The Horns of Ruin (9 page)

"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.