by Felix Gilman
—An old mad General. An old enemy? One of our many, many old enemies. You want me to kill him? You want revenge? What’s the point?
—We want you to bring him to us. He is worth more than gold. You must not kill him. On no account must you kill him, or allow him to be killed. A frontal assault will not work. The Spirit of the House is powerful, and will permit no violence within its walls. It does violence in return to those who bring violence to it. If we attack, the General may be killed.
—Oh, dear! If murder won’t work, we are rather at a loss, aren’t we?
—Shut up, Creedmoor. We have chosen you because you are personable, Creedmoor, you are charming. Worm your way in, past the Spirit, past the defenses. Befriend them. Seek employment if necessary. You pass for an ordinary man.
—Like I’ve always said, Creedmoor, you’re no hero, but you’d make a good janitor.
—Ha! Fuck you, Lion.
That voice was Abban the Lion. Abban, like Creedmoor, had not been born in the West; but where Creedmoor came from damp and misty Lundroy and was prone to grumbling and joint aches, the dark and eagle-nosed Abban came from the sands of Dhrav and was passionate. He fancied himself a warrior, wore his dark hair long, dressed all in black, and sometimes went so far as to affect a sword. At this moment he was probably staring into a fire in a camp somewhere in some distant hills, surrounded by the bodies of enemies. He said:
—I’ll be behind you, Creedmoor. In the hills. Whether you want me or not. Watching. You won’t be alone.
Fanshawe’s voice again:
—So will I. Like old times, Creedmoor!
—Not sure I trust you behind me, Fanshawe.
—I’ve never heard that one before, darling, well done.
Jen said:
—I will not be joining you. I wish you gentlemen well at the ends of the earth. My spies will be working in your behalf back in Jasper City. Come find me at the Floating World when you’re done.
—You should travel more, Jen. You used to go everywhere. Tell me—are you still young?
She laughed. Abban spoke:
—Don’t think you can betray us, Creedmoor. Don’t think if you run away again, you will be forgiven.
—Fuck you, Lion.
A gray shape that swirled through the smoke looked remarkably like the blade of a curved sword swooping at Creedmoor’s head, and he ducked, and immediately felt foolish. He said:
—Listen. What’s this about? Why do we care about this old General? There’s no shortage of Generals in this world.
Marmion answered:
—He was caught by the bombs of the Line—the bombs of terrible noise, that shatter the mind with fear. His mind is gone. He will be one among many with minds like children, rotting away in the cells of the House Dolorous. They do not know who he is or what he is. There are secrets hidden in his mind.
—What secrets?
—Bring him to us.
—What secrets?
—What do you think, Creedmoor? A weapon. What else?
—A weapon.
—Yes.
—What kind of weapon?
—A thing of the First Folk. It could mean victory.
—An end to the War? Peace at last?
—Not peace. Victory.
—What weapon? What does it do? Who is he? Who was he? What have the Folk got to do with it?
—You know enough already. You are not trustworthy, Creedmoor. None of our servants are trustworthy. Bring him to us.
—Hmm. Fanshawe?
—Yes?
—Have the young bucks really forgotten my name?
—Afraid so, dear boy.
—Serve us well now and you will never be forgotten, Creedmoor. Pay attention. . . .
They began to talk tactics, logistics. One voice interrupted another, and again. A disagreement on a point of precise timing emerged, and they began to squabble and snipe. The unity of the Guns never lasted long. Ambush and volley and countervolley of words . . .
The smoke thickened. Billows of it crossed the room back and forth like cavalry charges. Voices echoed and overlapped. What always unnerved Creedmoor was that though each voice was different, they were also the same. They sounded in his head and they sounded in his voice, with only a crude approximation of Abban’s accent or a mockery of Jen’s lilt or Fanshawe’s drawl or an echo of the thud and snarl of the Guns. It was horribly unpleasant, and enough to make a man wonder if he was mad.
When he threw open the door and let the smoke pour out, it was nearly morning, and Josiah was muttering in his sleep. Creedmoor walked away quickly before his master could decide the old man needed to be killed after all.
CHAPTER 5
SMILE THROUGH ADVERSITY
Dr. Lysvet Alverhuysen’s coach traveled west, through Koenigswald’s farmlands, and across the border into Sommerland, and along a high cliff road that looked over the vast gray Northern Ocean, and south across the moors, and up into the pines. Other travelers came and went—businessmen, widows, scholars, doctors, couriers, the idle rich on tour. Sometimes there was pleasant conversation; sometimes Maggfrid sat in deep silence and Liv read, or stared at the passing skies. Mail was picked up and dropped off. The coach bounced along the dirt roads that cut through the forests, narrow channels between dark walls of pine. A few logging towns and the occasional inn disrupted the green immensity. It got colder as they slowly gained altitude. They changed coaches twice, and both times Liv was convinced she was going to lose something vital from her luggage, though she couldn’t think what; already most of what she’d brought seemed unnecessary. She’d taken to wearing her hair down.
There was a certain casual and vaguely decadent camaraderie on the coaches, and Liv spent several of her nights drinking wine by the fireplace of a drafty log-built inn with young men of business, or a certain eager young student of Natural Philosophy on his way to a symposium. On those nights, Maggfrid sat protectively nearby, or stood with the horses, or went walking alone in the woods. Liv wrote a letter to Agatha—Agatha, my dear, I have become quite daring! You should see me. . . . But the coach bounced and she spilled ink on the page, and anyway decided she would prefer to keep such matters to herself. Some days she and Maggrid were alone, and she wrote in her journal, and the scratching of her pen and the clatter of hooves and the ticking of the golden watch passed the time.
The road ran farther south and west, and wound through the mountains, the blue-white peaks of which rose on either side like a wall built by God at the end of the world—like ghostly fairy-tale giants charged by God with guarding the border of creation.
That was what they still called them—the World’s End Mountains—though for four hundred years there had been another world beyond them. And one afternoon they turned a corner and the trees parted and Liv looked out west across golden plains, spread out far below her and out beyond the horizon. She gasped as she made out forests and lakes and even toylike towns and out beyond in the north the stark black scrawl of the Line. A distant eagle soared overhead. Her heart surged with mad excitement. Maggfrid leaned suddenly over her and stuck his great head and shoulders out the window and yelled a nonsensical echoing shout of joy. The coach rocked on the edge of a steep drop and Liv, laughing, tried to pull him back in.
The mail coach left them in Fort Sloten, a tiny way station up in the foothills of the World’s Ends. From Fort Sloten, riders took the mail off along steep trails north and south and west.
Liv and Maggfrid followed the trail down into Fort Blue on foot. She’d had the forethought, before leaving, to consult with Professor Woch of the Botanical Institute, who was a keen hiker, and consequently she wore quite excellent fitted boots. Even so her feet quickly blistered and her legs ached. She had Maggfrid break off a sturdy branch for her to use as a stick, and felt quite pleased at her own resourcefulness.
From Fort Blue they traveled on the back of a cargo barge down the river to Burren Hill. The barge was laden with a heap of bleached animal bones, from which ant
lers poked out like stripped fingers. Liv turned away from that horrible cargo and sat with her hands in her lap and watched the white World’s Ends dwindle behind her.
She arrived in Burren Hill in the late afternoon. It was a town of the border countries, a sprawl of low clapboard houses spilling down the hillside to the banks of a wide silt-brown river. There was a crumbling, ramshackle dock, to which Liv’s horrible barge tied off, and onto which, with Maggfrid’s help, she carefully climbed.
An imposing stockade sat on the hill overlooking the town. The warehouses by the river were fortified, too, and Liv had never seen so many armed men. The place hummed with industry—teams of men worked stripped to the waist digging ditches and erecting more stockades. Their backs were burned red. In the ditches and stepped earthworks, they bobbed and swayed like a thousand red flowers in a muddy garden. Bony shapes that Liv assumed must be the Hillfolk worked in chain gangs, and she wondered how they didn’t cook under their long black manes. Already the sun was hotter and fiercer out here.
Director Howell’s letter had promised that regular riverboats went west from Burren Hill, and had provided her with a letter of introduction to a Captain Canin. She showed the letter to a group of sunburned dockworkers, who regarded it with distaste and confusion, as if it might have been an arrest warrant.
“Captain Canin,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I have a letter of introduction to a Captain Canin, and I would be very grateful for your assistance in finding—”
“Dead,” the foreman told her.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Dead six months or more. They killed him and took his cargo and burned his boat.”
She put her hand to her mouth in horror. “How awful! Who did?”
Sunburned shoulders shrugged. “Bandits? Hillfolk? The Gun? Who knows? No one goes down the river these days.”
“No one? I need to go downriver.”
“Not these days.”
“Why not?”
“Three boats lost these last six months, just a few miles west of town. Boats burned, throats slit, the bodies wash up in towns downriver. Something’s taken up in those hills.”
The foreman said something’s taken up in those hills in the same resigned way farmers of the North might grumble about bad weather. It made Liv’s skin crawl.
On the other hand, she thought, they were probably lying to her. Somehow this story would probably end in them asking her for money, in which case, so be it. “I can pay extra,” she said.
“Well, good luck to you, then, ma’am.” The foreman hefted a crate of bones and walked bowlegged away.
“Don’t worry, Maggfrid,” she said, though he hadn’t spoken.
She found a room for the night in Burren Hill’s one hotel—a two-story structure huddled under the wooden walls of the Fort, a maze of tiny wooden boxes. She shared a chaste bed with Maggfrid, and the huge warmth of his body kept her awake. Already she itched from the heat and the flies. For the first time in years, she remembered the flat mad smile on the face of the man who’d murdered her mother; it surfaced suddenly from her memories and made her gasp. She took a measure of her sleeping tincture, and it turned the water in her cup a soothing green like the peaceful gardens of the North.
Her problems compounded themselves, as problems tended to do.
In the morning, she approached the overseers of the town—who she identified by the fact that they wore shirts, and in the case of one young man, a Mr. Harrison, a suit.
Liv found Harrison confusing. He had the long greasy hair of a pauper but the manner of an aristocrat or a popular and prosperous administrator. He sat on the hillside under the shade of a black canvas and watched the ditch-digging and wall-building going on below, and consulted his maps and blueprints, and gave orders to runners, and appeared busily content. He drank water with lemon in it—“For my health, Doctor. A healthy mind in a healthy body!”—and was apparently delighted to sit and make conversation with an educated lady traveler from the North—but his news was not good.
“No one goes down the river these days, Doctor. It’s not worth the risk. Boats are expensive things to lose.”
“Are there no police on the river?”
He laughed. “No police but what we might raise from these men. And we’re brave men in Burren but not soldiers. And maybe there are Agents or wild Folk in the hills. Who knows?”
“Agents, Mr. Harrison?”
“The servants of the Gun, Doctor. We try to stay neutral out here, but the Gun’s Agents get everywhere. Nothing we can do about it, is there? Just have to wait till they move on, that’s all.”
“I’ve heard stories—the Gun’s Agents are said to be dangerous men, but they are only men, are they not? Is there nothing you can do?”
Harrison smiled and said, “You didn’t learn much about this country before you set out, did you? First thing a businessman learns is to know the country he’s traveling in.”
“Enlighten me, then. Please.”
“There are greater powers than the human out here, Doctor. The earth here is haunted.”
She frowned. He called himself a businessman but talked like a mystic, or a lunatic. Under happier conditions, she would have found that interesting; now it just annoyed her.
He pointed out over the maze of ditches and earthworks and foundations. “It’s not so bad out here. Burren Hill was settled two hundred and thirty-some years ago, and our soil’s old and steady. But I still worry when we have to dig what we might dig up. What we might wake up. You just never know. Gun and Line had to be born somewhere, didn’t they, in some town that was only going about its business? It’ll only get worse as you go out west.”
“How do I go west from here, Mr. Harrison?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s the ten-thousand-dollar question. Someone might sell you a horse, but I couldn’t in conscience advise you to ride alone. The river’s closed, and it’s slow and so damn expensive to send caravans, and our cargoes are rotting in our warehouses, and our investors aren’t happy. This, too, will pass, of course—if we keep faith. But how? You tell me, Doctor. We are building fortifications, as you can see, but will it help? Shall I have a boy bring us more water?”
“I was told to get to a town called Gloriana, and from there I was told I could take the Line west.”
“Gloriana’s a Station, not a town.”
“A town of the Line, yes. Is there a difference?”
“You’ll know the difference when you see it. If you see it. It’s in Line country. We’re neutral here. No one’s going to want to take you near it.”
“I see.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. Most of what Harrison said seemed nonsensical to her, and a number of sharp questions rose to her mind, but she didn’t want to risk offending him. The horizon was a red-brown haze in every direction. Irritably she brushed away flies as Harrison sipped his water.
“Adversity strengthens us, Doctor.”
“Does it?” she snapped. “I would be interested to see your evidence.”
“Ten years in business and still by and large prospering is my evidence, Doctor.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Harrison. I’m not used to the heat here.”
“Are you a Smiler, Doctor?”
“I’m afraid that’s another question I don’t understand,.”
“The New Thought, Doctor. The practice is a great help in times of adversity. Would you like me to have a boy bring you a pamphlet?”
“Thank you, Mr. Harrison. Thank you. I’d like that.”
He stood and bellowed, “Boy!” in a suddenly coarse voice. He sat back down, apparently pleased.
“I’ll tell you what, Doctor. Talk to a man called Mr. Bond. He’s taking a party out soon. A trading caravan. They’re not headed to Gloriana, but they’ll get you close. Maybe he can use a doctor. Who knows? The world is full of curses but also full of blessings, if you just keep on smiling.”
She took lunch at the hotel, in a dark dining ro
om under the mounted heads of antlered beasts. There were stags in the forests of Koenigswald, but their counterparts here seemed more profoundly, more complexly, more savagely antlered than in the civilized world—antlered beyond utility, she thought.
She tried to explain their situation to Maggfrid; he was confused. Twice, he stood suddenly and proposed simply to walk west, and protect her from whatever got in their way.
He was full of energy these days, and restless. She wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or bad. On the walk down from Fort Sloten, she’d tried to explain to him how to walk with a stick and at first he hadn’t understood the principle of the thing, and had used the stick to strike the ground with each step as if trying to beat the mountain flat.
To calm him, she played a very simple card game with him. Then she went to her room to lie down and read. She was entirely too tired to read any of the scientific journals she’d brought with her, so instead she opened, for the first time, The Child’s History of the West.
The Child’s History was apparently the work of one General Orlan Enver, of the Red Valley Republic—the severe-looking uniformed gentleman who glared from the frontispiece. It was written in tones of stiff enthusiasm. It alternated between accounts of battles, which Liv found dull, and advice regarding exercise and cleanliness, which she found duller. It struck Liv as a well-meaning but unsubtle piece of propaganda—when she skipped impatiently to the final chapter, she learned that the Red Valley Republic had established peace and liberty and democracy, forever and ever, that the last holdouts of irrationalism and oppression and vice would soon learn from the example of young men and women of virtue and decency, that the turbulent history of the half-made world was at an end, and that the West was now made whole and ready to take its place among civilized nations.
But of course, she reminded herself, with hindsight everything seemed absurd; no doubt her own publications would look comical to later generations.
She tried to read chapter 1, “The First Colony at Founding,” but quickly fell asleep.
