by Felix Gilman
—Imagine it, old friend. Imagine what it looks like. You’ll be sorry you missed this.
He waited. Nothing answered. Eventually he smiled.
—Good. Just making sure.
He leapt up onto the rocks and ran headlong into the woods.
Destroy his weapon!—the Doctor had no idea what she was asking. Destroy it or, worse, leave it behind, like a Jasper City businessman forgetting his umbrella at the office—like it was nothing of importance!—the Doctor was mad.
If he broke the weapon, that would be the end of him. The pact would be canceled, the contract rescinded, the marriage annulled. His strength would be gone. He’d heard of it happening, to Agents caught in ambushes of the Line, caught drunk or drugged or otherwise vulnerable. The weapon could be quite easily broken, and the spirit within unhoused, sent back to its Lodge to lick its wounds, leaving the Agent only an ordinary person again, weak and frail. The obvious analogy wasn’t lost on Creedmoor. No doubt if he were to explain this to the Doctor, she’d give him a knowing look and say, Aha, you fear aging, you fear impotence, you fear loss of—well, yes, he did, as a matter of fact. But the matter of his weapon was also a very real and practical problem. Without it, he’d be an old man, with no property or family or friends or land or career or prospects or pride, nothing to show for the last thirty years. . . . Without it, he wouldn’t be running through dark woods, leaping from rock to rock, heedless of the branches whipping past his face, full of fierce animal joy. . . .
He scrabbled up a sheer rock face. The creature had gone before, slithering up a crack twice the width of a man’s waist, shedding scales and traces of black blood.
There was no doubt in his mind now that it knew he was chasing it. It fled. It led him on.
At the top of the rock face he stopped and looked back the way he’d come. They were high up now, him and the monster—the oaks were a shifting green sea far below. The Doctor and the old man drifted somewhere beneath them, far out of sight. The sun up in the heights was intensely bright and the sky was cloudless.
—A pleasant day. How goes it?
Still no answer. That couldn’t last. Sooner or later, they’d find their way back to him—certainly if he ever returned from the western wilderness, they’d find him—and his servitude would begin again. The woman was right. He should destroy the weapon. He should hurl it from the cliff. Be broken but free.
He didn’t. He couldn’t. Maybe after the monster was dead; maybe then.
He turned and ran up among the rocks, on the monster’s trail, which reeked of acids and oil and blood.
The slopes sharpened into a mountain, on which sunlight fell like snow. The gray rocks were made blinding white with it. The creature fled into the light. Creedmoor followed.
He’d lived half his life in the mountains—the other half, it seemed, being spent in the lowest dives of the worst cities on the flattest sunkest plains. Half a life hiding in the mountains, striking and retreating as his masters ordered, or tracking across them, scouting out paths and passes, secret routes from Station to Station—whether hunter or hunted, Creedmoor had spilled his fair share of blood on mountain snow. A rarefied kind of life, and a lonely one; sometimes he’d watched eagles soar between the white mountaintops and felt a kind of kinship with them—which was absurd, of course: there was nothing pure or elevated about him at all. Nevertheless, part of Creedmoor belonged among mountains. Memories crowded him; all mountains, being elevated as they were above the material world, were one, and ghosts haunted their peaks. The girl, for instance . . .
She’d been nine years old—small enough that he had to carry her through the deeper snow and over the wider crevasses, and light enough, with her well-bred delicate bones, that he’d been able to do so with ease. She’d wrapped her thin soft arms around his neck so trustingly—though no wonder, of course, that she held so desperately close, when one considered what was pursuing them.
Six, seven years ago—had it really been so long?
Her name had been Rose. He’d kidnapped her. And the mountains in question were far, far to the south and east, the Opals, above what had been the little trade town of Roker, and was now Baxter Station: so the mountains’ pristine snows were no doubt poisoned now with sulfurous mine-tailings, their wild soaring peaks ground down to chipped ugly stubs, their shimmering clouds gone black and heavy with Engine smoke—but at the time they’d been beautiful, and new, and every footprint Creedmoor’s boots stamped into the snow had been the first ever stamped by man, as he’d gone higher and higher into the whiteness and purity of it all.
But of course the mountains, though they were pristine, and clean, and white, and virgin—an unwritten page, an unblemished fair brow, and all that fine stuff—though they were silent, they were not empty. Hard on Creedmoor’s heels came the Hillfolk. Or Mountainfolk, more properly, he supposed.
They were a different kind of creature from the Folk of the snowless world below. Different soil, different breeds—mountain dreams shaped them. That was Creedmoor’s theory, anyway. Their manes were thick and white, peltlike, their shoulders ursine, their motions sudden, a sullen stillness that exploded like an avalanche into howling violence. By all accounts, they were man-eaters. They sure as shit had the teeth for it.
He’d have stopped and fought, and maybe won—if he had known their numbers, he would have known whether he could win for sure, but they hulked on the edge of his vision among the rocks and the snowdrifts, and maybe there were ten and maybe there were a thousand.
This was their sacred place—or maybe just their home—and he was an intruder in it, of a particularly loathsome variety. He saw their point; he was loathsome, and his master was worse. He preferred neither to kill them nor be killed. Better to run. Besides, there was the girl’s safety to consider—that innocent fragile softness, pale skin stung a raw needy red by the winds, blond hair stiff and rimed, clinging to his Gun-arm, unmanning him. He’d not let any further harm come to her. . . .
Her name had been Rose. She was silent, almost mute, in the mountains—dumbstruck most likely by fear, though Creedmoor liked to imagine it was awe at the beauty of the mountains.
Back down in the material world of smoke and business and dirt and noise, Rose had been a chatty little thing, precocious, you might almost say spoiled. Her father was Alfred Tyrias of the Tyrias Transport Trust, the largest meat-transportation concern in that part of the world. She was an heiress, though she was too young to understand what that meant. She’d spent her life in TTT’s concrete compound, living like a princess, waited on not only by a doting father but also by every dried-up craven old suit or ambitious young brownnose in her father’s employ; and she was innocent enough still to think it quite normal.
And waited on also by Creedmoor, who entered the household as a tutor in writing and elocution, under the name John Cadden.
That had always been one of Creedmoor’s talents: the ability to insinuate himself into the company of the good, and the decent, and the respectable. It was a rare talent among the outlaw cohorts of the Gun. It came easy to him, he liked to think, because he was himself only indifferently evil, only halfheartedly a monster.
And he was good with children. Though he, like all the Gun’s Agents, was infertile, would father no children himself, he had a natural rapport with them, little half-formed creatures that they were. Rose soon adored him. He was a lax tutor, and he amused her.
Rose had put up no struggle when Creedmoor took her, in the middle of the night, and carried her out past the guards, who he’d dispatched in a bloodless manner to spare her innocent eyes, and out over the roofs and the fence and into the wild scrub and woods outside. She’d thought it was an adventure—perhaps even a dream. She’d giggled.
The Gun had ordered her kidnapped because of her father, of course, who had been thinking—so the intercepted correspondence said—of throwing his fortunes in with the Line. Father Alfred had been thinking in dollars and cents, shortsightedly, thinking that if the Line ra
n across his territory, he might lease space on the Engines, might save himself money on each cattle run, might be free to pay a stingy severance to his teams of horse back drovers and simply hand the stock over to the machines, which would run cheap and reliable—but that would only be the start of things, would only be the first intrusion of the Line on that unspoiled territory, would be the first tremor of a quake that would flatten and swallow all of father Alfred’s world, and reduce him ultimately to less than nothing. . . .
Or so Creedmoor’s masters had briefed him; admittedly, in all his weeks bowing and scraping and charming his way into the household’s inner circle and the child’s innocent affections, Creedmoor had seen no sign of any such intention on father Alfred’s part, and he had come to wonder if the Guns were not running some deeper and darker scheme than they were letting on to him—offense was more in their nature than defense. But grand strategy wasn’t Creedmoor’s business.
Creedmoor took the girl from her bed at night. And he would have gotten clean away had there not been men of the Line spying on the compound from the hills with their telescopes, and had those men of the Line not wired up the woods with tripwires and alarms and bombs, and had they not had troops waiting. As it all shook out, he ended up cut off at the bridge, fled north into the mountains instead of south toward the waiting haven, and fled up and up into the snows, where the Linesmen, fat slow-moving earthbound black-lunged creatures that they were, fell behind; and then he’d have been free and clear had he not blundered across the caves the Mountainfolk called home.
“Keep them away,” Rose cried into his chest. “Don’t let them get me.” That was when she was still strong enough to speak. He promised her he’d keep her safe, he’d always keep her safe. . . .
—You cannot keep that promise, Creedmoor.
—I can and I will.
—Do not forget what you are, Creedmoor. You are not a good man.
The Mountainfolk chased Creedmoor for days. Howling and drumming, bashing their long, long arms on the ice in outrage and loathing. Night came and went; the girl slept from time to time in his arms. He wasn’t sure when she slept or when she was awake—the trembling was the same, and after the first few days, she was always silent. He broke from the shadows of the rocks and out across a vast glacial plain, a sea of ice that shone in the cold white sun so that he might have been running on air. The Mountainfolk followed behind him. The cold was so terrible as to numb all but the finest and purest feelings, of love and joy and pity and awe. Bit by bit Creedmoor stripped himself almost naked so as to wrap Rose as warmly as possible in his clothes, so that she became a formless mass of leather and linen and denim, while Creedmoor’s own ugly body was exposed to the sun and the ice, and he was scoured by the cold until he looked as raw and wild and alien as the Folk pursuing him. He was kept alive only by Marmion’s fires. He crossed the plain and ascended the shifting slopes of a peak that was carved square and steep like a church tower. Higher and higher . . . He was sure-footed; he’d kept his boots on, at least. And he leapt across a crevasse that was deep and black as death—and so wide that to clear it, he had to call upon all the strength Marmion had to spare, and he hung in the air over the depths for so long, it seemed he was falling or flying—and in so doing, he left the raging First Folk behind, and could continue through that elevated world in peace. The mountains were a skin of ice and air over pure thoughts. . . .
But soon enough the girl died anyway, days before he was able to make it back to the warmth of the world below. Cold, or hunger, or terror—who knew? Perhaps simply the thinness of the air, which was near-unbreathable—unlike Creedmoor, little Rose still needed to breathe. He suddenly felt her body become heavy in his arms—like the stone that sank in his gut.
But of course, it was better that way. Better that her soul vanished, sublimely, into the light of the mountains—better that than that he drag her back down with him and pass her over into the care of his masters. Probably it had not been painless, but she had at least remained innocent.
That was a dreadful, sickening thing to think; it reminded Creedmoor what he really was.
He scraped up snow to cover the body—he couldn’t bury her in the hard earth with his bare hands and his own strength, and Marmion wouldn’t aid him. Marmion only said,
—You failed us, Creedmoor. The girl was valuable.
Then he lay down in the snow beside her and waited to die. Waited for Marmion to tire of him and remove its protection from him, so that the cold would take him.
—We will not abandon you, Creedmoor.
—Let me go.
—Your life is not yours to throw away.
His limbs stiffened and went numb, but not frostbitten. His skin wove itself into the ice so that it was agony to tear away, when finally he recovered the will. And in the end, it was the boredom that got to him. He could lie not-dying in the snow for only so many days and nights before his boredom grew greater than his guilt. Until he began to feel ridiculous.
—This is pathetic, Creedmoor.
—It is. Oh, it is.
The episode of poor Rose was just another fact about himself he would have to get used to. Drink or drugs or women would help.
He stood, and he walked down out of the mountains, naked but for his boots.
—Never call on me again.
—We will if we choose. And you will come to heel.
As it happened, they didn’t call on him for another six years—not, in fact, until his current mission, with the General, and the Doll House, and poor Liv—not till this latest stage in his headlong descent into disgrace and damnation.
On the other hand, there’d been the episode in the mountains at Devil’s Spine seven years before, which had been a glorious success from start to finish; and last time Creedmoor had been in that country, they were still singing ballads about his daring and cunning, though admittedly they got his name wrong. . . .
In a ditch between four sharp rocks, the monster had made another cache of corpses. Mostly bones and horn; some red and stinking meat. Predominantly the bones were from the local deerlike animals—but what caught Creedmoor’s eye was the fairly fresh corpse of a human male, whose red jacket was torn and bloodied and had been patched a dozen times with fur but was nonetheless recognizably the uniform of an officer of the Red Valley Republic.
—Well, well. What do we make of that, then?
There was still no answer.
CHAPTER 39
LOWRY’S DUTY
Lowry wandered among the oaks. Where was he? Where was the enemy? He had no slagging idea. All he knew was shadow and sun and the hideous sound of dry leaves ceaselessly cracking and rustling, and—lately—Subaltern Collier’s whining.
“Sir. Acting Conductor Lowry, sir . . .”
Lowry marched and Collier followed behind him, complaining. Collier put an emphasis on the word Acting, which at first Lowry had found insulting, but after a while ceased to interest him.
“Sir. We have no goal. No purpose. Sir . . .”
There wasn’t anything much Lowry could say to that, so he ignored it. It was true; they were lost. They had no means of tracking the enemy. They had nowhere near enough provisions for the journey home, and even if they had, they had no idea where home was—they were going in circles.
“Sir,” Collier said patiently, “we’re going in circles.”
Well, yes. Under the oaks, there was no way of knowing what direction they were going. The sun was only occasionally visible, and had not set for what felt like several days, and generally could not be trusted. A few sleeps ago, Subaltern Gauge had had the bright idea of hacking marks into the trees so that they could confirm that they were going in circles, but the marks vanished—and yet their bootprints in the soft dark mud did not. So if it was a trick, it was a stupid one—malevolence for the sake of malevolence—the oaks wanted Lowry to see the trick, and know their hatred for him. He’d ordered charges to be placed on the trunk of one ancient mossy oak and detonated the ho
rrible thing, let loose a dreadful hammering of noise and weight that blasted the wood to splinters and sent the leaves scattering in a panic. That made a mark. Soon it was swallowed. They didn’t have enough charges to blast a path. They didn’t have enough of anything for anything.
“Sir, Subaltern Gauge has deserted.”
Lowry stopped and turned to look at Collier’s bearded filthy face. “Has he?” He was quite surprised.
“Yes, sir. Not sure when. He took ten men with him—they’d been lagging behind for a while and—”
Lowry shrugged, kept marching. Gauge’s was neither the first desertion nor would it be the last. Lowry was no longer certain how many men were under his command. Roughly 150. In addition to the desertions, there had been suicides.
“Sir,” Collier said. “I must insist we turn back. Additional forces will be coming behind us, sir, we can rejoin—”
“No,” Lowry said.
“Sir—”
“We do our duty. The enemy may waver in his loyalty, but we do not. Not made that way. Don’t have the parts. We can wish that we did, but we don’t. We go on.”
“Sir—”
“We go on.”
Lowry wasn’t a superstitious man or an imaginative one, but under the timelessness of the oaks, it was impossible not to entertain premonitions of one’s end; and he saw himself falling in his tracks in a drift of leaves, or dead of a fever or starvation, or twisting and breaking his leg on a root so that they’d have to shoot him, or . . . The one thing all his visions had in common was that his death would be meaningless and anonymous, and he would be quickly forgotten. Therefore, it was very important that he do his duty now.
“Sir. I insist that we turn back.”
Another possible end, of course, was that Collier might finally screw up the courage to mutiny, at which point the first Lowry would likely hear of it would be the bayonet in the back; and then Collier would be Lowry, interchangeable, each equally adequate or inadequate for the task, and it would be Collier who’d fall exhausted into the leaves. . . .