The Rise of Ransom City (19 page)

John Creedmoor shot at the wolves. By now some of White Rock’s townsfolk had come back up to Main Street to see what had happened, and some of them saw him at work. Their curiosity did them no good. Wolves snatched at stragglers and brought down the lawyer and the Nun and some old folk. Panicked townsfolk fell in the bloody snow and tried to flee on all fours. Wolves got Golda, the horse. Mariette had already perished in the collapse of the Grand Hotel. Wolves broke the butcher’s windows and dragged meat out into the street. Discipline broke down among the pack and the town descended into chaos. Discipline was never the natural state of the Gun’s servants and it could not be sustained for long.

A giant turned onto Main Street and stopped to examine the scene.

A Portrait of Mr. Knoll

If I mean to be honest, and I do, I have no choice but to report that Knoll was not so huge as the rumors described him. He was not nine feet tall. He was probably no more than seven. But he was huge in a way that went beyond numbers and words, huge in a way that the rumors did not do justice. He seemed to brush aside trees and buildings. To be in his presence was to know how small and weak and fragile you were.

He wore a bearskin, like the rumors said, or at least it was something massive and furred and filthy. It was heavy with snow, like a tree. Beneath it was a big gray soldier’s coat, filthy and threadbare and torn. He wore stiff frozen breeches stuffed into big black boots.

His head was a giant’s head, and oddly triangular in shape, as if he had had a difficult birth and nothing had gone quite right with him since. He had a wide jaw framed by a wild beard, and a tall tapering skull with patches of long black hair growing from it, among patches of pale scalp that looked scarred. His eyes were small and mean but sharp. His nose was large. I dare say it was broken but nothing about his giant’s face was quite right anyhow so who knows. There were countless bits of bone wound into his belt and his bearskin and I did not know what any of them meant to him.

He wore his gun in a leather sling over his back. It was long, ornate, handsome, and sinister.

Back then there no books about him, no songs. He had no legend yet. If you could bring yourself to look him in the eye you could see that he was still young— maybe no older than I was. He was new to the service of the Guns. I do not know what cave or solitary shack they found him in. I think they chose him to be a tracker, a hunter. He spoke only with difficulty, like it was a newly acquired skill. He was halfway between animal and man. He was a thing of darkness.

Creedmoor leaned over the roof of the Hotel of the Opals and shot him in the left shoulder.

The giant took a step back and bared his black teeth and snorted with contempt. He lumbered slowly through the snow to the Hotel’s front door and kicked it open and squeezed his way inside. Another one of Creedmoor’s caches of blasting-powder went off on the floor upstairs and the roof fell in on Knoll’s head, as Creedmoor limped off down Main Street, shooting any beast that came too close to him, most likely shooting some of the townsfolk too if they tried to stop him or slow him, dropping his precious bullets in the snow and not stopping to pick them up because his hip hurt too bad to bend.

The second explosion started some fires here and there on Main Street. From where I was, down by the lake, the glow of those fires was just barely visible through the trees, and greatly outshone by the Apparatus, whose energies continued to grow and cycle and feed on themselves unabated. The glass hummed with the strain of containing it all and the air crackled. The light had mostly settled into something golden in color. The Apparatus was warm and getting warmer and Carver and I were in the middle of a slowly expanding circle of thawing snow and glistening wet trees and patchy grass.

Miss Elizabeth Harper emerged from the trees. Her shirt was torn and there was blood on it that did not seem to be hers. She held a small silvery pistol in her hand.

“Harry,” she said. “I’m sorry. But we have no choice.”

The collapse of the Hotel of the Opals did not slow the giant for long. He shoved the rubble aside and walked out of it. He was scorched and bruised and bad-tempered but the demon in him rose up in the saddle and whipped him on, screaming in his head until his eyes went bloody.

Creedmoor was at the far end of the street. He turned, saw the giant standing in the ruins, and took a shot which maybe hit and maybe didn’t, I do not know and will not guess, it made no particular difference either way. The giant lowered his head and for the first time broke into a run and Creedmoor had time to do no more than turn his back and take a single step before the giant was on him. He felt the back of the giant’s hand cuff his ear and he was lifted off his feet and landed sprawling in the snow on his back.

The giant stood over him. He put his foot on Creedmoor’s leg, where his knee was twisted, and pressed down.

“The other one. The woman. Where?”

“I won’t help you. I don’t serve your masters anymore. I won’t go back. I’m free and bigger than all of you. You’re nobody. I was doing terrible things before you were born. I am John Creedmoor, I killed a hundred men at Devil’s Spine, you’re nobody. Who do you think you are? I will not serve. They’ll remember me forever, the man who defied you.”

That is what I imagine him saying.

“Who asked you to serve? The woman. Where?”

“Go to hell. You’re nobody.”

“Knoll.”

“What?”

“I’m Knoll.”

Knoll lifted Creedmoor out of the snow. Creedmoor drew his knife and Knoll slapped it aside, breaking the blade and two of Creedmoor’s fingers.

When Elizabeth Harper walked back into the town it was in flames here and there, and parts of it were in ruins. The townsfolk were reduced to a state of panic in which they were scarcely more human or less dangerous than the wolves. The town doctor and his assistant tried to seize her and she was forced to wave her pistol at them until they retreated.

The giant Knoll had taken up residence at the Bank of the Opals. The remaining wolves lay at his feet or prowled around, and sometimes he kicked them out of spite and impatience. He had torn open the vault and scattered its contents in the snow, along with all the unsent letters. He kept Creedmoor on his knees and would not let him stand. He had tracked down the Mayor of White Rock and the Nun and nailed them both by their hands and feet to the fence out front with nails from the general store. The Nun survived the night but the Mayor did not. Every few minutes he bellowed out his demand that the woman be brought to him.

As soon as she stepped onto Main Street he scented her. She saw his head loom from the Bank’s window, and then she started running.

Knoll stopped to nail Creedmoor to the floor by his left hand, for safe-keeping. Then he followed after Miss Harper. He took his time. He had her scent now and was in no hurry.

She burst out of the trees and into the clearing by the lake, into the light and warmth of the Apparatus. I think it had never before worked quite so well as it did that night. It was twice as bright and twice as beautiful as it had been when she last saw it. It was warm enough that the ice on the lake was melting. I like to think the beauty of it stopped her short for a moment.

She was panting and sweating and her clothes and skin had been torn by branches. She stumbled across the clearing to the Apparatus, where Carver waited. They made urgent signs at each other. I stood in the trees on the far side of the clearing and watched her approach.

Seconds later the giant appeared. I caught glimpses of him shoving through the trees and I just about disgraced myself with fear. His heavy shoulders, his heavy head turning this way and that, like he was sniffing.

I think until I saw him I had imagined I might talk my way out of this predicament, as I had so many others, as I had talked my way into it. That would not happen. The thing that came through the trees could not be reasoned with, could not be joked with or cajoled. He belonged to another world, one that I had no business in.

Knoll shielded his eyes as he stepped out into the clearing. The light of the Apparatus seemed to offend him and he let out a deep angry growl. He looked around, blinking, and caught sight of Carver.

Carver spat and raised his ax in both hands.

“No,” Knoll said. And he drew and fired. The bullet took off the top of my friend’s head before he could speak. Red blood slapped across the Apparatus’s innards. What was left of Mr. Carver fell to its knees, then over on its side. The ax fell from the dead hand.

Knoll came over and stood over the corpse. He kicked it with his boot as if to see what would happen. Then he raised his head and grinned hugely, showing broken and yellow teeth, and he turned his gun on Miss Harper.

It was at that moment that I perceived that what had to be done, had to be done by me. It was maybe not unlike the sensation Mr. Alfred Baxter describes in his
Autobiography
as
seizing the moment
or
perceiving the Spirit of the Age,
like the time he bet his whole fortune on Steel, or the time when he determined it was necessary to buy out and destroy the First Bank of Jasper City. It was not unlike the moment when as a boy I first glimpsed the mathematics behind the Process, and woke and hunted for pencil and paper. I am not a violent man or a political man and I never wanted any part in the Great War, but I saw that events had left me with no choice. I knew what plan Mr. Carver and Miss Harper had hatched that afternoon, and I saw that there was no alternative. In fact I was so overcome with selflessness that I forgave them then and there for planning behind my back.

None of this took more than a moment. I ran out from the trees and toward the Apparatus. Knoll turned and fired at me but missed, and since the Agents of the Gun never miss I think it must be that the light of the Apparatus pulsed at that moment and distracted him. I picked up the ax from where it lay at poor Mr. Carver’s side and I put it into the heart of the Apparatus, smashing through the glass dome and chopping through the magnets’ axle and into the coiled wires beneath. Then I threw myself off the rock and into the water and began swimming away as quickly as I could. Fortunately I am a quick learner. I found that it was mostly a matter of kicking wildly and hoping for the best. I heard the bright sound of the all the glass bulbs hung in the trees shattering. I did not see but I did
feel
the unleashed energies of the Apparatus expand into the air, surge and recoil and snap and twist around themselves, as the Process which was barely predictable at the best of times went wild and grew and grew and became something utterly new.