The blood hung on the wide blade like lumpy mud, smearing across the sun-bright metal in uneven streaks. Old blood, cold blood, blood that had clotted and cooled and stiffened like tar.
Dead man's blood.
I looked at the man at my feet. He sat on the ground, a clumpy pool of thick gore spilling out of his burst gut. His voxorator squealed in mindless complaint, then he raised the gauntlet of his right hand and drove the blade into my knee.
Pain burst through my leg like a wildfire, and I shrieked. The tip of his weapon skidded off the hazy shell of my invoked shield, but was thrust hard enough and came close enough that it drew blood and scraped bone. Still screaming, I brought the sword down. Put the blade into his head near the base of the sword, then drew back, slicing, running the dull metal of his helmet along the full length of the sword in a long, rasping strike that slid through metal, bone, and meat. Tarthick blood spilled out. A swirling tendril of fog followed the blade through the wound like smoke snatched by the wind. Frost glittered along the blade, and then the man fell back. Dead. Finally.
The others were on me in a breath. Seven or eight of them, and it was all I could do to stay in one piece. Blades slipped through the waning shield, the power of the invokation stressed by the explosion and the sheer number and ferocity of their attacks. I was able to sneak in a handful of guard strikes to legs and hands that would have crippled living men. These things, these warriors, these cold-meat, dead-blood monsters… they fought on. Glittering frost and gummy blood slopped from their wounds with each strike. I retreated, foot by foot, shifting my stance closer to the edge of the square. When I got to the mouth of an alleyway I dropped the rest of my arcane bindings and flared the invokation of the Rite of the Stag Hunt, pushed it into my legs, and leapt away from contact with the dead men in a series of long, ground-shuddering steps. I slid around a corner and started to run in a staggering gait.
I was spent. By the time I disengaged, I counted five attackers left. Just as many more were limping off, arms or legs mangled beyond use. Still too many in my present condition. As I ran the final invokations wisped away, leaving me drained. When the Hunt faltered, I stumbled to a halt against the side of a building to catch my breath. Hell, it was all I could do not to lie down and tremble into sleep. I slid to the ground, sword tumbling to the stone of the street.
"What the hell is going on back there?" I gasped to the empty street. My hands shook as I wiped the clods of blood away from my sword with a rag. Tired, bone-tired. Scared, too. I tried to go through the meditation of assessment, struggling to focus against the hammering of my heart. Blood leaked from my knee, both arms, a dozen smaller cuts, and a deeper wound that had scraped my ribs. The invokations that had wrapped me away from these things were gone, and now the flesh was back and full of holes. My hands hummed from the constant striking of metal against metal and yielding bone. I fumbled open the first-aid kit from my thigh pocket and bandaged up as best I could. I didn't have it in me to invoke the Binding of Flesh just now. Didn't have anything left. I wiped the blood from my hands and threw the rag to the ground.
I struggled to my feet. Tired, scared. Unsure of the tactical situation. Had they gone for help? Had they gotten at the Fratriarch? More important, why in the name of the living Brother was I fighting dead men, and what did they want with the Fratriarch? I was used to fighting alone. I expected to fight alone. Just not dead men, and not with the life of the Fratriarch on the line. And he was back there, alone with the girl. With the Amonite. Those wards of his wouldn't last forever.
I jogged toward the wreck of the monotrain, taking a longer, circuitous route back. The streets were quiet. I held the double-handed sword in a loose grip, hugging it close to my body. So tired, afraid I was going to drop it, but more afraid that if I sheathed it I wouldn't be able to draw fast enough if one of those dead men jumped me.
Creeping the last few yards to the square, I invoked a weak shield and snuck up to the corner. The courtyard was empty.
I moved carefully around the wreckage of the fight. The civilians were long gone, obviously, but where were my attackers? I reached the elevated track and reluctantly put the blade away, then started to climb. The iron trestles offered good handholds, but I was drained to the bone. Twice I nearly fell before I was able to scramble onto the track.
The car leaned dangerously away from the courtyard, probably unsettled by the burnpack's explosion or some other tampering by the undying assailants as they tried to pry Barnabas from his shell. I stepped inside carefully, this time holding the revolver in shaky hands. There was a body in the entrance, the scarred metal of the dead man's armor rimed with frost. I put a boot into his shoulder and turned him over.
His chest had burst open, the grim smile of ribs clenched behind the metal. That same tarry blood lined the wound, but where there should have been heart and lungs, there was a glass cylinder. A piston cycled slowly inside the glass, a plunger of leather and brass that rose slowly before settling to the bottom of the tube with a metallic sigh. Up and down, slowly. Breathing.
I drew back the hammer of the ordained revolver and sighted along the barrel, then fired a slug into the dead man's chest. The glass popped and a cloud of fog erupted out, twisting up to the revolver before dancing across my chest and filling my face. Startled, I gasped for air and swallowed a century's cold lungful of ancient, stale breath. It tasted like metal caskets and the frozen memories of tombs, buried in stone and ice. I staggered back, coughing until my lungs were clear. Shivering just as much from the memory of that breath as from the cold, I stepped into the car.
The floor was charred. Not an easy task with metal. The seats were nothing but twisted wreckage, the windows all blown out, and the Fratriarch's column of metal was gone. Where it had been, the floor was clear, spotless. There was something at the edge, a tiny dot of color against the dark metal. I bent down for a closer look. Just a drop, really. I put a finger to it and it burst, splattering across my nail. Holding it up to my face, I twisted to get a better look in the light from outside the car.
Blood. Real blood, red and warm and slippery between my fingers. The Fratriarch was gone.
* * *
My earliest memory of the Fratriarch is one of my earliest memories, period. I was in a car, the interior warm red leather, the woman sitting next to me dressed in a tight gray dress, her face covered by a white lace veil. My mother, I think, or a woman who was mourning my mother. I had the feeling of coming from some complicated ritual. Something that I hadn't understood, but that everyone around me took very seriously. Very sadly. Later in life I told myself it was a funeral. It could have been anything. I remember not understanding, but also not being afraid.
It was raining outside. The car drove through parts of the city I didn't know. More than that. Drove through a city I didn't know, like I didn't know what cities were. I knelt on the seat and looked out the window at all the close-together houses, the tall buildings, the crowded sidewalks. So many people. Something in my memory compared this to long gardens, carefully manicured, perfectly empty. Even the trees of my memory were empty. No birds, no squirrels.
The woman sitting next to me pulled me to the seat beside her, wrapping my tiny hands in her long, cold fingers, pressing them into my lap. I looked up at her, but she was facing forward. Watching where we were going.
The driver was a man, just another man, gray coat and hat and gloves. He drove stiffly. I pulled on my mother-mourner's hand, straining to look out the window, but all I could see were the rainstreaked clouds and the stony tops of buildings.