The Blood Debt (48 page)

The view from the top was spectacular. The Wall curved ahead of him, a graceful arc isolating that corner of the Divide from the rest as effectively as a dam. To his left were the towers of the city, reaching upward for the sky, and to the right was a red and gold wasteland. Two parallel handrails ran along the top of the Wall, protecting pedestrians from a fatal misstep. Gwil unhesitatingly led the visitors between them. A fitful wind snatched at Skender’s robe, making him acutely conscious of where he put his feet.

This is stupid,
he told himself.
I’ve climbed cliffs higher than this in the middle of the night. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

But there was, and he knew it. Back home, the cliffs were natural, not built; there were plenty of handholds; and falling was the only thing to worry about. In Laure, there were hordes of man’kin at the bottom making angry sounds that vibrated through the stone and up his calves.

He hugged the right-hand rail and peered as far over the edge as he dared. The air below was hazy with dust and difficult to see through, but he glimpsed enough to be certain. The stony mass that milled at the base of the Wall was larger than all the previous migrations put together, and more were on their way. The crowd stretched as far as he could see, and in it he saw no sign of Pirelius and the twins.

‘Why?’ he asked, wondering if the vibration he felt beneath his feet really came from the horde below. ‘What are they doing here?’

‘They don’t like us,’ said Gwil. ‘They never have.’

‘But why
now?’

‘I don’t know.’

Skender remembered what Mawson had said about the man’kin in the ruins. ‘Maybe their success in the Aad has gone to their heads. They’ve come to free the stones they think you’re imprisoning in Laure and the Wall.’

‘How? The charms painted on the Wall aren’t the only defences we have. The stones themselves are charmed, just like the gate some of you came through yesterday.’

Shilly stopped to examine a tiny sigil carved into one of the giant slabs. Her fingers softly caressed the ancient grey stone. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘but why would the builders do that?’

She reached out a hand to steady herself as the Wall jolted beneath her. Skender staggered and grabbed the nearest handrail for balance. The hollering of the man’kin rose up over the howling of the alarum.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Gwil.

‘I think,’ Shilly said, ‘that coming up here might have been a very bad idea.’

‘What?’ Skender couldn’t hide the panic in his voice. ‘It was your idea in the first place.’

‘Well, I’ve changed my mind.’

‘Why?’

‘The man’kin are talking — talking to the stones.’

Sal knelt next to Shilly. Instead of helping her to her feet, he put one hand flat against the stone, as she had.

Skender gripped the rail tighter as another rolling wave spread through the Wall. His palms tingled where they touched the rail. He felt disoriented, confused. His voice seemed to come from a very long way away, swallowed up in the roar of the man’kin like a bush in a landslide. ‘What are they saying?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Shilly, ‘but whatever it is, the stones are listening.’

* * * *

The Wall

‘Only the very brave and the very mad

find no fault in their actions.’

THE BOOK
OF
TOWERS,
EXEGESIS 4:11

hilly saw it perfectly in her mind. She didn’t need the Change to enhance her natural vision; the Wall was crawling with it. All she had to do was touch the stone and reality came crashing in on her.

People didn’t build doors out of glass because it was brittle and would shatter at a solid blow. Doors were made of wood, which was flexible and able to absorb an impact.

It was the same with the Wall. Stone was strong and heavy but not terribly flexible. If struck hard enough, it too would shatter. For a wall on the scale of the one protecting Laure, built to resist an enemy more powerful than the average battering ram, shattering was a real risk. If all the stones were bound together as one, joined into a single, rigid shield, there was a small — but not zero — risk of someone striking it just the right way to bring it down. Even the repeated cycle of night and day could cause it to crack and split.

The solution lay in the sigil beneath her hand. She could read the truth of it in the way the stones nestled against each other, even if she couldn’t decipher the signs themselves. They were bound together, linked by the charms, but not permanently. There was some give in the joins. They could flex and shift as necessary. The determining of that necessity was not left up to the architects, who knew that time might allow such knowledge to fall into disuse and disappear. That ability was imparted to the stones themselves.

Shilly understood this in a flash. It made sense, and it matched what she felt beneath her fingertips, and through the Change.

The stones were alive, and they could move.

The voices of the man’kin had a strident, hypnotic rhythm.

A shudder knocked her feet out from under her, sending her sprawling onto her backside. Sal fared no better. Gwil yelped like a puppy as he danced to keep his balance. Skender clung to the handrail for grim life.

It was too late for them to run. They could only hang on and hope. The clamour of the man’kin and the wailing of the alarum were lost under the grind and groan of shifting rock. Shilly squeezed her eyes shut. She tried not to wonder what it would be like to fall to her death or to die in an avalanche — or both at once, as was likely when the Wall collapsed. Each time the stone beneath her lurched, she expected the world to drop out from beneath her and the end to begin.

Sal’s hand found hers and gripped tight. She heard a keening sound and realised that it came from her own throat.

Not long enough,
she wanted to shout. The unfairness of death gripped her.
I’m too young to die!

Then the turbulence began to ease. The rocking and swaying settled down to a trembling vibration, as though the Wall was quivering with exhaustion. The sound of stone sliding against stone ceased.

She dared to open her eyes.

The first thing she saw was a heavy lifter riding the wind high above her, its polished wood catching the bright sunlight. A crimson standard hung from the front of the gondola, and she knew that the Magister was aboard.

Reconnoitering,
she wondered,
or fleeing?
There was no way to tell.

The second thing she saw was Sal’s face leaning over her. His lips moved, but her ears were so numbed by the clamour of moving stone that it took them a moment to hear what he was saying.

‘Are you hurt? Can you stand up?’

She didn’t know, but she tried. The surface of the Wall was still shaking, but not so much that she couldn’t keep her balance. Sal’s hand stayed in hers. When she was upright she embraced him tightly, feeling shocked and overwhelmed that they were still alive. The Wall
should
have come down. There was no knowing why it had not.

‘What happened?’ she asked, putting a hand to her temple. ‘Did the man’kin stop?’

Sal edged closer to the outer edge of the Wall, where Skender stood, peering carefully over.

‘They’re doing something down there, that’s for sure.’ Skender’s expression was as disbelieving as her own. The bruise on his cheek stood out starkly against deathly pale skin. ‘And look — there’s someone we know.’

He pointed down into the vast crowd of stony shapes. A clear patch stood out right on its edge, a space in which the man’kin refused to tread. It took Shilly a moment to understand what she was seeing.

‘The Homunculus!’

‘And Pirelius,’ Sal added, identifying the second person in the bubble. The Homunculus’s wake stretched behind it like a ribbon, winding across creek beds and craterous holes in the Divide floor. There was no sign of Kail.

Before she could ask where the tracker might be, the sound of running feet rose up over the alarum. Shilly looked back the way they had come and saw at least thirty armed guards sprinting towards them.

There was nowhere to hide and no point trying to run. Shilly straightened, forming a tripod out of her legs and her stick to maintain balance on the trembling stone. She had no intention of moving just because someone told her to.

‘What in the Goddess’s name are you four doing up here?’ shouted the leader, a different one to the woman they had deceived at the gate.

‘We’re acting under the authority of the Magister,’ Gwil began, raising his briefcase.

‘That doesn’t matter. You have to get out of here. It’s not safe.’

‘Why not? The Wall hasn’t come down. The man’kin have been repelled. Haven’t they?’

The guard didn’t waste time replying. A suspicion that Gwil’s supposition —-- and Shilly’s own — might be deeply flawed began to dawn on her. The guards hadn’t come to arrest them. Most of them ran right past them to take up stations along the Wall’s northern edge, not facing out to where the man’kin waited, but inward, towards the city. They looked down.

Only then did she realise that the calling of the man’kin was coming from
both
sides of the Wall, not just the outside.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, limping across the top of the Wall and looking down. Rooftops and spires clustered around the Wall for much of its length. The base was almost invisible.

‘There!’ cried one of the guards, pointing down. A cloud was rising from under a ramp leading to a warehouse that had seen better days. Through a gap in the woodwork, she glimpsed a stream of dark shapes moving into the city.

The guards ran to join the one who had shouted. From packs slung over their shoulders they produced golden, glassy spheres, which they lobbed down on the man’kin. Flashes of light blossomed where they struck. The stone creatures roared.

Shilly’s knuckles turned white as they gripped the rail. The spheres operated on the same principle as the trap she and Sal had planted outside the workshop in the dunes. Light, stored and amplified in the crystalline lattice of the glass, found explosive release when that glass was shattered. Man’kin weren’t flesh and blood, but they weren’t invulnerable either. Stone bodies blew apart in the brilliant explosions; others lost limbs or faces.

And they weren’t the only casualties. Each flash of light brought down walls and sent bricks flying. The area appeared to have been evacuated — sensible, she supposed, given the Wall was under attack — but she still worried that someone would get hurt. Anyone still down there was likely to be blown to bits if the man’kin didn’t pulverise them first.

From her elevated viewpoint, she could see more guards converging through the city streets. Some leapt across the rooftops to attack from higher ground. They fired golden globes with slingshots, sending them arcing high overhead to fall in the midst of the man’kin. More stone flew. More buildings collapsed. The air was full of the sound of devastation.

‘They tunnelled!’ said Skender over the racket. Shilly couldn’t blame him for not grasping the situation straightaway. The man’kin didn’t need to bring down the Wall to get into the city. All they had to do was rearrange the stone blocks comprising the Wall so they could walk right through it. She kicked herself for not seeing it earlier.

‘We have to stop them,’ she said, crossing back to the far side to look down at where the man’kin were swarming into the tunnel mouth. She could see it clearly, now she knew it was there. It looked like little more than a shadow on the base of the Wall, but stone figures were going into it and not coming out again.

‘Hey, you!’ she yelled at the guards. ‘Try on this side! You’ll have better luck hitting them, and do less damage to the city.’

The leader of the guards saw the sense of that, and ordered his troops to do as she said. Soon the golden globes were falling in graceful arcs through clear air straight into the swarming masses of man’kin. It didn’t seem to deter them. They clawed their way forward. Nothing was going to turn them back.

‘This is useless,’ Shilly said, turning to Sal. ‘We have to close the tunnel somehow.’

‘There’s only one way,’ he said, nodding further out into the Divide. ‘The Homunculus won’t be able to close the hole, but it could plug it well enough.’

‘Yes!’ She gripped his arm with excitement. His plan would work if only they could put the Homunculus in position quickly enough. But how to get word to Pirelius?

Someone else was obviously thinking along the same lines. The heavy lifter she had noticed before was moving across the sea of man’kin towards the clear spot Pirelius occupied. A blue-robed figure leaned over the side, waving.

Shilly squinted. ‘Who does that look like to you?’ she asked Sal.

He didn’t reply.

‘Sal?’ She turned to look at him. His eyes were hollow. He didn’t see her. ‘Sal, are you all right?’

* * * *

Sal was elsewhere.

‘
I
know you’re out there,’
he sent through the Change. With senses other than the usual five, he probed the complicated topography of the Divide and felt a flicker of the mind he was looking for.
^‘
If you’re out there, you can hear me.’

‘Loud and clear?
Kail responded. The tracker’s mental voice was weary but firm. ‘
Is
that you on top of the Wall?’

‘Yes. Where are you? I can’t see you. You’re not in the wake, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to talk.’’

‘Where I am isn’t important. What’s happening is.’

Sal’s extra senses shifted, and suddenly he was experiencing the Divide through Kail’s eyes and ears. The vision was a pale echo of reality, one painted on top of the view he was actually seeing, but clear.

Pirelius was stumbling over the rough ground, his eyes darting at the man’kin all around him. He drove the Homunculus on with the knife pressed firmly in its back. The Homunculus walked with both heads down, letting itself be shoved, edges blurry and indistinct. The man’kin throng snarled and badgered them from outside their protective bubble. Pirelius ignored them. Bizarrely, he seemed to be singing.