sheets that washed the world away five feet in front of Lowry’s face. And the signal from the device in the gold watch the woman carried was weak; in the constant crashing rain, the ethereal vibrations of the device’s delicate hammers and rods were lost—drowned—damn it. Four artillery pieces and two motor guns sank in mud. Two of the telegraph devices were ruined, and one of the two amplifiers, despite all efforts to waterproof them. Patrols went out and they came back days late, or not at all, as if washed away. Their weapons jammed so bad, it was a good thing they couldn’t catch up with the Agent; he would have slaughtered them. They crept forward. Every foot they slogged forward, they slid six inches back.
After ten days, the rains broke without warning or apology—just plain stopped and the clouds parted and the sun came roaring on in, and within ten minutes the Linesmen were steaming and baking in their soaked uniforms. Some of the men put their heads back and turned their pale faces to the sun.
“Well, come on, then,” Lowry roared. “Let’s get moving again. Come on, come on.”
Fuck the weather out here. It made no sense and it had no decency at all. That was how it was out there, over the border of creation and into lands not yet reduced to order. How Lowry longed to see all that land subdued and made sane.
The rains had come out of a cloudless sky without warning—a sudden madness of the heavens. Mud and rain came roaring downslope toward them. The first thing they lost were their horses. One was washed from its feet and broke its leg. The other fled into the rains and was lost from view. After that, Creedmoor and Liv moved on foot from shelter to shelter, caves and overhangs, as one rat-hole after another flooded. Very soon there was no shelter. “High ground,” Creedmoor said. “High ground!” He slung the General’s brittle body over his shoulder. Liv staggered behind, sliding in the mud; sometimes Creedmoor had to carry her, too. The rains seemed to pour down for years; they seemed to have been pouring forever. The drumming and pounding of it drove all thoughts out of Liv’s skull except survival, and soon even that was beyond her, and all she could do was inch along in Creedmoor’s wake. From time to time, Creedmoor was talking to her, but she couldn’t hear his words; in the gray hell of driving water, she could barely see his mouth working.
She took the last of her tonic; cupping her shaking hands to keep the rain out, she drank down the dregs of the vial. She risked overdose, but she did not expect to survive the rains anyway. For some uncountable blissful period of time, she felt nothing at all; she believed she was following Creedmoor, but she could not be sure of it; the rains were gentle and their purpose clear and sane.
But that was the last of it. As it left her body, her joints racked with pain and her head burned; Liv lay in a cave, while the rains pounded outside, and the last of that sickly-sweet poison sweated out of her crawling skin. It seemed that Creedmoor stood over her and wiped the sweat from her brow. It seemed that her mother was there, holding her, whispering to her, scolding her for her weakness. Her very good friend Agatha from the Faculty of Mathematics offered to make her green tea, and stirred poison into it with a dirty knife. The cave’s walls crawled and glimmered with the Folk red markings, and it seemed she was watched, from the cave’s far shadows, from beneath a vast and wild black mane, by curious alien eyes in a deathly white face. She thought she was going to die, but she did not.
When she returned to herself, she was not in a cave, and perhaps never had been; she was slogging along through mud, Creedmoor’s arm around her shoulder as he pulled her and pushed the General and yelled, “Faster, Liv! They’re closing.”
It was still raining.
A Line patrol blundered upon them.
They were slogging ankle deep across a plain of seemingly infinite mud and rain in search of shelter. Creedmoor forged on ahead, shoulders down, the General in his arms. Liv stumbled after him, screaming, “Creedmoor!”
He screamed back, “Keep moving!” One had to scream to be heard over the rains.
“Where are we going, Creedmoor?”
“How would I know? Forward. West