shudders and quakes.
Waite feels warm and cold at once. He starts to laugh.
He stops laughing when a white arm shoots up out of the roiling earth of the floor of what used to be Mr. Digby’s barn.
The arm is terribly long and thin, like a bone-white sapling. It stretches. What follows, lifting itself up and shaking off earth and laughing, is the maned form of a female of the First Folk, rising from death.
She looks Waite’s way with brilliant ruby-red eyes, and he slowly moves his hand away from his gun.
She looks all around her, head cocked, listening. She seems troubled. She climbs up the timbers of Digby’s barn and looks west.
She tumbles loosely back to earth, and opens her fist; it’s full of stones. She scatters them. She pokes among them. She seems unhappy with their answer.
What she’s doing, Waite thinks, is very nearly like shaking her head. Or drumming her fingers nervously. In her troubled uncertainty, she suddenly seems remarkably human. Her gestures are nearly human gestures. She might even be beautiful.
She looks Waite’s way again. With a crackling of joints and a shifting of her mane, she shrugs her bony shoulders as if to say, What can you do? and she smiles.
Waite turns and runs from the ruins, and he never goes back. When Sally asks why, he tells her it’s time for a fresh beginning.
Her second child, born in summer, is healthy.
FOUR: GOOD-BYE
And when the letter finally arrived at the Academy of Koenigswald, it bore the stamps of a dozen postal services. Between the House Dolorous and the Academy, it had crossed the continent with the uncertain dithering flight of a butterfly. It was addressed to one Dr. Grundtvig, who had retired several years ago, and so it gathered dust in a pigeonhole that no one checked anymore, until one of the porters noticed it, opened it, called for silence, and read the highlights to his colleagues: It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that Dr. Alverhuysen was taken from us . . . the responsibility is ours . . . no ransom demand so far . . . an Agent of those Powers that bedevil our land . . . we must now presume her dead . . .
In one of those coincidences that are so impressive and terrifying to the weak-minded, but are in fact inevitable in the nature of things, it was a mere two days later that the enormous mental defective Maggfrid showed up at the Academy’s August Hall—banging on the great doors in the dead of a rainy night, bellowing to be let in—and confirmed the sad news. He was unable or unwilling to explain how he’d accomplished his return across the world, beyond the words I fought. There was something wild and savage in his bearing. He resumed his janitorial duties, but now a certain glamour attached to him, and the students sought his conversation.
The Faculty commissioned a commemorative painting. At the insistence of Agatha, Liv’s dear friend from the Faculty of Mathematics, it pictured Liv in a white dress carrying a book down the Academy’s summer lawns. They hung it in a shadowy spot at the back of the Hoffman Library, where overworked students liked to take afternoon naps.
There was a small quiet farewell service. Dr. Ekstein gave a speech, praising that noble spirit of scholarship that knows no frontiers, that fears no peril! Maggfrid sat with solemn dignity. Agatha, mildly sedated, muttered good-bye, good-bye, my dear over and over; and those colleagues who were inclined to say well what did she expect going out there or I told her so were at least able to hold their tongues until after the service, when sherry was served and decorum somewhat loosened.
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Book One: Out to the Edge of Things
Chapter 1: The Departure ~ 1889 ~
Chapter 2: A Gentleman of Leisure
Chapter 3: The Black File
Chapter 4: Ancient History
Chapter 5: Smile Through Adversity
Chapter 6: Kingstown
Chapter 7: The Long Road West
Chapter 8: The Net
Chapter 9: Kloan
Chapter 10: Gloriana
Chapter 11: Sub-Invigilator Lowry Investigates: Kloan, After the Fire
Chapter 12: The Passage
Chapter 13: Creedmoor at Work
Chapter 14: The Guardian at the Gate
Chapter 15: Lowry
Book Two: The Doll House
Chapter 16: Early Days
Chapter 17: Telegraph Communion
Chapter 18: Pleasant Investigations
Chapter 19: The Spirit
Chapter 20: The Wound ~ 1871 ~
Chapter 21: Weakness
Chapter 22: Forward Camp at Kloan
Chapter 23: The General in his Retirement
Chapter 24: Breaking Cover
Book Three: Westward
Chapter 25: Flight
Chapter 26: Greenbank
Chapter 27: Over the Border
Chapter 28: The Rains
Chapter 29: The Valley
Chapter 30: Lowry in the Wilderness
Chapter 31: The Games
Chapter 32: Liberation
Chapter 33: Forward the Glorious Purpose
Chapter 34: Ku Koyrik
Chapter 35: The Shadows
Book Four: A Land Fit for Heroes
Chapter 36: The Rose
Chapter 37: Out of the Oaks
Chapter 38: The Hunt
Chapter 39: Lowry’S Duty
Chapter 40: A Machine That Would Go of Itself
Chapter 41: A Guest at Dinner
Chapter 42: The Serpent
Chapter 43: A Stranger in Town
Chapter 44: Heel
Chapter 45: The Dance
Chapter 46: Creedmoor in the Shadows
Book Five: The Battle of New Design
Chapter 47: Raising the Alarm
Chapter 48: The Amplifier
Chapter 49: New Design at War
Chapter 50: Murder
Chapter 51: The General Speaks ~ 1878 ~
Chapter 52: Liv Chooses
Epilogue One: Engine Song ~ Six Months Later ~