The Horns of Ruin s-9

by Tim Akers

  The bullet punched through the shimmering waves of their fight, slowing like a stone in water. As it slowed it peeled like an onion, the layers of lead spiraling outward until there was nothing left but a cloud of potential violence. Even that disappeared.

  "Godsdamn Scholars," I spat, then emptied the cylinder.

  Each shot followed the first, corkscrewing out of existence, each cloud wafting closer to the bastard. Waves of shock traveled out from their flight, cones of force that disturbed the balance of Cassandra's battle. Five bullets, five arcs of energy washing over each other, building and disturbing the patterns of energy that had accumulated between the two Scholars. An ever growing wave of shattered lead flowered out into the room.

  The last bullet struck him. Just a glancing blow, and only the barest core of lead left from the aura of Unmaking. It was enough. He flinched as blood touched his cheek. Cassandra moved against him, viciously, with enlightened power.

  The bricks of the floor roared up, stacking into a tower, the hollow core of which enveloped the man. He stumbled back, slapping his hands against the jigsaw horror that was swallowing him. There was no room for retreat. She built a tower around him. When she closed the cylinder, the shuffling whirlwind of bricks slid into place, clenching into the center, leaving no room for the man. One scream, and he was gone.

  Cassandra collapsed to the floor. Her whole body was shaking, and a thin trail of blood leaked from her mouth. I put a hand on her shoulder.

  "You alright?"

  "I hope there aren't too many more like him. I hope he was their best."

  "The doorman?" I stood up and started thumbing bullets into the bully's cylinder. "Probably not."

  The Chanters were all dead. I'll say it again: good shooting, especially for a Scholar. These boys were a different breed from the Librarians Desolate, that was for sure. I lined the bodies up and did some violence to the door.

  "What if we have to go out that way?"

  "It's a door," I said. "I can open it."

  We gathered up our stuff, the archive, and Cassandra's shotgun. I threw the disguises under the carriage, along with the remains of my false staff. If this was going to be a killing job, I'd rather do it in the full glory of Morgan. Before we left, we stood by the carriage and pulled down the tarp.

  No idea what it was. Beautiful, for one. Complicated. Smooth and black and cut from some kind of wood. Like of which I'd never seen.

  "They were building something," Cassandra said, quietly. "Something big."

  "Something about this size, I would say." I put my hand against it. It pulsed in familiar time. Couldn't put my finger on it. "You're the Scholar. What is it?"

  She circled it slowly, running gentle hands over its surfaces. First time the pulse vibrated through it, she snapped her hand back, startled.

  "Is it breathing?" she asked.

  "It's wood. Maybe it's some kind of instrument."

  She shook her head. "Brothers know."

  "I suspect one of them does," I said. "And let's be honest, we don't really have time to figure it out."

  "Yeah," Cassandra said, then placed both palms against it, closed her eyes, and breathed in very deeply. Twice. When she opened her eyes, they were watering. "Yeah, okay. Let's go."

  There was one big door that led to an elevator. The gears were running. Someone was coming up, so we went back to the room and took a different door. This led to a stairwell. Everything went down, it seemed. We followed the obvious path, trying to be quiet as we went. The stairs had a lot of horizontal sections, long hallways that moved us closer to the Spear before we descended again. We were probably underneath that old stone tower when we started coming across other doors to other floors. They were all locked. I could have gotten through them, but none of them seemed terribly compelling to me. By now the bodies would have been found. I didn't hear any alarms, but I had to assume that there was a search on. I was starting to taste something in my bones, too. Deeper we got, deeper it went.

  "You've got that?" Cassandra asked me. "That feeling?"

  "Got it," I said. It was like the impellors, but all the time. Made it hard to concentrate. "That can't be your hidden archive."

  "Why else would there be Amonites here? Those two were his private stock, Eva. He's got his own little team of Scholars working on something."

  "Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe he just uses them as guards."

  "We make terrible guards."

  "Those two did okay."

  "Yeah, well…" she began, but I held up my hand. Voices.

  One of the doors near us began to open, multiple locks being thrown and unlatched as we stared at it in terror. I cast about for an open door or hidden nook. We had just come around a corner, but after that the hallway was long and uninterrupted until the stairs. The direction we had been going was also a long hallway, pocked with doors. None of them looked unlocked. I grabbed the girl and ran. Best we could do was scoot around the corner and hope they were going the other way.

  … the damned Chanters, if you ask me. Finley said they had been butchered."

  "I thought we had a pretty good team in there," the second voice answered. They were getting closer. I pushed Cassandra farther back from the corner and whispered a quick invokation of speed.

  "Yeah, we did. Not good enough, though. Someone must have tipped them off."

  "We should have moved a dampener up there. I said we should have. "

  "Hindsight, Mal. Always with the hindsight."

  They were right by the corner. I could hear their feet, their robes. The jingling of keys. They were opening the last door we had passed. I relaxed, just a fraction.

  "I'm just saying that there'd be fewer dead now, and we wouldn't have to be doing this." The second voice was older. Cranky. "This is going to throw off the rotation. And for all we know, the Chanters fought just enough for one of them to escape and run for it."

  "We have to assume more than that. This is a delicate time."

  The final bolt was thrown and the door opened. There was a lot of open space in the new room, judging by the echoes. How much space could there be, this far under the street? We must be under the water by now, surely? The two voices paused in the open door.

  "Our lot is not the one I would have chosen. That any of us would have chosen. But we are here, and we must play our part. It is all we can do for the Scholar."

  "His name be praised," his companion intoned, like a prayer. "His body held tight."

  The two men sighed, then moved inside the larger room. As the door swung shut I heard one more snippet.

  "When we are done with the preparations, we can return to the archive and lock it down. The toll won't last forever."

  "It will set us back weeks."

  "Perhaps. But we'll still be alive."

  And the door shut. I looked at Cassandra, but she was already past me and around the corner. I followed. She went straight to the door the men had come out of, and had her palm against it, her eyes closed.

  "We can't wait around, Cass," I whispered. "They'll be coming back."

  "Yes," she answered, and opened her eyes. "Coming back to the archive."

  My eyes widened, and I turned to the door. The archive. I changed stance and began to invoke the Rite of the Sundering, as quietly as I could. Cassandra gave me a little slap and shushed me.

  "We'll need to close the door again, Paladin." She produced a complicated tool, knelt by the door, and put her forehead against the metal. "This may take some time."

  "It's in short supply, I think. They know someone is in the building."

  "It will take more time if you keep talking."

  I grimaced, but backed off. This was much too long of a hallway for me to be comfortable. Any of these doors could open with little or no warning. And if they had found the massacre upstairs, it wasn't like we'd be able to talk our way past a patrol. Sword in sheath, bullistic in hand, I paced. That was as much peace as I could give the girl.

  Her whole body hummed with attent
ion. She had the tool flat up against the lock. There were sounds coming out of her, out of the door, out of the tool. Like stones grinding. That had to be drawing someone's notice, didn't it? This was taking forever. A thousand forevers. I kept my eyes on all the doors, on the passageway, especially on the door that those two had gone through. Had they been Amonites? Alexians? They had referred to the Scholar, so probably some of Alexander's pets. They still wore the chains, I remembered. They couldn't be all that free.

  The grinding sound stopped, and the door sighed open. Cassandra stood, smiling.

  "Breaking things is not always the way," she said.

  "Fine, fine," I said, hurrying her through the door. "Let's just get inside."

  The door locked behind us. Inside was a square room with a low ceiling. The space was dominated by a brass dome that reached almost to the ceiling, and nearly to the walls. The only clear areas were at the corners, where the circumference of the dome did not reach. There were hooks all along the wall by the door, several of which were hung with some sort of suit. The dome looked pressurized, and in fact had several dogged portals leading into it at various heights, each one accessible by rungs soldered onto the dome. It was covered with Amonite runes, some painted on, some forged into the metal, or made of iron or copper or gold and bolted to the surface. I looked back at Cassandra.

  She was standing in quiet awe, her eyes wide. She was whispering below her breath, and her free hand was making rites. The symbols of her faith.

  "This is it?" I asked.

  "Yes. The last archive of Amon the Scholar. It's… enormous."

  "Well. We aren't taking this thing out of here, obviously. You wanna strap up and see what you can-"

  "Can you give me one second of quiet, for Brothers' sake? Does Morgan have no holy place, no room of silence and meditation?" She turned to me, and I saw tears in her eyes. "Can we just be quiet for a minute?"

  I gritted my teeth. "Battle, Cassandra-that is our holy place. Everything else has been burned." I pulled one of the suits off the wall and tossed it to her. "And I've prayed enough today. I'd like to get out of here cleanly."

  She looked unhappy, but she shucked off her robe and pulled on the suit over her skinny legs. I gave her what privacy I could. She was half into it when one of the pressurized doors unsealed with a gasp of frost, and an Amonite came out.

  He was in a suit like the one Cassandra was pulling on. Without looking around, he hurried down the rungs and to the floor near us. He stopped long enough to release the mask and hood. His hair was white, but when he turned I could see that he was quite young. He didn't register who we were at first, instead rushing to one of the hooks that held a gray robe. He stopped, looked at me, at my revolver, at the blood still on my boots. Unphased, really. Then he looked at Cassandra, half naked, half suited, unchained and yet so clearly an Amonite. His eyes got wide. He jumped for a switch by the door, a panel that had a big red button on it. I got between him and it.

  "Don't," I said. He stopped, his hand trembling as it reached for the button.

  "They'll kill us all. If they find you here, they'll kill every one of us." He looked between us. "You don't know what you've done."

  "And you have no idea what I've done. Or what I'm willing to do. Now get away from that switch."

  "It doesn't matter," he said. "They'll kill us all." And he jumped for the console. I put two bullets in him, the report loud, the reverberations echoing around the dome. He fell, startled, and lay there with his mouth open.

  "You didn't have to do that," Cassandra said as she rushed past me. She knelt at his side. "You didn't have to kill him."

  "I think I did," I answered. She didn't look up. Blood was trickling out of the guy's mouth. He was trying to talk, but nothing was coming. He put a bloody hand on Cassandra's chest, right over her heart, smearing gore on her skin and undershirt. And then he died.

  Cassandra nearly vibrated, she was so furious. She rolled him onto his back, cupped his hands over his eyes, and pushed his mouth closed. She was saying some kind of rite over him.

  "We don't have time-" I said.

  "We have more time than he does. Now shut up. This is not a place for blood."

  "It's going to be, if you don't-"

  "Shut. Up," she said, exasperation in her voice. "In Amon's name, be quiet."

  I took a step back, but I was quiet. I remembered standing the watch over Elias. Who was I to deny her the comfort of ritual? She finished, stood, and buckled into the suit, all without looking at me, or the body of the Amonite.

  "Watch the door," she said, and started up the ladder.

  "He was going to sound the alarm."

  "Watch the door."

  She got up the dome and undogged the portal. White frost blossomed around her, turning the suit into a glittering sleeve. She disappeared inside, sealing the dome behind her.

  I looked at the body, at the slowly growing pool of blood, at Cassandra's gory footsteps, and where she had knelt by the Amonite as he died. Then I turned, and watched the door.

  16

  he guy just lay there, dead. I usually didn't spend a lot of time with the people I killed. The advantage of a battlefield. You charge a position, sweep through, put down whatever resistance, and then redirect. Maybe get called back to reinforce the line, or forward to exploit a breakdown in the enemy. And then you move on. Plenty of time around dead bodies, of course. They were everywhere in the modern battlefield. But which ones did you kill? Which ones died at your brother's hand, or some other soldier's, or their own? Who could tell? Who could sort it out?

  But this guy, I had killed him, and he wasn't going away. Cassandra's reaction had been wholly surprising to me. He had been about to call the heat down on us. Killing him was all I had. Maybe I could have subdued him, just knocked him out and tied him up, but it had been a split-second decision. This is how it had ended up.

  I turned him over with the toe of my boot, so I didn't have to look at his gaping mouth and the weird way Cassandra had arranged his hands. That would probably upset her, too, but we can't all get what we want.

  Look at me. What I want is my Cult back. Barnabas alive, the Strength intact, and a steady flow of initiates in the door. That was never going to happen. A long time, we'd been dying, little by little. Every potential initiate who passed us by to serve in the whiteshirt army was a little death. When the initiates stopped coming, it was only a matter of time before we stopped being. Just stopped. I didn't expect it to happen like this, of course. I didn't expect the Betrayer to come back, to start killing us off. But you can't turn back time. There wasn't going to be a Cult of Morgan, once this was through.

  Scratch that. I didn't want the Cult back. It was dead, and had been dying for a long time. I didn't want to drag it out. What I wanted, what I really wanted, was revenge. I wanted the damn Betrayer dead, whoever he was. Alexander or Amon, it didn't matter to me. I wanted his towers thrown down. I wanted his Cult scattered, his scions persecuted and killed. I wanted to put my blade through the gut of that bastard Nathaniel. I wanted the Cult of the Betrayer to suffer what Morgan had suffered. Wiped clean from the earth. That would be enough for me.

  And this guy. What did he want? Amon was dead. Even if the Scholar were cleared of the murder of his brother, people would never trust him. Never trust what they'd been taught for two hundred years to despise. And how would the Cult of Amon react, to learn that their god had been falsely accused? That they had lived in slavery or on the run for two hundred years to preserve a lie, all the while ruled over by the man who had put both of our gods to death. What measure of forgiveness would they be willing to pour out, and what measure of wrath?

  I realized then the horror of what Cassandra and I were proposing. To expose the last god of man as a murderer. What would that do to the city, to the Fraterdom? If the cycle were about to turn, and Alexander was the only thing holding our divinity together, would it be worth our revenge to throw down the godking and open the door for the ascension of th
e Rethari? But what choice did we have? Bend the knee to a murderer, or lose our empire. These were the things we must face.

  That's when the door opened. I was lost in staring at the dead guy and trying to juggle the gods of man, and didn't hear the bolts throw. When the door began to slide open, I only had time to step behind it. Good thing is, the Scholars were still talking, and that distracted them enough to get inside and close the door before they saw the body. Soon as the door was closed, I slid in front of it, right by their fancy panic button.

  Two men, one old and stooped with age, the other young and thin. They wore gray robes, similar to the two we had killed upstairs. They wore their soul-chains openly, looped around their chest and neck, linked to their wrists and waist. A lot more chain than what the Librarians Desolate wore, I noted, though it seemed a much lighter weight. Almost delicate. Their heads were close together, and they were talking.

  "The duration of the interruption doesn't matter," the old one was saying. "Any interruption is terrible. Alexander plays with these things like they're dice, but if we build up too much noet-"

  "Yes, yes. Too much power, not enough conduit. I know, Malcolm, but-"

  And that's when they saw the body. Malcolm just stood, staring at the twisted form, its back sticky with blood, the stink of meat and voided gut finally cutting through the antiseptic purity of the chamber. The other one, the young one whose name I had yet to hear, immediately turned for the button. Turned right into my bully, in his eye.

  "What have you done?" he whispered. Malcolm turned and saw me. They both started backing up to the dome. "They'll kill us all."

  "That's what he said. I'd like to hear a little more than that, if you don't mind."

  "It's too late. You don't understand what you've done. As soon as the Holder learns that the archive has been found… he'll just kill us. He'll start over with a new batch from the Library."

  "They can't afford that, Daniel," Malcolm muttered. "They can't get a new crew in here and hope to maintain the noet. The Ruin will break open, and then where will we be?"