The world was drowned by a wave of the gritty black smoke that poured from the mouth of the Engine carrying her.
Their boiling black blood, their breath!
Coal-dust fragments spun in the haze and reflected the electric light from her window. Liv let the blind fall, and she tried to busy herself in her puzzle again.
Maggfrid was now thoroughly panicked. The Engine plainly terrified him. He darted his eyes from side to side as if expecting attack. Liv cursed herself for leaving him—not to mention for bringing him in the first place.
“Maggfrid. Come on, Maggfrid. Shall we play a game?”
She no longer studied his condition—she had accepted long ago it was congenital, and incurable. But he still enjoyed the motions of her analysis—the cards, the questions. It calmed him. He answered her questions with great seriousness, as if he were engaged in a project of enormous importance.
Why not? It would pass the time.
Maggfrid got the small medicine bag down from the compartment. Under the calipers and the various vials of brightly colored serums and powders were the cards.
The apparatus she used for the electric-cure was in the big black case overhead, safely cushioned in rags and old curtains. The applicator needles and plates, and the tongue depressors without which it was not safe, were all in the smaller bag.
She shuffled the cards and took the first one off the top of the pile. It was made of stiff wheat-yellow stock; it was printed with a complex dark pattern. “What do you see, Maggfrid?”
“. . . a dog.”
“Very good. And this?”
“. . . a house.”
“Excellent. Do you remember the name of the town we left this morning?”
“. . . ”
“It was called Gloriana, Maggfrid. But never mind. No, don’t look so sad. Let’s look at this card again, shall we?”
Time passed and outside the cabin the day wore into evening, though the monotone electric light inside never changed. At last Maggfrid slept, tired by his efforts. She tapped out three green smoky drops of her nerve tonic into a glass of water and soon she joined him, her bright hair lolling on the black of the seat back.
The Engine rushed endlessly on, never stopping, seemingly never swerving—though in fact, Liv knew from the maps she’d studied that it was curving in a wide arc south and southwest through the lands of the Line and then west out into the wild lands. Green hills gave way to sage and rust red. If the stories were true, then ahead of them in the dark untamed hills of the night waited Agents of the Gun. Liv wasn’t sure whether to fear them or not—she could hardly believe that any man could assault or even slow that dreadful Engine on which she traveled, no matter what sort of spirit or demon they’d trucked with.
The Engine obliterated space, blurred solid earth into a thin unearthly haze, through which it passed with hideous sea-monster grace.
The noise waxed and waned but never ceased. The chatter of pistons and hammers; low and sad moaning of steel under stress; the grinding of gears and the hiss of steam. The Song of the Line. What were they singing to each other? Orders and plans and schemes, no doubt. They planned in terms of leagues and multitudes. They sang to each other all across the continent.
Periodically Liv checked her golden pocket watch. It didn’t work; it had stopped entirely soon after she boarded the carriage. She had no good idea how much time was passing.
She opened the blind and saw that they were passing through the foothills of gray and white-capped and distant mountains. They rushed through dark pines. She closed the blind. When she opened it again—an hour, two hours later?—the mountains were gone.
Liv wrote in her journal. Maggfrid closed his eyes and listened; he seemed to find the scratching of her pen soothing. He had a touching faith in science. His brow twitched.
I am aboard the Gloriana Engine, in Compartment 317C. Sometimes I am too excited to read, and at other times I am dreadfully bored. None of the other passengers come to talk to me. There is none of the camaraderie of a sea voyage, or of Mr. Bond’s caravan. And I dare not intrude on them. It would seem sacrilegious, somehow.
The food is quite appalling. It tastes of ash and coal and dust.
What did the Engine look like? I saw it on the Concourse, but only in shadow, and besides, the memory