but effective and cheap enough for mass production. Incapable of disloyalty; he lacked the parts.
Lowry marched through thick gray fog. His men were flickering shadowy smears of black. What that reminded him of, when he got sick of his own self-pity and looked up, was a moving picture brought to life. The world was gray, no, black-and-white, grainy and ill-focused, and everyone marched with an odd lurching jerking motion.
Back in Angelus, the tunnel-children had been rounded up from time to time and herded into moving-picture vaults. The vaults were dark and cold and echoing and smelled of sweat and rust and leaking fuels. Lowry still remembered his first time: two hundred boys, shoveled in like coal—the doors had locked behind them, and the littler brats whined and pissed themselves then went silent. Even Lowry at first feared a trap—though it wasn’t a trap, that would come a couple of years later when they shoved him into a lightless crowded car on the back of the Angelus Engine and it carried him off to the battle of Black Cap—in fact, it turned out to be the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen, though that wasn’t saying much.
The huge screen had glowed softly—flickered—seemed to crack open with those shuddering black lines and sudden flaring of ink-blots—and then the cracks and blotches had resolved instantly into smoke—clouds of dark smoke, gray smoke, billowed across the screen—then whoosh: a pure black Engine punching through the smoke and pulling it behind as it rushed on along the tracks into the distance as the screen opened up to show a vast gray sky, gray plains, a world made of shadows, a terrifying emptiness that nearly made Lowry piss himself, too—and the title card, in white block print on black:
THE LIVINGSTONE ENGINE PATROLS THE NORTHERN BORDER. THE BORDER IS YET TO BE CIVILIZED BUT THE LIVINGSTONE ENGINE IS PUSHING THE PURPOSE FORWARD!
Or something like that. The vault had been full of a noise that drove Lowry to his knees. . . .
He marched through the fog for what seemed like days. The ground was uneven: he stumbled over low walls of rock. The shadows of his men moved all around him but didn’t speak. That was normal enough, since there was nothing to say; but after a while, it frightened him anyway. He began to doubt that they were real. He began to imagine that they’d been replaced, in the nights or in the fog, with man-shaped hostile reflections of themselves. He swore and spat and told himself not to be such a slagging coward.
“Mr. Collier!”
“Sir?”
“There you are.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Begun to wonder.”
“Yes, sir. I know—”
“Mr. Thernstrom!”
When Thernstrom didn’t immediately answer, Lowry went stamping over, waving wisps of curling fog away from his face, to a knot of men that he thought might contain Thernstrom but didn’t; then when he turned away from them, he grabbed at the shoulder of the first shadowed figure he saw before him. Instead of a uniform jacket, he got a fistful of greasy black hair. The figure spun round, and for a moment an inhuman face was pressed up against Lowry’s own—bone white, odd angled, red eyed—then the figure twisted, effortlessly pulling its mane from Lowry’s fist, leaving Lowry stumbling as that First Folk interloper scrabbled away into the fog.
Someone nearby screamed. Lowry drew his gun.
CHAPTER 34
KU KOYRIK
A chill mist filled the valley, hiding its walls from sight. It coiled and shifted like cigarette smoke. It brushed damply against Liv’s face. It was a thick whiteness shot through with the faintest, eeriest hint of red. Creedmoor strode through it confidently, and it flowed around him and drifted together again to put its fingers on Liv, struggling along behind him, her arms around the General’s hunched and shivering body.
“Not too much farther,” Creedmoor told her. “Bear up.”
“I thought we were going to the ends of the earth.”
“I hope not! I sincerely do. Our enemies lag behind. Some days I can hardly hear them. Soon the wilderness will grind them down. They’re made of cheaper stuff than us.”
“And then what?”
He shrugged. “Set up a little place together in the wilderness. I’ll build it and feed us, and you can care for the young ’un. How is he today?”
“He’s freezing, Creedmoor. We should stop, make a fire, if you’re so confident the Line are lagging behind.”
“We’ll see.” Creedmoor whistled for a moment, then lost the tune. “I am sorry to bring you out here, Liv,” he added. “But these things happen. Great forces contend for our