snapping on the round bottle-glass goggles. In theory, the gas had long since dissipated, but Lowry didn’t like to take risks. Once he was fully ready, he opened the door and stepped out onto Greenbank’s Main Street.
It was the early hours of morning, and the sky was flat and gray. Smoke shadowed the town. The Grand Howell Hotel and the Howell Bank and half the buildings on Main Street were crumbling ruins. Fires still smoldered here and there.
Lowry slipped for a second on a drift of loose ashes. He waved away the Subaltern’s offer of a helping hand and stamped his way down Main Street, over the bodies, to the scaffold his men had erected in the square.
Three bodies hung from it, trussed up by bloody ropes like butchers’ pheasants.
Two were dead. One Lowry knew from the Black File: Dagger Mary. The other was a woman, too. Red hair. No other remaining identifiable features.
It hadn’t been possible to capture the women alive. The women had been the worst. They usually were.
The third was an old man. Face handsome but badly bruised now. Long gray hair wild and matted with blood. Mustache burned. He’d been wearing an elegant russet silk suit when the morning’s operation began. After he’d finally been beaten to the ground, he’d been stripped of its torn and bloodied remains. He now hung naked, ropes cutting into his pale flesh. His torso was a ragged mass of wounds. An ordinary man would have been dead long ago. He looked ridiculous, vile.
There’d been a fourth and final Agent. Name unknown. He’d fled. Yet to be recovered.
“Fanshawe, right? You called yourself Dandy Fanshawe.”
The old man lifted his head and grinned. His left eye was closed with blood. The right regarded Lowry with contempt.
“So I did. I was famous and that name will not be forgotten. Do you have a name, Linesman? Does it matter?”
A gesture of psychopathic dignity. Lowry said nothing.
The Agent laughed. Lowry was glad his own eyes were hidden behind the dull glass shields of the gas mask; he wouldn’t want the Enemy to see him flinch.
Behind him, his men cleared away the dead.
Very little of Greenbank had survived the engagement. If it had been possible without alerting the enemy, Lowry would have preferred to warn Greenbank’s people to evacuate.
“You did this,” he said. “You made this necessary. Skulking among innocents.”
The Agent rolled his good right eye. “Oh, please, Linesman.”
The Agent’s left eye was already starting to heal. His masters’ hideous power still flowed into him, mending his flesh. Lowry could see broken bones writhing and knitting under the old man’s skin. Within a couple of hours, he’d be as strong as ever.
“Show me your face, Linesman. Are you ugly? All Linesmen are ugly, of course, but how ugly are you? This matters to me. Show your face. Are you afraid of me? Still?”
He was. He’d never stood so close to an Agent. He had a stone of fear in his gut, and his skin crawled. He folded his hands behind his back to stop them shaking. He stared up at the Agent from behind his mask.
How many had Fanshawe killed? The Subalterns were still reckoning up the extent of the losses, but they were heavy. The capacity of Lowry’s forces had been very significantly degraded. Numerous Vessels, Ironclads, and trucks lay broken and smoldering all around. Bodies filled the streets in every direction—many of them were Greenbank’s former citizens, but more than Lowry would have liked wore the black of the Line. Dozens were dead at Fanshawe’s hands, and that wasn’t counting the tolls taken by the women.
“I won’t ask your name, Linesman. It doesn’t matter. Your kind have no names.”
“Lowry.”
“You’re boring me, Linesman. You are a very ugly and inferior man.”
“Fanshawe. We have a file on you.”
“No doubt you do. Does it liven your dull life to read it? I imagine it does. I could tell you some stories, Linesman.”
“A sodomite. And an opium fiend.”
“What of it?”
“Creedmoor gave up your location, Fanshawe.”
In a manner of speaking, that was true. Creedmoor had spoken his own name, and Fanshawe’s name, and the name of the Grand Hotel in Greenbank, in the presence of the Doctor’s signaling device. Five hours later, the Signal Corps had translated the information and brought it urgently to Lowry’s attention.
Fanshawe lifted an ironic eyebrow and said nothing. Lowry had hoped for more of a reaction.
“Where’s Creedmoor going now, Fanshawe?”
Lowry had hoped to catch Creedmoor with the rest of them. No such luck. The Agent