Chapter 85 — The Sixth Bell III (Bonus)
The Bell-keeper looked at the causeway. Then at the smoke. Then at me, for a long moment, and I could see him doing arithmetic he did not want to do.
"How long."
"Four hundred metres out and four hundred back, plus six minutes on the wheels."
"How long."
"Twenty-five minutes. Perhaps thirty."
"Thirty minutes." He said it without any inflection at all. "In thirty minutes that line down there is gone and they are on this road, and if I have not rung the Bell by then I will not be able to."
"Then ring it at thirty."
He stopped.
"If I am not back and the water has not come, ring it. I am not asking you to wait for me. I am asking you for thirty minutes and then you do exactly what that paper says."
---
I have thought about what he did next more than about anything else in that city.
He is a man with a written order from his own Council in his coat, and the guaranteed outcome is right there in his hand. Ring the Bell, lose two thousand, save ten.
And a runner he met ninety minutes ago has just offered him a thing on a survey that nobody has attempted in two hundred years.
"Thirty minutes," he said.
"Cian—" the officer started.
"Thirty minutes. I will hold the mouth." He was already walking toward the causeway. "Bellkeeper goes with him. She is the only one who knows the order of the wheels and she is no use to me down there anyway."
"And if it does not work?"
"Then I ring a bell at thirty minutes instead of at five, and the difference is twenty-five minutes of people walking, and I will take that on its own."
---
He got about six steps before it came through.
Something had reached the mouth and got past two of them, and it came up the road inside the crowd, and it was going straight at the Bellkeeper because she was the only person standing still.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I crossed eleven metres and my ankle held.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 182/240 → 176/240.]**
I got between them and put my fist through the underside of its jaw, and the whole of it went backward off the edge of the road into the channel below.
> **[Fomorian Raider — Level 15.]**
>
> **[HP: 0.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 75.]**
>
> **[EXP: 975/1,000 → 1,050/1,000.]**
>
> **[Level increased: 10 → 11.]**
>
> **[Excess experience carried forward.]**
>
> **[EXP: 50/1,100.]**
>
> **[All Attributes increased by 1.]**
>
> **[Strength: 30 → 31.]**
>
> **[Endurance: 40 → 41.]**
>
> **[Agility: 39 → 40.]**
>
> **[Perception: 25 → 26.]**
>
> **[Maximum Health: 400 → 410.]**
>
> **[Health: 302/410 → 312/410.]**
>
> **[Maximum Mana: 240 → 250.]**
>
> **[Mana: 176/250 → 186/250.]**
>
> **[Three Attribute Points acquired.]**
Eleven.
It went through my shoulders and down the backs of my legs and I was still standing on a road with a hundred metres of frightened people on it, so I left the three points exactly where they were and turned round.
"Thirty minutes," I said.
---
The maintenance route out is a stair inside the thickness of the Seventh Wall, and it comes out in a lane on the wrong side of it.
Then we were in the Sixth.
The change was immediate and it was not the noise, it was the absence of it.
There were no defenders. No column. No shouting. Doors standing open all down one side of the lane with nobody behind them, and one of them still swinging.
Fire was moving along the rooftops in a line rather than in patches, which is what happens when nobody is putting any of it out.
And there was seawater in the gutters.
We are four districts above the harbour and there was water running down the middle of that lane over the cobbles with weed in it, and I do not know how it got up here and I did not want to work it out.
Bodies where the retreat had passed. Not many. Enough.
Somewhere two streets over, something was shouting in a language made of consonants, and something else answered it.
We had walked backward into ground that had already been declared dead, and it knew it.
---
Four hundred metres took nineteen minutes.
I did most of it on rooftops and in the mouths of alleys with the Bellkeeper behind me and my hand on her shoulder more than once.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
Across a lane, twice, to put myself between her and something before it committed.
> **[Snare — S activated.]**
>
> **[Mana: 186/250 → 176/250.]**
Once on a raider’s rear foot at the top of a flight of steps, which took it down the whole flight without me touching it.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
Three times in six-second pieces into things that got close enough to matter.
> **[Mana: 176/250 → 146/250.]**
And once, in a smoke bank thick enough that I could not see my own boots, I opened the field and let it tell me where the four of them were standing.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
Three ahead. One left and behind.
We went right.
> **[Health: 312/410 → 264/410.]**
---
They caught us in an access point about ninety metres from the chamber.
Stone corridor, two metres wide, with a stair up at the far end and no side doors. Three of them came in behind us and two more came down the stair in front.
The Bellkeeper got behind me and I put her against the wall with my forearm and did not have anywhere to send her.
Nowhere to move. Nowhere to go round. No angles.
Which meant, for the first time since I got here, that I was not going to be leaving the floor.
> **[Ability Activated: Antaeus — SS.]**
>
> **[Antaeus consumes 3 Mana per second while active.]**
---
It came up through the soles of my boots.
Not through my chest and not out of my hands.
It arrived at the floor and came up the backs of my legs and into my hips and settled across my back and shoulders, and it was the most solid I have ever felt in my life.
The stone under both boots cracked out in a short ring.
The first one came down that corridor and put a hooked bar into my raised forearm with everything it had, and I went back about four centimetres.
Four.
Two hours ago that same weight put me four metres along a walkway.
I got a hand into its chest and pushed, and it left the ground.
---
I killed three of them in that corridor and I did not have to be clever about any of it.
That is the thing about Antaeus that I did not understand from the outside. It does not make you invulnerable. The second one opened my thigh through the scale and I felt every bit of it.
What it does is make you *heavy*. Everything I threw had all of me behind it, and everything they threw arrived at a man who was part of the floor.
And my arms stopped burning.
I had been running on shaking forearms since the barricade and about eleven seconds into that corridor the shaking stopped, and I could close a fist properly again, and I have no idea what to do with a thing that does that.
> **[Mana: 146/250 → 110/250.]**
>
> **[Health: 264/410 → 209/410.]**
---
Then the fourth one came down the stair at the Bellkeeper’s side and I made the mistake.
She was four metres left and there was no time to walk it, so I did the thing my body has learned to do in the last week.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
> **[Antaeus deactivated: contact lost.]**
Both feet came off the stone.
The whole of it went out of me while I was still in the air, from the back of the legs upward.
I arrived on the other side of that corridor as an ordinary eighteen-year-old with a torn thigh, and the impact I took on the way in nearly finished it.
> **[Health: 209/410 → 176/410.]**
I killed it. Barely, and with fire, and with my back against a wall.
Then I stood there breathing with blood running into my boot and understood the shape of what I am carrying.
Antaeus is a floor and Talaria is a launch. They are the same resonance running in opposite directions and I cannot have both at once, and every single time I choose one I am giving up the other.
The Bellkeeper had not made a sound through any of it.
"Ninety metres," she said.
---
The old chamber is behind a door made for something wider than a person.
It was still intact. That is what I noticed first, because everything for four hundred metres had been on fire or open or full of water, and this was a door with the dust undisturbed along the bottom of it.
Behind the wall on the left, the mechanism was talking.
Water pressing on stone from the other side, a low continuous pressure-noise with no shape to it, and every so often a chain somewhere above us taking up about a centimetre of slack and groaning about it.
The Bellkeeper got both hands on the wheel of the door and put her shoulder into it and I put mine beside her, and it came round.
Nineteen release wheels in two rows down a vaulted room, and a master lock at the end of them the size of a table.
She was already moving. "Third, seventh, second, then the whole left row in order. Do not touch the master until I—"
Then something landed in the street behind us.
---
It came down from a roof and the sound it made was not a landing. It was an impact, and the cobbles went, and I felt it in my knees from eleven metres inside a stone room.
I turned round in the doorway.
The street out there is four metres wide.
It was wrong around him. That is the only way I can put it. He was standing in a lane built for carts and the lane had become the wrong size, and the buildings on either side had become models of buildings.
Wet armour hanging off him in plates that had been lashed rather than fitted, black with water, running with it.
Shoulders I could not have got my arms round.
And a face with one eye in it.
Not one working eye. One eye, enormous, taking up most of the left side of that head, and it was closed, and the lid on it was the thickness of my wrist.
There were five or six raiders in the street behind him.
Not one of them came past him. They had stopped where they were and gone still, all of them, in a way that nothing in that district had done for anybody else all night.
That told me before the panel did.
> **[Balor — Level 32.]**
>
> **[Scenario Boss.]**
>
> **[Fomorian Commander.]**
---
Level Eleven.
Cian was four hundred metres behind me holding a causeway mouth with sixty men and a thirty-minute promise. Nineteen of those minutes were already gone, the wheels took six. That left us with exactly five minutes to get back a distance that took us nearly twenty minutes.
The Bellkeeper was at my back with her hands on a wheel she has thrown perhaps twice in her life.
And the only thing in this city that could still change the ending was the nineteen pieces of iron in the room behind me, guarded by a commander we had no time to fight.
My eyes went off him twice, both times to check the distance back to that master lock, and both times I made myself put them back.
The water behind the wall kept pressing. A timber came down somewhere above the street and threw sparks along the wet cobbles.
Then the lid moved.
Just the bottom edge of it, upward, about a centimetre, and light came out from underneath.
> **[Warning.]**
>
> **[High-output hostile Ability detected.]**