The Aeronaut's Windlass (70 page)

The monk lifted his head. One of his eyes was gone, vanished into a vast, purpling bruise that swelled that side of his face to grotesque proportions—the result of a glancing hit or near-miss from a gauntlet blast. He stared at them with his bleary eye. His expression was a contortion of agony.

“Vincent!” Benedict cried, his voice anguished. He leapt into the blazing heat, lifting his arms to try to shield his face as he did. His sleeves began smoking almost at once.

“Leave me!” the monk gasped. He began to fumble weakly with his robes. “Take it!”

“No one’s getting left anywhere,” Benedict said. Then he knelt down, planted a foot, and reached out his hands.

Bridget stared in fascinated horror. The shelf could not weigh less than a ton in metal alone, never mind the weight of the books still contained on its upward side. And in that room, the metal would be heated to searing temperatures.

Benedict slipped his hands beneath the edge of the shelf, next to Brother Vincent’s trapped body. Then he clenched his jaw and gripped it.

There was a sound like sizzling meat.

Benedict let out a leonine roar that bore only a passing resemblance to a scream of pain.

And then his lean body bowed into the effort of lifting the enormous shelf. For a second, then two, nothing happened—and then his legs quivered and the enormous mass began to move, if only by inches.

Bridget leapt forward into the oven. The heat was like a smothering blanket, painful—and getting noticeably hotter after only seconds of exposure. She grasped Brother Vincent’s wrist and forearm and hauled his burned form from beneath the shelf.

“Got him!” Bridget shouted, dragging Brother Vincent toward the hallway.

Benedict dropped the shelf and it crashed to the floor, sending up showers of sparks.

They burst back into the hallway together, and the sudden lack of furious heat made Bridget start to shiver, as though she had walked into an icebox.

It wasn’t until she turned to let the wounded man down gently that she saw the horribly misshapen contour of Brother Vincent’s back and shoulders. The man was shuddering in pain, arms twitching and shaking.

But not his legs.

Below the shoulders he was completely, eerily still.

She looked up to find Benedict staring at Brother Vincent in horror. “Oh, Maker of Paths,” he breathed. He sagged down to his knees beside the monk, as if the sight had drained the strength of his legs entirely out of him. “Oh, Vincent.”

“No time, boy,” Vincent said. He choked on a couple of short, hard coughs, and blood suddenly flecked his lips—which quirked into a small smile. “Literally, for me.”

“Dammit,” Benedict said. “Damn those Auroran sons of bitches. I’ll murder every last one of them.”

Brother Vincent’s expression became annoyed and he slapped irritably at Benedict’s leg. “Benedict. There is no time for this kind of indulgence.” He fumbled at his robes again and with a grimace managed to produce a book with a very plain brown cover. “Take it.”

Benedict accepted the book, his expression bewildered. “What?”

“Take it,” Brother Vincent said. Blood had begun to run from his mouth. “To the Spirearch. It’s the last copy. She burned the rest.”

“What is it?” Benedict asked.

Brother Vincent coughed again, and grimaced in pain. The blood trickling from his mouth had turned his teeth bright red. “What they came for,” he said. “The
Index
.”

“I’m getting you out of here,” Benedict said. “You can give it to him yourself.”

A smile touched the unmarred corner of Brother Vincent’s mouth. “Oh, Ben. Death is just one more Path. One you’ll come to in time.” He lifted a hand weakly, and Benedict gripped it tight.

“Don’t let your pain choose your Way for you,” Brother Vincent said quietly. “You’re a better man than—”

And then the monk died. Bridget saw it. In midword, the light and life in his eyes suddenly, simply went out like a snuffed candle. What had been Brother Vincent was now . . . an inanimate object.

“Vincent?” Benedict asked quietly. “Vincent?” Then his voice broke with a ragged sob. “Vincent.”

Bridget stepped up beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Benedict,” she said, quietly urgent. “We have to go.”

He nodded. He put the monk’s hand down gently onto his chest, his seared fingers moving stiffly, clumsily, and then he began to rise—and suddenly pitched forward, over the corpse, to land in a limp sprawl atop it.

“Benedict!” Bridget cried. She grabbed him, rolled him over. His body was twitching in rhythmic shakes, and there was saliva and foam leaking from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were rolled back to the whites.

God in Heaven. The silkweaver venom.

Bridget shook him, slapped him, shouted at him—but he never stirred or gave any response. What was she to do?

With a roar, the doors of the Great Library burst into flame on their hinges.

Bridget ground her teeth. She wasn’t sure she could find her way back, but if she didn’t take action, they would both die in moments, if not sooner. She rose, seized the warriorborn, and dragged him up. His limp weight was difficult to manage, but the heat and smoke were getting thicker, and she could think of no alternatives under the circumstances. She screamed and thrashed and strained and finally managed to get him over one shoulder.

Then she started staggering toward the exit—then realized that she had forgotten the book Brother Vincent had given his life to protect. Dropping down to get it was quite difficult, but not nearly so hard as standing up again with Benedict’s weight dragging at her shoulder.

She headed for the exit following the grooved path in the floor. She couldn’t move very quickly. The burden was too heavy—but she dared not leave him to rush out for help. He might have choked on smoke by then. So Bridget grimly put one foot in front of the other and kept moving ahead.

She never saw the Auroran Marine before the man emerged from a cross-corridor and collided with her. Bridget fell with a cry, trying to keep Benedict from landing on his head as she crashed to the floor. The impact hurt. The Auroran landed near her, and something metallic clanged on the floor.

Bridget stared at him for a second in wonder. The man had been wounded. There was blood on his tunic and more on one leg—and a swelling lump the size of a child’s fist on one side of his head. His eyes were glassy and dilated. Had he been knocked unconscious, out of sight of his companions? Surely the Aurorans had been in a hurry to leave as well. He stared at her blearily.

Bridget’s eyes dropped to the source of the clinking sound. The man’s copper-clad blade lay on the floor between them.

She looked up again, met the Auroran’s eyes, and felt a sudden surge of terror, of confusion, of certainty that this had just become a deadly encounter—and saw the same feelings mirrored in his eyes as they stared back.

Merciful Builders
, Bridget realized.
I’ve managed to get myself into a duel after all.

Except that there would be no rules, no marshal, no supportive friends, no crowd of observers.

If Bridget lost this duel, no one would ever know it.

The Auroran let out a slurred cry and threw himself toward the sword.

Bridget’s foot got there first, kicking the weapon from his grip. The man lunged at her, hands grasping. She twisted in the defensive maneuver Benedict had taught her, and caught one of his arms instead. The man jerked his arm away, and seemed startled when he could not free it from Bridget’s fingers.

Bridget whirled with the man, using his own strength to begin the motion, and swung him into the nearest wall. The impact made his knees wobble and he fell to the ground, with Bridget keeping the hold on his arm. He threw a punch with his other arm, and though Bridget managed to roll in the same direction to lessen the force of the impact, the blow made her see stars. There was no time for astronomy in ground fighting, she thought, and her sudden hysterical laugh turned into a scream of fear.

The Auroran got some of his weight on top of her, his hands scrambling for a hold on her throat. If that happened, she knew, she was likely as good as dead. A proper choke hold could leave her unconscious in seconds, and in the frantic terror of combat, the amount of force required to crush a human windpipe was a surprisingly minor effort. At the same time, she realized that the Marine was faster than she was, and stronger, and had more experience at this kind of business. The only reason she was still alive and fighting at all was that he was clearly injured and disoriented, barely able to move upright.

She got her forearms lined up on his chest, intersecting one of his arms and holding his weight off of her as he tried to secure a grip. One hand got to her throat, but she hunched her neck muscles against its crushing pressure and kept it to one side, where it could do less harm. The other she held off with both of her arms, straining, knowing that the longer she had to fight against not only his muscle, but against the weight of his body, the faster she would tire. She struggled to throw him clear, arching her body, but he was too strong, simply too
big
for her to move. She fought for what seemed an eternity, though she knew less than half a minute went by, and felt her arms weakening, felt the fingers of his other hand brush against her throat.

So she took a terrible gamble. Instead of trying to push him again, she abruptly relaxed her arms—and slammed her head forward, into his, as he came down. She heard a significant-sounding crunch.

The Auroran reeled back, blood fountaining from his nose, and fell, banging his head against the floor as he did. Bridget gave him no time to recover. She rolled atop him and began slamming her fists down at his skull in elemental brutality.

The Auroran tried to hold up his hands in a feeble defense, but only for a few seconds. Bridget pounded his head into the ground, and once his hands were down, she seized his hair and began using that to bash his skull onto the floor, again and again. She barely realized that she was terrified and screaming at the top of her lungs.

The smoke thickened and she began choking on it, struggling to get her breath. She stumbled away from the now-limp body of the Auroran, back to Benedict. She felt so tired. The fight had been only seconds long, but she felt as though she’d been running for twenty-four hours straight.

Once more, Bridget managed to lift Benedict to her shoulder, if only barely. At least she’d had the presence of mind to pick up the book first this time. She could not stop coughing as she staggered forward, onto the path—and realized, with a dawning sense of horror, that she was lost.

This was an intersection of corridors. Paths wandered off down all four of them—and the fall and the subsequent fight had disoriented her completely. She could not tell which hallway led out. She felt her head getting lighter, her balance beginning to waver. She did not have time to choose incorrectly. If she didn’t get out of the smoke, and soon, she would fall, and could only hope that neither of them would awaken when the fire claimed them.

She turned slowly, hoping to gain a clue, but the smoke now obscured anything beyond a few feet, and it all glowed with firelight. Her already teary eyes began overflowing, and she let out a scream of rage and fear and frustration.

“Littlemouse!” called Rowl’s voice.

Bridget’s heart surged with sudden energy and hope. “Rowl! I’m here!”

The cat suddenly appeared from the smoke, his tail flicking in agitation. “You are
rude
. And this smoke is in my nose so that I could not track, which is also your fault. And we must
leave
.”

She managed not to choke on a sudden burst of terrified laughter, and tried to answer in Cat, but her throat seized on the smoke and she began to cough instead. She nodded and gestured for Rowl to take the lead.

They had not gone twenty feet before the beams began to give way with earsplitting screeches, and the masonry of the temple began to collapse around them.

Chapter 60

Spire Albion, Habble Landing, Temple of the Way

I
don’t like it, Skip,” Kettle said in a quiet tone, meant for Grimm’s ears alone. “Girl running into the fire like that.”