Chapter 142 - 140 — Beneath the Canal III (Bonus)
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
> **[Mana: 204/280 → 196/280.]**
I put both hands on the bottom pipe on the left wall and held them there.
Four seconds.
---
Bronze does not like that.
The pipe is hollow and it has been sitting on brackets since before anybody was born and I put a fire into one point of it that had nowhere at all to go.
It expanded. It expanded against two fixed brackets and then the near bracket let go of the wall.
The whole four-metre length of it came off and went down the passage on its side, ringing, end over end, into the dark forty metres behind me, and every time it hit the floor it hit it in a different place.
---
The animal went with the noise.
Not slowly and not stupidly. It had me at two metres and it left me at two metres and went past my hip at a speed I could feel in my chest, after a four-metre piece of bronze that was still moving.
The pads went over that floor almost silently. The claws did not. The claws made that same three-point scrape, over and over, going away from me.
I gave it one second and then I went.
---
> **[Talaria activated.]**
Twelve metres back down the run and I did not slow for the branch, which was a mistake, because a jamb one metre twenty-five high does not care how fast you are coming.
I got my shoulder down and took the arrest into the stone rather than into my ankle, and the adamantine face on the left forearm went along the jamb and took a strip of it off.
Something got me across the back on the way in.
> **[Health: 358/510 → 318/510.]**
---
It was not a strike. It had already turned again and come back four metres of the twelve.
What reached me was the very end of a forefoot at the very end of its reach, through a hole it could not get its head into.
Three lines from the bottom of my left shoulder blade to the top of my hip.
The armour on that side has been gone since the square. The shirt went. Two of the three got skin and the third one got more than that.
It hurt about four seconds later.
---
Then Sokolov put an anchor across the mouth of the branch behind me.
Not a wall. He put it from the jamb to the opposite jamb at about the height of a man’s knee, which is the height of that animal’s shoulder.
It came into it twice. I felt both of those through the floor.
The second time the anchor went and the ceiling of that branch let some dust down, and it did not come a third time.
---
We went along that branch on hands and knees for about a hundred and ten metres and none of us said one word.
It is a metre twenty-five for all of it. The floor is round rather than flat. There is a smell of old water and the walls are wet to the touch in the first forty metres and dry after that.
Hana had a hand on my ankle for the last thirty because I had started going slower than I thought I was.
Then the round gave way to square, and there were steps, and there was orange light coming down them.
---
We came up through a grating that had been off its seat for a long time, into the bottom of a stairwell, in a building with three walls.
And then out into the Inner City.
---
I got about four steps into the street and Hana said, "Stop. Shirt off."
"We are in the open."
"You have been bleeding down your own leg for six minutes and I could hear it in your boot." She already had the pack round. "Anton, watch the street. Two minutes."
---
It took her three and it was not pleasant.
Two of the three are long and shallow and she closed them with something out of the flat pouch.
The third is not shallow, and she put her hand on it directly, and I felt the whole of that side of my back go cold and then stop being open.
> **[Health: 318/510.]**
"I have not given you anything back," she said, before I asked. "Closing is not repairing. You have the same number you had. You will simply keep it."
"How much did that cost you."
"Not enough to matter. Ask me again if somebody gets a hole in them."
---
While she worked I looked at where we were.
The Inner City is a different place and you can see it from the first street.
Out in the Outer City the buildings stood apart and the avenues were eighteen metres wide and you could see the length of them. In here nothing is apart from anything.
The streets are four metres, five at the most. The buildings go up five and six storeys and they are built into each other, sharing walls.
So when one of them came down it took the next two with it, and what is left is a single mass with holes in it.
---
Above the streets there are walkways.
Stone spans, a metre and a half wide, running from one building to another at the third and fourth storey, and there are a great many of them and about half are still there.
You can stand in a four-metre street in that district and count six of them crossing over your head at different heights, and three of them will be broken in the middle with the ends still on the buildings.
People went to work over the top of the traffic.
---
There are shop fronts down here as well, and they are narrower, and above them the windows are smaller and there are more of them.
There is a door I walked past with four separate bell pulls beside it at four different heights, all of them on the same jamb, which means four households through one door.
And on the corner of the second street there is a public fountain built into the wall with a basin at the height of a child and a step in front of it, and the step is worn into a dish.
---
And over the roofline to the east, filling the gap at the end of every street that runs that way, the Spire.
We are close enough now that it has stopped being one thing. I can see courses in the stone.
I can see the line where the top third broke off, which from the far side of the canal was a line and from here is a wound about forty metres deep with the inside of the structure showing.
I can also no longer see the top of it from street level unless I stand in the right place.
That is progress and it is also going to be a problem.
---
The pillar is at the first junction and it is where both maps said it would be.
We cleared it the same way, all three streets, and Sokolov found the way off it before anybody touched anything.
Then I put my hand on it and the silver came up.
---
And nothing happened.
Twenty seconds. Forty. A minute.
"They are moving," Hana said. "You cannot activate a pillar while you are walking and nobody stops just because it is the hour."
Ninety seconds.
Two minutes.
"Hana."
"I know. Wait."
---
At about three minutes the silver went to twice its brightness and the pressure came off both ears.
*"Nolan."*
"Krüger. We are through. We crossed under the canal and we are at the first junction pillar inside the Inner City. There is something living down in that drainage system and it is not a Warden."
*"Say that later."*
---
That is not a thing he has said to me before.
"Go on."
*"Threat first, and it is past. Warden patrol at the eastern bridgehead. Four of them."*
"Four."
*"Four, and they were not coming at us. They were walking a route and we were standing on it."*
---
*"Location. We are about six hundred metres into the Inner City, off the main line, in a building."*
"Say injuries."
There was about a second and a half of nothing.
*"Viteri. Left leg. Below the knee."*
---
Hana was beside me before I had turned my head.
"Krüger, this is Arai. I need the answer to four things and I need them in the order I ask."
*"Go."*
"Is the bone through the skin."
*"No."*
"Is the foot warm."
A pause of about four seconds, and a voice further off that I could not make out.
*"She says it is. I have got my hand on it. It is warm."*
---
"Good. That is the one I was afraid of." Hana had both hands flat on the pillar. "Is it bleeding now, and how much did it bleed."
*"It is not bleeding now. It bled a great deal for about a minute and then Marchand got a strap on it above the calf and it stopped."*
"How long has that strap been on."
*"Eleven minutes."*
"Take it off in the next sixty seconds."
---
*"It stopped the bleeding."*
"It stopped the bleeding because it is cutting off her leg, and if it stays on for another twenty minutes she does not have a leg to save."
She did not raise her voice at all. "Take it off. Slowly. Then put direct pressure on the wound with a flat hand and count to a hundred and twenty, and if it starts again you put the strap back on and you tell me."
*"Understood. Marchand."*
---
Then Hana asked the fourth one and it was not a medical question.
"How far did she walk after it happened."
*"About two hundred metres. We carried her for the last eighty."*
"Can she stand on it."
*"She can stand. She has been standing on it while we argued about whether she can stand on it."*
"And can she walk at your pace."
A longer pause on that one.
*"No."*
---
I looked at Hana while that word came out of a black stone column, and she was already looking at me.
Everything that woman can do requires a hand on a person.
Contact. She said it at a map table in a room with a light over it, and I repeated it back to her and wrote it down in my own kit.
It was a limitation on a list. Now it is the whole of the situation.
Mara Viteri is about six hundred metres from where I am standing.
There is no version of six hundred metres that gets Hana Arai to her.
---
*"Say your position again,"* Krüger said. *"Properly. I want it on the map."*
I gave it to him and he read it back, and then Theo read something else back.
While they were doing that I got the sheet out and Sokolov got his out, and we put both of them down on the stone in the orange light.
"What are we looking for," Sokolov said.
"I do not know yet."
"That is not an answer."
"No." I put my finger on the junction we were standing in and then on the six hundred metres of Inner City between it and them. "It is what I have got."
---
Behind us Hana was counting to a hundred and twenty out loud, slowly, through two metres of black stone, for a man in another city with his hand on somebody’s leg.
Sokolov was measuring distances off his own sheet with the width of his thumb.
And I was looking at a route to the Spire that was drawn for six people moving at one pace, and had been since a table in a rented room eight days ago.
Half of it cannot move at that pace any more.
And the half that can is the wrong half.