The Blood Debt (51 page)

Skender’s gaze danced between him and Shilly. ‘Thanks. I promise I’ll bring it back.’

There was no more time for talking as Skender put himself into the hands of the guards. They gave him gloves and showed him how to grip the rope. He adopted a wide-legged stance and backed up to the edge. When the last of his guiding hands fell away, he leaned out and down, while two of the guards operated a mechanical winch to gradually pay out the rope.

‘A reservoir?’ said Shilly to Sal as their friend disappeared out of sight. ‘You never told me that.’

‘I never needed to. And that’s a good thing, right?’

She punched his arm. ‘Let’s get back from the edge. Things could start shaking again any time soon, and you’re going to have to keep me upright now.’

He did as he was told, while at the same time dipping back into Kail’s senses.

The Wall was a vast, solid mass. He could barely make out Skender against its sheer enormity. The sky at the top seemed impossibly far away. The heavy lifter had fallen back, cautious of coming too close lest a stray gust of wind sent it crashing into the stone. Pirelius picked his way over ground heavily scarred by the passage of the man’kin. Ahead, the tunnel gaped like a mouthful of jagged teeth.

Sal felt a vibration through his fingertips that he at first assumed was the stone of the Wall moving again. But it lacked any of the grinding, scraping sounds that had accompanied it before. Only gradually did he work out that its source wasn’t his fingers at all, but Kail’s.

The flood was coming.

* * * *

The Flood

‘There are many ways of existing. Some creatures

have no minds at all, or none that we would

recognise as such; others are
just
minds, cunning

intelligences hovering on the edge of the world.

The rule common to all is: like devours like.’

MASTER WARDEN RISA ATILDE:

NOTES TOWARD A UNIFIED CURRICULUM

kender clung tightly to the rope and tried not to look down. This wasn’t remotely like climbing. He was utterly at the mercy of the thin strand linking him to the apparatus at the top of the Wall. The guards turning the winch far above maintained his rate of descent. If the rope snapped, he would plummet instantly to his death. There was nothing he could do but dangle and hope for the best.

His descent was not so rapid that he risked skinning himself on the stone as it went past and he used his legs to keep at a distance from the Wall, kicking gently to maintain a rhythmic bounce. He felt like a bug on the vast expanse of the Wall. It seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions. The only details marring its smooth curvature were the giant charms reinforcing the sigiis on each block of stone.

A cool breeze caressed his neck. He relished the touch of it on his raw skin and bruises until he realised its probable source. A wall of water was rushing down the Divide pushing all the air ahead of it. A breeze was probably the best he could hope for, suspended as he was on a string right in its path.

He made sure the flags were secure against his waist.
Red for up,
the guard had said. It was imprinted in his memory forever. He just hoped the guards operating the winch were conserving their strength for a late charge.

* * * *

Shilly tore her eyes away from Skender as he receded down the Wall. Pirelius and the Homunculus were almost at the tunnel mouth. Movement out of the corner of her eye distracted her from the downward view, and she looked up.

The heavy lifter rocked from side to side, at eye level, painted pink by the falling dusk. The pilot turned it so it lay lengthways, parallel to the Wall, but its instability only seemed to worsen. Its fiery propellers spun furiously in an attempt to hold it in position.

Wind,
she thought, glancing upwards. There were no clouds, but the sky to the east was growing darker.

Wind and spray.
Time was running out.

‘Faster!’ she shouted at the guards turning the winch. ‘We don’t have long!’

They pulled their handles with increased energy. One, red in the face, muttered to the other, ‘Who
is
she, anyway?’

Shilly ignored him. ‘What’s happening down there?’ she asked Sal, wishing she had her stick. She felt unsteady without it.

‘Pirelius has stopped,’ he said, his gaze focused on infinity. ‘He’s calling for the Magister.’

Shilly nodded. ‘Looking for a rematch.’ Thus far, Pirelius was behaving exactly as expected. ‘Is she coming?’

‘She’s sent Marmion again.’

‘Good. Don’t want to make it look too easy.’

‘TUNNEL,’
rumbled the giant man’kin, startling her. She jumped and turned to face it.

‘What?’

‘TUNNEL CLOSING.’

The Wall began to shake. Obviously this man’kin had got word to Mawson about the flood and told the other man’kin to start closing the tunnel. ‘Good. While that’s happening, why don’t you help those two with the winch? Can you do that?’

The round face of the man’kin swivelled to take in the guards and the winch. It took two ponderous steps forward and crouched down. The guards backed away, terrified as a giant stone hand grabbed the handle.

‘TURN,’ it boomed, and did just that. The winch spun much faster than it had before. Rope vanished over the edge at a furious rate. ‘TURN.’

‘Excellent,’ she said, hoping against hope that she hadn’t given Skender the fright of his life. ‘Make sure you stop when we tell you to, okay?’

It nodded.
‘TURN!’

The Wall quaked beneath them, and she clung to Sal for support.

* * * *

‘For the last time
—’

At the sound of grinding stone, Pirelius stopped in mid-sentence and looked around.

‘What?’ He grabbed the Homunculus tight around the throat and pulled it closer to him, suspecting a trap. The blade at its throat gleamed. ‘Magister! What are you playing at?’

‘Nothing, Pirelius,’ said Marmion, bellowing to be heard from the shaking canopy above. ‘Stay calm! The man’kin can’t hurt you!’

Pirelius backed away from the tunnel entrance. The crush of man’kin around him hadn’t thinned, and that surprised Sal. He would have expected them to make for other refuges once word spread of the tunnel’s imminent closure, but they stayed tight around the man and his captive, and continued to ignore the invisible Kail.

It took a good while for the truth
—
that things weren’t going the way Pirelius expected
—
to sink in. In fact, it took the solid chest of a man’kin to drive the point home.

‘Wh
—
?’ Pirelius recoiled from the frozen statue with a look of utter confusion on his face. The man’kin consistently flinched from the Homunculus when it approached. This one
—
a three-metre-high bearded man in white stone with a beatific expression and outstretched arms
—
had not.

He backed away, and the frozen man’kin fell out of range. It shook its head, uncannily as though waking.

‘The one from the Void is here,’
the man’kin said. ‘Tiden har kommit.’

Pirelius just frowned at that, but the effect on the Homunculus was startling. It straightened with a jerk.

‘What could you know about that?’ it asked the man’kin, its superimposition of faces twisted in anguish.

‘The time has come,’
the man’kin stated matter-of-factly.
‘It has always been. You are there. We are there with you.’

‘You weren’t there! You couldn’t possibly know!’ The Homunculus wriggled in Pirelius’s grip, but the bandit clung tight. The blade bit deep into its throat, drawing not blood but a strange silver mist that bubbled and ran down its chest. ‘We are alone!’

The sound of propellers whining drew Kail’s eyes upwards. The heavy lifter was swooping lower in defiance of the rising wind. Sal couldn’t have been more surprised to see Marmion dangling from a rope ladder if the Sky Warden had been stark naked and clutching a flower between his teeth.

‘I’ll kill it!’ screamed Pirelius as Marmion dropped to the dirt in the safety zone. ‘I’ll kill it!’

‘I know,’ said Marmion coolly, making reassuring motions with both hands. ‘That’s exactly what I want. And if you’ll just stay calm, both our chances of making it out of this alive will significantly improve.’

Skender was having trouble keeping up. One moment he had been descending at a steady pace, the next the world had dropped out from under him and the Wall was streaming by. He had cried out, fearing for a moment that the rope had snapped and he was falling to his death. But the harness still had a tight grip on his backside; he wasn’t in freefall and hadn’t skinned himself too badly against the store. Somehow the crew up above had found a way to accelerate his descent without dropping him.

Then, with the ground finally coming appreciably closer, the heavy lifter had lunged for him — or so it had felt — and he had covered his face with his hands, fearing a new catastrophe.

Death spared him again. When he dared part his fingers, the dirigible was heading for the sky.

Skender looked down. Someone else had joined the party below. A Sky Warden, judging by the colour of the robe. He groaned, recognising Marmion’s bald spot. What was
he
doing there?

The ground was coming up awfully fast. He fumbled at the pouch, thinking,
Red for up, green for down, white to stop.
He produced the white flag and waved it. Nothing happened.

‘Pay attention, you idiots!’ he cried uselessly, flailing the flag in desperation as the ground swelled beneath him. ‘White to stop! White to stop! White to —’

With a throat-closing jerk, the winch suddenly slowed, forcing his chin down on his chest and the flag out of his hand. It flapped around his legs on the end of its string as he came to an abrupt halt a metre from the ground. He heard a ‘glurk’ and realised that it had come from him.

The rope jerked again and he dropped the rest of the distance. His feet hit the ground and his legs promptly gave way. He landed face first, staring at Shilly’s stick. He didn’t even know he’d dropped it.

A stone snout poked him, hard.

‘Ow!’ Skender sat up and backed against the Wall with the stick in his hands. The reservoir of the Change in the carved wood trembled against his fingertips, aching to be let out. He stood and confronted his attacker.

It was the man’kin pig he had spoken to the previous day.

‘You are needed in this world,’
it said again, and trotted away.

Skender let out a panicky breath and looked around. The ground was as broken as a freshly turned field. Further along the Wall was a metal door, glowing red. The man’kin stayed carefully away from it. Several dozen man’kin congregated outside the tunnel mouth, to his left. He could feel the stone slabs shaking behind him as they closed ranks, gradually shutting the makeshift entrance to the city. A pang of compassion for the stone pig struck him: it would be stuck outside when the flood came. The water would dash it to pieces.

But what was death to something that saw all its life at once? He didn’t know. He was, mainly, just glad that the other man’kin were ignoring him.

They stared, instead, at a confrontation taking place a dozen metres away. In the centre of a clearing, Pirelius and the twins had squared off against Marmion. Their voices were buried under the sound of the Wall rearranging itself, and another sound — a growing rumble the origin of which Skender tried not to think about. No one appeared to have noticed his arrival apart from the pig.

He went to move closer and was hauled up by the rope. He tugged on it, hoping the winch operators would take the hint. They did. Rope hissed to the ground, giving him much-needed slack. He followed the pig through a petrified forest of man’kin, none of whom paid him any attention. He was ready with the red flag and Shilly’s stick if they did.

Words gradually coalesced out of the noise.

‘— really think she’s coming back for you?’

‘Of course she is. We have a deal.’

‘We had a deal too, and look where I ended up!’

‘I don’t know anything about that — but I
do
know that the Magister is afraid at the moment. You can use that to your advantage.’

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘Because I’m down here with you.’ Skender was close enough to see Marmion’s expression. It was one of determination and fear. ‘Would I take a risk like this if I didn’t think it worthwhile?’

‘Pah!’ Pirelius spat into the dirt. ‘I don’t trust anyone without knowing what they have to lose.’

Skender peered from behind a statue of a horse as Pirelius dragged the twins away from Marmion. Pirelius came up sharp against a frozen man’kin, and flinched away from it into another.