Chapter 147 - 145 — The Last Approach II

We went at the top of the turn.

Sixty metres of open plaza with three people on it and the ash coming across at knee height from the north, and for about four seconds nothing in that plaza did anything at all.

Then the loose one had us.

It came round with the head first, the way they do, and it was about ninety metres out and it was already at full speed before the head had finished coming round.

---

"Now."

Sokolov put both anchors into it at about seventy metres.

Not on the ground. On the thing. One between the ankle and the knee of the leading leg and one across the hip, and what that does to a body travelling at that speed is not stop it.

It puts the top half somewhere the bottom half has not agreed to.

It went over. Seven feet of it came down onto a plaza with nothing on it and slid about four metres on its own shoulder, and the polearm went out of its hand and went further.

---

"Four left," Sokolov said, and he was already running.

We got thirty of the sixty metres.

Then the one on the second step came off the steps.

---

It did not accelerate. That is the thing I noticed even while it was happening.

It came down the eleven steps at a walk, unhurried, and reached the bottom course and turned toward us and only then did it stop being a thing that walks.

The other one stayed exactly where it was on the fourth step.

So that is what they are for. One of them comes. One of them does not, ever, for any reason, and that is a thing I now know and cannot use.

---

It arrived and it arrived at Hana.

I have no idea whether it chose her. I have thought about it since and I do not know, and it does not matter, because what it meant was that the fastest of the three of us was on the wrong side of it.

> **[Talaria activated.]**

Eleven metres, and the arrest went into the ankle and up through a hip that has been doing this all day and is going to send me a bill for it.

I got there about a third of a second before the hook did.

---

I did not block it.

I have two hundred and forty grams a side of a metal that does not break, and I got both forearms into the shaft rather than the head, and it still took me off my feet and put me down on the paving on my back with Hana behind me.

> **[Health: 271/510 → 227/510.]**

The plates did not move. The left forearm went numb from the wrist up and stayed numb for about four seconds, and I am going to find out tomorrow whether that is a bruise or something else.

Mercer was right and he is going to be right about it for the rest of my life.

---

I got up inside the recovery.

Three quarters of a second. It is the only part of that cycle that belongs to me and I have been waiting all day to spend it properly.

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

> **[Mana: 204/280 → 194/280.]**

Rear foot, the one carrying it, at four metres.

---

"Left," Hana said, from somewhere behind and low. "The second one is off the steps. Twenty-two metres."

So it does come off. Eventually. For this.

"Anton, do not spend anything on that one."

"I was not going to."

---

> **[Talaria activated.]**

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

> **[Mana: 194/280 → 188/280.]**

Four metres, in over the shoulder while the fixed foot was still an argument it was having with itself.

Collar seam. Three seconds, and it was enough, and the orange went out of the chest fractures from the top down.

> **[Warden eliminated.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 90.]**

>

> **[EXP: 365/1,400 → 455/1,400.]**

---

It came down across the bottom two steps and took the corner off the lowest course with it, and about a cubic metre of that step came away and went across the paving in pieces.

Which is the part I did not think about.

Fifty metres north, both of the outer walkers turned at the same time.

---

"Down," I said. "Now. Do not take the second one."

"It is eleven metres."

"It is eleven metres and it is coming and there are three more behind it, and the steps are twenty metres deep and we are not fighting a plaza."

Hana was already past me.

---

We went up the eleven steps and down into the opening with a Warden eleven metres behind us and another two coming across the plaza at a distance I did not stop to measure.

The last thing I saw of that plaza was the one on the fourth step, still on the fourth step, which had never moved at all.

Then the light went orange to nothing and we were inside.

---

The passage goes down.

Not stairs. A ramp, about four metres wide, dressed stone, running straight down into the foot of that tower at about one in eight for perhaps forty metres.

There is no door on it and there never was. It was built to have things carried down it.

The walls are cut and there are brackets in them at intervals that once held something and hold nothing now.

And it is dark about eight metres in, and stays dark, and the only reason we could see anything was Sokolov’s light in front and mine behind.

---

Then it opens out.

The chamber is round and it is enormous and it is directly under the middle of the Spire, and the first thing that hits you is that the ceiling is the underside of the tower.

It is one piece. A single dressed vault about forty metres across with no column anywhere in the middle of it, coming down to a wall that goes all the way round.

There are cracks in it. Three of them, running out from the northern side toward the centre and stopping about two thirds of the way across, and they are wide enough at the wall to put a hand into.

That is the break, two hundred metres above us, arriving at the bottom.

---

The floor is stone and it is not flat. It falls very slightly toward the centre from all directions, which I did not notice until I put something down.

Round the wall, at intervals, there are bronze structures.

I do not know what they were. They are frames, about three metres high, with shafts and wheels and quadrants in them, and every one of them is seized and four of them have come apart.

There are eight. Two are completely down and lying across the floor in front of their own mountings, and those two are the reason there is anything in that room to stand behind.

---

And in the exact centre, where the floor is lowest, there is a disc.

About four metres across, set into the floor, black, with a broad silver line cut into it in a circle a metre inside its edge.

It is the same black and the same silver as the pillars.

---

And beside it, four metres from the edge of the disc, on the northern side, there is a pillar.

Two metres, square in section, thin silver lines down all four faces and over the top, no ash on it, undamaged.

It is dark.

---

"That is it," Hana said.

She went down the last of the slope and stood at the edge of the disc and did not step onto it.

"Activation point in the centre of the chamber, pillar beside it. Both sides the same. That is what it says and that is what it is."

"You have not been in one before."

"No. My party got to a canal." She turned round once, slowly, taking the wall in. "Four hundred and six threads and I have read every one that mentions this room and there are eleven of them."

---

I went round the wall.

One entrance. The ramp we came down, four metres wide, and that is the whole of it. Eight bronze frames, no doors behind any of them, no openings anywhere in a forty-metre circle of dressed stone.

"One way in," I said.

"One way in," Sokolov said, from the other side.

"Which is good."

"Which is very good and it is also the only place anything can come from, so we will be looking at it for however long this takes."

---

I did not touch the disc.

I want to put down why, because I stood beside it for about four seconds and it would have been extremely easy.

Both chambers, inside the same window. That is the condition and it is the only thing the Tower has said about it.

Nobody has published how long a window is. Four men on that board could not agree on how long a pillar stays lit and three of them had counted. Nobody has ever written down the number for this, and I am not going to be the man who finds it out by guessing with five other people’s afternoon in his hands.

When their pillar lights, ours lights. Then we go together.

Until then it is a black stone column in a dark room and the most important thing I have ever looked at.