The Horns of Ruin (33 page)

I wheeled my blade to the ground and snatched the bully out
of the staff where it had come to rest when I dropped it, propped against the
carriage. I walked around the circumference of their little disturbance, my
feet buckling on the shifting plane of brick. When I was as close as I dared
get, I put the barrel in line with the Amonite's head and pulled the trigger.

The bullet punched through the shimmering waves of their
fight, slowing like a stone in water. As it slowed it peeled like an onion, the
layers of lead spiraling outward until there was nothing left but a cloud of
potential violence. Even that disappeared.

"Godsdamn Scholars," I spat, then emptied the
cylinder.

Each shot followed the first, corkscrewing out of
existence, each cloud wafting closer to the bastard. Waves of shock traveled
out from their flight, cones of force that disturbed the balance of Cassandra's
battle. Five bullets, five arcs of energy washing over each other, building and
disturbing the patterns of energy that had accumulated between the two
Scholars. An ever growing wave of shattered lead flowered out into the room.

The last bullet struck him. Just a glancing blow, and only
the barest core of lead left from the aura of Unmaking. It was enough. He
flinched as blood touched his cheek. Cassandra moved against him, viciously,
with enlightened power.

The bricks of the floor roared up, stacking into a tower,
the hollow core of which enveloped the man. He stumbled back, slapping his
hands against the jigsaw horror that was swallowing him. There was no room for
retreat. She built a tower around him. When she closed the cylinder, the
shuffling whirlwind of bricks slid into place, clenching into the center,
leaving no room for the man. One scream, and he was gone.

Cassandra collapsed to the floor. Her whole body was
shaking, and a thin trail of blood leaked from her mouth. I put a hand on her
shoulder.

"You alright?"

"I hope there aren't too many more like him. I hope he
was their best."

"The doorman?" I stood up and started thumbing
bullets into the bully's cylinder. "Probably not."

The Chanters were all dead. I'll say it again: good
shooting, especially for a Scholar. These boys were a different breed from the
Librarians Desolate, that was for sure. I lined the bodies up and did some
violence to the door.

"What if we have to go out that way?"

"It's a door," I said. "I can open it."

We gathered up our stuff, the archive, and Cassandra's
shotgun. I threw the disguises under the carriage, along with the remains of my
false staff. If this was going to be a killing job, I'd rather do it in the
full glory of Morgan. Before we left, we stood by the carriage and pulled down
the tarp.

No idea what it was. Beautiful, for one. Complicated. Smooth
and black and cut from some kind of wood. Like of which I'd never seen.

"They were building something," Cassandra said,
quietly. "Something big."

"Something about this size, I would say." I put
my hand against it. It pulsed in familiar time. Couldn't put my finger on it.
"You're the Scholar. What is it?"

She circled it slowly, running gentle hands over its
surfaces. First time the pulse vibrated through it, she snapped her hand back,
startled.

"Is it breathing?" she asked.

"It's wood. Maybe it's some kind of instrument."

She shook her head. "Brothers know."

"I suspect one of them does," I said. "And
let's be honest, we don't really have time to figure it out."

"Yeah," Cassandra said, then placed both palms
against it, closed her eyes, and breathed in very deeply. Twice. When she
opened her eyes, they were watering. "Yeah, okay. Let's go."

There was one big door that led to an elevator. The gears
were running. Someone was coming up, so we went back to the room and took a
different door. This led to a stairwell. Everything went down, it seemed. We
followed the obvious path, trying to be quiet as we went. The stairs had a lot
of horizontal sections, long hallways that moved us closer to the Spear before
we descended again. We were probably underneath that old stone tower when we
started coming across other doors to other floors. They were all locked. I
could have gotten through them, but none of them seemed terribly compelling to
me. By now the bodies would have been found. I didn't hear any alarms, but I had
to assume that there was a search on. I was starting to taste something in my
bones, too. Deeper we got, deeper it went.

"You've got that?" Cassandra asked me. "That
feeling?"

"Got it," I said. It was like the impellors, but
all the time. Made it hard to concentrate. "That can't be your hidden
archive."

"Why else would there be Amonites here? Those two were
his private stock, Eva. He's got his own little team of Scholars working on
something."

"Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe he just uses them as
guards."

"We make terrible guards."

"Those two did okay."

"Yeah, well ..." she began, but I held up my
hand. Voices.

One of the doors near us began to open, multiple locks
being thrown and unlatched as we stared at it in terror. I cast about for an
open door or hidden nook. We had just come around a corner, but after that the
hallway was long and uninterrupted until the stairs. The direction we had been
going was also a long hallway, pocked with doors. None of them looked unlocked.
I grabbed the girl and ran. Best we could do was scoot around the corner and
hope they were going the other way.

... the damned Chanters, if you ask me. Finley said they
had been butchered."

"I thought we had a pretty good team in there,"
the second voice answered. They were getting closer. I pushed Cassandra farther
back from the corner and whispered a quick invokation of speed.

"Yeah, we did. Not good enough, though. Someone must
have tipped them off."

"We should have moved a dampener up there. I said we
should have. "

"Hindsight, Mal. Always with the hindsight."

They were right by the corner. I could hear their feet,
their robes. The jingling of keys. They were opening the last door we had
passed. I relaxed, just a fraction.

"I'm just saying that there'd be fewer dead now, and
we wouldn't have to be doing this." The second voice was older. Cranky.
"This is going to throw off the rotation. And for all we know, the
Chanters fought just enough for one of them to escape and run for it."

"We have to assume more than that. This is a delicate
time."

The final bolt was thrown and the door opened. There was a
lot of open space in the new room, judging by the echoes. How much space could
there be, this far under the street? We must be under the water by now, surely?
The two voices paused in the open door.

"Our lot is not the one I would have chosen. That any
of us would have chosen. But we are here, and we must play our part. It is all
we can do for the Scholar."

"His name be praised," his companion intoned,
like a prayer. "His body held tight."

The two men sighed, then moved inside the larger room. As
the door swung shut I heard one more snippet.

"When we are done with the preparations, we can return
to the archive and lock it down. The toll won't last forever."

"It will set us back weeks."

"Perhaps. But we'll still be alive."

And the door shut. I looked at Cassandra, but she was
already past me and around the corner. I followed. She went straight to the
door the men had come out of, and had her palm against it, her eyes closed.

"We can't wait around, Cass," I whispered.
"They'll be coming back."

"Yes," she answered, and opened her eyes.
"Coming back to the archive."

My eyes widened, and I turned to the door. The archive. I
changed stance and began to invoke the Rite of the Sundering, as quietly as I
could. Cassandra gave me a little slap and shushed me.

"We'll need to close the door again, Paladin."
She produced a complicated tool, knelt by the door, and put her forehead
against the metal. "This may take some time."

"It's in short supply, I think. They know someone is
in the building."

"It will take more time if you keep talking."

I grimaced, but backed off. This was much too long of a
hallway for me to be comfortable. Any of these doors could open with little or
no warning. And if they had found the massacre upstairs, it wasn't like we'd be
able to talk our way past a patrol. Sword in sheath, bullistic in hand, I
paced. That was as much peace as I could give the girl.

Her whole body hummed with attention. She had the tool flat
up against the lock. There were sounds coming out of her, out of the door, out
of the tool. Like stones grinding. That had to be drawing someone's notice,
didn't it? This was taking forever. A thousand forevers. I kept my eyes on all
the doors, on the passageway, especially on the door that those two had gone
through. Had they been Amonites? Alexians? They had referred to the Scholar, so
probably some of Alexander's pets. They still wore the chains, I remembered.
They couldn't be all that free.

The grinding sound stopped, and the door sighed open.
Cassandra stood, smiling.

"Breaking things is not always the way," she
said.

"Fine, fine," I said, hurrying her through the
door. "Let's just get inside."

The door locked behind us. Inside was a square room with a
low ceiling. The space was dominated by a brass dome that reached almost to the
ceiling, and nearly to the walls. The only clear areas were at the corners,
where the circumference of the dome did not reach. There were hooks all along
the wall by the door, several of which were hung with some sort of suit. The
dome looked pressurized, and in fact had several dogged portals leading into it
at various heights, each one accessible by rungs soldered onto the dome. It was
covered with Amonite runes, some painted on, some forged into the metal, or made
of iron or copper or gold and bolted to the surface. I looked back at
Cassandra.

She was standing in quiet awe, her eyes wide. She was
whispering below her breath, and her free hand was making rites. The symbols of
her faith.

"This is it?" I asked.

"Yes. The last archive of Amon the Scholar. It's ...
enormous."

"Well. We aren't taking this thing out of here,
obviously. You wanna strap up and see what you can-"

"Can you give me one second of quiet, for Brothers'
sake? Does Morgan have no holy place, no room of silence and meditation?"
She turned to me, and I saw tears in her eyes. "Can we just be quiet for a
minute?"

I gritted my teeth. "Battle, Cassandra-that is our
holy place. Everything else has been burned." I pulled one of the suits
off the wall and tossed it to her. "And I've prayed enough today. I'd like
to get out of here cleanly."

She looked unhappy, but she shucked off her robe and pulled
on the suit over her skinny legs. I gave her what privacy I could. She was half
into it when one of the pressurized doors unsealed with a gasp of frost, and an
Amonite came out.

He was in a suit like the one Cassandra was pulling on.
Without looking around, he hurried down the rungs and to the floor near us. He
stopped long enough to release the mask and hood. His hair was white, but when
he turned I could see that he was quite young. He didn't register who we were
at first, instead rushing to one of the hooks that held a gray robe. He
stopped, looked at me, at my revolver, at the blood still on my boots. Unphased,
really. Then he looked at Cassandra, half naked, half suited, unchained and yet
so clearly an Amonite. His eyes got wide. He jumped for a switch by the door, a
panel that had a big red button on it. I got between him and it.

"Don't," I said. He stopped, his hand trembling
as it reached for the button.

"They'll kill us all. If they find you here, they'll
kill every one of us." He looked between us. "You don't know what
you've done."

"And you have no idea what I've done. Or what I'm
willing to do. Now get away from that switch."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "They'll kill
us all." And he jumped for the console. I put two bullets in him, the
report loud, the reverberations echoing around the dome. He fell, startled, and
lay there with his mouth open.

"You didn't have to do that," Cassandra said as
she rushed past me. She knelt at his side. "You didn't have to kill
him."

"I think I did," I answered. She didn't look up.
Blood was trickling out of the guy's mouth. He was trying to talk, but nothing
was coming. He put a bloody hand on Cassandra's chest, right over her heart,
smearing gore on her skin and undershirt. And then he died.

Cassandra nearly vibrated, she was so furious. She rolled
him onto his back, cupped his hands over his eyes, and pushed his mouth closed.
She was saying some kind of rite over him.

"We don't have time-" I said.

"We have more time than he does. Now shut up. This is
not a place for blood."

"It's going to be, if you don't-"

"Shut. Up," she said, exasperation in her voice.
"In Amon's name, be quiet."

I took a step back, but I was quiet. I remembered standing
the watch over Elias. Who was I to deny her the comfort of ritual? She
finished, stood, and buckled into the suit, all without looking at me, or the
body of the Amonite.

"Watch the door," she said, and started up the
ladder.

"He was going to sound the alarm."

"Watch the door."

She got up the dome and undogged the portal. White frost
blossomed around her, turning the suit into a glittering sleeve. She
disappeared inside, sealing the dome behind her.

I looked at the body, at the slowly growing pool of blood,
at Cassandra's gory footsteps, and where she had knelt by the Amonite as he
died. Then I turned, and watched the door.