his back. Maybe he was telling the truth about his master’s absence, and maybe he wasn’t; what was clear, though, was that his horrible strength and speed were not significantly diminished. Liv followed as best she could.
CHAPTER 35
THE SHADOWS
Lowry breathed deeply in the freezing fog, and clutched his gun with the same tight panicked grip one might use when riding on the outside of an Engine as it swerved hugely around high mountain passes. . . .
He counted the shadows around him.
“Mr. Collier?”
“Yes, sir. Sir, I—”
“Who’s missing, Collier?”
“Don’t know, sir.”
“Come here. Stay close.”
There was motion in the fog. Black and gray bodies, swinging arms and legs, waving arms, heads a vague bobbing blur. Shadows at work. Lowry thought again of motion pictures, like We Too Play Our Part, with its great scenes in the foundries of Harrow Cross, the screen a mass of moving black-and-white shadows, five thousand tiny soot-blackened men in clouds of smoke, moving like pistons. . . .
Five bodies came running up out of the fog and revealed themselves to be a bunch of privates Lowry didn’t recognize—each of them unshaved and filthy and a general disgrace but under present circumstances a beautiful sight—and Lowry said, “You men. Stay close. Follow me.”
And he thought of Victory at Logtown! which he hadn’t seen for twenty years, but he still remembered vividly the battle scenes, the grainy flickering shadows of the screen hiding a thousand mercenaries of the Gun, who were, in fact, played by Linesmen as decent and upstanding as Lowry himself but who were transformed by the shadows into nightmares of depravity, savagery, and wickedness. . . .
He pressed forward. Two bodies came toward him through the fog, the first waving an arm as if the fog were smoke that could be cleared away, the second following a step behind.
The first figure proved to be Subaltern Thernstrom, who lowered his arm and met Lowry’s eye with palpable relief.
“Sir, there you are—sir, this fog, some of the men—”
The figure that stood behind Thernstrom stepped forward, then, and though it seemed to emerge from the fog, it brought the fog with it, because where there should have been a face under a black cap with the plain honest features of a Linesman, there was only shifting gray dust.
Lowry stood and watched with baffled horror as the figure in Thernstrom’s shadow reached forward and yanked Thernstrom’s knife from his belt and—as Thernstrom said some of the men are missing—drove it up into Thernstrom’s back. Thernstrom convulsed and jerked suddenly forward, and a good quarter pint of shockingly bright red blood splattered from his open mouth.
Lowry shot the thing behind Thernstrom in its head. It dissolved to the ground in dust. Thernstrom’s body slumped beside it.
“Collier. You men.” Lowry turned and scanned their pale faces. “Are you all men? All right. All right. You’ll do. Stand back to back. Follow.”
He knew where he was now. A battlefield. This was enemy action; whether it was the Folk or the land itself or somehow some horrible trap the Agent had laid for them was beside the point. The field of battle was always the same, differing only in the particular arrangement of bodies and forces and fortified lines and vectors and inclines—details varied, but the problem posed was essentially invariant.
Two shadowy figures in Lowry’s path were locked arm in arm, wrestling. Collier acted smartly and shot the shadowier of the two in its leg, and the whole eerie shapeless half-made creature burst into dust, leaving a very grateful Private (Third Class) Plumb alive and breathing heavily.
Moments later, Collier stumbled over another dead Linesman and fell forward onto his hands and knees. A figure came running up out of the fog and proved at the last minute faceless just as it swung an arm holding someone’s pistol like a club down at the back of Collier’s head—Plumb drove his bayonet into it. It fell apart. Collier got to his feet covered in a shower of reddish gray dust but otherwise unharmed.
Lowry barked orders, gestured. But in fact, discipline was already reasserting itself, with or without him. The men of the Line fell into their places unbidden, automatically. Weeks of exhaustion and disorientation and despair and confusion blew away like dust, and the steel beneath was revealed. Lowry’s squad came stumbling out of the fog to find that Subaltern Slate had already organized some one hundred men into a line, back-to-back, fifty on each side, against which the shadows and dust devils that came running