The Half-Made World (67 page)

“Yes. In any case, I came here to give you a warning. The Line are not more than an hour or two away. They know where this town is. They will be here before dawn. I confess the worst part of me looks forward to the scene. I do not know exactly what weapons they have with them. At least two motor guns and two light cannon. Fire, perhaps, and possibly earth-shakers, noisemakers, poison gas, screamers, barbed wire, nightmares. I thought you deserved not to die in your sleep, at least. I suggest you flee now. Or alert the town. Or you may follow me, if you choose. You know where I’m going.”

He vanished out the window.

By the time Liv had dressed herself and put on her watch and her hunting knife and followed him outside, there was no sign of him.

—The General now, Creedmoor.

—I disappointed her, I think. She hoped for better from me.

—Foolish of her, then. No time for self-pity, Creedmoor; go to the General.

—Yes.

Liv stood in the street, listening.

Creedmoor was gone, and the town was empty, silent, touched by a light whispering rain. It was warm, and the earth under her feet was soft.

He would have gone south, she thought, past Justice Woodbury’s house, past the little octagonal book repository, across the square muddy field they used for courthouse, forum, Speaker’s Corner—past all that to the long low building Dr. Bradley called a hospital, where the town held the General in secret trust. There was silence from that direction, as from all others—but then, Creedmoor had seemed in no mood for murder. Perhaps he’d steal the General away and be gone without bloodshed.

In the silence, she thought maybe she could hear the Line coming—that she could hear the muffled slap and slide of their boots in the mud—but it was surely only the rain.

The urge to follow Creedmoor was very strong, so strong that she stared almost longingly south into the night, into the rain, past Justice Woodbury’s house where golden light spilled from the windows—Woodbury woke before dawn to study his law books, she’d heard—and not only because the General would need her, which was a very respectable concern, but also for perverse and willful and reckless reasons that she didn’t care to examine too closely, under the circumstances. . . .

Instead, she did the responsible thing: She turned her back on them and turned decisively
north,
toward the President’s house.

—Something is wrong here, Creedmoor.

—
Everything
is wrong out here.

No sounds from the hospital—no screams, no moans, no raging of dying men—hardly much of a hospital at all! That, Creedmoor thought, would change when the Line caught up to this town. Soft candlelight glowed around the edges of the canvas-hung windows. Maybe even here someone feared to sleep in the dark. . . .

—I smell him. Don’t you? Or whatever dim bloody thing your kind has in place of scent.

—Yes. Creedmoor, there is something wrong in this place.

—You never used to be such cowards.

—Do not be reckless, Creedmoor. There is something other than scent—there are subtle vibrations—there are points of density and absence—We
sense
things. Our kin scream at us from all over the earth and our Lodge. We must make no mistake now.

—We’ll see how it goes, won’t we?

There was no door, only a black hole hung with tarpaulin. Creedmoor brushed it aside and stepped in out of the rain.

The room stretched away to the left and right—turning an L-shaped right angle on the left side—and it was cluttered with beds—rusting wire-frame beds, folding camp beds, heavy oak-built constructions—and curtains—of silk, canvas, cloth, sheepskin, woven reeds—and shuttered lamps and two flickering candles—and all but one of the beds was empty.

—
There
he is. In the bed in the far corner.

—Creedmoor, there are others here—awake and armed.

—Yes. I hear them. Oh well . . .

—They know we are here. They are
listening
to us speak.

Creedmoor spun, weapon extended, to stare into the darkness behind him. In the next instant, he cried out in anger and threw his arm across his throbbing eyes, as a sudden, blinding light blazed across the room. Not firelight, not gaslight, either, but the cold white sparking neon of the Line’s dreadful machines.

He blinked the pain away. Black silhouettes resolved themselves into three figures—no,
four
—watching him, at the far end of the long room, thirty, thirty-five feet away, rifles leveled at him like the accusing fingers of so many
witnesses
. Rifles and heavy handheld glaring electric lights. As if to step in for his dimming vision, Creedmoor’s nostrils flared; whatever these men carried, there was no smell of the Line on them. Not that that made a difference to his sudden fury; they’d
hurt
him. They’d thought to
trap
him. . . . Creedmoor raised his own weapon, and the figure in the center of his accusers—long coated, wild haired, leaning with his left hand on a stick—his face gray and leathery and spotted with age, a smooth burn scar all down it, old, but
fierce;
Creedmoor saw the tension in the wiry fingers clutching that stick—and the old man’s right hand holding up. . . . And the old man opened his scar-twisted mouth and shouted:

“Stop! Kill me and you kill us all!”

Creedmoor slowed his hand, just for a second. Just long enough to see that the shape in the man’s right hand was—damn it!—another of the Line’s foul little toys—and if Creedmoor did not miss his guess, if he recognized rightly the intricate little hammers and sounders and cymbals and chambers of the horrible thing, it was a
bomb
.

Guards stopped Liv thirty yards from the President’s house. Strong arms, fur-clad, reached out from the shadows and seized her and covered her mouth.

They hid in the hills from the Line and Gun,
she thought,
they fought that way for years, of
course
they know how to hide, how to strike from the shadows.

One of them leaned in over her shoulder. His beard scraped her face and his breath was bad. He whispered:
“What’s your business here?”

She whispered, too. “The Line is here. Maybe an hour away. I came to warn the President.”

“And how would you know that?”

“You must evacuate. You must evacuate at least the children. You must save the General. You must—”

“Come with us.”

Lowry stood, hands folded behind his back, watching young Private Carr climb a tree. An ungainly procedure. Carr huffed and panted and swore. Private Carpenter and Private Dugger and Private What’s-his-name hooted and cheered.
“Go on, Carr! Forward, upward, Carr!”

Carr’s foot slipped off the edge of a branch and he nearly fell, stopping himself only by slamming his shin down hard on the wood and clutching desperately at leaves. He screamed.

“Don’t fall!” Lowry shouted. “Don’t you dare slagging fall, Carr!”

“No, sir. No, sir. Thank you, sir. No, sir.”

“You’ve got the only working telescope, Carr. Don’t you dare fall.”

Carr did his duty, despite his terror; he clambered up and up and dwindled into the distance, until Lowry could barely hear his voice. Eventually Carr heaved himself over a high enough branch, and lay outstretched, right arm wrapped round it, while with his left he reached slowly back to his belt and removed the precious ’scope. He extended it, one-handed, by shaking it, which made the branch quiver and leaves fall. He looked out across New Design.

The men waited expectantly. Spirits were high. The Linesmen had a proper enemy again, and a destination, and they stood straighter and their eyes were focused and they’d stopped talking treason. They scrupulously checked and rechecked their weapons’ mechanisms, though the general view, as Subaltern Mill kept putting it, was that the enemy were
dead meat on the tracks,
by which he meant that he expected no significant resistance from New Design.

It had occurred to Lowry that morning that, with Collier dead and Gauge deserted, and Thernstrom dead, too, and so on and so on, he was probably the oldest man present. He was certainly the only man present who’d ever fought the Republic—and, though he’d been only a boy at Black Cap, he’d been a
clever
boy, clever enough to have survived, anyway, when thousands died, and it hadn’t been lost on him that while the Republic talked a lot about virtue and honor and dignity, it fought dirty, low and vicious and cunning. . . .

Lowry grabbed the prisoner by the back of his hide shirt and yanked him to his feet. Hayworth, the boy’s name was. “Stop sniveling, boy. Tell me again: How many cannon?”