by Felix Gilman
She handed him a short telegram. “Sir, I apologize, I . . .”
“Shut up,” he said.
He read the telegram. It didn’t take long, and it left him entirely confused.
“Kingstown,” he said. Far to the West—indeed, the Line’s westernmost point. At least two weeks away. The Angelus Engine was going east, which meant that he would have to wait for the Archway Engine to pass through, which would take him only as far as Harrow Cross, from where perhaps the Harrow Cross Engine would take him west to . . .
“My apologies, sir,” the woman said. “In all the rush, sir, I forgot—”
He smiled at her, baring bleached teeth. “What’s your name, woman?”
The telegram said:
FOR SUB-INVIGILATOR (THIRD) LOWRY OF THE ARMY OF
THE ANGELUS ENGINE:
KINGSTOWN STATION
SETTING ASIDE ALL OTHER BUSINESS
WITHOUT DELAY
It was unsigned.
CHAPTER 4
ANCIENT HISTORY
Creedmoor left the riverboat that same night. He leapt from the boat’s stern and landed knee deep in riverbank mud, among reeds and turtles and toads and snakes. He laughed and thought to himself,
—The glories of your service, once more, once again.
And his master’s voice answered,
—Yes, Creedmoor. Our glories. Go north. There, over those hills, through those trees.
—We have business there? Someone you want me to kill?
—Not necessarily. We need a fire, Creedmoor. Our Lodge burns, just as it always does, and you must hear this from all of us.
—I remember. Would you care to explain the urgency?
—You have been idle too long. Go north.
The boat’s lights slowly drew away down the river, leaving Creedmoor alone in the night. With a sigh he blinked, once and then again, until his eyes adjusted. A gray film settled on his vision, each detail of the world painfully clear and intense, each rustling reed knife-sharp. The night-sight: the vision of the Guns. For six years, Creedmoor had lived among crowds and lights, and he’d almost forgotten the world the way the Guns saw it.
Toads and snakes! He slogged forward through the reeds and muck, and frogs trilled and black kingfishers fled from him, calling their shrill rattling call.
—That way, Creedmoor.
The voice hurt—it buzzed, it scraped, it burned—and the Gun that housed his master throbbed like a wound at his hip—but the pain was becoming familiar again.
He clambered up the banks and over a green mound of earth, and when he turned around, the last sign of the riverboat was gone.
There was no refusing his masters when they Called. Creedmoor knew that very well.
When a man first entered the service of the Gun, his masters promised strength, freedom, glory—it was impossible at first to imagine ever wanting to saying no to them. For the first ten years or so, man and weapon would exist in a wild and exhilarating unity of purpose. That was how it had been for Creedmoor. He’d been lost and drifting when the Gun first took him—too old still to be a rootless boy—no honest job, no family, more creditors than friends. Every grand cause he’d taken up in his wanderings had failed him, one by one. Liberationism—the Church of the White City Virgins—the Knights of Labor—even the fucking Smilers. He’d been considering settling down somewhere and devoting himself to the serious study of alcoholism and despair. The Gun had raised him up and made him extraordinary. For ten years, he fought for them all across the many fronts of the Great War, he schemed and murdered and bribed and seduced and blackmailed for them, and he did it joyfully.
But the Gun’s Agents were wild and unruly, and sooner or later, they all began to resent their servitude. And then their masters would give them the Goad. It always happened—sooner or later. They seemed to take a certain satisfaction in it. Sometimes it had to be done twice or three times, rarely more often.
Creedmoor had spent all afternoon in the riverboat’s bar, drinking like a condemned man and flirting desperately with the waitresses. When night fell and his master said,
—Go now.
. . . he’d gone. He didn’t want the Goad.
He marched north through the dark of a gum tree grove, through thin bone-white trunks. They put him in mind of Hillfolk. Mud sucked at his boots. The throb of bullfrogs got on his nerves. He’d taken off his necktie, and his jacket was already torn. The ground sloped up sharply and he broke through the trees and out over the marshy plains.
—That way, Creedmoor.
—What do you want from me? Just tell me.
—You must hear it from all of us. We must visit our Lodge.
—This is an important errand? I’m honored.
—All our purposes are important. And you are honored.
Marshland gave way to grassland. He walked alone under a stark moon, breathing deeply in the cold air and—it was ridiculous! But there was no denying it—he began to feel the old joy again. Already he felt younger and wilder than he had for years. His legs were tireless. The Gun banged rhythmically against his hip, and his master said,
—That way. Why are you smiling?
—I would rather not serve you. But if I must, I might as well try to do it gladly.
—Good, Creedmoor. We like our servants joyful.
He came to the crest of a low rise, and jumped a fence of wood and wire. Now he was on grazing land—he saw the tracks and droppings of goats. In the distance on the edge of a hill, he saw the sharp outline of a farmhouse.
—There, Creedmoor.
—A farm.
—Yes.
—Are we borrowing eggs?
No answer. He jogged briskly uphill. A worn and stony trail led him up to the farmhouse. It was a ramshackle cabin of logs and mud and corrugated iron. Its roof raised up a weathervane in the shape of a bird, probably some local Baron’s crest. Its door was adorned with an upturned horseshoe. Some simple people believed that iron would keep away wild Hillfolk, on the theory that it reminded them of their brethren’s chains. Creedmoor doubted its efficacy even on Hillfolk, and certainly it was wasted on him.
His master said,
—Yes. In there. This will do. They have a fire.
There was a fire burning inside, and smoke at the chimney. Two dogs chained to a post in the ground outside started to whine and bark. Dogs didn’t like Creedmoor. They smelled the demon that rode him.
—Our kin will join us in fire. First kill the inhabitants.
With a sigh, Creedmoor knocked on the door.
The cabin was cluttered with pots and pans, with pelts and hooves and animal bones, with the worn wooden paraphernalia of farmer’s work. Two-tined forks and a battered old hoe. A churn? Creedmoor wasn’t sure what half of it was. He hadn’t done a day’s honest work in his life since he was a printer’s apprentice back in Lundroy.
A low fire smoldered in the corner. The cabin had one inhabitant, by the name of Josiah, a wiry old man, bent like a fishhook, with a beard like a goat’s.
Creedmoor didn’t kill him. Instead, though it made his master displeased—because it made his master displeased—Creedmoor decided to drink with him.
Josiah had some awful poisonous stuff in a wooden keg, which he sipped from a ladle, and had already been unsteady drunk when he opened the door.
“Come in,” he’d said. “Come in, I got nothing left to steal. My only daughter ran off to Jasper City with a swarthy fellow to be an actress, so you won’t be stealing her neither. Sit down! Have a drink.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Creedmoor sat. In the interests of caution, he refused Josiah’s brew—there were limits, after all, to the strength the Guns could give a man—and he drank from a bottle he’d stolen from the riverboat. Noticing a battered old rifle on the wall, and some tattered flags, Creedmoor asked if the old man had been a soldier, and soon they got talking about long-forgotten wars.
—Kill him and be done with it, Creedmoor.
—I don’t s
ee the necessity.
The voice sulked and snarled and scraped in Creedmoor’s head. He ignored it.
Josiah had fought for the Delta Baronies thirty years ago, in the north, in a battle in which he still to this day believed was in support of an alliance with the young Red Valley Republic—though Creedmoor happened to know that the local Baron was acting secretly in furtherance of a scheme of the Guns. Creedmoor didn’t bother to set the old man straight. He made up some wild lies about his own military heroism. The old man swallowed it all up, eagerly, drinking and talking and talking . . . A lonely life out there, Creedmoor thought.
When the old man finally fell over in a dead drunk, Creedmoor carried him outside and left him with his barking dogs in the yard, and went back inside and shuttered the windows and bolted the door.
—We told you to kill him, Creedmoor.
—I didn’t see the necessity. Don’t worry, my bloodthirsty friend. I’m sure there’s killing to come.
—A sacrifice. Blood. To bring the Lodge here.
Creedmoor sighed, and rubbed his graying temples. Then he unbolted the door, stepped outside, and shot one of the dogs. As he bolted the door once again, he said:
—That will do.
—A dog. Undignified.
—I know your preferences. Do you care enough to punish me? Time’s wasting.
—Then stoke the fire.
—Good.
—We will remember this.
—Of course.
He heaped the fire with wood, and then with pelts, and then poured raw spirits onto it, and soon the cabin was dark with smoke, and red flames leapt high on the edges of Creedmoor’s hazy vision, and the fire roared and burning logs snapped with gunshot noises in a mad frantic rhythm. The Song of the Guns, the echo of their terrible voices. Creedmoor’s master said,
—Listen.
Creedmoor’s master’s name was Marmion. It hardly mattered, though; they were all much the same.
How numerous were the Guns? Creedmoor wasn’t sure. Some of them had several names, and some of them had no names at all, but went by the names of the particular Agents who carried them. They were immortal spirits, but their manifestation in this world was in the form of weapons of wood and metal and ivory and powder. Sometimes when their Agents died or their vessels were destroyed, they vanished from the world for decades, sulking in their Lodge; sometimes they came back at once, hungry for revenge. Some of them were carried by famous generals or warriors; others favored spies and blackmailers and murderers, and might never be known to history at all. Creedmoor’s best guess was that there were not fewer than three dozen, and probably not more than a hundred.
Before Creedmoor, Marmion had been borne by a con man called Smiling Joe Portis, who’d been arrested by men of the Line in Gibson City and dragged back to Harrow Cross to be hanged. In the last century, Marmion had been borne by a woman called Lenore Van Velde, aka Lenore the White, who’d stopped the advance of the Line over the Stow River by introducing plague rats into their encampments while posing as a cook. It was possible that Marmion had been borne by the legendary One-Eye Beck, who’d blown the bridge over the Tappan Gorge with a black-powder petard, sending the Archway Engine screaming back down to hell, from which it arose again two hundred years ago. That was all Creedmoor knew of his master’s history; presumably it went back a full four hundred years, to Founding and the first western settlements. And before that—before humans woke it and gave it form—before that Marmion slept in the earth. Or in fire. Or the stars. Or elsewhere entirely. It was hard to say.
The gods of the enemy were easier to count. Their straight and constant paths could be seen on maps. There were exactly thirty-eight Engines in the world.
His head spun in the smoke and he drowsed for a second. The crack and hiss of the fire began to sound like distant conversation. A voice in the back of his brain snapped him awake—
—Creedmoor! Listen.
Not his master—one of the others. The voice was the same but different. Which one was it? Belphegor? Barbas? Naamur? Gorgon?
—Creedmoor! We have work for you.
—Creedmoor! We have chosen you from among many.
—Creedmoor! You must go west, to the edge of the world.
And there were other voices beneath those, more distant, more alien—buzz and click and the off-kilter rhythm of gunfire. Part of the Guns was in the world, and they sang to each other across the continent in those distant echoes of violence. Part of them was always in their Lodge, which was—where? In the fires beneath the earth? In the dark beyond the stars? Creedmoor didn’t know.
The walls of old Josiah’s cabin were no longer visible. The room was made of smoke and fire and stink. Creedmoor didn’t understand or care to understand the metaphysics of it, but he was now in what might be called an anteroom to the Lodge itself, and it turned out that others were there waiting for him:
—Hello, Creedmoor. Have you been enjoying your retirement? No rest for the wicked, is there?
—You cowardly dog, Creedmoor, I thought you were dead. Dead or gone to No-Town. Have you been skirt-chasing while we were fighting?
—Hello, John. Sad news! The young bucks have forgotten you. You used to be a name to conjure with, but I mentioned you to a promising young fellow the other day and he said, Who? They have no respect, no manners.
Those were the voices of his peers, distantly refracted through the fire. His fellow Agents, scattered all across the continent, each one no doubt looking into their own smoking fires, each one accompanied by their own master. Jen of the Floating World; Abban the Lion; Dandy Fanshawe. It had been so long since he’d heard their voices. And there were others, again, clamoring behind them. Creedmoor recognized Hudnall the Younger, Kid Glove Kate, and Big Fane. He closed his eyes to clear his head and said,
—Are we all here? Such a rare gathering. I’m flattered.
Marmion answered:
—Many of us are here. You will go alone, but there will be others watching over you.
—Go where?
—On the edge of the world there is a hospital.
—Yes?
—West of here. North of Greenbank, northwest of Kloan. East of the world that is not yet made, and the far sea. It is called the House Dolorous.
—And?
—Quiet, Creedmoor. Listen. There is a man there. We believe there is a man there. We do not know. We have gathered rumors in dark places, and scryed, and sniffed out trails.
—They mean my spies gathered rumors. My girls. Don’t they always take the credit? The Guns are as bad as men, I swear.
That voice was Jen’s. Jen of the flaming hair, Jen of the Floating World. It had been six years since Creedmoor had seen Jen—six years since he’d last patronized her brothel, the Floating World, which hovered in the hills over Jasper City like a wonderful filthy dream—six years since he’d heard her red lips whisper secrets. She would be sitting now in her office in the Floating World, which was all jade and leather and mahogany and sensual curves; in fact, she would most likely be lying lazily on the sofa by the fireplace. He wondered if she was still beautiful. Could the Guns have kept her young? Would they? They must have. It was impossible to imagine her old.
The voice of the Guns:
—The House is a hospital for the wounded of the Great War. It is neutral—it takes those who fought in our service, and those who fought for the enemy. It takes the maimed, and it takes the mad.
—Commendable.
—It sickens us. Listen, Creedmoor: the House is defended.
—It’s only a hospital. It has guards?
—On the edge of the world, things are not yet settled. Unruly powers arise. Small gods. One of them protects the House.
—Some gulch-ghoul, some First Folk demon, some haunt of dry rivers? A poltergeist? A dust-devil with ideas above its station?
—It is strong, and old, and well-fed.
—Stronger than you?
—Listen, Creedmoor. The man we seek is the
re, in a hospital room. If our intelligence is accurate.
Jen interrupted, in tones of mock-outrage:
—My intelligence is always accurate.
Creedmoor said:
—Is it? Must have been someone else who sent me and Casca into that trap back in Nemiah in ’63. So who is this fellow?
—An old man. He was once a General, but now he is mad. The noise of the bombs of the Line shattered his mind. He does not know who he is, and nor do his doctors.
—Well?
—Well what? You do not need to know either. Bring him to us.
Secrets! Creedmoor could feel the Guns buzzing and preening. How they loved their secrets!
—They can be so dramatic, can’t they, darling?
That slow drawl was Dandy Fanshawe—the pomaded and silk-coated old Queen of Gibson City, who was so outrageous and self-indulgent that few ever suspected he was a first-class spy or that he had once killed over a dozen Linesmen with nothing but his ebony sword-stick and his own teeth. It had been Dandy Fanshawe who first recruited Creedmoor into the service of the Gun, back when Creedmoor had been young, and Fanshawe, well, not young, but not so scandalously old as he was now. They’d met in an opium den in Gibson City, and Fanshawe had been lying on silk cushions wreathed in smoke, with his jade-ringed hand idly draped on some young man’s thigh. His nails had been painted. He’d been ethereal, mysterious, behind clouds of smoke made nebulous by candlelight. Darling boy! Fanshawe had said. We’ve had our eye on you for quite some time. . . .
Creedmoor remembered old days and smiled. He said:
—They certainly can, old friend.
—They’re such whispering secretive girls. They won’t even tell me. None of us are favored with their confidence.
Creedmoor instantly suspected that Fanshawe knew exactly what was going on, but he kept quiet, because a dozen metallic voices chorused:
—Enough.
Creedmoor shook his head. The smoke dizzied him. He could see nothing except a haze of gray, in which ghostly forms came and went like memories. He was suddenly angry. He said: