Chapter 350 - 341 — The Way to the Throne I
The stair went down for a long time.
It turned four more times after the landing, and at every turn the channel on the left-hand wall turned with them and went on, and the red inside it kept going at the speed of a man walking.
The air changed on the way down. The stale mineral cold of the upper corridor gave way to something wetter — the walls were damp to the touch by the second turn and running by the fourth, and the whole stairwell smelled of old mortar and standing water and something underneath both that James did not have a word for.
Their footsteps came back off the walls at two and three seconds and did not agree with each other.
And somewhere well below them, a long way off, something made a noise.
It was not close. It was not aimed at them. It was the sound of a large thing in a large space, arriving through a lot of stone, and it happened twice on the way down and then did not happen again.
"That’s fine," said Cillian. "I’ve decided that’s fine."
---
The stair came out onto a floor.
Not a landing — a floor, a proper level of the fortress, and James stood at the bottom of the steps and understood that they had not been anywhere near the bottom of the thing.
Directly ahead of them was a junction. Four ways: the main route continuing east, wide and arched, and three narrower corridors going north, south and north-east.
Chambers opened off all of it. James could count six doorways from where he stood, and two of them had no doors and four had frames with the pintles still in them.
The ceiling was lower here — four metres instead of eight — and the pillars were closer together and squatter, and the whole level felt as though it had been built by the same people in a bigger hurry.
Water had got in. It ran down the eastern wall in a broad dark stain and spread across the flags in a sheet three centimetres deep for about twenty metres before it found a drain, and everybody’s boots were wet inside a minute.
"That’s not the lower keep," said Finn.
"No."
`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: REACH THE LOWER KEEP]`
"It hasn’t changed," said James. "So there’s more down."
"How much more?"
"No idea."
---
They did it the way they had done the level above, which by now took nobody any discussion.
Finn went forward. Ronan held the centre. Cillian took the angles — and there were fewer of them down here, no galleries, but the corridors ran straight and long and that suited him. Maeve started keeping the map, out loud, at every junction: *east is main, north-east we’ve done, north is open, south is open.*
And James put skeletons into the branches.
He had four of them, which was the most he had ever walked into a floor’s second level with, and he sent three of them down three separate corridors on three separate instructions and kept the fourth walking behind his own shoulder.
He could do that now. He had spent a large part of November learning to do exactly that, in a hall, with nobody shooting at him.
"North’s clear for sixty," he said, about a minute later. "South bends left and I’ve lost the feel of it round the corner. North-east has something in it about forty in and it’s not moving."
"Something?"
"Something that isn’t moving," said James. "That’s all I’ve got. It’s not eyes."
---
They cleared four chambers off the main route and none of them had a way down.
The first was a cistern room, which explained the water — a stone tank twelve metres square and three deep, cracked along the bottom, empty except for a foot of black sludge.
The second had been an armoury and had nothing in it but the brackets.
The third was a long hall with a stone table down the middle of it and benches cut out of the same slab, and forty-one iron cups on the floor, and James looked at that for slightly longer than he needed to and then walked out.
The fourth ended in a junction, which meant a choice, which meant Maeve standing in the middle of it reading walls again.
"East," she said. "East’s got the wear. Look at the middle of the floor — that’s the route people used, and people used it going somewhere. The north one’s got no wear on it at all."
They went east, and forty metres in, the corridor opened out into a room with two other corridors feeding into it, and both of those had things in them.
---
The ones in the left-hand passage came forward.
They were shorter than the Sentinels above and about half again as wide, and they had no armour on them at all because they did not appear to need any — their backs and shoulders and the outsides of their arms were plated in something that had grown there, grey and ridged and overlapping, like a beetle’s back put on a man’s frame. Their arms came down past their knees.
They had nothing in their hands. They did not need that either.
`[STONE BRUTE]`
`[LEVEL: 54]`
`[HP: 12,400 / 12,400]`
Four of them, coming down a three-metre corridor in single file because that was all it would take.
And fifty metres away, down the right-hand passage, five thinner things stopped where they were and did not come one step closer.
They were long-limbed and hunched, with their heads carried forward, and each one held a cupped hand out in front of itself with something burning in it.
`[EMBER CASTER]`
`[LEVEL: 53]`
`[HP: 6,800 / 6,800]`
The first one threw before anybody had finished counting them.
It came down the passage flat and fast — a knot of orange about the size of a fist — and hit the wall two metres from Ronan’s head and burst, and the wall stayed lit for four seconds afterward.
"*Cover*," Maeve said. "Left of the pillar, all of you, *left*—"
---
The geometry was the whole fight.
The Brutes could only come at them one at a time through the left-hand corridor. That was fine. Ronan stood in the mouth of it with the shield and Finn worked whichever shoulder came round the frame, and four Stone Brutes in a queue was the best problem Team Zero had been handed all day.
The Ember Casters were the problem, because they were fifty metres down a straight passage on the other side of the room, and they could throw, and Team Zero had to be in the room to fight the Brutes.
Cillian got two of them in the first ninety seconds and then they stopped standing in the middle of the passage and started throwing from behind the corners of the entrance, and after that he got nothing at all.
"I can’t reach them," he said. "They’re indexing off the wall, I’ve no line."
"Then don’t," said James.
He had a skeleton sixty metres away in the north corridor, and the north corridor, according to the shape of the level Maeve had been reciting out loud for twenty minutes, ran parallel to the right-hand passage and connected to it somewhere.
He walked it.
It took about forty seconds and it was the longest forty seconds of the fight — Ronan took a Brute’s forearm across the shield hard enough to go back a metre, and a knot of burning came in over the pillar and took the sleeve off Finn’s coat, and Maeve moved everybody four metres twice.
Then the skeleton found the connection.
The first the Ember Casters knew about it was one of them going down with a Stone Brute’s hand round the back of its neck.
They came out from behind the corners.
`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]` ×3
"*There* they are," said Cillian.
---
After that it was work.
The Brutes died in the corridor mouth one at a time, which took four minutes, because twelve thousand hit points behind natural plating does not come apart quickly and Finn had to open the same shoulder join on all four of them.
`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]` ×2
`[MANA: 2,650 / 3,100]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +60]`
`[MANA: 2,710 / 3,100]`
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×2`
`[MANA: 2,550 / 3,100]`
`[STONE BRUTES SLAIN ×4]`
`[EMBER CASTERS SLAIN ×5]`
`[EXP GAINED: 4,120]`
`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 62,985 / 75,000]`
Finn put his hand through the hole in his sleeve and looked at his own forearm, which was pink from wrist to elbow and would blister.
"They *throw fire*."
"They do."
"Nobody warned me there was going to be fire."
---
It took another half an hour to find the stair down, and two more small fights to get there.
`[STONE BRUTES SLAIN ×3]`
`[EMBER CASTERS SLAIN ×2]`
`[EXP GAINED: 2,320]`
`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 65,305 / 75,000]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +90]`
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×2`
`[MANA: 2,480 / 3,100]`
And the channels were on that level too.
James found the first one in the cistern room without looking for it — a cut line about two fingers wide running down the inside face of the tank, below the old water mark, with a thread of dull red in it.
After that he knew where to look, and they were everywhere once he did.
They were not a network. That was the thing he kept coming back to. A network branches and joins and doubles back. These did not. Every single channel he found on that level was going the same way — down, or east and then down — and where two of them met, they met the way two streams meet, and went on as one.
He found one running along the base of a wall that had been rebuilt at some point. The rebuilt section was cruder than the original and the channel had been cut through both, which meant somebody had come back after the repair and re-cut it.
He found one that went into the floor at the edge of a chamber and did not come out anywhere he could find.
And in the corridor before the stairhead, he found a place where the channel had been *blocked* — a section of it packed with something hard and grey that had been forced in and had set — and the red had gone around it. There was a new channel beside the old one, rougher, cut at an angle, rejoining the original forty centimetres further on.
He stood over that one for a while.
"Somebody tried to stop it," he said.
Maeve crouched beside him.
"And somebody cut around it."
"Same somebody?"
"No idea." She put her thumb on the rough section. "This one’s hand-cut with a bad tool. The first one’s cut by somebody with time and a proper chisel."
They did not stay. James put the location in the broadcast log the way Maeve had taught him — *say it out loud, say where you are, the feed timestamps it* — and moved on, because the objective was down and the channels were going the same way and he was not going to spend Floor 35 on his knees in a corridor.
---
The third level was not like the second.
They came off the stair into a chamber twice the height of anything above, and the first thing James noticed was that the stone was better.
Everything down here had been cut properly. The pillars were fluted. The vault overhead had ribs in it. The floor was laid in a pattern — two colours of stone, worn almost flat but still visible — and there were the remains of iron sconces at intervals along the walls, forged rather than hammered.
The second thing he noticed was that somebody had fought in here.
Not recently. There were scorch marks a metre across on three of the pillars, high up, and the eastern wall had a section blown out of it and roughly filled, and the floor pattern had a crater in the middle of it four metres wide with the pieces still lying in it.
"That’s not decay," said Ronan.
"No."
"Something happened in here."
"Something happened in here a very long time ago," said Maeve, "and then somebody swept it up badly and left."
The main route went east out of the chamber, and there were two side chambers on the north wall, and the whole level was open enough that Cillian was visibly happier about it.
And the channels ran openly across the floor.
That was the change. Upstairs they had been cut into masonry and easy to miss. Here, where the floor had been broken, three of them had been exposed along their length — the covering stone gone, the channel open to the air like a gutter — and the red in them was bright enough to put a faint colour on the pale stone either side.
They all went east.
---
The fight on the third level was the worst of the floor and it was James’s fault, which he said out loud afterwards.
They came down the eastern route into a long hall with pillars in two rows. James anchored two of his active summons at his flanks and sent the other three skeletons ahead through the pillars, because that was what he had been doing all day.
Something a hundred metres down that hall destroyed all three of them inside eleven seconds.
`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED] ×3`
"*Down*," Cillian shouted, and everybody went down behind a pillar, and a barb about the length of a forearm came through the space where Finn’s head had been and went forty metres past them and stuck in a wall.
`[BARB HURLER]`
`[LEVEL: 56]`
`[HP: 8,200 / 8,200]`
Three of them, at the far end of the hall, on a raised step. Squat, wide, with a thick tail behind them and a launching arm that bent the wrong way, and a quiver of the things standing up off the back of each shoulder.
And coming up the hall between the pillars, low and fast and from both sides at once:
`[CLAW STALKER]`
`[LEVEL: 55]`
`[HP: 7,400 / 7,400]`
Six of them. Lean, four-limbed, running on all fours with their heads up and their forelimbs ending in a pair of curved blades each.
"Range at the back and rushers in the middle," said Maeve, flat and fast, from behind a pillar. "Standard. Ronan, you’ve got the rushers — do *not* leave the pillars. Cillian, you can’t out-shoot three of those from open floor, don’t try. Finn, pillar to pillar, nothing in the open. James—"
"I know."