The Horns of Ruin (37 page)

"And when you're not?"

"Then? I would not want to be in the Library Desolate
on that day. I would not want to be wearing the chains when Alexander drives in
that knife."

"They'll be coming, soon," I said. We had secured
the door, Malcolm applying various invokations to strengthen the steel and seal
the portal. But it wouldn't last forever. "He'll discover that his gambit
with Barnabas failed, and he'll send someone else."

"Don't worry. I'll keep the girl safe."

"I meant you, old man." I shrugged and fitted the
helmet over my head. "The girl can keep herself."

"Of course," he said, patting my shoulder.
"You meant me. Nevertheless, I assure you, the girl will be safe."

I looked across the room at her. Sitting against the wall,
staring at her hands, and at the bloody print on her chest.

"Okay," I said. Then I unsealed one of the
pressure doors, and went inside to the mind of Amon the Scholar.

Just about a foot below the lip of the door, there was a
narrow walkway that went all around the inside of the dome. It was stone, and
the first of many concentric steps that led down into a pool of water. The
water came up to the third step, splashing lightly over it with each swell of
the tide. The pool was cold and clear; I could see that the dome was in fact a
sphere, and the steps went all the way to the bottom of it. A round opening at
the bottom of the sphere, about five feet in diameter, led out into some darker
space.

The archive itself sprouted like a flower from that
opening. It was a series of thick cables, ranging in size from the width of a
pencil to a couple that were as thick as my wrist. On the end of each cable was
a cylinder of some translucent material, each sized according to the width of
its cable. The cylinders glowed with an inner light, shimmering in the water
like bottles of lightning, with the pulse turned way down. Most of the
cylinders stayed below the surface, but those that had bobbed to the top
shifted and hummed with a constant chiming sound.

"Leave it to the Scholars to make it all so damn
complicated," I whispered to myself. I could see damp tracks where
Cassandra had emerged from the water just a little while earlier. I put my hand
beneath the surface and found it to be warm and ... sticky. Not really water.
Too thick. When I took my hand out it dried quickly, though where the water had
splashed against the stone it remained. Water that wasn't really wet. Of
course.

I sat by the edge of the pool and then slowly eased my way
into it. The suit constricted as it came in contact with the water. The liquid.
Whatever you want to call it. What had been comfortable a moment before was now
too tight. Half in the water, warmth tingling along my bones and light flashing
in my eyes, I pulled the helmet up and sealed it, then cut the bottle on and
breathed in a healthy gasp of iron-laced air. Do it quick, Malcolm had said. Do
it quick, and don't look back.

I plunged into the water and understood what he meant,
right away. I also understood why Cassandra was out there, babbling to herself.
And Amon wasn't even my god.

The water opened to me, opened fully to me, filled me with
light and lightning and a glowing warmth unlike any I have ever known.
Underwater, the chiming of the cylinders cascaded into more than sound, into
pain and madness, and through it all there were voices, a single voice, a
thousand times a single voice reciting prayers of madness and mathematics that
slid over me without sinking in, drowned me without water, tore me without
blood. I was no longer seeing a pool of water, a flower of light and sound, a
dome in a building under the city of Ash. I was seeing formulas from the inside
of numbers, knowledge from the inside of words. I was seeing the greatest mind
our world had ever known, with an eternity of knowledge flowing out in a
breath, half a breath, a never-ending sigh of ...

What saved me was the mud between my own ears. I was an
idiot. I mean that in the best possible way, the sort of idiot who can get by
and take care of herself, but also the sort of idiot who looked at all this and
could just let it slide over her without it sinking in. A duck in the water of
genius, you could say. But I saw what had driven Cassandra a little insane. The
initial blast had done a number on me, though. I was floating limp in the
water, tangled in the cords of the mind, wasting the limited breath in my
bottled lung.

I shrugged out of the coils of light and pushed to the
bottom of the pool. The stalks of the cables thickened near the opening, and I
dragged myself down by pulling on them. As I got close to the opening, the
warm, clear water became mixed with patches of darker, colder stuff. Actual
water, I thought. Lakewater.

The helmet had a tiny light. I turned it on, and could see
that there was a disk, wider than the opening and about a foot below it, that
held all of the bundles of cable together. I squeezed between the opening and
the disk, and came out into the lake, at the bottom of the city.

I'd been underneath the city before, along the edges. Never
this deep. The water here was impenetrably black, swallowing the beam from my
lamp in a matter of feet. The underside of the city disappeared in blackness. I
couldn't see any of the familiar blinking pathlight from the waterways, or
swirling dock indicators or ... anything. It was just watery night.

Examining the disk with my feeble light and my hands, I
could see that it was shaped like a barrel, slightly bowed at the middle and
warm to the touch. Metal, but old and pitted with corrosion. A single cable
emerged from the bottom, heavy and thick. It descended into the depths of the
lake.

Stay close to the cable, he said. It interacts with the
suit, and keeps you from experiencing ... something. Something to do with
pressure and depth and blood. I hadn't understood most of that, but the
illustration Malcolm had used when he could see that my eyes were glazing over
was a tube of meat, filled with blood, and a hundred hammers hitting it from
all directions at once. So I was going to stay close to the cable.

The water near the cable was warm and tingled across my
skin, or at least it felt that way through the suit. When I put my hand on the
cable the bones of my wrist hummed. Didn't like the feel of that, but I liked
the idea of hammered meat even less, so I held on while I followed it down into
the lake. Every once in a while one of my feet or the tips of my fingers would
stray a little too far away from the cable as I swam, and an instant numbing
coldness would fill them. That was all the instruction I needed, really. I was
not a complete idiot.

It was a long, cold trip. The pressurized bag that held the
sword and bully creaked on my back, the water tingled through my skin, the
light disappeared, and my eyes swam as the cable and the darkness seemed to be
the whole world. Down and down and down, lake without end.

And then there was light.

The structure looked like a madness of junk. It was nestled
at the bottom of the lake, burrowed into the stony bed. It was ringed with
light, coming from a circle of globes that whirled inside like starry
tornadoes. Their glow leaked across the lake floor in murky blueness, picking
out details of wrecked buildings and toppled pillars. These were the remains of
the Titan city, drowned by the Feyr under this great depth of water.

And crouching at the base of the ruins, the cable's end. I
descended toward it, the scale of the place slowly coming into perspective.
Enormous. Larger than most of the towers of the city above, flat on its side,
rippling with currents of light and shadow. The building shifted in the tricky
light, pulsing like a drum soundly struck. I could feel the song of it in my
mind, humming through the water. The closer I got, the bigger this place
seemed, until I got so close that I could see that the building itself was
quite small. Most of what I could see, what I had taken for structure, was just
edifice. A web of beams and pillars and buttresses that arced and crossed
through the water, supporting each other, building and descending without any
central plan. The lights that pulsed through this open framework seemed to
emanate from the stony arches themselves, without power or purpose. Beautiful,
in the way that madness can be beautiful if seen from afar, like battle, or a
storm cloud.

At the center of this openness was a single building. It
looked like a pile of iron clamshells, carelessly shucked and stacked on top of
each other. Long arcs of light lined the edges of the protruding shells, like
rows of windows or the glittering bevel of a blade. When I got a certain
distance from this structure, the cable branched and then branched again, a
dozen times, each split diminishing the size of the cables until there was
nothing but a thin vein-work of cables that led out into the stony arches
around the building. Hoping that whatever magic kept me safe when I was close
to the cable would transfer to this strange architecture, I let go and drifted
toward that building of shells.

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.