The Horns of Ruin

by Tim Akers

  "You're spooking me," Cassandra said as I tiptoed around Isabel's room. "Are we looking for something? Someone?"

  "Nope. Looks like all the Morganites who're still alive have made good their escape."

  "All but us," she said, nervously.

  "All but me." I clapped her shoulder on the way out. "Let's not pretend you're warrior material."

  I left the living quarters behind and made the final ascent to the ballroom without looking back. Cassandra kept up, but it was straining her. I wanted her a little wiped out for the bit that was to come. Wasn't sure how she was going to react when I showed her the artifact. If she really was some kind of Amonite spy, sent to gain my trust and then steal the machine, I'd rather find that out while she was good and tired.

  We paused long enough on the landing to secure the grand entrance doors. The entryway was concealed from the main ballroom by a length of curtain. I looked Cassandra over.

  "Doing alright?" I asked.

  "Well enough."

  "Okay. Just follow close."

  I drew my sword and swept the curtain aside. I wish I'd done it sooner. I wish I had been alone.

  Barnabas lay there, at the edge of the compass rose. Crushed. The wide, delicate window was shattered, and glass surrounded him like sharp confetti. I stumbled to a halt, the sword sliding loosely to the ground. Without thinking, I was by his side, kneeling, the shards cutting my knees and palms. I turned him on his back, but there was no point. He wasn't breathing, wasn't even bleeding anymore. He just lay there in a pool of stiff blood, his eyes pale and open, his hands clenched into dead man's fists. He had been beaten, while he was still alive. His face showed it. Angry bands around his wrists showed where he had been bound. His gums were bloody from a gag, and he smelled of offal and piss and long confinement. They had beaten him, an old man. They had beaten him, and they had killed him, and they had brought him here.

  I closed his eyes, then went back and got my sword. Cassandra was standing by the entrance, her hands to her face. The bitch was crying. For all that it was her godsdamn fault that they had taken him, and she was crying. I knelt by the body of my friend, my only true father, and intoned the words of the Watchman's Dirge. Or tried to, but I was crying.

  "We don't have time for this," Cassandra whispered.

  "Shut up. I have to get the words right. I have to stand the watch I promised."

  "We don't have time. You can pay your respects later, but we need to get-

  "I said shut up! I swore to him." I stood, pointing at the stiff old man at my feet. "I swore to the Fratriarch. There's no one else to stand his watch, and I'll be dead and damned if I'm going to let him just rot here. I don't care what they do. I don't care if they arrest me, or shoot me where I stand. I'm going to stand the watch I swore."

  She stood there looking at me for a minute. I turned back to Barnabas and knelt, my forehead on the cool hilt of my sword. The words were hard to get right in my head, like everything was pouring out of my skull and all I could do was grab pieces of it. The Dirge went something like ... like A thousand walls, and I march my beat. A thousand walls to stand. A thousand nights to chill my soul, a thousand dawns to hope. A thousand-

  "And then what?"

  I sighed against my sword, leaning against the steel. The words were slipping out of my head. A thousand dawns, ten thousand more, and a spear for every star.

  "What will you do then? You'll stand this watch, fine. You'll bury the old man. And then what?"

  "It won't matter. I'll be dead, like the others. It'll be over."

  "It won't. Not for us, not for the people of Ash. Something's happening, Eva. Something's rising up. You think the House of Morgan is being knocked down because it's weak? Or because it's the only strong thing left?"

  "The hell do you know?" I looked at her over my shoulder. She had the shotgun in her hands, squeezing it until her knuckles were white. "What the hell do you know?"

  "I know that this was a good man. That he saved me, and he's probably saved you a couple times, and Brothers know who else. And they killed him."

  I stared down at the Fratriarch. He looked better with his eyes closed. I could imagine the bruises were just from some brawl he'd gotten into, like when I was younger and he'd take me to the beater bars. To see the heart of the fight, he said. To see the ugly, violent, desperate, raw center of combat. Without the banners, the armor, the horsemen. Without the reason. Just the fight. And he always came away from those things laughing and bloody.

  I pulled his arms across his body, pushed his fists into his sleeves. Arranged the body as it should be arranged. Then I stood up.

  "A thousand spears against the sky, Brother," I said, and took out the pendant that he'd given Cassandra, and she had given me. I tossed it onto his chest. "You leave some for me, eh. I'll be there in a bit."

  I turned to the compass rose. Bad luck that they'd brought the body here. Drama, I suppose. And with my mind in its present state, there was no way I was going to remember the little dance Tomas had done, even if I'd been trained to the invokation. But Morgan always finds a way.

  Stacking invokations of strength, flaring them hard until a wave of energy burned out of me, layers of noetic power shimmering at my every edge, I raised my sword on high, the blade pure white with the mystery and majesty of dead Morgan. I brought it down on the center of the compass rose.

  The building shattered.

  The delicate pieces of the secret compartment burst open. The floor lurched beneath me, and I stumbled back. The artifact rose from the floor, too quickly, and tumbled across the ballroom like a jack. It came to rest under the glittering night sky, beneath the ruined window. I went to it.

  "What is that?" Cassandra asked, creeping up behind me.

  "A lot of dead people, and the end of my Cult," I answered. "Other than that, I have no damn idea."

  She ran her hands over it, her fingers pausing gingerly on the Amonite runes.

  "You know what it is," I said.

  "An archive." Her voice was quiet. She looked up at me, briefly, then back to the artifact. "Like a library. A whole library, in this one space."

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

  Cassandra turned some knob and a ring of runed light began to orbit the device. She lifted it carefully off the floor with one hand. It hovered, about two feet off the ground, level with the girl's kneeling head.

  "Oh. Well, not so heavy."

  "That's enough," a voice said from the shadows. I spun my sword into a guard and gathered up what little remained of the invokations of strength. A man stepped onto the dance floor. A thin man, a delicate man. A sharp man. Betrayer.

  "We probably could have done that, if we'd known it was so simple. Barnabas led us to believe that there was a bit of magic to the opening of the secret space. I suppose that sort of brutality passes for mysticism around here. Nathaniel said I should wait and see what you would do. I have seen."

  He wore white, trimmed with pewter, and his face was hidden behind an articulated mask of iron. Chain belts crossed his chest, an iron ring at the center protecting the icon of the Betrayer. He moved like a dancer. Displaying empty hands, he twirled his fingers with a flourish and produced daggers. Damn show-off.

  I raised my guard, invoked the Wall of Orgentha, and apologized to Barnabas for being the last, and for giving him such a crappy watch. It was all I could do.

  "Cass, run!" I yelled. I took a step forward, sword over my head, and then ... then I was flying backward, out the window, into the night. The girl's hand was on my shoulder, and all I could see was the rapidly diminishing window of the ballroom, and the Betrayer, and Barnabas's tiny, dead body on the floor.

  We landed in the framework of an iron water tower about two blocks from the Strength. Even now there were sirens stretching up into the sky from the street below. We'd been seen. Not sure how you'd miss us, honestly.

  "
That thing can fly?" I asked, when I'd reoriented to my surroundings. The flight had been a strangely weightless affair, and it was odd to be back in gravity's fist. Cassandra was bent over the archive, slapping controls and muttering invokations.

  "Nope. Not really. That was an egregious misuse of the technology." She smiled and looked up at me, like a kid in a candy shop. "And now I've broken it all to hell. But it was fun, yeah?"

  "You shouldn't have done that. I could have taken that son of a bitch."

  "Your Fratriarch couldn't take that son of a bitch. He's the same creep who jumped us outside the mono car. And I know you're all ready to die in the glory of battle, but I think you're going to be more use alive. Yeah. I sure broke something, didn't I?" She sat back on her heels and stared mournfully at the device.

  "I thought you said it was some kind of library? Why make a library that can fly?"

  "Not the point. The empulsor ... the flying bit ... that was just meant to make it easy to carry from place to place. Just meant to offset the weight. All I did was break off the dial and point it at the sky."

  "So now it's going to be heavy again?" I looked down at the swarms of whiteshirts below us. A flight of valkyn was powering up at the foot of the Strength. I didn't want to fight the mundane army. None of this was their fault. "Because we need to get a move on."

  "I can squeeze some lift out of it. Just ..." She loosened two straps from the artifact's side, spun some kind of dial at the base, then humped the whole thing onto her back. Looked all the world like a firefighter's breathing rig. "Oof," she said, and settled under the weight of it. Looked tricky.

  "I can carry that, if you want."

  "Nope, I got it."

  I chuckled. "Ruck full of food and you can't manage. World's heaviest book and all of a sudden you're the damned strong man."

  "Priorities, dear. Shouldn't we be going?"

  And so we should. The crowd below had seen our flight but not our landing. Spotlights were washing across the nearby buildings. The valkyn were taking a slow orbit around the Strength, their feet dan gling in the wash of their burners, wicked guns slung low from their shoulders.

  We took a service walkway from the tower to a grubby-looking building that turned out to be a vertical farm. The glass windows were smeared with pollen, and the air buzzed with flies. Past rows of crummy stalks and into the central service core, and we never saw a soul. The main entrance to this place was below the streets, in the moldy, half-flooded worker tunnels that riddled the city. Bad lighting, bad mold ... it was an unpleasant place.

  I had to believe that Betrayer would be following us, but I had no idea as to their methods. I saw no value in hiding our tracks, not until we were good and safe from the mundanes. I was sorry to have missed a chance to fight Barnabas's murderer in open battle, but there was nothing for it now. The next time he would come in shadows. I'd be lucky to see the blade before it struck.

  Which made the worker tunnels a less than ideal place to hide. Plenty of shadows for him to step out of. Plenty of dark tunnels to hide the bodies, and practically no witnesses. We had to get out of them, but the surface world wasn't too friendly to us either just then. We traveled about five blocks at a quick jog, the cobble road and ceiling of pipes slanting slightly down the whole time. The puddles became ponds, and soon we were walking on catwalks over the exposed waterways. The water below us was the lake, the same lake an army of coldmen had crawled out of earlier today. Or yesterday. I wasn't sure of the time anymore.

  We stopped for a break and the girl collapsed against the railings, exhausted. I gave her my water bottle and spent a minute invoking rites of movement and fatigue. She looked better when I was done, but she still looked like hell.

  "You have a plan, right?" she asked. "This is the sort of thing Morganites plan for."

  "The collapse and betrayal of our Cult by those closest to us? Yeah, you'd think that'd be something we'd have a whole book of plans for." I sat down next to her and dangled my legs over the catwalk. The water below was smooth, and a babbling of currents echoed against the steel all around. It could have been peaceful, in a subterranean, buried alive sort of way. "Sadly, I left that particular book at the monastery. Also, I'm not much of a reader."

  "So, no plan?"

  "I was thinking of running for a long time. Killing anything that chases us. That's the core of it."

  "Better than your previous tack of getting yourself killed and leaving the escaped Amonite slave behind to do your fighting for you," she said.

  "Speaking of slave." I stood and bent her head forward. She still had the collar on, as well as the manacles. "Can't you just unmake these things? They make it kind of hard to hide who you are."

  "One thing we can't unmake: the chains that bind us or our allies. It's part of the binding of Amon."

  The collar was pinned shut. I brushed her thick hair away from the linchpin. It would be tricky to get a tool onto that joint without risking the girl's neck. I started looking around for something to do the deed.

  "So how'd you get free of the chains you had when we took you from the Library? Those soul-things."

  "Barnabas took them away. It was like an invokation, or something. He cut them with his knife, before we tried to break out of the car." She rubbed her nose and sighed. "Said I should have a chance to get away, even if he didn't."

  "Sounds like the old man. But I'm not aware of any chain-cutting invokation. Then again, he was the Fratriarch." Was. I grimaced and kept looking for something to get the girl free.

  "Not like he invoked or anything," she said. "Just laid his blade across the metal, and it parted like paper."

  "Must have been a special knife. Then again. . ." I drew my twohander and held it carefully in both fists. "Maybe you should hold really still."

  I balanced the blade over the collar, calming my breathing. I wondered if I should invoke strength, but that didn't seem appropriate. Best to just take a light whack and see how it went. I lined up the blow, touched the blade lightly against the collar to set my aim, and ... the iron parted like warm cheese. As I raised the sword, the collar fell open and clattered to the floor.

  "Great," she said. "Now the wrists?"

  "That's some bad metal," I said. "Cut way too easy."

  Grabbing the manacles, I pulled and pushed and tested the strength of the rings. The girl didn't like the way the iron bit into her skin, but she kept quiet. The metal was good. And yet it split just as easily as the collar had.

  "I will be damned."

  She stood up and kicked the collar and cuffs into the water. They disappeared with a splash that was quickly swallowed by the current. I kept staring down at where they'd sunk until Cassandra had shouldered the archive and was tapping me on the shoulder.

  "That plan of yours, about running? We should get on with that."

  "Yeah," I said. "And while we're running, we can come up with a better plan."

  "I'm just kidding," she said, smiling. "I've already got a better plan. But the first step is still running. After that, I want to find a place to hole up and give this archive some attention. Something about this thing has gotten a lot of people killed."

  "Great. Glad not to be the only one coming up with ideas."

  "Yeah. We're all pretty glad about that."

  The instinct, when you are hunted, is to go to ground in familiar places. You know the land, you know the ins and outs of its paths. It's comfortable, and you need that when you're being hunted. You need the reassurance of the known.

  The thing to do, then, is to go somewhere you don't know and are yourself unknown. It's unexpected, and going where you are not expected to go will offset your unfamiliarity with the terrain and its inhabitants. This was difficult, because Ash was my city, the only city I had ever truly known. There weren't a lot of places that I didn't know, where the last Paladin of Morgan wouldn't be known for what she was. The best path would have been to leave the city completely, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. Whoever had killed my
Fratriarch and defiled my Cult, they were in the city. Whatever mystery would be uncovered with the Amonite archive, it was in the city. The collar countries around the lake could offer protection and anonymity. They could not bring me closer to vengeance, and I counted that higher than my safety, or the safety of the girl.

  It shocked me a little to think that I counted Cassandra's safety for anything at all. Some part of me still distrusted her, as I distrust all scions of Amon the Betrayer. It was clear, though, that she served Amon in his aspect as the Scholar and had chosen a life of great difficulty to uplift this positive aspect of that fallen Cult. I had to respect that, albeit grudgingly.

  Something more. I felt that she was my only link to Barnabas's last moments on earth. She had been with him, when I should have been. He had died to save her, holding off the Betrayer as she ran. That was the choice he had made, for whatever reason. I felt I could not dishonor that choice. That it was my duty, now, to carry on that choice.

  So we sought some safety, but not so much that we could not strike when the enemy presented itself. We could have gone to the waterways, to the sketchily mapped and partially drowned corridors of the undercity, and there found peace. But I could not get my mind away from the coldmen and their aquatic assault on the Chanter's Isle. I wanted to be as far away from that threat as possible.

  There are many high places in the city of Ash. Once, the ancient towers of the Spear of the Brothers and the Strength of Morgan were the greatest heights in Ash. No more. The inhabitants of the Library Desolate had advanced in their knowledge of architecture, and so now towers of glass and steel and light clawed their way to heaven. And not all of the space in these towers was occupied. There were service corridors, the empty floors abandoned to the strange disturbance of the impellors, ironframed towers that supported airship docks, and communications towers that spoke in invisible voices to the rig that Owen wore when he needed to talk to headquarters. So many empty spaces, with so few people.