No one goes down the river these days.”
“No one? I need to go downriver.”
“Not these days.”
“Why not?”
“Three boats lost these last six months, just a few miles west of town. Boats burned, throats slit, the bodies wash up in towns downriver. Something’s taken up in those hills.”
The foreman said something’s taken up in those hills in the same resigned way farmers of the North might grumble about bad weather. It made Liv’s skin crawl.
On the other hand, she thought, they were probably lying to her. Somehow this story would probably end in them asking her for money, in which case, so be it. “I can pay extra,” she said.
“Well, good luck to you, then, ma’am.” The foreman hefted a crate of bones and walked bowlegged away.
“Don’t worry, Maggfrid,” she said, though he hadn’t spoken.
She found a room for the night in Burren Hill’s one hotel—a two-story structure huddled under the wooden walls of the Fort, a maze of tiny wooden boxes. She shared a chaste bed with Maggfrid, and the huge warmth of his body kept her awake. Already she itched from the heat and the flies. For the first time in years, she remembered the flat mad smile on the face of the man who’d murdered her mother; it surfaced suddenly from her memories and made her gasp. She took a measure of her sleeping tincture, and it turned the water in her cup a soothing green like the peaceful gardens of the North.
Her problems compounded themselves, as problems tended to do.
In the morning, she approached the overseers of the town—who she identified by the fact that they wore shirts, and in the case of one young man, a Mr. Harrison, a suit.
Liv found Harrison confusing. He had the long greasy hair of a pauper but the manner of an aristocrat or a popular and prosperous administrator. He sat on the hillside under the shade of a black canvas and watched the ditch-digging and wall-building going on below, and consulted his maps and blueprints, and gave orders to runners, and appeared busily content. He drank water with lemon in it—“For my health, Doctor. A healthy mind in a healthy body!”—and was apparently delighted to sit and make conversation with an educated lady traveler from the North—but his news was not good.
“No one goes down the river these days, Doctor. It’s not worth the risk. Boats are expensive things to lose.”
“Are there no police on the river?”
He laughed. “No police but what we might raise from these men. And we’re brave men in Burren but not soldiers. And maybe there are Agents or wild Folk in the hills. Who knows?”
“Agents, Mr. Harrison?”
“The servants of the Gun, Doctor. We try to stay neutral out here, but the Gun’s Agents get everywhere. Nothing we can do about it, is there? Just have to wait till they move on, that’s all.”
“I’ve heard stories—the Gun’s Agents are said to be dangerous men, but they are only men, are they not? Is there nothing you can do?”
Harrison smiled and said, “You didn’t learn much about this country before you set out, did you? First thing a businessman learns is to know the country he’s traveling in.”
“Enlighten me, then. Please.”
“There are greater powers than the human out here, Doctor. The earth here is haunted.”
She frowned. He called himself a businessman but talked like a mystic, or a lunatic. Under happier conditions, she would have found that interesting; now it just annoyed her.
He pointed out over the maze of ditches and earthworks and foundations. “It’s not so bad out here. Burren Hill was settled two hundred and thirty-some years ago, and our soil’s old and steady. But I still worry when we have to dig what we might dig up. What we might wake up. You just never know. Gun and Line had to be born somewhere, didn’t they, in some town that was only going about its business? It’ll only get worse as you go out west.”
“How do I go west from here, Mr. Harrison?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s the ten-thousand-dollar question. Someone might sell you a horse, but I couldn’t in conscience advise you to ride alone. The river’s closed, and it’s slow and so damn expensive to send caravans, and our cargoes are rotting in our warehouses, and our investors aren’t happy. This, too, will pass, of course—if we keep faith. But how? You tell me, Doctor. We are building fortifications, as you can see, but will it help? Shall I have a