Meek

Chapter 64: On the Pillar

So Eli stepped onto the shield ... and it didn't disappear.

Instead, he felt a solid surface beneath him. He took two steps upward then crouched to leap toward the slab of wall.

Halfway through his leap, the shield vanished.

He yelped and flailed toward the wall, moving forward but not fast enough. He would've dropped into the risen mob except one of his spark shoved against the ground while the other lodged on top of the wall.

They pushed and pulled--and bought him one addition inch.

The fingers of his right hand snagged the edge of the wall. His body swung forward and smacked the stone and he started to slip off.

Riadn grabbed his wrist while his other hand found a grip around Lara's ankle, which was sticking out past the edge of the wall. A spark show her lying on her back with her feet hanging over, to give him something to hold onto. Looked like the worst possible way to save someone from falling, but it worked. Must've been a dryn trick.

With Riadn tugging and Lara lying here, he climbed to the top of the wall.

Then he collapsed, safe.

Only one problem.

It wasn't the top of the wall.

His spark showed him that the slab of stone didn't connect to the inner wall of the city. It was a free-standing chunk that had fallen away from the gatehouse at the edge of the square. It was basically a blessdamned pillar. Though least it was a big one: the sloping top was about ten feet by ten feet.

However, it didn't connect to the inner wall.

They were trapped there.

"Well," he said.

"Yeah," Lara said, sitting up beside him.

Riadn said, "Help me move him away from the edge."

She meant Payde, who'd collapsed from maintaining his shield. Or from raising one at all, that close to the Reach.

The power shedding off the great spire didn't feel so comfortable to Eli anymore. This close, it was far too intense to feel like an encouraging lover's whisper. Instead, he felt it in his bones. More like the shouts of a bloodthirsty arena crowd clamoring for the gladiators to fight. The sensation seemed to focus on him, like thousands of people watching, chanting, screaming.

He drew one spark closer as he dragged Payde into the center of the 'pillar,' and calmed his core. That helped a little, though the clamor of the Reach still exhausted him.

He sat heavily beside Lara and looked toward the heart of Ehrat Break. The rooftops beyond the inner wall had melted into crests and troughs like a choppy ocean, with a few higher peaks--towers and roofs--breaking the surface. The rooftops had melted and spread, and lapped against the inner wall. There was no space between the roofs and the wall. Instead, the wall contained the stone ocean like the rim of a bucket contains water.

The mist was light enough that Reach was visible maybe a quarter mile away. The waves of stone stopped short before reaching the great spire, leaving a wide circle around its base. Like a moat or a ... a quarry.

His spark couldn't make out details from that distance; all he knew was that there was a wide empty space around the bottom of the Reach. And that the lowest visible section of the great spire was surrounded by scaffolding.

Wooden scaffolding that appeared to wrap entirely around the base of the Reach. Which was as wide around, at the base, as a castle.

Well, that's where all that lumber had gone.

"How is he?" Lara asked Riadn.

"Unconscious," she said, rummaging in Payde's pouches for herbs. "He'll recover in a few hours."

"We're stuck here until then."

"Looks four, five yards to the next section of wall," Eli said, checking the distance with a spark from above. "We can't jump."

"The risen aren't climbing?" Riadn asked.

Eli shook his head, watching the mob shuffle aimlessly in the square below. "I think the shrine's weakening them."

"Hm," she said, forcing a pinch of herbs into Payde's mouth.

"When he recovers," Eli said, "we'll stroll across a shield onto the wall. Then we're in the inner city."

"How come the risen aren't on the rooftops?" Lara asked, frowning toward the empty waves of stone.

"Maybe the Reach hurts them, too," Eli said.

"Or maybe there's nowhere to climb," Riadn said.

"Looks like they're building ... something over there," Lara said, peering toward the heart of the city. "On Heaven's Reach itself. So it can't hurt them much."

"Scaffolding," Eli said.

"Is that what they're making? Why? For construction?"

"No idea." He frowned at a slash on her arm. "You're bleeding."

She startled. "I didn't notice."

So he cleaned her cut while Riadn tended Payde and a few dozen risen wandered the square beneath them.

"Who's Fishhook?" he asked, as he tied a cloth around Lara's cut.

"The one who told us to come to the Weep," Riadn said. "He used to be a member of the Order."

"The mercenary?"

She nodded. "When you leave the Order, you stay in touch. That's where a lot of our information comes from, former orderites. You develop a sense for lost mages."

"So someone like Fishhook," Lara said, "if he's hired for a mercenary job and catches the scent of a lost mage, he tells the Order?"

"Yeah. Most lost mages are harmless, though. We watch them. Help if we can. Banish them if we can't."

"And if they're dangerous, the Order sends a knife," Lara said.

Eli looked in the direction from which they'd raced across the city. "So where is he now?"

"Could be twenty yards away," Lara said. "With all this fog."

"He sent us to the temple district, though."

They talked in circles for a time, while Riadn poured sips of water into Payde's mouth and Eli monitored the edges of the pillar with his sparks. The roar of the Reach subsided into a dull clamor in his mind, and he couldn't tell if it felt more disquieting or strengthening. It was a little like ... like being drunk, maybe. You felt fast and strong and brave, but that didn't mean you knew what the halo was going on. Didn't mean you weren't stumbling around like a fool, either.

The risen twitched and shuffled across the square. Eli caught glimpses of them every time the mist cleared, but never lost his sense of revulsion. Not of them, so much as of what had been done to them. And what might happen to the children. They were four days gone already. The chance that they'd survived was shrinking from small to nonexistent.

He didn't want to remember his vow to Gertrud but ... he'd honor his pledge. He couldn't do anything else.

He'd never prayed much, not since he'd lost half his family to angelbrood as a kid. And now, well ... he wasn't exactly living his life in the image of the Chained Angel. Still, he prayed to Her to spare him that. To spare him that, at least, if nothing else.

After Riadn finished with Payde, she cleaned her own shallow wounds, then said, "So, Meek. You can see behind yourself?"

"He can feel behind himself," Lara said, before Eli could respond. "Feels the spark of life. Tugging at him like a flower feels sunlight."

"I am a flower?" he said in dryn.

"You are a flower," she corrected.

"That's what I said."

"You said you are a 'flower.'" She sang the tone differently. "Flower, flower."

"How did you come to leave the Glade?" Riadn asked, handing around hardtack biscuits.

Eli expected Lara to have a lie prepared, so he just looked at her and chewed. He figured she'd talk about having wanted to see the world as a child, how she'd never outgrown that.

What she said was, "I did--we did--something shameful. We won't return until we, uh ..."

"Wash your souls clean?"

"No, sins never wash away. They don't stain us, they dye us. They become part of the warp and weft of us. That is as it should be. We won't return until we've done as much that makes us proud as we've done that makes us ashamed."

"How about you?" Eli asked. "Payde said you're from the south. That's the coast?"

Riadn looked toward the rooftop sea of melted stone. The crests were touched by the sun, which shone at such a low angle that the troughs were becoming completely dark with shadow.

"I was raised on a trawler. The youngest of six. My sister, the closest in age to me, she was born to the sea. Well, they all were, except my eldest brother, he's a merchant now. But I was given a different gift."

"So you joined the Order, just like that?" Lara asked.

"First the militia, then the capital guard. That's where Fishhook spotted me. Recruited me to the Order."

"So there's no, uh ..." Eli thought for a second. "No reason you hate lost mages? No personal vendetta or, or tragedy that drove you onto this path?"

"I don't hate them," she said. "I pity them."

"Sometimes you hate them," Payde mumbled, lying curled on his side

She didn't react to him regaining consciousness, like she already'd known. "Only if I really don't like them."

Lara snorted a laugh. "Good policy."

"How're you feeling?" Eli asked Payde.

"Like I stubbed my toe on a saucepan, except it's my soul instead of my toe, and the Reach instead of a saucepan."

"Why a saucepan?" Lara asked.

"How long?" Riadn asked him.

"Hurts far more than stubbing your toe on a frying pan," he told Lara, as the color returned to his face. "Everyone knows that."

"How long, Payde?" Riadn repeated.

He looked to her. "For a shield-bridge across the gap?"

"Of course."

"Well, no sooner than--" He paused. "I hope fifteen seconds."

"It'll be at least an hour bef--"

"Because we don't want to be stuck here when they arrive," he continued.

He pointed in the direction of the Reach, and Eli's forward spark spotted fifteen or twenty small figures bounding toward them. Disappearing in one of the shadowed troughs, then visible again every time they went too high. Scampering, leaping, tumbling closer. Moving together like fish in a school. Maybe as tall as his hip and--

Monkeys. A troop of blood-monkeys.