'We can't wait around, Cass,' I whispered. 'They'll be coming back.'
'Yes,' she answered, and opened her eyes. 'Coming back to the archive.'
My eyes widened, and I turned to the door. The archive. I changed stance and began to invoke the Rite of the Sundering, as quietly as I could. Cassandra gave me a little slap and shushed me.
'We'll need to close the door again, Paladin.' She produced a complicated tool, knelt by the door, and put her forehead against the metal. 'This may take some time.'
'It's in short supply, I think. They know someone is in the building.'
'It will take more time if you keep talking.'
I grimaced, but backed off. This was much too long of a hallway for me to be comfortable. Any of these doors could open with little or no warning. And if they had found the massacre upstairs, it wasn't like we'd be able to talk our way past a patrol. Sword in sheath, bullistic in hand, I paced. That was as much peace as I could give the girl.
Her whole body hummed with attention. She had the tool flat up against the lock. There were sounds coming out of her, out of the door, out of the tool. Like stones grinding. That had to be drawing someone's notice, didn't it? This was taking forever. A thousand forevers. I kept my eyes on all the doors, on the passageway, especially on the door that those two had gone through. Had they been Amonites? Alexians? They had referred to the Scholar, so probably some of Alexander's pets. They still wore the chains, I remembered. They couldn't be all that free.
The grinding sound stopped, and the door sighed open. Cassandra stood, smiling.
'Breaking things is not always the way,' she said.
'Fine, fine,' I said, hurrying her through the door. 'Let's just get inside.'
The door locked behind us. Inside was a square room with a low ceiling. The space was dominated by a brass dome that reached almost to the ceiling, and nearly to the walls. The only clear areas were at the corners, where the circumference of the dome did not reach. There were hooks all along the wall by the door, several of which were hung with some sort of suit. The dome looked pressurized, and in fact had several dogged portals leading into it at various heights, each one accessible by rungs soldered onto the dome. It was covered with Amonite runes, some painted on, some forged into the metal, or made of iron or copper or gold and bolted to the surface. I looked back at Cassandra.
She was standing in quiet awe, her eyes wide. She was whispering below her breath, and her free hand was making rites. The symbols of her faith.
'This is it?' I asked.
'Yes. The last archive of Amon the Scholar. It's… enormous.'
'Well. We aren't taking this thing out of here, obviously. You wanna strap up and see what you can-'
'Can you give me one second of quiet, for Brothers' sake? Does Morgan have no holy place, no room of silence and meditation?' She turned to me, and I saw tears in her eyes. 'Can we just be quiet for a minute?'
I gritted my teeth. 'Battle, Cassandra-that is our holy place. Everything else has been burned.' I pulled one of the suits off the wall and tossed it to her. 'And I've prayed enough today. I'd like to get out of here cleanly.'
She looked unhappy, but she shucked off her robe and pulled on the suit over her skinny legs. I gave her what privacy I could. She was half into it when one of the pressurized doors unsealed with a gasp of frost, and an Amonite came out.
He was in a suit like the one Cassandra was pulling on. Without looking around, he hurried down the rungs and to the floor near us. He stopped long enough to release the mask and hood. His hair was white, but when he turned I could see that he was quite young. He didn't register who we were at first, instead rushing to one of the hooks that held a gray robe. He stopped, looked at me, at my revolver, at the blood still on my boots. Unphased, really. Then he looked at Cassandra, half naked, half suited, unchained and yet so clearly an Amonite. His eyes got wide. He jumped for a switch by the door, a panel that had a big red button on it. I got between him and it.
'Don't,' I said. He stopped, his hand trembling as it reached for the button.
'They'll kill us all. If they find you here, they'll kill every one of us.' He looked between us. 'You don't know what you've done.'
'And you have no idea what I've done. Or what I'm willing to do. Now get away from that switch.'
'It doesn't matter,' he said. 'They'll kill us all.' And he jumped for the console. I put two bullets in him, the report loud, the reverberations echoing around the dome. He fell, startled, and lay there with his mouth open.
'You didn't have to do that,' Cassandra said as she rushed past me. She knelt at his side. 'You didn't have to kill him.'
'I think I did,' I answered. She didn't look up. Blood was trickling out of the guy's mouth. He was trying to talk, but nothing was coming. He put a bloody hand on Cassandra's chest, right over her heart, smearing gore on her skin and undershirt. And then he died.
Cassandra nearly vibrated, she was so furious. She rolled him onto his back, cupped his hands over his eyes, and pushed his mouth closed. She was saying some kind of rite over him.
'We don't have time-' I said.
'We have more time than he does. Now shut up. This is not a place for blood.'
'It's going to be, if you don't-'
'Shut. Up,' she said, exasperation in her voice. 'In Amon's name, be quiet.'
I took a step back, but I was quiet. I remembered standing the watch over Elias. Who was I to deny her the comfort of ritual? She finished, stood, and buckled into the suit, all without looking at me, or the body of the Amonite.
'Watch the door,' she said, and started up the ladder.
'He was going to sound the alarm.'
'Watch the door.'
She got up the dome and undogged the portal. White frost blossomed around her, turning the suit into a glittering sleeve. She disappeared inside, sealing the dome behind her.
I looked at the body, at the slowly growing pool of blood, at Cassandra's gory footsteps, and where she had knelt by the Amonite as he died. Then I turned, and watched the door.
16
he guy just lay there, dead. I usually didn't spend a lot of time with the people I killed. The advantage of a battlefield. You charge a position, sweep through, put down whatever resistance, and then redirect. Maybe get called back to reinforce the line, or forward to exploit a breakdown in the enemy. And then you move on. Plenty of time around dead bodies, of course. They were everywhere in the modern battlefield. But which ones did you kill? Which ones died at your brother's hand, or some other soldier's, or their own? Who could tell? Who could sort it out?
But this guy, I had killed him, and he wasn't going away. Cassandra's reaction had been wholly surprising to me. He had been about to call the heat down on us. Killing him was all I had. Maybe I could have subdued him, just knocked him out and tied him up, but it had been a split-second decision. This is how it had ended up.
I turned him over with the toe of my boot, so I didn't have to look at his gaping mouth and the weird way Cassandra had arranged his hands. That would probably upset her, too, but we can't all get what we want.
Look at me. What I want is my Cult back. Barnabas alive, the Strength intact, and a steady flow of initiates in the door. That was never going to happen. A long time, we'd been dying, little by little. Every potential initiate who passed us by to serve in the whiteshirt army was a little death. When the initiates stopped coming, it was only a matter of time before we stopped being. Just stopped. I didn't expect it to happen like this, of course. I didn't expect the Betrayer to come back, to start killing us off. But you can't turn back time. There wasn't going to be a Cult of Morgan, once this was through.
Scratch that. I didn't want the Cult back. It was dead, and had been dying for a long time. I didn't want to drag it out. What I wanted, what I really wanted, was revenge. I wanted the damn Betrayer dead, whoever he was. Alexander or Amon, it didn't matter to me. I wanted his towers thrown down. I wanted his Cult scattered, his scions persecuted and killed. I wanted to put my blade through the gut of that bastard Nathaniel. I wanted the Cult
