The Horns of Ruin (26 page)

"And then what?"

I sighed against my sword, leaning against the steel. The
words were slipping out of my head. A thousand dawns, ten thousand more, and a
spear for every star.

"What will you do then? You'll stand this watch, fine.
You'll bury the old man. And then what?"

"It won't matter. I'll be dead, like the others. It'll
be over."

"It won't. Not for us, not for the people of Ash.
Something's happening, Eva. Something's rising up. You think the House of
Morgan is being knocked down because it's weak? Or because it's the only strong
thing left?"

"The hell do you know?" I looked at her over my
shoulder. She had the shotgun in her hands, squeezing it until her knuckles
were white. "What the hell do you know?"

"I know that this was a good man. That he saved me,
and he's probably saved you a couple times, and Brothers know who else. And
they killed him."

I stared down at the Fratriarch. He looked better with his
eyes closed. I could imagine the bruises were just from some brawl he'd gotten
into, like when I was younger and he'd take me to the beater bars. To see the
heart of the fight, he said. To see the ugly, violent, desperate, raw center of
combat. Without the banners, the armor, the horsemen. Without the reason. Just
the fight. And he always came away from those things laughing and bloody.

I pulled his arms across his body, pushed his fists into
his sleeves. Arranged the body as it should be arranged. Then I stood up.

"A thousand spears against the sky, Brother," I
said, and took out the pendant that he'd given Cassandra, and she had given me.
I tossed it onto his chest. "You leave some for me, eh. I'll be there in a
bit."

I turned to the compass rose. Bad luck that they'd brought
the body here. Drama, I suppose. And with my mind in its present state, there
was no way I was going to remember the little dance Tomas had done, even if I'd
been trained to the invokation. But Morgan always finds a way.

Stacking invokations of strength, flaring them hard until a
wave of energy burned out of me, layers of noetic power shimmering at my every
edge, I raised my sword on high, the blade pure white with the mystery and
majesty of dead Morgan. I brought it down on the center of the compass rose.

The building shattered.

The delicate pieces of the secret compartment burst open.
The floor lurched beneath me, and I stumbled back. The artifact rose from the
floor, too quickly, and tumbled across the ballroom like a jack. It came to
rest under the glittering night sky, beneath the ruined window. I went to it.

"What is that?" Cassandra asked, creeping up
behind me.

"A lot of dead people, and the end of my Cult," I
answered. "Other than that, I have no damn idea."

She ran her hands over it, her fingers pausing gingerly on
the Amonite runes.

"You know what it is," I said.

"An archive." Her voice was quiet. She looked up
at me, briefly, then back to the artifact. "Like a library. A whole
library, in this one space."

"No wonder it's so damn heavy." She started to
put her hands under it, as if to carry it off. "Seriously, it's a lot
heavy. You should-"

Cassandra turned some knob and a ring of runed light began
to orbit the device. She lifted it carefully off the floor with one hand. It
hovered, about two feet off the ground, level with the girl's kneeling head.

"Oh. Well, not so heavy."

"That's enough," a voice said from the shadows. I
spun my sword into a guard and gathered up what little remained of the
invokations of strength. A man stepped onto the dance floor. A thin man, a
delicate man. A sharp man. Betrayer.

"We probably could have done that, if we'd known it
was so simple. Barnabas led us to believe that there was a bit of magic to the
opening of the secret space. I suppose that sort of brutality passes for
mysticism around here. Nathaniel said I should wait and see what you would do.
I have seen."

He wore white, trimmed with pewter, and his face was hidden
behind an articulated mask of iron. Chain belts crossed his chest, an iron ring
at the center protecting the icon of the Betrayer. He moved like a dancer.
Displaying empty hands, he twirled his fingers with a flourish and produced
daggers. Damn show-off.

I raised my guard, invoked the Wall of Orgentha, and
apologized to Barnabas for being the last, and for giving him such a crappy
watch. It was all I could do.

"Cass, run!" I yelled. I took a step forward,
sword over my head, and then ... then I was flying backward, out the window,
into the night. The girl's hand was on my shoulder, and all I could see was the
rapidly diminishing window of the ballroom, and the Betrayer, and Barnabas's
tiny, dead body on the floor.

We landed in the framework of an iron water tower about two
blocks from the Strength. Even now there were sirens stretching up into the sky
from the street below. We'd been seen. Not sure how you'd miss us, honestly.

"That thing can fly?" I asked, when I'd
reoriented to my surroundings. The flight had been a strangely weightless affair,
and it was odd to be back in gravity's fist. Cassandra was bent over the
archive, slapping controls and muttering invokations.

"Nope. Not really. That was an egregious misuse of the
technology." She smiled and looked up at me, like a kid in a candy shop.
"And now I've broken it all to hell. But it was fun, yeah?"

"You shouldn't have done that. I could have taken that
son of a bitch."

"Your Fratriarch couldn't take that son of a bitch.
He's the same creep who jumped us outside the mono car. And I know you're all
ready to die in the glory of battle, but I think you're going to be more use
alive. Yeah. I sure broke something, didn't I?" She sat back on her heels
and stared mournfully at the device.

"I thought you said it was some kind of library? Why
make a library that can fly?"

"Not the point. The empulsor ... the flying bit ...
that was just meant to make it easy to carry from place to place. Just meant to
offset the weight. All I did was break off the dial and point it at the
sky."

"So now it's going to be heavy again?" I looked
down at the swarms of whiteshirts below us. A flight of valkyn was powering up
at the foot of the Strength. I didn't want to fight the mundane army. None of
this was their fault. "Because we need to get a move on."

"I can squeeze some lift out of it. Just ..." She
loosened two straps from the artifact's side, spun some kind of dial at the
base, then humped the whole thing onto her back. Looked all the world like a
firefighter's breathing rig. "Oof," she said, and settled under the weight
of it. Looked tricky.

"I can carry that, if you want."

"Nope, I got it."

I chuckled. "Ruck full of food and you can't manage.
World's heaviest book and all of a sudden you're the damned strong man."

"Priorities, dear. Shouldn't we be going?"

And so we should. The crowd below had seen our flight but
not our landing. Spotlights were washing across the nearby buildings. The
valkyn were taking a slow orbit around the Strength, their feet dan gling in
the wash of their burners, wicked guns slung low from their shoulders.

We took a service walkway from the tower to a
grubby-looking building that turned out to be a vertical farm. The glass
windows were smeared with pollen, and the air buzzed with flies. Past rows of
crummy stalks and into the central service core, and we never saw a soul. The
main entrance to this place was below the streets, in the moldy, half-flooded
worker tunnels that riddled the city. Bad lighting, bad mold ... it was an
unpleasant place.

I had to believe that Betrayer would be following us, but I
had no idea as to their methods. I saw no value in hiding our tracks, not until
we were good and safe from the mundanes. I was sorry to have missed a chance to
fight Barnabas's murderer in open battle, but there was nothing for it now. The
next time he would come in shadows. I'd be lucky to see the blade before it
struck.

Which made the worker tunnels a less than ideal place to
hide. Plenty of shadows for him to step out of. Plenty of dark tunnels to hide
the bodies, and practically no witnesses. We had to get out of them, but the
surface world wasn't too friendly to us either just then. We traveled about
five blocks at a quick jog, the cobble road and ceiling of pipes slanting
slightly down the whole time. The puddles became ponds, and soon we were
walking on catwalks over the exposed waterways. The water below us was the
lake, the same lake an army of coldmen had crawled out of earlier today. Or
yesterday. I wasn't sure of the time anymore.

We stopped for a break and the girl collapsed against the
railings, exhausted. I gave her my water bottle and spent a minute invoking
rites of movement and fatigue. She looked better when I was done, but she still
looked like hell.

"You have a plan, right?" she asked. "This
is the sort of thing Morganites plan for."

"The collapse and betrayal of our Cult by those
closest to us? Yeah, you'd think that'd be something we'd have a whole book of
plans for." I sat down next to her and dangled my legs over the catwalk.
The water below was smooth, and a babbling of currents echoed against the steel
all around. It could have been peaceful, in a subterranean, buried alive sort
of way. "Sadly, I left that particular book at the monastery. Also, I'm
not much of a reader."

"So, no plan?"

"I was thinking of running for a long time. Killing
anything that chases us. That's the core of it."

"Better than your previous tack of getting yourself
killed and leaving the escaped Amonite slave behind to do your fighting for
you," she said.

"Speaking of slave." I stood and bent her head forward.
She still had the collar on, as well as the manacles. "Can't you just
unmake these things? They make it kind of hard to hide who you are."

"One thing we can't unmake: the chains that bind us or
our allies. It's part of the binding of Amon."

The collar was pinned shut. I brushed her thick hair away
from the linchpin. It would be tricky to get a tool onto that joint without
risking the girl's neck. I started looking around for something to do the deed.

"So how'd you get free of the chains you had when we
took you from the Library? Those soul-things."

"Barnabas took them away. It was like an invokation,
or something. He cut them with his knife, before we tried to break out of the
car." She rubbed her nose and sighed. "Said I should have a chance to
get away, even if he didn't."

"Sounds like the old man. But I'm not aware of any
chain-cutting invokation. Then again, he was the Fratriarch." Was. I
grimaced and kept looking for something to get the girl free.

"Not like he invoked or anything," she said.
"Just laid his blade across the metal, and it parted like paper."

"Must have been a special knife. Then again. . ."
I drew my twohander and held it carefully in both fists. "Maybe you should
hold really still."

I balanced the blade over the collar, calming my breathing.
I wondered if I should invoke strength, but that didn't seem appropriate. Best
to just take a light whack and see how it went. I lined up the blow, touched
the blade lightly against the collar to set my aim, and ... the iron parted
like warm cheese. As I raised the sword, the collar fell open and clattered to
the floor.

"Great," she said. "Now the wrists?"

"That's some bad metal," I said. "Cut way
too easy."

Grabbing the manacles, I pulled and pushed and tested the
strength of the rings. The girl didn't like the way the iron bit into her skin,
but she kept quiet. The metal was good. And yet it split just as easily as the
collar had.

"I will be damned."

She stood up and kicked the collar and cuffs into the
water. They disappeared with a splash that was quickly swallowed by the
current. I kept staring down at where they'd sunk until Cassandra had
shouldered the archive and was tapping me on the shoulder.

"That plan of yours, about running? We should get on
with that."

"Yeah," I said. "And while we're running, we
can come up with a better plan."

"I'm just kidding," she said, smiling. "I've
already got a better plan. But the first step is still running. After that, I
want to find a place to hole up and give this archive some attention. Something
about this thing has gotten a lot of people killed."

"Great. Glad not to be the only one coming up with
ideas."

"Yeah. We're all pretty glad about that."