by Tim Akers
Luck held, and there was no more bruising coldness to greet me. I set foot on the sandy bottom of the lake. The grit was shallow, just covering a floor of sharp angles. Uncomfortable to walk on, but great traction. I felt light as air. Too light, in fact. I looked down at the iron lung, but the dials made no sense to me. I was getting featherheaded. That was indication enough for me. I rushed to the central building, kicking up in great long strides that bounced me across the lakebed.
Even dwarfed as it was by the brooding archwork all around, the building was huge. Maybe as large as the Strength, maybe larger. There was no perspective here, and I was running out of air. The swirling globes of light, embedded in the ground, were scattered around the approach to the building. Some of those were as large as buildings, some as small as eyes, all of them peering up out of the sand like crabs scuttling up from the tide. I stopped to put my hand against one, and felt the warmth of it shoot up my arm like a knife. I shivered and drifted away, smiling happily in the light and the lightness of my body. My body. My body was going away.
I bit my tongue and rode the pain toward the shell building. I panicked as I approached. Such a large building, but not built for people. Certainly not for intruders. I was going to starve for air, battering myself against its pebbled sides. I reached a near lip of shell, the band of light nearly as tall as I was, translucent and yellow-white in the murky water. I reached out for it but my hands were turning numb. I watched my fist beat senselessly against the colored wall, scrambling at the lip of it, striking my fingers on the smooth, cold edge of the shell building. There were no doors. There was no entrance.
The building settled, and I felt movement around me. Suddenly I was ... breathed in. Inhaled. Shooting up, pausing some distance away from the building, then the water swirled and I was going up again. I turned my head and one of the upper decks of the building rushed at me, a black void at its center, flexing as I slithered bonelessly toward it.
A smack of air pressure, the suit spasming against my ribs and legs, and then I was through and flopping up onto a beach of smooth pebbles. I lay there, still gasping for air, my lungs starving, and then I got a tingling hand up to my mask and threw the dogged seal away. A rush of air and I was alive. Alive, but trapped at the bottom of the lake without a breath of air to get me back.
I lay there for a while, breathing, aching as the blood surged back into my hands and feet, my lungs shredded with the effort of inhaling vacuum. I tossed the bottled lung away and listened to it clang loudly off stone. A big room. I forced myself to my knees for a look around.
It was a cancer of a cathedral, drowning at the bottom of the lake. Swirling constellations of naves led to fluted columns, supporting gothic arches that climbed out into midair, themselves supporting nothing. The whole space felt like the inside of a dead thing's shell, chambers whirling into smaller chambers, stairwells that started broad and narrowed into nothing, melting into the wall dozens of feet over the floor. Everything was smooth and dry. Organic.
I stripped off the pressure suit and refitted what remained of my holy vestments. Still on my knees, I rolled out the sealed weapon pack and settled the revolver and articulated sheath properly on my body. I fed the sword into the sheath, checked the load on my bully, then got to my feet and headed down into the convoluted center of the building.
This place wasn't built for traveling through. I felt like I was behind the stage at a carnival show, with half-built sets and stage tricks that stretched away into forever. Stairways ended abruptly. Doors opened into nothing, or wouldn't open at all. Arching paths led to other framework catwalks that led back to the start of the path. More than once I found myself jumping from one tilted floorscape to the next, leaping over chasms that yawned down for hundreds of feet, maybe more. Wicked gusts pulsed through the building, like the startled breathing of a dreaming child. The air smelled of dust, then of fire, then of mold. The air smelled of madness.
I rested on a terrace of pews. It amazed me, how much this place resembled the Grand Library, in the Scholar's prison up above. The same wild logic of architecture and landscape permeated everything, though here the logic slipped into dream as much as reality. And no books, I realized. There were no books here.
The farther I went, the narrower things became. Ceilings dropped claustrophobically low; walls pressed in. The stairways were mere wisps between rooms. The logic of the place was compressing into a single, disjointed note. I felt more and more like I was pressing on into a dollhouse, hunching down to pass through doors, stepping over walls that had never been closed. I was about to invoke Morgan's strength to clear a little space when I passed through the final door, and came to the heart of it all.
The central chamber was enormous and smooth. White walls raised up dozens of feet, a cylinder of arches, each arch leading off to tiny rooms like the one I had just left. It was as if the architecture of the building was an ever-expanding note, and this was the bell that had sounded it. I looked around once, then saw what was at the center of the room.
A boat, tucked into a bank of sand, wooden sides charred and bound with brass. The nose of the boat was down, as if it had plummeted to this spot and burrowed into the earth. Lying in the bottom of the boat, but nearly vertical due to its orientation, was a body, bound in chains.
Amon the Scholar. Still breathing, his lungs rasping like steel on sand. His skin was charred and black, great cracks in the flesh open and raw. Not a tall man, but a god. Water from the lake burbled from his mouth with every breath, slopping messily down onto his bound chest. The chains sang with power, hovering inches over his body and orbiting, seemingly diving into his body and his soul to twist out in a complex knot that strained my eyes. I looked away.
Nathaniel was there, leaning against one of the arches. He held a cigarette cupped in one hand, the iron mask of the Betrayer tucked under his arm like a football. Other than the mask, he was dressed as an Elector of Alexander. Playing his full hand. Hiding nothing.
"I thought he had convinced you," he said, quietly, his voice carrying through the bell-shaped room like an infection. "I thought Barnabas had turned you aside. Thought that you weren't going to come to me at all."
"You won't run from me this time, Betrayer," I said, though my voice shook.
"Oh." He smiled, then stubbed the cigarette out on the wall and dipped his head to place the mask on his face. When he looked up, it was with a gray visage, articulated into the shape of a face, cruel and sharp. "I wouldn't dream of it."
held my bullistic on him, trained at his heart. He smirked.
"Bullets, Eva Forge? Black powder? Is that how you wish to resolve this?"
"You dead. That's all I care about."
He nodded slowly, looking down at the floor. His hands were clasped behind him.
"I understand that. Expediency." His voice echoed off the high walls of the chamber. Behind me, Amon burbled on his eternal bed, iron creaking through his chest. "The Betrayer follows a similar path, Eva. One knife, rather than two, rather than a legion. One knife in the dark."
"Driven home by a coward," I spat.
"Well. Why fight when you cannot win? Why not fight the battle you are guaranteed to win? Efficiency of force." He was getting close enough to make me nervous. I poked the revolver at him. He smiled. "And still you haven't shot me."
"Whatever you want," I said, and sighted the shot.
"We dream Morgan's death every night, Eva. His last moments. The blood on our knife. The sirens in the camp as the body is found. I close my eyes at night and dream that glory." He stood straightbacked, halfway to the Scholar's coffin, arms still behind his back. Like a schoolteacher, standing in front of a gifted though stubborn student. "Is there anything about that you wanted to know?"
"Nope." And trigger. The thud of gunpowder roared through the chamber, flash and shock shuddering up my arm.
His swing was quick, quick as a bullet. Quicker. He swung his right arm up, holding something loose and silver. Sparks showered the wh
ite of his armor, but he kept smiling. I backed away as he slithered forward, cycling hammer and cylinder, taking even breaths, timing the shots to match the quiet of my body, putting round after round on target. And every shot, every booming report, met by that arcing silver that ended in sparks and his smile.
We stood, separated by ten feet, immobile. That dry clicking sound was the hammer landing on an empty chamber. He was in a relaxed stance, swinging his weapon casually across his chest in a figure eight. It looked like a chain, mirror bright and as long as my leg.
"Reload, if you like. I'm in no rush."
I stared at him in empty panic and fought my way through the nerves, through the antiseptic terror of his defense. I flicked my wrist and emptied the shells, clattering, to the floor. Calmly as I could, I pinched bullets out of my belt and seated them in the empty chambers. He watched me with idle amusement.
"If you prefer, we can start again. I can go back to my wall, there. Light a cigarette-"
"What happened to the darkness, Nathaniel? What happened to the expedient blade in the middle of the night?" I slapped the cylinder shut. "Why are you toying with me?"
He bowed ever so slightly. "A final kill, Eva. We have been counting the days, praying for the sheath to be dropped, the cloak pulled aside. There have been many deaths in these two hundred years. In the house of Morgan, in the temple of Amon. Even in the halls of Alexander. But it is drawing to an end. I am savoring the last bite of a marvelous feast."
"The halls of Alexander? You would kill your own?"
"They are not all our own. Very few are, in fact. We kill those who must be killed."
"And Morgan? Why must we all be killed?"
"You come here, and do not know the answer? No, I think you do. Come," he raised a hand. "The feast is getting cold. Let us dine."
I slapped the cylinder closed then holstered the revolver. I was never a lady of the bullet, anyway. Blade was my soul, and blade my heart. I raised my hands, and the sheath fed me my sword. Nathaniel laughed.
"Excellent! I would have it no other way." He stopped spinning his chain and held it limp in front of him. The links of the chain were sickle sharp and barbed, oddly formed to let the chain lay nearly flat when it was still. It swung slowly by his chest like a pendulum. With a quick hand he snapped it to one side. The chain stiffened, the links collapsed together, and suddenly he was holding a sword, full of barbs and gaps and links and sickle-shaped cruelty. Idly, he twirled it in his hand, and it droned as it cut the air.
"What amuses me is how little curiosity you show for your brothers of Morgan. Tomas? Isabel? You have yet to ask if they still live, or if I have named their judgment and declared their-"
I struck, without invokations or rage, without thought. I was mesmerized by the pattern of his blade, its path burned into my mind, its farthest orbit, weakest point, just as I stepped forward and put my blade neatly into his chin. Just nicked it, like an accident you might have while shaving.
He stumbled back, blood coursing down his throat and onto that gloriously bleached doublet. The mask went flying, to crack against Amon's charred boat. It ended up on the floor, spinning like a dropped plate. I barked out a laugh.
"Show your face, coward," I said, and swung in again.
He answered, his face angry, the blade swift as he countered my stroke, countered again, then riposte. I took the stroke on the wide, flat face of my sword and twisted the handle to throw off his weight. I lunged again. He back-stepped from the attack, and collected himself.
"Not talking so much now, eh?"
"Why do you attack without your invokations, Eva Forge?" he chided. "Has Morgan left you? Have you lost your faith in the old Warrior?"
"I don't need the rites to put down a dog. Even Alexander's dog."
He settled his face, assumed a stance of defense, and swung the chain-sword in a close dance. That drone hummed off the high ceiling and drowned out Amon's unnatural chorus.
"You seek to unsettle me. You think that because we fight in shadows, we do not know how to fight. You demand proof." He skittered forward in a series of quick half-steps, his balance always at center. "Proof you shall have."
Proof I had. I didn't think that, of course. I knew damn well they could fight. Elias had put up a fight. I had crossed blades with Nathaniel's boys over Simeon's body. He could fight. I just didn't want to waste my noetics this early on. Reserves for the long battle. If he was going to gloat, then I was willing to stretch it out.
I did just enough to keep him away, and he did just enough to keep me moving. We retreated across the chamber in a slow circle, blades dancing through sparks, the room quiet except for the metal strike and the drone of his blade, the scratch of grit under our feet as we moved. One circuit, and I had seen enough.
"Barnabas, never dead, son of hammers, son of light," I incanted, and the room began to hum with power. "Elias, green life and dark soil, warrior of wood and woad, blood feeding the life of us all. Isabel, ink-stained and careful shot." As I spoke the timber of our blades changed, the drone muting to be replaced by the high song of my sword. The sparks began to mix with a clinging fog that trailed my swings. The air cracked. My voice snapped like a flag in a hurricane. "Heridas, who stood at Chelsey Gate against the Paupers' Tyrant, dead for a day and still fighting. Bloody Jennifer, two swords against the night, never to see the dawn!"
The tide shifted, and we balanced against each other, blade for blade, stroke for stroke, countering each counter and stepping past each heart strike.
"What sort of invokation is that, Paladin? I know the names of your dead."
"The dead and the living," I spat. "Simeon, barrels hot, chamber dry, his eyes the eyes of heaven, his bully the hammer of gods. May the warrior never die!" And the chamber echoed with my voice, the warrior never die, never die ... "Jeremiah Scourge, last of the living shield-brethren of dying Morgan, carrying the flashing steel into the Straits of Armice, unyielding as the Rethari swarmed. The massacre at Middling Hall, the charge of Maltis, the siege of Or'bahar. The hundred years of the warrior, and a hundred more, and a hundred more!" I bullied into him, blade swinging wildly, fire in my eyes and in my hands, wicking from my sword as I struck again and again. "A hundred years forever, and may the warrior never die!"
He was in earnest now, falling back, sweat and blood dripping down his face and neck. Reckless with his blade, he left openings that I widened, revealed weaknesses that I pursued. He fell back, and I advanced, the warrior in me rising like the sun.
"I bind myself to the legions of the blade, to my brothers of sword and sisters of bullet. To the thousand years of Morgan, those who fell in his service, and those who fell in his defense. I bind myself to the battle unending, the hunt eternal." I spat the words, my voice rising into a crescendo of mad fury. "To the living sons of the warrior, and to the dead." And with each oath I struck, sword hammering against his defenses in glory and light. "To the dead! To the dead of Morgan! The dead of Morgan! Morgan!"
I threw him back and blood spilled out from his chest. He gasped and brought his sword around to defend. I hammered it aside and drew blood again. He was on his knees in the presence of the warrior god. I howled and rushed in.
The blade came from nowhere. From the shadows. It took me in the back, sliding smoothly between doublet and ribs, hot metal straight through me, and when it left there was nothing to fill that void but cold. I stumbled. I fell.
Nathaniel dragged himself to his feet, supporting his weight on the sword of chain. His servant ghosted behind me, shaking blood from his weapon and muttering invokations. I was on one knee, trying to get my breath against the pressure of the blood that was filling my mouth.
"The dead of Morgan," he said, and spat. "Morgan, warrior of the field. Champion of the people. Damned butcher." He raised his sword. "Hail to Morgan, the Brother Betrayed. Long may he die."
I twisted and swung my sword behind me, rising on one foot, just enough strength to drive the sword into the other ghost's belly, punc
h it in deep. The air smelled like piss and blood. I drew the sword out and up, rasping the blade against his ribs before exiting the steaming corpse just below the throat. He gurgled, already dead, slumped to the side. My return strike blocked Nathaniel's startled swing, corrected, then two quick punches that put the sharp base of the blade into his thigh, then his belly. We fell apart, leaving a pool of spilled life between us.
"The dead of Morgan," I burbled. He stared at me, face pale as his cloak, lips quivering. I was on my knees, gasping, grating my teeth.
Nathaniel leapt to his feet, hand on his opened guts, and invoked something short and arcane. Two quick steps and he was in the air, off the wall and higher up, disappearing into one of the archways. He left his sword and mask behind.
I knelt before Amon, my life spilling out into my lap, the chamber filled with the sound of the Betrayer's footsteps as he ran away, down the hundred hallways that led out of this place. Echoes of his feet, and my failing heart.
You come here, and do not know the answer? No, I think you do. His words ran through my mind as I lay before the undying Scholar god. I think you do. I did. Barnabas cutting the chain, the ease with which Cassandra's shackles fell away at the touch of my blade. The chains on the shoulders of the Librarians Desolate, and the chains twisting through their god. Before me. I knew.
The power of the soul-bonds came from this body, these chains. No Amonite had been able to remove his own chains, not since the Healer had taken possession of the Library Desolate. There must have been a ritual, with Amon as the sacrifice, and the chains as the reward. As long as these chains held Amon, the noetic chains in the city above would hold his scions. That was how these sorts of invokations worked.
But for every ritual, there had to be a price. An out. Chains had to have a key. And what better key than the Cult who hated Amon most? Only a scion of Morgan can free a Scholar. Barnabas knew, as the Fratriarch. Knew that when he laid his knife against Cassandra's chains, they would melt away. And Alexander must know, because he was the one who bound the rite to begin with.