The Half-Made World (62 page)

—Shit.
Shit
.

He sat with his head against the cooling rock for perhaps an hour, looking out into the darkness, until his fear dried up within him and blew away. He began to smile.

—Well, then. We’ll see. We’ll see how things are, I guess. I always said I never needed you.

He crept forward in the dark, groping with his left hand, holding his weapon outstretched with his right. Stones shifted beneath him. All he knew was that he was heading uphill. He proceeded through what felt like hours of darkness.

It became obvious that the objects that rolled and snapped under his boots with a noise like gunfire were bones, and lots of them. He didn’t need to see to know that. The acid stink of the monster’s spoor grew worse and worse, and behind it, there was the smell of rotting meat.

As he proceeded uphill, a sliver of yellow moon emerged from behind the peaks, like a door cracking open. Its light picked out details, made shapes out of the empty dark. He walked on a carpet of bones: mostly animal, some human, many too misshapen to say. The bones lay in a wide circle marked out by a dozen sharp toothlike rocks. And a patch of darkness that looked at first like a huge jagged rock shrugged its shoulders, swung itself round to face Creedmoor and opened two great yellow eyes like an Engine’s fog lamps.

It snapped out a dark gray shape at him—something that might have been a clawed arm or a long snapping jaw—but he’d already leapt back, shouting.

—Shit—

And he stumbled as some poor dead bastard’s rib cage cracked beneath him and he fell sliding in the bones. Another limb, and he was pretty sure it was a limb this time, swung through the space where his head had been. He crawled. Its thick glistening tail whipped out and scattered bones all around him and slammed into his side with the force of an exploding rocket. He went flying. He lost his hat and, more important, his gun. He landed on his feet, breathing heavily.

—Shit. Shit. I’ve changed my mind.

He was in terrible pain but not dead or even crippled; so his strength had not entirely left him yet. Was it enough?

He picked up a thighbone and held it like a weapon.

The creature stood fifteen feet away from him. Its huge body blocked the moon, and so its details were impossible to make out. It reared up on a long cobralike tail, thick as a tree trunk; but there was also a suggestion of several skinny shuffling legs, many-jointed like the legs of an insect or the branches of a tree, of uncertain number, which might or might not have been functional. Its eyes were huge and yellow and empty. Its shoulders were spined. Behind them opened out what looked like wings—diaphanous, ragged, the left far larger than the right. Creedmoor considered the wings irrelevant, but tried very hard to count the bastard’s
claws:
he couldn’t. Its scales were not precisely gray—rather, it was no color at all, as if all the misguided energy of creation had gone into its spines and claws and teeth, and nothing had been left over for mundane considerations like
what fucking color it was
—it hurt the eyes even to look at it.

The whole huge contraption whirled about its axis like a nightmare calliope, and its mouth or something not entirely unlike a mouth opened, and emitted a scream like a woman in terror, which was a sound that Creedmoor had never cared for.

It rushed forward. Creedmoor ran to meet it. He leapt and jammed the thighbone into one of its eyes—the eye shattered like glass and went dim. One of the monster’s many claws slashed Creedmoor’s leg open to the bone. Its mouth descended on him, but he’d already flung himself to one side, where he rolled in bones and ended up lying on his back. He scrabbled among the bones and his hand found his gun.

—Thank you. It fired.

—Thank you
thank you
shit
thank you.

He blew two ragged holes in the monster’s torso. The moon’s yellow light spilled through them. The monster bled nothing at all, or possibly smoke, or possibly yellow light. It kept standing. Creedmoor fired again, and the monster’s other eye went dark and its head changed shape. He pulled the trigger a fourth time, and nothing happened.

The monster surged forward, and Creedmoor slithered back, but too slowly, and it gripped his left shoulder with one clawed arm and lifted him and closed its jaws around his other shoulder and bit down. Its teeth worked like mechanical knitting needles, stripping flesh, cracking bone. Creedmoor’s shoulder was full of agony, but he couldn’t feel his right hand at all. He knew the gun in that hand had fired only because he heard the noise, he saw yellow moonlight pour through three more holes in the creature’s body, and it dropped him, and staggered back.

He’d dropped the gun. He fumbled to pick it up with his blood-slick left hand.

He fired twice more, into the monster’s central mass. One of its wings snapped off and trailed on the floor. The monster screamed again. Creedmoor shot it again. Its form began to collapse. Its internal strains revealed themselves. Some of its legs seemed to pull
left
and others
right,
and it screamed and thrashed but was helpless. He shot it twice more in its head, and it stopped screaming.

Its tail lashed out and slammed into him, harder even than the last time. It launched him into the cold night air and he spun flailing over the rocks and out of the circle of bones and he blacked out for a moment but not before he saw the monster slump twitching and maybe dying among the bones and when he next knew where he was he was sliding and bouncing down the side of a steep rocky slope.

He came to a rest on a stretch of hard cold dirt, among arrow-leafed weeds, not far from a stand of pines.

He was covered in blood and his agony had been replaced by numbness and he could not stand. Even if the gift of healing was still with him, he wasn’t sure it would be enough.

—Shit.

The stars chose that moment to come out.

CHAPTER 43

A STRANGER IN TOWN

They let Liv walk the town as she pleased.

In the square next morning, she saw a young man tied to the Whipping Post and given several short sharp strokes on his back. He looked drunk or possibly simple. He made an awful, heartbreaking noise.

“A shirker, ma’am.”

“I beg your pardon?”

There was no crowd of idlers watching. New Design was a busy town. Apart from the man with the whip, and his assistant, both hooded, only Mr. Peckham stood there. Peckham said, “A sad business. A shirker. Well known for it. We must all work together here. By and large, we do so gladly. This is a good place, madam. Some people even the strongest, most finely engineered republic cannot make useful without the rod. No teaching will mend them.”

Two more strokes; two more yodeling screams. Then the young man was let down sobbing onto the blood-spattered earth. Mr. Peckham nodded. “A sad bit of business. A shameful necessity. Mrs. Alveruysen, would you like to see our sawmill?”

She averted her eyes from the Whipping Post. “Please, lead the way.”

There were ten men at work in the sawmill. Liv stood on the dusty fragrant floor and watched them for a while. She stayed after Peckham moved on. The men were all proud of their work. Some of them were younger than the rusty old saws they held. She wondered what New Design would do when its tools finally wore out.

There were almost-turkeys in a pen. Docile, silent, fat. Liv watched them and they stared back. Their eyes were oddly human, and their clawed feet, scratching the dirt, seemed oddly purposeful, as if they were trying to spell out a message in an alien language. Another aberration of the rim of the world? Or were all turkeys like that? Liv had no particular familiarity with turkeys. She made a note to eat no bird-meat in New Design, and moved on.

There was a well near the center of town. It was lined with a rough blue gray stone that Liv had not seen in the forest of oaks; they must have brought it from far away. A large pumping contraption hunched over it, its wooden wheels and gears creaking and swaying. One or two houses had tanks or cisterns; most others had water barrels. Otherwise, there was the well. She’d rarely seen a place so lacking in luxuries or conveniences or modern improvements. At least the water was clear and, to the naked eye, clean.

Liv sat by the well all morning. Around it was a haphazard arrangement of wooden water troughs, and the earth was muddy and crisscrossed with hoof tracks. All morning, the girls from the outlying pens and farms came and went with their deerlike-herds, or carrying buckets back and forth. They were wary of her. They reminded her of shy students, and the thought made her smile.

Liv made a point of smiling at them as they passed. Some smiled back.

They were not peasants, though they dressed like peasants, or worse. Morton and his wife Sally had boasted of the schooling New Design’s children received. It was an admirable curriculum. In the morning, a solid grounding in the classics and the beginnings of the mathematical sciences; in the afternoons, a devout drilling in the personal virtues. Sally, who was a schoolteacher, had rattled off the various virtues, with Morton interjecting on the finer points of military virtue, and they’d both been rather patronizingly impressed when Liv explained that she knew what they were—she’d read them in the General’s
Child’s History.
Sally clapped her hands together.