The Horns of Ruin (36 page)

"I'm not sure what to think of that, lady. I wish you
hadn't killed my friends, but I don't think I'd have missed this for
anything."

"I have freed you. I will free all of the Scholars.
You may go."

"You'll probably want to rethink that. We've been
under heel for two hundred years. That's an awful powerful grudge to
bear." He scratched his brow and nodded. "And we aren't all pleasant
old men. Hardly any of us are, actually."

"Be that as it may, I will see the wrong done to you
righted. It is only just."

"Just isn't the best course, always. But I'm not going
to stop you. Do you mind-"

He stopped and turned to the dome. One of the pressurized
doors unsealed, and a cloud of fog vented into the room.

"There was someone in there? You sent some poor damn
fool into the mind's archive? What the hell were you thinking!" He dropped
the archive and ran to the bottom rung.

"She's an Amonite," I said. "She'll be
fine."

"Oh no she won't. Hell, that'll just make it worse.
Brothers damn hell, lady, do you just go around pushing all the buttons in a
factory?"

The door finally creaked open. Cassandra stepped into view.
My heart jumped. She was hurt. Something was wrong with her.

She stood just inside the door to the dome, wavering
slightly. The pressure suit hung in tatters, her pale skin steaming in the air.
The bloody handprint between her breasts pulsed through the remains of her
clothing. She put a hand against the dome to steady herself and ripped the
suit's mask from her head. Long black curls tumbled out and around her face.
She was hunched over, like she was catching her breath. When she looked up, I
could see that her eyes were nothing but ash.

"Cass!" I yelped, and jumped for the ladder. She
collapsed forward, skinning her knee on the iron sill of the door before
pinwheeling out into open air. I collided with her falling body, and we landed
in a heap. I wrenched myself around and cradled her head, then laid her down.
She looked up at me with empty eyes, tears that were nothing but soot smearing
across her temples.

"Cassandra, what happened?"

"Amon," she whispered. "Amon lives."

he girl is mad," Malcolm
snapped. He stood over the both of us, kneading his hands into his robe.
"I don't care how talented an Amonite she was, looking into that archive
without the proper training will have broken her."

"It's sure as hell done something to her," I
said. I brushed a flake of ash from Cassandra's cheek. She didn't seem to be in
any pain, but neither did she seem herself. I was starting to lean toward
Malcolm's interpretation of her condition. She was sitting against the curve of
the dome, her hands limp by her sides, looking around the room. Even though she
didn't have any eyes.

"The archive is ... How to explain it?" Malcolm
sputtered. "That man who was just here, Barnabas. Who was he?"

I turned to the old guy. He did like the tangents.
"Fratriarch of Morgan. He died at the hand of the Betrayer. I was supposed
to be guarding him at the time."

"Then it wasn't him. Not really. The dead don't walk,
or reason, or argue. But Alexander has a trick that lets him capture the
essence of a man, and put it back in the body later on."

"The coldmen?"

"Oh, yes. What a name for it. The coldmen. That's
exactly what they are. Anyway, to the point, the archive is like that. A bit of
Amon's soul was saved. Bottled up, and kept in there. Just the thinking parts,
mind you. Not the ... Betraying things."

I sighed. "None of that matters, you realize.
Alexander was really the Betrayer all along. What should we do with the
girl?"

"Oh. Oh, I don't know. I'm not a Healer, am I?"

"The bottle doesn't hold the soul," Cassandra
said. "And that soul hasn't been bottled, anyway."

"Elephants like penguins, but penguins aren't really
elephants," Malcolm answered. "Gibberish."

"I can't imagine why you didn't go into the healing
arts, sir. You have such a Healer's manner about you."

"Really? I never thought it would suit me,
honestly."

The power of whatever I had invoked was long gone from my
body. I was tired. Despite the surety of my words earlier, I really had no idea
where I was going from here. Barnabas had been right, just as right as he had
been dead. So what if Alexander killed his brothers two hundred years ago? From
the looks of things, he was all that was holding the Fraterdom together. Even
if I could challenge a god, killing him would get me nothing but an empire of
ruin, followed shortly by an invasion from the Rethari. Which is probably what
they were after. Probably why they gave us the archive in the first place.

On the other hand. He had killed Morgan, his brother. He
had framed Amon, his blood. And he had used the Scholar's research to learn
about the divine cycle, and to harness as much of the power as he could hold.
He had tortured and oppressed the scions of Amon to perfect whatever process he
was using to hold back the cycle. And now that the scions of Morgan had
discovered the truth of it, he was hunting us and killing us. Had killed all of
us, assuming the mock trials and authentic executions had taken place in the
shadow of the Strength. Had killed all of us but one. And what was I supposed
to do? Forgive that? Forget that?

So this is what I was left with. Bring down the Fraterdom,
or let a murderer of gods off the hook. There was no winning. And when there is
no win condition, all you can do is fight, as best you can, as long as you can.
May the warrior never die.

Malcolm had his hands around Cassandra's wrists, and was
peering at her face. "I think she'll live," he said. "Though her
mind ... Who knows?"

I looked at the girl's face, and wondered what she had done
to deserve this. What any of us had done. That she would be so ... maimed, just
as Amon was being justified. Not that it would do the old, dead god much good.
But it would have done her some good, I think. Something was boiling in my
mind. I looked up at Malcolm.

"His name be praised," I said. "His body
held tight."

Malcolm startled, but covered it quickly.

"I'm sorry, what?" he said.

"You said that. You or your friend. In the hallway,
when you were going to the other room. We overheard you. It's how we knew where
the archive was to be found." I stood up and crowded the old man's space.
"What did you mean by that?"

"It's just ... It's a ritual that we have. A
blessing." He blinked rapidly and looked up at me. "May the warrior
never die. That sort of thing."

"When I say that, I mean that we are all warriors,
those of us in the line of Morgan. That he and I and every blade-wielding,
bully-toting fool who has bled out on some gore-smeared battlefield far from
home are of one blood. One spirit. That the warrior is all of us, and will
always live. So." I poked him in the chest. "When you say that thing
about Amon's body-what are you talking about?"

"Nothing, nothing. Forget you heard it."

"You have his body. Don't you? That bull about the
archive being a bit of his mind, held in a bottle-"

"Bullshit," Cassandra sang, like a child.

"Bullshit," I repeated. "You have him in
there, don't you? Amon, bloody Scholar of the Brothers Immortal, founder of the
city of Ash. He really is alive, isn't he?" I stabbed my finger at the
dome. "He's right in there!"

"Well," Malcolm said. "Not ... right ... in
there."

This is the story of Amon's death. After the united forces
of Morgan and Alexander punched through the Rethari homelands and dragged the Scholar
back to Ash, there was a trial. A brief trial. When the sentence was read, Amon
was bound in chain and placed in his famous boat. The boat was set on fire and
then pushed out into the bay. The whole city gathered on the docks and watched
the bastard burn, cheering as he screamed and cheering even louder when the
boat failed and sank, and his screams were cut off by the black, cold water of
the lake. Burned and drowned, and at the time we all felt that was too good for
him, but it was the sentence Alexander, newly crowned godking of all the
Fraterdom, handed down.

This was before we knew he was innocent. This was before we
knew that Alexander was our Betrayer, and all Amon had done was be a little too
smart for his brother's comfort. Burned and drowned. But not, apparently,
killed.

How do you kill a god? I had been giving this a lot of
thought. Admittedly, I only started thinking about it when I learned that
perhaps it was Alexander who had put a knife in Morgan's back. And my thoughts
mostly involved ways in which I'd like to shoot him in the face. But these were
unrealistic and, honestly, insufficient. Morgan had suffered grievous wounds in
his life, wounds that would kill the strongest of mortal men. There was
something special about the Betrayer's blade that killed the Warrior, probably
something to do with the fact that it was held by someone he trusted so deeply,
that the hand that pushed the knife into him was that of his brother.

I was no god's sister, and no scion of the Betrayer, either
way. I had always assumed that, because Alexander bound the chains and kindled
the fire, there was something special about it that could kill a god. But what
if it had only been simple flame? Simple water? Surely these things wouldn't
kill Amon. So what then? He sank to the bottom of the lake, undying? Eternal?

Apparently. Because, as I strapped on the suit that Malcolm
handed me, a lot of what he was saying involved water.

"We don't know what's at the end of it. They monitor
the chains, so we don't get near the pool. But the cable should lead the whole
way. I've made the appropriate modifications, here," he said, tapping the
new helmet, the tank that clipped on my belt, "that should let you make
the descent. After that, I'm no help."

"How long have you known?" I asked.

"Since I came here. It's openly known, among the
scions who are brought from the Library. It's why we work so hard to please
Alexander. To preserve the body. As long as we're useful to him, he keeps Amon
alive."