by Felix Gilman
On the walls were mounted the heads of various mangy local beasts. Their fur frayed; they attracted the flies. Oh yeah; Lowry knew the Mayor’s type. He’d be at home on the range, huntin’ an’ fishin’, half-drunk, lordin’ his mastery over the beasts. He was not made for sitting in an office trying to think. But there he was, and Lowry’s orders left him no room for pity.
“Then we’ll proceed, sir, and thank you. And my superiors want me to let you know that they regret, assuming you were not consciously harboring this Agent of the Gun, any loss of life and property caused by our personnel in what may have been in some sense our overzealous enforcement of our prerogatives. We hope you’ll have no reluctance to host our men in the future. And to that end, there will of course be reparations.”
The Mayor lifted his head hopefully. “And some of our men will be here shortly to assist you in the administration of the rebuilding efforts and in the disbursement of funds.”
The hope was not quite off the Mayor’s face. By the Line, he was slow! “And generally to put affairs in proper order here,” Lowry added.
That did it; the Mayor made a tiny sound like a kicked dog.
Lowry waited for the Mayor to force out a broken noise of thanks. Then he put his broad black hat on his head, gave the Mayor a curt nod, and stepped out into what was left of Kloan, after the fire.
Morningside and his men waited outside in the square. Four ranks of five, nice and proper. Kloan was warm and humid, and Morningside’s men sweated in their unsuitable black uniforms, but he did not believe in deviations from protocol. Nor did Lowry; nor did their masters.
“All well?” Morningside said.
“All well.”
“Took you long enough.”
“Sir.”
“All right, then.” Morningside turned to his men. “You men, tear this pisspot town apart. Every stitch and fiber. Every print. If that stinking jackal pissed on a tree in Kloan, I want it broken down and bagged. You know the drill. Lowry?”
“Sir?”
“Question the witnesses.”
The girl’s name—which Lowry carefully jotted down in block print in his big black ledger—was Susan. The one before that, the boy, had been sullen, hostile; before that, so-called Professor Harry Ransom had thought he was cleverer than Lowry; in both cases, it had been necessary to resort to a small show of violence. Susan was pleasingly quiet and docile. Insofar as Lowry was any judge, she was pretty, though her eyes were raw from tears and her skin was pale. Lowry made her nervous, which pleased him.
“He never spoke to you?”
“No, sir. He never did. He only smiled.”
“A big smiler, you say. A happy man.”
“Yeah . . .”
“How lucky for him. Your young man, the one who’s dead now—oh, stop that, girl—your young man spoke to him?”
“No, sir, he never did.”
“He never gave a name?”
“Who?”
“Who do you think, girl? Your stupid young man? Do I look like I’m here for him? No, the stranger. The killer. The criminal.”
“Sir—he wasn’t—it was like he was—”
“Like he wasn’t a human being, is that what you mean to say, girl?”
“Yes, sir—”
“Better. Faster. Stronger. More daring. Never misses a shot. Handsome, was he?”
“I guess—”
“Of course he was. Tall, was he? Afraid of nothing. Worth twenty men like me in a fight, I’ll bet. Like something out of a storybook. I bet he just smiled and your knees went weak.”
“Sir—”
“All those daring crimes. Bet he’s robbed a bank or two, but that hardly counts. Bet he’s slipped right across Line lands a dozen times, over the wire, under the fence like a fox. Bet he’s blown up a barracks or two or four or five, but that hardly counts, does it, because it’s only soldiers. Only ugly bastards like me. Right? Bet you would have run away with him if he’d so much as winked.”
“Sir, please—”
“How many men do you think he’s murdered? No, never mind that: How many women? Pretty young things like you. Probably quite a few. Statistically speaking. More than none. That doesn’t sound so romantic, does it?”
“Sir, I don’t—”
“And for what? What’s the point? They’re losing. They’re always losing. They’re the past and we’re the future. But they have to make it as painful as possible, because they’re sick and they’re mad. . . . All right, then. Never mind. Stop sniveling. Tell me what he looked like again. From the beginning.”
The girl stuttered; Lowry jotted down notes.
A male, a white male, tall, blue eyed, leather skinned; well, that could be half of them. In his fifties at least; probably then an old and hardened one. The Gun took them young, as a general rule—in so far as the Gun had rules—and they did not generally live long. An old one was a bad one. Gray hair in a widow’s peak; a smiling man. Sounded like Rutherford; but Rutherford had been sighted far down south, raiding supply lines, poisoning wells. One-Shot Luce? Reported dead.
Lowry sighed and flipped through the Black File, the several volumes of which lay open on the Mayor’s desk; the cold eyes of killers and rogues looked up at him from every page. He waved a hand for the girl to keep going.
John Creedmoor? Creedmoor had an eye for the ladies, they said. Oh, Creedmoor was a bad one; his file practically stank of powder and blood. But he’d been reported dead by the Sub-Conductor of the Second Army of the Harrow Cross Engine, one Mr. Gormley. Lowry made a note to telegraph Gormley for details.
“You still here, girl? Right. Did he have a scar? Like so? No?”
No scar; couldn’t be Slater, then. Dandy Fanshawe? Not if he was making eyes at the girls. Blood-and-Thunder Boch? Cantor? Red-Heeled Jack? Shit, they put one down and another two sprung up! Straight-Arrow Sussex? Thorpe, who’d brought himself to the attention of the Guns after the horrors of the Battle of Vezelay, horrors to which he, Thorpe, had been a great contributor?—but that was decades ago and Thorpe would be near eighty now, hard as walnut if he wasn’t dead. Lowry kept flipping. So many of them. Sometimes he thought the Line’s work would never be done.
“Go on, girl. Fuck off out of here. Send the next one in.”
He drafted a composite description of the killer, for circulation to all patrols and Heavier-Than-Air Vessels. Then he walked outside and leaned against a charred hitching post out front of the Mayor’s house and watched Morningside’s men work.
He had a headache. The Black File often gave him a headache. It was disordered; uncertain; full of suppositions and half truths and scraps of unverifiable almost-fact; facts that could not be put in their proper place; outright myths and stories and the most unpleasant sort of fantasies. The Agents of the Gun poisoned everything they touched, even unto the deepest recesses of the Line’s most TOP SECRET files.
The boardinghouse was a charred ruin. So were several surrounding buildings. Most of the walls were gone, leaving only odd-angled and crumbling beams and struts, and Lowry could see Morningside’s men at work in what had been bedrooms and bathrooms. It was eerie. Some Agents, the Black File speculated, could see through walls, which made them damnably hard to kill. . . .
Morningside’s men carried wheelbarrowfuls of wreckage out of the ruins and laid them out on the street for analysis. Scraps of furniture, brass fittings, antlers, some charred and twisted painting frames. Kloan’s residents stood by glumly at the perimeter of the activity. Professor Harry Ransom crept away down Main Street with a battered suitcase in either hand and a bloody nose, and Lowry couldn’t be bothered to stop him.
Poor old Kloan, Lowry thought; it wasn’t their fault, really. He’d exhausted his contempt on the Mayor, and now he allowed himself a moment of pity.
But what had to happen, had to happen.
He breathed deeply. He got a mouthful of ash and coughed, and it turned quickly into the bent-double coal-dust compulsive hacking of a Linesman born and bred.
Some of Morningside’s men looked up, shovels in hand, and glanced with concern at the Sub-Invigilator. Lowry sent them back to work with a bad-tempered wave of his hand.
One of Morningside’s men, deep in the ruins of the boardinghouse, called out, “It’s here! I’ve found the telegraph, sir! It’s badly—”
Morningside entered the ruins, clambering over heaps of ash and fallen timbers. “Right. Let’s see. Let’s see. Any last mess—?”
He stumbled and leaned against a charred beam of wood, which toppled under his weight. Wedged in the join of the beam had been a black briefcase, which had apparently dropped during the fire through a vanished upper floor, and which now fell the remainder of the way to earth. As it fell, it clicked softly open and its contents, which were the dead Signalmen’s last weapons, tumbled out. As it happened, only one of them went off.
Moments before Sub-Invigilator (First) Morningside was wiped clean by waves of annihilating noise, Lowry had the presence of mind not only to dash for a safe clearance but also to throw his whole head into a nearby water trough, hands tight over his ears. He escaped with only a brief period of unconsciousness, from which he woke, somewhat disoriented, to learn that he had been promoted again.
CHAPTER 12
THE PASSAGE
The trek from the mountains through Burren Hill and west to Conant and Gloriana had taken weeks, and it had taken its toll on Liv’s body. She was sunburned, her hair was stiff and pale, and entirely unfamiliar muscles ached. Her standards of hygiene had been somewhat relaxed. She had developed new nightmares. She had seen violence. She had learned to ride and shout and haggle.
And all that journey was only the tiniest fraction of the distance from Gloriana to the House Dolorous—a distance that the Engine crossed in days. The Line reduced the world to nothing.
The cabin was small and dark. Outside in the Station’s grand Concourse, the high steel arches threw angular shadows, and the sober men of the Line went back and forth in shadow, in smoke, hard at work, so tiny in their dark suits. There was so much empty inhuman space in the Line’s places; dark spaces filled only with the echoes of the machines.
Maggfrid heaved her bags into the luggage rack. He was clumsy. The Linesmen had beaten him badly, and besides, the Engine made him nervous. It made Liv nervous, too. They were inside the monster’s belly. An ugly fairy tale!
She patted Maggfrid on his broad back and told him it was all right. The big childlike man whined gratefully. She sat down and folded her skirts, and gestured for him to sit down opposite her. She pulled down the blinds and breathed a sigh of relief.
The cabin was cold as a big black icebox, and the leather of the seats creaked stiffly. The Engines of the Line were always cold, she’d heard. She wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and shivered. She tugged on a thin silver chain by the window, and the cabin filled with cold electric light. She took out her journal and began writing. “Don’t stare, Maggfrid. Why don’t you sleep now? We have a long journey.”
She was surprised, after the altercation at the hotel, that they had not been thrown in some cramped and stinking Line jail to rot. Maggfrid had broken one Linesman’s nose and hurled another bodily into a heap of rusting junk. It had taken seven men to bring him down. They’d held him and kicked him while she stood by, pleading. She’d tried to identify the officer in charge, but all Linesmen looked much the same to her. When they dragged Maggfrid away, handcuffed, she followed, and was not especially surprised when they decided to handcuff her, too, or when they sat her in a tiny claustrophobic concrete-walled cubicle and shone a light in her eyes and demanded that she explain—again!—who she was.
“My friend is sick,” she explained. “Defective, you might say. He didn’t understand your questions. He meant no harm. I can pay. . . .”
They confiscated her property, including the golden watch, and so she had no idea how long she sat in the cubicle.
They bustled in and made her sign more forms. Then they left her alone again.
She wondered if the Linesmen were discussing her case. Perhaps they were consulting the Engine itself about her. Perhaps they had simply filed away her papers and forgotten about her. She had no way of knowing.
She wondered if they were watching her.
She wondered if they would let her write a letter to the Academy. She doubted it. In any case, something in her rebelled against the notion of asking for aid; she had come here alone, and she would fight her own battles. Wasn’t that, in fact, precisely why she had come here?
The cubicle was windowless, and the Linesmen did not feed her. Minutes became hours. The Engine would leave without her—perhaps it already had. She became light-headed, and then became angry. How dare they—how dare they? The Linesmen were ugly, ill-mannered, and vile, and their tin gods absurd. She stood suddenly and tried the door. It was locked, of course. The entire Station was like a great locked gate of iron—an ogre’s castle standing across the road. How dare they bar her way into the West?
Her anger was both quite genuine and carefully calculated. If I am to argue with these people, if I am to free Maggfrid and win my way past this place, I must be angry. The proper manner when dealing with Linesmen, she surmised, was a haughty imperiousness. Linesmen were naturally servile and cringing. She was significantly taller than the average Linesman and markedly healthier. This was the first great challenge that had been set in her path, and she had no intention of failing it! She prepared herself, breathed deeply, and reached out to strike loudly upon the door.
She was quite astonished when the door clanged open and yet another Linesman, one of the pale stunted anonymous mass, reached in, tossed her watch back at her, and said, “Dr. Alverhuysen? Go on. No charges. On your way.”
“How d—I, ah, hah.” She collected herself. “I shall not leave without my friend.”
They let her go. She didn’t dare ask why. Perhaps something was watching over her! They gave Maggfrid back to her as if he were just another one of her possessions. She filled out forms for him. “Sign here, ma’am, and here. Thanks. On you go.” It was too easy; she was relieved and disappointed. Not yet, she thought. The challenge will come, but not today.
Then she hurried through the corridors, because she saw by her watch that she had been nearly a day in the cubicle and it was evening, and the Engine had returned, and was due to leave again. She could feel it in the walls of the Station: a sense of weight and expectancy. She ran across the Concourse and Maggfrid limped, laden with her bags, as whistles blew and gears ground and forces gathered, and so she caught only the briefest glimpse of the Engine before she boarded. And perhaps that was fortunate, too.
A note taped to the window of the cabin said REMAIN SEATED WHILE THE ENGINE IS STILL in an anxiety-inducing red typeface. It was, Liv assumed, a matter of respect for the occasion, like removing one’s hat in church. She remained seated.
The seats were made of some deep black substance that resembled leather, and had, under the electric lights, an unpleasant oil-slick shine. They were made for persons shorter than her. Maggfrid had to squeeze sideways, with his legs under his chin, and looked the picture of misery.
The Engine sat still on the Concourse for what felt like hours. Liv sat folding and unfolding her hands.
“Don’t worry, Maggfrid. It won’t be so bad. Thousands or tens of thousands of quite ordinary people do this quite regularly.”
He looked unconvinced.
The Engine wasn’t idle, Liv thought, but coiled and ready to spring, a huge and oppressive potentiality; she sat tensed and ready for a sudden shock that would throw her from her seat. Pressure built up below her feet. There was a distant rattle and hiss, a constant low hammer-chatter, as the thing gathered its strength.
“Wait there, Maggfrid. Everything will be all right.”
She nervously slid back the door; it resisted her. She stepped out into the narrow corridor that was the Engine’s central artery. The door snapped shut behind her and she heard Maggfrid moan, but before sh
e could go back to him, she was knocked nearly off her feet by a passing Linesman, and then another passing urgently the other way knocked into her and spun her around. She heard muttered fragments of conversation that meant nothing to her—Ravenbrook. Refueling. Lowry. Torque. Diligence. For a moment she feared she might be trampled as two more men came jogging side by side toward her, but they parted around her at the last possible instant, snarling contemptuously under their breath.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me. Sir—excuse me. Please. When do we leave?”
The Linesman sidestepped left then right to avoid her, but she wouldn’t let him. He glanced up at her and sighed.
“Sir. When—?”
“Twenty-four minutes ago. Go back where you belong.”
His shoulder knocked her aside as he went past.
She stumbled back into her seat. Suddenly the floor beneath her seemed unsteady. She opened the blind a crack: the hills outside were a dizzying liquid blur of speed.
Oh—is that how they see us? Is that how they see our world?
Behind as the tracks arced inward and northwest, the Station obtruded onto the edge of her vision. It gathered distance like shadows but remained vast. Vast and hunched and complex and smoky, like a combustion engine or electric motor swollen to extraordinary size; as if the Station reflected its contents, and the world the Engines were making reflected their Stations; as if size and distance were nothing to the Engines.
The world was drowned by a wave of the gritty black smoke that poured from the mouth of the Engine carrying her.
Their boiling black blood, their breath!
Coal-dust fragments spun in the haze and reflected the electric light from her window. Liv let the blind fall, and she tried to busy herself in her puzzle again.
Maggfrid was now thoroughly panicked. The Engine plainly terrified him. He darted his eyes from side to side as if expecting attack. Liv cursed herself for leaving him—not to mention for bringing him in the first place.