Chapter 351 - 342 — The Way to the Throne II
James did not replace the three skeletons.
That was the decision, and it was the one he would not have made a year ago.
Three summons was two hundred and forty mana, and putting them back into the same hall against the same three throwers would have got him exactly the same result eleven seconds later, and he would have been four hundred and eighty down with nothing to show.
So he used what was already on the floor.
The three destroyed skeletons were lying between the pillars — broken, but lying in the open, in three places between Team Zero and the Barb Hurlers. And a hundred metres of hall with three pillars and three heaps of bone in it was a hundred metres with cover in it.
James did not raise them. He left them exactly where they were and told Finn where they were.
"Third pillar left, there’s one at the base of it. Fifth pillar right, there’s another. You’ve got two extra places to be."
Finn went pillar to pillar and twice went pillar to *bone-heap* to pillar, and got to the raised step in about forty seconds instead of getting shot in the open in nine.
And the Claw Stalkers came at Ronan in the pillars, which was the worst place on the floor for them, because a thing that runs at forty kilometres an hour on all fours is a thing that needs a straight line.
`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]` ×2
`[MANA: 2,360 / 3,100]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +60]`
`[MANA: 2,420 / 3,100]`
Once Finn was on the step, Cillian had his angle, and the hall went white three times.
`[BARB HURLERS SLAIN ×3]`
`[CLAW STALKERS SLAIN ×6]`
`[EXP GAINED: 4,560]`
`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 69,865 / 75,000]`
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×3`
`[MANA: 2,180 / 3,100]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +120]`
`[MANA: 2,300 / 3,100]`
"That was my fault," James said, afterwards, to nobody in particular. "I walked three of them into that."
"You did," said Ronan.
"That’s it? ’You did’?"
"You noticed. That’s the bit I care about."
---
Past the hall, the corridor ran east for two hundred metres without a single opening off it, and then it stopped being a corridor.
They came out into the largest space in the fortress.
It was not a hall. A hall has a function. This had one direction.
It was perhaps ninety metres long and sixty wide and the vault went up so far that Cillian’s light did not put anything on it. Twelve pillars, six a side, each one four metres through and fluted from base to capital, standing in two absolutely straight rows — and the two rows converged very slightly toward the far end, which was not an accident, and which made the far end look further away and then, when you walked toward it, made it arrive faster than you expected.
The floor was one pattern, unbroken, undamaged, running the whole length.
At the far end, eleven wide steps went up to a landing.
And on the landing was a doorway.
It was six metres high and four across and it had no door in it and had never had one — there were no pintles, no frame, no bolt housings. Just a squared opening in dressed stone with an arch over it, and beyond the arch, dark.
Everything in that chamber pointed at it. The pillars, the pattern in the floor, the convergence of the rows, the eleven steps. Somebody had built ninety metres of the most careful stonework in the entire mountain for the sole purpose of making a person walk toward that opening and feel it coming.
"Right," said Cillian, quietly. "I liked the corridors."
---
And every channel in the fortress came to that doorway.
They came in along the base of both walls, and out of the floor at the edges of the pattern, and down the faces of four of the pillars — eleven separate channels that James could count from where he stood, all of them converging on the landing at the top of the steps, all of them running in along the sides of the opening and over the threshold and into the dark.
They were brighter here than anywhere. Not bright — you could still have missed them if you did not know. But the red in them had gone from a coal going out to a coal that somebody had breathed on.
`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: REACH THE LOWER KEEP]`
`[DISTANCE TO OBJECTIVE: 90 M]`
"So it’s been pointing us here," said Finn.
"It’s been going where we were going," said James. "That’s not the same thing and I keep having to tell myself it isn’t."
---
Maeve found the relief.
It was on the northern wall at the foot of the steps, and they had all walked past it, because the wall at that end was a mess.
Somebody had taken the wall apart. Not the structure — the *surface*. Two metres of dressed facing stone had been chiselled, gouged, hammered and broken across a span about four metres wide, so thoroughly that there was nothing left of whatever had been carved there except depth: you could see it had been a relief because the ruined stone was still eight centimetres deeper than the wall around it.
Except in one place.
In the middle of all that damage, a section about a metre and a half tall had survived.
James came and stood in front of it and did not say anything for a while.
It was a man.
He was standing, three-quarter on, with his weight on one hip and one hand loose at his side, in a posture James recognised without being able to say why — it was the stance of somebody who has been waiting a short time and is not troubled about it.
The face was intact. It had been carved by somebody very good. Hard clean lines to the jaw, a straight nose, and hair cut into the stone in long loose strands falling past the line of the jaw and back over the shoulders. The mouth was doing something. Not smiling. Interested.
Behind him, off both shoulders, wings.
They went out to the edges of the surviving section and were cut off by the damage on both sides, so there was no telling how far they had gone — but what was there had every feather in it, individually, hundreds of them, laid in overlapping courses.
And above and behind the head hung a ring.
Perfectly round. Unbroken. Carved standing free of the stone behind it, which must have taken somebody a week, with a gap you could have got a finger into.
Below all of it, running along the bottom of the surviving section, was the top edge of something else. Broken bodies. James could make out four of them, and half of a fifth, and the suggestion of a great many more going away into the damaged stone in both directions — figures on their backs and their faces, in rows, among shapes that had probably been buildings.
The man was standing over the whole of it and looking somewhere else.
---
"That’s one of them," said James.
He said it quietly and he meant it as a question.
Maeve came and stood beside him with her head tilted.
"You’re saying that because of the wings."
"I’m saying it because of the *halo*."
He put his hand up near the carved ring and did not touch it.
"Four months," he said. "Four months she’s been in my mother’s house with that behind her head, and it’s dark, and it’s broken. There’s a piece missing out of the top of it about that wide." He held two fingers up. "That’s not the same as the one in this wall. That one’s whole."
"Which tells you what?"
"That it’s the same kind of thing and it isn’t her."
That was the entire extent of it, and James turned it over three or four times looking for more and there was not any more to find.
He did not know who that was. He had never seen a picture of any of the Seven except the one living in his back room. He had a name — one name, out of a dead man’s mouth on Floor 30 and out of Alice’s on the same afternoon — and he had a ruined wall with a beautiful man standing over a field of bodies on it, and nothing whatsoever that connected the two.
He was not going to pretend otherwise standing in a corridor.
"Cillian," he said. "Get the light on it properly."
Cillian did. James stepped out of the way of the broadcast and said, clearly and slowly, where they were, what level, and what he was looking at, and let the feed sit on it for eleven full seconds.
Then he stopped and realised what he had just done.
Two million people had that now.
"Ah," said Maeve, who had got there at the same moment.
"Too late."
"It was always going to be. You couldn’t have walked past it."
Finn was up at the doorway by then with one axe out, standing to the side of the opening rather than in it.
"There’s a chamber," he called down. "Big one. Bigger than this. There’s a floor about fifteen metres in and then it drops and I’m not walking out onto that in the dark."
"Anything moving?"
"Nothing I can see. And I’d want to say that’s good."
Ronan, at the foot of the steps: "Say it anyway."
"It isn’t good," said Finn.
---
Maeve went back to the channels one more time before they finished, on her knees at the top step, tracing two of them with her eyes.
"They don’t spread," she said.
"What?"
"Look at it. Eleven channels come into this landing and every one of them goes *in*. Not one of them turns round. Not one of them runs along the wall and off somewhere else." She sat back. "Whatever’s through that door, it’s taking. It’s not sending."
James looked at the opening and the dark inside it for a moment.
Then he walked the last eleven metres and put his boot on the landing at the top of the steps, outside the threshold, and stopped.
`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]`
`[LOWER KEEP REACHED]`
`[FLOOR 35 CLEARED]`
---
`[COMBAT EXPERIENCE: 11,000]`
`[FLOOR 35 CLEAR REWARD]`
`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 9,200]`
`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 44,000 PER MEMBER]`
`[LEVEL UP]`
`[LEVEL: 44 → 45]`
`[ALL STATS +1]`
`[FREE STAT POINTS GAINED: 5]`
`[EXP: 4,065 / 78,000]`
`[SKILL PROFICIENCY UPDATED]`
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`
`[UNEARTH — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`
`[FLOOR MVP — MAEVE CALLAHAN]`
`[REASON: ROUTE IDENTIFICATION — THREE LEVELS, NO BACKTRACKING]`
"Second one in a row," said Cillian.
"Third, counting thirty-four," said Finn.
"I’m not going to get tired of it," said Maeve.
Nothing else came up. No item. No fragment of anything. Nothing under the scythe’s line in James’s list, and nothing under Fossor’s, and no new skill offered for having stood in front of a wall.
Forty-five. Five points in a box again.
---
`[FLOOR 36 AVAILABLE]`
James opened that one, which he had not done in eight months.
He did not open the mission. He only wanted the one line, and the Tower gave it to him without any ceremony at all:
`[FLOOR 36 — ENTRY POINT: THRONE CHAMBER]`
Everybody read it.
Everybody turned round and looked at the six-metre opening eleven metres away with the eleven channels running into it and the dark on the other side.
"So we’re coming back here," said Ronan.
"We’re coming back here."
"Through that door."
"Through that door."
Cillian let out a long breath. "Grand. Well. At least we know where the hard bit is."
---
`[FLOOR EXIT SEQUENCE INITIATED]`
`[LIVE BROADCAST ENDING]`
**[FloorTheoryIE]:** GO BACK TO THE WALL
**[ZeroFan]:** WHO IS THAT
**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THE HALO ISN’T BROKEN. ALICE’S IS BROKEN.
**[GalwayGoblin]:** HE’S STANDING ON PEOPLE
**[CorkClimber]:** ELEVEN SECONDS OF FOOTAGE AND THEN HE JUST WALKED OFF
**[user88317]:** SOMEBODY SMASHED THE WHOLE WALL AND MISSED HIM
`[FLOOR EXIT — BROADCAST TERMINATED]`
---
The white was already coming up out of the floor around them when James turned round for the last time.
Eleven channels, converging on a landing. A doorway with no door and nothing beyond it he could see. Ninety metres of pillars built to make a person walk exactly that way.
And on the northern wall, in the middle of four square metres of stone that somebody had spent a long time destroying, one intact carving of a man with an unbroken ring behind his head, standing over a field of bodies with his weight on one hip, looking at something outside the frame.
James had that on a feed now.
And in about forty minutes he was going to be standing in a kitchen in Ballymun showing it to a woman with a broken one.