The Horns of Ruin (23 page)

Even deaf to the Song, I could still feel it, feel the
tension in its octaves and the crashing rhythm of its power. Before there had
been a serene majesty to it, but now it was swollen with fear and violence.
Whatever the Chanters were weaving, it was born of desperation.

I came around the corner and found that the Chanters' dome
was being unmade. Some great power had split the dome in half, and the two
sections were grinding together. My half of the building was sinking. Above me,
I could see the floors that had once been parallel to my own, crumbling as they
rose up into the air. Looking down, I could see the cracked heart of the
building, the ornate wooden chamber of the Song, where the Elders of the Cult
held watch over the ancient hymn. Smoke rose up from that chamber. On all
sides, black water from the lake was spilling into the structure.

And with the water, hordes of the coldmen. They remained
limp as corpses as the water carried them sloppily over the moat's edge,
pouring into the building, spilling out over the floors and hallways that were
suddenly revealed to the sky. They became animate only as they reached stone,
dragging themselves to unsteady feet, then drawing out their blades and rushing
into the structure. None had reached my floor yet, but they seemed intent on
gaining the heart of the building, where the Song warbled and raged.

This was unexpected. I had come to try to convince the
Chanters to turn Cassandra over to my custody. Failing that, I was going to
steal the girl, and consequences be damned. At the worst, I was concerned that
the Betrayer might try to assassinate her while she was in the hands of
Alexander's people. Since Simeon had arranged his meeting with an Alexian
friend, it seemed likely that the Cult of the Betrayer had infiltrated
Alexander's power structure. If they could lead an Elder of Morgan into a trap,
surely they could arrange to have a prisoner of the Chanters killed without
causing too much of a fuss.

But this? There was more force here than had been used to
kidnap the Fratriarch. Surely the girl wasn't more important than Barnabas? Was
she?

The details would matter later. For now I was on a sinking
island, swamped with undead warriors, and stone deaf. There was so much
destruction that I could feel it in my bones, in my meat, but my mind was
wrapped in a thick cloud of roaring silence. I tried to invoke and stumbled on
the words. Power would not come to me if I couldn't form the words of the
invokation. I was alone, and I had to get to Cassandra.

Cassandra was somewhere above me, in the half of the dome
that was thrusting up into the sky like a new mountain range. Assuming they
hadn't moved her while I was drinking black wine with Lesea. Assuming she
wasn't already dead, wiped out in the first strike that had torn the dome
asunder. Assuming.

The water continued to rise around me, and some of the coldmen
spotted me and lumbered over. There was something different about these guys.
Less armor, more flesh. Their skin was bloated, crisscrossed with deep cuts
that had been hurriedly sewn together with thick leather cord. They still had
the goggle eyes and the staticky voice boxes, but these were bolted crudely
into their faces. Their weapons were just as wicked, though, just as sharp.
They rushed me.

It was a poor-quality fight. I swept the length of my blade
underhand, pushing the tip about four inches into the first guy's belly and
drawing it up his chest until I got to his chin. His ribs popped like a cheap
zipper. He stumbled back and I maintained the sword's momentum, passing it
overhead and then laterally. I put steel on his neck, near the base of the blade,
driving straight through the meat and bone and coming out the other side with
most of the weapon's speed still intact. I went to one knee, rotated, and drove
the blade right through his companion's thighs. They fell away from me, falling
tonelessly into the dark water that was beginning to pool around my ankles.
Quick fight. These guys didn't have the constitution of the coldmen I had
encountered before.

But there were a lot of them. More than I had the time or
patience to deal with, frankly. Let the Chanters guard their home. Before any
more of the hastily stitched dead men could waylay me, I slid down the ruined
chasm of the dome. Tiny waterfalls followed me, and avalanches of shale. When I
got low enough, I was able to jump across the chasm, landing in a heap among
broken instruments. I was low enough that I could see the fight that was
boiling around the breach in the central chamber. Chanters, badly outnumbered
and dwindling by the second, swarmed by the clumsy coldmen. I think there were
Feyr among the defenders. Strange, but a puzzle for another day.

I climbed the rumbling incline of the shattered dome. The
ghosts of sounds were starting to penetrate my head, even though my eardrums
must surely be blown. The Song was such a violent thing, but even it was
drowning in the groan of the building, the tectonic explosions and shifting
architecture of the island. I looked down and saw water bubbling in the chamber
below, working its way through organ pipes and articulated voice machines. I
shivered and climbed on, as the Song began to fade from my bones.

When I got to the level where I thought Cassandra might be,
I slid into the corridor. This whole half of the structure was leaning away
from vertical, and once-level passages had become more like amusement park
rides. Below me, the singing had stopped, or at least fallen to a level at
which it no longer penetrated my deafness. The air was thick with dust. There
were bodies on the ground, caked in dirt and their own blood. I couldn't tell
if these were Chanters or their attackers. It didn't matter. I slid past them
and down into the crumbling structure.

The lights were failing. I tried to invoke the Ghosteyes,
but the words were thick on my deafened tongue and the invokation failed. Wisps
of bluish light splintered out from me, scattering around the room before
disappearing. I crept along, mostly blind, completely deaf, nothing but my
hands and the weight of my sword to guide me. Something shifted far below and
the floor tilted a little more. I wondered if it was an Amonite engine that
kept this place up. I wondered if the scions of the Betrayer, Amon the
Murderer, would know how best to disable the work of their god.

Someone stumbled out of the shadows and took a swipe at me.
I punched him with the pommel of my sword, swept his legs from under him, then
held my elbow across his throat until he stopped struggling. I raised his face
up close to mine to get a better look. One of Cassandra's guards. Glad I hadn't
just sliced him open. I wasn't quite at the point of taking up arms against all
the scions of the Brothers Immortal. Not yet. And it looked like I was getting
close to where I needed to be.

Sure enough, the next corner was familiar. A frictionlamp
glowed dimly on its bracket, just outside a very memorable, very heavy door. I
tried to invoke again with a little better success, coming away with enough
strength to wedge the door aside. The guards were gone, but Cassandra remained,
limp on the floor in her chains.

I said her name, then again, louder. She looked up, nodding
when she saw me. Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear her. I pulled one of the
chains taut, laid it out against the stone, and took an invoked swing at it. My
swing struck as much stone as steel, and there were sparks. It was enough. One
of the chains snapped open. With the loop broken, Cassandra was able to gather
up the rest of the links and stand. She was as free as I could make her in my
present state. I sheathed the blade and put my arm around her. Leaning on each
other, we struggled out of the room and back into the hallway.

She leaned her head against me and spoke some more. I
couldn't hear her, so I shook my head. She put her forehead directly against my
head, the vibrations of her voice getting through my throbbing silence.

Thank you.

"Sure thing," I said, or I think I said. And
that's when they hit.

It was a whole cadre of the coldmen, the true breed, the
ones who had kidnapped the Fratriarch. They came out of the deeper parts of the
building, boiling up from the darkness, their eyes glowing blue and green as
they rushed us. The girl fell off my arm, or I pushed her, and the bully was in
my hand. I stitched lead into the first couple of them, and then they were too
close. In one motion I holstered the bully and went for my sword. The blade cut
them as I drew it, the articulated sheath spinning the sword under my arm and
into my hands. The corridor was too narrow and too precarious for truly fancy
forms. I kept one hand high on the blade, on the weighted, dull length of steel
that was there for just this purpose, striking mostly with the middle of the
blade and thrusting with the tip. Trap with the hilt, push back with the
middle, spear into black blood and cold flesh with the tip. Repeat. They fell
around me.

Deaf, so I never heard the explosion that almost ended us.
The floor jumped, and we all slid in a tangle of living and dead, deeper into
the drowning building. Water, dark and cold, swallowed me. I pushed to my
knees, then my feet, scything all around me at the grasping hands. I saw Cassandra
burst from the water and swim to a tangle of metal at the center of this new
pool, then wondered how I could see, then realized that the roof was gone and
above us was yawning sky and sun.

The coldmen kept coming. They clawed out of the water and
came at me. I was without invokation, without strength or shield. All I had was
a childhood spent with a sword in my hands, a girlhood under the heavy eye of
the Elders, lived in service to my god. It would have to be enough.

The trick is to keep the blade moving. A sword like this is
only heavy if you try to stop it, or change direction, or carry it on a
thirtymile march in the woods. I have done all of these things, and I have
learned to keep the blade moving in a fight. If you do it right, the only thing
that will stop your blade is bone and meat and metal. And the only way to keep
that from happening is to keep your blade very, very sharp. I have done that
since I was a little girl. Sharp and heavy and always moving, and the strength
that comes from thirty-mile marches.

I led with the pommel, bullying the blade into the air with
my off hand on the blade rest, then launched the sword into a wide, scything
swing that spun me around. This was before I had even gotten to the coldmen.
Something to get the momentum going. I planted my feet, holding the hilt
loosely in my palms to maintain the arc of the blade without getting twisted
around, and just kept the sword moving. It was a training form, honestly, to
build strength and familiarity with the weapon. As a child I had done it with a
length of wood capped with lead. Today I did it to stay alive.

When the speed was good I shuffled forward and pushed the
orbit of the blade into the nearest coldman. It cut into him at the knees, the
shoulder, crossing back to open up his belly and finally splitting him from
neck to nuts. He fell in many pieces, the way a plate does when struck by a
stone.

I kept the motion up and two of them jumped me. There was
water here, always rising, and as I shifted my weapon from front to back it
kicked up tails in the muck. I could barely keep track of the blade's path, but
my heart knew it instinctively, adjusting to skim off of armor without losing
momentum, hardening my arms when the metal was about to find flesh or bone,
always compensating for the motion of the enemy and the crazy tilt of the
collapsing dome. All in complete silence.

The more of them that came at me, the less I felt the form
of the blade and the more of it happened without thought, without direction.
Two fell, then three. A fourth joined them and the blade moved on. I was sure
that I was cut, but could not feel it. There was blood in the air, black blood
and red, cold blood and warm, but all I felt was the joy of the blade's dance
and the opening of meat. They came and they fell away, they rushed and they
fell away. The world around me was nothing but the path of the blade.

It was over before I realized it, over and I was still
dancing. No one else came to fall against my steel. I did another pass of the
room, arcing and scything and dancing, the water kicking up all around me, the
air whistling against my face, rustling my hair. No one left but the separated
fallen at my feet. I gave the sword one last whirl and then grounded it tip
first in the earth, and all the wounds rushed at me as the momentum of the
dance left me, shuddering through my arms and the blade and into the ground. I
collapsed against the hilt, struggled to stand, heaving breath and life all
over my blade.

There were many wounds. I had not come through cleanly, but
I had come through. Leaning on the sword, I looked around the room. At the
half-submerged bodies of my enemies, at the tangle of metal and stone in the
deeper parts of the pool. At Cassandra, just standing up from behind a column
of brick. She looked frightened. I understood that. She was talking. I didn't
understand that.

A shadow passed over me and I looked up. Above us, a great
section of the dome peeled away and, slowly, gracefully, bent toward us. To
flatten us, to bury us under a world of brick and stone and metal. All that,
and the building was going to kill us.

Suddenly, Cassandra was beside me. She put one arm around
me and threw the other one up, as though shading me from the sun. Power surged
through her. I watched as the wall leaned down to us and then, suddenly, the
avalanche of tumbling brick stiffened. Around us the stones formed a dome as
they fell, stacking tight. The Cant of Making.

I looked down at Cassandra, and her eyes were fire blue as
she intoned the Cant. Her hair whipped around, as though blown in a wind that
came from inside the girl. Even her clothes, the cuffs of iron, her metal
collar, all hung as though without gravity. Even I felt light.