'Did that work for you, Morganite?'
'Well-'
'Then do not ask the same of us. We have been falsely bound for too long. The Library is being gathered and removed.'
'Agreed. But if you come out this way, there's just going to be a lot of burned books and dead Scholars.' I strained my neck to see around the crowds, then looked back at the old man. 'There has to be another way out. The lake?'
'The lake,' he said, considering. Eventually he nodded. 'I think something can be done with the lake.'
'Great. Everyone inside.'
And they went. Peacefully, quietly, calmly. The whiteshirts followed them in and sealed the door. I stayed outside. When I turned to go, Owen was waiting.
'I said, you broke my skull.'
'I'm sorry. Honestly I am. But now isn't the time for this.'
He sighed, tore the icon of Alexander from his breast, and tossed it to the ground. Then he unhitched his shotgun.
'What is now the time for?'
'Follow me,' I said, then left. He followed.
We found our way back to the Spear of the Brothers. Its remnants, at least. Just as I had feared, the central tower had turned to chalky powder and collapsed. There were bodies. I found a door, then a stairwell, then more doors. I got out from under that sky of madness and felt a little better. Even Owen seemed to be relieved to be out of the gaze of his former god.
The architecture had been shuffled, levels misaligned, doors hanging open and corridors flooded. I didn't think I would find my way back to Cassandra. Turned out not to be half as difficult as I was expecting.
Some kind of feedback had found its way to the chamber with the pressurized dome, where I'd left Cassandra and that cranky old Amonite Malcolm. The dome itself was cracked like an egg, steaming with frost and an aura of flickering light. The rest of the floor was leveled. Cassandra and Malcolm stood by the ruin of the dome, looking up at it. Cassandra was… changed.
She turned to me when Owen and I slid down a bit of wrecked floor and into the chamber. She wore little armor: pauldrons and a halfbreast, gauntlets, armor for her hips and pelvis. Boots. She wore nothing else. Her nakedness reminded me uncomfortably of Amon, hovering above the city. The armor was metal, but charred. And the bloody handprint on her chest leaked through the metal, for all the world looking like it had soaked through the armor from her skin. When she turned to me, I saw that she was blindfolded. Smears of ash showed on her cheeks.
'You…' I started.
'I have accepted what you turned away, Eva,' she said. Her voice was unchanged, only sad. 'I am the Champion of Amon.'
I shuddered at the sound of her voice. Malcolm looked between us, then at Owen, then shrugged.
'What happened here?' Owen asked.
'Place blew up,' Malcolm said. 'She started babbling, then she stopped, then the place blew up. She shielded me. When the smoke cleared, she looked like that. So.' He clapped his hands and turned to me. 'What's happening outside?'
'It's complicated,' I answered.
'I figured.' He looked back at the dome, then fished something out of his robe and threw it to the ground. The remnants of his soulchains. 'Complicated is good, sometimes.'
'In this case, complicated will end up destroying the city,' I said. 'Those two are going to keep at it until one of them is dead. And they're too evenly matched for it to be a clean fight. The city won't survive.'
'None of us will, in the grand sense,' Malcolm said quietly. 'Alexander was barely holding on to the power. And that was with the people behind him. He's played his hand now, revealed himself as the Betrayer. Tell me.' He turned to us. 'Do you think the city will worship Alexander the Betrayer?'
'No more than they'll worship Amon the Mad,' Owen snapped.
'Some of us will,' Cassandra said.
I nodded. 'There will be split loyalties. And neither will let the other live, either way.' I walked up to Malcolm. 'What's that thing called? The damned holy battery?'
'The Ruin,' he said. 'They're both tapping it now. Even if it only held the power Alexander has gathered in the last two hundred years, this battle could last for weeks.'
'But you said it goes back farther than that. Back to when the Titans fell.'
'Aye. Don't worry. The energies will drive them mad long before then.'
'Or they'll kill each other,' I said.
The building shook, chunks of ceiling and tile clattering down into the chamber.
Malcolm nodded. 'That does seem the more likely conclusion.'
'What if we destroyed it?' I asked.
He turned to me, a quizzical look in his eyes. 'Destroy it? What good would that do?'
'Drain them of their power. At least the stored stuff. I don't know, maybe it would weaken them enough to put them on their heels.'
'Or it could destroy the city. It's a boiler, Eva. You don't just punch a hole in it.'
'There are pressure valves, though. The impellors. That's what Amon was getting at, when he was working with the Feyr.' I made a connection in my head. 'It's what the Chanters were looking at, too. They were working with the Feyr, building something. They must have been figuring something out about the Ruin, and Alexander didn't like it.'
'That's why he sent his little dead army, to crack them open?' Owen asked. 'And we've been worshipping this guy?'
'There are valves. But emptying the Ruin through them…' Malcolm shook his head. 'I don't know what would happen.'
'Will it be something better than the city getting destroyed by those two bastards, throwing the entire Fraterdom into chaos?'
He bent his head to one side and thought, steepling his fingers against his lips.
'I can't guarantee that it will be.'
'Close enough for me,' I said. 'Show us where these valves for the Ruin are.'
'Hold,' Cassandra said. She was standing between us and what remained of the door. 'I cannot assist you in this. You act against Amon.'
'But I act in his interest,' I said, turning straight to her and clasping my hands across my sword. 'If Alexander doesn't kill him in this fight, he'll be so badly wounded that he won't be able to hold on to the power of the Ruin anyway. Better to let it out now than have it tear free later.'
She stared at me, hands clenched into a fist between her breasts, legs set to receive a charge. No other movement.
'We don't have time for this, girl.' I walked up to her. 'Are you going to stop me from doing this?'
Several breaths. She shook her head.
'Then move or follow. We're going.'
And we went. When the room was empty she touched a finger to the bloody handprint on her breast, then smeared it against her forehead. But she followed us.
* * *
What the Feyr had told me of the Ruin was minimal. An ancient place. An atrocity lodged in the soul of their people, and then passed on to us. That it could be used to prevent the cycle of gods was a by-product, and one that the Feyr had never tapped. Leave it to man. Leave it to Alexander.
It did explain why we built our city on a lake, though. The Ruin itself did not float, nor did it sink. It simply was where it was, and the city was built up around it. The Elemental of the Feyr had described it like a sore, burned into reality. It looked like a rock, though.
