NOVGO.NET Chapter 125 - 123 — No Protection I
**POV: Jace**
---
The thread opened and the first thing in it was not a map.
It was a box at the top, above the title, above the author’s name, above everything.
> **BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE.**
>
> **There is no Floor Protection on Floor Two.**
>
> **Fatal damage is fatal. You can withdraw an attempt if you are able to. You cannot withdraw after you are dead.**
>
> **If you have only cleared Floor One, read that again.**
I read it again.
Then a panel came up over the corner of it, because somebody on that site had noticed I was on it.
---
> **Kavanagh: you are on here**
> **Kavanagh: i can see the little light**
I have known that man for about thirty hours and eight minutes of that was him trying to remove my head.
> **Nolan: I am reading about Floor Two.**
> **Kavanagh: HA**
> **Kavanagh: you got to the box yet**
> **Nolan: I am looking at the box.**
> **Kavanagh: good. thats the whole floor. everything under it is detail**
---
> **Nolan: You have not cleared One. How do you know anything about Two?**
> **Kavanagh: i have been in that staging district four times mate. you hear things**
> **Kavanagh: you know what nobody does in there? nobody talks about two the way they talk about one**
> **Kavanagh: on one people argue about placement and gear and who got done by who. its a sport**
> **Kavanagh: two comes up and the table goes quiet and somebody changes it**
> **Kavanagh: because on one you come back. on two somebody at that table has a name they are not saying**
---
He went quiet for about forty seconds and then came back with something else, which is how that man’s head works.
> **Kavanagh: right so heres my actual question**
> **Kavanagh: are you going**
> **Nolan: Eventually.**
> **Kavanagh: see i would go tomorrow if they would let me in**
> **Kavanagh: and i am aware that is the exact reason they should not let me in**
> **Kavanagh: anyway. dont die, i want the rematch**
Then he was gone, and I sat there with the box still open on the screen.
---
I went and found four more accounts before I let myself believe it, because a stranger with a Bureau number against his name is still a stranger.
Three by people who cleared. One by a man who withdrew at the Severed Canal with two of his six still walking and then wrote eleven paragraphs about why.
All four say it. Two of them say it in the opening line.
The withdrawal account says it twice, and the second time it says it like this.
> I have had four people tell me I quit early. Two of them have not been on Two. One of them has and should know better.
>
> There is no light. Nobody stands up afterward with a bruise and a failure logged. You carry them out or you leave them there, and I have done both, and one of those is worse.
---
Floor One catches the blow. I have watched it do that perhaps thirty times in nine hours.
Floor Two does not catch anything, and I had to sit with what that means for me specifically, because there is a version of this where I get it wrong in a way that kills somebody else.
On Floor One I lost two Abilities to that rule. Neither of them can fire without a death the Tower would not permit.
On Floor Two both of them come back.
---
That is worse.
The first feeling was relief and the first feeling was wrong.
If I go into that city alone and it goes badly, I die, and twelve hours later I am sitting on the end of this bed with the whole day in front of me again.
If I go in with five other people and it goes badly, I die, and twelve hours later I am sitting on the end of this bed.
They are not.
---
There is no line anywhere in my Status that extends any part of that to a man standing next to me.
So the thing I have spent a month treating as an expensive way of buying information stops existing the moment somebody else is on the ground with me.
I cannot walk a corner to find out what is round it. I cannot take a fight I am unsure of to see what the thing does.
Every one of those is now a bet with somebody else’s life on the other side, and I would not be present for the part where they pay it.
I wrote that down on paper, four words, and put it where I have to look at it.
---
Then I read the floor properly and discovered that the guide is the calmest thing in that entire section.
Underneath it there are eleven hundred replies and a great many of them are people who have been in there disagreeing with each other.
> Route through the eastern canal crossing is four hours shorter and I will keep saying it.
> It is four hours shorter for Stone. It is not four hours shorter for Ash, because on Ash that crossing is a hole. You lost nobody on that route. Say which side you were on before you recommend a route.
> Fair. Stone.
> Then you have recommended half a route to people who will not know which half they get.
That exchange is eight years old and it has a moderator note under it marking it as the reason the site now requires you to state your side.
---
There is an argument further down that nobody has won.
> Pillar stays lit about four minutes.
> Two and a half.
> I have it at a hundred and ten seconds and I counted, because I was the one counting.
> All three of you are right and that is the problem. Nobody has timed it against anything except their own nerves. Assume ninety and be pleased if it is more.
I read that four times. Three people who have all been inside that city, all certain, all giving different numbers, and the fourth man is the only one being useful.
The guide upstairs says "a few minutes." That is what a guide does. It smooths it.
Down here it is not smooth, and the unsmooth version is the one I want.
---
And then a post from somebody who had clearly never been.
> Wardens are basically slow. You can walk past them. Half the deaths on Two are people fighting things they did not need to fight.
Sixty replies under it, and the first one sets the tone.
> They are slow until the slit goes amber. Then you have about a fifth of a second and you are wrong about everything.
> Black slit, it has not decided. Amber slit, it has, and the thing is already on you.
> He is not wrong that half the deaths are unnecessary fights. He is wrong about why, which is that people think they have time.
I put the amber thing in my head and left it there, because that is the single most useful sentence anybody in this section has written.
---
There was one more thing in that section I could not resolve from a screen, so I went downstairs.
---
Mercer had a cuirass on the fourth bench with the back of it toward the room, and he did not look up.
"They are not ready."
"I know they are not ready. I have a question."
"Then ask it standing there. Do not come round the bench."
I stayed where I was.
"If a thing is wearing overlapping plate, pale, something like glazed ceramic, with bronze underneath at the joints. Can I punch through it."
---
He put the scribe down.
That is the first time I have seen him stop for a question rather than for a piece of work.
"You are going to Two."
"Not this week."
"Wardens." He said it the way you say a word you have said a great many times. "Who told you glazed ceramic?"
"Four separate accounts."
"Then four separate accounts have looked at it and guessed, and the guess is close enough." He wiped his hands and came round to my side of the bench, which he had just told me not to do. "Here. I have had this since March."
---
He turned the cuirass over.
There was a hole in the upper chest on the left, about the width of two fingers, and the metal around it had gone in and then come back out.
"Look at the edges."
"They are turned outward."
"That is not a cut. Something went in, and then a man pulled." He put a finger through it without ceremony. "Hook on a polearm."
"It goes in, it sets, and then the thing holding it does not stab you again. It takes you off your feet and drags you where it wants you."
"And the man wearing it."
"Walked in here on his own feet and has not been up the Tower since." He put the cuirass down. "So. Your question."
---
"Can I punch through the plate."
"No. Do not try, and do not let anybody tell you that you nearly did." He held his own hand up, flat, and tapped the back of it.
"A plate like that spreads the impact sideways into the plates beside it. Your fist arrives, the whole shell takes it, and nothing underneath the shell has had a bad day."
"So the joints."
"So the joints. Bronze. Bronze is a completely different argument." He almost looked pleased about it.
"Bronze does not spread anything. It takes a load in one place and deforms in that place, and once it has deformed the joint does not travel through its full range any more."
---
"How many would it take."
"Depends what you are hitting it with, and you have not told me the interesting part yet." He looked at me. "The fire. Does it go into a thing, or does it sit on the surface of a thing?"
"It goes in. On hide it opens it. On plate armour a good deal comes back at me."
"Then it will come straight back at you off that shell, and it will go into bronze like a candle into butter." He picked the scribe back up.
"So do not fight the outside of them. You have no business fighting the outside of them."
"Neck seam."
"Neck seam if you can reach it and you probably cannot, they are seven feet plus. Knees, elbows, the join at the hip. And anything already missing a plate, which on one side of that floor is most of them."
---
I had not told him there were two sides.
"You know about the Ash ones."
"I know some of them come back in worse condition and everybody describes them as broken." He shrugged. "I do not need to know why."
"I need to know that half my Two customers have burn damage on their gear and half have not, and I have been quoting two different prices for four years without anybody telling me the reason."
"There are two versions of the city."
He stopped again.
Then he said, "Say that again slowly," and I did, and he listened to the whole thing without interrupting once, which I did not expect.
At the end of it he looked down at the cuirass with the hole in it for a moment.
"Four years," he said. "That explains the prices."
---
"They will not be ready before you go, if you are going soon."
"I am not going soon."
"How long."
"I do not know yet." That was not evasion and he did not take it as one. "It depends on five people I have not met."
"Six on that floor."
"Six."
"Then get me a date when you have one, and if the date is inside nine days say so now rather than in seven." He was already turning back to the bench.
"And do not let anybody sell you a weapon for it. You will be tempted. A man who has punched for six years does not learn a hook in a fortnight. He learns how to be killed holding one."
---
I went back up and read the rest of it, and the rest of it is the part that made the last sixty years of Floor Two reports contradict each other.
The guide does it in one sentence.
> **A party of six does not arrive together.**
The Tower takes your six and puts three in each of two versions of the same city.
Same twelve kilometres. Same streets, same bridges, same Spire in the same place.
The same city at two different points in its life.
---
The photographs are the part that does it to you.
Stone Side is that city shortly before whatever happened. Pale paving cut square with the joints still tight. Aqueducts on arches down the eastern quarter still carrying water. Bridges intact. Bronze mechanisms indoors that still turn when something turns them.
White sky, no sun, no shadows worth the name, and the light does not change all day.
Market stalls with the frames still standing and the awnings gone. A fountain that is dry and clean rather than dry and filthy. Eight statues on the bridge piers, all of the same figure, and nobody has established what the figure is.
Workshops with the tools laid out in an order somebody understood.
Rooms with the furniture where somebody left it.
People were in that city. That is what the photographs do. It is not a set of rooms built to be a challenge.
---
Ash Side is the same twelve kilometres afterward.
The buildings have come down inward rather than outward. The streets are under grey ash, shin-deep in the open and much worse where it has drifted.
The Severed Canal is mostly dry, and the drop exposes things that are underwater in the other one.
Half the Inner City has burned to black foundation stone, so you can walk across where four streets used to be and read the shape of them at your feet.
Dark orange sky. No sun in that one either.
The Spire is standing and the top third of it has split and hangs out over the city at an angle, and it has been in that position for as long as that place has been in that state.