Chapter 145 - 143 — The Cost of Crossing III (Bonus)

He put it across the gap.

Not on the Warden. Across the gap itself, from jamb to jamb, at about the height of a chest, in a hole a metre wide in a wall three quarters of a metre thick.

Seven feet of it arrived into that at full speed.

The anchor went almost immediately. The wall did not.

It went into the anchor, and the anchor went, and by then its shoulders were in a gap that its shoulders do not fit through and its own speed had put them there.

---

That bought us eleven seconds and it emptied him.

"Anton."

"Nothing," he said. "I have nothing. Do not ask."

---

We went east down the lane and we did not fight anything else.

That is a decision and I want it written down, because there was a second one at the end of that lane that I could have taken.

And I had two hundred and seventy Health, a man beside me with no mana at all, and a woman who has spent four hours keeping all three of us standing.

I went round it.

It came after us for about forty metres and then stopped at the edge of whatever ground it had decided belonged to it, and we kept going, and nobody said anything about it for four streets.

---

We got two of them in the range and neither of them was clean.

> **[Warden eliminated.]**

>

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

> **[Warden eliminated.]**

>

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

> **[EXP: 185/1,400 → 365/1,400.]**

Which is eleven hundred metres of running and a great deal of somebody else’s mana for a hundred and eighty EXP and a shutter opening in a city I cannot see.

And it was worth it, and I would do it again, and both of those things are new.

---

The next pillar is at the eastern edge of the Inner City on the near side of the last district, and we reached it about fifty minutes later.

They were already there.

*"Nolan."*

"Krüger."

*"Positions."*

"Eastern Inner City. Last pillar before the Spire district on my map."

*"Same. We came out of that lane and took the turn and we have not seen anything since. Viteri walked the whole of it."*

---

Then Theo, and he had got about half a sentence out before Krüger let him.

*"That shutter. That shutter had not moved in sixty years and you took the dog off it with your hands."*

"With a fire and then with my hands."

*"There is a man on the board who has been to Two four times and he has a whole post about how none of the service machinery works any more."*

*"It does not work on our side,"* Mara said. *"It works on his."*

*"That is what I am saying. That is exactly what I am saying and I want it written down."*

---

"Viteri."

*"Go."*

"How is the leg."

There was a short pause and I could hear her deciding how to answer it, and I could hear her decide to answer it the way Hana had asked her to.

*"It is worse than it was four hours ago and it is not worse in a way that matters yet."*

*"I have been walking on it for two and a half hours and I have not run and I have not turned on it. It is bleeding again, a little, and Krüger is looking at me while I say that."*

*"She is."*

*"And I would rather be here with a bad leg than at a terminal with a withdrawal."*

---

Hana said, "Thank you," and meant it, and then went straight on.

"Pressure and a fresh pad when you stop. Not while you are moving. And Krüger, you are looking at that leg every forty minutes whether she offers it or not."

*"Every forty minutes."*

*"Marchand does it,"* Mara said. *"Krüger tells me he is fine when he is not and I want the one who says everything out loud."*

*"That is fair,"* Krüger said, without any offence in it at all.

---

*"Right,"* he said. *"Spire district. What have you got."*

"I am about to have it. Give me twenty minutes."

*"Next window at that distance is the plaza pillar on both maps. Do not go into the plaza before it."*

"Understood."

*"Nolan."*

"Go on."

*"That was good work."* Nothing in his voice moved. *"Do not let it make you comfortable."*

---

The streets go up for the last four hundred metres.

The Inner City sits on a rise and the rise is the reason the Spire is where it is, and you feel it in your legs before you see it in the ground.

Then the buildings stop.

---

It is a plaza and it is enormous.

Three hundred metres across at least, roughly circular, paved in slabs a metre and a half square, and the edge of it is a ring of buildings that have all been the same height and are now all different.

Nothing has been built on it. Not a stall, not a base, not a wall. Whoever laid that plaza out kept it empty on purpose and it has stayed empty.

Ash lies across the whole of it in a thin even sheet with nothing to catch it, and the wind moves it in slow sheets from the north.

---

And in the middle of it the Spire comes out of the ground.

I have been looking at that thing since the moment I arrived in this city and I have not once seen the bottom of it until now.

It does not taper from the ground. It comes up out of the plaza in a single mass about sixty metres across, straight-sided for the first two hundred metres, and only then does it begin to narrow.

You cannot see the top from the plaza. You have to walk back four streets to see the top.

What you can see from the plaza is the break. Two hundred and something metres up, the whole of the upper third leans out over the northern side of the city, and from directly underneath it you are looking at the underside of a thing the size of a hill that is not attached to anything.

---

The entrance is on the western face and it is exactly where the map says.

An opening about twelve metres across and eight high, square-headed, with a broad flight of shallow steps going up to it and then going down inside.

It is dark past the first four metres.

And carved above it, three times the size of any of the others I have seen, there is that mark. Four strokes, three curved and one straight through the middle at an angle that stops looking wrong once you have seen it twice.

---

"That is the chamber," Hana said. "Down those steps and under it. Ours is in the same place on the same face and theirs is on theirs."

"How far down."

"Further than you want."

---

There are six Wardens on that plaza.

I counted them twice from the mouth of the street and got six both times. Then Sokolov got seven.

I looked again and he was right, because the seventh is standing still against the ring of buildings on the north side and I had been reading it as a statue.

Four of them are walking. Two are at the foot of the steps, one on either side, and they have not moved since we got here.

The seventh has not moved either.

---

Four hundred metres of open paving with nothing on it, and two things standing on the steps, and no rubble anywhere between the street and the entrance.

That is not an accident. Somebody built that plaza empty and something has been standing on those steps ever since.

---

*"Say the plaza,"* Krüger said, when the window came up.

I said it. All of it, the count and the positions and the two on the steps and the one against the buildings.

*"Ours is the same,"* he said. *"Six moving, two static at the entrance. We do not have your seventh, or we have not found it."*

"Then find it."

*"We are looking."*

---

*"Distance to your entrance,"* he said.

"Four hundred metres of open ground."

*"Ours is four hundred and it is intact paving and there is nothing to stand behind."*

"How long."

There was a pause I did not like.

*"At her pace, and not in a straight line, and not through the middle. An hour. Possibly more."*

---

An hour.

I can be at the bottom of those steps in about ninety seconds if I am willing to spend everything I have left, and it would not matter at all.

There is no line anywhere in that clear condition that pays a man for being early. One from each side, both chambers, inside the same window.

I could stand at the bottom of that stair for an hour with my hand on whatever is down there and it would do precisely nothing.

What I can do is spend the hour.

---

"Then we do not go in," I said. "We go and stand on it."

*"Say that properly."*

"You need an hour to cross your plaza. I need ninety seconds to cross mine. So I spend the hour taking the two off my steps and working out which way the four walk, and when you are at your entrance, my side is already clear and I am waiting at the door."

*"And if it goes wrong on your side while we are still crossing ours."*

"Then it goes wrong at the end of an hour instead of at the end of two, and you will hear about it at the next window either way."

---

Krüger took about four seconds with that and I could hear him running it against something.

*"Arai. Sokolov. He has just volunteered the three of you for seven Wardens on open paving. Say what you think and say it now."*

"Two of the seven," Sokolov said. "Not all of them. And I need the hour as much as anybody, because I am empty and I come back slowly."

"And I want him doing it while I can still see him," Hana said, "rather than in forty minutes when he has decided on his own that he has to."

---

*"Then it is agreed and I am going to say the unpleasant part."* Krüger’s voice did not change for it.

*"Viteri is the slowest thing in this party and she is in the half that cannot be helped. Every plan from here is built around an hour we do not control."*

*"I am aware,"* Mara said.

*"I know you are. I am saying it so that nobody has to say it later with less time."*

---

The silver went out and left three of us at the mouth of a street.

Hana had her pack open on the stone and was counting what was in it out loud without being asked, which is the first time she has done that.

Sokolov was sitting with his back against a wall and both hands open on his knees, doing nothing at all, deliberately.

Two hundred and seventy-one out of five hundred and ten. A hundred and seventy-four out of two hundred and eighty. Three points I still have not spent.

---

Four hundred metres of empty grey, and the two on the steps, and above all of it two hundred metres of stone with the top third hanging off it over a dead city.

"How long do you want," I said to Sokolov.

He looked at the plaza rather than at me.

"Twenty minutes and I have a third of it back. Give me that and I can take a leg out from under one of them while you are busy with the other."

"Twenty minutes."

Then I sat down on the step beside him and started counting the walkers.