Chapter 349 - 340 — The Keep Beneath the Mountain III (Bonus)
It was one of them and at the same time, it wasn’t.
It had the same build, the chest, the shoulders, the grey hide. Same forward-and-down horns, except these had not been worn blunt; somebody had put bands of dark iron round both of them and the tips came to a point.
The plate on it was not strapped-on scrap. It was a harness, made for that body, covering the chest and the belly and both shoulders and going down over the hips in a skirt of overlapping plates, and it had been maintained — there was no rust on it anywhere that James could see from twelve metres up.
And it was not carrying a shaped bar with a head on it.
It had a poleaxe. Two and a half metres of it, with a proper head — axe blade one side, a spike the other, a point on top — and the whole thing had been made by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing.
It was standing in front of the arch. Not patrolling. Standing, square on, with the poleaxe grounded and both hands on the haft, facing out into an empty hall.
It had been doing that for a very long time.
`[HORNED CHAMPION]`
`[LEVEL: 58]`
`[HP: 27,000 / 27,000]`
"It’s guarding the stairs," said Ronan.
"It’s guarding the stairs," said James.
---
They did not have to beat it. They had to get past it, and it was standing in the doorway, which meant the same thing.
They took eleven minutes over it and it was the most straightforward difficult fight they had had in months, because the shape of the answer was one they had built in a padded hall in August and had been running ever since.
Ronan went down the balcony stair first and took it and held it and never once tried to hurt it.
Finn worked the outside of the hip plates where the skirt had to move.
Cillian stayed on the balcony twelve metres up — he did not come down at all, which was new for him — and had a downward angle on a thing that could not reach him and could not leave.
Maeve called the poleaxe. That was her whole job for eleven minutes, and it was the job, because the reach on the thing was enormous and every third exchange somebody was one step from being taken apart at the waist.
And James put three skeletons in the arch behind it.
Not to fight. To stand in the doorway and take up space, so that every time the Champion gave ground toward the stairway it was giving ground into something, and after the fourth time it stopped trying.
`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]` ×2
`[MANA: 2,740 / 3,100]`
`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`
`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`
`[FINN HALE — GIANT BREAKER STRIKE]`
It came apart at the left hip, and then the leg went, and James put Durendal up under the harness at the armpit while Ronan had the poleaxe haft pinned against the floor with the shield.
`[HORNED CHAMPION — HP: 2,100 → 0]`
`[HORNED CHAMPION SLAIN]`
`[EXP GAINED: 1,900]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`
`[MANA: 2,770 / 3,100]`
`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 48,505 / 75,000]`
No clear panel. Of course there was no clear panel. The objective was down the stairs.
---
It fell back and to the left, and James walked round it toward the arch, and stopped.
There were lines in the stone.
Channels — narrow, about two fingers wide and as deep, cut into the flagstones and running up the wall on both sides of the archway. They were not cracks. They were straight, and they turned at right angles, and they were cut.
And they converged.
All of them ran toward a single point on the wall to the left of the arch, about chest height, where there was a relief carved into the stone — a flat panel, half a metre across, that had been damaged so thoroughly that whatever it had shown was not recoverable. Somebody had gone at it with something.
"That’s deliberate," said Maeve, crouching. "Look at the corners. Somebody sat down and cut those."
"Before or after the fort?"
"After." She ran her thumb along one. "The flags are worn smooth and the channel’s sharp. They cut these into a floor people had already been walking on for years."
James put his hand near one of the channels running up the wall beside the arch.
And saw the light in it.
---
It was very faint.
A thread of dull red, down inside the channel, about as bright as a coal going out — and if he had not spent four floors looking for exactly that, he would have walked past it and never known.
It was moving.
Not fast. Slowly, steadily, in one direction: down the wall, across the floor, under the archway, and away down the stairs into the dark.
James did not touch it.
"Cillian. Come here."
Cillian came down off the balcony and looked and said a word.
Finn looked and did not say anything at all.
Maeve got down on the flags with her face about eight inches from the channel and stayed there for a long time.
"It’s the same colour," she said, finally.
"It’s the same colour."
"That’s all I’ll give you. It’s the same colour and it’s moving and that’s it. It isn’t in anything. There’s no body. It’s not looking for one." She sat back on her heels. "On twenty-eight it came up out of the ground at whoever was hurt. On twenty-nine it left people to get uphill. On thirty it was under an entire city. This is inside a wall, in a cut channel, going one direction, and nobody’s fighting."
"So it’s not the same thing."
"I did not say that either," said Maeve.
---
James reached back and put his hand on the haft of the scythe and did not release it.
Thirty minutes. That was what it was worth, once, and he had no idea at all what would happen if he put a black blade into a channel in a wall.
It might take the red apart, the way it had four times on three floors.
It might take the channel apart. And the channel went somewhere, and the objective went the same way, and cutting the route open before he understood it was the kind of thing he had spent a year learning not to do.
"Not yet," he said, and took his hand off it.
"Agreed," said Maeve.
"You’re agreeing quickly."
"I’ve seen you cut things you understood," said Maeve. "You were very good at it. I’ve never seen you cut something you didn’t."
---
They went down.
The stairway behind the arch was wide — four metres, made for moving numbers of people — and it turned twice and kept going, and the air got colder rather than warmer with every flight.
And the channels came with them.
That was the thing that got into James and stayed there for the rest of the descent. On the left-hand wall of the stair, about waist height, the cut channel ran down beside them, keeping pace, turning where the stair turned, and inside it the thread of dull red went the same way they were going at about the speed of a man walking.
It had been doing that before they arrived.
At the third turn the stairway opened out into a landing with a rail, and below and beyond it the fortress went on — more of it than had been above, levels and galleries and the tops of pillars going down into a dark that Cillian’s light did not reach the bottom of.
`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: REACH THE LOWER KEEP]`
`[PROCEEDING]`
Somewhere a very long way beneath them, at the limit of what the eye could do with that much dark, the channels on the walls all seemed to be going toward the same place — and whatever that place was, it was big enough that the red going into it was not making any difference to it at all.
"Down," said James.
And they went down, five of them on a wide stone stair inside a mountain, with a thin red line running along the wall beside their shoulders the whole way.