Chapter 150 - 148 — The Two Sides of Victory II

"We are holding it."

"We are holding it for another forty minutes at this rate, and I am being generous with the forty." She had come round the disc while she said it, which is the first time she has come forward all evening. "Three of them cost you a hundred Health and fifty Mana and a torso piece. There were seven on that plaza."

"Four left."

"Four left, and I have no idea whether the walkers on the far side have come round, and neither do you."

She stopped four metres from me and did not go any closer to the gap.

"So the question is not whether we can hold it. The question is what we are holding it for."

"For them."

"For them to arrive. And you do not know where they are."

---

That is the part I have been putting off for two hours and she put it in front of me in eleven words.

"No."

"Say it properly."

"I do not know where they are. I know where they were two hours ago and I know she was walking on a bad leg across four hundred metres of open paving, and I have not had a word since."

"And the window."

---

"The window is the reason I have not touched that disc."

I went and stood beside it and I did not put a hand on it, which I have now not done about forty times.

"Both chambers inside the same window. Nobody has published how long the window is. If I open it now and they are twenty minutes out, I have spent it, and I do not know whether it comes back."

"So you are waiting for a pillar that has been dark for two hours."

"Yes."

"While the thing we are standing in gets smaller."

---

"Give me a number," I said to Sokolov. "Not an estimate. If I ask you to hold that gap while I do something, how long."

He thought about it properly. He always does and it has never once been irritating.

"Thirty seconds of one of them not getting through. Then four minutes where I can make one of them slower and take one off its feet, once, at a moment I choose."

"And after that."

"After that I am a man sitting on a bronze frame."

---

"That is four minutes and thirty seconds of a defence for a window nobody has ever timed."

"Yes."

"Then I am not opening it on four and a half minutes and a guess."

"Then do not," Sokolov said. "But do not tell me you are waiting for certainty, because there is not any and there is not going to be."

---

The fourth one came down the ramp while we were saying that.

It came through the widened gap at full speed and it did not go for me.

It went for Sokolov, because he was sitting down.

---

I was eleven metres away on the wrong side of the disc.

> **[Talaria activated.]**

Eleven metres is more than the room wants to give me and the arrest went into the hip that had already said something, and it said it again, and this time I heard it.

I got there about a third of a second after Sokolov did the only thing available to him, which was put an anchor between that thing’s own knee and the floor at a range of two metres.

It went down onto the knee in front of him.

And Hana was already there, with a hand in the back of his collar, hauling a man who weighs more than she does backward across a stone floor by main strength.

---

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

> **[Mana: 140/280 → 134/280.]**

I put three seconds into the collar seam from above and it was the cleanest thing I have done in six hours and it cost me the rest of the wall.

Because it went down across the second block on its way, and the second block went, and what is left of what we built this afternoon is a heap of stone across the mouth of a four-metre ramp with two gaps in it instead of one.

> **[Health: 131/510 → 97/510.]**

> **[Warden eliminated.]**

>

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

>

> **[EXP: 725/1,400 → 815/1,400.]**

---

I stood up and the room did something unhelpful for about two seconds.

Ninety-seven out of five hundred and ten.

Sokolov was on his back eight metres from where he had been sitting with Hana’s hand still in his collar and both of them looking at the ramp.

And the wall is gone.

---

"Right," I said.

"Say it," Hana said.

"I am opening it."

---

"Good."

"You have been waiting for me to say that for twenty minutes."

"I have been waiting for you to get there, which is not the same thing." She let go of Sokolov’s collar. "If I had told you to do it you would have done it and you would have been wrong, because you would have done it on my nerve instead of your arithmetic."

---

"Anton. Can you keep them off the disc."

He got himself upright against the frame. It took him two attempts.

"Off the disc, yes. Off you, no."

"I am not asking for off me."

"Then yes." He put both hands out and flexed them once. "Four. And I am going to spend them badly and early, because slow and clever is for people with six."

---

"Hana."

"No."

"I have not asked anything."

"You are about to ask whether you should do it or whether you should stay in front of the gap while I do it, and the answer is no." She had already moved to the far side of the disc. "You are the only one of us who can touch that and then still be useful. So touch it and come back."

"And if one of them gets past me while I am standing on it."

"Then it gets past you, and Anton takes its leg, and I am twenty metres away and I run. That is the plan and it is not a good plan and it is the one we have."

---

"One more thing," she said.

"Go on."

"When you are on that disc you finish. Whatever is happening behind you." Nothing moved in her face at all. "If you come off it halfway because somebody is in trouble, we have spent the window and we are all still in this room."

---

I went and stood on it.

It is four metres across and black and it does not feel like anything under a boot. The silver line runs in a circle a metre inside the edge and it is cut about two fingers deep.

There is nothing to press. There was nothing to press on the pillars either.

I put my hand flat in the middle of it and it took about two seconds.

---

> **[Convergence Chamber: Ash.]**

>

> **[Activation confirmed.]**

The silver came up out of the line all the way round, all at once, and went up out of the floor in a wall of light a metre high that I could put my hand through and could not feel.

Then the pillar beside it lit.

Not the communication silver. A single line down one face, and it stayed.

> **[Awaiting corresponding activation: Stone.]**

>

> **[Window: 05:00.]**

---

Five minutes.

Four men on a forum could not agree on ninety seconds for a pillar and nobody has ever written down this number, and it is five minutes, and now I know it and so will everybody.

I got off the disc and went back to the gap.

---

The fifth one came through the left-hand gap at four minutes and twelve.

I do not have a clean account of the next three minutes. I have pieces.

I have Sokolov saying "left" twice and "down" once, and an anchor taking a foot out from under something two metres in front of me.

I have Hana’s voice from behind the disc telling me a thing was coming round the light rather than through it.

I have my own hip going on the second Talaria and me deciding to stop using it.

---

> **[Window: 03:00.]**

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

> **[Mana: 134/280 → 124/280.]**

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

> **[Mana: 124/280 → 116/280.]**

---

I did not kill that one.

I got it onto the floor twice and I could not finish it, because finishing it meant going past the disc and standing where nothing was standing between the ramp and the light.

So I kept it at four metres and I let it have the exchanges, and it took the whole of that side of me apart a piece at a time.

> **[Health: 97/510 → 61/510.]**

---

> **[Window: 02:00.]**

Sixty-one out of five hundred and ten.

There is no light on this floor. Nobody stands up afterward with a bruise and a failure logged.

I have known that for eleven days and it arrived properly at two minutes, in a chamber under a tower, with a thing four metres in front of me that has already hit me three times.

---

*Have they withdrawn.*

That is the thought and I had it once and it took about a second and a half.

It is available from anywhere on this floor. He put it on the table himself this afternoon, flatly, early, the way he puts everything. If her leg had gone in the middle of that plaza he would have taken it and he would have been right.

And there would be no way at all for me to know, because a man who withdraws does not get to tell you.

---

*Or she is forty metres from her own disc and walking.*

Both of those are exactly as likely and the difference between them is five minutes long.

I stopped thinking about it and put my forearm into a polearm shaft, which is the only useful thing available to a man in that position.

> **[Window: 01:00.]**