He looked around. They’d followed a set of multiple railroad tracks five or six pairs across into the ruins; usually even if one or two tracks were blocked by trains caught at the Change, or rubble slumped across in the twenty-five years since, it was simply a matter of switching the pedal-carts and rail-wagons over to another that was whole and clear. Most of the route inside the lost city was solidly bound in stone and concrete and metal, and still holding against the gnawing of nature. Nature was winning with its infinite patience-they’d just come through a section where water six inches deep ran over the rails-but that victory was delayed here where the hand of the ancients still lay so heavy. Hence there was less of the annoying minor scrub growth that was covering more and more rail as the season advanced.
Northward were broad streets still littered with a scattering of rusting, tattered vehicles, then the ruins proper. He wouldn’t go anywhere near that; some of the streets had collapsed into the pits and tunnels beneath and were slow-moving swampy rivers now, and there might be dwellers, though they hadn’t seen any, or heard drums in the dark either. Southward were elevated roads-freeways, they’d called them-and the tower, and another scattering of ruins in a narrow strip between the railways and the blue of the lake. Which was more like an ocean, since you couldn’t see the other side.
Ritva and Mary reported the same all the way out of the vast necropolis to the west, so that the worst they’d have to do would be to set up the winches to topple rolling stock off the rails until it fell out of the way; they’d gotten that down to a science in their weeks on the trail.
“We’ll do it,” he said. “Those that wish to. The rest can stand guard. You Norrheimers may come back this way, but we of Montival will not, and it’s an opportunity we’ll never have again. Who’s for it?”
Bjarni laughed and shook his head. “I’m a friend of Thor. His mother is Earth.” He stamped his feet on the cracked concrete. “I’ll bide here. That thing’s like the Bifrost Bridge to Asgard, and I’ll not walk that as a living man.”
The party sorted itself; all his closest companions, and Asgerd, who wouldn’t show doubt in front of Edain; he suspected that the bowman might have hesitated if she hadn’t already loudly volunteered too. Garbh sat at the command of stay but growled dolefully as Rudi and the others walked off.
They took ropes and sledgehammers, pry-bars and bolt-cutters and hacksaws as well as their weapons with them, and a good assortment of torches-their tallow candles were long gone. They needed all of those in the tumbled entryway buildings; three false starts left them feeling discouraged before they found a way in.
Though those statues were worth the trouble, Artos thought; they’d been part of the big domed building next to the tower. Bronze giants trying to squeeze themselves out of those narrow spaces, like ground meat from a sausage. I wouldn’t call them beautiful, like the things Matti’s mother collects, but striking? That they were!
Ignatius stopped with broken glass gritting under his feet when they finally stood at the base of the huge stairway.
“Your Majesty, there is some danger in this,” he said quietly. “Can a King take an unnecessary risk, when on his safety depends the welfare of the realm? We must get the Sword to Montival. And yourself to bear it.”
“No, it’s a necessary risk,” Artos replied, giving him a quick grin. “Necessary because a King must be a man, and a man is more than a machine that does a task. Sometimes he must do a deed for the deed?s own sweet sake. If I become less than that, I’d be less than a man; and it’s a poor King I would be.”
Artos lifted his torch, watching the ruddy light of the flames sweep across stalactites of rust and plaster taller than him. Hibernating bats hung like thick fur from the ceiling, a few stirring at the light and noise; the smell of their droppings was thick in the damp musty air, and a littering of their dead sprawled mummified on the floor. Ingolf braced a foot against the wall and the door under his pry-bar squealed back. Artos ducked his head in and looked upward past the stairs; light vanished into a well of night, with wisps of smoke drifting across it.
“Dark and narrow, but it looks pretty dry,” he said. “If there’s not much water, the steel of the stairway should still bear our weight.”
“Wish there were windows,” Mathilda grumbled.
“If there were windows, there would have been more water!” Artos said. “Let’s be at it. Everyone on the rope, now-through a good sound loop or ring on your harness, people. Be ready to grab hold if one of us falls through.”
They joined themselves together, extinguished all but the lead climber’s torch and began the ascent, not sprinting but keeping to a slow steady jog, careful to keep four or five feet of distance between each. Even for someone in hard warrior’s condition he found his breath coming faster after a while and the thick air tired them all faster; there wasn’t anything he did often that used quite the same combination of muscles, but he made his thighs into pistons to push against his weight and his gear. Rusty metal squealed and squeaked under their boots. He studied the wall for a while; sections were of heavy-gauge wire mesh, but mostly plastered concrete. Here and there a black trail showed where water was finding a way, to seep and freeze and expand and scale at the structure, or rot the steel wire within.
They paused after fifteen minutes. “Excitin’ as a tunnel,” Virginia said; she was mildly claustrophobic. “Only more work’cause it’s uphill.”
“I just had a thought,” Artos said. “Eventually this thing will weaken, and in ten years or twenty or fifty or a hundred will fall, so it will. Think of what a sight that would be to watch, the fall of a building two thousand feet high!”
“Jesus!” Ingolf swore. “Or Manwe.”
Virginia whistled. “Goddamn,” she said, pronouncing it gaaawddaaa-ym. “Now that would be sumthin’ to see.”
“Of course,” Ritva said sweetly, “it could fall right now. Wouldn’t that be something to feel?”
She snickered at Virginia’s scowl; then the rancher’s daughter joined in the twins’ giggle, hitched at the baldric that supported her quiver, and followed as Artos started up once more. He estimated that it was about three-quarters of an hour from their start before they emerged into the first of the floors in the observation pod, and saw light streaming through windows shattered by storm or frost or the slow decay of their metal frames.
“Careful now!” he said sharply. “Everyone on a safety line, anchored solid to here! The support members and the floor could be much weaker than the tower itself.”
To Ingolf: “No bones anywhere, that I’ve seen. Wouldn’t anyone have made a fort of it? None easier to defend.”
The former salvager shook his head; he had more experience of the dead cities than any of them.
“Too hard to get water up here,” he said. “Nothing to cook with. And it’s conspicuous-show a light here and you’d be seen by anyone for a long way around. Plenty of really hungry anyones, for a while, until the city was eaten out and the last ones drifted out into the suburbs where there were rabbits and varmints.”
They explored cautiously, until they were close enough to the windows to see out. They did come across some bones before then; a woman’s, he thought, though it was hard to be sure when they were scattered a bit by birds. The human skeleton curled around a smaller one, certainly a cat’s.
“Sedatives,” Father Ignatius said, taking up a cylindrical plastic pill bottle from the finger bones.