The Horns of Ruin (24 page)

Before the new dome had finished forming, she threw an arm
out in the direction we had come, back up to the top of the building. A
physical shock wave, very concentrated, shot out from her hand. As it traveled,
the avalanche of collapsing architecture formed around it. It burrowed a tunnel
into the sky, bricks lining up and clattering together like metal suddenly
magnetized. The avalanche roared around us, the ground shook, but that tunnel
formed and held in the span of a breath. Far away, at the end of the new
tunnel, I could see a ring of blue sky. The earth settled, and it was still.

She collapsed in my arms, sobbing. My own strength was
gone, but I lifted her, and she lifted me, and together we struggled up the
tunnel and out into the light.

Owen grasped my head in his hands, palms against my ears,
and began to invoke. My skull burned like a coal. When he released me, long,
gummy strands of blood trailed from his palms to my ears. I could hear again.
It was loud.

"That was a very bad idea," he yelled, though I
could barely hear him over the rest of it. "I mean, a good idea, but a bad
one too. We probably could have made some earmuffs for you, or something."

Owen had found us huddled in a ruined gazebo, on the shore
of the copper lake where I'd seen the Feyr on my way in. The little men and
their boat were gone, and the copper lakebed was punctuated with blast marks.
The water had drained away. There was a lot of burning topiary, too. It looked
surreal, burning green horses and spirals crisping away to nothing while I
watched. This was as far as we were able to get in our condition. Owen and his
patrol of Healers were fixing us up, one at a time.

"Where'd they take you?" I asked.

"Visitors' center. More like a holding cell for the
curious. When that thing hit, though, everyone started rushing toward the
center. We just followed."

"What was it?"

"You tell me. You came out of where it struck."

I looked over at Cassandra. Her face and arms were
bloodless, and the two Healers who were attending her kept their voices low. I
saw that her ruined hand was still sleeved in that contraption of steel I had
first seen in the alleyway. How long ago had that been? Weeks? Days?

"I don't know either. We were inside, deep inside.
Whatever it was cleaved the hell out of that sanctuary of theirs." I sat
up and rubbed my head. "Doesn't make a lot of sense."

A flight of valkyn screamed by overhead. The city's
defenses had finally responded to the attack, and the island was swarming with
Alexander's peasant army. Back in the dome the Song had been replaced by a chorus
of gunfire and muffled explosions. The whole island was shaking.

"You don't want to go back in there, do you?"
Owen asked, nervously.

"I'm a Paladin of Morgan, idiot. Of course I want to
go back in. But my sworn duty is to her, and her safety." Cassandra was
sitting up now, looking around like a child woken from a nap. That Making had
taken it right out of her. "How long until they hit Alexander directly,
you think?"

"What?"

"Whoever these guys are, they're doing this for a
reason. They started with Morgan. Maybe because we're the weakest, maybe
because we have some trick that could stop them." I thought of the
archive, but didn't mention it. I didn't know how that played into this game
yet. "Now they've moved against the Chanters. Arguably the Alexians'
greatest weapons, thrown into disarray."

"This is not the time for this conversation,"
Cassandra said. She was struggling to stand. I rose and pulled her up by her
injured hand, to test its strength. She grimaced, but the hand felt strong.

"Did you do this?" I asked, holding on to her
sleeve. Her hand rested in a glove of wires and pistons, each joint articulated
by minuscule gears that twitched and shimmered with motion, even when her hand
was still. It reminded me of my sheath.

"The family didn't have any healers, and little
medicine." She pulled her hand away and hid it in her cloak. "I did
what I could."

"Does it hurt?" Owen asked. "I could do
something for it."

"No, thank you. I'll be fine."

A series of thumps resounded out of the new chasm at the center
of the island. Something deep inside the artificial ground collapsed, and the
home of the Chanters clenched in on itself. Sirens began to wail in the
distance, like the horns of the final battle sounding the ruin of the world. I
grabbed Cassandra by the shoulder.

"This is the part where we run away," I said.
"Come on."

We were not alone in our intention. The civilian population
had been fleeing the island since the disturbance had started. They were now
joined by the broken legions of the city of Ash, the valkyn arcing high
overhead, the foot soldiers trying to find the boats they had come in on being
turned aside by unit commanders who insisted the battle wasn't yet lost. The
only ones not running were the coldmen. They pursued, their stitched bodies
clamoring forward even as the ground gave way and they fell into the waters of
the lake.

We stopped at the crumbling edge of the island. The wall
had peeled away, and raw machinery bristled out of the ground, trailing into
the lake. Owen was on the communications rig, trying to find us a ride.

"It's a rout," he spat, "and the boats are
already gone. They evacced the civilians when they dropped off their
units." He pulled off the rig and peered at the city. I could see a
flotilla of transport boats steaming toward the docks. "Ten minutes at
least, before they get empty and turn around."

"Where's our boat?"

"Commandeered to assist in the evacuation." He
nodded to the distant fleet. "It's in there, somewhere."

"You got any holy tricks that involve walking on water?"
I asked him. He shook his head. "Well. How about swimming? How does
everyone feel about swimming?"

"A city on a lake, populated by gods, and people are
trying to swim to shore." Cassandra slipped between those of us who had
gathered at the rough edge of the water, and raised her hands to the sky. She
invoked.

"Amon and his Brothers Immortal were at that time
traveling across the land, meeting with the leaders of the people to warn them
of the coming fall. In time they came to a great river, deep and swift. Morgan
and Alexander argued how best to cross it, and while they argued Amon gathered
wood, and rope, and pitch." She clapped her hands together and then
pointed them down at the water. The surface of the lake boiled and churned.
"He built for them a great ship, which carried them across the river, and
later to the far islands, and the people of heaven were with them."

The girl raised her hands and something loomed in the dark
water. It broke the surface with much trouble, listing and pouring water out
its sides. It was a boat, covered in black sludge. Those few surfaces that were
clean looked to be charred wood. Eventually it settled on the water, and
Cassandra hopped lightly into it.

"Nice trick. You sure that thing's going to hold us
all?" Owen asked.

"Weren't you listening? It's been to the far islands.
It should be able to get us across this pond here."

"This is Amon's ship?" I asked. "What
happened to it?"

"Not his actual ship, no, but a noetic representation
of it. And the ship hasn't been the same since ..." She shrugged.
"You know."

We boarded and the boat started across the water. Owen took
me aside.

"Since what?"

"Amon's death," I answered. "They bound him
to that ship and burned him alive. It sank eventually, with him still
screaming."

"Ah." He looked around the charred hull and
winced. "Cheery."

"It's not so bad," Cassandra said. "At least
we aren't swimming."

The boat lurched in the wake of another explosion from the
Dome of the Song, and I grasped its side. The wood came away in damp splinters
in my fist. Hard to forget that the story arc of this particular vessel ended
with its owner burning alive and sinking to the bottom of this very lake.

"Not swimming yet," I corrected.

The boat made the short journey across the bay, docking
along the inner horn. From there it was just a short mono ride back to the
Strength. Owen left us at the station to report in. The civilian guard and
their Alexian supervisors were in an uproar over the attack. Understandable. No
one knew what had breached the dome, or where all those newly stitched coldmen
had come from. It was unnerving, to maybe have an army floating under the city.

The Strength of Morgan was dark when we got back to it. Day
was mostly over, and the old folks didn't keep the lamps burning deep into the
night these days. Not even on days like this. The noetic bonds on the front
door were intact, so I invoked my way inside and led Cassandra to the main
mess. I found the remains of a meal in the kitchen, gathered up what looked
serviceable, and took it out to the girl. While we broke our fast, I left my
revolver on the table, next to my plate, the barrel turned ever so slightly
toward Cassandra. We ate in silence.

"When are you going to tell me what happened with the
Fratriarch?" I asked.

"When are you going to ask?"

I put down my fork and leaned back in my chair. "I'm
asking."

She nodded, pushed aside the remains of her stew, and then
took a long drink from her bowl of warm beer.

"Can I get a cigarette?"

"You smoke?"

"No." She shook her head. "But my lungs
do."

I went out to Barnabas's study and fished up a cylinder of
cigarettes and a lighter. She cut free a short length of cigarette, tapped it
tight, and lit up. The lighter was an antique, a disk of torsion-driven element
that heated up a ring of brass at its center. It took a couple pumps to get it
hot, and it smelled of summer tar, but it reminded me of the old man. She
tossed the lighter on the table and watched the smoke billow away.

"So. What happened?" I asked.

"After you left it was bad. We could tell when you
were getting close because they would leave us alone for a while, but most of
the time they were just hammering on us. It cost that old man, to keep his
shield up."

"That old man was the Fratriarch of Morgan. He could
have held it up forever."

"No. He could have lasted a long time, I'm sure, but
there came a point when ... when he had to make a choice. It had been a while
since you'd been by to draw them off."

"Hadn't been that long. I was hitting them as hard as
I could."

She looked at me for a long time, breathing in coals and
breathing out smoke.

"It had been long enough. He decided to run for it,
before he was too weak to run at all."

"That was a bad decision," I said.

"Maybe. But it was his decision. He invoked a shield
onto that pendant and gave it to me, then he peeled back his metal column and
broke out into the car. There had been an explosion a minute earlier, and they
had slowed down quite a bit. We thought maybe you were nearby. That we could
hook up with you and run together."

"I had just left. Thirty seconds earlier-"

She cut me off. "Doesn't matter. They were distracted
enough. He killed the couple who were in the car and made it to the tracks.
There were a bunch in the courtyard. They saw us and started shooting, and we
jumped the other way." She tapped off the cigarette and swallowed.
"They had someone waiting."

"Who?"

"Betrayer. One of the true scions of the Assassin. He
might have been there the whole time, for all I know. Just ... stepped out of
the shadows and struck the old man down."

"So he's dead. Barnabas is dead."

"Not that easy. He fell and then he rose. There was a
hell of a fight."

I remembered the icon of the Betrayer we found melted into
the stonework, by the wreckage of the train. It made me proud, the old man going
out like that.

"And that's how you got away. Your Betrayer buddy
recognized one of his fellow Amonites and gave you a pass."