The Horns Of Ruin Part 21

This was before we knew he was innocent. This was before we knew that Alexander was our Betrayer, and all Amon had done was be a little too smart for his brother's comfort. Burned and drowned. But not, apparently, killed.

How do you kill a G.o.d? I had been giving this a lot of thought. Admittedly, I only started thinking about it when I learned that perhaps it was Alexander who had put a knife in Morgan's back. And my thoughts mostly involved ways in which I'd like to shoot him in the face. But these were unrealistic and, honestly, insufficient. Morgan had suffered grievous wounds in his life, wounds that would kill the strongest of mortal men. There was something special about the Betrayer's blade that killed the Warrior, probably something to do with the fact that it was held by someone he trusted so deeply, that the hand that pushed the knife into him was that of his brother.

I was no G.o.d's sister, and no scion of the Betrayer, either way. I had always a.s.sumed that, because Alexander bound the chains and kindled the fire, there was something special about it that could kill a G.o.d. But what if it had only been simple flame? Simple water? Surely these things wouldn't kill Amon. So what then? He sank to the bottom of the lake, undying? Eternal?

Apparently. Because, as I strapped on the suit that Malcolm handed me, a lot of what he was saying involved water.

"We don't know what's at the end of it. They monitor the chains, so we don't get near the pool. But the cable should lead the whole way. I've made the appropriate modifications, here," he said, tapping the new helmet, the tank that clipped on my belt, "that should let you make the descent. After that, I'm no help."

"How long have you known?" I asked.

"Since I came here. It's openly known, among the scions who are brought from the Library. It's why we work so hard to please Alexander. To preserve the body. As long as we're useful to him, he keeps Amon alive."

"And when you're not?"

"Then? I would not want to be in the Library Desolate on that day. I would not want to be wearing the chains when Alexander drives in that knife."

"They'll be coming, soon," I said. We had secured the door, Malcolm applying various invokations to strengthen the steel and seal the portal. But it wouldn't last forever. "He'll discover that his gambit with Barnabas failed, and he'll send someone else."

"Don't worry. I'll keep the girl safe."

"I meant you, old man." I shrugged and fitted the helmet over my head. "The girl can keep herself."

"Of course," he said, patting my shoulder. "You meant me. Nevertheless, I a.s.sure you, the girl will be safe."

I looked across the room at her. Sitting against the wall, staring at her hands, and at the b.l.o.o.d.y print on her chest.

"Okay," I said. Then I unsealed one of the pressure doors, and went inside to the mind of Amon the Scholar.

Just about a foot below the lip of the door, there was a narrow walkway that went all around the inside of the dome. It was stone, and the first of many concentric steps that led down into a pool of water. The water came up to the third step, splashing lightly over it with each swell of the tide. The pool was cold and clear; I could see that the dome was in fact a sphere, and the steps went all the way to the bottom of it. A round opening at the bottom of the sphere, about five feet in diameter, led out into some darker s.p.a.ce.

The archive itself sprouted like a flower from that opening. It was a series of thick cables, ranging in size from the width of a pencil to a couple that were as thick as my wrist. On the end of each cable was a cylinder of some translucent material, each sized according to the width of its cable. The cylinders glowed with an inner light, shimmering in the water like bottles of lightning, with the pulse turned way down. Most of the cylinders stayed below the surface, but those that had bobbed to the top shifted and hummed with a constant chiming sound.

"Leave it to the Scholars to make it all so d.a.m.n complicated," I whispered to myself. I could see damp tracks where Ca.s.sandra had emerged from the water just a little while earlier. I put my hand beneath the surface and found it to be warm and ... sticky. Not really water. Too thick. When I took my hand out it dried quickly, though where the water had splashed against the stone it remained. Water that wasn't really wet. Of course.

I sat by the edge of the pool and then slowly eased my way into it. The suit constricted as it came in contact with the water. The liquid. Whatever you want to call it. What had been comfortable a moment before was now too tight. Half in the water, warmth tingling along my bones and light flashing in my eyes, I pulled the helmet up and sealed it, then cut the bottle on and breathed in a healthy gasp of iron-laced air. Do it quick, Malcolm had said. Do it quick, and don't look back.

I plunged into the water and understood what he meant, right away. I also understood why Ca.s.sandra was out there, babbling to herself. And Amon wasn't even my G.o.d.

The water opened to me, opened fully to me, filled me with light and lightning and a glowing warmth unlike any I have ever known. Underwater, the chiming of the cylinders cascaded into more than sound, into pain and madness, and through it all there were voices, a single voice, a thousand times a single voice reciting prayers of madness and mathematics that slid over me without sinking in, drowned me without water, tore me without blood. I was no longer seeing a pool of water, a flower of light and sound, a dome in a building under the city of Ash. I was seeing formulas from the inside of numbers, knowledge from the inside of words. I was seeing the greatest mind our world had ever known, with an eternity of knowledge flowing out in a breath, half a breath, a never-ending sigh of ...

What saved me was the mud between my own ears. I was an idiot. I mean that in the best possible way, the sort of idiot who can get by and take care of herself, but also the sort of idiot who looked at all this and could just let it slide over her without it sinking in. A duck in the water of genius, you could say. But I saw what had driven Ca.s.sandra a little insane. The initial blast had done a number on me, though. I was floating limp in the water, tangled in the cords of the mind, wasting the limited breath in my bottled lung.

I shrugged out of the coils of light and pushed to the bottom of the pool. The stalks of the cables thickened near the opening, and I dragged myself down by pulling on them. As I got close to the opening, the warm, clear water became mixed with patches of darker, colder stuff. Actual water, I thought. Lakewater.

The helmet had a tiny light. I turned it on, and could see that there was a disk, wider than the opening and about a foot below it, that held all of the bundles of cable together. I squeezed between the opening and the disk, and came out into the lake, at the bottom of the city.

I'd been underneath the city before, along the edges. Never this deep. The water here was impenetrably black, swallowing the beam from my lamp in a matter of feet. The underside of the city disappeared in blackness. I couldn't see any of the familiar blinking pathlight from the waterways, or swirling dock indicators or ... anything. It was just watery night.

Examining the disk with my feeble light and my hands, I could see that it was shaped like a barrel, slightly bowed at the middle and warm to the touch. Metal, but old and pitted with corrosion. A single cable emerged from the bottom, heavy and thick. It descended into the depths of the lake.

Stay close to the cable, he said. It interacts with the suit, and keeps you from experiencing ... something. Something to do with pressure and depth and blood. I hadn't understood most of that, but the ill.u.s.tration Malcolm had used when he could see that my eyes were glazing over was a tube of meat, filled with blood, and a hundred hammers. .h.i.tting it from all directions at once. So I was going to stay close to the cable.

The water near the cable was warm and tingled across my skin, or at least it felt that way through the suit. When I put my hand on the cable the bones of my wrist hummed. Didn't like the feel of that, but I liked the idea of hammered meat even less, so I held on while I followed it down into the lake. Every once in a while one of my feet or the tips of my fingers would stray a little too far away from the cable as I swam, and an instant numbing coldness would fill them. That was all the instruction I needed, really. I was not a complete idiot.

It was a long, cold trip. The pressurized bag that held the sword and bully creaked on my back, the water tingled through my skin, the light disappeared, and my eyes swam as the cable and the darkness seemed to be the whole world. Down and down and down, lake without end.

And then there was light.

The structure looked like a madness of junk. It was nestled at the bottom of the lake, burrowed into the stony bed. It was ringed with light, coming from a circle of globes that whirled inside like starry tornadoes. Their glow leaked across the lake floor in murky blueness, picking out details of wrecked buildings and toppled pillars. These were the remains of the t.i.tan city, drowned by the Feyr under this great depth of water.

And crouching at the base of the ruins, the cable's end. I descended toward it, the scale of the place slowly coming into perspective. Enormous. Larger than most of the towers of the city above, flat on its side, rippling with currents of light and shadow. The building shifted in the tricky light, pulsing like a drum soundly struck. I could feel the song of it in my mind, humming through the water. The closer I got, the bigger this place seemed, until I got so close that I could see that the building itself was quite small. Most of what I could see, what I had taken for structure, was just edifice. A web of beams and pillars and b.u.t.tresses that arced and crossed through the water, supporting each other, building and descending without any central plan. The lights that pulsed through this open framework seemed to emanate from the stony arches themselves, without power or purpose. Beautiful, in the way that madness can be beautiful if seen from afar, like battle, or a storm cloud.

At the center of this openness was a single building. It looked like a pile of iron clamsh.e.l.ls, carelessly shucked and stacked on top of each other. Long arcs of light lined the edges of the protruding sh.e.l.ls, like rows of windows or the glittering bevel of a blade. When I got a certain distance from this structure, the cable branched and then branched again, a dozen times, each split diminishing the size of the cables until there was nothing but a thin vein-work of cables that led out into the stony arches around the building. Hoping that whatever magic kept me safe when I was close to the cable would transfer to this strange architecture, I let go and drifted toward that building of sh.e.l.ls.

Luck held, and there was no more bruising coldness to greet me. I set foot on the sandy bottom of the lake. The grit was shallow, just covering a floor of sharp angles. Uncomfortable to walk on, but great traction. I felt light as air. Too light, in fact. I looked down at the iron lung, but the dials made no sense to me. I was getting featherheaded. That was indication enough for me. I rushed to the central building, kicking up in great long strides that bounced me across the lakebed.

Even dwarfed as it was by the brooding archwork all around, the building was huge. Maybe as large as the Strength, maybe larger. There was no perspective here, and I was running out of air. The swirling globes of light, embedded in the ground, were scattered around the approach to the building. Some of those were as large as buildings, some as small as eyes, all of them peering up out of the sand like crabs scuttling up from the tide. I stopped to put my hand against one, and felt the warmth of it shoot up my arm like a knife. I shivered and drifted away, smiling happily in the light and the lightness of my body. My body. My body was going away.

I bit my tongue and rode the pain toward the sh.e.l.l building. I panicked as I approached. Such a large building, but not built for people. Certainly not for intruders. I was going to starve for air, battering myself against its pebbled sides. I reached a near lip of sh.e.l.l, the band of light nearly as tall as I was, translucent and yellow-white in the murky water. I reached out for it but my hands were turning numb. I watched my fist beat senselessly against the colored wall, scrambling at the lip of it, striking my fingers on the smooth, cold edge of the sh.e.l.l building. There were no doors. There was no entrance.

The building settled, and I felt movement around me. Suddenly I was ... breathed in. Inhaled. Shooting up, pausing some distance away from the building, then the water swirled and I was going up again. I turned my head and one of the upper decks of the building rushed at me, a black void at its center, flexing as I slithered bonelessly toward it.

A smack of air pressure, the suit spasming against my ribs and legs, and then I was through and flopping up onto a beach of smooth pebbles. I lay there, still gasping for air, my lungs starving, and then I got a tingling hand up to my mask and threw the dogged seal away. A rush of air and I was alive. Alive, but trapped at the bottom of the lake without a breath of air to get me back.

I lay there for a while, breathing, aching as the blood surged back into my hands and feet, my lungs shredded with the effort of inhaling vacuum. I tossed the bottled lung away and listened to it clang loudly off stone. A big room. I forced myself to my knees for a look around.

It was a cancer of a cathedral, drowning at the bottom of the lake. Swirling constellations of naves led to fluted columns, supporting gothic arches that climbed out into midair, themselves supporting nothing. The whole s.p.a.ce felt like the inside of a dead thing's sh.e.l.l, chambers whirling into smaller chambers, stairwells that started broad and narrowed into nothing, melting into the wall dozens of feet over the floor. Everything was smooth and dry. Organic.

I stripped off the pressure suit and refitted what remained of my holy vestments. Still on my knees, I rolled out the sealed weapon pack and settled the revolver and articulated sheath properly on my body. I fed the sword into the sheath, checked the load on my bully, then got to my feet and headed down into the convoluted center of the building.

This place wasn't built for traveling through. I felt like I was behind the stage at a carnival show, with half-built sets and stage tricks that stretched away into forever. Stairways ended abruptly. Doors opened into nothing, or wouldn't open at all. Arching paths led to other framework catwalks that led back to the start of the path. More than once I found myself jumping from one tilted floorscape to the next, leaping over chasms that yawned down for hundreds of feet, maybe more. Wicked gusts pulsed through the building, like the startled breathing of a dreaming child. The air smelled of dust, then of fire, then of mold. The air smelled of madness.

I rested on a terrace of pews. It amazed me, how much this place resembled the Grand Library, in the Scholar's prison up above. The same wild logic of architecture and landscape permeated everything, though here the logic slipped into dream as much as reality. And no books, I realized. There were no books here.

The farther I went, the narrower things became. Ceilings dropped claustrophobically low; walls pressed in. The stairways were mere wisps between rooms. The logic of the place was compressing into a single, disjointed note. I felt more and more like I was pressing on into a dollhouse, hunching down to pa.s.s through doors, stepping over walls that had never been closed. I was about to invoke Morgan's strength to clear a little s.p.a.ce when I pa.s.sed through the final door, and came to the heart of it all.

The central chamber was enormous and smooth. White walls raised up dozens of feet, a cylinder of arches, each arch leading off to tiny rooms like the one I had just left. It was as if the architecture of the building was an ever-expanding note, and this was the bell that had sounded it. I looked around once, then saw what was at the center of the room.

A boat, tucked into a bank of sand, wooden sides charred and bound with bra.s.s. The nose of the boat was down, as if it had plummeted to this spot and burrowed into the earth. Lying in the bottom of the boat, but nearly vertical due to its orientation, was a body, bound in chains.

Amon the Scholar. Still breathing, his lungs rasping like steel on sand. His skin was charred and black, great cracks in the flesh open and raw. Not a tall man, but a G.o.d. Water from the lake burbled from his mouth with every breath, slopping messily down onto his bound chest. The chains sang with power, hovering inches over his body and orbiting, seemingly diving into his body and his soul to twist out in a complex knot that strained my eyes. I looked away.

Nathaniel was there, leaning against one of the arches. He held a cigarette cupped in one hand, the iron mask of the Betrayer tucked under his arm like a football. Other than the mask, he was dressed as an Elector of Alexander. Playing his full hand. Hiding nothing.

"I thought he had convinced you," he said, quietly, his voice carrying through the bell-shaped room like an infection. "I thought Barnabas had turned you aside. Thought that you weren't going to come to me at all."

"You won't run from me this time, Betrayer," I said, though my voice shook.

"Oh." He smiled, then stubbed the cigarette out on the wall and dipped his head to place the mask on his face. When he looked up, it was with a gray visage, articulated into the shape of a face, cruel and sharp. "I wouldn't dream of it."

*held my bullistic on him, trained at his heart. He smirked.

"Bullets, Eva Forge? Black powder? Is that how you wish to resolve this?"

"You dead. That's all I care about."

He nodded slowly, looking down at the floor. His hands were clasped behind him.

"I understand that. Expediency." His voice echoed off the high walls of the chamber. Behind me, Amon burbled on his eternal bed, iron creaking through his chest. "The Betrayer follows a similar path, Eva. One knife, rather than two, rather than a legion. One knife in the dark."

"Driven home by a coward," I spat.

"Well. Why fight when you cannot win? Why not fight the battle you are guaranteed to win? Efficiency of force." He was getting close enough to make me nervous. I poked the revolver at him. He smiled. "And still you haven't shot me."

"Whatever you want," I said, and sighted the shot.

"We dream Morgan's death every night, Eva. His last moments. The blood on our knife. The sirens in the camp as the body is found. I close my eyes at night and dream that glory." He stood straightbacked, halfway to the Scholar's coffin, arms still behind his back. Like a schoolteacher, standing in front of a gifted though stubborn student. "Is there anything about that you wanted to know?"

"Nope." And trigger. The thud of gunpowder roared through the chamber, flash and shock shuddering up my arm.

His swing was quick, quick as a bullet. Quicker. He swung his right arm up, holding something loose and silver. Sparks showered the white of his armor, but he kept smiling. I backed away as he slithered forward, cycling hammer and cylinder, taking even breaths, timing the shots to match the quiet of my body, putting round after round on target. And every shot, every booming report, met by that arcing silver that ended in sparks and his smile.

We stood, separated by ten feet, immobile. That dry clicking sound was the hammer landing on an empty chamber. He was in a relaxed stance, swinging his weapon casually across his chest in a figure eight. It looked like a chain, mirror bright and as long as my leg.

"Reload, if you like. I'm in no rush."

I stared at him in empty panic and fought my way through the nerves, through the antiseptic terror of his defense. I flicked my wrist and emptied the sh.e.l.ls, clattering, to the floor. Calmly as I could, I pinched bullets out of my belt and seated them in the empty chambers. He watched me with idle amus.e.m.e.nt.

"If you prefer, we can start again. I can go back to my wall, there. Light a cigarette-"

"What happened to the darkness, Nathaniel? What happened to the expedient blade in the middle of the night?" I slapped the cylinder shut. "Why are you toying with me?"

He bowed ever so slightly. "A final kill, Eva. We have been counting the days, praying for the sheath to be dropped, the cloak pulled aside. There have been many deaths in these two hundred years. In the house of Morgan, in the temple of Amon. Even in the halls of Alexander. But it is drawing to an end. I am savoring the last bite of a marvelous feast."

"The halls of Alexander? You would kill your own?"

"They are not all our own. Very few are, in fact. We kill those who must be killed."

"And Morgan? Why must we all be killed?"

"You come here, and do not know the answer? No, I think you do. Come," he raised a hand. "The feast is getting cold. Let us dine."

I slapped the cylinder closed then holstered the revolver. I was never a lady of the bullet, anyway. Blade was my soul, and blade my heart. I raised my hands, and the sheath fed me my sword. Nathaniel laughed.

"Excellent! I would have it no other way." He stopped spinning his chain and held it limp in front of him. The links of the chain were sickle sharp and barbed, oddly formed to let the chain lay nearly flat when it was still. It swung slowly by his chest like a pendulum. With a quick hand he snapped it to one side. The chain stiffened, the links collapsed together, and suddenly he was holding a sword, full of barbs and gaps and links and sickle-shaped cruelty. Idly, he twirled it in his hand, and it droned as it cut the air.

"What amuses me is how little curiosity you show for your brothers of Morgan. Tomas? Isabel? You have yet to ask if they still live, or if I have named their judgment and declared their-"

I struck, without invokations or rage, without thought. I was mesmerized by the pattern of his blade, its path burned into my mind, its farthest orbit, weakest point, just as I stepped forward and put my blade neatly into his chin. Just nicked it, like an accident you might have while shaving.

He stumbled back, blood coursing down his throat and onto that gloriously bleached doublet. The mask went flying, to crack against Amon's charred boat. It ended up on the floor, spinning like a dropped plate. I barked out a laugh.

"Show your face, coward," I said, and swung in again.

He answered, his face angry, the blade swift as he countered my stroke, countered again, then riposte. I took the stroke on the wide, flat face of my sword and twisted the handle to throw off his weight. I lunged again. He back-stepped from the attack, and collected himself.

"Not talking so much now, eh?"

"Why do you attack without your invokations, Eva Forge?" he chided. "Has Morgan left you? Have you lost your faith in the old Warrior?"

"I don't need the rites to put down a dog. Even Alexander's dog."

He settled his face, a.s.sumed a stance of defense, and swung the chain-sword in a close dance. That drone hummed off the high ceiling and drowned out Amon's unnatural chorus.

"You seek to unsettle me. You think that because we fight in shadows, we do not know how to fight. You demand proof." He skittered forward in a series of quick half-steps, his balance always at center. "Proof you shall have."

Proof I had. I didn't think that, of course. I knew d.a.m.n well they could fight. Elias had put up a fight. I had crossed blades with Nathaniel's boys over Simeon's body. He could fight. I just didn't want to waste my noetics this early on. Reserves for the long battle. If he was going to gloat, then I was willing to stretch it out.

I did just enough to keep him away, and he did just enough to keep me moving. We retreated across the chamber in a slow circle, blades dancing through sparks, the room quiet except for the metal strike and the drone of his blade, the scratch of grit under our feet as we moved. One circuit, and I had seen enough.

"Barnabas, never dead, son of hammers, son of light," I incanted, and the room began to hum with power. "Elias, green life and dark soil, warrior of wood and woad, blood feeding the life of us all. Isabel, ink-stained and careful shot." As I spoke the timber of our blades changed, the drone muting to be replaced by the high song of my sword. The sparks began to mix with a clinging fog that trailed my swings. The air cracked. My voice snapped like a flag in a hurricane. "Heridas, who stood at Chelsey Gate against the Paupers' Tyrant, dead for a day and still fighting. b.l.o.o.d.y Jennifer, two swords against the night, never to see the dawn!"

The tide shifted, and we balanced against each other, blade for blade, stroke for stroke, countering each counter and stepping past each heart strike.

"What sort of invokation is that, Paladin? I know the names of your dead."

"The dead and the living," I spat. "Simeon, barrels hot, chamber dry, his eyes the eyes of heaven, his bully the hammer of G.o.ds. May the warrior never die!" And the chamber echoed with my voice, the warrior never die, never die ... "Jeremiah Scourge, last of the living shield-brethren of dying Morgan, carrying the flashing steel into the Straits of Armice, unyielding as the Rethari swarmed. The ma.s.sacre at Middling Hall, the charge of Maltis, the siege of Or'bahar. The hundred years of the warrior, and a hundred more, and a hundred more!" I bullied into him, blade swinging wildly, fire in my eyes and in my hands, wicking from my sword as I struck again and again. "A hundred years forever, and may the warrior never die!"

He was in earnest now, falling back, sweat and blood dripping down his face and neck. Reckless with his blade, he left openings that I widened, revealed weaknesses that I pursued. He fell back, and I advanced, the warrior in me rising like the sun.

"I bind myself to the legions of the blade, to my brothers of sword and sisters of bullet. To the thousand years of Morgan, those who fell in his service, and those who fell in his defense. I bind myself to the battle unending, the hunt eternal." I spat the words, my voice rising into a crescendo of mad fury. "To the living sons of the warrior, and to the dead." And with each oath I struck, sword hammering against his defenses in glory and light. "To the dead! To the dead of Morgan! The dead of Morgan! Morgan!"

I threw him back and blood spilled out from his chest. He gasped and brought his sword around to defend. I hammered it aside and drew blood again. He was on his knees in the presence of the warrior G.o.d. I howled and rushed in.

The blade came from nowhere. From the shadows. It took me in the back, sliding smoothly between doublet and ribs, hot metal straight through me, and when it left there was nothing to fill that void but cold. I stumbled. I fell.

Nathaniel dragged himself to his feet, supporting his weight on the sword of chain. His servant ghosted behind me, shaking blood from his weapon and muttering invokations. I was on one knee, trying to get my breath against the pressure of the blood that was filling my mouth.

"The dead of Morgan," he said, and spat. "Morgan, warrior of the field. Champion of the people. d.a.m.ned butcher." He raised his sword. "Hail to Morgan, the Brother Betrayed. Long may he die."

I twisted and swung my sword behind me, rising on one foot, just enough strength to drive the sword into the other ghost's belly, punch it in deep. The air smelled like p.i.s.s and blood. I drew the sword out and up, rasping the blade against his ribs before exiting the steaming corpse just below the throat. He gurgled, already dead, slumped to the side. My return strike blocked Nathaniel's startled swing, corrected, then two quick punches that put the sharp base of the blade into his thigh, then his belly. We fell apart, leaving a pool of spilled life between us.

"The dead of Morgan," I burbled. He stared at me, face pale as his cloak, lips quivering. I was on my knees, gasping, grating my teeth.

Nathaniel leapt to his feet, hand on his opened guts, and invoked something short and arcane. Two quick steps and he was in the air, off the wall and higher up, disappearing into one of the archways. He left his sword and mask behind.