Chapter 137 - 135 — The Counterweight I

**POV: Jace**

---

"Krüger. We have three coming in. Keep talking."

*"Say again."*

"Three Wardens, three streets, into this square, now. Do not stop transmitting. We are holding the pillar."

There was about a half-second on the other end of that and I could hear him deciding not to argue.

*"Understood. Marchand, gatehouse, from the top, slowly enough that he can hear it through a fight."*

---

The first one came off the second street and the other two were still walking.

That is the thing about three of them. They do not arrive together and they do not wait for each other, and the gaps between them are exactly long enough to make you think you have time for the one in front of you.

Hana had already moved.

"North one is the fast approach. That street is wider. He will get here before the far one."

"How do you know."

"Because he has further to come and he has started to lengthen."

---

The first hook came across and I did not go under it this time, because I had Hana at nine metres behind me and there was nothing behind her.

I got the outside of my left forearm into the shaft rather than the head, which is a different thing entirely.

I turned it about thirty degrees so that it went past my hip and into the paving, instead of past my hip and into her.

The stone took a wedge out of itself the size of a dinner plate.

My forearm took everything else.

> **[Health: 462/500 → 431/500.]**

The plate did not move. The bone underneath went numb from the wrist to the elbow for about two seconds and then came back angry, and Mercer’s sentence is going to be with me for the rest of my life.

---

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

> **[Mana: 258/270 → 252/270.]**

I went for the knee rather than anything useful, because the neck was four feet above me and the second one was coming in on my right and I needed the first one to stop being able to cross the square.

The bronze at the back of that joint took three seconds and bent, and after that the leg came through late on every stride.

Then I was somewhere else, because it had got its hand up and the second one had arrived.

---

*"Gatehouse is two storeys on a stone foot,"* Theo was saying, into all of this, from another world. *"Machine floor above, counterweight pit below the machine floor. The pit is the thing we cannot get into."*

"Go on."

*"There is a shaft. The counterweight runs in a shaft down through the foot of the structure and out into the canal wall. It is not a room, it is a column."*

---

"Anton, left one, he is coming round Hana."

"Yes."

He did not stop it. He caught the polearm at the top of the arc with two anchors.

The Warden came round with it and put its shoulder into the space where the weapon should have gone, which is what it should have done, and Hana was already not there.

She had moved eight metres before it turned, and she had moved to a place where the low wall on the east side was behind her and a statue base was on her left.

There is no version of that approach where anything gets round her without coming through a gap a metre wide.

She has not touched her blade.

That is the whole of what she is doing and it is worth more than the blade.

---

The third one came out of the north street at about eleven seconds after the second, and by then I had two of them inside six metres and one of them had a bad leg.

I put both boots flat on the paving.

> **[Ability Activated: Antaeus.]**

> **[Mana: 252/270 → 240/270.]**

The stone came up through my legs and into my hips and the whole of me stopped being a thing that could be moved.

The bad-legged one arrived and put the hook into my crossed forearms, and I did not go backward.

Four seconds of that and the paving under my left boot cracked in a ring and my knees complained and nothing else happened at all, and that is the single most useful thing that Ability has ever done for me.

---

Then the second one stopped trying to come through me and went round.

Not round me. Round toward Hana, on the outside, at the angle where I would have to turn to do anything about it.

I turned.

> **[Antaeus: condition broken.]**

The foot came off the stone and the ground let go of my legs.

The third Warden had been watching that whole exchange from the north with its slit black the entire time, and it went from a walk to full speed inside a distance I did not measure, because I was already moving.

It put its shoulder into me while I had one boot in the air.

> **[Health: 431/500 → 389/500.]**

---

I went four metres and came down on my side in the ash and got up on the second attempt.

That is what three of them does. It is not that any one of them is worse than the first one.

It is that the moment you commit to anything at all, the other two get a free look at whichever side you have stopped defending.

Four seconds of standing still cost me forty-two, and I will not be standing still again today.

---

*"The brake,"* Theo said. *"There is a brake on the counterweight. Big lever arm and a pawl, drawn on the wall plan as a separate item, which means it was serviced separately, which means there is a way to it."*

*"From the pit,"* Krüger said. *"From inside the shaft."*

"Say that again in eight seconds."

---

Bad leg first, because a thing that cannot reposition is a thing I can choose.

> **[Ability Activated: Snare.]**

> **[Mana: 240/270 → 230/270.]**

I put it on the good foot.

The bad leg was already late.

Fixing the good one meant that for about three quarters of a second the entire weight of that thing stood on the joint I had already bent, and it did what a bent joint does under a load it was not designed for.

The knee folded sideways and it went down onto it.

> **[Talaria activated.]**

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

> **[Mana: 230/270 → 224/270.]**

Five metres. I came in over the top of the shoulder while it was still on one knee and put the right hand into the collar seam twice.