Chapter 68: The Sky’s Husband
There was no floor one on the other side of the step.
There was a room.
It was round and it was grey and it had no lights in it, but you could see perfectly well, and there were about forty people standing in it, and every one of them had come through a different door.
Nobody was talking. Theo noticed that first. Forty people in a confined space and not one conversation, and it was not because they were disciplined. It was because half of them were standing exactly where they had arrived and had not moved since, hands still held out at their sides in the shape of whatever they had been holding on the other side.
A woman near him in expensive plate was turning slowly on the spot, looking for the door she had come in by, and it was not there any more. The wall behind her ran on unbroken, the same flat grey as the floor and the ceiling and everything else, and after her third turn she stopped turning and looked at her own boots instead.
In the middle of the room stood a plinth with a shallow basin on it, filled to the brim with water that did not shiver when people walked past it, and above the basin, hanging in the air in gold, one line of text.
[ENTER THE NAME BY WHICH YOU WILL BE KNOWN]
’Ah.’
Theo went over to it.
He was the fourth person to approach, which he thought was quite slow for forty people, and later he understood that this was because thirty-six of them were waiting to see what happened to the first three.
The man in front of him wrote Brandy in the basin with his finger, and the letters lit and lifted off the water and hung over his head for a moment before fading, and the man turned round with his chin up in a way that suggested he had been rehearsing.
Theo stepped up.
He looked at the water.
’Right. So the whole floor is going to see this. Which means a few people might catch me if I use my real name.’
Which was, he understood now, standing there with his sleeve pushed back off his wrist, sort of exactly why Estea had told him to use an alias, in the flat voice she kept for things she had already decided he would be too slow to reach by himself.
So instead, he spent the next few seconds thinking about what to write.
He thought about all the things that he considered to be his identity, and then about how much of it he believed had actually changed, and how recently, and then he added a little twist to it and wrote with one finger, in the water:
THE SKY’S HUSBAND
The letters lit, and lifted, and hung over his head, and somebody behind him snorted.
"The what?"
"The Sky’s Husband," said somebody else. "Is that a title? Is he from a guild?"
"Hey, can’t you see, what guild will be willing to send a low rank like that to the Tower. He must be independent."
Theo turned round and smiled at them pleasantly, because they were not wrong, and stepped away from the plinth.
[Registered: THE SKY’S HUSBAND]
[Rank on record: C]
[Trial participant 004 of 51]
The room filled up to fifty-one, and then the doors stopped appearing, and the gold text over the basin changed.
[TOWER TRIAL — MANDATORY, FIRST ENTRY]
[You will be placed within a scenario alongside the other participants]
[The scenario is not a simulation. Injuries are real. Death is real]
[Duration: until resolution]
[There is no failure condition. There is only what you do]
The woman in expensive plate said, loudly, "What does there is no failure condition mean?"
Nobody answered her. A few of them found something to look at on the floor. One man checked the buckle on his gauntlet twice.
A man near the wall with grey in his beard and the look of somebody who had been in a great many rooms like this one spoke up instead, and he spoke to all of them.
"It means the Tower does not care whether you win," he said. "It means it is going to watch."
’Oh, that’s much worse.’
***
[Beginning]
The world came in the way water comes into a boat.
First there was the smell, which arrived a full second before the sight of anything, and it was smoke and old rain and something underneath that was sweet in a way that made the back of Theo’s throat close.
Then there was noise. A low continuous grinding sound, coming from everywhere at once, made up of about four thousand separate small sounds too far away to separate.
Then there was the city.
Theo was standing on a rooftop.
It was a real rooftop of a real building in a real city, with grit under his boots and a lead gutter running warm beside his foot from a sun he could not find anywhere in the sky, and the city went out in every direction to a horizon he could not see the end of, and it was enormous, far bigger than Meteor City, built in pale stone with wide avenues and towers with green roofs and a river through the middle of it, and it had been beautiful about a month ago.
Now, about two-thirds of it was moving.
That was the part that took Theo the longest to process, and he stood on that roof with his hand on the parapet for a long time working it out, his thumb going back and forth over a chipped edge of the stone without him noticing he was doing it. The eastern half of the city was intact. The buildings were fine. The lamps were even lit in places.
The streets were simply full, from wall to wall, of things that used to be people, and they were flowing.
They moved like a tide comes up a beach. They filled a street, and then they filled the next street, and where they met a barricade they piled against it and went over it, and the line of it, seen from above, was a smooth curved front creeping west across the whole city at the speed of a slow walk.
’What in the world is that?’
[You have entered a Trial]
[Trial Scenario: THE FALL OF ALDERKEEP]
[Hostile classification: INHERITOR]
Theo let the Genesis Eyes open and put them on the nearest section of the tide, eleven streets away, and the panel that came back made his stomach turn over.
[Inheritor]
[Rank: varies]
[Type: Undead / Assimilant]
[Description: A body claimed by the Inheritance. Upon claiming, the Inheritance receives what the body knew. Skills, techniques, circulation and combat instinct are retained and remain usable by the claimed body.]
[Note: An Inheritor that was strong in life is strong in death. An Inheritor that was skilled in life is skilled in death.]
[Warning: Any participant slaughtered in this scenario is claimed]
Theo read that last line again. Then he read it a third time, in case the second time had been him.
’Any participant.’
’So most likely everyone in the room is participating?’
He looked out at the front again with new eyes and found, now that he was looking for it, that he could see them. Scattered through the tide at intervals were shapes that carried themselves differently, upright where the rest of it sagged, taking the corners instead of being pushed round them.
They went faster and with intention. One of them, four streets down, ran up the side of a building in three jumps using something that was very obviously a wind technique, reached the roof, and pulled two screaming people off it. The crack of the technique arrived at Theo about half a second after the jump did, flat and small and late across all that distance.
Theo gulped. And made himself keep looking, and kept surveying from where he stood.
Down in the west of the city, where the streets were still empty of the tide, there was a wall, and behind the wall there were fires and tents and a great many people.
Theo could see them from up there. Thousands. Tens of thousands, packed into the last third of a city with their backs to a river. Washing strung between tent poles. A queue standing at something that was probably water.
And on the wall itself, where the defenders should have been standing in ranks, there were gaps.
Long gaps.
Theo sighed, summoned his sword... and began to move.