The Masked City

As they descended the flight of stairs, Kai spotted something. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Can we pause for a moment?’

Irene followed his gaze. There was nothing there except a still pool of water. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was intensely ominous, probably full of things with too many tentacles and too many teeth. Although nothing had tried to eat them yet.

‘Only a moment.’ Vale frowned; the rockfalls were getting closer. ‘The guards we bested will certainly have raised the alarm by now. And that noise, whatever it is—’

‘Either it’s an alarm,’ Irene said, ‘and we’re being pursued. Or I’ve fundamentally damaged this place’s nature by using the Language - so it’s tearing itself apart and the ceiling’s falling down. I’m not sure that’s much better.’

Kai knelt by the edge of the pool and cupped water in his hands, pouring it over his head. It ran down over his hair and in trickles down his shirt, plastering it to his body. He sighed in relief, closing his eyes and splashing his face. ‘It’s safe enough,’ he said, turning back to Vale and Irene as he rose to his feet. ‘I just needed to clean myself. There’s nothing alive in those waters.’

‘Or anywhere else in this place,’ Vale said. ‘Except for the prisoners, I fear. Do you think they could get free, Winters?’

‘It’d be stupid to have an alarm system that let all the prisoners loose when it went off,’ Irene said. A spatter of dust drifted down from the spur of an arch above them, and the pool’s surface shifted in long dark ripples. The instability was getting much closer. ‘Run now, talk later?’ she suggested.

The ground shuddered under them as they began running again. Pieces of the upper bridgework and pillars began to tumble from above, crashing to the ground in great explosions of sound and sprays of marble shards. It was like the slow unfolding of a nightmare, where the falling rocks and rising wind were always just behind them, forcing them to stumble onwards, their muscles aching, panting for breath, not allowing them to rest. They couldn’t afford to stop. Stonework was giving way less than a hundred yards behind them now, dropping pieces into the huge chasms. Distant shrieking came through the howling of the wind, as unseen prisoners cried their rage into the storm. All Irene could focus on was running, putting one foot in front of another, and on the exit ahead. They had to get out before the destruction caught up with them, or they were all lost. There should be only a couple of bridges now between them and the exit, and if they could just make it in time …

Then a cold realization spiked through her mind. We’re not escaping, we’re being driven like panicked rabbits. And where you have a hunter driving rabbits, there’s a snare at the other end.

She forced herself to look up and around, scanning the horizon rather than the path to the bridge directly ahead. And that was how she caught the glint of light on the gun. With an effort that made her legs scream in pain, she pushed herself forward and slammed into Vale, knocking him down as the bullet ricocheted only a few inches from his head.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

All three of them hit the floor with varying degrees of style, and Irene desperately hoped the bridge’s marble railings and pillars would block any but the luckiest of shots.

Crawling forward on her belly, she peered through its railings in the direction of the shooting and could see a squad of half a dozen disciplined-looking guards. They were on a ramp that curled up the side of a pillar, level with the centre of the bridge, giving them a rather too convenient firing point. The one who had fired his long gun was reloading with cool efficiency, while the others were kneeling, ready to fire.

‘Those look like muzzle-loaded rifles,’ Vale hissed.

‘What do you mean?’ she muttered.

‘I mean that they are very accurate, Winters.’ Fresh blood from his exertions had stained his makeshift bandage. ‘That shot was not meant to hit me. It was meant to frighten us.’

‘If I hadn’t knocked you down, it would’ve hit you!’ Irene snapped, having to raise her voice now, for it to carry above the sound of crashing rock. ‘Vale, they definitely want to take Kai alive, they might even want to take me alive, but I don’t think they mind killing you! For heaven’s sake, stay down!’

‘Hells,’ Kai muttered. He wriggled sideways, lifting himself up a fraction to check the other end of the bridge. ‘And the railings cut out, once we get to the far end, which means we’d be an open target. But if they’re not trying to bring us down, they’re here to keep us trapped …’ He swallowed.

Until someone else gets here to deal with us. Irene’s right wrist throbbed from a remembered grip, and she rested it against the cold stone. ‘Can we go back?’ she asked.

‘We were less than ten minutes from the entrance,’ Vale growled. ‘If we turn back now and take a different route, we may not be able to find the entrance again, and we’d lose more time anyway.’

Irene tried to think. They’d made it this far. She would not accept failure. ‘Kai, if you change form—’

‘I’d be a sitting target before I could take flight,’ Kai said quickly ‘And even if they’re holding fire on me right now, we can’t assume they’ll continue to do so.’

Irene sighed. She hadn’t even reached the part about and then you escape on your own, while Vale and I make our way out separately, but she suspected he’d seen it coming and rejected it.