They left it behind. She did. She left it for me to find. I held it up, letting it shimmer in the unlight of my invoked eyes. How had she gotten it? Ripped from his throat as he struggled? Dropped from his dead fingers? Left behind as he fled? Where had it come from, and where did it lead?
"He gave it to me, if you're wondering," she said. Behind me.
I spun, bully whipping around the small dock, seeing nothing but black wood and blacker water, not a glimmer of movement. Nothing.
"Where the hell are you?" I spat. Voice down. Didn't want Owen and his boys to hear me and come storming in. No telling what she'd do.
"I am here," she said, from everywhere. "What are you going to do when you catch me?"
"It's what you're going to do, bitch. You're going to tell me what you did with the Fratriarch. You're going to tell me where he is, who has him, why. You're going to talk. You're going to wish you had never gotten away."
"You make it sound so… appealing." Her voice was breathy, near and then far, always quiet. "Maybe I won't let you find me."
"Let? Let! I'll find you, girl. I'll hunt you from here to Everice, to the halls of the Rethari swine. I'll kill every Brother-damn one of your ragged friends that get in my way, and every one of them that doesn't. I'll find you wherever you hide."
"Yes, I suppose you will," she said. There was a crackle, and her voice changed. Became more real, more local. "And I can't have that."
A sound came from above, a winch unwinding rapidly. I cleared the floor with my bully and drew my sword, switching guard directions as quickly as I could breathe. She dropped into the middle of the dock, some kind of mechanical pulley in one hand, the trailing edge of a rope in the other. The rope disappeared a dozen feet above the ground, as though it was magicked into thin air. A mask hung around her throat, dangling across her white clavicle like a necklace. A very complicated thing, with speakers and breathing tubes and wide buckles that had been unclasped. She snapped the rope and it fell, like a magician's trick.
"I just can't have you chasing them. You're a monster, Eva Forge. If I can keep you out of their lives, I will. It's all I can do."
I lowered the bully at her chest and snarled. She held her hands up in surrender, dropping the rope and the pulley. I motioned to the mask, and she worked it free from her neck and sent it clattering to the ground. No other weapons that I could see.
"You should gag me, if you're worried."
"I'll leave the worrying to you. Owen, you can come out now," I said, pocketing the pendant. The hatch swung open and Owen and his boys exited, sparking up their lamps as they came. The room looked pretty much as it had under the influence of the Fellwater. Gray and cold and wet. Cassandra squinted at them, and I realized she had been seeing without light. Not something I knew about the Scholars. Now I could see that her right hand was in some sort of glove, metal laced into flesh. I remembered seeing that hand after the wreck, bending all sorts of wrong.
Owen started when he saw the girl, then gave a crisp nod and motioned to his boys. Always the leader. They surrounded her, guns held at her tiny chest. She made no move.
"Where did the rest of them go?" he asked me. "Was there a ship?"
"Beats me. Probably. You think all those kids swam out?"
"Seems unlikely." He turned to Cassandra, who was staring blankly up to the ceiling. "What do you say, kid. Boat?"
She didn't answer.
I shrugged. "Yeah. So. They have a boat."
"Maybe someone…" He paused, cocking his head at a curious angle. "Huh."
"What?" I asked, then a gunshot echoed sharply down from the spiral staircase. Yelling, more shooting, then feet on metal. Owen grabbed me as he ran by. I shot the girl a look and then followed up the stairs.
The staircase was chaos. Lots of people rushing down, a couple of us rushing up. The ones coming down were hurt. Blood on their faces, or their shirts. One guy was dragging a body. The limp's head was bouncing on each metal step, thumping meatily and leaving bits behind. I made a note not to get shot on a staircase, or at least not get shot in such a way that some fool felt compelled to drag me out.
The firefight was on us quick. Heavy bullistic fire came in short bursts, answered by weak revolver shot that was again quickly drowned out by the heavy stuff. The first shots came ricocheting past us shortly after we left the lower room. Not long after that, I heard those staticlaced voices, methodically working their way closer to us. I stopped.
"What are you doing?" Owen asked. "We've got to get up there."
"Up there is coming down here," I said. I cursed myself for never learning many rites of the bullet. The sword had always been a nobler path, but I kept finding myself in places where it just wasn't appropriate. "The rest of your team is dead."
"You don't know that," he said, nervously. Something in his voice… He hadn't lost men before. That's tough. I looked him in the eye and waited for him to actually see me.
"Justicar. Your team is dead. All that's left are those boys behind us. And all we can do is take care of them."
He looked up the stairs, grimacing and twisting his hands around the short shotgun he had slung out. More shooting, much closer. Hot bullets traced a row of dimples into the wall just above us. He nodded.
Once we were on our way down, it went fast. Those things, with their static voices and cold-piston hearts, must have sensed us. Must have known there were few of us left. The fever of the hunt was on them. I knew the feeling.
"Get your men in the water. Maybe the Amonites swam out, and there's a quick path that we just can't see."
"There are injured. They'll drown."
"Drown or get shot," I said. "Now get 'em in the water."
On the dock, the few remaining Healers were milling around. Alexians aren't cut out for this, I thought. How did we ever let them take charge? Who left them in the big-boy chair? This crowd had done a bangup job of getting the injured all lined up and field triage accomplished, but most of them had dropped their weapons. Those who were still walking around were pretty badly hurt themselves.
Cassandra knelt by the edge of the water, staring nervously at the door. She had a guard or two, but those boys looked more scared than her, and she looked pretty scared. I pointed at her.
"Don't you try getting away in all the excitement. This bit'll be over soon, and then we have business."
She nodded at me, or at least in my direction. I turned my attention to the defenses, such as they were.
Owen got into an argument with one of the older guys. It was pretty clear that no one was going into the water any time soon. I closed the hatch, but the lock was on the other side. A couple of the Alexians saw what I was doing and tried to help. That's when I saw the other Amonite.
He was sitting cross-legged against the wall, staring at Cassandra. It was the guy who had opened the hatch for us, Owen's pet Scholar.
"Hey, aren't you on the wrong side of this door?" I yelled. He shrugged, then stood and came over.
"Would you like me to go out there, or would you like me to close that door?"
"Can you close the door, and then maybe drown yourself?"
He sighed, then placed one palm on either side of the pressurized window and began to invoke. All of our frictionlamps guttered, which is unusual for normal, mechanical lights. The air around us seemed to swell and grow heavy, like we were moving through molasses. His words stretched out in time, long syllables rolling out of his mouth and sticking in the air, their weight and density drawing us in. The room seemed ready to collapse.
Everything snapped, the whole world rushing at the space between the Amonite's two palms. I lurched forward like a drunk on a ship, and the room lurched with me. We were in sudden vacuum, without sound or breath, the instinctive panic burning through my lungs before I even realized I couldn't breathe. The door crumpled like a child's toy and I felt an instant of betrayal, before I realized that the egglike hatch had flattened out and molded itself with the frame. The whole door was solid metal now, wrinkled and hot. Only the window remained intact, untouched among the violence.