It smelled
revolting but the way was clear. Viola was able to sneak up the stairs and look
out across the ruins of the city. The entire area, with the exception of the
space around the Tower was covered in the tents and constructions of the
Tlaxacan army. It was as if, having destroyed the city once they’d come back to
have another go at doing it properly.
The sound of hammering and the smell of smoke rose up from everywhere.
The curse on the surface was, if anything, now worse, and Viola felt as if a
massive weight had suddenly been placed back on to her shoulders. She wondered then again for a moment how they
had ever functioned up here in the open with the curse upon them, but then she
heard in her head the sound of Ophia’s bell.
She briefly surveyed the forces ahead of her. The organisation of the
troops was clearly based on a large number of labouring kinaam (who Viola couldn’t help but notice, with a pang of guilt,
did look a lot like Rem) and a few scattered supervising humans. The humans
grunted at the kinaam in a language
that Viola didn’t understand and they moved around like slaves doing exactly as
they were told. What they were being told to do appeared to be to clear out all
of the remaining vaults. Whatever fear they had had of the minor vaults before
they had obviously lost now. Food, clothes and weapons lay scattered about the
rubble, destroyed or defiled. It was very hard to look at. The relics of
Viola’s culture were being burned away.
She knew that she didn’t have long to look at this and so she rapidly
turned to consider a possible route to the Tower. From the top of the Vault to
the safe area around the base of the Tower was a good fifteen minute walk at
the best of times and it was clear that she’d have to take a very long route
round to it. Would she have enough time?
She climbed up onto a boulder. She immediately discovered that it was
surprisingly hard to move when invisible, mostly because you couldn’t see where
you were putting your feet. It took a
good minute of scrambling to get to the top. Once she was there she realised
that if she had hadn’t been invisible then it would be an easy job to half-jump
from boulder to boulder above the heads of the Tlaxacans for at least part of
the way. As it was, and her gammy foot didn’t help, each leap would carry a
large risk of injury. It was, however, still worth a try – anything to avoid
being too close to these creatures who made her feel physically sick.
The row of closely positioned boulders led from the Vault to the main
street that bisected this part of the city. Viola crossed them easily, moving
almost soundlessly past several dozen Tlaxacans who had been displaced by the
commotion in the Vault. She stepped down on to the road, in an area free of any
enemies. This road was fairly sparsely occupied, but she really didn’t feel
like taking the risk of brushing past someone too closely and giving herself
away. Avoiding people is tricky when you don’t know exactly where you are
yourself.
Viola spotted a low wall that ran alongside the road for about half its
length. If she could get up there then she could get within a few minutes of
the exclusion zone around the Tower.
Perhaps from there she’d be able to sprint to the edge. She looked down at her foot to judge whether
it looked up to a run, and then realised that this was futile. She made a mental note never to volunteer to
be invisible again.
The wall was about as high as Viola might normally be happy to climb,
but she was unsure whether she could cope with it given her present double
disability. She moved to the edge of it and examined it. It did look dauntingly
tall, but then a group of humans came round the side of a nearby ruin and she
was spooked into scrambling up without any problem. She wiped her forehead with
the back of her hand, half expecting the sweat to be visible as little beads of
water suspended in mid-air, but was quietly satisfied to see nothing at all.
There was no doubt that this was a very well-crafted spell.
The wall was wide at its top, although it was only about six feet above
the ground. It had obviously been too low to be worth destroying the first time
around. She ran along it for as far as
she could, hobbling slightly but still without making any appreciable sound.
She reached the end of the wall and jumped down into a space between it and a
large boulder. She studied herself briefly – no sign of flickering yet. She
also wondered how loud a really rapidly beating heart and the sound of rasping
panting would sound to anyone nearby.
The road to her left stretched on a few hundred yards more and then a
right turn would take her within a dozen hurried steps of the exclusion zone.
Between her and there, however, were about two hundred kinaam. She gulped and her heart quailed momentarily. She would have to make her way as well as she
could, looking for places to climb up if anyone came too near.
She wormed her way through to the very edge of the street and slowly
crept down its length, keeping as close to the accumulated marginal debris as
possible. Progress was slow and every passing group of enemies was terrifying.
The horde might look a bit like Rem, but the few that she dared to look at in
any detail had strange white eyes that contrasted horribly starkly with the
deep grey of Rem’s. Either something had been ignited in Rem’s eyes or something
had been extinguished from theirs.
Wherever possible she walked on loose rubble, anywhere that she thought
would look or feel unattractive to anyone else.
This, however, was taking forever.
It was quite safe, but every now and then, when she looked down, she
worried that she could see the hint of a smudge, like a pencil mark lingering
in mid-air. She was going to have to hurry. The only option appeared to be to
try to run for it.
She started off in as straight a line as she could, given her bad foot,
looking for gaps in the sea of bodies and hoping that no-one would grab an
invisible presence that just appeared to brush past. The first few things that
she interacted with seemed to hardly react at all, but as the number increased,
she could sense a buzz building up behind her. People began to shout and she
realised that she was now a barely visible grey haze. She ran on as fast as her
injured foot would allow her; she bounced off walls and people, wriggling and
struggling, as, finally, they began to grab at her. The sound of the harsh
Tlaxacan language rose up everywhere around her, like a barbed wire fence. She
had never felt so scared or so certain that she would fail.
Somehow she struggled to the junction. She now resembled a badly drawn
cartoon flick book with monochrome sketches on every fifth page, but she could
be seen clearly. Letting out a huge yell of despair she attempted to half-run,
half-dive into the sea of fallen white bones that surrounded the Tower. For a
moment she was suspended in mid-air, flickering uncontrollably. A kinaam had grabbed her as she had made
for safety. It looked at the strange shape without interest and then bared its
huge teeth. Viola was convulsed with disgust and terror. It was going to eat
her! Oh no it’s not – she thought
feverishly – not before I’ve had my go!
She bent over and bit the hand that held her, as hard as she had ever bitten
anything. The Tlaxacan screamed and
withdrew its hand in a spurt of blood. Viola struggled away and rolled across
the gap that separated her from the shattered skeletons.
The noise behind her had now turned into an uproar. She staggered to
her feet and glanced back. A sea of Tlaxacans were lapping against the side of
the exclusion zone, desperate to get at her, but unwilling to move over the
remains. Instead they started to throw debris at her. They threw anything that
came to hand and they were fiendishly strong. A hail of bricks, wire and stones
came careering towards her. Almost immediately a large pebble struck her on the
shoulder. She smarted and began to run, a desperate, zigzag, hobbling, run to
the tower door. Two more rocks struck her legs – she knew that a direct blow to
the head would be the end of her.
She reached the edge of the tower and embraced the wall like a
long-lost friend. The human guards had now arrived among the others and they
were forcing their minions to cross the forbidden zone, shouting at them and
prodding them viciously with their swords. They were moving slowly, but they
would still be with Viola very soon.
She shuffled round to the door. Now she needed to remember Ophia’s Elven
words.
‘Paraphonia’ she cried out,
above the growing hubbub. She heard the
door click once.
Arrows began to fly around her. The humans had clearly found their
bows.
‘Eleutheria’ she shouted. She heard the door click a second time.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see the sea of kinaam surrounding her. She could almost
feel their heavy, extraordinarily hard, teeth. There was only one way to escape
them.
‘Agape’
she shouted. The door clicked a third time, and glided open a hand’s width.
Viola kicked the door fully open and threw herself inside. The pursuing
kinaam hesitated for a second and she
just had enough time to push the door shut before they crowded into the narrow
hallway. She heard three emphatic clicks. The door was locked again. She leant
against the wall inside, blubbing with relief, her entire body screaming with
fatigue and pain. By now she was cycling through washed out blue, red and
yellow. She really didn’t care.
Viola turned
from the door and looked up the stairs behind it. They were spiral and cast in
iron but they were hard to see in the darkness of the enclosed space. She began
to climb the stairs, and as her foot landed on the first step the braziers on the
wall lit up. They lit up the stairwell, revealing dark green walls and an
opening into a space about thirty steps up. Viola hurried on to this floor. It
was apparently a communal or work area, with a desk, chairs and a small
library. She really wanted to stop to have a look around, but she knew that she
didn’t have the time. She pressed on.
The spiral staircase continued from the centre of this room and climbed
through two more similar-shaped rooms, one a cooking area and the second a
dormitory with four beds. One of the beds had a skeleton of an elf lying in it.
Again, Viola was desperate to examine all this more closely, but she felt
utterly compelled to continue climbing the stairs5.
Finally she arrived at the space at the top of the tower. It was open on two sides and capped by the
conical peak of the tower. The bell hung
in the middle of the space, with a bell rope trailing from it to the
floor. Two skeletal, clearly eleven,
figures lay at the bottom of the rope on the wooden floorboards. The bell was
cast in bronze and was about three feet across. It was unadorned except for a
single word engraved on its side.
‘Ekeo’ she whispered, ‘ring!’
Viola picked up the bell rope and began to sound the bell. It was large
and heavy, but it soon began to toll. It
filled the sky with the purest, clearest, sound she had ever heard. It sounded
exactly like it had in her head – note after sonorous note. Down in the city a
dreadful tumultuous wail began as if from every mouth in unison. One by one the enemy below began to crumble,
just as surely as they had done the last time that the bell had been rung, nine
hundred summers before.
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