Chapter 133 - 131 — The Ash Side III (Bonus)

The staging room upstairs is four metres square with nothing in it.

We went in and shut the door and there was no speech, because Krüger did not make one and nobody else wanted to.

Hana checked her own straps. Sokolov stood by the wall with his hands loose. Mara had the spear butt on the floor.

"Creating it," Krüger said.

---

> **[Tower Party created.]**

>

> **[Party Leader: Bastian Krüger.]**

>

> **[Invitation sent: Jace Nolan.]**

> **[Accept?]**

> **[YES.]**

> **[PARTY — 6/6]**

>

> **[Bastian Krüger.]**

>

> **[Jace Nolan.]**

>

> **[Mara Viteri.]**

>

> **[Hana Arai.]**

>

> **[Theo Marchand.]**

>

> **[Anton Sokolov.]**

> **[Floor Two available to all party members.]**

---

Then the Tower put something up that it had not put up for Floor One.

> **[WARNING.]**

>

> **[Floor Protection is unavailable on Floor Two.]**

>

> **[Fatal damage will result in death.]**

>

> **[All party members must acknowledge.]**

Nobody said anything.

I have read that in five different places in nine days, and I have had it said to me out loud by a woman who watched it happen four metres from her hands.

None of that is the same as the Tower saying it to you with your own name on the panel.

Hana acknowledged first. Then Sokolov. Then Mara, then Theo, then me.

Krüger last.

---

"Everybody ready," he said.

It was not a question in the shape people usually mean it. He went round the room and waited for each one.

"Ready."

"Ready."

"Ready."

"Ready."

"Ready."

"Then we go," Krüger said, and pressed it.

---

It is the same light and it has been the same light every time.

The panel gets brighter and then the brightness stops being inside the frame, and it comes out past the edges and goes across the floor and up the walls, flat and white and with nothing warm in it.

The difference is that this time there were five other people in the room.

Sokolov went first, at the wall, and he did not move while it took him. Then Mara, and Theo beside her. Then Hana.

Krüger looked across at me about half a second before it reached him and did not say anything.

Then the floor stopped being under me.

---

Grit.

That is the first thing, before my eyes were any use, because I came down with my boots about ten centimetres into something soft and my weight went through it and found stone underneath.

The air was moving and it had things in it.

I got my forearm across my face and breathed through my sleeve for two seconds and then opened my eyes properly.

> **[Floor Two.]**

>

> **[Party divided.]**

> **[Present: Jace Nolan. Hana Arai. Anton Sokolov.]**

>

> **[Not present: Bastian Krüger. Mara Viteri. Theo Marchand.]**

> **[Designation: Ash Side.]**

---

Hana was four metres to my right with one hand on her pack strap and both feet already set.

Sokolov was behind her and had turned a full circle before I had finished standing up.

"Krüger," Hana said, once, not loudly, the way you check rather than the way you call.

Nothing.

"Three and three," Sokolov said.

"Three and three," she said. "And we have the ash, so they have the stone."

---

I looked up.

The sky is orange and it is dark, both at once, which does not sound like a thing until you are standing under it.

Not sunset. There is no low light coming from a direction. The whole of it is that colour, evenly, from one horizon to the other, and there is no sun anywhere in it and nothing casts a proper shadow.

It is bright enough to read by and it looks like the last twenty minutes of a very bad evening.

---

We were standing in the middle of a street about eighteen metres wide.

It has been a market. That is not a guess.

There are stalls down both sides of it, or the frames of them, burned to black posts about waist height with the crossbars gone, in two rows with a gap every fourth one for a cross-alley.

The buildings on both sides go up three and four storeys and about half of them have no roof.

The stone is black and it is not soot black. It is black all the way through, and where a block has cracked the fresh face inside is grey.

Ash lies over everything.

It is shin-deep in the open middle of the street where the wind moves it about, and it is up past my knee against the walls, and there are drifts in the alley mouths that are chest high and smooth on top.

Underneath, the paving is cracked in long lines and you can feel the cracks through your boots before you see them.

---

The wind does not stop.

It comes down that avenue steadily from behind us and it carries ash along at about knee height in a moving sheet, so that the whole street looks as though the floor is travelling and the walls are not.

It got into my mouth in the first ten seconds and it is dry and it has no taste at all, which is somehow worse than a taste.

Somewhere off to the left, wind was going through a building with nothing left inside it and making a low note that changed when the gusts changed.

That is the only sound in that city apart from us.

---

And then I looked down the street, and there it was.

The avenue runs dead straight for about four hundred metres and then bends, and above the roofs of everything in between, standing up out of the middle of the city, is the Spire.

It is enormous.

From six kilometres out it takes up more of the sky than the buildings at the end of the street do.

The top third has split off and come over, and it hangs at an angle across the skyline with nothing holding it up that I can see from here.

Every photograph in that thread had it in the frame and I had assumed that was framing.

It was not framing. You cannot put a camera down in that city and not have it in the shot.

---

> **[FLOOR TWO.]**

>

> **[Clear Condition: At least one Challenger from each Side must reach the Convergence Chamber beneath the Central Spire.]**

>

> **[Both Chambers must be activated within the same window.]**

>

> **[There is no placement and no elimination requirement.]**

Six kilometres. Outer City, then the canal, then the Inner City, then the middle.

Three of us here and three of them somewhere under a white sky standing in the same street with the stalls still on it.

---

"Right," Hana said. "I know this street."

She came forward past me about four paces and stopped and turned round once, slowly.

"Western Outer City. There is a market avenue in the guide that runs east and bends north, and that is this, and the fourth cross-alley on the left is a route down to the canal approach."

"How certain," Sokolov said.

"Certain about the street. Not certain about the alley." She started walking toward it. "Because on my attempt that alley was open and I went down it."

---

We got to the fourth gap and it was not there.

The building on the near corner had come down across the mouth of it at some point, in two storeys.

What is in that alley now is a slope of black block and roof timber going up to about four metres, with ash filled in round the bottom of it.

Hana stood in front of it and did not swear.

"Right. That is the thing everybody tells you and nobody believes."

"The big things stay," I said.

"The big things stay. The street is the street, the canal is the canal, the Spire has not moved." She put a hand out toward the slope without touching it. "And every small thing you planned around is a coin."

---

Sokolov had gone past both of us and was looking up the face of the collapse.

"I could hold it."

"Hold what," I said.

"Middle third." He pointed, twice, at two points about three metres up and four metres apart. "Two anchors across there. It stops the slope moving while somebody goes over the top of it."

"For thirty seconds."

"For thirty seconds, four times." He came back down. "It is there if we need it. I would rather we went round."

"We go round," Hana said. "Sixth alley. It is two hundred metres and it costs us ten minutes."

---

I looked at the Spire again before we moved, because I intend to do that every few minutes for as long as I am in this city.

Then I put my hand up in front of me and made a fist twice and felt the adamantine come round with about a fifth of a second of lag and then stop being a fifth of a second.

Two hundred and forty grams a side. Strength thirty-eight.

"Front," I said, and went.

---

We got about sixty metres.

The ash moved.

Not the sheet at knee height, which has been moving the whole time.

Something underneath it, twenty metres down the avenue on the right, behind a stone cart that had gone over on its side and been there long enough for the drift to reach the axle.

A long low hump came up in the surface and travelled about two metres and stopped.

"Hold," Hana said.

I held.

---

It came up out of it standing.

Not rising. It got its feet and it stood, and about forty kilos of ash came off it in a single sheet and made a cloud that the wind took away.

By the time I could see it properly it had already finished getting up.

Seven feet and then some. Long in the arm and long in the leg, and the proportions are close enough to a man that the places where they are not sit badly.

Overlapping plates, neck to ankle, curved, fitted to each other the way scales are fitted.

They have been pale. You can see what colour they were in two places near the hip where the scorching has not taken.

The rest of it is black and the black is burned on, blistered in patches, with the edges of some plates crazed the way a glaze crazes.

---

Four plates are gone off the left side of the chest and two off the same shoulder.

Underneath there is bronze.

Rings and a segmented column running down where an arm joins a body, moving very slightly all the time, oiled-looking, not damaged at all.

And behind the bronze there is light.

It comes out of the fractures in the chest plates in three or four thin lines, dull orange, the same colour as the sky, and it does not flicker. It sits there.

---

The head is a smooth oval and there is nothing on it.

No mouth. No eyes. No nose, no ridge, no seam, nothing that any face has ever had.

One narrow vertical slit down the centre of it, top to bottom, about the width of two fingers.

The slit is black.

---

It has a polearm and the polearm is in worse condition than the thing holding it.

Two and a bit metres, a hook on the end, and about a third of the way down the shaft there is a split that has been bound with something and the binding has burned.

It holds it in one hand, low, with the head trailing in the ash.

---

Then it walked toward us.

That is what it did. It walked, at the speed of a man who is going somewhere and is not in any hurry about it, with the polearm dragging a line through the ash behind it.

Twenty metres. Eighteen.

Everything in my body wanted to treat that as time.

"Do not wait for the face," Hana said, very quickly and very flatly, from my right. "Watch the head. If it stops turning the head, it has already gone."

Fifteen.

I brought both gauntlets up.

The head came round toward me and steadied and stopped.

The slit went amber.

Then the twelve metres between us stopped existing.