Chapter 352 - 343 — The Man on the Wall I
`[HP RESTORED]`
`[MANA RESTORED]`
`[MANA: 3,100 / 3,100]`
The Waiting Room took about forty seconds and James spent all of it looking at nothing, because he had the footage and there was no use to any of it until somebody who had met one of the Seven looked at his wall.
Then Earth, and a car, and twenty-five minutes of the M50 at teatime.
---
He came in the front door at ten past seven and the house was warm and smelled of frying onions, and there was a television on in the front room with the sound up too loud.
And on the television was a wall inside a mountain.
Nyra was kneeling about a metre from the screen with the remote in both hands. Alice was standing behind the sofa with her arms folded, in the burgundy jumper, not moving.
Neither of them had heard the door.
"They’ve got it slowed down," Nyra said, without looking round. "Look. *Look*, they’ve got it slowed down and you can see the—"
"They’ve had it about ninety minutes," said James.
Alice’s head came round.
"You put it on a broadcast."
"I didn’t put it anywhere. I was standing in front of it with a live feed on my shoulder." He shut the door. "Cillian had a light on it. I said where we were and I let it sit, because if I’d walked past that wall without recording it I’d have been an idiot, and about four seconds later I worked out what that meant."
"It means two million people have it."
"It means two million people have it."
Alice looked at the screen again, where somebody’s analysis channel had frozen the carving and put a box round the ring.
"Then show me the real one," she said.
---
His mother turned the hob down and came and stood in the doorway with a wooden spoon in her hand and did not say anything at all for the whole of the next ten minutes.
James put the raw feed up on the big screen in the front room, which took a minute and a half, and then ran it from the point where he had come round the base of the steps.
He gave it to her the way he had found it — wide first. Four square metres of destroyed facing stone, gouged and chiselled and broken across the whole span, with one section in the middle of it that had survived.
Alice did not react to that.
Then he took it in.
The stance first: three-quarter on, weight on one hip, one hand loose at the side. Then the face, enlarged until the grain of the stone showed — the hard clean line of the jaw, the straight nose, the long loose strands of hair cut into the rock falling past the jaw and back over the shoulders, and the mouth doing the thing that was not a smile.
Alice had gone completely still by then.
James had lived with her for four months. He knew what her stillness looked like — she went still when she was bored and she went still before she killed things, and neither of those was this. Her arms had come apart. One hand had found the back of the sofa and was holding it.
He took it in further, onto the wings, and the individual feathers laid in overlapping courses, hundreds of them, going out to the edge of the surviving stone and cut off.
"The halo," said Alice.
"I was getting to it."
"*The halo.*"
He put the ring on the screen, four foot across, carved standing free of the wall behind it with a gap you could get a finger into. Perfectly round. Unbroken along its whole circumference.
Nyra, on the floor, looked from the screen to the back of Alice’s head and did not say anything, because Nyra was eleven and not stupid.
Alice looked at that ring for about nine seconds.
"Wrath," she said.
---
James had been braced for a maybe.
"You’re sure."
"Yes."
"How sure, Alice? Because I can look at that and tell you it’s one of the Seven and I can tell you it isn’t you, and that’s every single thing I’ve got out of it—"
"I am certain." She had not taken her eyes off it. "I do not know where the fortress is. I have never seen that hall, or that stair, or one stone of it, and you can show me all of it and I will tell you the same thing. But I have seen that face before, and I have seen that ring, and I am not mistaken about either."
"From what?"
"I don’t know."
"Alice—"
"I *don’t know*." She said it without any heat at all, which was worse. "That is the shape of what I have. I know his face the way you know the face of somebody who was at the edge of a room you were in a long time ago. It is not a memory. There is nothing around it."
James let a beat go.
"And the name comes with the face."
"The name has always come with the face," said Alice. "That is why I would not give it to you for four months."
---
He asked her the other four things and got nothing on any of them.
She did not know why a likeness of him was cut into a wall in that fortress. She did not know what the channels were, or who had cut them, or what was at the end of them. She could not tell him whether Wrath was physically in that mountain.
"Would you know?" James asked. "If he was. Would you feel it."
Alice thought about that for longer than she had thought about anything else.
"I do not know that either," she said. "Which I would rather have told you a month ago than tonight."
---
His mother went back to the onions at some point and the sound of the pan came through, and Nyra got up off the floor and sat on the arm of the sofa, and James stood in his own front room and did the arithmetic he was going to have to be honest about later.
What he actually had was this.
A dying man on Floor 30 had looked at a broken scythe and a pair of black wings and said one word.
Alice had said that word belonged to one of the Seven, and had refused for four months to say anything more.
Five floors later there was a fortress with a carving of that man in it, and eleven channels of something the colour of the thing they had fought on three floors, all running into a doorway.
And what he wanted to conclude, standing on his mother’s carpet, was that Wrath was down there.
He made himself stop.
Because he had the identity of a face on a wall and he had precisely nothing else. Nobody put a carving in a wall because the subject was standing behind it. There were statues of dead kings all over Dublin. The channels had been cut into that fortress *after* it was built, by somebody with a chisel and time, which meant people had lived in there and made a decision about it, and every single thing he actually knew was consistent with a mountain that had something to do with Wrath and nothing at all to do with Wrath being in it.
*You’ve done this before*, he thought. *You spent twenty-nine and thirty certain it was going to Floor 30. Then you watched Korea’s Floor 30 and it was a man with no red on him.*
"Right," he said out loud.
"Right what?" said Nyra.
"Nothing." He shut the screen down. "What’s for dinner?"
"You can *smell* what’s for dinner."
---
He took it into Guild Zero at nine the next morning and put all of it on the wall of the strategy room, and Maeve had the archive up beside it inside four minutes.
Floor 25, Baldwin wrapped to the throat. Floor 28, the seams under a dry valley. Floor 29, a bright line crossing sixty metres of terrace into an arch. Floor 30, a courtyard lit from underneath. And now Floor 35, a cut channel two fingers wide with a thread of dull red going one direction inside it.
"She’s certain," said James. "That’s the new information. That’s all the new information."
"That’s a lot of new information," said Finn.
"It’s one word."
"It’s a *name* on a *face*, James. We’ve had the word for four months and nothing to hang it on."
Maeve was not looking at the relief. She was looking at her own five windows.
"These are not the same," she said.
"The colour—"
"The colour’s the same and I have said so about eleven times. Look at the behaviour." She pointed down the row. "Twenty-five, in a body. Twenty-eight, in bodies. Twenty-nine, leaving bodies to travel. Thirty, under a whole city and in every soldier on it before we touched them. Thirty-five — in a cut groove in a wall, going one direction, with monsters walking straight past it and not one of them lit up."
"So it’s dormant," said Cillian.
"Or contained. Or it’s something else that happens to be that colour. Or it’s the same thing with nothing to get into." She sat down. "I’m not picking one."
---
Finn asked the only question that had to be answered before Friday.
"Do we prepare for the red or not?"
Everybody looked at James.
"Both," he said. "We prepare for a hard floor with the scythe available and a plan that doesn’t need it. If something down there starts wearing the red and taking hits it shouldn’t, we know exactly what to do about that — we’ve done it four times. If it doesn’t, we’ve lost nothing except me carrying six kilos of broken farm equipment I wasn’t going to use."
"And if he’s actually in there?" said Ronan.
James had been waiting for that one since seven o’clock the previous evening.
"Then we’re going to find out five seconds after the rest of the world does," he said, "and we come out. I mean that. If there is a thing in that chamber that Alice would not have gone near at the top of her strength, we are not fighting it to see. We turn round and we take the failure."
"You can do that? On a floor?"
"You can withdraw from a Story Floor. It’s a fail, it’s on the record, you lose the run." He shrugged. "I’d rather have it on the record."
Nobody argued, which told him it had needed saying.