without hesitation, unslung Suresight, attached one of his whizzlines, and fired it towards a statue above Freel. A second later he had hoisted himself to a position where he waited for the enforcer to catch up.
'Useful toy,' Freel commented. 'But this isn't some kind of competition…'
'I know. I'm just trying to get the job done.'
Now that they had bypassed the initial lip of the slab's frame, where the statuary was sparser, there was no need to continue using the whip or Suresight, and the pair were able to pull themselves manually from one statue to the other. The going was slow. Some of the grotesque figures were unstable in their settings, and needed to be negotiated with the utmost care. When, finally, they reached the halfway point of the incline, the men paused, breathless and sweating.
'How did you meet?' Freel asked. 'You and Miss Hooper.'
Despite himself, Slowhand smiled. 'On the Sarcre Islands. I'd bought passage with a pilot named Silus. He, in turn, had been hired to pick up a female passenger from one of the outlying islets — but I don't think he knew what he was going to get. Hooper came running at us out of the jungle, down the beach, dropping ancient artefacts as she ran, she was trying to carry so many. She yelled at us to rig for top knots, and a mob of angry natives poured out of the jungle after her. All of a sudden about a thousand fire arrows came arcing through the sky and Silus had no choice but to get the boat out of there. I was pitched overboard and ended up on the beach, with Hooper, surrounded by the natives. Turned out what she'd thought was an Old Race site was actually a temple to their fertility god… Rumpo-Pumpo, or something.' Slowhand paused and shrugged in the manner of someone convinced the name couldn't be quite right. 'Hooper was new to the game, then.'
'You obviously lived to tell the tale.'
'Just. The two of us ended up stripped and dumped in a pot to be blanched for the native's supper, jammed together thigh to thigh. Only got out when I told them we had the hic.'
'That would do it. You actually sound as if you enjoyed yourself.'
'Ohhhh, yes. Took Hooper back a year or two later when the natives had started dabbling in tourism. Room with a hot tub. Wasn't my fault the native eldress recognised us. Hooper almost got stuffed and I… well, I was cursed.'
'Cursed how?'
'Something about me always being dressed for dinner. Never could work it out myself.'
Freel looked at him sceptically. He'd read the report of the number of times Slowhand had been arrested for losing his clothes, so it was either an astounding set of coincidences or the man was in complete and utter denial.
'Let's move on,' Freel said.
He grabbed the base of the next statue and heaved himself upward. Slowhand was about to follow when, with a crack, the statue broke away from its base. Freel tried to throw himself free but was snagged in the statue's hands and found himself tipping over the edge of the buttress. The statue dropped another foot with a sharp jerk and the remainder of its base began to crumble. Slowhand steadied himself and thrust out a hand but couldn't reach.
'If you're thinking of making a rope out of your clothes, don't,' Freel growled through gritted teeth. 'I'd rather take the fall.'
Slowhand studied the crumbling statue. 'Fall, then.'
Freel snapped a look upward, glaring at him. And the statue jerked again.
Slowhand's jaw pulsed. '
A strange expression crossed the enforcer's face — disappointment, perhaps? — but there was no time to work it out as the statue came free of its base and began to fall, Freel still trapped in its grip.
The moment it did, Slowhand snatched Suresight from his back, primed an arrow and aimed it at his falling companion. But he didn't fire. Not yet. Instead he waited while the falling statue impacted with the incline of the entrance slab, breaking apart. His eyes narrowed, picking out Freel's flailing form amid the cloud of debris. Suresight moved infinitesimally but, again, Slowhand did not release his arrow until his aim was true.
The arrow flew through the coils of chain whip at Freel's waist, and ricocheted off the entrance slab beneath to wrap around the neck of one of the statues further below. Freel came to a sudden stop, bouncing on Slowhand's rope, and looked up at the archer calmly securing its other end. He blew out a relieved breath.
'I thought you were…'
'I know what you thought,' Slowhand said. The archer climbed back down a number of statues and thrust out a hand, which Freel grabbed.
The remainder of the climb was laborious but uneventful, and at last Slowhand and Freel pulled themselves up onto the necropolis roof. A slight mist curled on its lip. They walked forward between the towers of the Time of the Bell, mouths agape at the pandemonium beyond.
Both men swallowed. On reaching the roof, they had, of course, expected to see the pillar of souls, for it was now originating from beneath them, but neither had given much thought as to how it might be rising from Bel'A'Gon'Shri. Through some kind of dome, maybe, or perhaps even just a channel in the rooftop. But ahead of them there
The pillar itself was a screaming, roaring, constantly whirling maelstrom of ghostly forms and presences, these once human manifestations, thousands of them, writhed and churned about each other, even tore at each other, as they sought release. Stripped from their bodies as they had been, drawn inexorably into this insane captivity, it must have seemed to them that they had been condemned to the hells themselves. As Slowhand and Freel moved closer, they found themselves recoiling as the desperate souls tried to punch through the surface of the maelstrom — a horrifically distended eye here, a screaming mouth there, half a face or a spasming, clutching hand on the end of an arm made of spectral bone. Nor were these horrors occurring only before them. The pillar of souls was so vast that the victims passed out of sight in all directions. They craned their necks to try and see the distant top of the pillar stretching out to Kerberos.
'Not something you come across every day,' Slowhand shouted.
'True,' Jakub Freel agreed. His jawline throbbed as he regarded the morass with a steely gaze. 'The Pale Lord will answer for this.'
'Come on. There might be some way we can get down into the necropolis.'
The two men picked their way onto the floating masonry at the pillar's periphery, taking care to avoid stones whose orbit took them too close, lest the grasping maelstrom pull them in. Hopping slowly from stone to stone, they caught glimpses of the necropolis' interior between the jumble of tumbling rubble. Hair and clothes whipping about them, they found themselves a relatively stable platform and stared down onto a floor they guessed was a few hundred yards in from the necropolis' main entrance. At the base of the pillar of souls, the chamber could only be one thing.
The Chapel of Screams.
Their position, in truth, did them little good. Despite Slowhand's best attempts to find an anchor for a whizzline, there was no way down. All the pair could do for now was reconnoitre from here and then look for another route.
The Chapel of Screams was blood-red. Arranged around a central aisle were tombs, six to the left, six to the right, and before each but one stood a rigid figure, but who these figures were was impossible to tell. At the end of the aisle, the Chapel widened into a huge circular chamber, and a raised stone platform overlaid with a complex magical circle. This was the base of the pillar of souls, and its screaming captives, for the most part, obscured it. All that could be made out with certainty was that the patterns were not carved, because they pulsed and shifted occasionally, darting about the circle like angry snakes.
Or perhaps threads. Black threads.
Standing before the platform, dwarfed by the pillar of souls, were two more figures, one as rigid as those by the tombs, the other, much taller and with a mane of flowing hair, thrusting his hands high into the air, as if summoning the gods themselves.
Bastian Redigor. The Pale Lord.
Slowhand shifted towards the edge of the platform they stood on, and Freel held him back.
