by Tim Akers
We ended up at the row of shops where Cassandra and I had pretended to argue while the two peculiar men passed us by. We got there just as night was taking the city of Ash in its grip. The moon was barely over the horizon, painting the high buildings all around with silver light. The sky was clear, and our breath puffed out as fog. Reminded me of the coldmen. Lots of stuff reminded me of those freaks today.
"This is it. Our planned route continued around this corner, up to the Terrace Boulevard, and then home. Long walk, but straight, and lots of people." By now the Terrace would be empty, but the high lamps that lined it would still be burning white. "Those two spoiled that." I indicated their path with my hand. "Came right through here and around that corner. We took off, back the way we just came."
"And you said they were big guys?"
"Bulky. Never got a look at what they were wearing underneath those cloaks. Could have been armor."
"Hm." Owen paced the street, his patrol sticking close to the wagon. All the perimeter lamps on the stubby wagon were burning, bathing the vehicle in a circle of light. Good thing this wasn't a residential district, I thought. "It seems weird that guys like that would be tailing you. They sound kind of obvious to me, like they'd stick out in a crowd."
"There was something about them. Something ..." I waved my hand, looking for the thought. "Something arcane. Like they were shielded. We just didn't see them."
"Amon's Betrayers are supposed to be able to do something like that," one of the whiteshirts said, from the safety of the wagon's wide double doors. "Walk through the night like shadows, and you don't see them until they've put the knife in your back."
"Your momma tell you that, Travers?" Owen said. "That's what they do, just before they steal the candy off bad little boys. That's what I heard."
"I'm serious," I said. "Fratriarch said it, too. Something about them we couldn't see."
"Well, okay. If the Fratriarch said it. But I'm still pretty sure Travers there is just passing on fables." Owen walked down the street, his hand on his sidearm. "This way, you said?"
"Yeah, around the corner. They even looked back at us as they went."
"Stealthy couple of guys, making eye contact and sporting facial tattoos. I don't know how y'all ever picked up on it."
"Stop being an idiot," I said. "If this is how you're going to be, you and Travers and your damn truck can just pack it up and go back to your station. File a report about your mothers, or something."
Owen chuckled. "Prickly, prickly girl. Come on, folks. The strange men went this way."
"Not like they're still going to be there," I said.
"Hope not," Owen answered, then went around the corner. I followed. None of the other whiteshirts moved.
This road began to ascend gradually as it led up to the elevated boulevard that cut across this part of the city. Another late addition to the city's architecture, the boulevards served as direct routes for the foot and pedigear traffic that most citizens used, especially those who couldn't afford the monotrain service. We followed it up for a while. Eventually the wagon clattered around the corner behind us, the patrol walking carefully behind it in a loose semicircle.
"Brave bunch of boys you've got there, Justicar," I said.
"They do okay. They're good guys. This is just a ... kind of strange situation."
"Walking around at night with a woman?" I asked, looking back at the patrol. They were young, holding their weapons tightly in their skinny hands. "Yeah, it looks like it'd be a new thing for most of them."
Owen chuckled. "You're probably not what they think of, when they think like that."
"Likewise," I said. "And this is where we stop."
"Oh, be cool. I'm just-"
"You're still walking when I said stop. So stop." I knelt down and peered at the ground, then looked around. We were at the mouth of a narrow alley that had a thin trickle of water running down a gutter in its middle. The cement at my feet was splattered with something dark. I put a finger to it. It was cold, and gummy.
"Get those lights up here."
The boys obliged, after a few miscues and misunderstandings. I moved out of the way so the wagon could get good light on the street. It was spotted with dark, muddy blood. I looked up at Owen, then nodded down the alleyway.
"Put the wagon here, focus the beams down there," he said, directing the patrol. The wagon turned tightly on the avenue, its tall tires showing a remarkable agility. The whiteshirts mostly stayed behind its bulk. "Get out here, guys. Come on. Stand over here, like we practiced for building entry."
They did, eventually. They really were just kids, and not that well armed. There was a single bullistic and his ammo guy. The rest had thick staves with blades that snapped out of the top, should a riot turn political. I waited until they looked ready, then decided I'd be waiting all night. I pulled Owen close.
"I don't want these guys getting in my way," I said.
"They won't. Unless you decide to run away, of course, and then you might trip over them."
"Be nice. But be out of the way more."
He nodded. I drew my bully and crept into the alley.
You can't sneak up on the dead. I smelled it pretty quick, going down that alleyway. The air was rimed with ice, and stank of dead meat and old blood. Oil, too. I found them in a little alcove off the alley, the entrance boarded up. Someone had kicked the door in. I went back and got Owen and his boys.
The room was filled with about a dozen of the coldmen, all deader than they had started out. Lots of injuries, from severed limbs to ruptured skulls. The wounds were savage. Something an animal might have done, or a madman. Someone had put a blade into their chests and smashed that glass and leather piston. It was that old air I could smell, air that tasted like the breath of tombs.
"Lot of 'em," Owen said. "And well done for. Your tattooed friends might be on our side."
"Or against these guys. Which might be the same thing. Or it might not." I kicked through the corpses and their shattered weapons. "What's this look like to you?" I asked, toeing a complicated metal box.
"Some kind of communications rig," Owen answered. He knelt down next to it and fiddled with a few dials. The top folded out into some kind of array, orbits of metal and wire telescoping open like a mobile. "Not too different from ours. Don't see any input or output jacks, though. Like it's a receiver with no speakers."
He folded the box away and got two of his boys to take it back to the wagon. One of the whiteshirts was in the alley, spinning up the Justicar's rig to call in a team to cart off the bodies, when the ground began to rumble. We all knelt down and looked up.
The makeshift room was open to the sky, hidden only by a collection of pipes and other business from the surrounding buildings. I hadn't given it much of a look when we got there, distracted as I was by the carnage and the stink. Now that rumbling grew into a roar and the sky was blocked out completely as something rushed over our heads.
The monotrain. We were tucked away just under some of the elevated tracks, our teeth rattling as the train went past. When it was gone I looked at Owen and jerked my chin up.
"Which circle was that?"
"Must have been the Hamilton Stone," he answered. "You were on the Pershing when you were attacked."
"They meet up," I said. "Those circles intersect, north of here."
"Yeah."
There was some junk in the alleyway, crates and an old discarded manifold. I dragged those into the room and piled them up, then clambered to the level of the tracks.
"You really shouldn't do that," Owen said.
"You'll make a great mom someday." I pulled myself onto the tracks and squinted around.
As with all buildings in the city, the surrounding structures had an open framework at the level of the train. It wasn't necessary, as the impellor could go right through them, but people didn't like living in the constant surge of those engines, and why build walls if you don't have to? I felt that surge now, my bones vibrating as it pulsed
through me. There, between the iron grid of the open buildings, far away at the center of this particular monotrack orbit, I could see the impellor tower, shimmering sickly in the moonlight.
"They were waiting," I said. "Waiting for us to come by."
"How could they know you were coming this way?"
I looked over at Owen. He had clambered up beside me, his hands white on the railing at the edge of the tracks.
I smiled. "You really shouldn't be up here," I said.
"Gods help me if I implied you would make a good mother someday. Gods in heaven help me."
"They couldn't know. Whether they were waiting for us to come by the boulevard, or ride by on these tracks." I shook my head. "They just couldn't know."
"Unless someone told them. Someone who knew where you were going and how best you might get there."
"Someone from the Library? Maybe. But we didn't come this way, even though we planned to. And they still found us."
"Not this batch, though." Owen looked down at the mess of bodies, and his nervous patrolmen trying to organize them. "But another. Which means they could have been watching multiple routes."
"Which means we'll find other groups like this, watching other tracks?"
Owen looked thoughtful, twisting to peer along the track and around at the city. "Maybe. Maybe if we make a map of other paths you could have taken. I've had enough fun up here, for now."
He climbed down, leaving me alone with the periodic pulsing of the distant impellor. The rails began to rumble again, and I sighed and followed him down. The train came by a minute later, but I barely heard the roar.
This is how I usually spend my nights when I spend them with men. We crawled through alleyways, we rumbled down boulevards, we stopped monotrains so we could walk on the tracks and poke through alcoves and cringe when the impellor's invisible surge washed through our bones. It was filthy.
We found two more places where we'd been watched, where someone had sat and waited for the Fratriarch to come by. Mostly they were improvised rooms, cobbled together from driftwood or old crates, hidden in alleys and under tracks. We found another of those communication rigs, this one still active. We shut it down and took it. I felt something when I was close to it, like a voice in my blood, but then it faded. There were signs these guys had been there for days. At one place we found a body, some old guy who must have stumbled on their hideout and paid with his life. He'd been dead almost a week, wrapped in some kind of sheeting that masked the smell. We even found a lookout on the closest waterway, accessible only by depthship or a really good set of lungs. The last place we looked was along the Pershing circle, trying to find where the guys who had actually attacked us were hiding. It was almost dawn.
It was an easy place to find. Just had to figure out where we were when they had attacked the rails, and then backtrack a little bit. It was a nest, built into the open gridwork at the level of the train, shielded from view by barrels taken from a local distillery. There was no communications rig here, just some kind of tube that was charred at both ends and smelled of gunpowder. From here I had a clear view of the crash site, and the surrounding square. Patrols milled about, whiteshirts circling nervously and black-robed Amonites working on the track. I sat down on the little platform and swung my legs over the edge.
"So," Owen said, sitting beside me, "what do we know?"
"We know where they waited. That there were a lot of them, spread out all over the city. They knew we were coming, and how."
"Not necessarily. We've only looked in places we knew you could have gone. There might be other sites like this, all over the city."
"That's a cheery thought."
"Yeah," he said. "Means there could be a lot of those guys."
"We also know that someone killed some of them. Either because they were following us, or knew we were being followed." I rubbed my face and looked down at the street, far below. "That's something."
"Really, we still don't know much of anything," Owen said.
"We know the Fratriarch is missing."
There was a shout, far away, and we both looked up. In the distance, there was a commotion around the crash site. Amonites were rushing away, all of them running toward a white-robed man who held one hand high in the air. They threw themselves at his feet. The other Alexians at the site were milling about. The tracks and other buildings blocked much of our view.
"They've found something," I said.
Owen stood and spun up his rig, the swirling orbits of the helmet closing around his head and eyes as it tapped into the communications grid.
I didn't wait. I jumped to my feet and, invoking a little trick from the book of Morgan, leapt the distance to the track. I ran along the rails, toward the crash site, bully out, heart pounding.
hey were gathered around a crater in the ground. The Amonites were fully leashed, lurking unhappily behind their Alexian master on the far side of the square. There was a yellow tape barrier around the crash site, lined with a handful of curious passersby, though more were gathering as the search team became increasingly agitated. It didn't help when I boomed down the tracks, glory wicking off my boots as I leapt to the ground in full combat gear. I'm a crowd pleaser.
The investigator in charge, a bald-headed, frail, middle-aged man in an impeccable Alexian robe, waved me to a stop. Then he put a hand on my shoulder as I passed him and, eventually, hurried after me as I closed on the crater. He was sputtering.
"We don't know the full extent of its power, my lady, and think caution is best."
"Full extent of what's power?' I asked. There were a number of craters in the ground, all of them from my fight yesterday. Already yesterday, I mused. How long did the Fratriarch have? "What did you find?"
"It's ... unclear. An icon, perhaps. It might be nothing."
"Nothing, huh? That would be in line with the rest of your findings." I reached the crowd of whiteshirts who had gathered around the crater and muscled my way through.
It was far from nothing.
The crater was shallow. I didn't remember it from the fight-at least, I didn't remember doing anything dramatic in this particular spot. Close to the tracks, but not where I had engaged the two burnpack soldiers. My line of retreat had been ... over there. This hole could have come from something the coldmen had done while they tried to get to Barnabas and the girl. The sides of the crater were charred, and most of the indentation was filled in with rubble. The cobblestones here had been pulverized but left in place, like a giant cube of ice crushed in a bowl. The Amonites had been clearing it out, from the looks of things. And among the shards of stone was an icon, torn from someone's ceremonial robe.
We all wear icons, the scions of the three Cults of the Brothers Immortal. My armor is an icon, as are my sword and revolver. Very practical icons. But I wear others, noetic symbols of the power of Morgan. An iron fist pendant at my neck, the bound copper wire around my wrist, tattoos on my chest and legs. There is a holy symmetry to my symbols, brought to arcane life by the power of Morgan. The Fratriarch jangled with the icons of the holy Brother.
This was not his symbol, not a symbol of Morgan or of Alexander or any of the other minor sects dedicated to inchoate powers of significant events or famous battles. This was a symbol of the Betrayer. Amon, in his aspect as murderer and assassin. It was a pendant, silver clasping the gnarled blade of that darkest aspect of our darkest god. No wonder they had the Amonites so tightly reined.
"Is there any doubt now that the Betrayer was involved?" the inspector whispered at my side.
I holstered my revolver and looked back nervously toward the pack of Scholars at the far corner of the square.
"Did any of them touch it?" I asked.
"One of them found it, but swears it did not reach his skin."
"Contain him. You'll need to keep the rest out of the general population until you can confirm they were not infected."
"We know the rites of infection, my lady." The inspector sniffed and waved a hand at
some of his fellow whiteshirts. "We will do our duty."
"Whatever." I bent to the icon and dusted the debris away from it. It had been embedded in a cobble, like a stone pressed into hot wax. I removed the penetrated cobble and slid it onto the ground. "Some force that was."
"Your battle was mighty, my lady."
"I had nothing to do with this," I said. "Those weren't servants of the Betrayer I was fighting. Not scions, at least. Evil creatures, perhaps, but there was nothing ... blessed about them."
"Who, then? The Fratriarch?" the inspector asked. Doubtless remembering the old man who walked in the parades. Not exactly a figure embodying power.
"What is it?" Owen asked, running up. He skidded to a halt and looked over my shoulder at the stone and its infernal decoration. "Ah. Oh ... huh."
"You are a man of culture and insight, Justicar. What do you make of it?"
"You did not speak of scions of the Betrayer, though we all suspected they were the power behind the attack."
"Suspected," I said, nodding. "But unknown."
"We can lay that to rest, it seems. How did it get here?"
I craned my neck to look up at the elevated track. The damaged car had been removed, and the twisted support towers were being rebuilt. The tracks themselves looked solid enough.
"A fight," I said. "The icon gets ripped off in the heat of battle."
"When, though? You stated that the Fratriarch was locked away in a column of steel, and the coldmen could not break him out. Then you returned and he was gone. They were all gone."
"They didn't break him out." I stood, looking around at the damage of the square, seeing lines of force and advance in the arrangement of wreckage. "He fought his way free. There was a body in the door of the car. I never really thought about how it got there."
"So he might be out there, free?" Owen turned in a slow circle, gazing around at the buildings on the square as if the Fratriarch might be looking down at us from some terrace. "We should organize search parties."
I snorted. "You should? Maybe a day ago, when I first came to you with this. No, he didn't get away. The living Fratriarch would have returned to the Strength of Morgan, no matter his condition. He battled, and was defeated."
