the brain’s delicate architecture bleeding and crumbling, was that horrid senseless arrhythmia. The General recalled and forgot the names of Holmes and Mason and Darke. A Linesman bent down and gripped Kan-Kuk’s beard and forced back the hinge of his long white neck and silenced him with a boot-knife. (Would he rise again?) The rhythm of the Linesmen’s noisemaker was not horses, of course, nothing so natural; it was the sound of Engines. The Linesmen, being already mad, were inured to it, but to the General it sounded out madness, worse than death. He recalled that the battle standard of his first regiment, which he made the standard of this desperate rump of the Republic, after Black Cap, bore two eagles. The eagle was a noble bird. He recalled a story regarding a prince who set out from his father’s castle of red rock into the mountains with nothing to accompany him but an eagle, no course to follow but the course the eagle’s black wings marked across the blue sky. He couldn’t recall why, and it frustrated him. Begin again: Once upon a time and it was the last time I went into the mountains to find . . .
“That one.”
“Where?”
“There.”
“Right. I see him.”
Private (Third Class) Porter, soldier of the Line in the First Army of the Gloriana Engine, stood over the body and poked it with his foot. An elderly fellow, weather-beaten, dark-skinned but with a startlingly silver-white beard. His eyes, which stared blankly up into Porter’s own, were a deep vibrant green, which Porter disliked. The pupils had collapsed almost to pinpricks. That often happened with the mind-bombs. The old man didn’t respond to a poke in the ribs or when Porter nudged his head from side to side with the blood-slick sole of his boot.
Still breathing, just about, but the mind was gone. Porter’s back ached after the long chase through the mountains, and he couldn’t be bothered to bend down to finish the old man off.
“Already dead,” Porter lied.
Private (First Class) Copper looked around him. The hollow was strewn with bodies. “Good. That’s all of them, then. All gone. Might as well do that savage, too, shut him up. Soap.”
Private (Second Class) Soap drew his knife, yanked the jerking, shrieking Hillfolk fellow up by his mane, and took care of business.
Porter gave the old man another poke with his boot. “Who do you think they were?”
Copper shrugged. “No one important. Who cares? They’re dead now.”
“Wonder what they were doing up here.”
“Trespassing,” Copper said. “Where they didn’t belong.”
“Odd-looking bunch, though.”
“Shut up,” Copper said. “Not our place to ask questions.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Been a long night,” Copper said. “I want to get back to bed. Leave these idiots for the crows.”
BOOK ONE
OUT TO THE EDGE OF THINGS
CHAPTER 1
THE DEPARTURE
~ 1889 ~
One fine spring afternoon, when the roses in the gardens of the Koenigswald Academy were in bloom, and the lawns were emerald green, and the river was sapphire blue, and the experimental greenhouses burst with weird life, the professors of the Faculty of Psychological Sciences met in the Faculty’s ancient August Hall, in a handsomely appointed upstairs library, where they stood in a little group drinking sherry and saying their good-byes to their colleague Dr. Lysvet Alverhuysen—Liv to her friends—who was, against all reasonable advice, determined to go west.
“You’ll fall behind, Dr. Alverhyusen.” Dr. Seidel shook his head sorrowfully. “Your work will suffer. There are no faculties of learning in the West, none at all. None worth the name, anyway. Can they even read? You won’t have access to any of the journals.”
“Yes,” Liv said. “I believe they can read.”
“Seidel overstates his argument,” Dr. Naumann said. “Seidel is known for overstating his arguments. Eh, Seidel? But not always wrong. You will lose touch with science. You will rip yourself from the bosom of the scientific community.”
He laughed to show what he thought of the scientific community. Handsome and dark of complexion, Dr. Naumann was the youngest of the Faculty’s professors and liked to think of himself as something of a radical. He was engaged in a study of the abnormal or misdirected sexual drive, which he regarded as fundamental to all human activity and belief.
Liv smiled politely. “I hope you’ll write to me, gentlemen. There are mail coaches across the mountains, and the Line will carry mail across the West.”
“Hah!” Dr. Naumann rolled his eyes. “I’ve seen the maps. You’re going to the edge of the world, Dr. Alverhuysen. Might as well hope to send mail to