"Stay here," she said, and her voice ripped from her throat like barbed honey. "I'll be right back."
I stumbled at the sound of her voice, my glass tumbling to the floor, warm black wine splashing across the plush rug. I slid boneless from my chair, my skull vibrating, my fingers numb. By the time my eyes cleared the room was empty, and the door was sliding shut.
I struggled to my feet, using my sword as a crutch, leaning against it as I swayed in the wake of Lesea's impossible voice. Even I could hear the chaos in the Song outside. A great deal of divine violence was being done, at octaves that barely registered to my mortal ears. I dragged myself to the door, checked to see that it was locked, and slid back to the floor with my back to the wall. Time for the trick.
The bullets clattered as I dropped them to the floor, emptying the cylinder with a flick of my wrist. I loaded two blanks, special rounds we kept to scare the hell out of crowds. Two rounds.
"Morgan, god of war, lord of the hunt," I intoned. "Your breath is smoke, your mouth is the grave. Your skin is fire."
My skin stiffened and then sprouted the tiniest scales, blackening as the invokation spread across me. It wouldn't last long, but I didn't need it to. I held the bullistic next to my ear, said a little prayer for Barnabas and Cassandra, closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Sharp pain, and then the sound of the world was sucked away into a humming maelstrom of silence. Quickly I switched hands before I lost my nerve, held the gun next to my other ear, and pulled the trigger. A lesser noise, but still great pain. I stood. My eyes were burning with powder. The scales had flashed away in the heat, but my face was blackened with powder. Warm, thick blood poured out of my ears. The world around me was silence. I could still feel the Song in my bones, but not in my head. I flicked the two rounds onto the ground, reloaded my bullistic, then exchanged weapons and invoked a silent rite of guidance.
In absolute, deafening silence, I opened the door and stepped out into chaos and fire.
11
Oman lay outside the door. His mask lay shattered by his face, and there was blood coming from his mouth. I stepped over him and walked down the hallway, in the direction I had come from. I found the source of all the violence just around a corner.
Even deaf to the Song, I could still feel it, feel the tension in its octaves and the crashing rhythm of its power. Before there had been a serene majesty to it, but now it was swollen with fear and violence. Whatever the Chanters were weaving, it was born of desperation.
I came around the corner and found that the Chanters' dome was being unmade. Some great power had split the dome in half, and the two sections were grinding together. My half of the building was sinking. Above me, I could see the floors that had once been parallel to my own, crumbling as they rose up into the air. Looking down, I could see the cracked heart of the building, the ornate wooden chamber of the Song, where the Elders of the Cult held watch over the ancient hymn. Smoke rose up from that chamber. On all sides, black water from the lake was spilling into the structure.
And with the water, hordes of the coldmen. They remained limp as corpses as the water carried them sloppily over the moat's edge, pouring into the building, spilling out over the floors and hallways that were suddenly revealed to the sky. They became animate only as they reached stone, dragging themselves to unsteady feet, then drawing out their blades and rushing into the structure. None had reached my floor yet, but they seemed intent on gaining the heart of the building, where the Song warbled and raged.
This was unexpected. I had come to try to convince the Chanters to turn Cassandra over to my custody. Failing that, I was going to steal the girl, and consequences be damned. At the worst, I was concerned that the Betrayer might try to assassinate her while she was in the hands of Alexander's people. Since Simeon had arranged his meeting with an Alexian friend, it seemed likely that the Cult of the Betrayer had infiltrated Alexander's power structure. If they could lead an Elder of Morgan into a trap, surely they could arrange to have a prisoner of the Chanters killed without causing too much of a fuss.
But this? There was more force here than had been used to kidnap the Fratriarch. Surely the girl wasn't more important than Barnabas? Was she?
The details would matter later. For now I was on a sinking island, swamped with undead warriors, and stone deaf. There was so much destruction that I could feel it in my bones, in my meat, but my mind was wrapped in a thick cloud of roaring silence. I tried to invoke and stumbled on the words. Power would not come to me if I couldn't form the words of the invokation. I was alone, and I had to get to Cassandra.
Cassandra was somewhere above me, in the half of the dome that was thrusting up into the sky like a new mountain range. Assuming they hadn't moved her while I was drinking black wine with Lesea. Assuming she wasn't already dead, wiped out in the first strike that had torn the dome asunder. Assuming.
The water continued to rise around me, and some of the coldmen spotted me and lumbered over. There was something different about these guys. Less armor, more flesh. Their skin was bloated, crisscrossed with deep cuts that had been hurriedly sewn together with thick leather cord. They still had the goggle eyes and the staticky voice boxes, but these were bolted crudely into their faces. Their weapons were just as wicked, though, just as sharp. They rushed me.
It was a poor-quality fight. I swept the length of my blade underhand, pushing the tip about four inches into the first guy's belly and drawing it up his chest until I got to his chin. His ribs popped like a cheap zipper. He stumbled back and I maintained the sword's momentum, passing it overhead and then laterally. I put steel on his neck, near the base of the blade, driving straight through the meat and bone and coming out the other side with most of the weapon's speed still intact. I went to one knee, rotated, and drove the blade right through his companion's thighs. They fell away from me, falling tonelessly into the dark water that was beginning to pool around my ankles. Quick fight. These guys didn't have the constitution of the coldmen I had encountered before.
But there were a lot of them. More than I had the time or patience to deal with, frankly. Let the Chanters guard their home. Before any more of the hastily stitched dead men could waylay me, I slid down the ruined chasm of the dome. Tiny waterfalls followed me, and avalanches of shale. When I got low enough, I was able to jump across the chasm, landing in a heap among broken instruments. I was low enough that I could see the fight that was boiling around the breach in the central chamber. Chanters, badly outnumbered and dwindling by the second, swarmed by the clumsy coldmen. I think there were Feyr among the defenders. Strange, but a puzzle for another day.
I climbed the rumbling incline of the shattered dome. The ghosts of sounds were starting to penetrate my head, even though my eardrums must surely be blown. The Song was such a violent thing, but even it was drowning in the groan of the building, the tectonic explosions and shifting architecture of the island. I looked down and saw water bubbling in the chamber below, working its way through organ pipes and articulated voice machines. I shivered and climbed on, as the Song began to fade from my bones.
When I got to the level where I thought Cassandra might be, I slid into the corridor. This whole half of the structure was leaning away from vertical, and once-level passages had become more like amusement park rides. Below me, the singing had stopped, or at least fallen to a level at which it no longer penetrated my deafness. The air was thick with dust. There were bodies on the ground, caked in dirt and their own blood. I couldn't tell if these were Chanters or their attackers. It didn't matter. I slid past them and down into the crumbling structure.