Chapter 136 - 134 — First Contact III (Bonus)

It was worse than he made it sound.

The middle building has lost most of its upper floor into its lower one, and what is holding the rest up is a beam that has burned through about halfway along and is resting on a pile of its own ceiling.

You can walk under it. You can also see the crack running up the wall where the beam has moved, and the crack is not old, because the edges of it are clean.

"How long do you need," Sokolov said.

"To cross it? Nine seconds. Ten."

"Then I will give you twenty."

---

He put four anchors in.

Two between the beam and the party wall on the sound side, and two more across the lower course where the crack runs.

He took about forty seconds doing it, and he talked to himself the whole time in a language I do not have.

Then he said, "Go," and his voice had changed.

We went. Hana first because I made her, then me, then him last and moving faster than he had come in.

The whole time we were under it there was a low sound out of that beam. Not cracking. A sort of continuous complaint.

---

He came out on the far side and put both hands on his knees for a moment and stayed there.

"Are you all right."

"Yes." He straightened up. "Four anchors on a building is not two anchors on a weapon."

"How much did that cost."

"About a fifth." He looked back into the dark of it. "I could do that four more times today and then nothing else. Do not ask me for it unless the alternative is a street."

---

The third building opens into a courtyard and we stopped at the edge of it because Hana put an arm out.

It is about twenty metres square with the buildings on all four sides and doorways in three of them, and it is under ash the way everything is under ash, flat and grey and even from wall to wall.

"Do not cross the middle."

"Why."

"Because on the Stone maps there is a fountain in every one of these." She was looking at the corners rather than the centre.

"Residential courtyard, four sides, three doors. There is a basin in the middle of it about waist high and two metres across."

---

I looked at twenty metres of flat grey.

"There is nothing there."

"There is nothing there *on the surface*." She picked up a piece of masonry about the size of a fist and threw it underarm into the middle.

It went in and did not stop where it should have.

It went in and kept going, and the sound of it arriving was about half a second late and came from lower down and further away than it had any right to.

---

Sokolov got a line out and we tested it properly, because she said herself she was working from the other city’s map and the other city’s map has been wrong twice today.

The basin is there. About a metre and a half deep, full to the brim with ash.

The ash on top of it sits at exactly the same level as the ash on the paving, because the drift has made everything one surface.

A man walking across that at a normal pace puts his leading foot into a metre and a half of nothing while his other one is still committed.

---

"That is the whole floor," Hana said, while Sokolov was coiling the line. "In one courtyard."

"She is reading my ground off their map."

"And they will be reading their ground off ours by tomorrow, and neither of us has said a word to the other yet."

We went round the edge.

---

The square is about seventy metres across and it has been the civic centre of that quarter.

There are the bases of eight statues round the perimeter and two of the statues are still on them. Wide steps go up into a building on the north side that has lost its roof and kept its columns.

And in the middle of it, black, square in section, about two metres high, with thin silver lines cut down all four faces and over the top, there is the pillar.

It is not damaged. That is the thing that stopped me.

Everything in that square has burned and cracked and come down, and that column is exactly as it was drawn in a survey eleven years ago, and there is no ash on it at all.

---

We did not go near it for six minutes.

Hana would not, and she was right, and she made us do it her way.

Five streets feed that square. We walked the perimeter and looked down every one of them for as far as they ran.

Sokolov went up the steps on the north side and checked the roofless building.

I opened Androphagos twice, in two different corners, and got exactly what it is going to give me on this floor, which is my own two people.

Then he came back down and pointed out two ways off that square that are not streets, one through the columns and one over a low wall on the east side.

"If it goes wrong," he said, "east wall. Not the streets."

"East wall," Hana said.

"East wall," I said.

---

I put my hand flat on the face of it.

There is nothing to press. The silver came up under my palm and started at the bottom and went to the top in about two seconds, four faces at once, and the light in it is the colour of nothing in that city.

And the vibration came up through my boots before the light had finished.

It is low. It is lower than a sound. It is in the paving and it is in the ash.

You can see it in the ash, which is the worst part, because a ring of the surface around that pillar went smooth and stayed smooth.

---

Then nothing happened for a long time.

Twenty seconds. Forty.

"How long did you wait on yours," I said.

"Nine minutes."

"Nine?"

"They had a fight." Hana had her back to the pillar and her eyes on the widest of the five streets. "We stood here for nine minutes and nothing came, and I have spent a year telling myself that was luck and not judgement."

Sixty seconds. Ninety.

---

The ash is moving wrong at the mouth of the second street.

That is what I told myself for about four seconds, and then I stopped telling myself anything, because the pillar went.

The silver came up to twice the brightness it had been, all four faces, and something opened.

It is not sound arriving. It is the absence of a thing you had not noticed was there, a sort of pressure coming off both ears at once, and then there were people in that square who were not standing in it.

---

*"Pillar four, western Outer City. Krüger. Who is on this?"*

His voice is in the middle of the square rather than in my head, and it is coming off the pillar the way light comes off a lamp.

"Nolan. Arai and Sokolov with me. Ash Side."

*"Ash. Confirmed."* No relief in it at all. *"Order. Threat first."*

"Threat. One Warden, Level Eighteen, western market avenue, dealt with. Nothing in contact now. Three approach streets to this square are clear as of four minutes ago."

*"Level Eighteen."*

"Level Eighteen."

*"Ours was twenty."* A pause of about half a second. *"Location."*

---

"Location. Civic square, first mapped pillar, about one kilometre east of our arrival point. Arrival was the market avenue in the western Outer City."

*"Same for us. Route."*

"Route. Fourth alley off the market avenue is under a two-storey collapse. Not on the four-day map. We went round through a building line."

"Courtyard on that line has a buried fountain basin at exactly surface level and it would have taken somebody’s leg. Arai called it off your maps."

There was a second voice then, further back, quick.

*"Say the courtyard again, which one."*

"Second building in from the western frontage, three doors, twenty metres square."

*"Got it."*

---

*"Injuries,"* Krüger said.

"None. One impact on me, thirty-eight, no treatment used. Arai and Sokolov untouched. Sokolov has spent about a fifth holding a ceiling."

*"Ours. Marchand took a fall and has a bad wrist and is being annoying about whether it counts. Viteri and I are clean. Nobody has used anything from a kit."*

"Understood."

*"Right,"* he said. *"Now yours is going to be different from ours and we need that quickly. Marchand."*

---

*"Stone Side is easy to walk and horrible to be in."*

Theo, and he was talking faster than Krüger but he was inside the order, which I noticed.

*"The streets are intact. All of them. Paving, bridges, everything, you could get a cart down here. And there are mechanisms running in the buildings. Not all, but a lot, and they make noise, and the noise moves."*

"Meaning?"

*"Meaning I have had six signatures inside forty metres twice in an hour and neither time was it people."* A breath.

*"And the Wardens here patrol. Routes. Fixed ones. We have watched two of them go past the same corner about eleven minutes apart, twice."*

---

That is worth more than anything on my side of this conversation.

"So you can predict them."

*"We can predict them and we cannot avoid them, because an intact street has no rubble in it and nowhere to be."* Theo again.

*"You have got a burned city full of holes to stand in. We have got a clean one with nothing in it and a thing coming round the corner every eleven minutes."*

*"Objective,"* Krüger said, and the word cut Theo off cleanly, and Theo let it.

---

"Objective. Severed Canal, western crossing. From our side it is the only route on the map that goes anywhere."

*"Same objective, different problem. Ours first."*

*"The canal here is full. Dark water, wall to wall, I would not put a depth on it. There is a bridge at the western crossing and it is up."*

"Raised?"

*"Raised and locked. We have got into the gatehouse on the near side and it is intact and the counterweight mechanism is in a chamber we cannot open. The door into it is not a door on this side. It is stone."*

---

"Ours is dry," I said.

*"How dry."*

"Bone. Hana’s map has no crossing at all on our side, because we do not need a bridge, we need a way down and a way up, and the walls are eleven metres of dressed stone with nothing on them."

*"So you cannot cross a canal with no water in it."*

"We can get down it. There is a difference between eleven metres down and eleven metres up on the far side, and two of us do not have an acceleration."

There was a pause on the other side of that and I could hear them talking to each other with the connection open and could not make out any of it.

---

Then Theo, and he was audibly excited and audibly keeping it inside four items.

*"Right. Route. The gatehouse here has a plan on the wall. Actual plan, cut into the stone, of the whole structure, and it is not in the public guide because nobody has bothered to copy a wall out."*

"Go on."

*"There is a maintenance chamber under the western mechanism. Under it, below the level of the gatehouse floor, with a passage running out of it through the canal wall."*

---

*"The chamber is in the same place in both,"* Krüger said. *"It has to be. Everything else has been."*

"And on your side it is sealed behind a stone wall that used to be a door."

*"And on yours,"* he said, *"that gatehouse has burned."*

---

I got it about a second before he finished saying it and I found that my hand had closed.

"If it is open on our side we can get into the chamber."

*"And release the counterweight from underneath, which drops the bridge here."*

"And the mechanism moving is what opens the maintenance passage through the canal wall on ours."

*"That is the guess,"* Krüger said. *"I want to be exact about that word. Nobody in that guide has done this. We have a plan cut into a wall and one floor that has burned, and we are assuming the rest."*

---

There it was, in about ninety seconds of a conversation through a black stone column.

I have a dry canal and no way up the far wall. They have water and a bridge they cannot lower.

The thing that solves mine is under their feet behind a stone wall. The thing that solves theirs is in a burned building I have not reached yet.

Neither half of that is visible from either side and neither half is guessable.

Sixty years and it took them until somebody stood at a pillar and said the word *gatehouse* to somebody who could see a different one.

---

*"Both groups to the western gatehouse,"* Krüger said. *"Next pillar is on the canal approach, marked on both maps, about—"*

"Jace."

Hana’s voice, flat and not loud, from behind my right shoulder.

---

One had come into the square from the second street.

It was thirty metres out and it was walking, with the polearm trailing and the head slightly down, and it had come in while three of us were listening to a man in another world.

Then the fourth street, and the ash at the mouth of it, and a second one came through it about four seconds later.

They are not together. They came out of two different streets at two different times and neither of them has looked at the other.

They have both looked at the pillar.

---

"Anton."

"Third one." He had already turned. "Behind the first. Forty metres, in the street, not out of it yet."

*"Nolan. Say again, we did not get that."*

The silver is still up. The connection is still open and Krüger has not given me the location of the pillar on the canal approach, and the man who has the plan of that gatehouse in his head has not finished describing it.

A ninety-second transmission window is a number three men on a forum could not agree on, and ours was running out.

---

Hana had her blade out and had put herself between the pillar and the second street without being asked, which is the wrong place for a woman who cannot fight and exactly the right place for the only person here who has done this before.

"We do not leave," she said. "Not until it is finished. Otherwise we are going to the canal with half of it."

"Agreed."

"East wall after," Sokolov said. "Not the streets."

"East wall after."

---

I put both gauntlets up and got my feet into the ash and put the smooth ring of the pillar’s vibration behind me.

Thirty metres. Twenty-five. Forty.

Three of them, from three directions, into an open square with no rubble in it and nothing to put my back against except two metres of black stone that is the only reason any of us are standing here.

The first one’s head came round and steadied and stopped.

Then the second one’s did.