. His movements were steadier. He struggled more when Liv fed him and cleaned him, which was tiresome but also encouraging. Sometimes his eyes fixed on Liv’s and he seemed to be straining to speak sense. Liv liked to think this was because of her efforts; more likely, she suspected, it was because of the calm of the oaks; just possibly it was because of Creedmoor’s frequent absences.

Creedmoor noticed none of this. He was occupied with his own thoughts. Liv didn’t mention it to him.

“Liv,” he said. “Is it possible that you
could
make the General speak his secrets, but you won’t?”

“You overestimate me.”

“Or maybe when I go walking or hunting, he
has
spoken to you, and you keep it secret from me.”

“You’re paranoid, Creedmoor.”

“True. On the other hand, you did try to kill me once.”

“Not lately.” She walked over and sat beside the General, whose breathing had become labored, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Anyway, can you blame me?”

Ordinarily he might have laughed, to prove that he was above bearing grudges. Now he just kept talking. “If the General were to speak to you, if he were to reveal his secrets, would you tell them to me?”

“Yes, Creedmoor. Of course.”

“Why?”

“What kind of a question is that, Creedmoor? Because I’m your prisoner, because—”

“You shouldn’t.”

She didn’t know what to say, so she kept silent.

“The brave thing to do,” he said, “would be for you to refuse; to flee if necessary; to take a knife to the General’s throat or your own rather than give his secret into my hands. Why don’t you? In fact, your guilt is worse in a way because you are free to make your choices while the rest of us—”

He paused again and collected his thoughts. “It’s true that the secret, if the Guns obtain it, may slow the Line; at least that’s what they told me. But who knows what else it may do? Who knows what the Guns would do unopposed? The present war is terrible; could it be worse?”

The General muttered. Liv shushed him.

“Suppose I promised you, Liv, that I would not give the secret into the hands of my masters; suppose instead we found someone loyal to neither Gun nor Line, who might turn it against both; or we sold it on the open market, perhaps, or published it in the letter columns of the newspapers, or took it to Jasper City and shouted it in the streets, or suppose we just stay out here in the wilderness like it’s No-Town where what we do matters to no one and enjoy the harmless satisfaction of knowing for ourselves. . . . I don’t know. What do
you
recommend? But what if. Would you help me then?”

“If I could heal the General, I would, Creedmoor.”

“Would it make any difference?”

“I would probably believe you were lying.”

He scowled. “I am, of course, used to distrust, to—”

“Stop pitying yourself, Creedmoor.”

“Careful, Liv.”

She pointed at the gun that hung at his waist. “You still carry that thing. It may or may not be silent; how would I know? If you want me to believe that you are no longer loyal—”

“I was never
loyal
. Am I a dog?”

“Then destroy it.”

“I—” He looked genuinely shocked. His eyes widened. The thought seemed to appall him. He appeared so genuinely terrified at the possibility that for the first time Liv wondered if he might be sincere.

She got quickly to her feet. “Destroy it,” she said. “Throw it away. That, Creedmoor, would be the
brave
thing to do, and then I might—”

His eyes narrowed and his expression went flat. “Do you hear that, Liv?”

“No.”

“The Line. I hear marching feet, not so far behind. The roaring of motors. We must move on.”

“Creedmoor—”

“We must move on. See to the General.”

Creedmoor strode through the forest. He kept his head down and his hand hovered, perhaps unconsciously, near to his weapon. Liv followed along twenty paces behind him, holding the General’s hand and pulling him stumbling along like a wayward dog. Leaves rustled underfoot and twigs cracked.

“Creedmoor—slow down. The General—”

“No time. No time.”

Overhead a thick canopy shifted. One moment Liv was in shadow while Creedmoor moved through a shaft of sun; the next moment Liv blinked in sudden light and lost sight of Creedmoor as he moved into darkness, and it was only the sound of him pushing violently through underbrush ahead that made it possible to follow. That was how they went on for hours. Leaf-drifts thickened like snow, ankle deep. Slowly the sun fell—or perhaps the canopy thickened—and moments of light became few and far between, and the forest filled with soft shadows. It was cool, windless, dry, and musty. At last Creedmoor said—

“Stop.”

He stood at the foot of an oak, looking up. He held out a hand to warn her off. Then he changed his mind and beckoned her closer.

“Stay,” she said, and let go of the General’s hand.

She took a few steps farther, and suddenly became aware of a foul odor, which only grew as she approached the spot where Creedmoor stood. As she stood beside him her face was pale and she covered her face with her filthy sleeve. The odor was rot, feces, and something else, something oily, something metallic, something burned.

A half dozen bloody and mangled corpses were cradled in the oak overhead. Broken backs were slung over branches; gore trickled in the hollows. Liv’s first thought was that the corpses were human—then she noticed a stripped leg loosely dangling, which ended in a cloverlike three-pointed hoof—and she noticed a head flung back, its throat torn, with the glassy round eye and delicate features characteristic of the local fauna, the not-exactly-deer—and then she turned away and retched.

“Well, well,” Creedmoor said. “Do you smell that?”

“Yes, Creedmoor, of course I do,
yes
.” She staggered away and leaned for support on a nearby tree trunk.

“I mean its spoor. Its piss, Liv. It marks its kills, see. Oils, acids. Not a regular creature at all, but something very strange and misbegotten indeed.”

He paced back and forth under the defiled oak, stroking his beard. “Claws not unlike a bear. Habits of a mountain cat. Look, see, it kills for pleasure—these corpses are butchered, not eaten. Doesn’t this interest you, Liv?”