The Half-Made World (3 page)

Now a song sounded in the General’s head, but it was a terrible one, not peaceful, not a cure for anything, but a gathering torrent of mad noise. Kan-Kuk! The General remembered Kan-Kuk and then forgot again, forever. Kan-Kuk and Deerfield. The names of Putnam and Holmes occurred to him as well. The echo in his mind grew and thundered rhythmically over and over like horses’ hooves. The names of Halley and Orange surfaced from the sinking ruin of his mind, and he remembered that Orange was once from the Twenty-third Regiment of the Third Army of the Republic, before the Third Army was lost at Black Cap. The echo of horses; it was tearing him apart, but for a moment it made him think of
escape
—he imagined that the horses were thundering an escape, thundering new hope. He could escape one more time; he could regroup. Regroup what? He forgot. The black boots of a Linesman stopped in front of him. The echo was not rhythmic—the horses that galloped across his mind were limping, falling, screaming. What shattered the soul, what set the brain’s delicate architecture bleeding and crumbling, was that horrid senseless arrhythmia. The General recalled and forgot the names of Holmes and Mason and Darke. A Linesman bent down and gripped Kan-Kuk’s beard and forced back the hinge of his long white neck and silenced him with a boot-knife. (Would he rise again?) The rhythm of the Linesmen’s noisemaker was
not
horses, of course, nothing so natural; it was the sound of Engines. The Linesmen, being already mad, were inured to it, but to the General it sounded out madness, worse than death. He recalled that the battle standard of his first regiment, which he made the standard of this desperate rump of the Republic, after Black Cap, bore two eagles. The eagle was a noble bird. He recalled a story regarding a prince who set out from his father’s castle of red rock into the mountains with nothing to accompany him but an eagle, no course to follow but the course the eagle’s black wings marked across the blue sky. He couldn’t recall why, and it frustrated him.
Begin again: Once upon a time and it was the last time I went into the mountains to find
. . .

“That one.”

“Where?”

“There.”

“Right. I see him.”

Private (Third Class) Porter, soldier of the Line in the First Army of the Gloriana Engine, stood over the body and poked it with his foot. An elderly fellow, weather-beaten, dark-skinned but with a startlingly silver-white beard. His eyes, which stared blankly up into Porter’s own, were a deep vibrant green, which Porter disliked. The pupils had collapsed almost to pinpricks. That often happened with the mind-bombs. The old man didn’t respond to a poke in the ribs or when Porter nudged his head from side to side with the blood-slick sole of his boot.

Still breathing, just about, but the mind was gone. Porter’s back ached after the long chase through the mountains, and he couldn’t be bothered to bend down to finish the old man off.

“Already dead,” Porter lied.

Private (First Class) Copper looked around him. The hollow was strewn with bodies. “Good. That’s all of them, then. All gone. Might as well do that savage, too, shut him up. Soap.”

Private (Second Class) Soap drew his knife, yanked the jerking, shrieking Hillfolk fellow up by his mane, and took care of business.

Porter gave the old man another poke with his boot. “Who do you think they were?”

Copper shrugged. “No one important. Who cares? They’re dead now.”

“Wonder what they were doing up here.”

“Trespassing,” Copper said. “Where they didn’t belong.”

“Odd-looking bunch, though.”

“Shut up,” Copper said. “Not our place to ask questions.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“Been a long night,” Copper said. “I want to get back to bed. Leave these idiots for the crows.”

BOOK ONE

OUT TO THE EDGE OF THINGS

CHAPTER 1

THE DEPARTURE

~ 1889 ~

One fine spring afternoon, when the roses in the gardens of the Koenigswald Academy were in bloom, and the lawns were emerald green, and the river was sapphire blue, and the experimental greenhouses burst with weird life, the professors of the Faculty of Psychological Sciences met in the Faculty’s ancient August Hall, in a handsomely appointed upstairs library, where they stood in a little group drinking sherry and saying their good-byes to their colleague Dr. Lysvet Alverhuysen—
Liv
to her friends—who was, against all reasonable advice, determined to go west.

“You’ll fall behind, Dr. Alverhyusen.” Dr. Seidel shook his head sorrowfully. “Your work will suffer. There are no faculties of learning in the West, none at all. None worth the name, anyway. Can they even read? You won’t have access to any of the journals.”

“Yes,” Liv said. “I believe they can read.”

“Seidel overstates his argument,” Dr. Naumann said. “Seidel is known for overstating his arguments. Eh, Seidel? But not
always
wrong. You
will
lose touch with science. You will
rip
yourself from the bosom of the scientific community.”

He laughed to show what he thought of the scientific community. Handsome and dark of complexion, Dr. Naumann was the youngest of the Faculty’s professors and liked to think of himself as something of a radical. He was engaged in a study of the abnormal or misdirected sexual drive, which he regarded as fundamental to all human activity and belief.

Liv smiled politely. “I hope you’ll write to me, gentlemen. There are mail coaches across the mountains, and the Line will carry mail across the West.”

“Hah!” Dr. Naumann rolled his eyes. “I’ve seen the maps. You’re going to the edge of the world, Dr. Alverhuysen. Might as well hope to send mail to the moon, or the bottom of the sea. Are there mail coaches to the moon?”

“They’re at war out there,” Dr. Seidel said. “It’s very dangerous.” He twisted his glass nervously in his hands.

“Yes,” Liv agreed. “So I’ve heard.”

“There are wild men in the hills, who are from what I hear only very debatably human. I saw a sketch of one once, and I don’t mind admitting it gave me nightmares. All hair and knuckles, it was, white as death, and painted in the most awful way.”

“I won’t be going into the hills, Doctor.”

“The so-called civilized folk are only marginally better. Quite mad. I don’t make that diagnosis lightly. Four centuries of war is hardly the only evidence of it. Consider the principal factions in that war, which are from what I hear not so much political entities as religious enthusiasms, not so much religion as forms of shared mania. . . . Cathexis, that is, a psychotic transference of responsibility from themselves to
objects
that—”

“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps you should publish on the subject.”

If she listened to another moment of Dr. Seidel’s shrill voice, she was in danger of having her resolve shaken.

“Will you excuse me, Doctors?” She darted quickly away, neatly interposing Dr. Mistler between herself and Seidel.

It was stuffy and dusty in the library; she moved closer to the windows, where there was a breeze and the faint green smell of the gardens, and where Liv’s dear friend Agatha from the Faculty of Mathematics was making conversation with Dr. Dahlstrom from the Faculty of Metaphysics, who was terribly dull. As she approached, Agatha waved over Dahlstrom’s shoulder and her eyes said,
Help!
Liv hurried over, sidestepping Dr. Ley, but she was intercepted by Dr. Ekstein, the head of her own Faculty, who was like a looming stone castle topped with a wild beard, and who took both her hands in his powerful ink-stained hands and said: “Dr. Alverhuysen—may I abandon formality—
Liv
—will you be safe? Will you be safe out there? Your poor late husband, rest his soul, would never forgive me if I allowed . . .”

Dr. Ekstein was a little sherry-drunk and his eyes were moist. His life’s work had been a system of psychology that divided the mind into contending forces of thesis and antithesis, from the struggle of which a peaceful synthesis was derived, the process beginning again and again incessantly. Liv considered the theory mechanical and unrealistic.

“I have made my decision, Doctor,” she reminded him. “I shall be quite safe. The House Dolorous is in neutral territory, far from the fighting.”

“Poor Bernhardt,” Dr. Ekstein said. “He would
haunt
me if anything were to happen to you—not, of course, that I would expect that it would, but if anything
were
to happen—”

Dr. Naumann insinuated himself. “Hauntings? Here? Sounds like you’ll miss all the
real
excitement, Dr. Alverhuysen.”

Ekstein frowned down on Naumann, who kept talking: “On the other hand, you won’t be bored—oh my no. No place out there is neutral for long. No matter how remote your new employer may be, soon enough
you-know-what
will come knocking.”

“I’m afraid I
don’t
know, Dr. Naumann. I understand things are very turbulent out there. Excuse me, I must—”

“Turbulent! A good word. If you cut into the living brain of a murderer or sex criminal, you might say what you saw was
turbulent
. I mean the forces of the Line.”

“Oh.” She tried to look discreetly around Dr. Ekstein’s mass for sight of Agatha. “Well, isn’t that for the best? Isn’t the Line on the side of science and order?”

Dr. Naumann raised an eyebrow, which Liv found irritating. “Is that right? Consider Logtown, which they burned to the ground because it harbored Agents of the Gun; consider the conquest of Mason, where . . .” He rattled off a long list of battles and massacres.

Dr. Alverhuysen looked at him in surprise. “You know a lot about the subject.”

He shrugged. “I take an interest in their affairs. A professional interest, you might say.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow their politics closely, Dr. Naumann.”

“You will. You will.” He leaned in close and whispered to her, “
They’ll
follow
you,
Liv.”

She whispered back, “Perhaps you should travel that way yourself, Philip.”

“Absolutely under no circumstances whatsoever.” He straightened again and consulted his watch. “I shall be late for my afternoon Session!” He left his glass on a bookshelf and exited by the south stairs.

“Unhealthy,” Ekstein said. “Unhealthy interests.” He glanced down at Liv. “Unhealthy.”

“Excuse me, Dr. Ekstein.”

She stepped around him, exchanged a polite
good luck, good luck to you, too,
with a gray-haired woman whose name she forgot, passed through a cool breeze and shaft of dusty afternoon sunlight that entered through the oriel window, heard and for nearly the last time was delighted by the sound of the peacocks crying out on the lawns, and deftly linked arms with Agatha and rescued her from Professor Dahlstrom’s droning. Unfortunately, Agatha turned out to be a little too drunk and a little too maudlin, and did not share any of Liv’s nervous excitement. She blinked back tears and held Liv’s hand very tightly and damply and said, “Liv—oh, Liv. You must promise you’ll come back.”

Liv waved a hand vaguely. “Oh, I’m sure I will, Agatha.”