The Half-Made World (56 page)

She sat in the sun and waited. The General remained silent.

After a while she checked her golden watch—it was, as she suspected, still not working. Time was not reliable in the western wilderness. She snapped it shut and returned it to the bag.

When she looked up, she gasped in shock.

Three men stood under the oaks, not thirty feet from the rock pool.

At first, because they were in shadow, she couldn’t make out their faces or their clothes. They might have been Linesmen, or Folk, though they were tall for the former and short for the latter—and something in their bearing suggested that they were almost as surprised to see her as she was to see them, which suggested they were neither Linesmen nor Folk. It seemed possible but unlikely that they were hallucinations, brought on by loneliness.

They approached. They moved slowly, stiffly, almost shyly.

They’d come silent as Folk, but they were clean shaven and sun-browned, dressed in bright clothes, holding steel weapons—they were
men
.

She inched her hand closer to her bag, and the knife within it. Not too close or too quickly, for the men held bows, arrows notched and straining. Bows! Like storybook fairies. Not Linesmen, then.

Two were bare from the waist up. The tallest, thinnest, and oldest wore a red jacket—a cavalry jacket—with faded golden epaulettes, and a few remaining black buttons. Beneath the jacket he, too, was bare chested. He wore rough deerskin trousers. He carried a cavalry saber at his waist. He had a fine-boned old face, long white hair greased back from a high scalp.

The other two were younger. Both were short and heavy shouldered. One fair; one dark. The dark one had a large wen on the side of his nose, from which hair sprouted. An unfortunate face but not an
alien
face. Liv could not, she thought, be imagining them—she would not have troubled to create that wen.

They came forward slowly, staring with such open amazement that Liv could not fear them, bows notwithstanding.

Liv stood, hands open. They were already lowering their bows.

“We are not alone,” she told them.

The silver-haired man in the red jacket—where the jacket fell open, its buttons lost to time, the hair on his skinny old chest was white, too—saluted smartly.

He greeted her: “Madam.” He nodded to the General, who appeared to have fallen asleep. “Sir.”

Then he huddled and whispered with his companions.

She was so delighted to see the faces of human beings other than Creedmoor and the General that it was all she could do not to run up and put her arms around them and burst into tears.

“You seem,” she interrupted, “to be civilized men. I had not thought to meet civilized men so far west.”

Red-jacket turned back to her. “We’d not thought to see so-called civilized men ever again. Nor women. Never a woman and an old man alone like this . . .”

“We are not alone.”

Red-jacket drew himself erect and placed his hand on the pommel of his saber. “Madam. You and your companion must come with us. I must insist. These woods are not safe.”

“Who are you, sir?”

“Captain William Morton, ma’am, of the town of New Design, which is not only the very most westernmost outpost of humanity, but also the last refuge in exile of the Red Valley Republic, and if you have news of the world back east and how they remember us, I’d be delighted to hear it. May I ask your name? And your friend here, or is it your grandfather perhaps—who’s he?”

CHAPTER 38

THE HUNT

Creedmoor crouched among weeds. Their leaves were thick and spiny and dark. They had tiny flowers, which resembled golden pen nibs. The serpent had thoroughly crushed them on its passage through, wriggling and thrashing its fat tail from side to side, perhaps just for the sheer pleasure of destruction. Not too long ago, either—the weeds still bled ink.

The weeds grew in the shadow of rocks. The beast had slithered up among them. A few of the creature’s scales lay glittering among the flakes of stone chipped loose by its passage. Above the rocks stood more oaks, which the creature had slashed in passing, leaving its distinctive two-clawed mark on their trunks or tearing off branches, which Creedmoor suspected it did with its teeth. The ground rose sharply upward. Among the oaks were scattered rocks and smaller trees, pinelike, that Creedmoor couldn’t name; the woods thickened and darkened.

—It seeks high ground.

There was no answer.

Creedmoor picked up one of the creature’s scales. It was no larger than his thumb. It was covered with soft spines, which he carefully pressed down, wary of poison. Beneath the spines, its surface shimmered with an uncertain color—depending on how it caught the sun, it was either pearly white or a dark bruised purple—it shifted like a puddle of motor oil.

—Imagine it, old friend. Imagine what it looks like. You’ll be sorry you missed this.

He waited. Nothing answered. Eventually he smiled.

—Good. Just making sure.

He leapt up onto the rocks and ran headlong into the woods.

Destroy his weapon!—the Doctor had no idea what she was asking. Destroy it or, worse,
leave it behind,
like a Jasper City businessman forgetting his umbrella at the office—like it was nothing of importance!—the Doctor was
mad
.

If he broke the weapon, that would be the end of him. The pact would be canceled, the contract rescinded, the marriage annulled. His strength would be gone. He’d heard of it happening, to Agents caught in ambushes of the Line, caught drunk or drugged or otherwise vulnerable. The weapon could be quite easily broken, and the spirit within unhoused, sent back to its Lodge to lick its wounds, leaving the Agent only an ordinary person again, weak and frail. The obvious analogy wasn’t lost on Creedmoor. No doubt if he were to explain this to the Doctor, she’d give him a knowing look and say,
Aha, you fear aging, you fear impotence, you fear loss of—
well, yes, he did, as a matter of fact. But the matter of his weapon was
also
a very real and practical problem. Without it, he’d be an old man, with no property or family or friends or land or career or prospects or pride, nothing to show for the last thirty years. . . . Without it, he wouldn’t be running through dark woods, leaping from rock to rock, heedless of the branches whipping past his face, full of fierce animal joy. . . .

He scrabbled up a sheer rock face. The creature had gone before, slithering up a crack twice the width of a man’s waist, shedding scales and traces of black blood.

There was no doubt in his mind now that it knew he was chasing it. It fled. It led him on.

At the top of the rock face he stopped and looked back the way he’d come. They were high up now, him and the monster—the oaks were a shifting green sea far below. The Doctor and the old man drifted somewhere beneath them, far out of sight. The sun up in the heights was intensely bright and the sky was cloudless.

—A pleasant day. How goes it?

Still no answer. That couldn’t last. Sooner or later, they’d find their way back to him—certainly if he ever returned from the western wilderness, they’d find him—and his servitude would begin again. The woman was right. He should destroy the weapon. He should hurl it from the cliff. Be broken but free.

He didn’t. He couldn’t. Maybe after the monster was dead; maybe then.

He turned and ran up among the rocks, on the monster’s trail, which reeked of acids and oil and blood.

The slopes sharpened into a mountain, on which sunlight fell like snow. The gray rocks were made blinding white with it. The creature fled into the light. Creedmoor followed.

He’d lived half his life in the mountains—the other half, it seemed, being spent in the lowest dives of the worst cities on the flattest sunkest plains. Half a life hiding in the mountains, striking and retreating as his masters ordered, or tracking across them, scouting out paths and passes, secret routes from Station to Station—whether hunter or hunted, Creedmoor had spilled his fair share of blood on mountain snow. A rarefied kind of life, and a lonely one; sometimes he’d watched eagles soar between the white mountaintops and felt a kind of kinship with them—which was absurd, of course: there was nothing pure or elevated about him at all. Nevertheless, part of Creedmoor
belonged
among mountains. Memories crowded him; all mountains, being elevated as they were above the material world, were one, and ghosts haunted their peaks. The girl, for instance . . .

She’d been nine years old—small enough that he had to carry her through the deeper snow and over the wider crevasses, and light enough, with her well-bred delicate bones, that he’d been able to do so with ease. She’d wrapped her thin soft arms around his neck so
trustingly
—though no wonder, of course, that she held so desperately close, when one considered what was pursuing them.

Six, seven years ago—had it really been so long?

Her name had been Rose. He’d kidnapped her. And the mountains in question were far, far to the south and east, the Opals, above what had been the little trade town of Roker, and was now Baxter Station: so the mountains’ pristine snows were no doubt poisoned now with sulfurous mine-tailings, their wild soaring peaks ground down to chipped ugly stubs, their shimmering clouds gone black and heavy with Engine smoke—but at the time they’d been beautiful, and new, and every footprint Creedmoor’s boots stamped into the snow had been the first ever stamped by man, as he’d gone higher and higher into the whiteness and purity of it all.

But of course the mountains, though they were pristine, and clean, and white, and virgin—an unwritten page, an unblemished fair brow, and all that fine stuff—though they were silent, they were not empty. Hard on Creedmoor’s heels came the Hillfolk. Or Mountainfolk, more properly, he supposed.

They were a different kind of creature from the Folk of the snowless world below. Different soil, different breeds—mountain dreams shaped them. That was Creedmoor’s theory, anyway. Their manes were thick and white, peltlike, their shoulders ursine, their motions sudden, a sullen stillness that exploded like an avalanche into howling violence. By all accounts, they were man-eaters. They sure as shit had the teeth for it.