that bounced me across the lakebed.
Even dwarfed as it was by the brooding archwork all around, the building was huge. Maybe as large as the Strength, maybe larger. There was no perspective here, and I was running out of air. The swirling globes of light, embedded in the ground, were scattered around the approach to the building. Some of those were as large as buildings, some as small as eyes, all of them peering up out of the sand like crabs scuttling up from the tide. I stopped to put my hand against one, and felt the warmth of it shoot up my arm like a knife. I shivered and drifted away, smiling happily in the light and the lightness of my body. My body. My body was going away.
I bit my tongue and rode the pain toward the shell building. I panicked as I approached. Such a large building, but not built for people. Certainly not for intruders. I was going to starve for air, battering myself against its pebbled sides. I reached a near lip of shell, the band of light nearly as tall as I was, translucent and yellow-white in the murky water. I reached out for it but my hands were turning numb. I watched my fist beat senselessly against the colored wall, scrambling at the lip of it, striking my fingers on the smooth, cold edge of the shell building. There were no doors. There was no entrance.
The building settled, and I felt movement around me. Suddenly I was… breathed in. Inhaled. Shooting up, pausing some distance away from the building, then the water swirled and I was going up again. I turned my head and one of the upper decks of the building rushed at me, a black void at its center, flexing as I slithered bonelessly toward it.
A smack of air pressure, the suit spasming against my ribs and legs, and then I was through and flopping up onto a beach of smooth pebbles. I lay there, still gasping for air, my lungs starving, and then I got a tingling hand up to my mask and threw the dogged seal away. A rush of air and I was alive. Alive, but trapped at the bottom of the lake without a breath of air to get me back.
I lay there for a while, breathing, aching as the blood surged back into my hands and feet, my lungs shredded with the effort of inhaling vacuum. I tossed the bottled lung away and listened to it clang loudly off stone. A big room. I forced myself to my knees for a look around.
It was a cancer of a cathedral, drowning at the bottom of the lake. Swirling constellations of naves led to fluted columns, supporting gothic arches that climbed out into midair, themselves supporting nothing. The whole space felt like the inside of a dead thing's shell, chambers whirling into smaller chambers, stairwells that started broad and narrowed into nothing, melting into the wall dozens of feet over the floor. Everything was smooth and dry. Organic.
I stripped off the pressure suit and refitted what remained of my holy vestments. Still on my knees, I rolled out the sealed weapon pack and settled the revolver and articulated sheath properly on my body. I fed the sword into the sheath, checked the load on my bully, then got to my feet and headed down into the convoluted center of the building.
This place wasn't built for traveling through. I felt like I was behind the stage at a carnival show, with half- built sets and stage tricks that stretched away into forever. Stairways ended abruptly. Doors opened into nothing, or wouldn't open at all. Arching paths led to other framework catwalks that led back to the start of the path. More than once I found myself jumping from one tilted floorscape to the next, leaping over chasms that yawned down for hundreds of feet, maybe more. Wicked gusts pulsed through the building, like the startled breathing of a dreaming child. The air smelled of dust, then of fire, then of mold. The air smelled of madness.
I rested on a terrace of pews. It amazed me, how much this place resembled the Grand Library, in the Scholar's prison up above. The same wild logic of architecture and landscape permeated everything, though here the logic slipped into dream as much as reality. And no books, I realized. There were no books here.
The farther I went, the narrower things became. Ceilings dropped claustrophobically low; walls pressed in. The stairways were mere wisps between rooms. The logic of the place was compressing into a single, disjointed note. I felt more and more like I was pressing on into a dollhouse, hunching down to pass through doors, stepping over walls that had never been closed. I was about to invoke Morgan's strength to clear a little space when I passed through the final door, and came to the heart of it all.
The central chamber was enormous and smooth. White walls raised up dozens of feet, a cylinder of arches, each arch leading off to tiny rooms like the one I had just left. It was as if the architecture of the building was an ever-expanding note, and this was the bell that had sounded it. I looked around once, then saw what was at the center of the room.
A boat, tucked into a bank of sand, wooden sides charred and bound with brass. The nose of the boat was down, as if it had plummeted to this spot and burrowed into the earth. Lying in the bottom of the boat, but nearly vertical due to its orientation, was a body, bound in chains.
Amon the Scholar. Still breathing, his lungs rasping like steel on sand. His skin was charred and black, great cracks in the flesh open and raw. Not a tall man, but a god. Water from the lake burbled from his mouth with every breath, slopping messily down onto his bound chest. The chains sang with power, hovering inches over his body and orbiting, seemingly diving into his body and his soul to twist out in a complex knot that strained my eyes. I looked away.
Nathaniel was there, leaning against one of the arches. He held a cigarette cupped in one hand, the iron mask of the Betrayer tucked under his arm like a football. Other than the mask, he was dressed as an Elector of Alexander. Playing his full hand. Hiding nothing.
'I thought he had convinced you,' he said, quietly, his voice carrying through the bell-shaped room like an infection. 'I thought Barnabas had turned you aside. Thought that you weren't going to come to me at all.'
'You won't run from me this time, Betrayer,' I said, though my voice shook.
'Oh.' He smiled, then stubbed the cigarette out on the wall and dipped his head to place the mask on his face. When he looked up, it was with a gray visage, articulated into the shape of a face, cruel and sharp. 'I wouldn't dream of it.'
18
held my bullistic on him, trained at his heart. He smirked.
'Bullets, Eva Forge? Black powder? Is that how you wish to resolve this?'
'You dead. That's all I care about.'
He nodded slowly, looking down at the floor. His hands were clasped behind him.
'I understand that. Expediency.' His voice echoed off the high walls of the chamber. Behind me, Amon burbled on his eternal bed, iron creaking through his chest. 'The Betrayer follows a similar path, Eva. One knife, rather than two, rather than a legion. One knife in the dark.'
'Driven home by a coward,' I spat.
'Well. Why fight when you cannot win? Why not fight the battle you are guaranteed to win? Efficiency of force.' He was getting close enough to make me nervous. I poked the revolver at him. He smiled. 'And still you haven't shot me.'
'Whatever you want,' I said, and sighted the shot.
'We dream Morgan's death every night, Eva. His last moments. The blood on our knife. The sirens in the camp as the body is found. I close my eyes at night and dream that glory.' He stood straightbacked, halfway to the Scholar's coffin, arms still behind his back. Like a schoolteacher, standing in front of a gifted though stubborn student. 'Is there anything about that you wanted to know?'
'Nope.' And trigger. The thud of gunpowder roared through the chamber, flash and shock shuddering up my arm.
His swing was quick, quick as a bullet. Quicker. He swung his right arm up, holding something loose and silver. Sparks showered the white of his armor, but he kept smiling. I backed away as he slithered forward, cycling hammer and cylinder, taking even breaths, timing the shots to match the quiet of my body, putting round after round on target. And every shot, every booming report, met by that arcing silver that ended in sparks and his smile.
We stood, separated by ten feet, immobile. That dry clicking sound was the hammer landing on an empty chamber. He was in a relaxed stance, swinging his weapon casually across his chest in a figure eight. It looked like
