by Felix Gilman
Five bodies came running up out of the fog and revealed themselves to be a bunch of privates Lowry didn’t recognize—each of them unshaved and filthy and a general disgrace but under present circumstances a beautiful sight—and Lowry said, “You men. Stay close. Follow me.”
And he thought of Victory at Logtown! which he hadn’t seen for twenty years, but he still remembered vividly the battle scenes, the grainy flickering shadows of the screen hiding a thousand mercenaries of the Gun, who were, in fact, played by Linesmen as decent and upstanding as Lowry himself but who were transformed by the shadows into nightmares of depravity, savagery, and wickedness. . . .
He pressed forward. Two bodies came toward him through the fog, the first waving an arm as if the fog were smoke that could be cleared away, the second following a step behind.
The first figure proved to be Subaltern Thernstrom, who lowered his arm and met Lowry’s eye with palpable relief.
“Sir, there you are—sir, this fog, some of the men—”
The figure that stood behind Thernstrom stepped forward, then, and though it seemed to emerge from the fog, it brought the fog with it, because where there should have been a face under a black cap with the plain honest features of a Linesman, there was only shifting gray dust.
Lowry stood and watched with baffled horror as the figure in Thernstrom’s shadow reached forward and yanked Thernstrom’s knife from his belt and—as Thernstrom said some of the men are missing—drove it up into Thernstrom’s back. Thernstrom convulsed and jerked suddenly forward, and a good quarter pint of shockingly bright red blood splattered from his open mouth.
Lowry shot the thing behind Thernstrom in its head. It dissolved to the ground in dust. Thernstrom’s body slumped beside it.
“Collier. You men.” Lowry turned and scanned their pale faces. “Are you all men? All right. All right. You’ll do. Stand back to back. Follow.”
He knew where he was now. A battlefield. This was enemy action; whether it was the Folk or the land itself or somehow some horrible trap the Agent had laid for them was beside the point. The field of battle was always the same, differing only in the particular arrangement of bodies and forces and fortified lines and vectors and inclines—details varied, but the problem posed was essentially invariant.
Two shadowy figures in Lowry’s path were locked arm in arm, wrestling. Collier acted smartly and shot the shadowier of the two in its leg, and the whole eerie shapeless half-made creature burst into dust, leaving a very grateful Private (Third Class) Plumb alive and breathing heavily.
Moments later, Collier stumbled over another dead Linesman and fell forward onto his hands and knees. A figure came running up out of the fog and proved at the last minute faceless just as it swung an arm holding someone’s pistol like a club down at the back of Collier’s head—Plumb drove his bayonet into it. It fell apart. Collier got to his feet covered in a shower of reddish gray dust but otherwise unharmed.
Lowry barked orders, gestured. But in fact, discipline was already reasserting itself, with or without him. The men of the Line fell into their places unbidden, automatically. Weeks of exhaustion and disorientation and despair and confusion blew away like dust, and the steel beneath was revealed. Lowry’s squad came stumbling out of the fog to find that Subaltern Slate had already organized some one hundred men into a line, back-to-back, fifty on each side, against which the shadows and dust devils that came running and sneaking out of the rock charged and burst harmlessly. Slate’s line passed through, taking slow methodical steps, and Lowry’s squad was wordlessly integrated.
Lowry, for a moment, lagged behind. He watched the line pass away into the fog. Muzzle flashes sparked in the gray, marking its path. The fog echoed with the crack of rifles. No screaming now.
By Lowry’s side, the fog eddied, convulsed, and a brief tiny whirl of wind like a drain in reverse lifted dust and grit and shards of flint up from the ground and spun them like potter’s clay into a form that was roughly human. Lowry shot it.
He hurried after Slate’s line and fell in.
Afterwards, he wrote in clumsy longhand a report that would almost certainly never be read, but which he nevertheless felt was necessary.
The confrontation persisted for roughly two hours. In the first minutes with the advantage of surprise and disorder 110 casualties were sustained. However, the discipline of the Line could not be broken and only six men were lost in the following two hours, mostly to friendly fire. It is probable that this action was a tactic of First Folk who claim this wilderness as theirs. Their tactics are as always ineffective against good order and training and the will of the Line.
There are now 219 men fit for duty including myself. Subalterns Thernstrom and Drum were among the dead, and First Signalman Sinclair. Gauge and Mill have been promoted to Thernstrom’s and Drum’s place. No artillery or munitions were lost. However, the Signal device was lost to friendly fire. Therefore First Signalman Sinclair will not be replaced. We can no longer listen to or track the Agent. We now operate without orders or directions or realistic hope of success. Morale is low. Nevertheless we push west.
BOOK FOUR
A LAND FIT FOR HEROES
CHAPTER 36
THE ROSE
Liv sat in a silent sunlit clearing, her legs folded beneath her, studying a rose.
The floor of the clearing was soft dirt and leaves, interrupted by occasional crests of grass. The clearing was about the size of a ballroom. It was bounded by a stream on one side, and on the other a fallen ancient oak, its shape blurred by decades of moss and decay. There was a low mound of earth in the middle of the clearing, and a single rose grew from it. The rose was the only thing visible anywhere that was neither green nor brown nor the blue of the vast sky overhead; it was only natural that it drew Liv’s attention.
What color the rose actually was was unclear. At first glance, it had seemed to be an intense sunrise red. As Liv came curiously closer, its petals had flushed shyly, shifting down through the spectrum, purpling. By the time Liv sat beside it, it was a deep pulsing amaranthine. She suspected that if she turned her head away, it might change again.
It was also not strictly speaking a rose, though of all things of the made world, it most closely resembled a flower, and of all the flowers Liv knew, it most closely resembled a rose. It was more like a sketch of a rose, perpetrated by a person who’d never seen one; or, more precisely, it was like the product of processes that would, in the made world, have resulted inevitably in a rose, but out here were not so narrowly constrained.
Its petals formed a corolla that was roselike, yet iterated over and over, whorls within whorls, past the point of ordinary botanical possibility. Nor was its pattern simply a matter of spirals; there were regularities and irregularities and repeated themes within its architecture that Liv could not begin to describe. The whole thing was no larger than the palm of Liv’s hand, but it appeared to have vast starlike depths. Liv had a sense that it might at any point slowly begin to turn.
It smelled of electricity, and slightly of motor oil; and in its heart, where a flower made more rigorously to the standard specifications would have had soft anthers and filaments, this one had a delicate crisscrossing of golden wires, enclosing something minute and fleshy that pulsed with a steady beat.
With each beat, the petals shivered as if in a breeze.
The thing was hideous. It was ridiculous. It was beautiful. All those things at once, and none of them. It was not meant for her, and her opinions of it were beside the point. It would have been both futile and insulting to classify it; it was neither a rose nor a relative of the rose. It was perhaps in part the potentiality of a rose, or an alternative to the rose, or more likely something with no meaning at all. . . .
There were gentle creatures among the oaks that in many ways resembled deer, though they weren’t. She’d taken to calling them deer anyway.
“Name nothing,” Creedmoor had warned her. “It’s poor form out here to name things.” She saw h
is point.
All around the clearing rose tall silent oaks. The light that fell through them was golden. Anywhere Liv looked, there might be something equally as strange and beautiful as the thing that she was conscientiously trying not to think of as a rose.
The oaks were peaceful—a surprise. Liv had expected, when she and Creedmoor and the General first struck out west beyond the valley, that they would be walking into growing chaos and horror. And indeed, there had been bad days—as they climbed through broken hills with ditches and ravines that ran with what smelled like blood and looked like bile—as they forced their way through thick yellow grass among which hid huge black ticks that beat like a heart—as they struggled through forests of bamboo, and mangrove, and trees that had no name but were nightmarishly immense, their branches riddled with hollows like big-city tenement blocks in which lived golden-furred monkeys that Creedmoor pronounced good eating but screamed like children when he shot them—and trees whose hollows were fleshy and vulval—and they had climbed cold rocky slopes into windy heights and camped for a night watching the stars fall and wheel and deliquesce in waves of green and blue that surged like a sea.
“The Western Lights,” Creedmoor had said. “Or the Western Sea, toward which we are heading. Sea, sky, land, day, night, indistinguishable, not yet separated. Where creation begins, or maybe hasn’t happened yet. How many explorers have come this far? Not many. One day we may come to the shore and make our stand there against the Line under the light of its mad energy. They should write a poem about us.”
Then Liv and the General had caught a fever, and Creedmoor reluctantly let them stop for three full days, and Liv thought she might die, but didn’t. When they were strong enough to move on, they went down again into forests and soon they were among the oaks, which were peaceful and beautiful and still and silent as a library and restful and seemed to go on forever, day after day, perhaps all the way to the ocean. So the western wilderness resisted her expectations again.
Creedmoor returned to the clearing. He carried one of the animals-that-wasn’t-a-deer over his back, and he threw it down into the dirt not far from where the General lay curled up asleep. He went and sat on the fallen oak at the clearing’s edge, toying with his knife.
The not-rose closed itself. Liv sat up straight.
“Well done, Creedmoor. Give me the knife and I’ll clean it.”
“Thank you, Liv.” He didn’t move.
“Are we still alone?”
He waved vaguely. “Our friends from the Line are still behind us, of course.”
She strongly suspected that he was lying; in fact, she suspected that they’d lost their pursuers days or weeks ago. Creedmoor had, seemingly without noticing it, let the pace of their westward flight ease, then come almost to a standstill. Hours would go by when he simply sat in silent thought, or walked off by himself into the forests to hunt or scout or just to think. It seemed that he recalled their pursuers and the need for haste only when he wanted to cut conversations short.
“And the creature?”
He shrugged. “Signs. Spoor. The usual. Nothing more.”
Liv considered it symptomatic of Creedmoor’s generally poor mental health that he didn’t find the oaks restful. Even the General seemed happier under the oaks—but not Creedmoor. Peace and calm unsettled him. At first he’d insisted that the oaks were only the eye of the storm, that in a matter of days they’d be replaced by lakes of fire, or poison swamps, or something else equally awful. When that didn’t happen, he became slowly convinced that they shared the oaks with something monstrous and predatory. He deduced its existence from claw marks on trees that looked to Liv like nothing at all, faded spoor-scents that Liv couldn’t smell, the yellowing bones of not-quite-deer.
“And—”
“And my master has still not found its way back to me, Liv.”
He continued to play with the knife. He quite clearly very much wanted to be smoking.
“And you?”
“The General is well enough. He talks but says nothing. Today I encouraged him to walk unaided.”
“That helps, does it?”
“Probably not. He fell.”
“Oh, well.” Creedmoor sheathed the knife. He looked as if he were about to stand up, but didn’t.
In fact, the General had been showing signs of improvement in recent days, or at least signs of change. He was calmer. He didn’t shake so much, or roll his eyes. He talked more—it was nonsense, of course, but it suggested some activity going on within—and his voice was firmer. His movements were steadier. He struggled more when Liv fed him and cleaned him, which was tiresome but also encouraging. Sometimes his eyes fixed on Liv’s and he seemed to be straining to speak sense. Liv liked to think this was because of her efforts; more likely, she suspected, it was because of the calm of the oaks; just possibly it was because of Creedmoor’s frequent absences.
Creedmoor noticed none of this. He was occupied with his own thoughts. Liv didn’t mention it to him.
“Liv,” he said. “Is it possible that you could make the General speak his secrets, but you won’t?”
“You overestimate me.”
“Or maybe when I go walking or hunting, he has spoken to you, and you keep it secret from me.”
“You’re paranoid, Creedmoor.”
“True. On the other hand, you did try to kill me once.”
“Not lately.” She walked over and sat beside the General, whose breathing had become labored, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Anyway, can you blame me?”
Ordinarily he might have laughed, to prove that he was above bearing grudges. Now he just kept talking. “If the General were to speak to you, if he were to reveal his secrets, would you tell them to me?”
“Yes, Creedmoor. Of course.”
“Why?”
“What kind of a question is that, Creedmoor? Because I’m your prisoner, because—”
“You shouldn’t.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she kept silent.
“The brave thing to do,” he said, “would be for you to refuse; to flee if necessary; to take a knife to the General’s throat or your own rather than give his secret into my hands. Why don’t you? In fact, your guilt is worse in a way because you are free to make your choices while the rest of us—”
He paused again and collected his thoughts. “It’s true that the secret, if the Guns obtain it, may slow the Line; at least that’s what they told me. But who knows what else it may do? Who knows what the Guns would do unopposed? The present war is terrible; could it be worse?”
The General muttered. Liv shushed him.
“Suppose I promised you, Liv, that I would not give the secret into the hands of my masters; suppose instead we found someone loyal to neither Gun nor Line, who might turn it against both; or we sold it on the open market, perhaps, or published it in the letter columns of the newspapers, or took it to Jasper City and shouted it in the streets, or suppose we just stay out here in the wilderness like it’s No-Town where what we do matters to no one and enjoy the harmless satisfaction of knowing for ourselves. . . . I don’t know. What do you recommend? But what if. Would you help me then?”
“If I could heal the General, I would, Creedmoor.”
“Would it make any difference?”
“I would probably believe you were lying.”
He scowled. “I am, of course, used to distrust, to—”
“Stop pitying yourself, Creedmoor.”
“Careful, Liv.”
She pointed at the gun that hung at his waist. “You still carry that thing. It may or may not be silent; how would I know? If you want me to believe that you are no longer loyal—”
“I was never loyal. Am I a dog?”
“Then destroy it.”
“I—” He looked genuinely shocked. His eyes widened. The thought seemed to appall him. He appeared so genuinely terrified at the possibility that for the first time Liv wondered if he might be sincere.
She got
quickly to her feet. “Destroy it,” she said. “Throw it away. That, Creedmoor, would be the brave thing to do, and then I might—”
His eyes narrowed and his expression went flat. “Do you hear that, Liv?”
“No.”
“The Line. I hear marching feet, not so far behind. The roaring of motors. We must move on.”
“Creedmoor—”
“We must move on. See to the General.”
Creedmoor strode through the forest. He kept his head down and his hand hovered, perhaps unconsciously, near to his weapon. Liv followed along twenty paces behind him, holding the General’s hand and pulling him stumbling along like a wayward dog. Leaves rustled underfoot and twigs cracked.
“Creedmoor—slow down. The General—”
“No time. No time.”
Overhead a thick canopy shifted. One moment Liv was in shadow while Creedmoor moved through a shaft of sun; the next moment Liv blinked in sudden light and lost sight of Creedmoor as he moved into darkness, and it was only the sound of him pushing violently through underbrush ahead that made it possible to follow. That was how they went on for hours. Leaf-drifts thickened like snow, ankle deep. Slowly the sun fell—or perhaps the canopy thickened—and moments of light became few and far between, and the forest filled with soft shadows. It was cool, windless, dry, and musty. At last Creedmoor said—
“Stop.”
He stood at the foot of an oak, looking up. He held out a hand to warn her off. Then he changed his mind and beckoned her closer.
“Stay,” she said, and let go of the General’s hand.
She took a few steps farther, and suddenly became aware of a foul odor, which only grew as she approached the spot where Creedmoor stood. As she stood beside him her face was pale and she covered her face with her filthy sleeve. The odor was rot, feces, and something else, something oily, something metallic, something burned.
