'Doing alright?' I asked.
'Well enough.'
'Okay. Just follow close.'
I drew my sword and swept the curtain aside. I wish I'd done it sooner. I wish I had been alone.
Barnabas lay there, at the edge of the compass rose. Crushed. The wide, delicate window was shattered, and glass surrounded him like sharp confetti. I stumbled to a halt, the sword sliding loosely to the ground. Without thinking, I was by his side, kneeling, the shards cutting my knees and palms. I turned him on his back, but there was no point. He wasn't breathing, wasn't even bleeding anymore. He just lay there in a pool of stiff blood, his eyes pale and open, his hands clenched into dead man's fists. He had been beaten, while he was still alive. His face showed it. Angry bands around his wrists showed where he had been bound. His gums were bloody from a gag, and he smelled of offal and piss and long confinement. They had beaten him, an old man. They had beaten him, and they had killed him, and they had brought him here.
I closed his eyes, then went back and got my sword. Cassandra was standing by the entrance, her hands to her face. The bitch was crying. For all that it was her godsdamn fault that they had taken him, and she was crying. I knelt by the body of my friend, my only true father, and intoned the words of the Watchman's Dirge. Or tried to, but I was crying.
'We don't have time for this,' Cassandra whispered.
'Shut up. I have to get the words right. I have to stand the watch I promised.'
'We don't have time. You can pay your respects later, but we need to get-
'I said shut up! I swore to him.' I stood, pointing at the stiff old man at my feet. 'I swore to the Fratriarch. There's no one else to stand his watch, and I'll be dead and damned if I'm going to let him just rot here. I don't care what they do. I don't care if they arrest me, or shoot me where I stand. I'm going to stand the watch I swore.'
She stood there looking at me for a minute. I turned back to Barnabas and knelt, my forehead on the cool hilt of my sword. The words were hard to get right in my head, like everything was pouring out of my skull and all I could do was grab pieces of it. The Dirge went something like… like A thousand walls, and I march my beat. A thousand walls to stand. A thousand nights to chill my soul, a thousand dawns to hope. A thousand-
'And then what?'
I sighed against my sword, leaning against the steel. The words were slipping out of my head. A thousand dawns, ten thousand more, and a spear for every star.
'What will you do then? You'll stand this watch, fine. You'll bury the old man. And then what?'
'It won't matter. I'll be dead, like the others. It'll be over.'
'It won't. Not for us, not for the people of Ash. Something's happening, Eva. Something's rising up. You think the House of Morgan is being knocked down because it's weak? Or because it's the only strong thing left?'
'The hell do you know?' I looked at her over my shoulder. She had the shotgun in her hands, squeezing it until her knuckles were white. 'What the hell do you know?'
'I know that this was a good man. That he saved me, and he's probably saved you a couple times, and Brothers know who else. And they killed him.'
I stared down at the Fratriarch. He looked better with his eyes closed. I could imagine the bruises were just from some brawl he'd gotten into, like when I was younger and he'd take me to the beater bars. To see the heart of the fight, he said. To see the ugly, violent, desperate, raw center of combat. Without the banners, the armor, the horsemen. Without the reason. Just the fight. And he always came away from those things laughing and bloody.
I pulled his arms across his body, pushed his fists into his sleeves. Arranged the body as it should be arranged. Then I stood up.
'A thousand spears against the sky, Brother,' I said, and took out the pendant that he'd given Cassandra, and she had given me. I tossed it onto his chest. 'You leave some for me, eh. I'll be there in a bit.'
I turned to the compass rose. Bad luck that they'd brought the body here. Drama, I suppose. And with my mind in its present state, there was no way I was going to remember the little dance Tomas had done, even if I'd been trained to the invokation. But Morgan always finds a way.
Stacking invokations of strength, flaring them hard until a wave of energy burned out of me, layers of noetic power shimmering at my every edge, I raised my sword on high, the blade pure white with the mystery and majesty of dead Morgan. I brought it down on the center of the compass rose.
The building shattered.
The delicate pieces of the secret compartment burst open. The floor lurched beneath me, and I stumbled back. The artifact rose from the floor, too quickly, and tumbled across the ballroom like a jack. It came to rest under the glittering night sky, beneath the ruined window. I went to it.
'What is that?' Cassandra asked, creeping up behind me.
'A lot of dead people, and the end of my Cult,' I answered. 'Other than that, I have no damn idea.'
She ran her hands over it, her fingers pausing gingerly on the Amonite runes.
'You know what it is,' I said.
'An archive.' Her voice was quiet. She looked up at me, briefly, then back to the artifact. 'Like a library. A whole library, in this one space.'
'No wonder it's so damn heavy.' She started to put her hands under it, as if to carry it off. 'Seriously, it's a lot heavy. You should-'
Cassandra turned some knob and a ring of runed light began to orbit the device. She lifted it carefully off the floor with one hand. It hovered, about two feet off the ground, level with the girl's kneeling head.
'Oh. Well, not so heavy.'
'That's enough,' a voice said from the shadows. I spun my sword into a guard and gathered up what little remained of the invokations of strength. A man stepped onto the dance floor. A thin man, a delicate man. A sharp man. Betrayer.
'We probably could have done that, if we'd known it was so simple. Barnabas led us to believe that there was a bit of magic to the opening of the secret space. I suppose that sort of brutality passes for mysticism around here. Nathaniel said I should wait and see what you would do. I have seen.'
He wore white, trimmed with pewter, and his face was hidden behind an articulated mask of iron. Chain belts crossed his chest, an iron ring at the center protecting the icon of the Betrayer. He moved like a dancer. Displaying empty hands, he twirled his fingers with a flourish and produced daggers. Damn show-off.
I raised my guard, invoked the Wall of Orgentha, and apologized to Barnabas for being the last, and for giving him such a crappy watch. It was all I could do.
'Cass, run!' I yelled. I took a step forward, sword over my head, and then… then I was flying backward, out the window, into the night. The girl's hand was on my shoulder, and all I could see was the rapidly diminishing window of the ballroom, and the Betrayer, and Barnabas's tiny, dead body on the floor.
* * *
We landed in the framework of an iron water tower about two blocks from the Strength. Even now there were sirens stretching up into the sky from the street below. We'd been seen. Not sure how you'd miss us, honestly.
'That thing can fly?' I asked, when I'd reoriented to my surroundings. The flight had been a strangely weightless affair, and it was odd to be back in gravity's fist. Cassandra was bent over the archive, slapping controls and muttering invokations.
'Nope. Not really. That was an egregious misuse of the technology.' She smiled and looked up at me, like a kid in a candy shop. 'And now I've broken it all to hell. But it was fun, yeah?'
'You shouldn't have done that. I could have taken that son of a bitch.'
'Your Fratriarch couldn't take that son of a bitch. He's the same creep who jumped us outside the mono car. And I know you're all ready to die in the glory of battle, but I think you're going to be more use alive. Yeah. I sure broke something, didn't I?' She sat back on her heels and stared mournfully at the device.
'I thought you said it was some kind of library? Why make a library that can fly?'
'Not the point. The empulsor… the flying bit… that was just meant to make it easy to carry from place to
