With a roaring creak, the great circular tracks of the monotrains shuddered and strained into life. Behind their shrouding towers, the impellors sparked. Glowed with arcane power. Began to move. The trains inched forward on their tracks, slowly speeding up as the cycle of the impellors increased, each pass moving the trains forward a little quicker, each pass coming sooner and with more power. More strength. Strength unrestrained. Something was wrong.
Thankfully, no one was on any of the trains. A small grace, on a day of great tragedy, with more tragedy still to come. The trains turned and turned, howling around their tracks. The force of the impellors exceeded all that the tracks had been designed to withstand, and kept going. Sparks showered down from the iron wheels, the metal of track and train starting to glow as they continued to accelerate. All across the city people stopped their rioting and their persecution and turned to look at the howling iron horses. The smart ones ran.
When the tracks failed it was with a great sigh of straining metal and broken tolerances. In many places, freed Amonites ran to the failing system and tried to bolster them, but this was beyond their ken. Many died, only hours into the dawn of their newly liberated Cult. Many ordinary citizens died as well, for standing too close to faltering tracks, or not realizing what was happening and trying to get close enough to see.
In most cases the trains just toppled from their tracks, skidding through towers and streets and across cobbled paths before burying themselves into a canal or building. Hot metal charred the ground as they rolled, flailing around like chain shot.
On the impellors roared, faster and faster, their power drums glowing to sun's brilliance as they spun. Their force peeled open the towers that hid them, shattering their skin like a struck bell. Feyr boiled up from their hidden places, screaming in mad ecstasy, clawing at their ears. The impellors roared, and soon the towers that had been built taller than the tracks were crumbling. Walls boomed, windows popped, the steel framework splintering like china. The city fell, tower by tower, block by block. Only the ancient buildings stood, those that had been built lower than the tracks. Even those structures sustained damage as the higher places collapsed on them in a cloud of glass and steel.
The impellors howled like sirens, like juggernauts, like the horns at the end of the world, calling damnation down from heaven. The horns sounded, and Ash fell into ruin.
Above us, the sky wrinkled and flexed. The two gods of man screamed along with the ruining of their Fraterdom, and when the last gasp had left them, the world was silent. They fell to earth like broken angels, to crater into the city. The storm broke, the sky cleared, and the world breathed anew.
20
he crater was twenty feet across, lip to smoldering lip. What had once been a smooth stone parkway was now fragmented like cracked pottery. The heat of Amon's entry had fused the stone as soon as it was shattered. He lay at the bottom, venting arcane steam from the fissures in his skin.
We pushed through the silent crowd that had gathered. Cassandra ran gracefully down the incline and knelt at the side of her god. I waited up top. The crowd began to mutter.
I heard a lot about Amon the Betrayer, about how he was dead and was back. To finish the job he had started, some said. Others, that he had allied with the scions of Morgan to put down the true godking. Others claimed he was someone else, some new god. Some devil, or a sign from the next ascendant race. Some knelt right there and swore allegiance to this unnamed deity. Some called for a lynching. Some stayed quiet, too scared or confused to do anything but stare.
When Cassandra looked up at me, the crowd stiffened. I hopped down and made my way to the girl.
'They'll kill him,' she whispered.
'He might have killed himself,' I answered, my eyes up on the crowd around us. 'I think we're in a delicate place here, girl.'
'He did what was natural. He did what you would have done, in his place.'
'Aye. Doesn't make it right.'
'Paladin,' one man called down to us. His robe was singed, and there was a nasty scar along one eye. 'Who is this new god, that we may name him?'
'Amon, Brother of Morgan and Alexander,' I answered. 'The Healer bound him. Morgan has released him.'
'Why would you release the Betrayer?' he asked. Those who had knelt looked at me expectantly. I held a new religion in my hands. I wasn't sure what to do with it, whether to crush it or let it grow, set it free to find its own way. Nurture it. Cassandra tugged on my hand, pulling herself up. She was still so light. She faced the crowd with her blinded eyes and the dripping blood on her breast, the pale skin of her torso and the charred metal covering her shoulders.
'Amon was betrayed, as was Morgan. Alexander acted against them, to gain the throne,' she said in a clear, loud voice. 'Alexander is the Brother Betrayer.'
'Well, I probably wouldn't have gone that far…' I hissed. The crowd was restless now. New gods were one thing. Casting down the old, established gods was something else. I took Cassandra by the arm and bent my head to hers. 'Losing either of these gods is unacceptable, Cassandra. Divinity has been lost, and the cycle is turning. We can't put Alexander down without threatening the whole divinity of man.'
'He murdered your god, Eva. He kept my cult as a pet and yours as a shield, until he burned the Strength and strung up your Elders. You would forget that?'
'No. But remember, your Cult has been tolerated for two hundred years because you served the god Amon was before the Betrayal. Now it is Alexander who is in need of that tolerance. Nothing's changed.'
'How can you say that, woman?' she hissed. 'Alexander must be punished for his crimes, his followers cast down and his temples leveled. Nothing short of justice must be seen. Nothing has changed? Everything has changed! Amon lives!'
I pushed her away, back to her prone god. 'The only difference is that you are in the right, now, when before you thought you were in the wrong. Only you have changed.'
'Eva-' she said, scowling. I held up a hand.
'Enough. See to your god. He won't be worth a miracle for a while. And when the power in him settles, I'm leaving it to you to see that he doesn't let his rage guide his terrible hand.'
'You would dictate to your god?'
I climbed back out of the crater, then drew my sword and presented it to the girl and her god.
'I am Eva Forge, last Paladin of the dead god Morgan. Last scion of that god, his living blade and only initiate. I am the Cult of the Warrior, and I will hold you accountable. Amon is mad. Alexander is a murderer. Only the Warrior stands.'
'The Warrior stands,' several members of the crowd whispered back to me, and then more. The Warrior stands, rippling out into the mob, into the city, into the sky. I turned my back on them and headed toward the wreckage of the Spear of the Brothers.
I had another god to settle, and another score to count.
* * *
I could not walk alone. I hoped that the crowds would stay behind, but some followed, and more joined as I made the long walk across the city. He was easy enough to find. The sky was cut where he had fallen, a line of night in a bleached sky.
Halfway there, Malcolm appeared at my side. He was smirking. Looking back at the crowd that had gathered in my wake, he leaned to me and said, 'Tell me something about your parents, Eva.'
I gave him a look. Not a happy look. 'What are you talking about, old man?'
'Your parents. Were they kind? Cruel? Did you run away from them, and swear to the Cult of Morgan to spite your mother? Or did they raise you holy and chaste, and cried tears of joy when their little girl chose the humblest of the Cults to call her own?'
