‘She’ll fray it,’ cried the Master.
The albatrosses, frighted by the whining cable, scattered into the air.
Let it hold.
It held.
But Navy wasn’t the last person in the tower. As they drew her over the wall, Fitz and the Master each with an arm round her body, he saw over his shoulder the movement of a face in the shadow.
‘There’s someone there,’ he said. ‘There’s someone else in the tower.’
‘Sassani,’ said the Master, and spat with disgust into the great abyss of the dome beneath them.
‘No,’ said Fitz, the cords of his voice breaking before his thoughts had overtaken them. His eye had seen something else, but his mind refused it. He couldn’t think. His world whirled. He clutched the pillar.
And then she was out on the wire, inching towards them, then sliding.
Clare.
The cable lurched, then held. She slid faster. The cable sang again, louder, and deeper.
‘It’s breaking,’ said the Master. ‘It won’t hold her.’
From below, within the dome, inside the palace, came a scream: long, sustained, a peal not of fear but of anger, of terrible fury, of a passion that destroys, wastes and desolates.
‘Dina,’ said the Master. ‘She’ll try to stop us.’ He turned to Fitz. ‘How long?’
Fitz knew she would move at twice his speed: faster, and with nothing in her way, she could climb the ledges in … ‘Five minutes. No more.’
Clare swung her legs over the wall, and slung her arms round Fitz.
‘We saw the light in the tower,’ she said. She was breathing hard. ‘We came up from the shore alone – there are two boats moored – Ned –’
She turned back the way she had come, where Ned was already on the cable. He never bothered with his legs, but slid the whole of the long distance between the tower and the cupola at speed, slamming into the stone so hard that it shuddered around them. With a single hand he gripped the cable itself as he lifted his legs over the wall to join them. The metal bar with which he had crossed clattered against the tiles of the dome and slid out of sight.
‘You tore one of the bars – out of the window?’ said the Master. He was plainly amazed.
‘Not me,’ said Ned. ‘Him.’
Professor Farzan was on the cable already, sliding freely along it as Ned had done, but with his legs up behind him, dragging against the free whine of metal on metal. Now the cable groaned, and it seemed as he reached the centre of his passage that it would snap. The albatrosses wheeled around the cupola in scything rings, their white bodies a dance of anguish. Fitz, from the rough nest of Clare’s embrace, counted down the seconds, wishing that he could squeeze his eyes shut, not daring to, and wishing it all the same.
Clare turned to take hold of the Professor’s body as he reached the cupola; as she turned, turning Fitz’s face as her coat turned, he saw the fires on the valley floor. They were streaming towards the wall. As he watched, the first of them disappeared from sight beneath its shadow. They would be climbing.
Dina.
There was hardly room left in the little space above the dome, but Fitz pulled away from Clare and leaped lightly across the void to the other side. There, from the north rim, he scanned the tiles of the dome where they fell towards the corner of the Lantern Hall. One of the finials that spiked up from the edge of its gable would, by means of a drainpipe, allow them to climb to the broad roof, and from there to the first of the two lanterns that crowned the hall’s long nave.
‘Down,’ Fitz said to Navy, gesturing with his finger, ‘and up.’ She hurdled the wall and jumped down on to the steep tiled slope of the dome. Knocking herself into a crouch, she kicked out her legs and began to spider down the slope, arching her back and scurrying as low as her arms could bend. Ned ruffled Fitz’s hair as he passed, following her. Next went Clare, then the Professor.
By the time Fitz was ready to leap over the wall, last of all and hard on the Master’s heels, he knew Dina couldn’t be far. He didn’t dare look. On the northern wall of the Heresy fires briefly blazed; some toppled forward, others back. One or two stayed. The Wispers were not advancing; and Fitz could feel the pressure of them, the hot and smoky torchlight mass of their arrival, huddling just out of sight at the outer base of the wall. There was a sense of imminence everywhere in the night around the Heresy, the sense that a tide was poised on its turn.
The tide.
His thoughts swept across the roof and through the lantern, to plummet through the hall to the well of the Sad King.
It’s not a well at all.
In a sudden concussion of understanding that seemed to detonate across his whole body, Fitz grasped for the first time the true nature of the well of the Sad King, the way the Serfs used it as a scullery, the briny, cold taste of its waters, the odd hours at which the Riddler had called him down to the Sensorium. It wasn’t a well. It was the tide that filled the shaft, washing in at the flood, washing out at the ebb. The Riddler had appointed him hours when the tide was high, so that he might splash safely into the waters beneath the hall, then drift through the still point of the water at its height to emerge dripping from the stairs in the Sensorium. But if he had ever leaped into the well at low tide … Fitz’s shoulders slumped, and rattled violently.
‘Little brother,’ Dina hissed from below. ‘I’m coming for you.’
A crash came from the palace beneath him, and Fitz realized with a shock that Dina must have thrown down the last of the busts – the
