Chapter 131: The Thing In The Wall

He went out along the ruts.

The water came up over his belt in the middle of the vault and stayed there, and the Shadow Fragment went ahead of him the whole way, low and straining, and Theo followed his own armour four hundred feet across a flooded floor with a wooden beak on his face.

At two hundred feet the shape stopped being a shape.

At a hundred it was a shoulder.

’...That’s not a monster. That’s a wall somebody’s building.’

It came up out of the water twenty-five feet, on its knees, and it had been on its knees for a very long time.

Stone. Or something that had started as stone. A torso, and one arm finished down to a hand with four fingers on it, and where the second arm should have been, an armature of grey matter half the length of the first, ending in nothing.

And it was full of cores.

They were set into it the way stones are set into a wall, hundreds of them in the chest and the shoulders and down the length of the finished arm, packed edge to edge with the grey grown up around each one. Every single one of them had a slow light going round inside it, and the lights were out of time with each other.

Theo stood in four feet of black water and looked at a thing with four thousand heartbeats.

Then he looked down.

Eight iron cables came out of the water at the base of it and went away from him across the floor of the vault. Each one ended at a ring set in stone, and the rings had been set properly, with lead poured round the shanks.

’Somebody surveyed this floor.’

He waded to the nearest ring, put his hand on it and turned it over, and on the underside of the collar, where a man would put it, there was a foundry stamp.

Three letters and a shape.

’...I’ve paid eleven invoices with a mark like that on the bottom.’

He turned the collar over again and put his thumb in the letters.

’That’s a supplier. Somebody cast eight of these to order, and delivered them, and got paid.’

[Target: —]

[Realm: Enhanced — Rank IV]

[Status: INCOMPLETE]

[Progress: 61%]

[Restraint: eight anchor points, load-bearing]

[Note: this creature has been conscious for the duration]

Theo read the last line, and then read it again.

For a moment he stayed exactly where he was, with the collar under his hand.

’Four thousand four hundred and eleven trips... years of them. A man with a handcart coming down that ramp once a day, and this has been awake on its knees in the dark the entire time, listening to the wheels.’

Then the Fragment pulled so hard it nearly took his coat off his shoulders, and Theo looked up.

A plate of obsidian was set into the thing’s chest among the cores, four inches across, with wisps coming off the edge of it in a room with no wind.

[Fragment Resonance]

[Origin: matched]

’Ah. They put you in a wall.’

He tried the water trick first. It had worked eleven times that afternoon.

He put a rope of shadow out to his left and stirred.

The thing came round and took the causeway behind him apart with one hand, across sixty feet, faster than anything that size had any business moving.

Theo went under and came up forty feet away with his ears ringing and brick dust settling on the surface all round him.

’It doesn’t feel the water! It felt me on the floor—’

Eight cables in the brick, and years of a handcart coming down that ramp over its head.

’It feels the STONE.’

He looked down at four feet of water over brick, and then at nothing in particular, and then he did the only thing he had left.

He stood up on the dark.

It came up under his boots out of the water the way it had come up under his heels on a mountain road, condensed and cold and about as steady as a rowing boat. It lifted him four inches clear of the surface and held him there.

The Warden’s hand went past him at chest height and hit nothing at all.

’IT WORKED! And it’s cost me about a third of everything I’ve got and I can’t do it for very long—’

The fight took eleven minutes and Theo did not enjoy one of them.

Everything from the causeway failed. Rain Cutter went into that chest and turned, wet and sharp and no use at all against rock with stones in it. Raindrop’s angle did nothing, with no blade coming at him to slide off, only weight. The shadow would not move it an inch.

What was left was the Cinderfall.

He took the second hit on crossed forearms without moving his feet, and the kinetic shock went through him and out and hurt him a great deal less than it should have. He read the reach. He worked the sixty-foot circle and stayed inside it where the arm could not fold, and he went at the half-built side over and over, the side with the armature on it and no cores in the shoulder.

[Status: INCOMPLETE]

[Progress: 61%]

’You’re finished down the right and you’re nothing down the left, so I’m going to live on your left.’

He put nine feet of shadow into the unfinished shoulder eleven times in four minutes, and on the eleventh the grey came away in a sheet the size of a door.

The thing made a sound then.

It was the first sound it had made, and it came up out of the water and off the brick and into Theo’s chest, and none of it was a roar.

’...Oh, don’t. Don’t do that, I haven’t got anywhere to put that—’

He killed it with Attendant’s Hands.

He went up the finished arm with the shadow under his boots and put his left palm flat on the collar to find the seam between two cores. Then he walked his fingers three inches along it to the gap where the grey had never closed, and drove Raindrop in to the crossguard.

The lights went out in rows.

They went from the chest outward, four hundred of them and then a thousand and then all of it, the slow turning stopping one at a time like a street going dark window by window. Twenty-five feet of stone came down sideways into the water and put a wave across the vault that broke over the third causeway.

Theo sat on a broken piece of causeway with his legs in the water for a while.

’Eleven minutes. The Warden took eleven minutes too, and that one nearly killed me... this one just made me tired.’

He got up eventually, because there was work.

The obsidian plate came out of the chest with three cuts and came into his hand warm. The Shadow Fragment went into it, or it went into the Fragment, and he could not afterwards say which. Both of them went up his arm at once and he lost about four seconds.

[Shadow Fragment — Fragment Resonance resolved]

[Integrity restored: 2 of ? ]

[New function unlocked]

’Two of question mark! That’s an extremely rude way to tell a man there are more of these.’

Then he harvested, and it took him the better part of an hour, and he stopped counting the walnut-sized cores at two hundred and just filled the Coffer.

[Cinderfall Warden Core — 1]

[Warden Core fragments — 214]

[Warden Core — this Dungeon: absent]

[Note: this Dungeon has no Warden Core to give]

Theo looked at that one for a long moment with water running out of his sleeves.

’Of course it doesn’t. It wasn’t a Warden, it was a thing they parked in here.’

[Limitless Flow: 17.08% → 19.90%]

[Combat Skill: 44 → 49]

[Shadow Sword — Mythic] 11.08% → 13.60%

[Attendant’s Hands — A] 0.09% → 1.44%

[You have entered the Mundane Realm — Middle Stage]

’...’

Theo stood in a flooded vault in a wooden mask, with two hundred and fourteen stolen cores in a box, and read that line about nine times.

’FINALLY!’

He was halfway back along the second causeway when the water moved.

Only a little. A long slow push of it against the brick on his left, then the same push against his right, and Theo stopped walking and put his hand out flat over the surface and felt the whole vault breathing.

’...That’s a reset. Fine. Good, actually, that’s what they do, I’ve seen it—’

Then he turned round.

Out in the middle of the vault, four hundred feet back, where he had left twenty-five feet of dead stone lying on its side in the dark, the cores he had not been able to prise out were coming back on.

One at a time.

In rows.

And the eight iron cables, with the lead poured properly round the shanks, were still bolted into the floor and holding.