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Valentine quit breathing, froze. Sixteen holes in the legworm's side. He lifted a piece of loose skin, saw stitching in the legworm's hide.
He looked around, kicked some more refuse under the legworm's nose. He marked rings around the light sensors that passed for eyes. The creature wasn't old; it was ill cared for and badly fed. It had clearly been ridden on very little feed recently.
The legworm's anchor detached with a casual press to the carabiner attaching the drag chains to the fire hydrant serving as a hitching post.
"You!" he called to the smoker on the corner of the main drag. "Get everyone back from this side of the building. This worm's a bomb!"
When is it set to go off ?
Valentine unsheathed his knife and prodded the creature in its sensitive underside.
Valentine crept along, keeping low in the gutter, moving the legworm along with shallow stabs. Clear fluid ran down the knife blade, making his hand sticky.
The legworm angled left, drawing away from the building as it slowly turned from the conference center, tracing a path as gradual a curve as an old highway on-ramp.
Duckwalking made his bad leg scream with pain. Valentine waited for the cataclysm that would snuff his life out like a candle in a blast of air.
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."
