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. . . .
“Enough! You’ll kill the General, you idiots, you slagging idiots, we have our duty, this is meaningless if we don’t do our duty.”
Silence fell. The men attempted to pull themselves together.
“We go in,” he said. “Motor guns at the bridges, we go behind them, street by street.”
But that was only one of his cannon; and the other, some two hundred feet away, on the other side of the ranks, continued to fire.
As soon as Dr. Bradley was dead, and his stolen device disarmed, Creedmoor lifted the General up from his bed. The old man seemed disinclined to move of his own will—or such as was left of it—preferring to remain stiffly curled on that hard bed like it was his mother’s lap. He’d been groomed quite finely, Creedmoor noticed, and dressed in a white shirt and black pleated uniform trousers that, though somewhat stained and worn at the knees, were perhaps the smartest clothes in the whole sad town. There was a red jacket, gold braided, many medaled, hanging from a rusty hook by the bed. Creedmoor wrestled it over the General’s shoulders. The effect was quite striking. “You must have been something to see in your prime, sir. Ah, now, ah now, steady.” The General struggled away, eyes rolling, mouth working. “You’re in fine strong spirits, sir, but we must be going.”
In the end, Creedmoor had to carry the General outside in both arms like he was carrying an unsatisfactory bride back out over the threshold. This quickly posed problems, for two local fellows tried to rush him with clubs and throwing-axes and it was a damn difficult trick to shoot them while shielding the General—and without dropping him, for though the earth was rain softened—and quivering now, puddles shimmering and rippling at the sound of the oncoming machines—the General was so fragile, so thin that he might break himself falling on a featherbed.
—This is going to get tiresome.
—Stop whining, Creedmoor. Flee to the west.
Liv ran past the Mortons’ house, and saw through the window that inside the house was no longer silent or dark. Sally Morton was awake, and working. She and three other women, two of them as young as she, one old enough to be her grandmother, stood