could have gone to the waterways, to the sketchily mapped and partially drowned corridors of the undercity, and there found peace. But I could not get my mind away from the coldmen and their aquatic assault on the Chanter's Isle. I wanted to be as far away from that threat as possible.
There are many high places in the city of Ash. Once, the ancient towers of the Spear of the Brothers and the Strength of Morgan were the greatest heights in Ash. No more. The inhabitants of the Library Desolate had advanced in their knowledge of architecture, and so now towers of glass and steel and light clawed their way to heaven. And not all of the space in these towers was occupied. There were service corridors, the empty floors abandoned to the strange disturbance of the impellors, ironframed towers that supported airship docks, and communications towers that spoke in invisible voices to the rig that Owen wore when he needed to talk to headquarters. So many empty spaces, with so few people.
We took residence in an airship dock. It was a steel-frame tower, sheathed in metal cladding for a facade, perched on top of a middling height building on the edge of the outer horn of the city. An older building, but it afforded a grand view of the lake and the surrounding collar mountains. The dock wasn't built for people, but people had used it. There was a haphazardly constructed platform of wooden planks, allowing enough space for a half- dozen people to sleep, as long as they were friendly. Whoever had built the platform was long gone. It served the purpose we required: a place to sleep, to hide, to think about next moves. The constant docking and undocking of airships shook the tower, but no one came up to disturb us. It was ideal.
The girl spent most of the first night huddled over her archive, the pale green light of its runes bathing her face. I slept with my back to her, my hand over my sword. It was cold this high up, even though the facade kept most of the wind away. I was restless, kept getting up to peer between the slats of the wall. The airship traffic was constant, their cylinders glowing a warm orange from the burners as they eased into the dock. Behind them, the sky was crystal black and clear, the moon like a chip of ivory. It would be peaceful, in other circumstances.
'Where do you think they are?' Cassandra asked without looking up from the machine. 'Your brothers of Morgan?'
'Dead, mostly,' I said. I hadn't told her about the rooms of bodies I had found. Didn't need to tell her. It was written on my face, I knew, and in the set of my shoulders. 'Some may have made it out. Some of the Elders.'
'So there's hope. Your Cult will continue.'
'It's been dying for a long time. It will keep on dying, regardless of what we do.'
'Yeah, you Morganites have it real tough.' She rubbed her eyes and cycled down the archive. It settled into itself, the runes flickering as they died. 'Must be unbearable.'
I looked back at her, then leaned against an iron spar and crossed my arms.
'There aren't many of us to bear it, that's for sure. And in case you haven't noticed, someone's trying to kill us off.'
'And those who remain are free to defend themselves, or to run away.' She busied herself with putting the archive to bed, closing valves and tightening dials. 'You may be dying off, but it's not for lack of the opportunity to defend yourselves.'
'You're talking about Amon. About the Library Desolate. Listen, you're the one who chose to enter the service of a fallen god. Not me.'
'It's time you started thinking of Amon as something other than the Betrayer.' She finished with the archive and stood to face me. 'And his servants as something other than murderers. Our gods were brothers before they were enemies. Something led them to that path, and maybe something else can lead them back.'
'One of them just killed my Fratriarch! Simeon is in the hospital with Betrayer steel in his guts. Elias and… hell, and Tomas and Isabel, for all I know. There are rooms full of my dead brothers back in the Strength, all of them dead at Betrayer hands. And you're talking about forgiveness?'
She watched me for a time, her eyes dark pools under her hood. Finally, she shrugged and went to the other side of the platform to lie down.
'It is an Amonite who will save you, Eva. And the knowledge of Amon that will get us out of this. Whatever we are, those of us who have chosen the life of the Library Desolate, we are not murderers. We are not the scions of the Betrayer.'
With the light of the archive gone, the platform was very dark. I stared at the lump of her body, curled up at the edge of the platform. The wind and the passing of airships filled my ears, and in time I lay down and slept. My dreams were full of people I knew, people I had loved, and all of them were dead.
13
was bored. Bored, bored, cooped up on a tiny platform in a tiny tower, listening to the wind and the airships and the girl and her archive, bored. When I woke up she was already at the feet of that machine, turning dials and muttering to herself, the crumbled remains of some of the flatbread I had stolen from a vendor cart scattered about her. All morning it had been like this. Dial, mutter, invoke, mutter, dial. I was going nuts.
'So how do you know how to work that thing?' I asked while cleaning my revolver. Again. This was the eighth time, I think. Cleanest gun in all of Ash, and no one to shoot.
'It's my nature,' she said.
Silence. Mutter. Dial.
'Learned anything?'
She didn't answer for a long time. When she did, it was like she was answering a different question.
'He wasn't asking the questions I would think of.' She pushed back from the archive and pulled a tangle of hair out of her face. 'I suppose that's what made him the Scholar.'
'This is the great secret that's gotten most of my Cult killed? That Amon asked strange questions?'
She smiled and shook her head. 'I suppose that's the heart of it. But I'm not sure what this has to do with… anything else. You asked how I know how to operate the archive. Experience. We have one of these in the Library. Much larger, in fact. Our keepers tell us that it's the sum of Amon's knowledge, minus the profane knowledge that led to the Betrayal.'
'Is that what this is?' I asked, rising to my feet. 'The profanity?'
'I hope not. It would be the dullest blasphemy ever. Besides, everyone thinks Alexander keeps that close. If you show especial talent with the archive, with sorting it and plumbing its knowledge, the whiteshirts disappear you.'
'Doesn't sound like it would pay to be good at that,' I said.
'Who knows? We think they get taken off to a secret archive, hidden away. Something Alexander culled from the main body and kept for himself. Secret knowledge does have a certain appeal, doesn't it?'
'So this archive here, it's part of that secret knowledge?'
She shrugged. 'I don't know all of the main archive, obviously. This doesn't seem like something you'd want to keep hidden.' She turned the archive toward me, revealing a screen of garbled runes, flooding past like a waterfall. Images popped up, but they made no sense to me. 'It's his research on the impellors. It looks like they're an offshoot of some kind of Feyr creation. When Amon wrote this, he was just beginning to apply the principle to the monotrains. Really, it's kind of dull, in a fascinatingly detailed sort of way. But I can't imagine there's anything here to justify… you know.'
I paced around the archive, making one circuit before I stopped and sighed.
'And that's it? That's all that's in there?'
'Oh, gods no. I mean, it all seems to be related to this, but I've only just figured out the subject line. There are noetic pounds of knowledge in here-research, tangential investigations, technical drawings. It's a very thorough history of the process. And it's fascinating to see his mind at work. How he made the leap from the Feyr device to the monotrains.'
'The Feyr didn't use them for transport?' I asked.
She shook her head, then leaned in to the machine and flittered through the text. 'Near as I can tell, they just shot them up in the air. No idea why.'
