Chapter 80 — The Seventh Bell II
The stone came up and hit me in the back and the whole street went sideways.
I could not get air in for about three seconds and my left arm did not want to answer, and I lay there looking at wet cobbles and rain going into them.
Then the spearman put his shoulder into my armpit and hauled me up.
"Again," he said. "Same side. It cannot turn the shield fast."
So we did it again.
He pulled the timber down and I burned the hole wider and a woman with a crossbow put two bolts into its face from a first-floor window, and the third time it came round it had stopped being able to see out of one side.
It went down about forty seconds later with four people on it.
I sat on a doorstep for exactly as long as it took to get my breathing back.
Level Ten and seven Abilities and a Level Thirty-Seven Giant behind me, and one raider in a street had put me on my back and taken a sixth of my Health with a single swing.
This is not the Green Gate. Whatever this place is, it is not scaled down for a newcomer.
---
I went up after that.
The streets had become impossible. Every one of them was a river of people going inward and the gates were bottlenecks and the bottlenecks were where the crowd was killing itself.
So I took the roofs, because the roofs of this city are flat and close and made for it, and there are walkways between half of them that somebody built on purpose.
Four streets in, I came down into a courtyard on top of nine people who nearly killed me for it.
Six of them were defenders. Two were carrying a third.
And the ninth was a woman in her twenties in a long grey coat with copper on the shoulders, and she had a leather roll strapped across her back and she was the only person in that courtyard not holding a weapon.
"Runner." She had seen the cylinder before she had seen my face. "Which tower."
"Seventh."
Something changed in her expression and she did not explain it.
"Then you are with us. Stay behind Halder and do not take the Copper Stair, it is gone."
"Who are you?"
"Bellkeeper," she said, as though that answered it.
---
Nobody in this entire city has told me a single name.
I noticed it in that courtyard and I have not been able to stop noticing it since.
Runner. Bellkeeper. Halder is a stair. The officer on the wall did not tell me who he was and the spearman did not tell me who he was, and everybody here is a job.
I do not know whether that is because a scenario does not bother, or because these people have known each other so long that names stopped being necessary, and I am not sure which of those is worse.
---
They took us between the Third and Second rings.
One came off a roof directly into the middle of the group and put a man into a wall, and while everybody was turning to that, a second one came into the mouth of the street and filled it.
The street was four metres wide. Overturned market stalls all down one side. Nowhere to go.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 222/240 → 210/240.]**
Fire in a space that size is a mistake and I made it anyway.
The heat came off the walls and back into all of us and the man beside me shouted at me about it, and I could not take it back because the thing in front of me was already coming.
I got it against a stall and put my fist through the side of its neck.
Sparks came off the wall behind us where somebody’s blade went into masonry.
> **[Health: 341/400 → 318/400.]**
The one that came off the roof got a hand into the Bellkeeper’s coat and pulled her off her feet.
I was six metres away and there was a man between us.
---
Then it stopped having an arm.
I did not see where he came from.
A shape came past my shoulder from behind and there was a very short heavy sound, and the raider’s arm came off at the elbow and the rest of it went into the wall hard enough to bring plaster down.
He was already turning to the other one before the first had finished falling.
Two exchanges. That is all it took him.
He put his weight into a plant, took the hooked bar on his shield without moving one centimetre, and then killed the thing holding it.
Then he had the Bellkeeper up on her feet by the front of her coat and was moving her toward the far end of the street before anybody else had reset.
"Kessin, front. Two on the left roofline, watch it. You, carry him, not like that, under the shoulders."
The defenders reformed around him without being told twice.
Somebody who had been about to run was suddenly holding a line instead, and I watched that happen in about three seconds, and it had nothing to do with anything he said.
---
He looked at me once.
"Runner."
"Yes."
"Seventh?"
"Seventh."
"Then you stay in the middle and you do not get killed, and if I tell you to run you will run and you will not stop to help anybody. That is the job."
"Understood."
He had already turned round.
---
I wanted to be accurate about the Captain, because of what happened afterward.
He carried a wounded man for two streets himself when the two carrying him could not manage the stairs.
He stopped the retreat once, entirely, because a family had come out of a side door into the middle of the column and got separated, and he stood in the street with the whole line waiting until the child had been found.
He did not make a speech at anybody. He gave about four words at a time and every one of them was a place to stand.
When a man broke and started running inward on his own, the Captain got him by the harness, turned him round, put him back in the line, and said nothing about it to anybody afterward.
I liked him. I wanted that written down before the rest of it.