The Half-Made World (72 page)

Creedmoor perched crowlike on top of the town’s wall and watched the fighting.

—Senseless.

—Yes. All these people are mad, Creedmoor.

The fighting was concentrated at the east of the town. The town’s soldiers fought to defend the east bridge over the moat from the massed Linesmen. But the moat was shallow, empty, more symbolic than real—a line in the sand—and should have posed no barrier to the Linesmen, who could have attacked equally well at any point, could’ve torn through the wall with their motor guns, could have swarmed the town from all sides if they’d chosen, like ants dismantling a corpse. But of course, they respected barriers and lines. . . .

The Linesmen fought contemptuously, joylessly. In fact, they hardly fought at all. The young men and boys of New Design—and some of the women, too—went charging over the bridge waving old swords, or their clubs or sharpened spears, and the Linesmen lazily activated their hideous grinding machine guns and reduced them to nothing. The process repeated itself. The Linesmen seemed content to let New Design’s forces exhaust themselves in futile gestures.

—Why are we wasting our time, Creedmoor? These people are hopeless.

—Not all of them. Look.

There were riflemen and bowmen in the far forest attempting to pick off the Linesmen’s flanks—but the Linesmen simply released their poisons, their roiling black clouds of smoke and grit and cold choking death, and the forests went silent again. The town’s soldiers had more mortars and explosives still to launch, but they were twenty-year-old junk and they fizzled and misfired. On the town’s side of the bridge lay the wreckage of three tripod-mounted motor guns, old models, no doubt stolen from the Line decades ago—the Linesmen had destroyed those first, long before Creedmoor started watching.

—It’s a brave effort.

—That makes no difference, Creedmoor.

—It’s magnificent, in its way. I never saw the point of the Republic while they were winning, but now they’re dying, they’re magnificent.

New Design’s defenders faltered. The Linesmen pushed forward and began to penetrate their ranks, fanning out through the town.

—Shall we join in, then?

—We will not forgive you for this, Creedmoor.

—
Oh, well.

Creedmoor stood, drew, shot down the black-suited black-capped operator of the nearest motor gun on the far side of the bridge. He turned and shot the operators of the second motor gun, and one of the cannon—he couldn’t get a clear shot at the other cannon operator. He shot the men who came running up to take their place. He put three bullets into the overheated motor of one of the motor guns and it exploded, spraying bits of hot twisted metal. The Linesmen shouted and pointed and turned their rifles in his direction, so Creedmoor, laughing, turned away and dropped down from the wall into the town, which was now lousy with Linesmen and their ugly weapons.

Lowry led a force of fifteen men along the bridge and into the town. (Just fifteen men! That was what they’d been reduced to.) They cleared a path for themselves with noisemakers and poison-gas grenades, then followed implacably behind, stepping over writhing mindless bodies, doing some quick work with their bayonets.

They encountered local resistance. Several young women appeared in the windows as they walked past and let fly with bows and slings, which once again proved surprisingly effective weapons. Private Carr got an arrow right through the glass plate of his gas mask and fell down dead. Private Stack got one in his leg. The women went down to a gas grenade tossed by Subaltern Mills.

Lowry kept moving, expecting at any second that an arrow would enter his shoulder blades, or the idiot locals would get their cannon working and drop a rocket on his head, or . . .

He found himself approaching an unusually large and important-looking building, low and flat like all of New Design, but wide and sprawling. There were half a dozen guards outside it who Lowry’s men shot down even before Lowry could give the order. Inside the building there was a maze of corridors, and an office containing a local in a brown suit who rose stiffly from a desk and said
“We will never surrender, Linesmen, we will fight you—”
before Subaltern Mills shot him, and no sign of the General. There was, however, a large heavily barred door, and behind that a room containing an impressive collection of machinery scavenged from the Line—rockets, amplifiers, motors, generators, drills, telegraphs, projectors, arclights, signal devices—ancient, rusty, battered, but some of it serviceable.

New Design fell apart. There was no fire, not at first. The Line didn’t make much use of fire. Fire raged out of control; it burned too bright. The Line favored fear, and madness, and despair, and noise, and choking gas. Creedmoor, on the other hand, was as happy in fire as a pig in shit, so he started a fire or two in the thatch or curtains of the houses. It gave the Linesmen something to worry about, and it set Creedmoor’s own mind at ease. With the fire at his back, he fought through the streets. It was joyful to fight precisely because it was not his duty and Marmion forbade it, and gave him strength with an ill grace. . . .

—Kill them, Creedmoor. Quickly.

—See? I knew you’d enjoy it.

The boys of New Design watched him work. Huddled in the ruins of someone’s house—burned over, then extinguished by the Line’s chill black gas—a group of boys watched him go by. They’d let go of their weapons. One of their number was bleeding from his head. Creedmoor winked and tipped his hat to them as he walked past. “Good day! Tell ’em Creedmoor was here! Tell ’em, should the Republic survive into future generations, that
John Creedmoor
saved it! And make sure to note that he did it of his own free will!”

Some of them looked at him with desperate pleading hope. Some of them looked at him with hate, willing him to fail, to spare them the shame of being saved by his kind. . . .

—They will never forgive you, Creedmoor. Only we will—

—I know. I know.

He erased the Linesmen one by one. Linesmen shambled through the town in units of five or ten. Creedmoor picked away at what looked like leaders, or at whatever was easiest. Their ranks were breaking down. Their motions were becoming without purpose. The shock of Creedmoor’s assault had knocked the machine off its proper functioning, and parts were spinning loose. The town was full of smoke and the black gas, so the Linesmen wore masks, which made them identical; they were things, not men. Of course, Creedmoor wouldn’t have cared if they
had
had faces, except insofar as it might have made it easier to identify leaders, to identify that Lowry fellow, to pick him out from the mass. Creedmoor himself passed through the gas simply by holding his breath. When he found a clear spot, he paused and breathed in great deep joyful breaths of clean air and thought,

—This is what we were made for, my friend. Why deny it?

—More of them behind you, Creedmoor. Quick now.

“Who here knows signals?” Lowry looked over his thirteen men. Gas masks hid their faces, but he scanned their uniforms’ insignia. One of them was a Signalman, Second Class.

“You—Signalman What’s-your-name.” He wiped dust off the dented casing of an obsolete model signal device. “Is this salvageable?”

The Signalman wordlessly got to work. He unscrewed the casing with the point of his knife and examined the rusting innards. His mask hid his expression. Meanwhile gunshots echoed in the streets outside, random and meaningless, fraying Lowry’s last nerve.

“Well?”

The Signalman started working levers and valves, and studying fluttering needles and dials.

“Well?”

“Yes, sir. Weakly, sir. But we have the signal again. The signaling device is likely still with the woman; at least, it’s here in town, sir.”

“Take it,” Lowry said. “You and you, carry the machine. You and you and you, guard them. Follow the signal.”

He turned, drew his pistol, and strode out through the corridors, and out into the street, where he saw a man who could only have been John Creedmoor himself walking by, bloodstained and laughing and gesturing as if he was talking to himself and apparently having a wonderful time, without a fear or a care in the world, and Lowry was so suddenly so sick with
envy,
he had to lean against the doorframe a moment for support.

—There, Creedmoor.

Creedmoor glanced over his shoulder and saw a short gas-masked Linesman leaning oddly in a doorframe with what seemed, insofar as one could say it of a man in a gas mask, an expression of peculiar intensity. Creedmoor shot him dead, and then he shot the Linesman who stood behind him dead, too; and then it looked like there were more of them packed into that dark corridor, each of them ready to take the others’ places, a never-ending factory-line. . . .

—Too many. And men of the Republic coming. Move on.

—Yes.

He turned and ran.

Liv hid at the back of a barn, surrounded by hay bales. With the hunting knife Creedmoor had left her, she tore a shirt from the back of a dead townsman and used it to bind her ears and the General’s. She used the rags of it to dab ash and rose-pink bloody tears from her cheeks. She cradled the General’s head and whispered,
“Calm, calm, calm.”