Chapter 139 - 137 — The Counterweight III (Bonus)
He went up it on his hands and knees and put his palm on things and did not explain what he was listening for.
Then he came back down and pointed at four blocks in no order I could see.
"Those. In that sequence. And when I say stop you stop with your hand still on it."
I took them out one at a time and he had an anchor across the course above me the entire time, and twice he said stop, and both times I stopped with my hand still on it and did not ask why.
The second time there was a sound from somewhere in the stack and then there was not.
"Go on."
---
It cost him two more anchors and it cost me a shoulder against a block that did not want to come and then came all at once, and the stair head opened up into black.
"How much have you got left."
"Enough." He was not looking at me.
"Anton."
"A quarter. Perhaps less." He put the line back in his pack. "It is enough for what is down there because what is down there does not move."
---
The maintenance level is one room and the room is a shaft.
Five metres square and it goes up.
You come in at the bottom of it and above you there is a vertical throat in the stonework going all the way to the machine floor, with guide rails cut into two opposite faces.
Hanging in it about three metres above my head is a block of stone the size of a cart.
It is on four chains. The chains go up out of sight.
That is the counterweight, and it is sitting there in the dark exactly where it was on the day this city stopped.
---
Against the eastern wall there is a bronze assembly with a lever arm as long as I am tall.
The arm comes out of a housing and the end of it sits in a slot, and there is a pawl in the slot, and the pawl is engaged.
It has been engaged for however long that sky has been orange.
---
And in the corner of that room, black, square in section, two metres high, with silver lines cut down all four faces, there is a pillar.
There is no ash on it. There is ash on everything else in that room.
"They put one *here*," I said.
"They put one everywhere they put a machine." Hana was already going round the walls. "Which is the only reason anybody has ever solved anything on this floor."
---
I put my hand on it.
The silver came up from the bottom. The vibration came into the stone floor of a buried room and went up through the shaft, and I did not enjoy that at all.
Then it flared.
*"Krüger. Western gatehouse, machine floor. Who is on this?"*
"Nolan. We are in the pit."
A pause of about a second, and the first thing that came back was not Krüger.
*"You are IN it?"*
---
"Marchand. Yes. Five metres square, throat going up, four chains, counterweight hanging about three metres off the floor."
*"Four chains."* He said it the way another man would say a name. *"The wall plan shows four. I have been standing next to a stone wall for twenty minutes telling everybody there are four chains behind it."*
"There are four chains."
*"Right."* A breath. *"Right."*
---
*"Brake,"* Krüger said.
"Bronze assembly, east wall, lever arm about two metres, pawl in a slot. Engaged."
*"Can you move it."*
"I can move anything in this room."
*"That is what I am afraid of,"* he said. *"Listen to the order."*
---
*"We are on the machine floor. The winch is under a roof and the drum is free and there are two of us who can turn it and one who cannot because of his wrist."*
*"I can turn it."*
*"Marchand, you cannot turn it."*
---
*"Here is the sequence,"* Krüger said. *"We take the load first. Viteri and I get the drum turning and hold the deck’s weight on the winch, and when I say it, you knock the pawl and let the counterweight down."*
"And if I do it before you have the load."
*"Then eleven tons of stone falls down a shaft with nothing at the other end of it, the chain runs, and the deck comes off its seat and goes into the water."*
"And you are standing on the machine floor with a drum that has just been given eleven tons."
*"Also that."*
---
"And when it goes right?"
*"When it goes right the weight comes down slowly, and the drum pays out against it, and the deck comes over and seats, and we walk across."*
"And on my side?"
*"On your side,"* Krüger said, *"I have no idea whatsoever, and that is why I want you standing well back from that shaft."*
---
Hana had gone all the way round the room twice by then and she stopped at the south wall.
"Jace."
She had her hand flat on the stone about waist height.
"There is a seam. It runs from about here down to the floor and along."
It is not a crack. It is a joint, and there is a joint because there is supposed to be a joint, and the shape it makes on that wall is the shape of something about the size of a door lying on its side.
"That is the canal wall," she said. "The other side of that is eleven metres above the canal floor."
---
*"Are you ready,"* Krüger said.
I went and put both hands on the lever arm.
"I am ready."
*"Viteri. On three."*
Then there was about forty seconds of nothing at all coming out of that pillar except a sound I could not identify, which was two people getting a bronze drum to move for the first time in however long that city has been standing.
---
*"We have the load."*
"How much of it."
*"All of it. Do not ask me how long we can hold it."*
I put my weight on the arm and nothing happened, because a pawl that has been sitting in a slot since before anybody alive was born does not come out because a man leans on it.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
> **[Mana: 210/280 → 204/280.]**
I did not hit the pawl. I put the fire into the slot around it, three seconds, and then I put my shoulder under the arm and stood up.
---
It went with a sound like a bell being hit inside a wall.
The pawl came out of the slot and the arm went over and the whole assembly rotated about forty degrees and stopped, and for about a second and a half nothing else in that room did anything at all.
Then the chains started to move.
---
They came down through the throat in four lines, slowly, paying out against something a long way above us that was taking the weight, and the block came with them.
Three metres above my head. Two and a half. Two.
It went past my face at walking pace and I could feel the air of it, and it kept going, down into a slot in the floor of that room that I had not identified as a slot because it was full of ash.
The ash came up out of it in a cloud that put out everything I could see for four seconds.
---
And underneath it, through the floor, something else moved.
Not the block. A chain running under the flagstones, from the base of the shaft toward the south wall, and it made a noise like a mill.
Then the seam in the south wall opened.
---
It did not swing and it did not fall. It went sideways.
A slab about two metres by one and a half went into the thickness of the wall, on rollers that have not been serviced in an age.
It went about a third of the way and stopped and shuddered, and then went the rest of it.
Cold air came through it into that room and the ash cloud went out through the gap ahead of us.
And beyond it there was a passage, going straight, with the dark orange of that sky at the far end of it about ten metres away.
---
*"Nolan."*
I put my hand back on the pillar.
"It opened. South wall. There is a passage through the canal wall and it comes out into the channel."
*"Say again."*
"The counterweight dropping is what opens it. There is a chain under the floor. One machine does both."
There was a silence on the other end.
*"Then the bridge is down here."* Krüger’s voice, and something had come off it. *"Viteri says the deck is seated. It came over about the same time you stopped talking."*
---
Eleven metres of dressed stone with nothing on it, and a channel I had no way of getting two people out of on the far side.
And a gatehouse full of water and a deck in the air.
Neither of us could see one single piece of the other’s problem, and the answer was one machine standing in the same place in both, half burned open and half sealed behind a wall.
Sixty years.
---
*"Cross separately,"* Krüger said. *"We take the bridge. You take whatever that is. Next pillar is inside the Inner City at the first junction and it is on both maps."*
"Understood."
*"And Nolan."*
"Go on."
*"That is the first time either half of this party has done something for the other half."* No weight on it at all. *"Do not let it make you comfortable."*
The silver went out.
---
We went through the slab and along the passage with Sokolov’s light in front and mine behind, and it is dressed stone all the way, about two metres high, with a gutter cut down one side of the floor.
Men walked down here with tools.
It comes out in the face of the canal wall about a metre above the slope, and there is a lip, and then eleven metres of stonework going up behind us and seventy metres of dry channel in front.
I came out onto the lip first and stopped.
---
There is ash on that slope. Not much, in a place that sheltered. A thin even layer, the way dust lies in a room nobody goes into.
Something has walked through it.
---
The tracks come up the slope out of the deeper channel in the middle, and they go along the foot of the wall, and they come past the mouth of this passage about two metres from where I was standing.
They are going north. Out of the Inner City, and past us, and away.
The edges of them are sharp. The wind down there is not much but it is not nothing, and there is no softening on them at all.
---
"Hana."
She came out onto the lip and crouched and did not touch them.
"That is not a Warden."
"You are certain."
"A Warden leaves a flat print with a squared heel and you can see the plate edges in it. I have looked at a hundred of them."
She put two fingers beside one of the marks without going near it. "This has three points at the front and a drag between them, and it is deeper at the toe than at the back, and there is no heel at all."
"How big."
"Length of my hand. And there are a great many of them and they are close together, so whatever it is has short legs or it was not in a hurry."
---
"Is it in the guide."
She did not answer straight away, which is not something she does.
"There is nothing on Two except Wardens," she said. "That is in every document there is. Wardens and the mist, on both sides, and that is the whole list."
"And?"
"And I have been in here once and I have read the board for two years and I have never seen that shape in my life."
---
Sokolov came out onto the lip behind us with the light and put it down the slope, and the tracks went out of the edge of it and kept going.
Then he turned it the other way, at the passage we still have to use, which runs under the Inner City from the bottom of that channel, because that is the route and there is no other one.
They come out of that.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
The Spire is directly above the far wall from down here and takes up most of what there is to look at, and about three hundred metres of dry stone lies between us and the bottom of it.
"Right," Hana said. "Then that is the first thing on this floor nobody has written down."