The Horns Of Ruin Part 14

I turned to the compa.s.s 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 compa.s.s 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?" Ca.s.sandra asked, creeping up behind me.

"A lot of dead people, and the end of my Cult," I answered. "Other than that, I have no d.a.m.n 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 s.p.a.ce."

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

Ca.s.sandra turned some k.n.o.b 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 s.p.a.ce. I suppose that sort of brutality pa.s.ses 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. d.a.m.n 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 c.r.a.ppy watch. It was all I could do.

"Ca.s.s, 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. Ca.s.sandra 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 h.e.l.l. But it was fun, yeah?"

"You shouldn't have done that. I could have taken that son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"Your Fratriarch couldn't take that son of a b.i.t.c.h. 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 d.a.m.ned 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 gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l.

"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 d.a.m.ned."

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 Ca.s.sandra 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."

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 rea.s.surance 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 Ca.s.sandra'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 a.s.sault 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 gla.s.s and steel and light clawed their way to heaven. And not all of the s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ces, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 circ.u.mstances.

"Where do you think they are?" Ca.s.sandra 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.ds 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 ... h.e.l.l, 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 pa.s.sing 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, G.o.ds 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."