The Half-Made World (70 page)

Bradley’s eyes opened wide. He sneered.

“Now I know what you’re thinking, Doctor: He’s old, even older than you, or me, and quite mad, and what’s he that’s worth saving, all on his own? But hear me out, Doctor. The General has a secret. Did my friend Liv tell you that? I know what it is. I’m in on the secret. A weapon. The First Folk have a weapon. Or not so much a weapon as an idea, maybe, or a dream, or something we have no words for. They offered it to him.”

Creedmoor turned to Bradley’s riflemen. “You’re young,” he said. “Do you know that the General used to pal around with a fellow of the Folk? A caster of stones, a wise man, a something-or-other. I met his wife, believe it or not. The General made a
deal
with the Folk, I reckon. They built his Republic for him and in return—”

Bradley spat. “Shut up, monster.”

“Don’t like that sort of talk, eh, Doctor? Mystical bullshit, tarnishing your glorious rational virtuous origins. But listen: They promised him a
weapon
. The weapon puts an end to spirits, Dr. Bradley. A
final
end. I know you’ve destroyed Engines and maybe you broke Guns, but you know you only broke their housings, you know they came back, they would always come back, like the Folk themselves, like nightmares, like a disease with no cure. And so they never learned fear.”

—Why are you telling him this, Creedmoor?

From behind Creedmoor’s back came the sound of the General turning in bed, whimpering, muttering. Some of the riflemen glanced uneasily over at him, dividing their attention.

“See? He remembers, somewhere down in the rubble of his mind. He
found
it. He sent a letter home to his family, you see, before his last ride. Then he vanished. The Line caught him. Most likely by mistake; they throw those ugly bombs around like toys. Someone brought him down the mountain—and believe me, we’d like to know who. Somehow he ended up in an eerie little hospital back on the world’s edge not
that
many weeks east of here. What if he still holds the secret? If he still deep down knows where to find that weapon? Or how to make it? What if he
found
it? He won’t live long. Your town, your Republic, your world is dead. You’ll never have that weapon. But what if
I
had it? We could kill the Engines. We could teach them fear. You could be revenged. Will you consider it?”

Bradley raised the bomb again, as if he intended to strike Creedmoor with it. “We don’t make deals with your kind, monster. You pervert everything you touch. We saw too many nations fall to your kind. We stand on our own.”

The riflemen flanking Bradley looked wary, Creedmoor noted. But of course, they were irrelevant. Creedmoor had no doubt he could outdraw their trigger-fingers, could outrun their bullets, could even take the wound if necessary.

“Suppose I fought alongside you, Doctor. If you disarm that bomb, I give you my word I’ll hold back the Linesmen as long as I can. You know your people are no match for them. I can make no promise of success, but I believe I may even the odds. You yourself might survive. Do you have children here? A young second wife, maybe?”

“Mind your business, Creedmoor.”

“You’ve played a weak hand well, Doctor. Perhaps you’ve saved your people. You should accept my aid with pride.”

“Your word means nothing, Creedmoor. We’ll make no deals.”

“You used not to be so inflexible, Doctor. Back in the old days, back in the world behind us. Oh, your General and your charters and your speechifying men in medals or top hats all said, stand on your own feet; a government of laws, not Powers; have no truck with devilry . . . all that. I remember the speeches, Doctor. But even back then, you couldn’t keep my kind out. Your sons and daughters dreamed of us. When your leaders were weak and afraid, they let us in. At Wolverhampton, and Tin Hill, and Syme, and a dozen other places, they called on us for aid. It’s not in the history books, but it’s known by those who care to know. You wouldn’t be the first to bend a little.”

“That was back in the old world, Creedmoor. We’re a purer strain out here. Our sons and daughters are taught virtue. No deals.”

“Well then fuck you, Doctor.”

Creedmoor drew and fired, and the air, which had gone silent when Lowry’s machine stopped howling some minutes ago, echoed again. The riflemen all drew in their breath. Bradley’s body fell stiffly backwards, the long black coat opening out behind him. He let go of his walking stick, and it balanced on its steel tip for a moment then fell slowly forward. He let go of the bomb and it fell leadenly toward the earth. The hammer arced toward the striking-plate. There was a tiny screech of wire and a creak of uncoiling springs. A slow shiver and scrape of metal.

Creedmoor, already in motion, crossing the floor in fractions of a second, leaping across the beds in his path (their wooden frames sounding under his feet like drums) heard every slow sound with painful clarity. Launching himself from the last of the beds, he twisted in the air. His old bones creaked and his muscles nearly tore. He focused his
will;
the flesh could only slow him down. He hit the floor hard on his back, sliding over the hard-packed dirt. The bomb fell with a thud into his outstretched hand. He fumbled his thumb in between the striking-plate and the descending hammer. It stabbed down on the quick of his nail. It was a sharp little thing and it drew a tiny jewel of blood out of him.
Fuck,
he said; but it worked. The bomb remained silent.

—You madman, Creedmoor. You fool. What if you’d been too slow?

—Then I would be dead, or worse. You could go howling back to that dark place where your kind lodge. You could curse my name.

The three riflemen were standing around looking stupid, their rifles still trained on the place where he’d been standing the half second before. Creedmoor stood and shot them in quick succession.

He wasn’t sure how to disarm the device. In the end, he simply tore off the hammer and flicked it into the corner of the room. For good measure, he prized off the striking-plate. That seemed to work. He kicked what was left of the bomb under a bed.

A terrible crash sounded outside, off in the distance, like a resounding echo of Creedmoor’s own gunshots. Like now that he’d begun the killing, it was ricocheting madly out of his control: like it was all his fault once again.

CHAPTER 49

NEW DESIGN AT WAR

Dawn came. The sun rose in the west, behind thick dark clouds.. Lowry watched New Design’s walls, from which no surrender party emerged, over which no white flag was flown.

Subaltern Mill stood beside him. “Time’s up, sir.”

“Is it?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Huh.” The problem was that none of Lowry’s men’s timepieces worked right anymore. If they hadn’t been waterlogged in the rains or battered and cracked along the march, they’d stopped working for more mysterious reasons. Their hands spun meaninglessly, or hardly at all. Time out here was not yet ready to be measured. So Lowry waited, indecisively, for what felt like much longer than half an hour. He was waiting for
orders
. He was waiting for something to tick over and give him his signal. He waited, listening to the prisoner moan and pray, listening to his men mutter nervously, listening for sounds of surrender from New Design. And he was still waiting when there was a soft distant
thump
from behind the town’s walls, and a line of black smoke vented into the sky, and a shell came arcing up and then down again, falling well short of Lowry’s front lines, killing no one. A second shell followed instants later, and killed half a dozen.

The soldiers of New Design had brought up their cannon into a beet-field near the center of town. The deerlike things that had been corralled in the pen next door had been evicted. Some of the creatures stood around looking on, nervous and whinnying and incontinent. Others fled.

Liv watched the cannon move in from down the end of the street. She peered around the wall of that odd octagonal repository of books—the lock of which was broken, and now some of the deer-things hid in its shadows and grazed its shelves.

There were two cannon. Two long metal stalks, each rising from two heavy wheels that churned the mud of the beet-field. Different models—one was much smaller than the other, and put Liv in mind of a polio-shriveled limb. Their metal gleamed in the dawn light. They’d been well looked after.

A team of men dragged them with ropes. The ground was soft, and it took ten men apiece. Captain Morton led them. When it came time to set the charges, he pushed the younger men away and kneeled down in the muck to do the work himself.

They worked quickly and confidently, they were well drilled. They had the guns in place well before Lowry’s half hour was near up, even if one counted from the moment his rant began, and not from the moment the fuses fried and silence reclaimed the air. Or so Liv guessed—her own golden pocket watch was still worthless.

Morton stood looking out east across the beet-field. There was a dull glow in the distance. Not firelight; something cold and electric lit Lowry’s camp.

At no particular signal Liv could see, Morton knelt again by the base of the fatter, healthier cannon. A younger man applied himself to the undercarriage of the weaker cannon and mirrored Morton’s motions. Both men stood well back.

The cannons sounded.

Liv shielded her eyes from the flash. She had only a vague impression of thick black lines scored across the gunmetal sky. She went running, head down, and did not see the distant flicker where the shells struck, or the smoke rising.

Lowry’s retaliation came quick. Liv heard something whistling overhead, and didn’t look up. It flew with an incongruously bright and cheerful sound. She was well away down the street and through a muddy close between houses when she heard the sound of the device striking—a sound that reached her first as a dull despairing thud, as of a suicide’s body falling from a bridge, and then repeated itself, again and again, harsher each time, louder and louder, gathering steam but not rhythm, until it was no longer sad and quiet, but persistent, manic, onrushing. It had no pattern; it lurched toward structure and shattered it, crashing on, and on—it had the pulse of dying muscle tissue, spasming, or the last firings of a diseased brain. Liv fell against a wall of haystacks and a fence of wet wood, and covered her ears.

The sound washed over her and was gone. Her eyes felt terribly swollen. Her nose was bleeding.

The device had struck where Morton stood. New Design’s cannon were silent. Liv did not look back.

She staggered south. Men and boys ran back and forth around her, stumbling with their rifles or bows or spears. There was another cheerful whistling sound from the north, and from the west, and then the mad drone and thunder of the Line’s weapons echoed distantly over the town. Neither device struck close enough to Liv for the sound to destroy her; even so the muffled echo of it was enough to make her belly lurch as if miscarrying, and she stopped to retch into a water trough. Nothing inside to expel but bad air. She slumped against the trough’s side and pressed her cheek against the cold wood.

Liv watched two men go by, dragging a third, whose body was unwounded, but whose legs spasmed, and whose head twisted back and howled senselessly like a motor breaking down. She watched a fourth man, alone, stagger out from behind a barn and stumble for twenty paces before falling twitching in the dirt. She went over to him. His eyes rolled back in his head. He appeared to have bitten his tongue; blood frothed on his smiling lips. She could not bring herself to touch him. She heard men running up near and backed away out of their path. Thirty men and boys with a pawnbroker’s assortment of weapons ran past, not stopping.

The sound of shooting echoed from the east, and she was glad of it; shooting was a
cleaner
death.

“Enough,” Lowry said.
“Enough!”

He ran toward the nearest cannon, choking in its smoke, screaming over its noise, over the noise of his men running, shouting, loading noisemakers and poison gas. . . .