The Horns of Ruin (22 page)

"Eva. My name's Eva Forge."

She glanced over at me, a little surprised, then nodded.
"As you say. "

"And I suppose you don't have a name?"

"Names are part of the Song, and should not be given
away."

I grimaced and stuffed my fists into my robe. "Now you
tell me," I muttered.

She shrugged and gave a light, lilting laugh. "We will
each have our advantages in this, Eva. That is the way of these things."

There was no more talking. This tunnel led to another,
which led to another. We crossed brackish ponds and moist fern gardens, passed
under open skies and stone ceilings until we came to a final dark moat, and a
castle at the center. I looked down and saw that this was lakewater, deep and
black.

"All these walls and paths and buildings, and your
final barrier is open to the lake?" I asked.

"There are other barriers. There is more to this place
than walls and gardens, Eva."

"And I still don't know your name, and you're throwing
mine around like a shuttle. Harsh."

"Lesea," she said. "This way."

The bridge was narrow and slick, as though it was carved
from a single rib of the world's biggest fish. Lesea went first, her hands held
slightly out as if for balance. The building that I had mistaken for a castle
was really just a dome, spiked with towers like the head of a mace. The door
was a disk of iron that rolled aside on geared teeth at the Chanter's signal.
Soon as it was open I could feel their damn Song, itching into my blood. The
water of the moat rippled away from us. We hurried inside and the door settled
shut with a gasp of air pressure. The Song was louder in here, but not in a way
that you could hear. The air vibrated with the Chanters' words, pure as honey
and sharp, like a broken chime, beaten into a knife. This is why they got their
own island, kids. The city folk wouldn't put up with this on their streets.

The domed building was really just a series of airlocks and
pressure chambers, and each opened door layered on the discomfort in the air. I
could actually hear it, now, could feel it in my bones and in my teeth. The
articulated sheath seemed to cringe on my back, like a crushed spider. It was
the hardest thing not to just draw steel and start shooting. Anything to drown
out that mad Song.

The Chanters come from a narrow arc of Alexander's life
story. An unhinged time. Becoming divine had been tough on the three brothers,
and they each dealt with it in their own way. Alexander's place in the divinity
meant he was particularly sensitive to the pain and sickness of men, and his
initial reaction was to try to heal all of it. Noble, but foolish. Morgan did
not try to win all the battles, only the one before him. But Alexander locked
himself up and tried to sing a song of healing that would spread around the
whole world. To say that he failed would be ... well, polite. He went mad. The
song he tried to form ended up forming him, as he tapped into deeper and older
powers than he could ever understand. When he broke free from it, the song
continued, and became the subject of worship for certain of his followers. They
etched it, and it cut them, and together they became the Chanters.

I always felt like the Song was getting the better part of
that conversation, between scion and invokation. It seemed as if the Chanters
had to form their whole lives around this thing that they barely understood,
much less controlled. They got farther and farther away from their service to
Alexander, and became more and more their own thing. A separate thing. But the
power that this service gave them, my Brother. I didn't think Amon's captive
Cult was going to invent something to replace them anytime soon.

We stayed far enough away from the central chorus, where
the Elders of the Sect kept the Song, trading off watches to rest their voices
and their minds. The visitors' chambers were in the perimeter of the dome,
though still too deep for my comfort. They weren't really built for comfort
though, I guess. Lesea led me down a long hallway of circular doors, each
vibrating like the stops in a pipe organ. I just kept my eyes forward, my hands
at my sides. The woman next to me seemed completely at her ease, of course, and
I saw that an unnoticed tension had left her face. She looked a bit drunk,
actually.

Cassandra's door had its own little hallway, and the drone
grinding out from it was something I could feel in my lungs. Lesea paused before
she opened it and looked at me over her shoulder.

"Your shields will not help you in here, Paladin. But
I would brace yourself, nonetheless."

I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists into knots. She
nodded, then opened the door.

Cassandra was in chains, draped from heavy iron manacles
and a collar. She was on her knees, her head bowed, her eyes closed. I would
have thought her asleep if she hadn't turned her head at our entrance. There
were four Chanters with her, one at each of the cardinal points, three men and
a woman. They were singing through her, the drone of their voices whipping her
robe and hammering her bones. And yet she looked calm. In the whining harmony I
could hear a voice, nearly subsonic. Asking questions, about the Fratriarch,
the Betrayer, the kidnapping. The murders. Not direct questions, just bringing
up images and then abandoning them, like a dream that you forget with your
first breath in the morning. Yet these dreams were carried on hammer blows.
They spoke at the level of thoughts and spirit. I caught myself mouthing what I
knew of the Fratriarch, intoning the story of our first meeting, our first
fight, our first lesson together. The last time I had seen him. That I was
worried he was dead, that it was my fault.

Cassandra was silent, cocking her head to listen.

"She is unique in this," Lesea whispered to me,
though I wasn't sure she was even talking anymore. "We have never sung a
song like her."

"Do you question many Amonites?" I asked, each
word a gasp.

"We rarely have the opportunity, not since the
Betrayal. They are always difficult. Such clear thinkers. Not like ..."
She paused.

"Morgan. I know. All fire and emotion. Will she
talk?"

"She talks all the time. Just not about things that we
want to hear."

As if to demonstrate, Cassandra raised her head and spoke
to us, her eyes still closed.

"It is a series of mathematical thirds, iterated and
then reiterated across a platform of subsonic patterns. I would call it
beautiful, I think, in other circumstances." Finally, she opened her eyes
and looked at me. A little surprise. "Eva?"

I didn't answer her, and in time she shut her eyes again.
The singers did not stop. Lesea plucked at my sleeve, and I happily turned away
and followed her into the hall.

"So you see she is well," the Chanter said. Her
voice was strangely the same breathy whisper here, amidst the din of the Song,
as it had been in the quiet garden above.

"I need to speak to her, still. Alone."

"No," she said, and her voice raised a little,
gaining an echo and a vibration that unsettled me. "You do not. You are
here for other purposes, Eva Forge. I feel the dissonance in your blood."

"Oh, that's just distaste, lady. Now get her out of
those chains and give us a little privacy."

We stood, staring at each other in the cacophonous hallway,
unmoving. Finally, she nodded and motioned me away from the door.

"She is in ritual now. I will not interrupt that. But
we may sit, and talk this through." She turned and walked down the hall.
When I followed her, she glanced over her shoulder. "Can I get you
something to drink?"

"Whatever you've got," I said. "And plenty
of it."

What they had was black wine, served in crystal that hummed
between my fingers. We drank it in the quietest room I had been in since I had
entered this damned building. The walls were three feet thick and the door was
like a tombstone, rolled aside by pistons as thick as my waist and then sealed
from the inside. Still I could hear that music, running through my bones.

"How do you people stand it?" I asked, my face
buried in the wide mouth of the wineglass. "It's like living on the
monotrain."

"Hm. Yes, I suppose it would be. But this is something
you grow to love." She paused to drink. When she raised the glass to her
mouth, the fluted chimes of her mask shuffled aside. Her lips were painted
black, and she had the most delicate bones. She was careful not even to breathe
when the mask was retracted. "You would have loved it, I think. Had you
been born to the right path."

"We don't choose our paths, Lady Chanter. Not any more
than they choose us."

"How very fatalistic. Appropriate for a warrior, I
suppose."

I drank my wine and listened to the music in my bones. She
tried to start a couple conversations, but I wasn't liking it. This place
wasn't for me. It wasn't for Cassandra, either. Lesea was halfway through
describing something about octaves and the high calling of the Chanters when a
noise played its way through the horrible chorus, a noise that gave even the
good Lady Lesea pause.

To me it just sounded like more of the Song, at least at
first. The background noise of earthquakes. But then I noticed the Chanter had
stopped talking, and was sitting perfectly still with her head cocked to one
side, wineglass halfway to her mouth. Then I noticed that the chorus had kicked
it up a notch, rising in waves and tides of pure noise.

Something tore through the chorus, like a jagged line of
fire in a forest of dry grass. The Chanter dropped her glass and stood. The
mask of chimes snapped open, revealing a perfect mouth and teeth white as tile
and sharp as knives.

"Stay here," she said, and her voice ripped from
her throat like barbed honey. "I'll be right back."

I stumbled at the sound of her voice, my glass tumbling to
the floor, warm black wine splashing across the plush rug. I slid boneless from
my chair, my skull vibrating, my fingers numb. By the time my eyes cleared the
room was empty, and the door was sliding shut.

I struggled to my feet, using my sword as a crutch, leaning
against it as I swayed in the wake of Lesea's impossible voice. Even I could
hear the chaos in the Song outside. A great deal of divine violence was being
done, at octaves that barely registered to my mortal ears. I dragged myself to
the door, checked to see that it was locked, and slid back to the floor with my
back to the wall. Time for the trick.

The bullets clattered as I dropped them to the floor,
emptying the cylinder with a flick of my wrist. I loaded two blanks, special
rounds we kept to scare the hell out of crowds. Two rounds.

"Morgan, god of war, lord of the hunt," I
intoned. "Your breath is smoke, your mouth is the grave. Your skin is
fire."

My skin stiffened and then sprouted the tiniest scales,
blackening as the invokation spread across me. It wouldn't last long, but I
didn't need it to. I held the bullistic next to my ear, said a little prayer
for Barnabas and Cassandra, closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger.

Sharp pain, and then the sound of the world was sucked away
into a humming maelstrom of silence. Quickly I switched hands before I lost my
nerve, held the gun next to my other ear, and pulled the trigger. A lesser
noise, but still great pain. I stood. My eyes were burning with powder. The
scales had flashed away in the heat, but my face was blackened with powder.
Warm, thick blood poured out of my ears. The world around me was silence. I
could still feel the Song in my bones, but not in my head. I flicked the two
rounds onto the ground, reloaded my bullistic, then exchanged weapons and
invoked a silent rite of guidance.

In absolute, deafening silence, I opened the door and
stepped out into chaos and fire.

Oman lay outside the door. His
mask lay shattered by his face, and there was blood coming from his mouth. I
stepped over him and walked down the hallway, in the direction I had come from.
I found the source of all the violence just around a corner.