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The hungry legworm hit some of the overgrowth at the end of street. What had once been a pleasant river walk had largely collapsed into brush and small trees. The starving legworm settled into a hurried munch.
Valentine, launching off his good leg, used a saddle chain to swing up and over the beast and dashed for the convention center.
Whoever had spread the alarm didn't do a very good job. Several delegates, their ID cards whipped by the wind, ran out the doors on the worm's side.
"Not that way," Valentine yelled, waving them toward the main street.
Koosh! Koosh! Koosh! Koosh!
Valentine had his face in the pavement. Later, he was told by witnesses that some kind of charges had fired out of one side of the beast like cannons firing in an old pirate movie. Most of the charges fell in the Ohio, detonating in white fountains like a long series of dynamite fishing charges. Valentine, deafened, felt the patter of worm guts all around.
When the thunder stopped, he stood up. The worm had been opened messily, mostly in the direction of the river. Part of the northwest corner of the conference center looked like it had been struck by artillery fire.
Troops, police, and citizenry were running in from all directions. Valentine went to work getting help to the figures knocked off their feet or staggering around in a daze, turning chaos into order.
Valentine felt something squish and slip underfoot as he directed the confusion. He glanced down, expecting a brown smear of dog feces, and realized he was standing on a length of human intestine.
Incredibly, within a few hours of the blast the Assembly had reconvened.
"They are ready to vote," Brother Mark said. "They've excluded all non-Kentuckians from the Assembly."
Valentine saw the Evansville delegates decamp en masse for the beer halls and wine gardens of Owensboro-if you called a wood- paneled interior with a couple of potted palms a garden, that is.
"Which way do you think it'll go?" Valentine asked.
"Our, or rather, freedom's way, praise God. You know, that bomb ended up being ironic. It was obviously meant to blow the Assembly apart, but it ended up pulling them together. Another foot stuck well into mouth on the part of the Kurian Order. The one man killed was named Lucius F. B. Lincoln, by the way-a delegate from Paducah. A good name for today's entry into Kentucky history. He ended up doing more for the Cause by dying than we'll ever do, should we both live out our threescore and ten. The Assembly's all talking to each other again. I think they know those shaped charges would have torn through the Old Dealers or All-Ins without discriminating according to political belief."
"That's a hard way to put it," Valentine said.
"It's a hard world. I tell you, Valentine, that bomb couldn't have worked better if we planned it and one of our Cats had done it herself."
"You don't think we did, I hope," Valentine said.
"I don't know that we're that clever."
"I'd say ruthless," Valentine said.
"Oh, mass manipulation isn't all that hard," Brother Mark said. "I had whole seminars devoted to it. We're herd animals, Valentine. One good startle and we flock together. Then once you get us going, we all run in the same direction. There's a lot of power in a stampede, if you channel it properly."
"Perhaps. But it can also send your herd right off a cliff," Valentine said, "the way our ancestors used to hunt buffalo. Saved a lot of effort with spears and arrows."
"You're a curious creature, son. I can never make out whether you're a shepherd or a wolf."
"Black sheep," Valentine said.
"No, there's hunter in you."
Valentine nodded to some relief sentries, and said to them, "When the post has been turned over, head over to the diner and get some food. Kentucky is buying our meals, for once."
He turned back to the old churchman. "When I was inducted into the Wolves, the Lifeweaver warned me I'd never be the same. I'd be forever sundered from my fellow man, or words to that effect. I was too keen to get on with it to pay much attention."
"It's a bargain most of the men in your profession make, and it's a very, very old one. War changes a man, separates him from someone who hasn't seen it. You're both exalted and damned at the same time by the experience."
"What about you?" Valentine asked. "You've seen your share of fighting."
"Oh, I was damned before I saw my first battlefield."
Valentine was organizing his soldiers to block nonexistent traffic two blocks away from the convention center, using old rust buckets dragged into position as roadblocks.
