Chapter 135 - 133 — First Contact II

Level Eighteen.

I am Thirteen, and that was one of them, and the guide describes them as the common enemy of the floor.

---

I looked at my hands.

Both knuckle faces are marked and neither is deformed. There is bronze on the right one, a smear of it, actually transferred onto the adamantine and sitting there.

Nothing has moved. Nothing has play in it. The wrist band is where it was this morning.

And my right forearm, from the wrist to about two thirds of the way up, has an ache in it that arrived while I was doing something else and is now the loudest thing in my arm.

The plate took all of it and passed all of it straight through into me.

Mercer said that in a sentence and I nodded at him, and it turns out that nodding at a man in a forge is not the same as finding out.

---

Hana came and put two fingers on the front of what is left of my chest piece and looked underneath it.

"Bruising. Nothing open."

"Do you want to do anything about it?"

"No." She let the flap down. "That is thirty-eight out of five hundred and it will fade on its own. If I spend mana on that I am short of it in eight hours when somebody has a hole in them."

"Fair."

"Everybody asks on the first one." She was already turning to Sokolov. "Anton. Hands."

He put them out. She looked at them and gave them back.

---

"Right," she said. "Correction, and this is the one that matters."

"Go on."

"Everything you have read about a Warden is about a Warden. One of them, at this range, with three of us and one of you being whatever you are."

She put the blade away. "That fight was fine. It went the way a fight with one of those is supposed to go."

"And?"

"And the floor does not kill people with one." She looked back down the avenue the way we came, at nothing.

"It kills them with three, coming in from different streets, because the recovery gap is three quarters of a second and there is no version of three quarters of a second where you deal with one and then look at the next one."

"How do you know it is three quarters."

"Because we counted it. Afterward. At the canal."

She did not say anything else about that and I did not ask.

---

We went east.

The first mapped pillar is about a kilometre deeper in, in a civic square, and the route is straight for four hundred metres and then bends north with the avenue.

The Spire sat above the rooftops the whole way and I looked at it every two or three minutes, deliberately, the way you check a compass you do not entirely trust.

It does not get closer in any way you can feel over four hundred metres. That is the problem with a landmark that size. It tells you the direction and it tells you nothing at all about progress.

---

The city stopped being a battlefield after about two hundred metres and started being a city.

It was a commercial district. You can tell because the ground floors are all one shape, wide and open at the front with a stone counter across two thirds of the opening.

Every single one has the counter still there, because a stone counter is difficult to burn.

Above them the buildings go up two and three more storeys and those are smaller windows and narrower doors, and there are external stairs up the alley sides.

People lived over the shops. Everywhere. In every street we walked down.

---

In one of them the counter had a row of six round holes cut into the top of it, each about the width of my forearm, and under each hole there had been a vessel.

Four of them are still there. Ceramic, thick, cracked, sitting in the recess under the counter where somebody put them.

I looked at that for longer than I should have, because I have seen that arrangement before, in a market street in Eastwick, with the vessels made of steel and a man standing behind them with a ladle.

---

There is a fountain in a small square off the avenue with nothing in it but ash.

There are wall carvings in the passage beside it, low down, at about the height of a person sitting on the ground, and they have gone soft with heat but you can still read that they were carvings.

There are tables in two of the ground floors that are not furniture. They are cut into the floor and come up out of it, part of the building, and somebody built a room around a table on purpose.

None of it is loot. There is nothing in any of these buildings that anybody would carry out.

---

And on the front of two of the larger buildings, and once more on a statue, there is a mark.

It is about the size of my two hands. Four strokes, three of them curved and one straight through the middle.

The angle of the straight one looks wrong until you have seen it twice, and then it stops looking wrong and I could not tell you why.

The statue is at the end of a short flight of steps and has lost its head and both arms, and it is facing the Spire.

Not roughly. It is square to it.

---

"You have seen that," I said to Hana.

"The mark? It is in the guide. There is an appendix." She did not stop walking. "Forty-odd sightings logged, both sides, always on the big civic buildings and never on a house."

"And?"

"And nobody has the faintest idea. There are three translations on the board and all three of them are somebody being confident on a Tuesday."

She glanced at it as we passed. "Somebody built that city, and we come through it twice a week, and the only thing we have ever taken out of it is a route."

---

The collapse was not on my map.

Four hundred metres short of where the avenue bends, a building has come down across the whole width of the street and taken the one opposite with it.

What is in front of us is nine or ten metres of black block and beam, with ash drifted up the near face.

The map shows an open street. The map is four days old and downloaded from a man who came through here in a different attempt.

"There it is again," Hana said.

---

I went up.

There is a wall on the left with three courses of window openings in it and the stone is sound.

I got my boot into the first sill and used the acceleration off it, vertically, with the arrest coming down through the ankle on the parapet instead of along a street.

It is not comfortable that way round. Everything that usually spreads along a stride goes straight into the joint.

But I was on the roof in about two seconds and I had four hundred metres of sightline.

---

The Spire, dead ahead, unmistakable.

The square with the pillar in it, which I could identify because it is the only open ground in that quarter and there are stubs of statuary round the edge of it.

And two ways to it. A parallel street one block north that runs clear as far as I can see.

And a shorter line through the block directly in front of me, if there is a way through the block, which from up there I could not tell.

I came back down.

---

I did not stay up there and I did not go along the roofs, and I want to be clear with myself about why, because for about three seconds it was extremely attractive.

Up there I am visible from every street in that quarter to anything that looks up.

And down here there are two people who have to go through the ground floor whatever I do.

The entire reason six of us walked into this city instead of one is that three people in a street are worth more than one man on a roof.

Theo would have done that better than me and from the floor. He reads forty metres through open air and twenty-five through a wall and he would have told me whether the block was passable without anybody climbing anything.

He is under a white sky about six kilometres and one universe away.

---

Sokolov found the way through the block while I was still describing the two options.

He had gone twenty metres along the frontage and was standing in a doorway looking up into the dark of it.

"Here."

"Through the building?"

"Through three buildings. The party walls have gone in two places and there is a line." He pointed with his whole hand rather than a finger.

"It comes out on the far side about level with the square. Saves five hundred metres and it does not put anybody in a street."

"And the problem."

"The ceiling in the second one."