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‘It’s getting darker,’ Vale called back over his shoulder.
Irene really wished he hadn’t said that. ‘Maybe they usually bring lanterns,’ she answered. ‘How’s your arm? Is it bad?’
‘Merely a flesh-wound,’ Vale said dismissively. ‘Can’t you use your Language to seal it?’
‘You’re a living thing,’ Irene explained, in between panting for breath. ‘I can tell it to close, but it won’t necessarily stay shut. I’d need precise anatomical knowledge to hold it together. Bandages are going to be of more use.’
And then it was getting light again. The walls were far away now, and the staircase was a single metal spiral in the middle of a frighteningly large space. There was still no clear way to define from where the light was emerging. When she looked out through the spaces in the iron panelling, Irene could see distant walls and a far more distant ceiling, but no sky or artificial lights. She was breathing heavily now, and her legs were aching.
Another stronger gust of wind made the staircase tremble again. This time both she and Vale slowed their pace, and she saw Vale’s hand tighten on the central post as he steadied himself. Blood streaked his sleeve and had spattered across his jerkin.
‘Wait here,’ Irene said firmly. ‘We’ve enough light. I need to bandage your arm before you lose any more blood.’
Vale peered through the panelling. ‘I can see something a little further up. Perhaps we should reach that first?’
‘If there is danger up there, I’d rather we stopped your loss of blood before we run into it.’
‘Oh, very well,’ he said pettishly and sat down on the stairs, bracing his arm on his knee. ‘It doesn’t feel that serious.’
Irene wasn’t sure whether to ascribe that to a casual disdain for injuries - being shot might be an occupational hazard - or simple unwillingness to admit weakness. Rather than get into an argument, she sat down beside him and peeled back his sleeve. A thin, sluggish line of blood oozed down from where the bullet had ripped through the muscles of his upper arm. ‘You’re lucky,’ she said calmly. ‘It didn’t hit an artery.’
‘I would certainly have noticed if it did,’ Vale muttered.
‘Do you have any brandy on you?’
‘No. But I doubt we’ll have time for it to go septic in any case.’
Time, yes. Time was a voracious clock eating up the minutes and forcing them closer and closer to disaster. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, bringing out her knife. A few seconds’ work turned Vale’s blood-stained sleeve into a couple of pads, one for each side of the arm, and the bottom of her skirt was repurposed into a bandage.
Vale looked at the ungainly wad of fabric. ‘Did you ever train as a nurse, Winters?’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘Only basic first-aid and life-saving. You know, sprains, fractures, bullet wounds, sulphuric acid, that sort of thing.’ She tucked her knife away. ‘I wonder if there’ll be more guards at the top.’ ‘Let us find out.’ Vale started up the stairs again, going fast enough that Irene wondered if he felt he had something to prove. But then he came to a halt and pointed. ‘Look, here.’
Irene followed his pointing hand, where the stairs finally came to a halt - like the end of a vertical tube, with the ceiling still lost somewhere above. She felt vertiginous just thinking about the distance they’d climbed. And there was another archway in the side of the staircase ahead. From this gap, a bridge of the same iron as the staircase arced out over the circular chasm that surrounded them, spanning a steep drop, to join some paving on the other side.
The staircase was a single point in the middle of a wide emptiness, and beyond that emptiness there was an incredible, impossible architectural landscape. Stone walls with arches set into them rose in the distance, on an inhuman scale, like a cathedral built to cover an entire country. Bridges made of both stone and iron ran between these arches and across small chasms, pale grey and dark grey in the half-light. Staircases curved down along walls or hung from long cables, which in turn were fastened to some ceiling high above. Tiny grilles marked windows in the sides of flying buttresses and towers, minuscule from Irene’s and Vale’s distant vantage point. The wind soughed through the stonework, humming against the high stairwells and whispering past the rows of arches. It was a maze. There was probably far more of it than they could even see from where they were, and no way of knowing how far it went on. There were no clear walls and no countryside beyond.
And there were no people anywhere. None.
‘A very baroque, convoluted method of entry,’ Vale said in tones of dissatisfaction.
Irene was thinking this through. ‘Perhaps,’ she said slowly, ‘the only entrance or exit to this place, for Fae at least, is through this stairwell. The iron steps would weaken any Fae trying to get in - or out. After all, it wouldn’t be much of a prison if they could travel between worlds and just emerge within this space, as they normally would if they were powerful enough.’
Vale nodded. ‘Well, we will have to hope that it is not proof against dragons or Librarians. They must be restraining Strongrock somehow. But if they can restrain a dragon, we’ll just have to hope we can remove the restraint.’
Irene sighed. She took off her mask, enjoying the feeling of cool air on her face after the climb. ‘I’m afraid that I’d need a library to open an exit myself, or at least a good collection of books - and that would be assuming it worked here, when it didn’t work in Venice proper.’
‘Ah well,’ Vale said. He gave her one of his rare smiles. ‘You did extremely well with that iron plating, when the guards were questioning us. My compliments.’
Irene smiled back. ‘We make a good team.’ It was unusual enough to have him actually compliment her, rather than simply accept her proficiency. But she didn’t want to get too emotional and embarrass him.
‘We do,’ Vale agreed. He turned to the ironwork bridge and started to walk across. It was wide enough for two to walk abreast. Fortunately there were rails on either side, but even so it was a worryingly fragile construction - no, Irene corrected herself mentally, it was solid enough. It just seemed flimsy when compared to the sheer scale of everything around her.
Vale halted again once they stepped off the bridge onto the stone paving beyond, looking around thoughtfully. ‘The area to be searched is unfeasibly large. However, the guards escorting Strongrock must have passed this way within the last couple of days. If we can find their traces—’
‘Actually, I have another idea,’ Irene said. ‘I tried it below in Venice, but there was too much ambient chaos interfering with it. Since this area is supposed to be a prison for Fae, it may work better here. Give me a moment, please.’
Vale nodded and stepped back to watch.
