The Horns of Ruin (6 page)

"I bind myself to the Champion, the Warrior, the
battlefield, the blade!" I intoned, my flat, arcane voice grinding out
like an avalanche of steel. As I spoke, fat red sparks rolled off my weapon
like crimson leaves in an autumn breeze. The air around me coiled with power.
Red and black flecks coalesced in front of me, plowing forward as I ran.
"I bind to blood, to fire, to steel, to grave! I bind myself to battle and
the war eternal! For Morgan, dead and unending!"

They saw me, too late.

The near one turned, raising the intricate double blades of
his gauntlets into a guard that would never withstand such arcane fury. I cut
him down, the blade sliding in an easy cross against his chest, his blades and
his arms falling away as he crumpled to the ground. His companion took one look
at the invokations roiling over my noetically armored body and fired the
turbines on his burnpack. Flames and heat filled the square and a plume of
smoke boiled down to the cobbles.

I rushed toward him, my blade catching the fleeing warrior
on the shoulder. He twisted, his control of the 'pack wavering as he sluiced
sideways. I punched forward with the blade, strength and force coming from my
hips, my legs. The tip of the wide sword parted his chest and drove back into
the whining furnace of the turbines. A tongue of flame lashed out from the
man's chest, charring the scream that died on his lips. I whipped the sword out
in a backhand slash. The turbines ruptured, tearing the man apart.

The explosion battered my shields, framing me in angry
fire, flames of blue and red that tore up into the sky. The shock wave rippled
up into the towers that surrounded the square. Glass shattered into a diamond
snow that crashed down to the cobbles. Glittering shards flaked across the
remnants of my shield, building up a shell of starry light shot through with
skeins of furious red.

The glass settled into a field of sharp light, reflected
from the sun above. The cataclysm of the explosion echoed through the canyons
of the city. The bodies of the two men lay twisted under the tiny glass flecks.

I turned to the men standing beneath the elevated tracks
and raised my sword in salute.

"I bind myself," I said quietly, gasping with the
effort of the invokations and the fight, "to battle. The blade. The
grave."

The last misty shards of glass shuffled to the ground. They
crunched under the knobby treads of my boots like broken bones. In the shining
light that reflected off the broken-tooth windows far above, the courtyard was
silent. The goggle-eyed men and I stared at one another. Before they gather
themselves, I thought. Before they recover from watching me blow one of their
comrades into rags of meat and ash. Before I collapse from the strain of the
attack, from the sheer arcane weight crushing my lungs and straining against my
bones. Before I became something I couldn't control.

I moved, and the air shimmered around me as I ran. Waves of
force tore away from my sword as I swung it into a variable guard-to-strike
position. The stones under my boots boomed as I rushed them, rushed them like
an avalanche broken free from the mountain of god. My scream was meaningless
and terrifying, full of incoherent rage, full of pain and anger.

I moved and they fell back. Dropped their weapons, their
guards, their formation, and fell back. But not fast enough. Never fast enough.
The first one I caught on his heels, his sword held forgotten by his knee. Two
more fell before any of them held a guard worth avoiding. I burned bright,
flaring my invokations for quick results. Had to break them fast. I couldn't
win a long fight, not against this many.

Another down, arm and shoulder split from his chest, the
heat of my blade curling up in wisps of smoke from the edges of the wound. My head
was a dull roar, little in it but the form of the sword and the rage of
murdered Morgan arcing through my bones. Something lurked at the edge of my
attention, though, something begging to be heard through the fire of the
battle. The next one managed a guard block and counterstrike as my mind raced.

Blood. The blood. I raised my sword warily, sparring with
the warrior. The others were circling. Another one came at me and I fell into a
dual guard position without thinking about it, cycling my sword in broad,
sweeping arcs, finally finishing the first attacker with a cut to the inner
thigh that slid through bone and whirled up into the stinking mess of his guts.
He folded, and I spun around to give my full attention to the second man. I
held my sword in front of me.

The blood hung on the wide blade like lumpy mud, smearing
across the sun-bright metal in uneven streaks. Old blood, cold blood, blood
that had clotted and cooled and stiffened like tar.

Dead man's blood.

I looked at the man at my feet. He sat on the ground, a
clumpy pool of thick gore spilling out of his burst gut. His voxorator squealed
in mindless complaint, then he raised the gauntlet of his right hand and drove
the blade into my knee.

Pain burst through my leg like a wildfire, and I shrieked.
The tip of his weapon skidded off the hazy shell of my invoked shield, but was
thrust hard enough and came close enough that it drew blood and scraped bone.
Still screaming, I brought the sword down. Put the blade into his head near the
base of the sword, then drew back, slicing, running the dull metal of his
helmet along the full length of the sword in a long, rasping strike that slid
through metal, bone, and meat. Tarthick blood spilled out. A swirling tendril
of fog followed the blade through the wound like smoke snatched by the wind.
Frost glittered along the blade, and then the man fell back. Dead. Finally.

The others were on me in a breath. Seven or eight of them,
and it was all I could do to stay in one piece. Blades slipped through the
waning shield, the power of the invokation stressed by the explosion and the
sheer number and ferocity of their attacks. I was able to sneak in a handful of
guard strikes to legs and hands that would have crippled living men. These
things, these warriors, these cold-meat, dead-blood monsters ... they fought
on. Glittering frost and gummy blood slopped from their wounds with each
strike. I retreated, foot by foot, shifting my stance closer to the edge of the
square. When I got to the mouth of an alleyway I dropped the rest of my arcane
bindings and flared the invokation of the Rite of the Stag Hunt, pushed it into
my legs, and leapt away from contact with the dead men in a series of long,
ground-shuddering steps. I slid around a corner and started to run in a
staggering gait.

I was spent. By the time I disengaged, I counted five
attackers left. Just as many more were limping off, arms or legs mangled beyond
use. Still too many in my present condition. As I ran the final invokations
wisped away, leaving me drained. When the Hunt faltered, I stumbled to a halt
against the side of a building to catch my breath. Hell, it was all I could do
not to lie down and tremble into sleep. I slid to the ground, sword tumbling to
the stone of the street.

"What the hell is going on back there?" I gasped
to the empty street. My hands shook as I wiped the clods of blood away from my
sword with a rag. Tired, bone-tired. Scared, too. I tried to go through the
meditation of assessment, struggling to focus against the hammering of my
heart. Blood leaked from my knee, both arms, a dozen smaller cuts, and a deeper
wound that had scraped my ribs. The invokations that had wrapped me away from
these things were gone, and now the flesh was back and full of holes. My hands
hummed from the constant striking of metal against metal and yielding bone. I
fumbled open the first-aid kit from my thigh pocket and bandaged up as best I
could. I didn't have it in me to invoke the Binding of Flesh just now. Didn't
have anything left. I wiped the blood from my hands and threw the rag to the
ground.

I struggled to my feet. Tired, scared. Unsure of the
tactical situation. Had they gone for help? Had they gotten at the Fratriarch?
More important, why in the name of the living Brother was I fighting dead men,
and what did they want with the Fratriarch? I was used to fighting alone. I
expected to fight alone. Just not dead men, and not with the life of the
Fratriarch on the line. And he was back there, alone with the girl. With the
Amonite. Those wards of his wouldn't last forever.

I jogged toward the wreck of the monotrain, taking a
longer, circuitous route back. The streets were quiet. I held the double-handed
sword in a loose grip, hugging it close to my body. So tired, afraid I was
going to drop it, but more afraid that if I sheathed it I wouldn't be able to
draw fast enough if one of those dead men jumped me.

Creeping the last few yards to the square, I invoked a weak
shield and snuck up to the corner. The courtyard was empty.

I moved carefully around the wreckage of the fight. The
civilians were long gone, obviously, but where were my attackers? I reached the
elevated track and reluctantly put the blade away, then started to climb. The
iron trestles offered good handholds, but I was drained to the bone. Twice I
nearly fell before I was able to scramble onto the track.

The car leaned dangerously away from the courtyard,
probably unsettled by the burnpack's explosion or some other tampering by the
undying assailants as they tried to pry Barnabas from his shell. I stepped inside
carefully, this time holding the revolver in shaky hands. There was a body in
the entrance, the scarred metal of the dead man's armor rimed with frost. I put
a boot into his shoulder and turned him over.

His chest had burst open, the grim smile of ribs clenched
behind the metal. That same tarry blood lined the wound, but where there should
have been heart and lungs, there was a glass cylinder. A piston cycled slowly
inside the glass, a plunger of leather and brass that rose slowly before
settling to the bottom of the tube with a metallic sigh. Up and down, slowly.
Breathing.

I drew back the hammer of the ordained revolver and sighted
along the barrel, then fired a slug into the dead man's chest. The glass popped
and a cloud of fog erupted out, twisting up to the revolver before dancing
across my chest and filling my face. Startled, I gasped for air and swallowed a
century's cold lungful of ancient, stale breath. It tasted like metal caskets
and the frozen memories of tombs, buried in stone and ice. I staggered back,
coughing until my lungs were clear. Shivering just as much from the memory of
that breath as from the cold, I stepped into the car.

The floor was charred. Not an easy task with metal. The
seats were nothing but twisted wreckage, the windows all blown out, and the
Fratriarch's column of metal was gone. Where it had been, the floor was clear,
spotless. There was something at the edge, a tiny dot of color against the dark
metal. I bent down for a closer look. Just a drop, really. I put a finger to it
and it burst, splattering across my nail. Holding it up to my face, I twisted
to get a better look in the light from outside the car.

Blood. Real blood, red and warm and slippery between my
fingers. The Fratriarch was gone.

My earliest memory of the Fratriarch is one of my earliest
memories, period. I was in a car, the interior warm red leather, the woman
sitting next to me dressed in a tight gray dress, her face covered by a white
lace veil. My mother, I think, or a woman who was mourning my mother. I had the
feeling of coming from some complicated ritual. Something that I hadn't
understood, but that everyone around me took very seriously. Very sadly. Later
in life I told myself it was a funeral. It could have been anything. I remember
not understanding, but also not being afraid.

It was raining outside. The car drove through parts of the
city I didn't know. More than that. Drove through a city I didn't know, like I
didn't know what cities were. I knelt on the seat and looked out the window at
all the close-together houses, the tall buildings, the crowded sidewalks. So
many people. Something in my memory compared this to long gardens, carefully
manicured, perfectly empty. Even the trees of my memory were empty. No birds,
no squirrels.

The woman sitting next to me pulled me to the seat beside
her, wrapping my tiny hands in her long, cold fingers, pressing them into my
lap. I looked up at her, but she was facing forward. Watching where we were
going.

The driver was a man, just another man, gray coat and hat and
gloves. He drove stiffly. I pulled on my mother-mourner's hand, straining to
look out the window, but all I could see were the rainstreaked clouds and the
stony tops of buildings.

The car stopped and the man got out and came around to our
door. The woman looked at me for the first and last time, then released my
hands. The man opened my door. A wave of rain washed into the car, spattering
across the deep-red leather. I shied away from the sudden cold and wet. Afraid
to ruin my dress and my little hat. The woman put a hand on my hip and slid me
out. I stumbled on the runner and nearly fell, catching the man's pants leg in
a twist of my fingers. He closed the door and went around to the front again. I
looked back at the car, water beading across its beetle-smooth black shell, its
engine huffing quietly in the rain. I was getting soaked.