fish sellers, tailors, beggars. But armed with the Scholar-crafted weapons of the Royal Armory. They were unstoppable. They put fire into the Rethari, and the scaly legions fled. Their totem-men tromped away, their heavy feet digging into the bloody mud of the field. The battle was carried by common men, and the weapons of Alexander and his pet Scholars.
That was the lesson of the day.
* * *
I woke up, startled by the sound of the maid pushing dust down the hallway outside my door. I stood naked and shivering in my room, bullistic in hand, listening to her brush, brush, brush her way until she turned a corner and the sound faded. I had been sleeping, but I had not been sleeping well. Dreams of the Fratriarch, of Elias, both lying cold and dead in the Rest. Of them rising up and calling after me with static voices that scratched against my bones like the song of the impellors.
My fingers shook as I got dressed. They shook as I cut my breakfast in the quiet mess hall, shook until I stuffed them into the pockets of my pants and hurried away from the Strength. This was before dawn. The sky was just barely light, and the streets were empty.
It was a hell of a thing the Elders were asking me to do. The Cults of the Brothers Immortal had their differences, as the Brothers themselves had their differences. Petty things that brothers do, whether or not they are gods. More so for Morgan, Alexander, and Amon, since they were born human and became gods through their actions during the war against the Feyr. Petty things, and serious things, and in one case at least, murderous things. But ever since Amon had betrayed Morgan, since the Cults of Morgan and Alexander had hunted down their wayward Brother and put him to the torch, enslaved his Cult, and harnessed their wisdom… ever since then, Morgan and Alexander had stood close. Whatever grievances we had against each other were insignificant beside the Betrayal.
So what were we doing now? Hiding an artifact of the Betrayer in our monastery, acting behind the Alexians' backs, risking the life of our Fratriarch to preserve that secrecy. These were the orders of the Elders. And now they were asking me to break into Alexander's palace and free an escaped Amonite. An Amonite who might know where Barnabas had been taken, who certainly knew something of what had happened to him. All to keep the scions of Alexander in the dark. It made me… uncomfortable. But that was my vow, reiterated to Tomas just yesterday, burned into my heart since I had been left at the door of the Strength.
I wandered the city of Ash in quiet contemplation, wandered as the city unfolded around me, as the night fell to morning, and morning became day. I was wasting time. But my hands had stopped shaking, at least.
I felt better, the closer I got to the Strength of Morgan. That old building always gave me peace, nestled darkly among the bright glassand-steel towers of the city. It was a place of dense power and ancient strength, like a foundation stone from which an entire world could be built. I had built my life on it. Easy to forget its majesty in my trouble.
I paused along the wide boulevard that circled the Strength, resting beside a vendor cart at the edge of a stream of pedigears clattering over the cobblestones. The Strength rose above me, its egglike shape exaggerated by its height and width. The stone of its walls was intricately carved with friezes from the history of the Cult, its sides interrupted by terraces and gun platforms and wide glass windows on the higher levels that glittered in the sun. On the far side I could just make out the walled driveway where I had been turned over to the Cult as a child. And, facing me, the wide mouth of the recessed portal that led to the main door of the cathedral. Against the height of the Strength that door looked small, though it was ten feet tall and made of thick wood. The arched portal was easily thirty feet high, and bounded by statues of the warrior-saints. At our current strength, we couldn't afford the processional guard that traditionally stood at attention. That door remained closed but unlocked, even in this time of trouble.
What was not unlocked, and never open, were the sally ports that ringed the monastery. Solid stone doors, hidden in the seams of the holy carvings, openable only with invokations and secret knowledge. Which is why it caught my attention when the farthest sally port I could see cracked open and a single figure slipped out. Whoever it was scurried across the mostly deserted boulevard and disappeared into the press of buildings on the other side.
I was invoking before I fully understood I was moving, and moving before half a breath had left my mouth. The boulevard was never crowded these days, not since the Strength had lost its prominence as the spiritual center of the Fraterdom. Nothing got in the way as I sped along the edge of the buildings, each step faster with every invokation of speed and the hunt. By the time I reached the place where the figure had disappeared I was flaring power in a coruscating aura of glory. I turned the corner and turned my Morgan-blessed senses on the trail.
Whoever it was, he was running invokations, too. My senses were baffled by a muffled aura of misdirection. The street twisted under my feet, the buildings that should be so familiar fading from sight to be replaced by a nondescript facade of unknown houses and featureless walls. The sky closed in. Even my sense of balance took a tumble. I braced myself against a building that I'd never seen before and looked around. Behind me, the Strength was lost to sight. The average citizens who had the misfortune of traveling this street at this time stood dumbfounded in the road, unsure of where they were or where they were going. I passed them by, pushing through the subterfuge of the invokation with the burning eyes of the hunter. Faint hints of the figure's path called to me, disturbances of air and power that could only be detected by the sharpest of eyes. Morgan's eyes, blessed to me.
After that initial surge of misdirection the trail settled down. Traces of invokations hung in the air where my target had jumped a fence or passed, ghostlike, through an intervening wall. A couple times I found myself following ghost tracks and had to walk back and pick the trail up again. Twice I spotted the figure. Nondescript robe, shuffling through the crowd that had gathered in front of a fish vendor. Once he was in the clear, there was some sort of commotion in front of the shop that drew everyone's attention but mine. With no one looking, the shuffling figure jumped gracefully up a fire escape and disappeared into the alleyway beyond.
He was better than me. In a pure chase, speed against speed, invokation to invokation, he would have outdistanced me in a breath. It was only his apparent need for subterfuge and the occasional crowd that was slowing him down enough for me to keep in range.
My pursuit took me deeper into the city, away from the harbor horns and to the opposite shore of Ash. These were the oldest buildings, the first structures the Fraterdom had raised after the defeat of the Feyr. I kept catching glimpses of the Spear of the Brothers, the marble tower that had served as the seat of power before the three Cults had split and settled into their own domains. After the betrayal of Amon, Alexander had returned to the Spear to build his throne, leaving his Cult's Healing Halls to the administration of his scions and declaring himself the godking of all mankind. When it was built, the Spear was the tallest structure in all Ash. Now, like the Strength of Morgan, the Spear was dwarfed by the glassand-steel towers of the modern metropolis. Ironic that Alexander sat humbled by the technology created by his policies toward the Scholars.
We did not go to the Spear, however. The figure skirted the edge of the administrative district, keeping to the old town and transportation hubs, more than once ducking into shops and then out the back door without speaking to merchant or customer. People seemed unphased by his passing. There were a couple more instances of the disorientation, when it felt like the world was being squeezed through a tube and everything became unfamiliar. If my quarry was a scion of Morgan, he was reeling off invokations I had never heard of, much less learned. I felt the Betrayer's hand in this. My pace quickened, driven forward by curiosity as much as my warrior's training. I wanted this target, wanted to hunt him down and drive him to the ground.
Our path began to orbit a cluster of buildings. I slowed down. The figure was looking for tails, checking and double checking his path. I had him well in sight now, but there was no getting any closer. We circled that cluster of buildings once, twice, and then he stopped in front of one particular place. White walls, plaster chipped and old, windows shuttered, but the iconography still maintained. One of the original missions of Alexander, its glory faded, its doors long closed. But not to this man. He crept silently to the door and laid a hand against it. Something happened, an invokation or a signal, and the door opened. Before he went inside, the figure looked up and down the street, then disappeared into the darkness. I saw his face.
Elder Simeon, son of Hatheus, holy scion of Morgan.
* * *
