Chapter 353 - 344 — The Man on the Wall II
The recruits were in the small briefing room at eleven and James stopped outside the glass on his way past, because the door was open and because he could hear Ronan.
There were five of them round the table and they had come off Floor 12 the previous afternoon. The floor was cleared — the record was on the screen behind Cillian and it said cleared — and nobody in that room looked pleased about anything.
There was a helmet on the table with a piece missing out of the side of it and a shield beside it that was going to be scrapped.
"Forty-one minutes," Ronan was saying. He had the expedition log on a tablet and was not reading it. "Twelve’s a forty-minute floor for a party your size and it took you an hour and fifty-two. Where did it go?"
Nobody answered.
"Here." He put a still up. "That’s minute nineteen. Where’s your four?"
"...He’s forward."
"He’s eleven metres forward of where he should be and he’s there because you—" the tablet came round toward the woman at the end of the table, "—called a push and then didn’t go. So he went, and you didn’t, and for about four seconds there was nobody in the four position at all, and that’s the four seconds where *that* happened."
He put a finger on the helmet.
"That’s not a bad call," said Cillian, cutting in. "That’s the thing I want you to take out of here, because Ronan’s going to make it sound like a bad call and it isn’t. The call was right. You should have pushed."
"Then—"
"You called it and then you *checked*." He leaned back. "You looked left to see if he’d heard you. Minute nineteen, half a second, you looked left. And that half-second is the whole of it, because he’d already gone — he went on the word, which is what he’s supposed to do — and you were behind him from there to the end of the floor."
The man with the helmet was looking at the table.
"How do we fix it," said the caller.
"You stop looking," said Ronan. "That’s all it is and it takes about a year. You say the thing and you move on the thing, and you find out afterwards whether anybody came. Sixteenth’s Floor 13. Be in the hall at eight on Monday and we’ll do nothing but that."
James went on down the corridor.
He had not said a word and nobody in that room had noticed him standing there, and both of those facts were the reason he was in a good mood for the rest of the day.
---
Friday, nine o’clock.
Equipment checks done. Finn ran them. Ronan had a new shield and had stopped complaining about the strap. Cillian had been looked at properly, twice, and had been pronounced exactly as damaged as everybody already knew he was and no more.
Alice stayed on Earth.
James did not ask her and she did not offer, and the closest either of them came to it was in the hall at half eight when she said, "If it is him, you will not be able to tell from looking," and James said, "I know," and that was all.
`[TEAM ZERO — PARTY CONFIRMED]`
`[JAMES GANNER — FINN HALE — MAEVE CALLAHAN — RONAN CLEARY — CILLIAN WARD]`
`[CHALLENGERS: 5 / 5]`
`[REANIMATED — ACTIVE]`
`[ANATHEMA — BOUND — NOT TRANSFERRING]`
`[LIVE BROADCAST ACTIVE — REGION: IRELAND]`
`[VIEWERS: 3,410,882 ▲]`
The number was the highest it had ever been before a floor, and James knew exactly why, and did not look at the chat.
`[FLOOR 36 ENTRY CONFIRMED]`
---
They came out on the far side of the doorway.
The first thing was the air, and it was the same air — the stale, cold, mineral thickness of the fortress, unchanged, which told James more about where they were than the floor number did.
They were standing on a floor about fifteen metres deep, and then it dropped.
Four broad steps down, and then the hall.
It was enormous. A hundred and twenty metres long and forty wide, running away from them into a dark that Cillian’s light reached about a third of. Sixteen pillars, eight a side, each one six metres through at the base and going up into a roof nobody could see. Between the pillars on both sides, at intervals, the mouths of side passages — James counted five on the left and four on the right before the light gave up.
The floor was flagged and level and completely bare.
At the far end, at the limit of what any of them could see, the floor went up again: a platform, five or six metres high, with a stair up the middle of it.
And on the platform there was a chair.
Behind the chair, in the back wall, there was a passage. A squared opening with light of some sort in it, very faint, not red.
Their footsteps went out into all of that and came back after a long time.
`[FLOOR 36]`
`[FLOOR CLASSIFICATION: STORY FLOOR]`
`[MAIN STORYLINE ACTIVATED]`
`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: CLEAR THE THRONE OF ITS DEFENDERS]`
`[SECONDARY: THE PASSAGE BEYOND THE THRONE IS SEALED WHILE DEFENDERS REMAIN]`
"Story floor," said Cillian.
"Yeah," said James.
---
The channels were in the floor.
They ran up the hall under the flagstones — James could see them through the joints, faint red lines in the seams, and where the floor had subsided slightly near the third pillar on the left there were eleven centimetres of open channel with the thread of it moving inside.
They all went toward the platform.
"Same as upstairs," said Maeve, on one knee. "Going one way, in the stone, not interested in us."
"How many?"
"More than eleven. A lot more. They’re coming in from the side passages as well."
---
There were things between them and the chair.
Not a lot. Six of them, spread across the width of the hall about sixty metres in, standing rather than patrolling, and they had been standing there for a length of time James did not want to think about.
They were the best-equipped things he had seen inside that mountain. Full harness, front and back, dark plate over mail with a surcoat rotted to threads over the top of it. Closed helms with no face showing. Each one carried a long-hafted mace and a shield, and the shields were all the same pattern, and the pattern had been painted once.
`[THRONE SENTRY]`
`[LEVEL: 58]`
`[HP: 10,600 / 10,600]`
"Those were people," said Ronan.
"Those were a garrison," said Maeve.
---
And on the chair, a hundred and twenty metres away, somebody was sitting.
Cillian got the light as far up the hall as it would go, and it was not far enough for detail, and what they had from that distance was a shape.
Then they advanced forty metres killing Sentries, and after that they could see him.
He was a man.
That was the thing that put a cold finger on the back of James’s neck, because everything else in that fortress had been horned, or plated, or desiccated, or built like a beetle — and the figure on the platform was a man in his sixties sitting in a chair with his back straight.
Dark surcoat over mail, both of them in better condition than anything else in the building. Grey hair, cut. A short grey beard. A heavy chain across the chest and over both shoulders, the sort of thing that means an office rather than a rank. Hands on the arms of the chair.
A sword lay across his knees. He was not holding it.
He watched them come the entire way and did not stand up.
`[THE STEWARD]`
`[FLOOR BOSS]`
`[LEVEL: 66]`
`[HP: 104,000 / 104,000]`
"A hundred and four," said Finn.
"I can see it."
"That’s nine more than the fella on thirty."
"I know."