by Felix Gilman
He pointed at the General, who was staring at his feet and quietly muttering nonsense.
“There’s a secret in that old fool’s head. He saw something, or did something, or went somewhere. There is a weapon. I can say no more. But anyway, the secret is buried under the rubble the enemy made of his mind.”
He patted the gun at his side. “My usual methods of questioning are in effec tive here. So I thought, Dr. A’s a clever woman. I read your notes. Didn’t understand a damn word of ’em, but they looked clever enough to a simple man like me. So I want you to heal him, Doctor. That’s not so bad, is it?”
“I don’t know how to heal him, Creedmoor.”
“Try.”
“I don’t know how.”
“I have faith in you.”
The General suddenly shuddered.
“Cold night,” Creedmoor said. He walked over to his bag and extracted one of the House’s rough woolen blankets. He wrapped it around the General’s shoulders.
“Sorry, Doctor. I brought only the one blanket. Unchivalrous of me; but I’m sure you agree the patient comes first.”
He removed a rope from the bag, too, and tethered the General’s ankle to the tree.
“In case he wanders off. Of course, there’s no need to do the same for you. I wouldn’t insult you by suggesting anything of the kind. Do be mindful, though, that I sleep lightly.”
He lay down on his back with his hands behind his head.
“We’re sleeping, Creedmoor? What about . . .”
He looked up. “The Line, Doctor. Say it out loud if you like, no awful consequences will follow; or at least nothing that wouldn’t have happened anyway.”
“The Line, Creedmoor. Are they not—?”
“We will be meeting friends of mine in Greenbank, at the Grand Howell Hotel. I can’t vouch for most of them, but Dandy Fanshawe’s a good fellow in his way. But we cannot ride down into Greenbank like this, three to a horse, you in your funeral clothes. A little way over the edge of a scarp to the south, over which I suggest you do not wander in the night, there are some farms. We shall resupply in the morning. Sleep while you can, Doctor.”
He lay back and started snoring.
Liv had rarely seen anyone sleep so quickly or deeply. Had he no conscience?
But the Gun by his side, close to hand, that did not sleep.
Nor did Liv. She sat hunched against a tree with her arms around her knees. She listened for sounds of pursuit. It grew colder.
As it happened, she did have her nerve tonic with her, or at least a tiny three-quarter-empty vial of the substance, which she kept around her neck at all times in case of emergencies, for her patients or, if necessary, for herself.
She had no water with which to take it, so she let a slow greasy droplet of it bead on her fingertip, and she licked it quickly up. Under the sickly-sweet of the palliative, her finger tasted of sweat and earth and pine needles. Her tongue tingled and went numb. A numbness rushed up through her head. She’d never taken it unmixed with water before. A peaceful greenness washed over the world. She slept.
“Wake up.”
Creedmoor shook her.
“Wake up.”
It was still night. They were still in the pines.
“Do you hear that?”
“I hear nothing, Creedmoor.”
“No. No, you wouldn’t. But they’re close.” He stared off at something invisible in the distance.
“They’re close. Move.”
They staggered on through the night. She did not know where they were going or why.
In the morning, they went down into a village: a nameless scattering of houses and farms at the foot of a brown stony hill.
“We’ve lost them for now, Doctor. But there must be no alarms. Remember, Doctor, if we are caught, I will die and the Line will take you and so eventually so will you, and their machines will drill the poor old General’s head for secrets. I very much want to live and be free. Do you?”
She nodded.
He smiled. “Excellent! Then I can trust you to make no sign of distress when we go into town. If there is any disturbance, if there is any violence, if I’m forced to bring bad luck to these folk, it will be on your head, Doctor.”
He looked her up and down. “Perhaps we can say we’re husband and wife, Liv. May I call you Liv? The General is your elderly grandfather from the less-blond side of the family. The rest will come to me. Come on.”
Before they went down, she took a drop of the tonic.
Creedmoor purchased a horse from one of the farms in the valley, and a saddle, and a pack and blanket, and a dented kettle and a bent pan and tin plate; and the farmer’s wife was not far from Liv’s size, and so Creedmoor haggled for sensible country clothes for her—red flannels and breeches—while Liv herself sat silent in the corner, the unmixed tonic numbing her mind and flattening her vision so that the farmer and his wife and the horse and the kettle seemed all infinitely distant and toylike.
The horse was mostly brown.
“Not a bad animal, Liv.”
“If you say so, Creedmoor.”
“I know horseflesh. Can you ride?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you learn? Back home? The old world, Koenigswald? Let me guess: a riding academy. Green meadows, flowers. Ponies? I’m not convinced.”
“What do you expect from me, Creedmoor?”
“So Professor Creedmoor’s School of Equestrian Studies is apparently in session. Come on.”
Creedmoor set a pace that terrified Liv and left her so badly bruised and aching, she thought—when they finally dismounted—she might never walk again. Creedmoor held the General tight, and the old man mumbled and droned. Liv could think of nothing all day but staying on the beast’s back. She barely noticed their course curving around—from northwest to northeast to east to southeast—as the afternoon wore on and the sun moved across the blue sky. But when they finally stopped for the night—only for a few hours, Creedmoor told her—then the fear came back.
She sat shivering against a rock as Creedmoor stood and smoked and looked out over the dark hills.
“Greenbank tomorrow,” he said.
CHAPTER 26
GREENBANK
The Subaltern came around back of the armored car and knocked on the doors to indicate that it was safe for Lowry to emerge. Lowry took a last swig of his coffee; he gargled and spat half the cold gritty substance back into the mug. He adjusted his collar and removed his spectacles. Then he buckled on the heavy rubber muzzle of his gas mask, strapping it on tight and snapping on the round bottle-glass goggles. In theory, the gas had long since dissipated, but Lowry didn’t like to take risks. Once he was fully ready, he opened the door and stepped out onto Greenbank’s Main Street.
It was the early hours of morning, and the sky was flat and gray. Smoke shadowed the town. The Grand Howell Hotel and the Howell Bank and half the buildings on Main Street were crumbling ruins. Fires still smoldered here and there.
Lowry slipped for a second on a drift of loose ashes. He waved away the Subaltern’s offer of a helping hand and stamped his way down Main Street, over the bodies, to the scaffold his men had erected in the square.
Three bodies hung from it, trussed up by bloody ropes like butchers’ pheasants.
Two were dead. One Lowry knew from the Black File: Dagger Mary. The other was a woman, too. Red hair. No other remaining identifiable features.
It hadn’t been possible to capture the women alive. The women had been the worst. They usually were.
The third was an old man. Face handsome but badly bruised now. Long gray hair wild and matted with blood. Mustache burned. He’d been wearing an elegant russet silk suit when the morning’s operation began. After he’d finally been beaten to the ground, he’d been stripped of its torn and bloodied remains. He now hung naked, ropes cutting into his pale flesh. His torso was a ragged mass of wounds. An ordinary man would have been dead long ago. He looked ridiculous, vile.
; There’d been a fourth and final Agent. Name unknown. He’d fled. Yet to be recovered.
“Fanshawe, right? You called yourself Dandy Fanshawe.”
The old man lifted his head and grinned. His left eye was closed with blood. The right regarded Lowry with contempt.
“So I did. I was famous and that name will not be forgotten. Do you have a name, Linesman? Does it matter?”
A gesture of psychopathic dignity. Lowry said nothing.
The Agent laughed. Lowry was glad his own eyes were hidden behind the dull glass shields of the gas mask; he wouldn’t want the Enemy to see him flinch.
Behind him, his men cleared away the dead.
Very little of Greenbank had survived the engagement. If it had been possible without alerting the enemy, Lowry would have preferred to warn Greenbank’s people to evacuate.
“You did this,” he said. “You made this necessary. Skulking among innocents.”
The Agent rolled his good right eye. “Oh, please, Linesman.”
The Agent’s left eye was already starting to heal. His masters’ hideous power still flowed into him, mending his flesh. Lowry could see broken bones writhing and knitting under the old man’s skin. Within a couple of hours, he’d be as strong as ever.
“Show me your face, Linesman. Are you ugly? All Linesmen are ugly, of course, but how ugly are you? This matters to me. Show your face. Are you afraid of me? Still?”
He was. He’d never stood so close to an Agent. He had a stone of fear in his gut, and his skin crawled. He folded his hands behind his back to stop them shaking. He stared up at the Agent from behind his mask.
How many had Fanshawe killed? The Subalterns were still reckoning up the extent of the losses, but they were heavy. The capacity of Lowry’s forces had been very significantly degraded. Numerous Vessels, Ironclads, and trucks lay broken and smoldering all around. Bodies filled the streets in every direction—many of them were Greenbank’s former citizens, but more than Lowry would have liked wore the black of the Line. Dozens were dead at Fanshawe’s hands, and that wasn’t counting the tolls taken by the women.
“I won’t ask your name, Linesman. It doesn’t matter. Your kind have no names.”
“Lowry.”
“You’re boring me, Linesman. You are a very ugly and inferior man.”
“Fanshawe. We have a file on you.”
“No doubt you do. Does it liven your dull life to read it? I imagine it does. I could tell you some stories, Linesman.”
“A sodomite. And an opium fiend.”
“What of it?”
“Creedmoor gave up your location, Fanshawe.”
In a manner of speaking, that was true. Creedmoor had spoken his own name, and Fanshawe’s name, and the name of the Grand Hotel in Greenbank, in the presence of the Doctor’s signaling device. Five hours later, the Signal Corps had translated the information and brought it urgently to Lowry’s attention.
Fanshawe lifted an ironic eyebrow and said nothing. Lowry had hoped for more of a reaction.
“Where’s Creedmoor going now, Fanshawe?”
Lowry had hoped to catch Creedmoor with the rest of them. No such luck. The Agent had been taking his sweet time getting to Greenbank. Lowry had struck too soon. He was not yet sure whether he would or would not be punished for his error of judgment. Likely he would.
“I have no idea, Linesman. Creedmoor and I have not been intimates for many years. Do you want to hear all our gossip? Do you want to pry and sniff into our intimate secrets?”
It was possible to track the movements of the signaling device, but not with precision. The device could be tracked to within a mile or two of its location, depending on various conditions—bad weather interfered with the transmission, as for some reason did the presence of substantial populations of Folk. It had been dreadful in the House. And the signals, of course, took hours to receive and decode. Five hours ago, Creedmoor and the target had been a few miles northwest of Greenbank. Where were they now?
Fanshawe blinked his left eye. The swelling was nearly gone. “Are you a virgin, Linesman? Have your masters permitted you to mate? Do they consider you good breeding stock?”
Lowry clapped his gloved hands, and his attendants approached, carrying a low steel folding table. On the table, arranged neatly, were three Guns, grips facing Lowry, deadly muzzles facing safely away.
An attendant handed Lowry a hammer. It had a head of pig iron and a shaft that Lowry had to grip in both hands. He raised it over his head and crashed it down on the leftmost weapon, so that the table rang like a cracked bell and shook and sparks flew from the steel. Behind the ringing, there was something like screaming at the edge of Lowry’s hearing. He drew the hammer back—and again—and again and again until he was red-faced and sweating.
Lowry tore off the mask and breathed heavily.
The table—and the earth around it—was littered with the bright silver coils and broken black wood of the Guns. Their demonic blood was a thin and sulfurous scattering of powder.
“There’s an end to them, then.” Lowry threw the hammer aside and gasped for breath. “Your master’s gone, now, Fanshawe. Gone back to its Lodge. And left you all alone. It’ll come back, I know, with some new servant. You won’t.”
There was a satisfying change in the Agent’s bearing. Now that his master was gone, he hung limply. Now he looked frightened, old, weak. His bruises blackened, and his left eye began to bleed again.
“Cut him down. Harmless now. Not so clever now. Right. Let’s get to work.”
CHAPTER 27
OVER THE BORDER
They rode south toward Greenbank across open country. It was just before dawn, and the sky was banded red and gray. Distant trees were black silhouettes.
They rode along the crest of a steep rocky slope. At the foot of the slope, far below, were white rapids; beyond that, wilderness stretched out into the west.
The General rode with Creedmoor, lashed inelegantly to his back. Creedmoor was telling stories.
“. . . so in those days, I was part of Fanshawe’s circle back in Gibson City. Young and new to the Cause. We were the finest fellows in town. All Gibson’s fashionable folk paid court to us.”
Liv gave him no encouragement. She hated the sound of his voice.
“The banks all owed us a cut. No doubt it went to finance some struggle somewhere; I don’t know. Fanshawe was the strategic thinker among us. But so one fine day, Liv, Fanshawe and Casca and I—Oh, Casca! So dark, so beautiful. This was after we’d fished Casca half-dead from the river, a suicide in her black dress, and recruited her into our number. . . .”
Liv’s hands tingled on the reins. The urge to break and flee was so great that she could hardly resist it. Her hands twitched.
“Fanshawe and Casca and I paid a visit, listen, to a certain bank manager, I shouldn’t name him, who had refused our cut; and Fanshawe, cool as you like . . .”
Would he gun her down? Perhaps, perhaps not. He would almost certainly retrieve her, slung over his back most likely, a humiliation she did not wish to endure.
“On another occasion, I recall, Fanshawe . . .”
She clutched the reins. Now, she thought; now or never. While he was lost in his horrible, ugly memories. . . .
Creedmoor fell silent.
The next instant, he yanked on his horse’s reins so that it reared, and he screamed. Had the General not been roped in place, he would have been flung limply to the ground, and most likely rolled helplessly down the slope and into the rapids below.
Liv froze. She held her breath.
Creedmoor’s face went red, and the veins on his neck bulged. He drew his Gun and he fired again and again into the rocks, shattering them into bloodred dust; he was screaming in rage and the Gun was screaming, too, in its way; she could not tell which one controlled the other.
Suddenly it was over.
—What shall we do what shall we do? All of them dead! Fanshawe dead! First Abban then Fanshawe! And Keane and whoever-t
he-fuck else! They were to spirit us to safety what shall we do now?
The place inside Creedmoor’s head where he spoke to his master was still again, dark again. It stank of powder, and the darkness echoed dully and throbbed with blood; but their rage was exhausted. The voice came back to him:
—We are thinking.
—You were supposed to have thought before we embarked on this venture my friend now where are your plans?
—We are thinking. It is hard. It is . . . noisy in our Lodge. Our siblings’ bodies were broken. Belphegor, who rode Fanshawe. Yblis, who rode Mary. Gorgon, who rode Black Roth. Their spirits released in pain. You cannot imagine how we feel pain. Their spirits have returned to us; now they must be reborn in new hosts and rebirth is painful and noisy. We can think of little else but vengeance. The flames rise.
Creedmoor waited.
—Stephen Sutter fled Greenbank. He would not return to battle. We struck him down by the Goad, and he died in a ditch. We were angry and in pain. It was unwise.
—I don’t care I don’t give the least fraction of a shit what happened to Sutter what will happen to me?
—We are still thinking. For now, you must flee.
—The Line is all around me! My time is running out!
—You must flee west of here.
—There is nothing west of here.
—We know. You must go into uncharted lands. Nameless and unmade lands. Unsettled lands. It will be . . . strange.
—No.
—They will not expect it.
—And if they do? If they follow us? We will go farther and farther from any allies.
—And so will they. They will pursue you, but the western lands will wear them down. It will be hard for you but harder for them. You will not be coming home for a long time. It is the only choice. We have decided.
—West of this place is uncreated land you bastard the lights and the sea and the storms and the wildness and the nightmares and the monsters I will go mad I won’t go.
—Of course you will go, Creedmoor. It is the only way out of this trap. Go now.
