the General were alone, and almost happy. But when the cold came suddenly down, the General went silent. He curled himself up in simple animal pain and whimpered at the outrage of it. He flinched at Liv’s touch, and her heart broke. She withdrew from him and huddled by the fire and rubbed her legs—which were thinner now and wiry, like the legs of a stranger who’d led a harder life than the one she was meant for.
This, too, is a trap, Liv thought. Her growing affection for the poor old General was irrational. Its causes were obvious: first, loneliness and fear; and second, displaced guilt over her unintentional-but-nevertheless-painful abandonment of Maggfrid. It would bind her to Creedmoor’s side, prevent her from running. She could not stop it from happening.
She sat by the red wounded throb of the fire and attempted to harden her heart.
She started a little when Creedmoor spoke.
“Have you ever heard of a place called No-Town, Liv?”
“No-Town? Never.”
“No.” He poked at the fire. “Why would you?”
He was silent for a while. Liv waited.
“You asked when I came to the Gun. When I signed up. That’s a short story. I was drunk at the time—the end. I’ll tell you instead about an earlier occasion, when I was still very young and innocent; the first time I set eyes on an Agent of the Gun, and as far as I know the first time the Gun turned its attention to me. Or who knows? Maybe they watched me in the womb. Their ways were mysterious.”
Liv stayed quiet. Creedmoor looked down into the fire and kept speaking. “It was in a town called Twisted Root. Far east of here, far north of the Deltas, on a dusty plain, away over the Opals, a frozen range on which I once nearly died. There’s hardly a wild place left in the world where I haven’t nearly died. This was thirty-some years ago; when you get to my age, you lose count. Thirty-two. I was there on behalf of—”
The Liberationists. That was his cause at the time. The Liberation from bondage and oppression of the First Folk, who never seemed grateful for the Liberationists’ attentions; but virtue was its own reward, and futility only a spur to greater sacrifice. . . .
A stocky bespectacled young man, with a pale face and shaggy black hair. He still had the accent of a boy from rainy and distant Lundroy, which was the home he’d run away from. He stood on an upturned crate in Twisted Root’s market square and shouted his message of Liberation in singsong Lundroy tones, his voice straining and cracking over the noise of the market.
It was the hot season, late in the day. The sun, descending, burned the world a raw-flesh red. The market was noisy with cows, and traders, and goats, and half a dozen blacksmiths, and occasional gunshots as gun merchants showed off their wares, and men on horseback—and red-coated soldiers on horseback—forcing their way through the crowds. And the buzzing of the flies!
John Creedmoor preached Liberation. The Hillfolk, the objects of his charity, stood silently in their pen, chained by their bony ankles, pale as bone and black-maned and stiff as pines. Iron chains; the Hillfolk could work stone like water, but iron pained them. Iron made them biddable. Iron shaped them into tools.
Ten feet away, a hunched old man of maybe forty-five stood on a tree stump hawking cheap yellow novels and ballads and picture books of the adventures of Henry Steel, Slavoj the Ogre, Springknife Sally of Lud-Town, and other rogues and killers and bank robbers and Agents of the Gun. And the slaver himself, a little rat of a man called Collins, in a tattered fur hat and a threadbare suit, stood by the Hillfolk’s pen and shouted out the praises of his stock.
And Creedmoor raised his voice again, and scattered his own pamphlets into the crowd: copies of The Chain-Breaker, house organ of the Liberationists. No one moved to pick them up. The farmers of Twisted Root looked at him with dull dislike.
A man’s voice shouted, “Go home, boy!” Not angry, yet—just bored. It wounded Creedmoor’s pride. He was the kind of young man who’d rather be hated than ignored.
He read from Chain-Breaker Number 22, Volume 3. It was the text of a recent speech given by one Mr. Ownslow Phillips, back in Beecher’s marbled City Hall.
Gentlemen, ladies, be not afraid of TRUTH; be not afraid nor too proud to look the monster SLAVERY