Chapter 244: Floor 35

Chapter 244: Chapter 244: Floor 35

The climb went faster after that, and it went better.

Floors 31 through 34 did not blur together, exactly. Each had a character of its own, a rhythm that the squad learned in the first hour and then broke apart, piece by piece, until it had no secrets left. But Rowan would remember them later the way one remembers a long road: as a handful of vivid places strung together by the steady sound of five sets of boots.

Floor 31 was a sky.

The stairs from the terrace climbed into the mist and came out onto a vast web of stone bridges strung across an open, windswept void, with nothing beneath them but cloud and the long, pale drop. Islands of rock hung in the air at the bridges’ ends, crowned with twisted trees and old, crumbling watchtowers. The wind never stopped. It sang through the stones in a thin, high note that set Rowan’s teeth on edge.

The gale harpies came at the second bridge.

There were a dozen of them, lean, gray-feathered things with wingspans wider than a cart, diving out of the clouds with their talons spread and their screaming voices tearing the air. Mirei dropped to one knee in the middle of the span and loosed three arrows in the time it took the first harpy to fall. Caelen planted himself at the front with his storm-gray cloak snapping behind him and met a diving creature head-on, his blade flashing out in a single clean arc. Barney’s shield rang like a gong under the weight of a third.

Rowan hung back and read the wind.

He had not expected the earth laws to help him in the sky. But when he stamped the stone of the bridge with the heel of his boot, he felt it, a faint, steady pulse running through the bedrock, and with it a quiet, dense certainty that the span would hold. He let it settle into his bones. Foundation. Then he planted his hoe, and thorns exploded across the bridge in a thicket of green.

[Vines of the Thorns]

The harpies that dove into the brambles screamed and twisted, tangled in the rapid-growth briars, and Mirei’s arrows finished them one by one.

They stripped the carcasses on the bridge, in the biting wind, with Barney whooping over the quality of the feathers and Seraphina holding her monocle up to a clump of pale, sky-blue moss growing from a crack in the stone.

"Cloudmoss," she announced, with deep satisfaction. "Lovely. Mild sedative, strong binding properties. Rowan, please take every single piece."

"Every single piece," he agreed, and tucked them into Eden.

Floor 32 was drowned.

They stepped out of the exit into a vast, flooded cathedral, with arches of black stone soaring out of knee-deep water and shafts of cold green light falling from windows high overhead. The air tasted of salt and old books. Long, pale shapes drifted just beneath the surface, and the whole hall was very, very quiet.

"I hate this floor," said Barney, with feeling.

"We’ve been on it for forty seconds," said Mirei.

"I hate it with great conviction."

The creatures that lived in the water were eels, or something like them. They were long and silver and eyeless, thick as a man’s thigh, with mouths ringed in needle teeth, and they came out of the dark in a wave, thrashing and screaming. Caelen’s cloak turned out to be very good at this sort of thing. He saw the first one before it surfaced, a faint swirl in the current, and was already moving, his sword leaving a pale line in the green light. Mirei’s silent boots carried her along the tops of broken pillars, where the water did not reach, and her arrows hissed down in a quiet, steady rain.

Rowan used the mud.

[Terra Tilling]

The floor of the flooded hall was stone, not soil. But the skill did not seem to mind. The water turned thick and sluggish around the eels, clinging and churning, and their movements slowed to a lazy writhe. Barney’s hammer, glowing orange from the heat of his new bracers, came down on one with a hiss of steam, and the creature split cleanly in two.

"Forgefather’s," Barney said, grinning at his own hands. "The metal’s singing."

"It’s an eel," said Seraphina.

"It’s a very good eel."

At the far end of the cathedral, behind a collapsed archway, Seraphina found a patch of luminous, sea-green fungus growing in the dark. She stood over it for a long time, the monocle glinting, and then, in a voice of quiet reverence, announced that it was the single richest source of purifying agents she had ever seen.

"Take it," she told Rowan. "Take all of it. I’ll make you a necklace of vials."

"I do not want a necklace of vials."

"You will, once you’ve worn it."

Floor 33 was crystal.

It was a cavern of impossible size, lit by a million shards of glittering stone, each one the color of a different jewel. They jutted from the ceiling in great, shining chandeliers and rose from the floor in jagged spires, and the whole cavern rang faintly, like a glass struck with a fingernail. Walking through it felt like walking through the inside of a bell.

The golems were waiting at the second bend.

They were tall, slow, and made of living gem, huge hulking figures of ruby and sapphire and smoky quartz, moving with a grinding, deliberate tread. Caelen’s blade rang off the first one and left barely a scratch. Mirei’s arrows shattered against their chests. They came on without haste, without fear, and a low, dissonant humming filled the cave as they approached.

"Defense is high," said Caelen, retreating a step. "Break it."

"Gladly," said Rowan.

He swung the hoe in a short, brutal arc and brought the haft crashing down on the golem’s chest.

[Threshing Strike]

The gravitational force rolled through the stone like a falling mountain. A web of cracks sprang across the golem’s torso, and it staggered, humming in a higher, more urgent note. Barney was already moving, hammer blazing, and he brought it down on the weakened plate with a thunderous crack that scattered gem shards across the floor like hail.

"Armor-break and shatter," Seraphina murmured, tracking the damage with her eyes. "A beautiful combination."

"We do try," said Rowan.

When the last golem fell, the squad stood amid a glittering drift of broken crystal, and Barney’s eyes had gone wide and slightly dazed.

"Do you have any idea," he said, "how much these are worth?"

"Quite a lot," said Rowan. "I’ve already stored them."

"I love this floor."

"A moment ago, you said..."

"Don’t remind me."

Floor 34 was a desert, and it was the first floor that truly tried to kill them.

The heat hit like a wall. The sun overhead was a white, pitiless disc, and the sand beneath their boots was so hot that the air above it shimmered. There was no wind, no shade, no horizon, only an endless, rippling sea of pale gold dunes under a bleached sky. Seraphina passed round vials of cooling tonic without comment, and they drank in silence.

The sandwyrms came on the third day.

There was no better word for it. They burst from the dunes in a roar of flying sand, long, armored, pale as bone, with mouths wide enough to swallow a horse. The first took Barney’s shield head-on and carried him backward thirty feet before Caelen’s blade drove into its flank. The second came up beneath Mirei’s feet, and only her boots’ impossible lightness saved her, sending her leaping aside a heartbeat before the sand collapsed. The third rose behind Rowan, close enough that he felt the wind of its jaws.

He did not run. He slammed the hoe into the sand.

[Chaff in the Wind]

A dense cloud of golden husks and dust burst from the ground, and the whole dune seemed to hold its breath. The sandwyrm’s jaws closed on empty air. It thrashed, blinded and choking, its great head swinging from side to side. Rowan was already gone, slipping through the cloud like a shadow and coming out behind the creature’s armored neck with the hoe raised.

[Scythe of the Harvester]

The blade came down in a flash of green and silver, and the wyrm’s head came away cleanly.

They butchered it in the shade of its own corpse, panting and burned, while the sun slowly sank toward the dunes. Barney hacked off a long, ridged tooth and hefted it in his hands, whistling. Mirei found a clutch of translucent, pearly eggs buried in the sand and cradled them like jewels. Seraphina, her monocle perched crookedly on her sunburned nose, discovered a withered, thorny little plant growing in the shadow of the carcass and pronounced it, in a voice of breathless wonder, a rare desert bloom whose sap could be distilled into a restorative worth its weight in gold.

"Take everything," she told Rowan, in a hoarse whisper. "Everything."

"I always do."

"I know. It’s why I love you."

"Sera."

"It’s a figure of speech."

By the fourth night, the desert gave way to stone, and the stone to a long, winding stair, and the stair to a gate of dark, weathered iron, rising out of the cliff face like the mouth of a cave.

Rowan stopped at the top step.

Beyond the gate, the air was warm and smelled of woodsmoke. Lantern light flickered through the bars. Faintly, from somewhere ahead, he heard voices, real ones, ordinary and tired and full of life, and under them the clatter of a market, a distant forge, and a dog barking.

He had not realized how badly he had missed that sound.

"Is that..." Mirei began.

"Floor thirty-five," said Seraphina, and adjusted her monocle. Her voice was very quiet. "The outpost. I read about it in the guild archives. The first safe zone above thirty. I had not believed it was real."

"It’s real," said Caelen, who had pushed back his hood and was staring through the bars with narrowed eyes. His cloak showed him everything: the bustle behind the gate, the faces, the banners, the thin ribbon of smoke. He drew a long, slow breath. "A citadel. A whole one."

The gate opened.

The citadel of floor 35 was larger than any of them had imagined.

It stood on a great plateau of pale stone, ringed by high white walls and crowned with a hundred towers, each one flying a different banner. Within its gates, a city spilled out in every direction: cobbled streets and crowded markets, inns with painted signs, workshops belching smoke, healers’ halls with green lanterns, training yards ringing with the clang of steel. Climbers of every kind thronged the lanes, guild members in matched livery, solitary adventurers in patched armor, merchants with carts and mules. Children, a handful of them, ran between the stalls, shrieking with laughter. A line of bakers’ stalls sent the smell of fresh bread rolling down the street.

It was a piece of the world, set down in the sky of the Tower, and it was alive.

The guards at the gate looked up, saw the five of them standing in the lantern light, and went very still.

"Squad 07," one of them breathed.

A murmur ran down the street like a rising wind. Heads turned. Conversations broke off mid-sentence. A baker stopped kneading, and a blacksmith set down his hammer. A hush spread outward, rippling through the crowd.

"Oh no," said Mirei. "Here we go."

Rowan tipped the brim of his Enchanted Straw Hat, pulled it low against the glare of a hundred lanterns, and managed, with great effort, to keep his smirk in place.

"We’d like a room," he said mildly. "Several, if you have them. A bath. A hot meal. And someone to tell us where we can restock."

The guard stared. Then he saluted, so sharply that his armor rattled.

"Right this way, sirs," he said. "The citadel is yours."