my attackers? I reached the elevated track and reluctantly put the blade away, then started to climb. The iron trestles offered good handholds, but I was drained to the bone. Twice I nearly fell before I was able to scramble onto the track.
The car leaned dangerously away from the courtyard, probably unsettled by the burnpack's explosion or some other tampering by the undying assailants as they tried to pry Barnabas from his shell. I stepped inside carefully, this time holding the revolver in shaky hands. There was a body in the entrance, the scarred metal of the dead man's armor rimed with frost. I put a boot into his shoulder and turned him over.
His chest had burst open, the grim smile of ribs clenched behind the metal. That same tarry blood lined the wound, but where there should have been heart and lungs, there was a glass cylinder. A piston cycled slowly inside the glass, a plunger of leather and brass that rose slowly before settling to the bottom of the tube with a metallic sigh. Up and down, slowly. Breathing.
I drew back the hammer of the ordained revolver and sighted along the barrel, then fired a slug into the dead man's chest. The glass popped and a cloud of fog erupted out, twisting up to the revolver before dancing across my chest and filling my face. Startled, I gasped for air and swallowed a century's cold lungful of ancient, stale breath. It tasted like metal caskets and the frozen memories of tombs, buried in stone and ice. I staggered back, coughing until my lungs were clear. Shivering just as much from the memory of that breath as from the cold, I stepped into the car.
The floor was charred. Not an easy task with metal. The seats were nothing but twisted wreckage, the windows all blown out, and the Fratriarch's column of metal was gone. Where it had been, the floor was clear, spotless. There was something at the edge, a tiny dot of color against the dark metal. I bent down for a closer look. Just a drop, really. I put a finger to it and it burst, splattering across my nail. Holding it up to my face, I twisted to get a better look in the light from outside the car.
Blood. Real blood, red and warm and slippery between my fingers. The Fratriarch was gone.
* * *
My earliest memory of the Fratriarch is one of my earliest memories, period. I was in a car, the interior warm red leather, the woman sitting next to me dressed in a tight gray dress, her face covered by a white lace veil. My mother, I think, or a woman who was mourning my mother. I had the feeling of coming from some complicated ritual. Something that I hadn't understood, but that everyone around me took very seriously. Very sadly. Later in life I told myself it was a funeral. It could have been anything. I remember not understanding, but also not being afraid.
It was raining outside. The car drove through parts of the city I didn't know. More than that. Drove through a city I didn't know, like I didn't know what cities were. I knelt on the seat and looked out the window at all the close-together houses, the tall buildings, the crowded sidewalks. So many people. Something in my memory compared this to long gardens, carefully manicured, perfectly empty. Even the trees of my memory were empty. No birds, no squirrels.
The woman sitting next to me pulled me to the seat beside her, wrapping my tiny hands in her long, cold fingers, pressing them into my lap. I looked up at her, but she was facing forward. Watching where we were going.
The driver was a man, just another man, gray coat and hat and gloves. He drove stiffly. I pulled on my mother-mourner's hand, straining to look out the window, but all I could see were the rainstreaked clouds and the stony tops of buildings.
The car stopped and the man got out and came around to our door. The woman looked at me for the first and last time, then released my hands. The man opened my door. A wave of rain washed into the car, spattering across the deep-red leather. I shied away from the sudden cold and wet. Afraid to ruin my dress and my little hat. The woman put a hand on my hip and slid me out. I stumbled on the runner and nearly fell, catching the man's pants leg in a twist of my fingers. He closed the door and went around to the front again. I looked back at the car, water beading across its beetle-smooth black shell, its engine huffing quietly in the rain. I was getting soaked.
A square, like a courtyard, but shabbier. I don't know what I compared this place to, to consider it shabby. There was a statue, a high wall that surrounded the circular drive, an iron gate that was open. I was standing in the lee of a grand high building, made of old stone and curving smoothly away from the ground like a big old egg. It looked like the coldest, hardest place I'd ever seen. There was a door that looked tiny, but only because it led out from this enormous place. A dozen half-circle stairs led up to the door, and there were two men in simple gray robes standing close to the building, out of the rain.
The car roared to life behind me, and I turned just in time to see it roll through the iron gate and out of view. How did I feel about that? Surprised? Relieved? Cold. Mostly I felt cold.
The closest man tossed a cigarette into a puddle and shrugged his hood over his head, then ran out into the rain to me. He was a large man, his shoulders wide as blocks, his face wrinkled and smiling. Like he enjoyed running in the rain. He leaned over me, cutting the rain off with his bulk, then held out a wide, flat hand to me.
'Miss Eva Forge? Welcome home. My name is Barnabas.'
'Barnabas what?'
He shook his great head slowly, happily. 'Silent. But never mind that. We don't have use for more name than that, here. Would you like to come inside?'
I looked back to the gate, where the car had driven off, then up at the friendly man and his enormous face.
'My name is Eva Forge,' I said.
'Of course, dear. Now come inside.'
His hand smelled like nicotine and oil. I held it and walked back to the door. He took tiny steps at my side, hunching down and keeping the rain off my nice, new hat.
* * *
I burst through the door and swept into the foyer. The Alexians had given me a white linen cloth to clean up with on the way over, and I tossed it at the stony feet of the idol of Saint Marcus and made for the holy nave. The whiteshirts who had given me a ride clustered anxiously at the door, afraid to enter but anxious to see the scene.
'Tomas!' I yelled. 'Isabel! Any of you bloody old… lordships, if you please. Tomas!'
'You rode in on every siren in the city, Eva. You don't have to yell,' Tomas said from the engraved stone archway that led to the Chamber of the Fist. 'We're gathered, all the Elders. Let Barnabas come inside and we can talk about whatever it is-'
'Talk later. He's been taken.'
'Taken? Who?' He dropped his cigarette and ground it out with an old, oil-stained boot. 'The Fratriarch?'
I brushed past him, not sparing a glance toward the open door of the Chamber. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the upturned faces of the rest of the Elders. There was a relic of armament next to the Chamber. I threw back the cowl and began rummaging through the offerings.
'They came at us after we left…' How much did he know about our business? What had the Fratriarch told him? Barnabas had said nothing to me of our business, and I was his guard. But these were the Elders. 'After we left the Library Desolate. There were two guys, following us, and then-'
My hand strayed to the dark wood tray of bullets. I hadn't seen those two again, I realized. The two bulky men with their metal cowls and tattooed cheeks. They had been following us, for sure, but they hadn't been in on the attack.
'Then?' Isabel asked. I looked up. The whole Fist of Elders was standing around me, eyes wide. Only Simeon, his dark face impassive, seemed to have gotten past the shock. He shouldered Tomas aside and began gathering bullets from the tray. I snapped out of it and joined him, pinching them into the empty cylinder of my bully.
'Then we were attacked. Strange guys… metal faces, goggle eyes. Never seen them before. They fought me off and took the Fratriarch.'
'The Rethari have struck us here, in the city?' Tomas said, his voice trembling with rage.
'Not Rethari. Forget the field reports, Elder. I know those war drums have been beating for months, but these
