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