The Horns of Ruin (14 page)

"Careful now," he said. He passed a palm over my
head, whispering some invokation of anatomy. He had put on his Healer's rings,
a dull silver cuff for each finger, and they glowed a dim blue as he watched me
with nervous eyes. "That was an unusual method of drowning."

"What happened?" I asked. My head felt like it
had been stuffed with kindling and then used to start a particularly stubborn
fire. The Justicar put his palm against my forehead, shook his head, then began
to invoke. His skin was cool and wet, surprisingly soft. I closed my eyes and
lay back against the damp tunnel wall. "Where are we?"

"Under the water," he said, then broke contact.
The pain in my head dampened to a soft roar. "There's some mechanism in
the water that dragged us in here. You should be fine until we get to the
surface."

"A force?" I sat up again and looked at the
waterfall. The water flickered light. I could detect a pulse in my bones now,
not unlike the feeling I got standing on the monotracks, staring at the distant
tower of the impellor. "This is how the Amonites got away?"

"Probably. Clever kids, those Scholars." He stood
up, hunching under the curved brick ceiling. "We can talk about it later.
I've got people to attend."

"Did our wounded get through?" I asked.

"Some of them. There must be a point in the water
where the field is most effective. We just brushed it. Lucky, really." He
started to turn away, then paused. "Some of those ... things came through,
too. We cut them and threw them back."

"What about the girl?"

He nodded down the hallway. "Yeah. We've got her
guarded, best we can. Took her toys away and made her drowsy." He rubbed
his knuckles around the cuffs, like an old man worrying the arthritis from his
bones. "She's scared, Eva."

"Yeah. I scare people."

"Not sure it's you. Not sure it's any of us." He
pulled one of his cuffs off, buffed it against his shirt, and put it back on.
"Anyway."

I nodded, and he returned to the row of bodies lined up
along the center of the corridor, checking pulses and invoking his rings. I
eased myself into a more comfortable position and did a quick inventory of the
meat. One of the Healers had already patched me up, Owen or one of his boys. I
felt pretty good, for a girl who had just fought off a horde of dead men,
followed promptly by a short period of drowning and unconsciousness. My sword
was in its sheath, either returned by one of my fellow survivors or plucked out
of the water by the articulators as it fell out of my hand. Watching the sheath
do its thing could be creepy sometimes, like watching a spider pounce across
the tense strands of its web. But it was good at what it did.

"How much of the city is like this?" I asked
myself, quietly. The waterfall at the end of the hallway looked like a living
painting, an artifact from the time of the Feyr. Might even be that old, though
most of their ancient city had been torn apart after the siege. "How many
burrows are there, for our little Amonite friends to hide in?"

"He did build the city," Owen said. He was
sitting against the curve of the wall behind me, still rubbing his hands.
"Who knows what Amon laced between the walls?"

"These guys do, obviously." I looked up at him.
"If I can't get the girl to talk, maybe we should have a chat with your
friends in the Library Desolate."

He shook his head. "We've found places like this
before. Hidden rooms, empty tunnels. Sometimes evidence that someone had just
left, or maybe provisioned the place like they intended to come back. We've
interrogated the captive Scholars about it. Nothing."

"There are no plans for the city, somewhere?"

"Sure. They were in Amon's personal library. The one
you guys burned to the ground."

"Ah. Well." It had happened in the angry days
between Morgan's murder and Amon's capture. "Sorry about that."

He shrugged, then pulled off his Healer's rings and dropped
them into a satchel on his belt. "We should get going. A lot of these guys
can't be moved, and they're beyond my abilities. We'll have to bring a real
Healer down here."

"Sure." I stood, then looked around the corridor.
"Can your guys watch the girl?"

"Cassandra. She said her name is Cassandra."

I looked at him in the dim light of the waterfall. He
wouldn't meet my eyes.

"Can your guys handle her?"

"Sure. She's out. Come on."

I nodded and checked my pockets. "I think I lost my
gun. You see it?"

"Nope. Then again, I lost ten guys and whatever
evidence those monsters destroyed on the way. So maybe I wasn't looking too
hard for your gun."

He spoke quietly to one of the Healers he was leaving
behind to watch the injured, then pulled a frictionlamp from his pack and
started down the corridor. I followed, balancing my way past the line of dead
and injured that took up the center of the path. We walked that way longer than
I expected. Cassandra was at the end of the row, three Healers crouched around
her, taking turns touching light fingers to her temples, her wrists, her
ankles. She was out. She looked a lot paler in the frictionlight than I
remembered. Once we were past all the quiet bodies, Owen and I walked in
silence and shadows.

The brick tunnel led to a series of ladders that ended in a
monostation on the city's inner horn. It was pretty clear that these were
maintenance tunnels. There were doors that led to rooms that were nothing but
machine and conduit, loud, hammering rooms that looked as if they'd been
running for generations and could run for generations more. Several times the
tunnel filled with vented smoke or steam, only to ventilate just as suddenly
through hidden ports.

Also plenty of signs of recent traffic. Someone had bled
all over one of the ladders, someone else had thrown up in a cubby-room off the
main drag. There were abandoned clothes, a bag of dinnerware thrown to one
side, even a muzzleloader that probably hadn't been fired in years, propped up
between two pipes. There was plenty of dust, too, but it had been disturbed.
This passage was ancient and hardly used. It was an easy trail to follow.

"How many people know about these places?" I
asked. It was the first thing either of us had said since we'd left Owen's
people behind. "Amonites come down here for maintenance, remember it when
they get away from your zero-escape-rate Library?"

He shook his head thoughtfully. "Probably not.
Maintenance is a problem. We know these passages exist, we just don't know
where they are. Long as something doesn't break, we don't worry about it."

"And if something does break?"

He shrugged. "We dig to it."

Once we were on the surface, Owen disappeared to coordinate
the rescue party. They closed off the monotrain station and filled the newfound
tunnel with men carrying lamps and shotguns. I waited until the girl was
brought up, arranged an escort for her back to Alexander's royal court where
she could be questioned about the Fratriarch's disappearance, then lost
interest. I had been gearing up emotionally for a hell of a chase, and it had
just ended in a flash. There was still the Fratriarch to find, and these
coldmen to figure out, but for now I was between tasks. I caught the last mono
the Healers let stop at that station and began the long series of circular
orbits and exchanges that would get me back to the Strength of Morgan.

I sat alone in the plush cabin of the mono, staring at the
pendant Cassandra had left for me on the dock. It was the Fratriarch's, though
not something associated with his office. More accurate to say that it belonged
to Barnabas, the man I knew, rather than the Fratriarch I served. He had been
wearing it as long as I'd known him, which had been forever. As long as I can
remember, at least.

Did this mean that she knew where he was? If her
compatriots were holding him captive, he would be bound and nearly naked. The
icons of the faith are powerful tools for channeling the invokations of Morgan.
My sword was an obsessively precise mimic of Morgan's own blade, the Grimwield.
Same with the revolver. My armor, the pauldrons and gauntlets and greaves, all
mirrored Morgan's battle dress, at least in style and spirit. At the higher
levels of the faith, the icons became more obscure and more genuine. The staff
Barnabas carried had at its core the driftwood staff that Morgan had carried
with him into the mountains during the Thousand Lost Days. Many of the pendants
and charms that the Elders wore or had stamped onto their robes reflected some
aspect of Morgan's personal life. Some were genuine, some were decoy, to
protect the secrets of Morgan's life. It was only knowledge of these things that
powered them, and that knowledge was carefully guarded by the ranks of the
initiated.

So they would have stripped the old man. Of his robe, his
jewelry, even that ancient staff. This pendant would have been taken from him,
too. The girl could have lifted it from the stash of his belongings, feeling
some regret perhaps over her involvement in his kidnapping. It didn't make any
sense.

Soon enough, the Chanters of the Cult of Alexander would
find their way into the girl's brain, and then we'd know. It was a slow
process, but she didn't seem the type to give it up to fear or intimidation. I
sighed and rested my head against the glass of the window. I'd know, soon
enough.

The invisible fingers of the impellor swept through the
train, setting my bones to vibrate like fine crystal for the briefest of
moments. I remembered the feeling in the tunnel, of something lurking in the
water producing the same wave under my skin. Pushing me out of the water and
into that tunnel. Out the window I could see the impellor tower, set in the
middle of our perfect-circle track. I imagined the impellor itself, like a
battle hammer, rotating swiftly through its cycle, giving the train a little
push and then passing on, each little push building up momentum until the whole
mono moved. I had no idea how it worked, how the impellors from the other
towers didn't interfere with this one, how the transfer from one circle track
to the next was handled. None of it. No one in the city understood it. Except
the Amonites. The wave passed through my bones again, and I sighed and closed
my eyes.

I didn't like the idea that was forming in my head. It
wasn't the Amonites, or at least not the local breed that I knew. The people I
had seen lived in squalor. They lived to survive, and they lived with their
families. They didn't have the kind of technology needed to take down the
Fratriarch. And I'd seen no sign of the coldmen, until the end. Certainly I'd
seen no sign of the Cult of the Betrayer, no one who would have carried the
icon we had recovered melted into the cobbles at the crash site. And the
coldmen showing up ... what did that mean? Why had they shown up? Were they
reacting to my attack, coming to defend their masters, or did our paths just
run parallel? Were they looking for the girl?

I pulled the pendant on over my head and tucked it into my
shirt. It was warm against my breasts. I held my hand over it for a while, and
stared out the window at the towers that moved us around the city of Ash.

The disassembled bullistic revolver shone golden in the
heat of the forge. It was spread out on an anvil of trueiron, each piece set
with ritual precision. A row of bullets lay below it, balanced on their
casings, like tiny soldiers at attention. I had looked down at this spread a
thousand times. At my side, my hands itched to go through the motions of
assembly. Not yet.

Tomas stood behind the anvil, dressed in the leather robe
of the Blacksmith. He held the ornate hammer of the role in both hands. We were
both sweating hard. Tomas looked uncomfortable behind the anvil. This was
usually Barnabas's job, but he wasn't around. Tomas lifted the hammer and
weakly struck the anvil near the barrel of the weapon. Still, the metal pieces
of the weapon jumped.