The lights were failing. I tried to invoke the Ghosteyes, but the words were thick on my deafened tongue and the invokation failed. Wisps of bluish light splintered out from me, scattering around the room before disappearing. I crept along, mostly blind, completely deaf, nothing but my hands and the weight of my sword to guide me. Something shifted far below and the floor tilted a little more. I wondered if it was an Amonite engine that kept this place up. I wondered if the scions of the Betrayer, Amon the Murderer, would know how best to disable the work of their god.
Someone stumbled out of the shadows and took a swipe at me. I punched him with the pommel of my sword, swept his legs from under him, then held my elbow across his throat until he stopped struggling. I raised his face up close to mine to get a better look. One of Cassandra's guards. Glad I hadn't just sliced him open. I wasn't quite at the point of taking up arms against all the scions of the Brothers Immortal. Not yet. And it looked like I was getting close to where I needed to be.
Sure enough, the next corner was familiar. A frictionlamp glowed dimly on its bracket, just outside a very memorable, very heavy door. I tried to invoke again with a little better success, coming away with enough strength to wedge the door aside. The guards were gone, but Cassandra remained, limp on the floor in her chains.
I said her name, then again, louder. She looked up, nodding when she saw me. Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear her. I pulled one of the chains taut, laid it out against the stone, and took an invoked swing at it. My swing struck as much stone as steel, and there were sparks. It was enough. One of the chains snapped open. With the loop broken, Cassandra was able to gather up the rest of the links and stand. She was as free as I could make her in my present state. I sheathed the blade and put my arm around her. Leaning on each other, we struggled out of the room and back into the hallway.
She leaned her head against me and spoke some more. I couldn't hear her, so I shook my head. She put her forehead directly against my head, the vibrations of her voice getting through my throbbing silence.
Thank you.
"Sure thing," I said, or I think I said. And that's when they hit.
It was a whole cadre of the coldmen, the true breed, the ones who had kidnapped the Fratriarch. They came out of the deeper parts of the building, boiling up from the darkness, their eyes glowing blue and green as they rushed us. The girl fell off my arm, or I pushed her, and the bully was in my hand. I stitched lead into the first couple of them, and then they were too close. In one motion I holstered the bully and went for my sword. The blade cut them as I drew it, the articulated sheath spinning the sword under my arm and into my hands. The corridor was too narrow and too precarious for truly fancy forms. I kept one hand high on the blade, on the weighted, dull length of steel that was there for just this purpose, striking mostly with the middle of the blade and thrusting with the tip. Trap with the hilt, push back with the middle, spear into black blood and cold flesh with the tip. Repeat. They fell around me.
Deaf, so I never heard the explosion that almost ended us. The floor jumped, and we all slid in a tangle of living and dead, deeper into the drowning building. Water, dark and cold, swallowed me. I pushed to my knees, then my feet, scything all around me at the grasping hands. I saw Cassandra burst from the water and swim to a tangle of metal at the center of this new pool, then wondered how I could see, then realized that the roof was gone and above us was yawning sky and sun.
The coldmen kept coming. They clawed out of the water and came at me. I was without invokation, without strength or shield. All I had was a childhood spent with a sword in my hands, a girlhood under the heavy eye of the Elders, lived in service to my god. It would have to be enough.
The trick is to keep the blade moving. A sword like this is only heavy if you try to stop it, or change direction, or carry it on a thirtymile march in the woods. I have done all of these things, and I have learned to keep the blade moving in a fight. If you do it right, the only thing that will stop your blade is bone and meat and metal. And the only way to keep that from happening is to keep your blade very, very sharp. I have done that since I was a little girl. Sharp and heavy and always moving, and the strength that comes from thirtymile marches.
I led with the pommel, bullying the blade into the air with my off hand on the blade rest, then launched the sword into a wide, scything swing that spun me around. This was before I had even gotten to the coldmen. Something to get the momentum going. I planted my feet, holding the hilt loosely in my palms to maintain the arc of the blade without getting twisted around, and just kept the sword moving. It was a training form, honestly, to build strength and familiarity with the weapon. As a child I had done it with a length of wood capped with lead. Today I did it to stay alive.
When the speed was good I shuffled forward and pushed the orbit of the blade into the nearest coldman. It cut into him at the knees, the shoulder, crossing back to open up his belly and finally splitting him from neck to nuts. He fell in many pieces, the way a plate does when struck by a stone.
I kept the motion up and two of them jumped me. There was water here, always rising, and as I shifted my weapon from front to back it kicked up tails in the muck. I could barely keep track of the blade's path, but my heart knew it instinctively, adjusting to skim off of armor without losing momentum, hardening my arms when the metal was about to find flesh or bone, always compensating for the motion of the enemy and the crazy tilt of the collapsing dome. All in complete silence.
The more of them that came at me, the less I felt the form of the blade and the more of it happened without thought, without direction. Two fell, then three. A fourth joined them and the blade moved on. I was sure that I was cut, but could not feel it. There was blood in the air, black blood and red, cold blood and warm, but all I felt was the joy of the blade's dance and the opening of meat. They came and they fell away, they rushed and they fell away. The world around me was nothing but the path of the blade.
It was over before I realized it, over and I was still dancing. No one else came to fall against my steel. I did another pass of the room, arcing and scything and dancing, the water kicking up all around me, the air whistling against my face, rustling my hair. No one left but the separated fallen at my feet. I gave the sword one last whirl and then grounded it tip first in the earth, and all the wounds rushed at me as the momentum of the dance left me, shuddering through my arms and the blade and into the ground. I collapsed against the hilt, struggled to stand, heaving breath and life all over my blade.
There were many wounds. I had not come through cleanly, but I had come through. Leaning on the sword, I looked around the room. At the half-submerged bodies of my enemies, at the tangle of metal and stone in the deeper parts of the pool. At Cassandra, just standing up from behind a column of brick. She looked frightened. I understood that. She was talking. I didn't understand that.
A shadow passed over me and I looked up. Above us, a great section of the dome peeled away and, slowly, gracefully, bent toward us. To flatten us, to bury us under a world of brick and stone and metal. All that, and the building was going to kill us.
Suddenly, Cassandra was beside me. She put one arm around me and threw the other one up, as though shading me from the sun. Power surged through her. I watched as the wall leaned down to us and then, suddenly, the avalanche of tumbling brick stiffened. Around us the stones formed a dome as they fell, stacking tight. The Cant of Making.
I looked down at Cassandra, and her eyes were fire blue as she intoned the Cant. Her hair whipped around, as though blown in a wind that came from inside the girl. Even her clothes, the cuffs of iron, her metal collar, all hung as though without gravity. Even I felt light.