important than Barnabas? Was she?
The details would matter later. For now I was on a sinking island, swamped with undead warriors, and stone deaf. There was so much destruction that I could feel it in my bones, in my meat, but my mind was wrapped in a thick cloud of roaring silence. I tried to invoke and stumbled on the words. Power would not come to me if I couldn't form the words of the invokation. I was alone, and I had to get to Cassandra.
Cassandra was somewhere above me, in the half of the dome that was thrusting up into the sky like a new mountain range. Assuming they hadn't moved her while I was drinking black wine with Lesea. Assuming she wasn't already dead, wiped out in the first strike that had torn the dome asunder. Assuming.
The water continued to rise around me, and some of the coldmen spotted me and lumbered over. There was something different about these guys. Less armor, more flesh. Their skin was bloated, crisscrossed with deep cuts that had been hurriedly sewn together with thick leather cord. They still had the goggle eyes and the staticky voice boxes, but these were bolted crudely into their faces. Their weapons were just as wicked, though, just as sharp. They rushed me.
It was a poor-quality fight. I swept the length of my blade underhand, pushing the tip about four inches into the first guy's belly and drawing it up his chest until I got to his chin. His ribs popped like a cheap zipper. He stumbled back and I maintained the sword's momentum, passing it overhead and then laterally. I put steel on his neck, near the base of the blade, driving straight through the meat and bone and coming out the other side with most of the weapon's speed still intact. I went to one knee, rotated, and drove the blade right through his companion's thighs. They fell away from me, falling tonelessly into the dark water that was beginning to pool around my ankles. Quick fight. These guys didn't have the constitution of the coldmen I had encountered before.
But there were a lot of them. More than I had the time or patience to deal with, frankly. Let the Chanters guard their home. Before any more of the hastily stitched dead men could waylay me, I slid down the ruined chasm of the dome. Tiny waterfalls followed me, and avalanches of shale. When I got low enough, I was able to jump across the chasm, landing in a heap among broken instruments. I was low enough that I could see the fight that was boiling around the breach in the central chamber. Chanters, badly outnumbered and dwindling by the second, swarmed by the clumsy coldmen. I think there were Feyr among the defenders. Strange, but a puzzle for another day.
I climbed the rumbling incline of the shattered dome. The ghosts of sounds were starting to penetrate my head, even though my eardrums must surely be blown. The Song was such a violent thing, but even it was drowning in the groan of the building, the tectonic explosions and shifting architecture of the island. I looked down and saw water bubbling in the chamber below, working its way through organ pipes and articulated voice machines. I shivered and climbed on, as the Song began to fade from my bones.
When I got to the level where I thought Cassandra might be, I slid into the corridor. This whole half of the structure was leaning away from vertical, and once-level passages had become more like amusement park rides. Below me, the singing had stopped, or at least fallen to a level at which it no longer penetrated my deafness. The air was thick with dust. There were bodies on the ground, caked in dirt and their own blood. I couldn't tell if these were Chanters or their attackers. It didn't matter. I slid past them and down into the crumbling structure.
The lights were failing. I tried to invoke the Ghosteyes, but the words were thick on my deafened tongue and the invokation failed. Wisps of bluish light splintered out from me, scattering around the room before disappearing. I crept along, mostly blind, completely deaf, nothing but my hands and the weight of my sword to guide me. Something shifted far below and the floor tilted a little more. I wondered if it was an Amonite engine that kept this place up. I wondered if the scions of the Betrayer, Amon the Murderer, would know how best to disable the work of their god.
Someone stumbled out of the shadows and took a swipe at me. I punched him with the pommel of my sword, swept his legs from under him, then held my elbow across his throat until he stopped struggling. I raised his face up close to mine to get a better look. One of Cassandra's guards. Glad I hadn't just sliced him open. I wasn't quite at the point of taking up arms against all the scions of the Brothers Immortal. Not yet. And it looked like I was getting close to where I needed to be.
Sure enough, the next corner was familiar. A frictionlamp glowed dimly on its bracket, just outside a very memorable, very heavy door. I tried to invoke again with a little better success, coming away with enough strength to wedge the door aside. The guards were gone, but Cassandra remained, limp on the floor in her chains.
I said her name, then again, louder. She looked up, nodding when she saw me. Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear her. I pulled one of the chains taut, laid it out against the stone, and took an invoked swing at it. My swing struck as much stone as steel, and there were sparks. It was enough. One of the chains snapped open. With the loop broken, Cassandra was able to gather up the rest of the links and stand. She was as free as I could make her in my present state. I sheathed the blade and put my arm around her. Leaning on each other, we struggled out of the room and back into the hallway.
She leaned her head against me and spoke some more. I couldn't hear her, so I shook my head. She put her forehead directly against my head, the vibrations of her voice getting through my throbbing silence.
Thank you.
'Sure thing,' I said, or I think I said. And that's when they hit.
It was a whole cadre of the coldmen, the true breed, the ones who had kidnapped the Fratriarch. They came out of the deeper parts of the building, boiling up from the darkness, their eyes glowing blue and green as they rushed us. The girl fell off my arm, or I pushed her, and the bully was in my hand. I stitched lead into the first couple of them, and then they were too close. In one motion I holstered the bully and went for my sword. The blade cut them as I drew it, the articulated sheath spinning the sword under my arm and into my hands. The corridor was too narrow and too precarious for truly fancy forms. I kept one hand high on the blade, on the weighted, dull length of steel that was there for just this purpose, striking mostly with the middle of the blade and thrusting with the tip. Trap with the hilt, push back with the middle, spear into black blood and cold flesh with the tip. Repeat. They fell around me.
Deaf, so I never heard the explosion that almost ended us. The floor jumped, and we all slid in a tangle of living and dead, deeper into the drowning building. Water, dark and cold, swallowed me. I pushed to my knees, then my feet, scything all around me at the grasping hands. I saw Cassandra burst from the water and swim to a tangle of metal at the center of this new pool, then wondered how I could see, then realized that the roof was gone and above us was yawning sky and sun.
The coldmen kept coming. They clawed out of the water and came at me. I was without invokation, without strength or shield. All I had was a childhood spent with a sword in my hands, a girlhood under the heavy eye of the Elders, lived in service to my god. It would have to be enough.
The trick is to keep the blade moving. A sword like this is only heavy if you try to stop it, or change direction, or carry it on a thirtymile march in the woods. I have done all of these things, and I have learned to keep the blade moving in a fight. If you do it right, the only thing that will stop your blade is bone and meat and metal. And the only way to keep that from happening is to keep your blade very, very sharp. I have done that since I was a little girl. Sharp and heavy and always moving, and the strength that comes from thirtymile marches.
I led with the pommel, bullying the blade into the air with my off hand on the blade rest, then launched the sword into a wide, scything swing that spun me around. This was before I had even gotten to the coldmen. Something to get the momentum going. I planted my feet, holding the hilt loosely in my palms to maintain the arc of the blade without getting twisted around, and just kept the sword moving. It was a training form, honestly, to build strength and familiarity with the weapon. As a child I had done it with a length of wood capped with lead. Today I did it to stay alive.
When the speed was good I shuffled forward and pushed the orbit of the blade into the nearest coldman. It cut into him at the knees, the shoulder, crossing back to open up his belly and finally splitting him from neck to nuts. He fell in many pieces, the way a plate does when struck by a stone.
I kept the motion up and two of them jumped me. There was water here, always rising, and as I shifted my weapon from front to back it kicked up tails in the muck. I could barely keep track of the blade's path, but my heart knew it instinctively, adjusting to skim off of armor without losing momentum, hardening my arms when the metal was about to find flesh or bone, always compensating for the motion of the enemy and the crazy tilt of the collapsing dome. All in complete silence.
The more of them that came at me, the less I felt the form of the blade and the more of it happened without
