"Stay here," she said, and her voice ripped from her throat like barbed honey. "I"ll be right back."
I stumbled at the sound of her voice, my gla.s.s tumbling to the floor, warm black wine splashing across the plush rug. I slid boneless from my chair, my skull vibrating, my fingers numb. By the time my eyes cleared the room was empty, and the door was sliding shut.
I struggled to my feet, using my sword as a crutch, leaning against it as I swayed in the wake of Lesea"s impossible voice. Even I could hear the chaos in the Song outside. A great deal of divine violence was being done, at octaves that barely registered to my mortal ears. I dragged myself to the door, checked to see that it was locked, and slid back to the floor with my back to the wall. Time for the trick.
The bullets clattered as I dropped them to the floor, emptying the cylinder with a flick of my wrist. I loaded two blanks, special rounds we kept to scare the h.e.l.l out of crowds. Two rounds.
"Morgan, G.o.d of war, lord of the hunt," I intoned. "Your breath is smoke, your mouth is the grave. Your skin is fire."
My skin stiffened and then sprouted the tiniest scales, blackening as the invokation spread across me. It wouldn"t last long, but I didn"t need it to. I held the bullistic next to my ear, said a little prayer for Barnabas and Ca.s.sandra, closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Sharp pain, and then the sound of the world was sucked away into a humming maelstrom of silence. Quickly I switched hands before I lost my nerve, held the gun next to my other ear, and pulled the trigger. A lesser noise, but still great pain. I stood. My eyes were burning with powder. The scales had flashed away in the heat, but my face was blackened with powder. Warm, thick blood poured out of my ears. The world around me was silence. I could still feel the Song in my bones, but not in my head. I flicked the two rounds onto the ground, reloaded my bullistic, then exchanged weapons and invoked a silent rite of guidance.
In absolute, deafening silence, I opened the door and stepped out into chaos and fire.
*Oman lay outside the door. His mask lay shattered by his face, and there was blood coming from his mouth. I stepped over him and walked down the hallway, in the direction I had come from. I found the source of all the violence just around a corner.
Even deaf to the Song, I could still feel it, feel the tension in its octaves and the crashing rhythm of its power. Before there had been a serene majesty to it, but now it was swollen with fear and violence. Whatever the Chanters were weaving, it was born of desperation.
I came around the corner and found that the Chanters" dome was being unmade. Some great power had split the dome in half, and the two sections were grinding together. My half of the building was sinking. Above me, I could see the floors that had once been parallel to my own, crumbling as they rose up into the air. Looking down, I could see the cracked heart of the building, the ornate wooden chamber of the Song, where the Elders of the Cult held watch over the ancient hymn. Smoke rose up from that chamber. On all sides, black water from the lake was spilling into the structure.
And with the water, hordes of the coldmen. They remained limp as corpses as the water carried them sloppily over the moat"s edge, pouring into the building, spilling out over the floors and hallways that were suddenly revealed to the sky. They became animate only as they reached stone, dragging themselves to unsteady feet, then drawing out their blades and rushing into the structure. None had reached my floor yet, but they seemed intent on gaining the heart of the building, where the Song warbled and raged.
This was unexpected. I had come to try to convince the Chanters to turn Ca.s.sandra over to my custody. Failing that, I was going to steal the girl, and consequences be d.a.m.ned. At the worst, I was concerned that the Betrayer might try to a.s.sa.s.sinate her while she was in the hands of Alexander"s people. Since Simeon had arranged his meeting with an Alexian friend, it seemed likely that the Cult of the Betrayer had infiltrated Alexander"s power structure. If they could lead an Elder of Morgan into a trap, surely they could arrange to have a prisoner of the Chanters killed without causing too much of a fuss.
But this? There was more force here than had been used to kidnap the Fratriarch. Surely the girl wasn"t more important than Barnabas? Was she?
The details would matter later. For now I was on a sinking island, swamped with undead warriors, and stone deaf. There was so much destruction that I could feel it in my bones, in my meat, but my mind was wrapped in a thick cloud of roaring silence. I tried to invoke and stumbled on the words. Power would not come to me if I couldn"t form the words of the invokation. I was alone, and I had to get to Ca.s.sandra.
Ca.s.sandra was somewhere above me, in the half of the dome that was thrusting up into the sky like a new mountain range. a.s.suming they hadn"t moved her while I was drinking black wine with Lesea. a.s.suming she wasn"t already dead, wiped out in the first strike that had torn the dome asunder. a.s.suming.
The water continued to rise around me, and some of the coldmen spotted me and lumbered over. There was something different about these guys. Less armor, more flesh. Their skin was bloated, crisscrossed with deep cuts that had been hurriedly sewn together with thick leather cord. They still had the goggle eyes and the staticky voice boxes, but these were bolted crudely into their faces. Their weapons were just as wicked, though, just as sharp. They rushed me.
It was a poor-quality fight. I swept the length of my blade underhand, pushing the tip about four inches into the first guy"s belly and drawing it up his chest until I got to his chin. His ribs popped like a cheap zipper. He stumbled back and I maintained the sword"s momentum, pa.s.sing it overhead and then laterally. I put steel on his neck, near the base of the blade, driving straight through the meat and bone and coming out the other side with most of the weapon"s speed still intact. I went to one knee, rotated, and drove the blade right through his companion"s thighs. They fell away from me, falling tonelessly into the dark water that was beginning to pool around my ankles. Quick fight. These guys didn"t have the const.i.tution of the coldmen I had encountered before.
But there were a lot of them. More than I had the time or patience to deal with, frankly. Let the Chanters guard their home. Before any more of the hastily st.i.tched dead men could waylay me, I slid down the ruined chasm of the dome. Tiny waterfalls followed me, and avalanches of shale. When I got low enough, I was able to jump across the chasm, landing in a heap among broken instruments. I was low enough that I could see the fight that was boiling around the breach in the central chamber. Chanters, badly outnumbered and dwindling by the second, swarmed by the clumsy coldmen. I think there were Feyr among the defenders. Strange, but a puzzle for another day.
I climbed the rumbling incline of the shattered dome. The ghosts of sounds were starting to penetrate my head, even though my eardrums must surely be blown. The Song was such a violent thing, but even it was drowning in the groan of the building, the tectonic explosions and shifting architecture of the island. I looked down and saw water bubbling in the chamber below, working its way through organ pipes and articulated voice machines. I shivered and climbed on, as the Song began to fade from my bones.
When I got to the level where I thought Ca.s.sandra might be, I slid into the corridor. This whole half of the structure was leaning away from vertical, and once-level pa.s.sages had become more like amus.e.m.e.nt park rides. Below me, the singing had stopped, or at least fallen to a level at which it no longer penetrated my deafness. The air was thick with dust. There were bodies on the ground, caked in dirt and their own blood. I couldn"t tell if these were Chanters or their attackers. It didn"t matter. I slid past them and down into the crumbling structure.
The lights were failing. I tried to invoke the Ghosteyes, but the words were thick on my deafened tongue and the invokation failed. Wisps of bluish light splintered out from me, scattering around the room before disappearing. I crept along, mostly blind, completely deaf, nothing but my hands and the weight of my sword to guide me. Something shifted far below and the floor tilted a little more. I wondered if it was an Amonite engine that kept this place up. I wondered if the scions of the Betrayer, Amon the Murderer, would know how best to disable the work of their G.o.d.
Someone stumbled out of the shadows and took a swipe at me. I punched him with the pommel of my sword, swept his legs from under him, then held my elbow across his throat until he stopped struggling. I raised his face up close to mine to get a better look. One of Ca.s.sandra"s guards. Glad I hadn"t just sliced him open. I wasn"t quite at the point of taking up arms against all the scions of the Brothers Immortal. Not yet. And it looked like I was getting close to where I needed to be.
Sure enough, the next corner was familiar. A frictionlamp glowed dimly on its bracket, just outside a very memorable, very heavy door. I tried to invoke again with a little better success, coming away with enough strength to wedge the door aside. The guards were gone, but Ca.s.sandra remained, limp on the floor in her chains.
I said her name, then again, louder. She looked up, nodding when she saw me. Her lips moved, but I couldn"t hear her. I pulled one of the chains taut, laid it out against the stone, and took an invoked swing at it. My swing struck as much stone as steel, and there were sparks. It was enough. One of the chains snapped open. With the loop broken, Ca.s.sandra was able to gather up the rest of the links and stand. She was as free as I could make her in my present state. I sheathed the blade and put my arm around her. Leaning on each other, we struggled out of the room and back into the hallway.
She leaned her head against me and spoke some more. I couldn"t hear her, so I shook my head. She put her forehead directly against my head, the vibrations of her voice getting through my throbbing silence.
Thank you.
"Sure thing," I said, or I think I said. And that"s when they hit.
It was a whole cadre of the coldmen, the true breed, the ones who had kidnapped the Fratriarch. They came out of the deeper parts of the building, boiling up from the darkness, their eyes glowing blue and green as they rushed us. The girl fell off my arm, or I pushed her, and the bully was in my hand. I st.i.tched lead into the first couple of them, and then they were too close. In one motion I holstered the bully and went for my sword. The blade cut them as I drew it, the articulated sheath spinning the sword under my arm and into my hands. The corridor was too narrow and too precarious for truly fancy forms. I kept one hand high on the blade, on the weighted, dull length of steel that was there for just this purpose, striking mostly with the middle of the blade and thrusting with the tip. Trap with the hilt, push back with the middle, spear into black blood and cold flesh with the tip. Repeat. They fell around me.
Deaf, so I never heard the explosion that almost ended us. The floor jumped, and we all slid in a tangle of living and dead, deeper into the drowning building. Water, dark and cold, swallowed me. I pushed to my knees, then my feet, scything all around me at the grasping hands. I saw Ca.s.sandra burst from the water and swim to a tangle of metal at the center of this new pool, then wondered how I could see, then realized that the roof was gone and above us was yawning sky and sun.
The coldmen kept coming. They clawed out of the water and came at me. I was without invokation, without strength or shield. All I had was a childhood spent with a sword in my hands, a girlhood under the heavy eye of the Elders, lived in service to my G.o.d. It would have to be enough.
The trick is to keep the blade moving. A sword like this is only heavy if you try to stop it, or change direction, or carry it on a thirtymile march in the woods. I have done all of these things, and I have learned to keep the blade moving in a fight. If you do it right, the only thing that will stop your blade is bone and meat and metal. And the only way to keep that from happening is to keep your blade very, very sharp. I have done that since I was a little girl. Sharp and heavy and always moving, and the strength that comes from thirty-mile marches.
I led with the pommel, bullying the blade into the air with my off hand on the blade rest, then launched the sword into a wide, scything swing that spun me around. This was before I had even gotten to the coldmen. Something to get the momentum going. I planted my feet, holding the hilt loosely in my palms to maintain the arc of the blade without getting twisted around, and just kept the sword moving. It was a training form, honestly, to build strength and familiarity with the weapon. As a child I had done it with a length of wood capped with lead. Today I did it to stay alive.
When the speed was good I shuffled forward and pushed the orbit of the blade into the nearest coldman. It cut into him at the knees, the shoulder, crossing back to open up his belly and finally splitting him from neck to nuts. He fell in many pieces, the way a plate does when struck by a stone.
I kept the motion up and two of them jumped me. There was water here, always rising, and as I shifted my weapon from front to back it kicked up tails in the muck. I could barely keep track of the blade"s path, but my heart knew it instinctively, adjusting to skim off of armor without losing momentum, hardening my arms when the metal was about to find flesh or bone, always compensating for the motion of the enemy and the crazy tilt of the collapsing dome. All in complete silence.
The more of them that came at me, the less I felt the form of the blade and the more of it happened without thought, without direction. Two fell, then three. A fourth joined them and the blade moved on. I was sure that I was cut, but could not feel it. There was blood in the air, black blood and red, cold blood and warm, but all I felt was the joy of the blade"s dance and the opening of meat. They came and they fell away, they rushed and they fell away. The world around me was nothing but the path of the blade.
It was over before I realized it, over and I was still dancing. No one else came to fall against my steel. I did another pa.s.s of the room, arcing and scything and dancing, the water kicking up all around me, the air whistling against my face, rustling my hair. No one left but the separated fallen at my feet. I gave the sword one last whirl and then grounded it tip first in the earth, and all the wounds rushed at me as the momentum of the dance left me, shuddering through my arms and the blade and into the ground. I collapsed against the hilt, struggled to stand, heaving breath and life all over my blade.
There were many wounds. I had not come through cleanly, but I had come through. Leaning on the sword, I looked around the room. At the half-submerged bodies of my enemies, at the tangle of metal and stone in the deeper parts of the pool. At Ca.s.sandra, just standing up from behind a column of brick. She looked frightened. I understood that. She was talking. I didn"t understand that.
A shadow pa.s.sed over me and I looked up. Above us, a great section of the dome peeled away and, slowly, gracefully, bent toward us. To flatten us, to bury us under a world of brick and stone and metal. All that, and the building was going to kill us.
Suddenly, Ca.s.sandra was beside me. She put one arm around me and threw the other one up, as though shading me from the sun. Power surged through her. I watched as the wall leaned down to us and then, suddenly, the avalanche of tumbling brick stiffened. Around us the stones formed a dome as they fell, stacking tight. The Cant of Making.
I looked down at Ca.s.sandra, and her eyes were fire blue as she intoned the Cant. Her hair whipped around, as though blown in a wind that came from inside the girl. Even her clothes, the cuffs of iron, her metal collar, all hung as though without gravity. Even I felt light.
Before the new dome had finished forming, she threw an arm out in the direction we had come, back up to the top of the building. A physical shock wave, very concentrated, shot out from her hand. As it traveled, the avalanche of collapsing architecture formed around it. It burrowed a tunnel into the sky, bricks lining up and clattering together like metal suddenly magnetized. The avalanche roared around us, the ground shook, but that tunnel formed and held in the span of a breath. Far away, at the end of the new tunnel, I could see a ring of blue sky. The earth settled, and it was still.
She collapsed in my arms, sobbing. My own strength was gone, but I lifted her, and she lifted me, and together we struggled up the tunnel and out into the light.
Owen grasped my head in his hands, palms against my ears, and began to invoke. My skull burned like a coal. When he released me, long, gummy strands of blood trailed from his palms to my ears. I could hear again. It was loud.
"That was a very bad idea," he yelled, though I could barely hear him over the rest of it. "I mean, a good idea, but a bad one too. We probably could have made some earm.u.f.fs for you, or something."
Owen had found us huddled in a ruined gazebo, on the sh.o.r.e of the copper lake where I"d seen the Feyr on my way in. The little men and their boat were gone, and the copper lakebed was punctuated with blast marks. The water had drained away. There was a lot of burning topiary, too. It looked surreal, burning green horses and spirals crisping away to nothing while I watched. This was as far as we were able to get in our condition. Owen and his patrol of Healers were fixing us up, one at a time.
"Where"d they take you?" I asked.
"Visitors" center. More like a holding cell for the curious. When that thing hit, though, everyone started rushing toward the center. We just followed."
"What was it?"
"You tell me. You came out of where it struck."
I looked over at Ca.s.sandra. Her face and arms were bloodless, and the two Healers who were attending her kept their voices low. I saw that her ruined hand was still sleeved in that contraption of steel I had first seen in the alleyway. How long ago had that been? Weeks? Days?
"I don"t know either. We were inside, deep inside. Whatever it was cleaved the h.e.l.l out of that sanctuary of theirs." I sat up and rubbed my head. "Doesn"t make a lot of sense."
A flight of valkyn screamed by overhead. The city"s defenses had finally responded to the attack, and the island was swarming with Alexander"s peasant army. Back in the dome the Song had been replaced by a chorus of gunfire and m.u.f.fled explosions. The whole island was shaking.
"You don"t want to go back in there, do you?" Owen asked, nervously.
"I"m a Paladin of Morgan, idiot. Of course I want to go back in. But my sworn duty is to her, and her safety." Ca.s.sandra was sitting up now, looking around like a child woken from a nap. That Making had taken it right out of her. "How long until they hit Alexander directly, you think?"
"What?"
"Whoever these guys are, they"re doing this for a reason. They started with Morgan. Maybe because we"re the weakest, maybe because we have some trick that could stop them." I thought of the archive, but didn"t mention it. I didn"t know how that played into this game yet. "Now they"ve moved against the Chanters. Arguably the Alexians" greatest weapons, thrown into disarray."
"This is not the time for this conversation," Ca.s.sandra said. She was struggling to stand. I rose and pulled her up by her injured hand, to test its strength. She grimaced, but the hand felt strong.
"Did you do this?" I asked, holding on to her sleeve. Her hand rested in a glove of wires and pistons, each joint articulated by minuscule gears that twitched and shimmered with motion, even when her hand was still. It reminded me of my sheath.
"The family didn"t have any healers, and little medicine." She pulled her hand away and hid it in her cloak. "I did what I could."
"Does it hurt?" Owen asked. "I could do something for it."
"No, thank you. I"ll be fine."
A series of thumps resounded out of the new chasm at the center of the island. Something deep inside the artificial ground collapsed, and the home of the Chanters clenched in on itself. Sirens began to wail in the distance, like the horns of the final battle sounding the ruin of the world. I grabbed Ca.s.sandra by the shoulder.
"This is the part where we run away," I said. "Come on."
We were not alone in our intention. The civilian population had been fleeing the island since the disturbance had started. They were now joined by the broken legions of the city of Ash, the valkyn arcing high overhead, the foot soldiers trying to find the boats they had come in on being turned aside by unit commanders who insisted the battle wasn"t yet lost. The only ones not running were the coldmen. They pursued, their st.i.tched bodies clamoring forward even as the ground gave way and they fell into the waters of the lake.
We stopped at the crumbling edge of the island. The wall had peeled away, and raw machinery bristled out of the ground, trailing into the lake. Owen was on the communications rig, trying to find us a ride.
"It"s a rout," he spat, "and the boats are already gone. They evacced the civilians when they dropped off their units." He pulled off the rig and peered at the city. I could see a flotilla of transport boats steaming toward the docks. "Ten minutes at least, before they get empty and turn around."
"Where"s our boat?"
"Commandeered to a.s.sist in the evacuation." He nodded to the distant fleet. "It"s in there, somewhere."
"You got any holy tricks that involve walking on water?" I asked him. He shook his head. "Well. How about swimming? How does everyone feel about swimming?"
"A city on a lake, populated by G.o.ds, and people are trying to swim to sh.o.r.e." Ca.s.sandra slipped between those of us who had gathered at the rough edge of the water, and raised her hands to the sky. She invoked.
"Amon and his Brothers Immortal were at that time traveling across the land, meeting with the leaders of the people to warn them of the coming fall. In time they came to a great river, deep and swift. Morgan and Alexander argued how best to cross it, and while they argued Amon gathered wood, and rope, and pitch." She clapped her hands together and then pointed them down at the water. The surface of the lake boiled and churned. "He built for them a great ship, which carried them across the river, and later to the far islands, and the people of heaven were with them."
The girl raised her hands and something loomed in the dark water. It broke the surface with much trouble, listing and pouring water out its sides. It was a boat, covered in black sludge. Those few surfaces that were clean looked to be charred wood. Eventually it settled on the water, and Ca.s.sandra hopped lightly into it.
"Nice trick. You sure that thing"s going to hold us all?" Owen asked.
"Weren"t you listening? It"s been to the far islands. It should be able to get us across this pond here."
"This is Amon"s ship?" I asked. "What happened to it?"
"Not his actual ship, no, but a noetic representation of it. And the ship hasn"t been the same since ..." She shrugged. "You know."
We boarded and the boat started across the water. Owen took me aside.
"Since what?"
"Amon"s death," I answered. "They bound him to that ship and burned him alive. It sank eventually, with him still screaming."
"Ah." He looked around the charred hull and winced. "Cheery."
"It"s not so bad," Ca.s.sandra said. "At least we aren"t swimming."
The boat lurched in the wake of another explosion from the Dome of the Song, and I grasped its side. The wood came away in damp splinters in my fist. Hard to forget that the story arc of this particular vessel ended with its owner burning alive and sinking to the bottom of this very lake.
"Not swimming yet," I corrected.
The boat made the short journey across the bay, docking along the inner horn. From there it was just a short mono ride back to the Strength. Owen left us at the station to report in. The civilian guard and their Alexian supervisors were in an uproar over the attack. Understandable. No one knew what had breached the dome, or where all those newly st.i.tched coldmen had come from. It was unnerving, to maybe have an army floating under the city.
The Strength of Morgan was dark when we got back to it. Day was mostly over, and the old folks didn"t keep the lamps burning deep into the night these days. Not even on days like this. The noetic bonds on the front door were intact, so I invoked my way inside and led Ca.s.sandra to the main mess. I found the remains of a meal in the kitchen, gathered up what looked serviceable, and took it out to the girl. While we broke our fast, I left my revolver on the table, next to my plate, the barrel turned ever so slightly toward Ca.s.sandra. We ate in silence.
"When are you going to tell me what happened with the Fratriarch?" I asked.
"When are you going to ask?"
I put down my fork and leaned back in my chair. "I"m asking."
She nodded, pushed aside the remains of her stew, and then took a long drink from her bowl of warm beer.
"Can I get a cigarette?"
"You smoke?"
"No." She shook her head. "But my lungs do."
I went out to Barnabas"s study and fished up a cylinder of cigarettes and a lighter. She cut free a short length of cigarette, tapped it tight, and lit up. The lighter was an antique, a disk of torsion-driven element that heated up a ring of bra.s.s at its center. It took a couple pumps to get it hot, and it smelled of summer tar, but it reminded me of the old man. She tossed the lighter on the table and watched the smoke billow away.
"So. What happened?" I asked.
"After you left it was bad. We could tell when you were getting close because they would leave us alone for a while, but most of the time they were just hammering on us. It cost that old man, to keep his shield up."
"That old man was the Fratriarch of Morgan. He could have held it up forever."
"No. He could have lasted a long time, I"m sure, but there came a point when ... when he had to make a choice. It had been a while since you"d been by to draw them off."
"Hadn"t been that long. I was. .h.i.tting them as hard as I could."