snapping shots into the brick at my feet. Two quick revolutions and he stopped shooting. Clean.
Turning, I saw the other guy in a stance of meditation. He and Cassandra were in a battle of noetic will. Waves of force lashed between them, making and unmaking the bricks, the walls, the very stuff of the air and earth and time. The cadence of their voices was a wall of tectonic force. They seemed to be channeling the purest of power, forming energy out of nothing, and nothingness out of the bare rock. Both stood in perfect meditation, an invisible wind animating their robes and hair, the barest of auras pulsing from their closed eyes.
I wheeled my blade to the ground and snatched the bully out of the staff where it had come to rest when I dropped it, propped against the carriage. I walked around the circumference of their little disturbance, my feet buckling on the shifting plane of brick. When I was as close as I dared get, I put the barrel in line with the Amonite's head and pulled the trigger.
The bullet punched through the shimmering waves of their fight, slowing like a stone in water. As it slowed it peeled like an onion, the layers of lead spiraling outward until there was nothing left but a cloud of potential violence. Even that disappeared.
'Godsdamn Scholars,' I spat, then emptied the cylinder.
Each shot followed the first, corkscrewing out of existence, each cloud wafting closer to the bastard. Waves of shock traveled out from their flight, cones of force that disturbed the balance of Cassandra's battle. Five bullets, five arcs of energy washing over each other, building and disturbing the patterns of energy that had accumulated between the two Scholars. An ever growing wave of shattered lead flowered out into the room.
The last bullet struck him. Just a glancing blow, and only the barest core of lead left from the aura of Unmaking. It was enough. He flinched as blood touched his cheek. Cassandra moved against him, viciously, with enlightened power.
The bricks of the floor roared up, stacking into a tower, the hollow core of which enveloped the man. He stumbled back, slapping his hands against the jigsaw horror that was swallowing him. There was no room for retreat. She built a tower around him. When she closed the cylinder, the shuffling whirlwind of bricks slid into place, clenching into the center, leaving no room for the man. One scream, and he was gone.
Cassandra collapsed to the floor. Her whole body was shaking, and a thin trail of blood leaked from her mouth. I put a hand on her shoulder.
'You alright?'
'I hope there aren't too many more like him. I hope he was their best.'
'The doorman?' I stood up and started thumbing bullets into the bully's cylinder. 'Probably not.'
The Chanters were all dead. I'll say it again: good shooting, especially for a Scholar. These boys were a different breed from the Librarians Desolate, that was for sure. I lined the bodies up and did some violence to the door.
'What if we have to go out that way?'
'It's a door,' I said. 'I can open it.'
We gathered up our stuff, the archive, and Cassandra's shotgun. I threw the disguises under the carriage, along with the remains of my false staff. If this was going to be a killing job, I'd rather do it in the full glory of Morgan. Before we left, we stood by the carriage and pulled down the tarp.
No idea what it was. Beautiful, for one. Complicated. Smooth and black and cut from some kind of wood. Like of which I'd never seen.
'They were building something,' Cassandra said, quietly. 'Something big.'
'Something about this size, I would say.' I put my hand against it. It pulsed in familiar time. Couldn't put my finger on it. 'You're the Scholar. What is it?'
She circled it slowly, running gentle hands over its surfaces. First time the pulse vibrated through it, she snapped her hand back, startled.
'Is it breathing?' she asked.
'It's wood. Maybe it's some kind of instrument.'
She shook her head. 'Brothers know.'
'I suspect one of them does,' I said. 'And let's be honest, we don't really have time to figure it out.'
'Yeah,' Cassandra said, then placed both palms against it, closed her eyes, and breathed in very deeply. Twice. When she opened her eyes, they were watering. 'Yeah, okay. Let's go.'
There was one big door that led to an elevator. The gears were running. Someone was coming up, so we went back to the room and took a different door. This led to a stairwell. Everything went down, it seemed. We followed the obvious path, trying to be quiet as we went. The stairs had a lot of horizontal sections, long hallways that moved us closer to the Spear before we descended again. We were probably underneath that old stone tower when we started coming across other doors to other floors. They were all locked. I could have gotten through them, but none of them seemed terribly compelling to me. By now the bodies would have been found. I didn't hear any alarms, but I had to assume that there was a search on. I was starting to taste something in my bones, too. Deeper we got, deeper it went.
'You've got that?' Cassandra asked me. 'That feeling?'
'Got it,' I said. It was like the impellors, but all the time. Made it hard to concentrate. 'That can't be your hidden archive.'
'Why else would there be Amonites here? Those two were his private stock, Eva. He's got his own little team of Scholars working on something.'
'Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe he just uses them as guards.'
'We make terrible guards.'
'Those two did okay.'
'Yeah, well…' she began, but I held up my hand. Voices.
One of the doors near us began to open, multiple locks being thrown and unlatched as we stared at it in terror. I cast about for an open door or hidden nook. We had just come around a corner, but after that the hallway was long and uninterrupted until the stairs. The direction we had been going was also a long hallway, pocked with doors. None of them looked unlocked. I grabbed the girl and ran. Best we could do was scoot around the corner and hope they were going the other way.
… the damned Chanters, if you ask me. Finley said they had been butchered.'
'I thought we had a pretty good team in there,' the second voice answered. They were getting closer. I pushed Cassandra farther back from the corner and whispered a quick invokation of speed.
'Yeah, we did. Not good enough, though. Someone must have tipped them off.'
'We should have moved a dampener up there. I said we should have. '
'Hindsight, Mal. Always with the hindsight.'
They were right by the corner. I could hear their feet, their robes. The jingling of keys. They were opening the last door we had passed. I relaxed, just a fraction.
'I'm just saying that there'd be fewer dead now, and we wouldn't have to be doing this.' The second voice was older. Cranky. 'This is going to throw off the rotation. And for all we know, the Chanters fought just enough for one of them to escape and run for it.'
'We have to assume more than that. This is a delicate time.'
The final bolt was thrown and the door opened. There was a lot of open space in the new room, judging by the echoes. How much space could there be, this far under the street? We must be under the water by now, surely? The two voices paused in the open door.
'Our lot is not the one I would have chosen. That any of us would have chosen. But we are here, and we must play our part. It is all we can do for the Scholar.'
'His name be praised,' his companion intoned, like a prayer. 'His body held tight.'
The two men sighed, then moved inside the larger room. As the door swung shut I heard one more snippet.
'When we are done with the preparations, we can return to the archive and lock it down. The toll won't last forever.'
'It will set us back weeks.'
'Perhaps. But we'll still be alive.'
And the door shut. I looked at Cassandra, but she was already past me and around the corner. I followed. She went straight to the door the men had come out of, and had her palm against it, her eyes closed.
