The Horns of Ruin s-9

by Tim Akers

  "Whatever you've got," I said. "And plenty of it."

  * * *

  What they had was black wine, served in crystal that hummed between my fingers. We drank it in the quietest room I had been in since I had entered this damned building. The walls were three feet thick and the door was like a tombstone, rolled aside by pistons as thick as my waist and then sealed from the inside. Still I could hear that music, running through my bones.

  "How do you people stand it?" I asked, my face buried in the wide mouth of the wineglass. "It's like living on the monotrain."

  "Hm. Yes, I suppose it would be. But this is something you grow to love." She paused to drink. When she raised the glass to her mouth, the fluted chimes of her mask shuffled aside. Her lips were painted black, and she had the most delicate bones. She was careful not even to breathe when the mask was retracted. "You would have loved it, I think. Had you been born to the right path."

  "We don't choose our paths, Lady Chanter. Not any more than they choose us."

  "How very fatalistic. Appropriate for a warrior, I suppose."

  I drank my wine and listened to the music in my bones. She tried to start a couple conversations, but I wasn't liking it. This place wasn't for me. It wasn't for Cassandra, either. Lesea was halfway through describing something about octaves and the high calling of the Chanters when a noise played its way through the horrible chorus, a noise that gave even the good Lady Lesea pause.

  To me it just sounded like more of the Song, at least at first. The background noise of earthquakes. But then I noticed the Chanter had stopped talking, and was sitting perfectly still with her head cocked to one side, wineglass halfway to her mouth. Then I noticed that the chorus had kicked it up a notch, rising in waves and tides of pure noise.

  Something tore through the chorus, like a jagged line of fire in a forest of dry grass. The Chanter dropped her glass and stood. The mask of chimes snapped open, revealing a perfect mouth and teeth white as tile and sharp as knives.

  "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 glass 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 hell out of crowds. Two rounds.

  "Morgan, god 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 Cassandra, 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.

  11

  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 Cassandra over to my custody. Failing that, I was going to steal the girl, and consequences be damned. At the worst, I was concerned that the Betrayer might try to assassinate 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 Cassandra.

  Cassandra was somewhere above me, in the half of the dome that was thrusting up into the sky like a new mountain range. Assuming they hadn't moved her while I was drinking black wine with Lesea. Assuming she wasn't already dead, wiped out in the first strike that had torn the dome asunder. Assuming.

  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, passing 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 constitution of the coldmen I had encounte
red 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 stitched 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 Cassandra might be, I slid into the corridor. This whole half of the structure was leaning away from vertical, and once-level passages had become more like amusement 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 god.

  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 Cassandra'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 Cassandra 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, Cassandra 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 stitched 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 Cassandra 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 god. 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 thirtymile 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 pass 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 Cassandra, 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 passed 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, Cassandra 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 Cassandra, 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.