The Half-Made World (75 page)

Creedmoor crawled on his belly through shifting ash, to where his Gun lay, some way upslope and hard to get to. He kept sliding back down. Behind him he heard the wheezing and panting of the Linesmen as they negotiated their own shifting nightmarish obstacle course of ash.

—The General is not yet dead, Creedmoor.

—He will be soon.

—But not yet.
Fight,
Creedmoor.

His veins flooded with fire. He lunged, closed his hand around his weapon, and rolled over on his back. He shot twice and killed two Linesmen, but his wounds slowed him and he could not get off a third short before the last three Linesmen got their rifles up. Their mechanisms rattled and coughed and Creedmoor screamed as a bullet hit his hip; then he screamed again as Marmion said,

—No.

. . . and began to force his bones roughly back together.

Then the Linesmen were on him. They stamped on him and kicked him and tore the Gun from his hand and kicked it away.

—You deserve this, Creedmoor.

—Yes.

Liv heard Creedmoor screaming, cursing, roaring obscenities, laughing and taunting, as if he’d never been happier in his whole hateful life. . . .

Why didn’t she run? She wasn’t sure. She told herself it was safest to stay still and silent. She told herself that perhaps she might still somehow save the General. The truth was she found herself oddly reluctant to leave Creedmoor.

She hoped they killed him.

She didn’t want him to have to die alone.

What if they heard her? The sound of her own breathing roared in her ears. The tick of her pocket watch echoed. . . .

And in fact, now that she listened to it as if for the first time—now that it seemed so loud as to drown out Creedmoor’s roars and screams—Liv sensed a horrible familiarity in its off-kilter ticktock, its rattle and rush. She
knew
that sound, that rhythm. She held it to her ear and heard in brittle miniature the Song of the Line, the Song the Engines beat out over the continent. She held it in her hand and stared at its blank gold-plated face. It was too heavy. She knew with utter certainty that if she could unscrew its gilt backing, she’d see some oily black iron parasite lurking in its bright clockwork. No wonder they’d never lost her. How long had they been spying on her? Had they gone through her luggage when the Engine carried her west?

She swore and dropped the device. She shoved it down into the ash, grinding it with the heel of her palm. She covered it over and crept slowly away.

The last three Linesmen stood all around Creedmoor, kicking and spitting and shoving him down in the ash and watching him heal and wounding him again; and Creedmoor spat back and called them every filthy name he could think of in every language he knew; and they could probably have stayed like that forever, but eventually the Linesmen got tired.

Night had fallen. There was no moon, and only a miserly allotment of stars. What little light there was came from the glow of the thunder in the west. The Linesmen fanned out and searched in the ashy gloom for Creedmoor’s weapon.

“There.”

“Where?”

“I see it. Mr. Mills, sir?”

“I see it. Looks so harmless, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t know, sir. How do we get rid of it?”

“Explosives should do the job. What do we have left?”

They bent low, planted some of their devices in the ash, then jogged to a safe distance.

—No. Fight, Creedmoor, stand up, fight them.

“Watch this, Agent. Carpenter, hold his head up. Watch his teeth.”

Creedmoor laughed and spat, “Carpenter? Fuck you, Carpenter. I’ll—”

There was an immense thumping noise, like a body falling from a great height; and the ash exploded, blasting outward in a red-and-black peacock crest of fire and ash and a cloud of nightmarish black smoke that stank of gunpowder and blood. The air was full of a terrible pressure, and the stars seemed to shudder and withdraw. Then there was a long deep silence. Creedmoor gasped and sagged as the full pain of his injuries hit him, and the fight went out of him.

—Marmion?

No answer.

A fragment of red-hot twisted trigger mechanism had flown out of the explosion and hit the one called Mills square in his head, killing him; Creedmoor’s master’s final act in the world as it fell back screaming into its Lodge.

The two remaining Linesmen didn’t seem sure what to do next. Carpenter let go of Creedmoor’s head and stepped over him. The two Linesmen stood side by side in confusion.

Liv heard the
thud
of the explosion, and moments later she choked on the stink of powder and blood, and she felt the agonizing pressure; and she understood at once that Creedmoor’s master was gone. It was too late, but the thing was finally gone. Its vessel was broken and it had gone screaming back or up or down or who-knew-where into what Creedmoor had called its Lodge.

She waited a little while, thinking. Then she crept back.

Creedmoor lay still on one slope of ash, his hands bound behind him. The General lay on another. Both of them lay in their own blood, and both looked dead.

Two of the five Linesmen survived. They were busy with some task, bent over and with their backs to her.

After a while, she realized that they were attempting to bury their dead. They dug with their bayonets and their bare hands in the ash. It wasn’t working. The ash poured back into every hole they dug.

She’d heard that the Linesmen did not bury their dead—that they fed them to their Engines. Apparently that was propaganda—she wondered if it was the Linesmen’s, or their enemies’.

She felt a spasm of sympathy for them. It passed. As she watched, they came to seem like insects, working from cold unconscious instinct; like engine parts grinding away; like there was no feeling or kindness in what they were doing, or even duty, but only habit.

Creedmoor rolled his bloodied head to one side and saw her crouching in the dark. He smiled grotesquely. She looked away from him.

One of the dead Linesmen’s rifles lay discarded in the ash. Liv crept closer and picked it up. Its mechanism was very complicated, and she wasn’t sure how to fire it, or how to operate it without making noise; and she couldn’t bear to use the bayonet; so instead she held the thing like a club and crept closer again, and struck the nearest Linesman on the back of his neck.

Pain ran up her arm. The Linesman fell like a sack of coal, into his own poorly dug grave. The other one turned very slowly, and she swung again and hit him in the face, bloodily breaking his jaw and his teeth—and possibly his neck, because he fell and did not get up.

She wondered if either of them had been—what was the name of the man on the loudspeaker?
Lowry
. She decided she preferred not to know.

She dropped the rifle and staggered limply over to where Creedmoor lay grinning.

Creedmoor’s face was bruised and bleeding; pale and
old
. His bound hands were swollen and red. His nose was broken, Liv observed, and his cheek torn. He seemed smaller, frailer.

“Well done, Liv. I thought you said
never again,
but I know as well as anyone that it only gets easier each time. I suggest you put a stop to the killing now, before you develop the habit of it, and cut me loose.”

“Why should I, Creedmoor?”

“My master is gone.”

“I know. Will it return?”

“Not to me. At least I don’t think so. It doesn’t often happen that our masters are broken and we survive. The Linesman did what I could not, bless ’em, they—”

“You’re bleeding badly, Creedmoor.”

“Not as bad as it looks. Much of it was healed. Untie me and ban dage my wounds.”

“I should leave you to die, Creedmoor.”

“My master is
gone,
Liv.”

“That excuses nothing.”

She left him and walked over to the General. He didn’t say another word.

The General, like Creedmoor, lay on his back. His arms were splayed. Blood formed a strange shapeless shadow around him. At first Liv thought he was dead—but then, as she approached, he took a single heaving ragged breath. Blood spattered on his lips, on the beard and mustaches that the doctors of New Design had so neatly groomed. After that, his breathing was shallow, rapid, but constant.

Liv touched the wound gently. The flesh around it was stiff, blackening, as if poisoned. The General was muttering beneath his breath. His face was terribly pale. She held his hand and it was cold. He stared up fixedly at the dark sky, the few harsh phosphor stars. Liv held his hand helplessly and waited for him to die. His eyes were fierce but unfocused in time.