walking by, bloodstained and laughing and gesturing as if he was talking to himself and apparently having a wonderful time, without a fear or a care in the world, and Lowry was so suddenly so sick with envy, he had to lean against the doorframe a moment for support.
—There, Creedmoor.
Creedmoor glanced over his shoulder and saw a short gas-masked Linesman leaning oddly in a doorframe with what seemed, insofar as one could say it of a man in a gas mask, an expression of peculiar intensity. Creedmoor shot him dead, and then he shot the Linesman who stood behind him dead, too; and then it looked like there were more of them packed into that dark corridor, each of them ready to take the others’ places, a never-ending factory-line. . . .
—Too many. And men of the Republic coming. Move on.
—Yes.
He turned and ran.
Liv hid at the back of a barn, surrounded by hay bales. With the hunting knife Creedmoor had left her, she tore a shirt from the back of a dead townsman and used it to bind her ears and the General’s. She used the rags of it to dab ash and rose-pink bloody tears from her cheeks. She cradled the General’s head and whispered, “Calm, calm, calm.”
He was clean-shaven, for the first time in weeks. But he was also terribly thin, and terribly hot, as if fevered. There was a strength to his movements that seemed unhealthy, unsustainable. She was afraid he might be dying. She held him and whispered to him.
Slowly she became aware of a steady tapping, as of stone on wood, coming from overhead. She looked up.
Red eyes watched her from the dark of the rafters.
Liv said, “I remember you.”
And from behind those red eyes, a long bone-white body unfolded itself, lengthening like a shadow, lowering itself down hand-over-hand from the rafters so that for one vertiginous moment it seemed to hang from the high beams by its knuckly feet, while its fingers rattled across the straw-covered earth, and its maned head was twisted at an impossible angle, regarding Liv with expressionless red eyes.
Then it sat by her, cross-legged, its long black mane covering its white skin and the ruby glitter of its body paint. A woman. Liv recognized her: Ku Koyrik, hound of the border.
Liv asked, “What do you want?”
There was no answer. Liv loosened the cloth round her ears; but there was still no answer. The Folk woman examined her silently.
“Did you do this?” Liv gestured at the sound of fighting all around—and now she noticed that there was shooting in the street outside the barn, terribly close. “Did you bring the Line here?”
The woman cocked her head curiously.
“Why did you let them pass? Why did you let us pass, for that matter?”
The red eyes continued their examination.
“What is the General’s secret? Is there any such secret? Do you know? What do you want from him? What do you—?”
Two words floated in her mind, in a cool firm voice, not unlike her own when she was at her best:
—Quiet. Too many questions. Listen.
“What do you want—?”
—Listen. There—
There was a crack and a stray bullet from out in the street punched daylight through the wooden walls of the barn and struck the Folk woman in the back of her black mane, crushing her long skull and spattering indigo blood across the straw. She fell forward dead. Her long bones clacked and rattled and settled themselves as if cast by a fortune-teller, meaning nothing.
A brief after-shower of bullets followed, thumping pointlessly into the hay bales. Then the fighting outside moved on.
There was a smell of smoke nearby.
Liv ran crouching to the half-open doors at the far end of the barn. As she shoved the General through and out into the mud, she turned briefly back, to see that the Folk woman’s blood still stained the floor, her body still lay tangled in the hay.
Outside, New Design was in flames.
Liv saw half a dozen Linesmen stagger out of a cut between barns, wreathed in black smoke, alien as Hillfolk or insects in their gas masks and eyeglasses and noise-bafflers. A crest of fire roared along the roof of the nearest barn and the whole building fell apart, sliding, burying the Linesmen in burning timbers—good.
And Liv saw a dozen townsmen running across the beet-field with their bayonets set, and a noise-bomb went off at their feet and they fell to their knees, clutching their heads, shivering and then going still, and Liv thought how the bombs