by Felix Gilman
This, too, is a trap, Liv thought. Her growing affection for the poor old General was irrational. Its causes were obvious: first, loneliness and fear; and second, displaced guilt over her unintentional-but-nevertheless-painful abandonment of Maggfrid. It would bind her to Creedmoor’s side, prevent her from running. She could not stop it from happening.
She sat by the red wounded throb of the fire and attempted to harden her heart.
She started a little when Creedmoor spoke.
“Have you ever heard of a place called No-Town, Liv?”
“No-Town? Never.”
“No.” He poked at the fire. “Why would you?”
He was silent for a while. Liv waited.
“You asked when I came to the Gun. When I signed up. That’s a short story. I was drunk at the time—the end. I’ll tell you instead about an earlier occasion, when I was still very young and innocent; the first time I set eyes on an Agent of the Gun, and as far as I know the first time the Gun turned its attention to me. Or who knows? Maybe they watched me in the womb. Their ways were mysterious.”
Liv stayed quiet. Creedmoor looked down into the fire and kept speaking. “It was in a town called Twisted Root. Far east of here, far north of the Deltas, on a dusty plain, away over the Opals, a frozen range on which I once nearly died. There’s hardly a wild place left in the world where I haven’t nearly died. This was thirty-some years ago; when you get to my age, you lose count. Thirty-two. I was there on behalf of—”
The Liberationists. That was his cause at the time. The Liberation from bondage and oppression of the First Folk, who never seemed grateful for the Liberationists’ attentions; but virtue was its own reward, and futility only a spur to greater sacrifice. . . .
A stocky bespectacled young man, with a pale face and shaggy black hair. He still had the accent of a boy from rainy and distant Lundroy, which was the home he’d run away from. He stood on an upturned crate in Twisted Root’s market square and shouted his message of Liberation in singsong Lundroy tones, his voice straining and cracking over the noise of the market.
It was the hot season, late in the day. The sun, descending, burned the world a raw-flesh red. The market was noisy with cows, and traders, and goats, and half a dozen blacksmiths, and occasional gunshots as gun merchants showed off their wares, and men on horseback—and red-coated soldiers on horseback—forcing their way through the crowds. And the buzzing of the flies!
John Creedmoor preached Liberation. The Hillfolk, the objects of his charity, stood silently in their pen, chained by their bony ankles, pale as bone and black-maned and stiff as pines. Iron chains; the Hillfolk could work stone like water, but iron pained them. Iron made them biddable. Iron shaped them into tools.
Ten feet away, a hunched old man of maybe forty-five stood on a tree stump hawking cheap yellow novels and ballads and picture books of the adventures of Henry Steel, Slavoj the Ogre, Springknife Sally of Lud-Town, and other rogues and killers and bank robbers and Agents of the Gun. And the slaver himself, a little rat of a man called Collins, in a tattered fur hat and a threadbare suit, stood by the Hillfolk’s pen and shouted out the praises of his stock.
And Creedmoor raised his voice again, and scattered his own pamphlets into the crowd: copies of The Chain-Breaker, house organ of the Liberationists. No one moved to pick them up. The farmers of Twisted Root looked at him with dull dislike.
A man’s voice shouted, “Go home, boy!” Not angry, yet—just bored. It wounded Creedmoor’s pride. He was the kind of young man who’d rather be hated than ignored.
He read from Chain-Breaker Number 22, Volume 3. It was the text of a recent speech given by one Mr. Ownslow Phillips, back in Beecher’s marbled City Hall.
Gentlemen, ladies, be not afraid of TRUTH; be not afraid nor too proud to look the monster SLAVERY boldly in its face. Be not too blind to see the cruelty you do to your brothers, to those simple folk whose land this once was. Is it any wonder that our earth sprouts the monsters of GUN and LINE to rule over us, when we water it hourly with the blood whipped from the backs of innocents, when we . . .
Liberationism was a new cause for Creedmoor. Six months ago, it hadn’t ever occurred to him to give a damn for the Hillfolk’s well-being. A year ago, he’d been a pious shaven-headed devotee of the Virgins of the White City. And the year before that, it’d been Free Love, and the Consolidated Knights of Labor. Cause after cause, each one a disappointment. And until a few months ago, he had frittered away his time on Self-Improvement, attending a meeting circle of Smilers in Beecher City. My name is John Creedmoor, and I know that I have been a frightened man, a willful man. . . . All that shit. A meeting circle of two bakers, a wheelwright, three bank clerks, and a haberdasher’s assistant; the mediocrity of it embarrassed him still. He’d given not one moment’s thought to the Hillfolk, not until he’d skipped meeting circle one morning and wandered by drunken mistake into Beecher City Hall, where Mr. Ownslow Phillips had been speaking. The grand speechifying and the organ and the stern determined songs echoing from the rafters—electrifying! And more electrifying still was the sight of Phillips, that noble white-haired old man, being dragged from the podium and beaten bloody by the thugs of some slaving-trust. Creedmoor had charged into the riot, laughing, fists swinging, and broken a slaver’s nose.
And six months later, he was out in the backcountry, in Twisted Root, all on his own, being ignored by dumb farmers. Laughed at.
And another voice called, Go home! and another, and the crowd started up a dull hooting at him, which he struggled to rise above with dignity.
The slaver Collins relaxed, leaned against a fencepost, and watched the proceedings with a rueful smile.
Creedmoor had been dogging this slaver’s steps for two weeks now, from town to town. When Creedmoor and Collins first met, in Far Peck, Collins had owned twenty-six Hillfolk; by the time they got to Twisted Root, he had ten. Business had been good. Creedmoor’s pure loathing of Collins had not diminished with familiarity. Collins, however, sometimes got avuncular; he sometimes talked to the younger man as if they were friends, casual rivals, players of the same rough game. He caught Creedmoor’s eye and shrugged, as if to say, Some you win, some you lose.
Creedmoor kept preaching.
“It’s a fine thing,” Collins shouted, “that in the cities a young man has leisure enough to develop such tender feelings for these dumb brutes! Will he do your work for you, with his soft hands?”
Creedmoor kept preaching, and the hooting rose to an angry chant, and the first thrown stone came soon after. It hit him in the shoulder and even though he was expecting it, he still dropped his pamphlets. The crowd laughed as he bent to pick them up. Another stone, and a handful of dirt, and then a hail of stones and dirt and muck. Creedmoor shouted even louder, and the crowd hooted back, and the market’s dogs started barking. Another stone hit Creedmoor on his forehead and he stumbled and the wooden crate tilted beneath him and he went down in the mud, on his hands and knees, looking for his spectacles.
A soldier of the Red Valley Republic saved him.
A shadow fell over him, and he looked up, and up, to see one of the red-coated soldiers astride his horse, looking down.
The mob withdrew.
The soldier’s red coat—red was for the Republic’s officers—was very fine. He had golden trim on his shoulders and a field of golden medals on his breast; a rifle on his back, a sword at his side; a proud black mustache and long black hair to his shoulders.
In those days, the Republic was at the height of its glory. Under its President Iredell and its great General Enver, it had won a sweep of brilliant victories and negotiated a series of grand treaties, and was carving out an empire in the heart of the West. It bowed to no inhuman Power—it fought the massed legions of the Line on one front and the mercenaries and bandits of the Gun on another. It was one of the few great causes Creedmoor had never been interested in; he found them self-righteous and dull. He didn’t see the romance of them until a few years later, a
fter the Republic was smashed at Black Cap Valley and the cause was doomed, and by then it was too late.
The soldier’s arm was outstretched to help Creedmoor up.
“You’re a long way from home, son.”
Creedmoor stood without taking the officer’s hand. The officer shrugged; smiled; rested his hand again on the reins. “By your accent and your aspect, I reckon you’re a Lundroy-man, born and bred. Far, far from home.”
Behind him the mob was watching, waiting.
“You’re a long way from home, too, Officer. What business does the Republic have here?”
“No business of yours, son.”
Hanging from the officer’s saddlebags like strange fruit were three black iron canisters, roughly cylindrical, but jutting with sharp-edged protrusions: gears, teeth, wheels, hammer-locks. Bombs. Weapons of the Line, mass produced in factories, like the Linesmen who carried them. The officer must have won them in battle.
The officer wasn’t much older than Creedmoor. Creedmoor envied and despised him and suddenly craved his respect. But before Creedmoor could say anything, the man leaned down and in a low flat voice told him, “Now, go home. Go to your lodgings. If these farm boys take it into their flat heads to show you violence, I ain’t going to help you.” He straightened again in the saddle. “It ain’t my mission here to make trouble. Sorry, son. Go home.”
What home? Creedmoor passed the last of the afternoon out in the fields, under a tree—hiding, sweating, wretched. He stole back into town in the evening. The market was over.
There was one main street in Twisted Root and two bars: Kennerly’s and the Four-and-Twenty. Kennerly’s ran gaming tables for traveling quality and advertised wines shipped in from Juddua and the farthest old-world east; the Four-and-Twenty had sawdust floors and smelled like an out house. Creedmoor sat alone in the shadows of the Four-and-Twenty and drank, and drank, and shook with anger, and watched the door with eager dread for the farmers from the market to show their faces.
There was a card game going at the next table. He avoided eye contact.
He drank the cheapest stuff in the house—money was tight. His pamphlets were gone, trampled in the dirt. He’d paid for the printing of them himself, and he didn’t have the money to do it again. Actually, he’d paid for the printing with stolen money—with money he’d borrowed from a trusting bank clerk from the Smiler meeting circle back in Beecher City, who’d been eager to invest in Creedmoor’s new business plan, a plan that did not, in fact, exist. Creedmoor could be charming and persuasive when he was lying—it was only when he tried to tell the truth that he got himself into trouble. He’d told himself the money was for a good cause, and it was; but now it was gone.
None of the farmers who’d assaulted him came through the door. The whore who worked the house flounced her skirts over to him, saw the look in his eyes, and swished swiftly away again. She sat and laughed with the game-players. A couple of snaggletoothed grave-digger-looking gentlemen sat at their own table, silently staring past each other. Some old traveler in a long black wax-coat sat in the far corner, in shadows, under a wide-brimmed hat, in still silence—save that every few minutes, he muttered to himself. The bartender read—lips working slowly, one finger tracing the page—one of the hawker’s lurid pamphlets: Regarding the Bloody Adventures of the Agent Henry Steel (Who Carried Both Hammer and GUN) and His Terrible Death Ground Under by the Wheels of the Line.
When the slaver Collins darkened the doorway, Creedmoor froze stiff in his chair.
Collins was alone. Weaving and smiling; already drunk—he must have been made welcome at Kennerly’s, Creedmoor thought. He must have done good business.
Collins’s eyes lit on Creedmoor and he winked and laughed. “No hard feelings, son.” Then he sat down at the game table, put a hand on the whore’s voluminous skirts, and waited to be dealt in.
Creedmoor half stood and loudly slurred, “Collins. Collins. You make me sick.”
The bartender put down the pamphlet and reached below the bar. The man in the long coat in the corner mumbled something to himself. The two men who might be grave-diggers watched with what might have been professional curiosity.
Collins turned calmly to Creedmoor—“You’re young, son. You’ll learn how things are”—then turned back to the game.
Creedmoor clutched the bottle by its neck and leapt over the table. When the bottle connected with the back of Collins’s head, there was an explosion of glass and whiskey and noise and a shock ran down Creedmoor’s arm. Every nerve in his body sang. Whiskey and glass sprayed the table and everyone who sat at it. Collins fell from his chair. What was left in Creedmoor’s quivering hand was a broken bloody bottleneck. Blood spread on the floor. It had an odd oil-thick sheen in the candlelight. It soaked into the sawdust and became a dark blot. A gathering stain. Irregular. A valley traced in the dust by the scrape of a chair leg flooded and became a river. Long cracks in the floorboards made lines. Creedmoor stared transfixed at the map of violence growing at his feet. He felt numb—frozen—drained, as if it were his blood on the floor. He looked up past a dozen shocked and outraged faces and saw the old man in the long black coat watching with a casual smile on his face, and sharp blue eyes, one of which winked. Creedmoor said, “What?” There was something so strange and familiar in the old man’s eyes that Creedmoor hardly noticed the yelling of the mob, or the hands on his shoulders, two hands, four hands, more hands seizing his arms, a fist in his back, in his kidney, one in his gut bending him double, still staring numbly as they dragged him away.
The crowd dragged him out into the market, where there were stalls and poles and stages and the makings of a gallows. They hunted around drunkenly for rope. The bartender was with them, and the grave-diggers, and the cardplayers, and the whore. Creedmoor had daydreamed for years of what it would be like to hang, how he’d spit defiance and roar with laughter and make a speech that would make the crowd weep—now that it came to it, he was too astonished to say a word. He’d been a thief for a long time, but he was genuinely surprised to find himself a murderer. Two men held him roughly against a post and shouted in his ears, but he didn’t care. They cinched the rope around his neck and pulled him up onto a box. He didn’t struggle. The rope was looped over a crossbeam, but they couldn’t work out how to make it taut, Creedmoor noticed, and they’d left his hands untied, possibly an oversight, certainly no kindness. They were still shouting nonsense at him. He looked around for the man in the long black coat—
Who came ambling quite leisurely down the street and across the red dust of the market. Now that he was standing, it was apparent that he was extraordinarily tall. He seemed to be keeping up a cheerful conversation with the night air. A shake of his head; a full-body shrug; a laugh. He took off his hat and held it in one hand, revealing long gray hair. With the other hand, he drew from his coat the most beautiful gun Creedmoor had ever seen, breathtaking in silver and black, heavy and ornate as a sacred icon. A thrill of fear shot through the crowd, who were suddenly only a handful of little men and women standing drunk in cow dung in an empty market square, fumbling with frayed ropes.
“A promising young man!” The man in the long black coat spoke in a booming voice, actorly, amused: a voice of utter command. “It’s a lucky young man,” he said, head cocked, over his shoulder, as if he was talking to the weapon in his hand, “who has a higher power watching over his shoulder.”
There was a shot; Creedmoor didn’t see the man’s hand move. He fell over backwards. The rope was cut. The crowd scattered, stepping over him. Someone was foolish enough to draw a weapon and there was another shot, and more blood.
There was more shooting. The man in the long black coat—who seemed to ignore bullets as if they were flies—walked casually past the makeshift gallows and gave Creedmoor, who still lay in the dirt, an appraising glance, and said, “Not yet. But you’ve got promise. Maybe later.”
Up close, it was obvious that the man was drunk.
Then he kept walking, p
ast Kennerly’s, where red-coated soldiers spilled out of the doors shooting at him, and down the street, and—kicking the doors open—into Twisted Root’s little bank.
Creedmoor ran. There was fire behind him, but he didn’t look back.
That was Creedmoor’s first murder; that was how he first came to the notice of the Guns.
“I never learned the identity of the Agent who saved me. I imagine he died. We have a tendency to do that. But two years later, I walked full of pluck and resolve and despair into an opium den in Gibson City, where one Mr. Dandy Fanshawe was known to be a regular; I was drunk and angry, but that’s no excuse; and I . . .”
Creedmoor was silent for a long time. Eventually Liv spoke.
“And?”
He glanced warily up. “And? And nothing. What happens after that is inevitable.”
“You were an idealist.”
He shook his head under the brim of his hat. “A very poor idealist.”
“And did your service to the Gun—?”
“Liv. You’re a fine listener, Liv. A professional skill, I assume. And I’m too fond of my own voice. I’m a vain man. I know it. It’s not the least of my flaws. And the Guns are silent out here, Liv, the echoes of their Song cannot reach us, and so I have a great deal of time to devote to my thoughts, and so—”