again, but I know as well as anyone that it only gets easier each time. I suggest you put a stop to the killing now, before you develop the habit of it, and cut me loose.”
“Why should I, Creedmoor?”
“My master is gone.”
“I know. Will it return?”
“Not to me. At least I don’t think so. It doesn’t often happen that our masters are broken and we survive. The Linesman did what I could not, bless ’em, they—”
“You’re bleeding badly, Creedmoor.”
“Not as bad as it looks. Much of it was healed. Untie me and ban dage my wounds.”
“I should leave you to die, Creedmoor.”
“My master is gone, Liv.”
“That excuses nothing.”
She left him and walked over to the General. He didn’t say another word.
The General, like Creedmoor, lay on his back. His arms were splayed. Blood formed a strange shapeless shadow around him. At first Liv thought he was dead—but then, as she approached, he took a single heaving ragged breath. Blood spattered on his lips, on the beard and mustaches that the doctors of New Design had so neatly groomed. After that, his breathing was shallow, rapid, but constant.
Liv touched the wound gently. The flesh around it was stiff, blackening, as if poisoned. The General was muttering beneath his breath. His face was terribly pale. She held his hand and it was cold. He stared up fixedly at the dark sky, the few harsh phosphor stars. Liv held his hand helplessly and waited for him to die. His eyes were fierce but unfocused in time.
His voice slowly rose into audible registers, quavering, sounding as if from a great distance. His hand tightened in hers as if he knew she was there, as if at last he desperately wanted her to be there.
“. . . again,” he said. “Once again. Dying once again under the stars, alone. A cause that is always failing and faltering. Another lost battle, and another.”
Liv felt an urge to reach for a pen and notepaper. Instead she clutched at his hand—no longer cold, now tense and feverishly hot—and leaned in close.
“And every time, I promise myself again to the cause, to the stars, to the future. And I come back down the mountain colder and less human. I hardly know my daughter, my wife. Everything changes on these nights. Oh, it’s hard to go on. . . .”
He spoke as if he was repeating himself, mouthing the lines of some speech—as if he were finally forcing out words he’d been holding mutely inside for years.
Creedmoor came crawling closer. Liv raised a hand, and he held his distance.
“Death and rebirth. I thought this time might finally be the last. I went up the mountain. . . .”
CHAPTER 51
THE GENERAL SPEAKS
~ 1878 ~
The General went up the mountain in the early days of spring, when the snows receded. Birch and pine breathed cool life into the foothills. There were vibrant purple pine-flowers underfoot. The white topknots of fat shy quail whistled through the underbrush. A clear and cold quality of sunlight. He took the time to comment on those matters to Master Jodrell, who was taking dictation on a sheet of paper flattened over the rusty lid of their ammunition case. The General sat stiff-backed on his shooting stick; Jodrell crouched at his side.
“Don’t write that down, Jodrell. Don’t write that down.”
The boy paid the flowers, the pines, no mind; that troubled the General. A man should have a sense of nature and of beauty. One might so easily become less than a man, in those desperate last days of the Republic. Striking from the shadows, hiding in the alleys, the remnants of a great cause might become monsters. And on the mountain’s barren peak, and in the troubled darkness beneath, it would be easy to forget. . . .
It took an hour for the General to finish dictating his letter. He addressed it to his daughter, and to his granddaughter, whom he’d never met. It was impossible for him to write to his wife—the General was not brave enough for that—but he hoped one letter would do for them all. He promised them: This is the last time. This is truly the last time. The end is in sight. In the halls of Kan-Kuk’s people . . .
Kan-Kuk himself stood among the trees, some twenty feet away, still and tall and thin as the pines, gnarled and bone white as birch. Watching with disapproval. Silent as a stone. The secret was for the General alone; the General was their