seen her papers. . . . Cockle threw up his hands and disavowed most fulsomely any desire to interrupt the lady’s business; he assured all present of his basically chivalrous intentions, notwithstanding his desire to be paid, on which subject he felt regrettably that it might be best if he were to speak to these men’s superiors, intending no slight to them, of course, it was only that . . .
Liv sighed and walked away. Her dress dragged in the dust and tore on a sharp rock and she nearly swore. She’d kept a white dress packed safely away all this time so that she could approach the House respectably attired; already it was ruined.
Weeks of travel, and her entrance had been entirely upstaged by this . . .
Cockle kept talking. Now the guards were laughing along with his jokes. His voice rolled and echoed. Some mad people of her acquaintance could talk like that—quite cheerfully, endlessly, without ever saying a meaningful thing.
She busied herself studying the poor souls Cockle had brought with him. Her patients-to-be, her new experimental subject matter. They looked half-starved, and their skin was peeling from the sun, but one of them gave her a lopsided smile. “I’m William, ma’am,” he said. She offered her hand, and he stared at it blankly, then mimicked her gesture with his hand hanging limp like a dead fish. She gave him her name, and he issued a little wheezing giggle.
“William,” she said. “Do you know where you are now?”
“The Doll House, ma’am.”
“What happened to you, William?”
“Ma’am?”
“How did you get here?”
“A man came.”
“Why are you here, William?”
“They say I’m not well.”
“Why do you think you’re not well, William?”
She was so engrossed in her subject matter that she hardly heard the approach of the Heavier-Than-Air Vessel. She didn’t sense it until after even William’s dull senses had caught it; she followed his nervous rheumy eyes up and saw it hanging in the sky. It was made of brass and iron and defied gravity and sanity. A man in black sat like an oversized fetus in a glass womb. The beating of its dreadful blades drove dust into the air and into her eyes, and she blinked away tears. The gate guards were shouting.
Creedmoor fell silent and considered the situation.
The Heavier-Than-Air Vessel hovered just within the rim of the ravine; the thrum of the spinning wing-blades and the rattle of its clockwork echoed from the rocks on either side. The black coal smoke from its engines climbed out of the canyon and into the sky.
The pilot leaned out from his glass-and-brass bubble and surveyed the scene through a spyglass.
Creedmoor bowed his head and tried to look frightened. It wasn’t entirely a pretense.
His instinct was to reach for his belt; but of course, there was no weapon there—he’d given it to William for safekeeping, strapped under William’s rags, for what gate guard would bother to search William? That was more or less the whole of the plan, in fact, now whirled away like leaves by fucking ’thopter blades. Now what was he supposed to do?
If he took back his Gun and fired on the Vessel, he had little doubt he’d be able to bring it down. But then the guards would know what he was; and, if the stories were true, then the Spirit, which did not tolerate violence, would strike him down.
The Vessel hovered, apparently suffering the same indecision as Creedmoor.
He risked a glance at the pilot, trying to read the man’s intentions. Did he know who Creedmoor was? Had he followed him here from Kloan, or was this merely a chance encounter? It was useless. Creedmoor never could tell what, if anything, Linesmen were thinking.
He turned to the guards and shouted, “Busy day!” They smiled nervously.
He thought: the pilot wouldn’t open fire. That was for sure. The Line’s intelligence was at least the equal of the Guns’, and they would know what happened to those who brought violence into the presence of the Spirit of the House. If this was a chance encounter, the Vessel would move on soon enough. If, on the other hand, the pilot knew who Creedmoor was, then unless he was a fool—and Linesmen were dull, but they were not fools—he would simply wire back for assistance and wait, and soon Creedmoor would be surrounded. . . .
With no warning but a high buzzing whine, the gun in the Vessel’s undercarriage spun into action. It looked like a mosquito’s nasty blood-spike; it cursed in lead. The guards