Read Online The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman - Free Book Online Page B

her feet quickly blistered and her legs ached. She had Maggfrid break off a sturdy branch for her to use as a stick, and felt quite pleased at her own resourcefulness.
    From Fort Blue they traveled on the back of a cargo barge down the river to Burren Hill. The barge was laden with a heap of bleached animal bones, from which antlers poked out like stripped fingers. Liv turned away from that horrible cargo and sat with her hands in her lap and watched the white World’s Ends dwindle behind her.
    She arrived in Burren Hill in the late afternoon. It was a town of the border countries, a sprawl of low clapboard houses spilling down the hillside to the banks of a wide silt-brown river. There was a crumbling, ramshackle dock, to which Liv’s horrible barge tied off, and onto which, with Maggfrid’s help, she carefully climbed.
    An imposing stockade sat on the hill overlooking the town. The warehouses by the river were fortified, too, and Liv had never seen so many armed men. The place hummed with industry—teams of men worked stripped to the waist digging ditches and erecting more stockades. Their backs were burned red. In the ditches and stepped earthworks, they bobbed and swayed like a thousand red flowers in a muddy garden. Bony shapes that Liv assumed must be the Hillfolk worked in chain gangs, and she wondered how they didn’t cook under their long black manes. Already the sun was hotter and fiercer out here.
    Director Howell’s letter had promised that regular riverboats went west from Burren Hill, and had provided her with a letter of introduction to a Captain Canin. She showed the letter to a group of sunburned dockworkers, who regarded it with distaste and confusion, as if it might have been an arrest warrant.
    “Captain Canin,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I have a letter of introduction to a Captain Canin, and I would be very grateful for your assistance in finding—”
    “Dead,” the foreman told her.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Dead six months or more. They killed him and took his cargo and burned his boat.”
    She put her hand to her mouth in horror. “How awful! Who did?”
    Sunburned shoulders shrugged. “Bandits? Hillfolk? The Gun? Who knows? 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