The Horns Of Ruin Part 17

"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 Ca.s.sandra.

"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 s.n.a.t.c.hed up my sword and fed it into the sheath's grasping mitts, then followed. Ca.s.sandra 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 a.s.sa.s.sin (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 Ca.s.sandra was reading from the archive was true, of course. Whole little creepy Feyr villages gathered ramshackle beneath each of those towers, filling in whatever s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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. Ca.s.sandra 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, k.n.o.bby 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 cus.h.i.+oned platform than anything else. He looked distracted.

His skin was as brown as a chestnut, and just as s.h.i.+ny. 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 Ca.s.sandra, 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?" Ca.s.sandra 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?" Ca.s.sandra 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. Ca.s.sandra 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 Ca.s.sandra, who was rubbernecking the whole Feyr populace. "Of what now?"

"The t.i.tans 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 G.o.dhood, then?"

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

"And after us, who?" Ca.s.sandra 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.d. And only shortly after the death of yours," he answered, nodding to Ca.s.sandra. "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 G.o.dking," 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?" Ca.s.sandra asked, desperation in her voice. "Amon spoke with your kind, learned the truth of the cycle of G.o.ds. Why would he kill his brother, knowing that it would doom the Fraterdom?"

"Why does Alexander not raise up more G.o.ds? 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 acc.u.mulate 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 G.o.ds 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," Ca.s.sandra 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?"

"What did you say about ruin? The ruin of what?" I asked.

"Of nothing. Of everything. You know our sins, child of Morgan. The blackness that we created, the destruction that we wrought. It gave birth to a form, a form that lives in this lake."

"What now?" Ca.s.sandra asked. "Some kind of monster?"

"Some kind of darkness," the Elemental answered. "We built our temples to try to purge it. It absorbed all our pain, all our vile terror, and fed it back to us. More with each sin, always more."

"Is it still here?" she asked.

"It must be. We did not purge it, but it no longer speaks to us. Your Alexander knows of it. We always thought ..." He paused, as if weighing us. "We always thought it was the burden of that sin that kept us from ascending completely. We may have been wrong. Alexander seemed to think it could ... sponge up divinity. Swallow the light of the holy."

"And hold it," Ca.s.sandra said. "Like a battery."

"But what about-" I started.

The Elemental raised a hand. "I'm sorry, but there is nothing more I can tell you, because there is nothing more I can know." He stood and ritually brushed off the knees of his robe. "I wish you well, scions of Morgan and Amon. It is quite a task you face."

"Wait! You didn't actually answer any real questions!"

"You did not ask any real questions. I can hardly be blamed for that."

He turned and stepped off the edge of the porch, to disappear among the ma.s.s of Feyr that surrounded us. They began milling about, until we lost sight of the Elemental.

"That's great," Ca.s.sandra said. "You think we could come back later?"

"Maybe we can make an appointment," I answered. We went back the way we came, past the wooden houses. The place looked abandoned now. "I get the feeling that he doesn't talk to a lot of people, though."

"Other than the G.o.ds, that is. And neither of us is Alexander."

"No," I said. "We certainly aren't. Nor Amon, nor Morgan. And we don't know what Alexander knows, or what he's doing to maintain the cycle. If he's using that d.a.m.ned Ruin." I looked up at the bricklined ceiling and grimaced. "Not yet, anyway."

*he old part of Ash is nice, especially in the early fall. The worst of summer is past, the worst of winter far away. The air is clean, probably the only clean breath you'll get in the whole city. Distant winds come down from the Crow's Teeth Mountains, wash across the vast plains of the collar, and break over the lake, right into the Brothers' Spear. That air carries the smell of the harvest and the cold promise of snow.

There are a lot of old buildings on the lakesh.o.r.e, stones that were raised under Amon's watchful eye. Picturesque arches cross ca.n.a.ls that once fed the mercantile heart of the Fraterdom, but now serve nothing more than pleasure rafts and private boats. This district has been spared the modern touch. No monotrains, no gla.s.s towers, no waterway access to speak of. Just glorious old architecture and cobblestone streets, and the kind of boutiques that sell things no one really needs.

Which is why I hadn't been back since my acceptance into the Paladin. Pa.s.sing through doesn't count, and the bit of sneaking I did on the edges of this district, following Simeon to his unfortunate meeting with Elector Nathaniel, doesn't either. No, for all my dedication to the old ways of my Cult, I had left this district to other pedestrians.

"The parade," I said, much to the surprise of my companion. "I suppose the parade comes through here. I'm usually too tired at that point from walking in formation to really notice."

"Notice what?" she asked.

"Oh. The buildings. The shops. It's really a nice area."

Ca.s.sandra looked around at the picture windows and colored awnings. I couldn't help but note how different this was from the Library Desolate. I wondered how long she had been in there, anyway. I asked.

"Five years, more or less. I've been visiting since I was a kid." I snorted at that. Still a kid, kid. "My parents didn't like it, but they supported my decision to dedicate."

"They still alive?"

"I don't know. I guess." She folded her arms into her sleeves and squinted out over the water. "I guess when I say 'support,' I mean they didn't physically stop me."

"Mm. Well. You ever been to this part of town before?"

"No. No reason."

"Yeah."