AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I scrambled to the edge of the cliff, my heart breaking into a thousand pieces, feral cries ripping from me that felt like they tore my lungs to pieces. I couldn’t lose him. I couldn’t lose Appius. I loved him. He was mine, my joy and my sweetheart. He wasn’t supposed to be, but he was. I had led him into this, led him into all of this, and without him, I—
“Conrad!”
My arms and legs gave out under me, and I flopped hard to my stomach as I peered over the edge of the cliff, only to see Appius clinging to the shattered, quivering remnants of the bridge, his face white and streaked with dirt. It almost looked like he was suspended in mid-air, attached to nothing. And then I saw that the only thing holding him to the swinging, swaying bridge chain was his rope and metal clip.
“Hold on!” I shouted down to him, my voice ragged with fear and hope. “Hold on, I’m coming down to get you.”
Appius nodded and scrambled to wrap himself around the pieces of the bridge near him.
“Can you climb up?” Darius asked, eyes wide, as he flattened himself against the cliff I’d just sprung back from.
“I’ll try,” I heard Appius’s tiny voice.
That idea lasted for thirty seconds before I heard ominous cracking from the suspension tower on our side of the chasm.
“It’s not going to hold,” Lucius said, shifting in panic, as if he didn’t know what to do. “It’s going to crumble too.”
I didn’t think about what I was doing. All I knew was that I had no time at all to climb down and rescue Appius before the very thing he’d fastened himself to for safety dragged him to his death. I had thrown the rope coiled around me off my shoulders when I’d gotten to that side of the chasm, but now I raced for it, finding the end with the hook and wrapping it around my waist several times.
“Lower me down,” I told the others as I walked back to the cliff’s edge, the rope trailing. “There has to be enough rope. If you four hold the other end and lower me down to Appius, I can reach him and hold him, then you can all pull us back up.”
The others agreed without words in an instant and helped me bring the rope over to the cliff edge. The whole time, the tower beside us cracked and rumbled more and more.
“Tie the rope around your legs, like a harness, or it might hurt you,” Mara said, working to help me fashion a crude harness.
As she did, Leander and Darius grabbed one of their coils of rope and began tying one end to the end of my rope to make it longer.
“Just in case,” Darius said as Mara finished with my harness and I rushed to the edge of the cliff.
“I’m coming for you, Appius,” I called down, not stopping once as Leander, Darius, and Lucius fed the rope out and braced themselves so that they could both control my descent and hopefully pull me and Appius up again. As they did, Mara started jamming her ax into the dirt about ten feet from the edge of the cliff, for some bizarre reason.
I didn’t have time to wonder about it. We were all working together, and nothing above the cliff was my concern. I climbed over the edge and tried to stick as close to the rock face as I could as Leander, Darius, and Lucius fed the rope to lower me.
I had no idea how long it took. All I knew was that the tower was cracking more and more with every second that passed. Appius had made an attempt to climb up, but he hadn’t gotten very far. I vaguely registered that any movement on his part destabilized the tower even more.
“Conrad,” Appius sobbed once I was close to him. “Conrad!”
He didn’t seem capable of saying anything else, and honestly, my mind was blank. As soon as I was level with him, I glanced up and shouted, “Stop!”
Mara was the only one I could see at the top of the cliff. She nodded and turned to shout “Stop,” over her shoulder.
My descent stopped, but the sound of the tower crumbling continued. I was a good five feet from Appius, so I had to swing a little to reach him, which made me deeply anxious.
“Grab hold of me,” I said, reaching one arm toward him.
“I…I….”
“You have to grab hold of me, then let go of the bridge. It’s about to crumble.”
Appius made a terrifying sound and let go of the bridge with one arm to reach for me. We fumbled for a few seconds before grasping ahold of each other. As soon as I had him, I tried to pull him in, but there was some sort of hard resistance.
“Clip,” Appius gasped. “The clip.”
I glanced past him and saw that he was still securely fastened to the suspension chain.
He reached for it as I held him around the waist, but his hands were shaking so badly that he kept fumbling.
But the tower wouldn’t wait for either of us to steady ourselves enough to get Appius free. Stones from the tower and the edge of the cliff rained down on us. One or two were big enough to sting and bruise. The cliff itself had several new and ominous cracks in it that the others couldn’t see. I knew that we had seconds before the stones that were falling were big enough to knock us out of our ropes or kill us outright.
