The Horns of Ruin

by Tim Akers

  The echoing hum started up in my bones as we got closer, the period of the impellor's vibration getting shorter with each step. By the time Cassandra and I were standing outside of the tall, black tower, every second breath was washed in the invisible song of the impellor.

  There was a time when these had been the tallest buildings in Ash, save the Spear and the Strength. Mostly for the comfort of the inhabitants, though even here at ground level the wave of the strange device inside was ... distracting. Up at the same elevation as the monotrain, you couldn't stand this close to the impellor, not without jellying your meat. All across the city, any building this high had a couple empty floors, abandoned to the periodic thrum.

  Cassandra hid in an alleyway near the tower. I had told her where we were going. There would be a signal for her to come inside. I was still wearing my new half-cloak, and the sword was bundled into a reed mat strapped across my back. Not the best disguise, but the best we could manage. No one had called the whiteshirts on us. Yet. Once Cassandra was good and hidden away, I braced myself and went inside.

  The tower was really just a shell, stitched inside with catwalks that gave access to the central spinning core. Black-clad Amonites crawled all over the inside of the tower, checking fittings and monitoring the impellor's activity. They wore some kind of hard suit, with masks and goggles over their faces. The sheath twitched beneath the reeds on my back as a wave of adrenaline spun through my fingers. Up there, in their goggles and masks, they looked so much like the coldmen. Similar technology, maybe? I swore, every clue I got gave me more people to mistrust. My instincts yelled for guilt on the heads of the scions of Amon. Everything else pointed to Alexander. I didn't like it.

  The impellor itself was ... alien. The shaft was a blizzard of movement, like a tornado of twisting metal pistons and smooth, swooping cogs that meshed and danced at odd angles and impossible speeds. The structure rose to the top of the tower, spinning in a near silence that was actually a roar of movement just below the range of my ears. My skull ached to hear it, but could not. At the top of the column was a giant cylinder, like the head of a war hammer. It turned more slowly than the column, though it seemed dependant on its action. Each face of the hammer was made up of dozens of open drums, their skin glowing an arcane blue, each drum fed by a dozen conduits that coiled and were themselves fed by larger tubes that burrowed down into the column. The whole thing looked like something that had dropped out of the sky, to be worshipped.

  I wondered how Amon had built such a crooked thing, based on that smooth, clean Feyr artifact that we had fished out of the cistern. Not a logical jump. Then again, for all that Amon was the Scholar, the Feyr were something more. Something different. I shrugged, then went to find someone in charge.

  Wasn't even a Healer. Just a guy in city blues, peering at gauges and checklists through a pair of uneven wire spectacles. His hair was rusty gray, sticking out all around and bald on top, his naked scalp spotted with moles. I had to tug on his shoulder to get his attention. There wasn't much about me to keep his eyes, so I showed him the gun under my cloak. He took in the whole package, the hidden sword, the revolver, the poorly covered uniform, then nodded once.

  "Yeah?" he asked.

  "There are some people here I'd like to talk to."

  "Those people are probably busy."

  "I'm sure they are," I said. "But I'm sure they could be spared."

  "What's it about?"

  "Kidnapping. Murder, maybe." I picked up one of his checklists, flipped through a couple pages, then put it down somewhere else. He didn't like that. "Maybe a grand conspiracy to topple the Cult of Morgan."

  "You're the Paladin," he said finally, after a long pause. "The heretic."

  "That's what they're saying. Does that matter to you?" I asked, flashing the bully again. "Or this?"

  "Neither, really. Were you hoping to threaten your way through this conversation?"

  "Does it matter to you that someone has killed all my friends, burned the house of my god, and now falsely accuses my Cult of siding with the Betrayer?" I took the revolver out and placed the barrel squarely on the table, like I was pointing something out in his ledger. "Does it matter that I'll kill anyone who gets in the way of me hunting those people down, no matter who they are, or on what throne they sit?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  He looked up at the catwalks, like he was doing a mental count of his crew.

  "It wasn't any of my people," he said. "Whatever you're talking about, it wasn't these guys. I know where they go, where they sleep, what they eat. Who they love. It wasn't any of them."

  "And if any of them are involved, I guess that makes you complicit?"

  He snorted. "You're trying to threaten me. That's cute, little girl warrior comes in here to threaten me." He plucked the glasses off his face and tossed them on the table. "I'm not going to scare. You pull my people off that machine, you maybe put the Harking line out of commission. How you like that?"

  I scraped the revolver along the edge of the table and passed it across my body. One long arm stroke and I backhanded him with the heavy tip of the weapon, the reinforced barrel taking him along the jaw. He spun away, drooling teeth.

  "Took you long enough to lose those godsdamn glasses." I holstered the bully, shattered the mat of reeds, and drew the blade. I put the tip on the floor and leaned against the crossbar. The blade slid into the hard stone of the floor like a hot knife into ice. "Now, I'd like to talk to some of your crew."

  He stood slowly, anger boiling off him in sheets. His voice was a barely controlled cauldron.

  "I said, it wasn't any of my damned people."

  "It's not your damned people I want to talk to. It's your damned Feyr."

  He looked at me with steadying calm, wiped the blood off his chin, and laughed.

  "Not my call to make. Those buggers come when they want, go when they want. And if they do a godsdamn thing while they're here, that's their business. No. They want to talk to you, they'll talk to you. Not my problem."

  "How do I-"

  He dropped like a cut puppet. I leaned away, surprised, then heard other things: tools falling, glass breaking. Above, an Amonite slid heavily against a railing, then spun over and fell against a lower platform like a bag of flour. No one to catch him, because all of his mates were out, too. I left the sword where it was, swaying slightly in the floor, and drew my bully.

  The Feyr was standing behind me and slightly higher, up on a piston array. He was wearing a robe, white cloth wrapped tight around his tiny form. He had a hand raised in benediction, looking all around the tower with his wide, black eyes. He noticed me and nodded.

  "We thought you should know," he said. His voice was tiny, small as his delicate, pinched face. His palm came around and I twisted, drawing a bead on his little chest. He shook his head and I faltered, though if that was something he was doing to me or just my own unwillingness to put lead into a child-sized target ... who knows? Point is, I didn't shoot and he put his hand down.

  "Know what?" I asked.

  He didn't answer immediately, didn't even seem to be paying attention to me any longer. He looked around the room at all the fallen people, their eyes open, breathing steadily. Even the broken ones seemed comfortable, regardless of which direction their legs were facing. For the longest time he meditated on the silence, his eyes turned up toward the top of the impellor, breath shallow. He looked back at me.

  "You wished to talk to us?"

  "Yeah, about-"

  "Then we shall talk. Your friend. You should give her the signal, now," he said, then turned and walked away, disappearing behind the array. I ran to the door and opened it, almost banging into Cassandra.

  "Couldn't wait?" I asked.

  "I heard something. Noises."

  "Yeah. Just don't look around." The street was empty. Dusk was falling. "It's kinda weird."

  We went around the thudding cylinders and caught sight of the Feyr ducking into a maintenance shaft
. I snatched up my sword and fed it into the sheath's grasping mitts, then followed. Cassandra didn't say anything, though her eyes must have seen a lot of blood and a lot of sleeping bodies.

  The corridor wasn't meant for big people. It made me wonder as to its origin. Amon, for all that he was a murderer and a mad assassin (and I corrected myself even as I thought it, but the thought came naturally), probably wouldn't have designed his engines to depend on child-labor parties. And he certainly didn't design anything for the Feyr. No one did.

  I went to the impellor because I knew they would be there. Something about the energies that washed out of those machines attracted the little creeps. I had the beginnings of an idea why that was, now that I knew something of Amon's research into the impellors. If the stuff Cassandra was reading from the archive was true, of course. Whole little creepy Feyr villages gathered ramshackle beneath each of those towers, filling in whatever space they could find with clapboard buildings and driftwood catwalks. They even built little rafts to anchor around the water-bound impellor towers between the horns. The crews tolerated them because sometimes they were helpful, calling the Amonites' attention to things that were on the verge of breaking, or clearing out in advance of some disaster. Like little canaries. Some people thought they could see the future. I preferred to believe that they were simply very aware of their surroundings.

  "What did you do back there?" I asked. It was hard to talk, bent over and squatting along with my knees in my face. I could crawl, but that was a bad position to try to react from. Not that this was much better.

  "I made it night. For them, of course."

  "Then why didn't they wake up, the ones who fell?"

  He shrugged. "Night is when you sleep. When you wake, it is morning."

  "Huh."

  He stopped and looked back at me. "You would like a demonstration?"

  "No, no. Just curious."

  "It is good to be curious," he agreed, then continued on his way.

  The path opened up, and I was in the expected hovel-town of the Feyr. This space must once have been a cistern, or some other storage facility. Muck lines on the wall of the wide, round chamber showed that varying levels of some liquid had spent time here. It smelled, mostly of burning timber and cooked food. The tiny houses were elevated on stilts, with porches that joined towers of buildings like wide catwalks. The stilts were water-stained and black. Maybe the place still flooded occasionally. It wasn't a big place, maybe a dozen small homes for small people. The largest building, at the center, did not share a porch with anyone else. We headed for that building.

  All around, the Feyr watched us. Cassandra had the archive in her arms, hugging it like a child as she rushed forward. The little people were silent, and simply dressed. Their hair looked like the swept-back roots of an overturned tree, thick ropes branching out from their scalps, the same shade of brown or black or chalk white as their hard, knobby skin. Their eyes were large and black, without pupils or irises, deep and watery like those of a shark. The rest of their faces were pinched and tiny, mere sketches of a nose and mouth filled with tiny, sharp teeth. They had three thick fingers, each opposed to the other two, and their nails were hard and sharp. They looked like something grown in the dirt, yanked out by their feet and still caked in the mud of their birth.

  My guide took me to the building in the middle. It was wide and flat, almost entirely porch, open to the rest of the room. Up the stairs, and the guy in charge was waiting for us in a tall chair. More of a cushioned platform than anything else. He looked distracted.

  His skin was as brown as a chestnut, and just as shiny. He sat with his hands in his lap, and his eyes on his hands, unmoving. My guide bowed out, leaving us alone with the creepy guy. Elemental, I think they called him, the guy in charge. Strange name for a boss. I waited for a while, then grew impatient.

  "I've got some questions for you."

  "You do," he said, without looking up from his hands. "Old questions."

  "Pardon me?"

  He raised his head, tired, blinking those deep, dark eyes like a man just waking up. He looked from me to Cassandra, and then to the archive.

  "Old questions," he said again. "We wondered when one of you would come to us again, to ask these questions."

  "How do you even know what we're going to ask?" Cassandra said.

  "When there is a flood, you do not ask about planting crops. When there is a fire, you do not ask about building boats." He folded his fingers together and clenched them in front of him. "Unless your boat is on fire, I suppose. And then you would have to ask very quickly."

  "Amon must have been a very patient man," I said, "to learn anything from you."

  "He was. Though it was not me, but my father."

  "Making you how many hundred years old?" Cassandra asked. Which wasn't what we were supposed to be asking about, but I suppose the Scholar is the curious type. I was getting impatient.

  "We do not think in such paths." The Elemental raised his hands to the dirty ceiling and nodded. "The days and years are like-"

  "Like water drops, right? Or snowflakes? And we are the blizzard. Look," I leaned down to the tiny man, "we've got some people who might be dying right now, and they do think in such paths, so maybe we could skip the poetry lesson."

  The Elemental looked at me, his hands still raised to the ceiling, his face placid.

  "A child of Morgan, then?"

  "Brilliant. And since you already know our question, why don't you go ahead and give us our answer, so we can get out of this sewer before it floods again?"

  One of the Feyr, on a different platform, stepped forward.

  "Flooding occurs on the third Friday of every alternating month, at a volume of-"

  "Shut up!" I yelled across the porch to him. He did, and stepped back. Cassandra was taking notes.

  "The question that you are asking, just so we are clear, it involves the cycle?"

  "The cycle of. . ." I glanced back at Cassandra, who was rubbernecking the whole Feyr populace. "Of what now?"

  "The Titans burned their candle slowly, and lived long. We burned ours even more slowly, so slowly that there was hardly a flame to be seen." The Elemental gestured nebulously, addressing us. "You burn quickly. Like a flare."

  "Like a fuse," I corrected. "This is the cycle of godhood, then?"

  "Yes. We can feel it in the air. The gods are changing, and you are changing with them. The days of mankind on the throne of god are limited."

  "And after us, who?" Cassandra looked up from her notebook. "You?"

  "We have had our time, and will have it again. But I think it will not fall to us."

  "Then the Rethari? Or some other race that we've never met, across some other ocean?"

  "A wise thought. Other oceans." The Elemental folded his hands beneath his chin and stared thoughtfully at the ground. "A good thought. But the power that will be released with your fall, I think it will go to the people of the scale. As you say."

  "Alexander should hear this," I said. "I'm sure he'd be pleased."

  "We have spoken. Not recently, but the nature of the formula is familiar to him."

  "He knows this stuff?" I asked. "Knows that fewer gods means a quicker descent? That doesn't seem to make him likely to betray his brother either, does it?"

  "Our conversation was after the death of your god. And only shortly after the death of yours," he answered, nodding to Cassandra. "He felt the change in power. It pleased him."

  "Pleased him?"

  "Before there was one fountain, and three vessels. After, one fountain, one vessel."

  "More power for the godking," I said. "There's your motivation."

  "You are implying that Alexander killed Morgan, and framed Amon." The Elemental shook his head. "We do not know that. To be clear, we stay out of the affairs of brief men."

  "But it makes sense, doesn't it?" Cassandra asked, desperation in her voice. "Amon spoke with your kind, learned the truth of the cycle of gods. Why would he kill his brot
her, knowing that it would doom the Fraterdom?"

  "Why does Alexander not raise up more gods? Why does he keep what knowledge he has secret?" The Elemental spread his hands wide. "Men do irrational things. Especially the Brothers."

  "So it could have been Amon," I said, weighing the thought. "All along, Alexander could have told the truth of that. The rest he's hidden just to accumulate power."

  "I will not lead you to answers like this. The ways of men are their own." He shook his head sadly. "I do not understand them."

  "This has been a tremendous help," I said, rubbing my face. "You've revealed to us, through a series of overly complicated proclamations, that Morgan could have been killed by Alexander, or he could have been killed by Amon." I sat down and folded my hands over my knee. "And either way, it doesn't really matter because the cycle of the gods is rolling over, and we're all going to end up servants of the Rethari. Any idea how long until that happens?"

  "We don't know how it hasn't happened yet. It should have been years, the way Alexander is burning. Like a fuse, as you say." He grinned and sat back. "Like a fuse. I like that. I will remember it, for the next time one of your kind comes to ask us these questions."

  "So it should have happened already. And you have no idea why it hasn't?"

  He shook his head. "Something is holding the water back. That was the point of Alexander's questions, when last he came to speak to us.

  "The hidden archive," Cassandra said. "The full knowledge of Amon. He must be handpicking the best for the Library Desolate and putting them to work on Amon's research into the cycle."

  "Which means he might have solved it," I said. "He might have figured a way to keep the cycle from turning."

  Again, the Elemental shook his head. "The cycle will turn. The sky will turn. The waters will rise and the dam will burst, and everything will be washed clean. Our whole race could not hold the power. Madness and the Ruin were the cost of that. Who knows what's happening in Alexander's strange little head?"