place. Just meant to offset the weight. All I did was break off the dial and point it at the sky.'
'So now it's going to be heavy again?' I looked down at the swarms of whiteshirts below us. A flight of valkyn was powering up at the foot of the Strength. I didn't want to fight the mundane army. None of this was their fault. 'Because we need to get a move on.'
'I can squeeze some lift out of it. Just…' She loosened two straps from the artifact's side, spun some kind of dial at the base, then humped the whole thing onto her back. Looked all the world like a firefighter's breathing rig. 'Oof,' she said, and settled under the weight of it. Looked tricky.
'I can carry that, if you want.'
'Nope, I got it.'
I chuckled. 'Ruck full of food and you can't manage. World's heaviest book and all of a sudden you're the damned strong man.'
'Priorities, dear. Shouldn't we be going?'
And so we should. The crowd below had seen our flight but not our landing. Spotlights were washing across the nearby buildings. The valkyn were taking a slow orbit around the Strength, their feet dan gling in the wash of their burners, wicked guns slung low from their shoulders.
We took a service walkway from the tower to a grubby-looking building that turned out to be a vertical farm. The glass windows were smeared with pollen, and the air buzzed with flies. Past rows of crummy stalks and into the central service core, and we never saw a soul. The main entrance to this place was below the streets, in the moldy, half-flooded worker tunnels that riddled the city. Bad lighting, bad mold… it was an unpleasant place.
I had to believe that Betrayer would be following us, but I had no idea as to their methods. I saw no value in hiding our tracks, not until we were good and safe from the mundanes. I was sorry to have missed a chance to fight Barnabas's murderer in open battle, but there was nothing for it now. The next time he would come in shadows. I'd be lucky to see the blade before it struck.
Which made the worker tunnels a less than ideal place to hide. Plenty of shadows for him to step out of. Plenty of dark tunnels to hide the bodies, and practically no witnesses. We had to get out of them, but the surface world wasn't too friendly to us either just then. We traveled about five blocks at a quick jog, the cobble road and ceiling of pipes slanting slightly down the whole time. The puddles became ponds, and soon we were walking on catwalks over the exposed waterways. The water below us was the lake, the same lake an army of coldmen had crawled out of earlier today. Or yesterday. I wasn't sure of the time anymore.
We stopped for a break and the girl collapsed against the railings, exhausted. I gave her my water bottle and spent a minute invoking rites of movement and fatigue. She looked better when I was done, but she still looked like hell.
'You have a plan, right?' she asked. 'This is the sort of thing Morganites plan for.'
'The collapse and betrayal of our Cult by those closest to us? Yeah, you'd think that'd be something we'd have a whole book of plans for.' I sat down next to her and dangled my legs over the catwalk. The water below was smooth, and a babbling of currents echoed against the steel all around. It could have been peaceful, in a subterranean, buried alive sort of way. 'Sadly, I left that particular book at the monastery. Also, I'm not much of a reader.'
'So, no plan?'
'I was thinking of running for a long time. Killing anything that chases us. That's the core of it.'
'Better than your previous tack of getting yourself killed and leaving the escaped Amonite slave behind to do your fighting for you,' she said.
'Speaking of slave.' I stood and bent her head forward. She still had the collar on, as well as the manacles. 'Can't you just unmake these things? They make it kind of hard to hide who you are.'
'One thing we can't unmake: the chains that bind us or our allies. It's part of the binding of Amon.'
The collar was pinned shut. I brushed her thick hair away from the linchpin. It would be tricky to get a tool onto that joint without risking the girl's neck. I started looking around for something to do the deed.
'So how'd you get free of the chains you had when we took you from the Library? Those soul-things.'
'Barnabas took them away. It was like an invokation, or something. He cut them with his knife, before we tried to break out of the car.' She rubbed her nose and sighed. 'Said I should have a chance to get away, even if he didn't.'
'Sounds like the old man. But I'm not aware of any chain-cutting invokation. Then again, he was the Fratriarch.' Was. I grimaced and kept looking for something to get the girl free.
'Not like he invoked or anything,' she said. 'Just laid his blade across the metal, and it parted like paper.'
'Must have been a special knife. Then again. .' I drew my twohander and held it carefully in both fists. 'Maybe you should hold really still.'
I balanced the blade over the collar, calming my breathing. I wondered if I should invoke strength, but that didn't seem appropriate. Best to just take a light whack and see how it went. I lined up the blow, touched the blade lightly against the collar to set my aim, and… the iron parted like warm cheese. As I raised the sword, the collar fell open and clattered to the floor.
'Great,' she said. 'Now the wrists?'
'That's some bad metal,' I said. 'Cut way too easy.'
Grabbing the manacles, I pulled and pushed and tested the strength of the rings. The girl didn't like the way the iron bit into her skin, but she kept quiet. The metal was good. And yet it split just as easily as the collar had.
'I will be damned.'
She stood up and kicked the collar and cuffs into the water. They disappeared with a splash that was quickly swallowed by the current. I kept staring down at where they'd sunk until Cassandra had shouldered the archive and was tapping me on the shoulder.
'That plan of yours, about running? We should get on with that.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'And while we're running, we can come up with a better plan.'
'I'm just kidding,' she said, smiling. 'I've already got a better plan. But the first step is still running. After that, I want to find a place to hole up and give this archive some attention. Something about this thing has gotten a lot of people killed.'
'Great. Glad not to be the only one coming up with ideas.'
'Yeah. We're all pretty glad about that.'
* * *
The instinct, when you are hunted, is to go to ground in familiar places. You know the land, you know the ins and outs of its paths. It's comfortable, and you need that when you're being hunted. You need the reassurance of the known.
The thing to do, then, is to go somewhere you don't know and are yourself unknown. It's unexpected, and going where you are not expected to go will offset your unfamiliarity with the terrain and its inhabitants. This was difficult, because Ash was my city, the only city I had ever truly known. There weren't a lot of places that I didn't know, where the last Paladin of Morgan wouldn't be known for what she was. The best path would have been to leave the city completely, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. Whoever had killed my Fratriarch and defiled my Cult, they were in the city. Whatever mystery would be uncovered with the Amonite archive, it was in the city. The collar countries around the lake could offer protection and anonymity. They could not bring me closer to vengeance, and I counted that higher than my safety, or the safety of the girl.
It shocked me a little to think that I counted Cassandra's safety for anything at all. Some part of me still distrusted her, as I distrust all scions of Amon the Betrayer. It was clear, though, that she served Amon in his aspect as the Scholar and had chosen a life of great difficulty to uplift this positive aspect of that fallen Cult. I had to respect that, albeit grudgingly.
Something more. I felt that she was my only link to Barnabas's last moments on earth. She had been with him, when I should have been. He had died to save her, holding off the Betrayer as she ran. That was the choice he had made, for whatever reason. I felt I could not dishonor that choice. That it was my duty, now, to carry on that choice.
So we sought some safety, but not so much that we could not strike when the enemy presented itself. We
