The Horns of Ruin (27 page)

The instinct, when you are hunted, is to go to ground in
familiar places. You know the land, you know the ins and outs of its paths.
It's comfortable, and you need that when you're being hunted. You need the
reassurance of the known.

The thing to do, then, is to go somewhere you don't know
and are yourself unknown. It's unexpected, and going where you are not expected
to go will offset your unfamiliarity with the terrain and its inhabitants. This
was difficult, because Ash was my city, the only city I had ever truly known.
There weren't a lot of places that I didn't know, where the last Paladin of
Morgan wouldn't be known for what she was. The best path would have been to
leave the city completely, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. Whoever had
killed my Fratriarch and defiled my Cult, they were in the city. Whatever
mystery would be uncovered with the Amonite archive, it was in the city. The
collar countries around the lake could offer protection and anonymity. They
could not bring me closer to vengeance, and I counted that higher than my
safety, or the safety of the girl.

It shocked me a little to think that I counted Cassandra's
safety for anything at all. Some part of me still distrusted her, as I distrust
all scions of Amon the Betrayer. It was clear, though, that she served Amon in
his aspect as the Scholar and had chosen a life of great difficulty to uplift
this positive aspect of that fallen Cult. I had to respect that, albeit
grudgingly.

Something more. I felt that she was my only link to
Barnabas's last moments on earth. She had been with him, when I should have
been. He had died to save her, holding off the Betrayer as she ran. That was
the choice he had made, for whatever reason. I felt I could not dishonor that
choice. That it was my duty, now, to carry on that choice.

So we sought some safety, but not so much that we could not
strike when the enemy presented itself. We could have gone to the waterways, to
the sketchily mapped and partially drowned corridors of the undercity, and
there found peace. But I could not get my mind away from the coldmen and their
aquatic assault on the Chanter's Isle. I wanted to be as far away from that
threat as possible.

There are many high places in the city of Ash. Once, the
ancient towers of the Spear of the Brothers and the Strength of Morgan were the
greatest heights in Ash. No more. The inhabitants of the Library Desolate had
advanced in their knowledge of architecture, and so now towers of glass and
steel and light clawed their way to heaven. And not all of the space in these
towers was occupied. There were service corridors, the empty floors abandoned
to the strange disturbance of the impellors, ironframed towers that supported
airship docks, and communications towers that spoke in invisible voices to the
rig that Owen wore when he needed to talk to headquarters. So many empty
spaces, with so few people.

We took residence in an airship dock. It was a steel-frame
tower, sheathed in metal cladding for a facade, perched on top of a middling
height building on the edge of the outer horn of the city. An older building,
but it afforded a grand view of the lake and the surrounding collar mountains.
The dock wasn't built for people, but people had used it. There was a
haphazardly constructed platform of wooden planks, allowing enough space for a
half-dozen people to sleep, as long as they were friendly. Whoever had built the
platform was long gone. It served the purpose we required: a place to sleep, to
hide, to think about next moves. The constant docking and undocking of airships
shook the tower, but no one came up to disturb us. It was ideal.

The girl spent most of the first night huddled over her
archive, the pale green light of its runes bathing her face. I slept with my
back to her, my hand over my sword. It was cold this high up, even though the
facade kept most of the wind away. I was restless, kept getting up to peer between
the slats of the wall. The airship traffic was constant, their cylinders
glowing a warm orange from the burners as they eased into the dock. Behind
them, the sky was crystal black and clear, the moon like a chip of ivory. It
would be peaceful, in other circumstances.

"Where do you think they are?" Cassandra asked
without looking up from the machine. "Your brothers of Morgan?"

"Dead, mostly," I said. I hadn't told her about
the rooms of bodies I had found. Didn't need to tell her. It was written on my
face, I knew, and in the set of my shoulders. "Some may have made it out.
Some of the Elders."

"So there's hope. Your Cult will continue."

"It's been dying for a long time. It will keep on
dying, regardless of what we do."

"Yeah, you Morganites have it real tough." She
rubbed her eyes and cycled down the archive. It settled into itself, the runes
flickering as they died. "Must be unbearable."

I looked back at her, then leaned against an iron spar and
crossed my arms.

"There aren't many of us to bear it, that's for sure.
And in case you haven't noticed, someone's trying to kill us off."

"And those who remain are free to defend themselves,
or to run away." She busied herself with putting the archive to bed,
closing valves and tightening dials. "You may be dying off, but it's not
for lack of the opportunity to defend yourselves."

"You're talking about Amon. About the Library
Desolate. Listen, you're the one who chose to enter the service of a fallen
god. Not me."

"It's time you started thinking of Amon as something
other than the Betrayer." She finished with the archive and stood to face
me. "And his servants as something other than murderers. Our gods were
brothers before they were enemies. Something led them to that path, and maybe
something else can lead them back."

"One of them just killed my Fratriarch! Simeon is in
the hospital with Betrayer steel in his guts. Elias and ... hell, and Tomas and
Isabel, for all I know. There are rooms full of my dead brothers back in the
Strength, all of them dead at Betrayer hands. And you're talking about
forgiveness?"

She watched me for a time, her eyes dark pools under her
hood. Finally, she shrugged and went to the other side of the platform to lie
down.

"It is an Amonite who will save you, Eva. And the
knowledge of Amon that will get us out of this. Whatever we are, those of us
who have chosen the life of the Library Desolate, we are not murderers. We are
not the scions of the Betrayer."

With the light of the archive gone, the platform was very
dark. I stared at the lump of her body, curled up at the edge of the platform.
The wind and the passing of airships filled my ears, and in time I lay down and
slept. My dreams were full of people I knew, people I had loved, and all of
them were dead.

was bored. Bored, bored, cooped
up on a tiny platform in a tiny tower, listening to the wind and the airships
and the girl and her archive, bored. When I woke up she was already at the feet
of that machine, turning dials and muttering to herself, the crumbled remains
of some of the flatbread I had stolen from a vendor cart scattered about her.
All morning it had been like this. Dial, mutter, invoke, mutter, dial. I was
going nuts.

"So how do you know how to work that thing?" I
asked while cleaning my revolver. Again. This was the eighth time, I think.
Cleanest gun in all of Ash, and no one to shoot.

"It's my nature," she said.

Silence. Mutter. Dial.

"Learned anything?"

She didn't answer for a long time. When she did, it was
like she was answering a different question.

"He wasn't asking the questions I would think
of." She pushed back from the archive and pulled a tangle of hair out of
her face. "I suppose that's what made him the Scholar."

"This is the great secret that's gotten most of my
Cult killed? That Amon asked strange questions?"

She smiled and shook her head. "I suppose that's the
heart of it. But I'm not sure what this has to do with ... anything else. You
asked how I know how to operate the archive. Experience. We have one of these
in the Library. Much larger, in fact. Our keepers tell us that it's the sum of
Amon's knowledge, minus the profane knowledge that led to the Betrayal."

"Is that what this is?" I asked, rising to my
feet. "The profanity?"

"I hope not. It would be the dullest blasphemy ever.
Besides, everyone thinks Alexander keeps that close. If you show especial
talent with the archive, with sorting it and plumbing its knowledge, the
whiteshirts disappear you."

"Doesn't sound like it would pay to be good at
that," I said.

"Who knows? We think they get taken off to a secret
archive, hidden away. Something Alexander culled from the main body and kept
for himself. Secret knowledge does have a certain appeal, doesn't it?"

"So this archive here, it's part of that secret
knowledge?"

She shrugged. "I don't know all of the main archive,
obviously. This doesn't seem like something you'd want to keep hidden."
She turned the archive toward me, revealing a screen of garbled runes, flooding
past like a waterfall. Images popped up, but they made no sense to me.
"It's his research on the impellors. It looks like they're an offshoot of
some kind of Feyr creation. When Amon wrote this, he was just beginning to
apply the principle to the monotrains. Really, it's kind of dull, in a
fascinatingly detailed sort of way. But I can't imagine there's anything here
to justify ... you know."

I paced around the archive, making one circuit before I
stopped and sighed.

"And that's it? That's all that's in there?"

"Oh, gods no. I mean, it all seems to be related to
this, but I've only just figured out the subject line. There are noetic pounds
of knowledge in here-research, tangential investigations, technical drawings.
It's a very thorough history of the process. And it's fascinating to see his
mind at work. How he made the leap from the Feyr device to the
monotrains."

"The Feyr didn't use them for transport?" I
asked.

She shook her head, then leaned in to the machine and
flittered through the text. "Near as I can tell, they just shot them up in
the air. No idea why."

"Hm. Well, how much longer do you think-"

"I have no idea, woman. Knowledge is not something you
can measure in time. It does not drip into our heads at a set rate. It comes
suddenly, or not at all."

I sighed and started taking off my armor. She squinted at
me in puzzlement.

"That won't make learning any faster."

"I'm going out. I can't sit here while your knowledge
doesn't come. And I can't wander around in the armor of a Morganite." With
my armor off, I unclasped the dozen icons and emblems that marked me as a
Paladin. Even my holster and the articulated sheath went away. My padded coat
and linen pants were plain enough. I shuddered at the thought of being
separated from my oath-bound blade, but I just couldn't risk carrying it. I
tucked a knife into my boot, and the bully into my waistband. "So I'm
going out, like this, before I go nuts."

"Do you think that's wise?"

"You're the Scholar. I'll leave wise to you."

She didn't say anything else, and I climbed down the tower
and through a garbage chute before making my way to the street. By the time I
was there I smelled like cabbage and looked like a bum. Nothing like a Paladin
of Morgan.