Chapter 138 - 136 — The Counter Weight II
The orange went out of it the same way it went out of the first one, down through the chest fractures from the top.
> **[Warden eliminated.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 90.]**
>
> **[EXP: 1,215/1,300 → 1,305/1,300.]**
> **[Experience threshold reached.]**
>
> **[Level increased.]**
>
> **[Level: 14.]**
>
> **[Strength: 38 → 39.]**
>
> **[Endurance: 50 → 51.]**
>
> **[Agility: 50 → 51.]**
>
> **[Perception: 30 → 31.]**
>
> **[Maximum Health: 500 → 510.]**
>
> **[Health: 389/510 → 399/510.]**
>
> **[Maximum Mana: 270 → 280.]**
>
> **[Mana: 224/280 → 234/280.]**
>
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 0 → 3.]**
>
> **[EXP: 5/1,400.]**
It came up through my boots in the middle of a square with two of those things still standing in it, and it gave me ten Health and ten Mana and about a second and a half of feeling like a different man.
Both of which I spent inside eleven seconds.
---
*"Nolan. Did you get the brake?"*
"Brake, lever arm and pawl, serviced separately, reachable from inside the shaft. Say the rest."
*"The rest is the part we are guessing at."*
---
Hana was talking the whole time and I had stopped noticing that I was using it.
"Right one has turned. Eight metres, your side. He has not decided."
"North."
"North is on the far side of the pillar and he is going round it, not over it. He will come out on your left."
He came out on my left.
I have never had that before. Not once in five weeks.
Everything I know about where a thing is has come out of six metres of an Ability that does not work on this floor, or out of my own eyes. There has never been a third source.
---
The one Anton had caught went for him.
That is the other thing about three. The moment one of them works out that a man standing still with his hands out is the reason its weapon keeps stopping, it stops caring about the person with the fire on him.
It came across the square at Sokolov and Sokolov did not move.
I understood about a quarter of a second later that he could not, because he had two anchors out and a third going in and all of it was on the other one.
"Anton."
"I know."
---
He dropped all three.
Every anchor he had out came off at once, which released a Warden I had spent forty seconds keeping occupied, and he put both hands out flat at the one coming at him and closed them.
Two anchors, both between that thing’s own chest and its own left thigh.
It did not stop. It could not stop, because the anchors were not attached to the ground, they were attached to it, and what they did was hold its own leg against its own body for about a second.
It went over.
Seven feet of it came down face first into the ash four metres short of him and took the top off a statue base on the way past.
---
"That is new," I said.
"It is not new." He was breathing hard. "It is expensive."
---
*"Both sides, listen."* Krüger, and the thing about that man is that his voice does not change. *"Here is what we have and here is what we do not have. Ours first."*
I got in under the second Warden’s reach with the fire already up.
*"Bridge is intact. Machine floor is intact. We can get to the winch and the drum and the chain and every part of it that lifts the deck."*
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
> **[Mana: 234/280 → 226/280.]**
*"What we cannot get to is the pit. The stair down into it from the machine floor ends in a wall. Not a blocked door, Nolan. A wall, coursed, part of the building."*
---
The hook caught me across the hip on the way past and took the last of what was left of that side of my armour with it.
> **[Health: 399/510 → 358/510.]**
I got a hand on the plate at the top of the shoulder and put the other one into the collar four times.
The fourth one was the one that did it, and it came down on top of the one Sokolov had put on the floor.
> **[Warden eliminated.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 90.]**
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> **[EXP: 5/1,400 → 95/1,400.]**
---
"Hana."
"Two more lines and we have it," she said, from the east wall, and she had her back to that wall and both hands free and she had not been touched. "Krüger. Finish the pit."
*"The counterweight sits in that shaft and the brake holds it."*
*"If the brake comes off with nothing taking the load, the weight drops the whole run. The chain hauls the deck out of its housing at full speed, it overshoots the far wall, and we have a bridge in the canal instead of over it."*
"So somebody takes the load first."
*"We take the load. On the winch. Then the brake comes off and the weight comes down onto us. It pulls the deck across the gap horizontally, and we use the drum to control the speed."*
---
"And I am the brake."
*"You are the brake. And I cannot see you and you cannot see me and neither of us gets to find out whether we got it right until it has already happened."*
---
The last one had been going round the outside of the square for eleven seconds doing what the first one did to me, which is wait for me to be busy.
It picked its moment properly. I will give it that.
It came while I was still standing over the second one with my hand out.
---
Hana said "Left," about a third of a second before I would have had it myself, and a third of a second is the entire difference.
I got off the line and it went past into the pillar.
The polearm hit that black stone and did not mark it.
The shock went up the shaft and into its own arm and put the shoulder out of line, and for about three quarters of a second it was a seven-foot thing recovering from hitting an immovable object.
> **[Ability Activated: Snare.]**
> **[Mana: 226/280 → 216/280.]**
Rear foot, which was the one carrying it.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
> **[Mana: 216/280 → 210/280.]**
Three metres. Collar seam. Twice.
> **[Warden eliminated.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 90.]**
>
> **[EXP: 95/1,400 → 185/1,400.]**
---
The square went quiet and the pillar was still lit.
*"Have you finished?"* Krüger said.
"We have finished."
*"Then get off that pillar. Both groups to the gatehouse. Next pillar is inside the western foot on both sides and it is marked on both maps."*
The silver went out from the top down and the pressure came back onto both ears and the square was just a square with three broken things in it.
---
Nobody said anything for about ten seconds.
Hana came off the east wall and went and looked at Sokolov first, which I noticed, and then at me.
"Sit down."
"We are leaving."
"Sit down for ninety seconds while I look at your hip, because if I look at it in an hour it will be worse and we will have walked two kilometres in the meantime."
I sat down.
---
Three hundred and fifty-eight out of five hundred and ten. Two hundred and ten out of two hundred and eighty.
That is four fights in about three hours and I am down a third of both, and the canal is not in sight yet.
Nothing in that square is worth carrying. There is no drop and there is nothing on them and there never is.
The only thing I took out of it was ninety EXP a time and a level I got in the middle of being knocked over.
Three points, unspent. I am not making a permanent decision with two hundred and ten mana and a canal to cross.
---
Sokolov sat down on the statue base without being told to and put his head back.
"How much," I said.
"Half. A bit more than half."
"That was three anchors dropped and two put out inside a second."
"Dropping is free. Putting them on a thing that is moving is not." He looked at his own hands. "Do not ask me for a building today."
Hana said, "Noted," in a way that meant she had written it down somewhere in her head next to everything else.
---
We went east and the streets opened out after about six hundred metres.
The buildings on the canal side of the Outer City are lower and further apart, warehousing rather than shops, with yards between them.
About two hundred metres from the edge the ground starts going down, and there is nothing standing in front of you at all.
And then the canal.
---
It is not a canal. Not in any sense that word has ever meant to me.
It is a channel cut through the middle of a city, seventy or eighty metres across, running north and south as far as I can see in both directions, and it is dry from wall to wall.
The walls are dressed stone, course on course, and they go down about eleven metres to a floor that is not flat.
There is a deeper channel in the middle of it, three or four metres across, and the rest slopes toward that from both sides.
Ash has got down there and it lies in long streaks along the slope, blown into lines.
There is nothing growing in it.
---
Everything on the far side is the Inner City, and it is a different city.
Bigger buildings, closer together, and about a third of them have burned down to their foundations so that you can see across the tops of the ones that have not.
And over all of it, much closer now than it was this morning, the Spire.
From the edge of that canal the split top of it takes up a quarter of the sky, and the piece that has come over is hanging out toward the north with a hundred metres of nothing underneath it.
Cross that channel and I am halfway.
---
The gatehouse is on the western bank where the map said it would be, and it is mostly gone.
What is left is the stone foot of it, two storeys’ worth of footing with the floor of the machine level still on top, and about a third of the walls. The rest has come down into its own yard.
There is no bridge. Not a raised one and not a dropped one. There is a gap in the canal wall where a bridge deck used to seat and there is nothing in it.
And the west face of that foot has burst outward.
---
That is the thing Krüger could not have guessed and I could not have guessed until I was standing in front of it.
Whatever went through this city went through the inside of that gatehouse, and the wall did not fall in. It came out.
Which means the machinery that lives inside the thickness of the wall is not inside anything any more.
There is a bronze drum the size of a cart wheel sitting in the open at the top of the break with its chain still on it, and the chain goes down into the structure and out of sight.
---
"That is the winch," Hana said.
"That is the winch."
"They have one of those with a roof over it."
---
Getting down to the maintenance level took forty minutes and all of it was Sokolov’s.
The stair is there. You can see the head of it under about two metres of the wall that used to be above it.
That wall came down in courses rather than in pieces, which means it is sitting in a stack holding itself up on nothing.
I could have gone through it in four minutes.
"If you pull that," Sokolov said, "the block above it comes down onto the stair head and we do not have a stair."
"Then tell me which ones."