by Felix Gilman
Creedmoor rolled his head to see the body. “He won’t.” He looked away again, up at the sky. “I’m sorry.” Creedmoor attempted to sit up again. It seemed to Liv that something important in the muscles of his back or belly had been damaged and not yet mended, because he only twisted and fell and swallowed ash.
Liv sat by the General’s side. She brushed his forehead and made it bloody.
Creedmoor spat the ash out; he said, “The murder was well done, Liv.”
“Thank you, Mr. Creedmoor.”
“You’re not finished yet, though.”
“I have lost the taste for it. I cannot and will not do it again. I refuse. Are you not in the most tremendous pain, Mr. Creedmoor?”
“I’m used to it.” He laughed and gurgled blood. “Oh, Liv, that’s a lie, of course; my master takes the pain from me. I am a terrible coward.”
“I know.”
The General stared up into the clouded sky. His breathing came loud and painful. He seemed to be trying to form words.
Creedmoor spoke again. “What was your plan, Liv, if I may ask?”
“I thought I would kill you, Creedmoor, and take the General away from you. Perhaps we might find survivors in New Design, who would help us back east into the world. We could bring his secret back, if he ever had one, and . . . I think I began to have heroic notions.”
“I know how that is, Liv, I know how that is.”
“If we couldn’t go back, I thought we might walk together into the west, into the sea, and be unmade together. No one would have him; not you, not the Line.”
“A good plan. Better. Simple, decisive, wise. Suicide is often the best course of action. If I tell you how much I sympathize with you, you will not believe me. And now no one will have the General’s secret, because he is dead.”
“Not yet.”
“Soon. What will you do now?”
“I am not brave enough to go into the sea alone, Mr. Creedmoor. What will you do?”
“I don’t know. I’m healing, which means my masters have not yet decided to dispose of me, despite this debacle. Maybe they’ve gone to their Lodge to debate what tortures to visit upon me.”
He grunted as he twisted his left leg back into place, and held a hand to the ragged tendons at the back of the knee. Pain, despair, relief mingled on his face.
“More likely they’ll forgive me. The Great War goes on. With Fanshawe gone, and Abban, there aren’t many of us old dogs left. I’ll go home, I guess. Back to work. I had heroic notions that I might break free, but I guess that’s all over now.”
From over the edge of the dune, there was the sound of stomping, sliding footsteps; shouting; grumbling; the rattle of packs and cans and weapons.
“Or perhaps not,” Creedmoor said. “Perhaps not.”
The footsteps came closer. The voices of Linesmen carried on the empty night air.
“My Gun, Liv,” Creedmoor said, trying to stand, and failing. “Hand me my Gun, please, Liv.”
But Liv was already off, and running, over the dunes.
Liv fell to her belly—standing, running, would only expose her to the Linesmen’s rifles. She crouched and slithered and crawled through the ash, through the hollows between the dunes. She put some distance between herself and Creedmoor and the General. Lying on her belly, she lifted her head a few nervous inches over the crest of a dune and looked back.
She saw them coming.
Five men. That was instantly clear, though all Liv could see were tiny silhouettes against the spoiled dawn. Short, heavy, heads down, not running but gracelessly stamping forward. A row of distant chimneys squatting the skyline. They went up and over the top of an ash-dune and were gone from view. When they reappeared, they’d grown larger, and she could see the black of their uniforms, the hard jut of their weapons. Two of them carried some kind of heavy box between them; as they came closer, they threw it away and started jogging.
When they were close enough that she could see the gas masks that elongated their jaws into inhuman forms, she slipped down out of sight and slid away. The ash whispered beneath her shifting body and she froze, inched forward again, froze again. She crept away with nightmare slowness. She heard gunfire.
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 fi
re 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.
His voice slowly rose into audible registers, quavering, sounding as if from a great distance. His hand tightened in hers as if he knew she was there, as if at last he desperately wanted her to be there.
“. . . again,” he said. “Once again. Dying once again under the stars, alone. A cause that is always failing and faltering. Another lost battle, and another.”
Liv felt an urge to reach for a pen and notepaper. Instead she clutched at his hand—no longer cold, now tense and feverishly hot—and leaned in close.
“And every time, I promise myself again to the cause, to the stars, to the future. And I come back down the mountain colder and less human. I hardly know my daughter, my wife. Everything changes on these nights. Oh, it’s hard to go on. . . .”
He spoke as if he was repeating himself, mouthing the lines of some speech—as if he were finally forcing out words he’d been holding mutely inside for years.
Creedmoor came crawling closer. Liv raised a hand, and he held his distance.
“Death and rebirth. I thought this time might finally be the last. I went up the mountain. . . .”
CHAPTER 51
THE GENERAL SPEAKS
~ 1878 ~
The General went up the mountain in the early days of spring, when the snows receded. Birch and pine breathed cool life into the foothills. There were vibrant purple pine-flowers underfoot. The white topknots of fat shy quail whistled through the underbrush. A clear and cold quality of sunlight. He took the time to comment on those matters to Master Jodrell, who was taking dictation on a sheet of paper flattened over the rusty lid of their ammunition case. The General sat stiff-backed on his shooting stick; Jodrell crouched at his side.
“Don’t write that down, Jodrell. Don’t write that down.”
The boy paid the flowers, the pines, no mind; that troubled the General. A man should have a sense of nature and of beauty. One might so easily become less than a man, in those desperate last days of the Republic. Striking from the shadows, hiding in the alleys, the remnants of a great cause might become monsters. And on the mountain’s barren peak, and in the troubled darkness beneath, it would be easy to forget. . . .
It took an hour for the General to finish dictating his letter. He addressed it to his daughter, and to his granddaughter, whom he’d never met. It was impossible for him to write to his wife—the General was not brave enough for that—but he hoped one letter would do for them all. He promised them: This is the last time. This is truly the last time. The end is in sight. In the halls of Kan-Kuk’s people . . .
Kan-Kuk himself stood among the trees, some twenty feet away, still and tall and thin as the pines, gnarled and bone white as birch. Watching with disapproval. Silent as a stone. The secret was for the General alone; the General was their confidential agent in the matter. The General shivered under the gaze of those dawn-red eyes, and changed his mind. “That’s enough, Master Jodrell. Pack it away and come along. No need to write to them, eh, when we’ll see them all soon enough?”
But the next morning, as they passed up into colder hills, over bare stony ground, as Kan-Kuk strode on ahead, the General called for the boy Jodrell again and sent him away down the mountain, carrying the letter, and
certain other papers, and money enough for a new life.
“And Jodrell. Tell my wife . . . tell her that if we come back, we bring hope. Tell her if we do not come back, there is no hope. The world will devour itself as it always has. Tell her to take our people from the world. Go west. She will understand.”
Maybe Kan-Kuk noticed Jodrell’s absence; maybe he didn’t. The General was not sure that Kan-Kuk distinguished among the men. In any event, Kan-Kuk never said anything.
It occurred to the General later, as they navigated a difficult creek bed, that he should have sent some message of more personal affection. But it had not crossed his mind at the time, and he could spare no more men.
There were twenty-four of them—not including Kan-Kuk. A small party. Deerfield and Darke had been trappers before they’d come into the service of the Republic. There was banditry in Mason’s past. Now that the last remnants of the Republic were reduced to hiding in the hills, men of that sort had come into their own.
The General had sent the remainder of his forces on to Broad Kills, there to make camp, to await his return, and should he not return, to prepare for exodus. These twenty-four had split off at Dunhayne, gone south, traveling by night, hiding by day, through lands under the shadow of the Line. They’d passed for long miles through hills looking down on the tracks, and watched the Engines of Dryden and Gloriana and Arkley pass each other, again and again, with terrible regularity, cutting across the plains with contemptuous, monstrous ease. . . . They’d gone up into hills where brave men had once panned for gold, for dreams; hills that were now hacked up, ground down, burned over by the greedy mining machines of the Line. They’d gone without their uniforms, in simple buckskins and furs, and the patrol of Linesmen that caught them creeping across the blasted black plain in the shadow of Dryden Station took them for ordinary bandits and got overconfident. The General lost only two men: Boone and Caldwell. They were pursued for a while by a larger force, but they evaded it, went to ground in the hills, moved again only when they were sure their pursuers had lost interest. They passed southeast out of the lands of the Line without further incident.