by Mike Wild
He plucked a cloth-wrapped bundle seemingly by magic from the steeple's side, and Kali realised he hadn't been pressing his palms there for stability but searching for a hidey-hole. From the shape of the bundle, it contained one of the weapons that had once been Slowhand's tools of the trade.
"You hid a longbow up here? Why on Twilight would you do that?"
Slowhand stripped away the cloth, hefted the impressively sized crescent and pursed his lips. "The amount of anti-Makennon rhetoric I've been spouting of late, I knew it wasn't going to be long before she sent her goons to have a word. I just thought of every eventuality."
"Actually, I meant what use is a bow up here? What are you planning to do — spear a cloud for us to ride away on?"
"Oh, funny," Slowhand said. Acting quickly, he pulled a coil of thin rope from the same hidey-hole and attached one end to an arrow, the other to one of the more secure parts of the walkway. The coil certainly looked long enough to be able reach a cloud.
Slowhand squinted down at distant buildings, eyeing a trajectory, then aimed the bow high into the air.
"What the hells are you doing?"
Slowhand ignored a louder banging on the hatch. It sounded as if the guards were almost through. "Little idea I came up with. Call it a death slide."
"Nice," Kali said, and then put two and two together. "Hold on — you're going to fire that rope at a building down there and expect us to slide down it?"
"Nope. Building's no good — from this height you'd slam right through the wall. Need to hit somewhere open, target it through a ring."
"A ring?"
"Okay, a big, iron ring," Slowhand admitted. "One I tied between the Whine Rack and Ma Polly's, actually." He pulled back on the bow and winked. "There's a pack of supplies down there and a stables nearby so you should be able to find a horse to get you out of the city. Clever little bugger, eh?"
Kali said nothing. She couldn't even make out the places he talked about. She knew Slowhand was good — very good — but to make the shot he planned over such a distance, at such a target, and in this weather? Impossible.
Then Slowhand reminded her why he had gained the sobriquet Slowhand.
In the space of a second her ex-lover seemed to shut the world away. The wind and the rain and the hammering and the shouts seemed no longer to matter to the man at all, and an aura of great calm enveloped him, as if he lived now in a universe entirely his own. Gone was the happy-go-lucky troubadour he had styled himself as of late, and back was the famed archer who for what had seemed like an eternity had tested the hearts of the men he had fought beside at the Battle of Andon eight years before, during the Great War between Vos and Pontaine. Kali had heard the story told in a hundred of Andon's taverns, how their forces were in danger of being overwhelmed — were being overwhelmed — and Slowhand had stayed his hand as his comrades had clamoured at him to loose his arrow and take one more of the invading bastards down. But Slowhand had waited — even as enemy swords and axes had cut and sliced about him, he had waited — because he had chosen his target and would not fire until he knew his aim was true. Finally his arrow flew. Just one arrow across the length of a battlefield that was sheer chaos — through the flailing, bloodied forms of a thousand battling warriors and their dense sprays of blood — unerringly on until it found its home in the forehead of John Garrison, the commanding enemy general. One arrow into one man, but a man on whose survival the morale of the enemy depended. With his death, Slowhand bought Andon's forces the time they needed to gather strength, and the tide of that battle had been turned.
Slowhand let fly. His arrow sang into the sky then arched downwards. He must have calculated its flight perfectly because seconds later the rope it carried with it ran taut.
"After you," Kali said.
Slowhand stared at her, hesitated. "There's just one thing. I'm not going."
"What?"
"There's no time for two runs," he said, looking towards the hatch. "And in this weather it's too dangerous to risk the rope to two."
"I see. But you expect me — "
"Listen to me. I saw how you handled yourself during our escape, your reflexes, your speed — what you could do. There's something different about you, something changing… something better." He tested the tension in the rope that stretched out into the night sky, wiping the moisture from it on his tunic. "I knew it when I came up here. To be honest, in these conditions I don't know if I can make this slide, Hooper. But I know you can."
"I'm not just going to abandon you here."
"Call it payback for the Sarcre Islands."
Kali faltered. Was this Slowhand being serious?
"Use the bow," he said, quickly stripping it of its string then handing it to her, nodding in reassurance. "It'll hold. Go, Kali. Find your friend. Now."
Kali knew there was no other choice, not if she was going to save Merrit Moon. Even if that meant not only abandoning Slowhand, but abandoning him defenceless. She slung the stringless bow over the wire and pulled down until it became a horseshoe, gripping either end as tightly as she could. Then she felt Slowhand's hand in the small of her back, for a second almost tenderly.
"Enjoy the ride," he said. And as he spoke, Kali heard the door to the walkway crash open.
Kali looked down and let her body go loose. "Slowhand, I'll be seeing you again. I'll be — "
Slowhand slapped her off the walkway.
"Bye bye."
Kali gasped, the sky taking her as swiftly and as powerfully as if she had been snatched by a dragon's claw, and though those legendary creatures were now long extinct, she felt for a second what it would have been like to be taken thus. She appreciated also just how powerful they must have been to survive at the heights they had flown, for what she had stepped into was a maelstrom.
Every one of her senses was immediately and utterly overwhelmed as she dropped and the deathslide took her weight, her eyes and ears and flesh battered by the elements, blinding and deafening and, on her skin, as agonising as being slapped by open palms. No one before had been exposed to the heavens at this height — no one had seen Scholten from this unique perspective — but Kali had no opportunity or desire to appreciate the scenery, busy as she was shivering in her underwear and simply clinging on for dear life.
Slowhand's bow slid down the rope with a noise like some large insect, a deep zuzzz that made the muscles in Kali's arms flutter as if tickled but at the same pierced them through with pain, making even her teeth ache. The curve of the bow slick with the rain that pelted down, it was difficult enough to hang on without the added hazard of the wind that threatened to dislodge her with every passing second but, roaring with the effort of keeping her grip, she managed. At one point she even managed to twist her neck to look back towards the roof of the cathedral, but when she did wished she hadn't. The guards that had appeared on the rooftop had moved across and reached Slowhand, and as Kali watched the resultant scuffle she thought that she saw the troubadour go down at the point of a knife and tumble screaming from the steeple. And there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing.
She continued her inexorable descent, her momentum gaining, and with it the wind resistance against her. Her arms were now corded with the effort of gripping the bow but her increasing speed meant that the length of time before she reached safety was lessening dramatically with every yard she slid. The rooftops of Scholten were coming at her as blurs now, and above the roar of the wind and rain she could actually begin to hear the noises of the city and its people below. Soon she would be on the ground and be able to lose herself in their ranks. Soon she would be safe.
Suddenly, though, something felt different.
There was a lack of tension in the slide.
There could be only one explanation for that, and Kali felt a hard knot of fear in her gut.
Because she was still far from the ground. Far too far to survive the fall she was plummeting into now that the rope had been cut.
Chapter Nine
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nbsp; Kali estimated she was seventy or so feet from the rooftops, no longer hurtling towards Killiam's ring but dropping back and down, her forward momentum cancelled out by the sudden loss of tension in the slide. Letting go of the bow — a surprise present or a sore head for someone below — her hands flailed for the whipping rope, hoping to use it as a swing to at least get her closer to the ground, but her greater weight had already caused her to fall from its reach, and the lifeline was snatched away into the darkness, signalling its departure by momentarily blinding her with a few heavy drops of rain that had clung to the hemp. There was nothing now that would slow her descent — nothing, of course, but the impact that would inevitably come — and she plummeted towards Scholten like a rejected soul from Kerberos, spat back to Twilight on this dark and stormy night.
It was the Spiral of Kos all over again, only a hells of a lot worse. There, at least, the bones of the brackan had softened her landing, but here there was nothing between her and the hard stone streets except a packed and undulant layer of the city's jagged and sharply angular rooftops, all bedecked with a collection of chimneystacks, guttering and assorted pointy protrusions that from Kali's unique perspective seemed to have been cruelly designed to bounce her back and forth and shatter all of her bones before the ultimate pleasure she had to come.
She was, as Slowhand might have put it, stuffed. Actually going to die. The realisation brought with it a peculiar calm, and as time seemed to slow around her — prolonging her fall until it became almost dreamlike, relaxing even — Kali reflected that at least for this imminent demise no blame could be attached to the archer, for he had done all that he possibly could do to help her. Fine, she was still having problems getting her head around the fact that the bloody man could actually be so selfless, but the one thing she could not deny was that on the walkway he had bought her a little more time, by the look of things sacrificing his own life to give her a few more seconds on the slide. She wished — though very much doubted — that she was wrong about what she had seen, hoping for a second that even Katherine Makennon would not sanction cold-blooded murder on her holy premises, but then she remembered the way Makennon had left her to Munch, and immediately thought otherwise.
Munch. A memory of the courtyard outside the Flagons again flashed into her mind, the blood-soaked picture turning even redder with suddenly returned rage. Horse and now Slowhand, she thought — with Merrit Moon, a man who had never harmed and would never dream of harming anyone in his life, hunted down as well. Makennon and her murderous damned lackey seemed intent not only on ruining her life but of stripping it of everything she held dear.
Well, she wasn't going to let them do that.
No more, damn them both.
No pitsing more!
Kali's awareness of her immediate predicament returned to her, suddenly and vitally, but also differently than before, as if every one of her senses had burst into greater life. Though she still fell in the same slow and almost dreamlike way, every facet of what was around her and, more importantly, rapidly looming beneath her, seemed more distinct, the wind, rain and approaching rooftops separate parts of a jigsaw that she suddenly thought she could piece together in order to survive.
There was just one problem. There didn't seem to be time to open the box the jigsaw came in.
Time returned to normal and Kali dropped, the air above Scholten buffeting her as it whistled past at an ever-increasing rate. But then, instinctively, she turned in the updraught, angling and stiffening her body so that it sliced rather than fell through the firmament, causing her to nosedive towards — and at the same sloping angle as — the nearest and highest roof. The manoeuvre felt like suicide, and she herself figured that it very probably was, but some newly awakened part of her also figured that as reaching the ground was an inevitable given, why not do it in her own way, and in whatever style she could muster?
Hells. What did she have to lose?
The first roof came at her a split-second later, granted the honour of being the first to welcome her to town by the fact it appeared to cover the home of someone rich, building upwards rather than outwards in the cramped streets until the property was five storeys high. The tiles that coated it were a further sign of the owner's affluence, expensive redslate, and recently replaced or repaired. Sadly, whoever lived beneath them would have to give the slate quarry another visit.
Kali relaxed her body as she slammed into the roof, but the impact still sent jarring waves of agony through her and winded her severely, her loud explosion of breath drowning out the sound of shattering tiles as well as splintering timbers as the roof beneath them buckled to accommodate her form. From below came a screech of alarm and the sound of a shattering pot — perhaps some servant in the attic — but Kali could only apologise in passing as it soon became obvious she wasn't staying there for long. Loose tiles skittered down the roof before her, and she with them, sliding forwards on her front, hands clawing at gaps in an attempt to slow her descent towards the lip of the roof, but one that was to little avail. Her momentum uncontrollable, she skidded down, tiles snagging at her vest and pants and scraping her skin so that she felt as if she'd been thrown onto some giant cheese grater, the rough surface threatening to do her more damage than the impact itself. Grunting, she rolled onto her back as she slid but then realised she was heading towards the edge of the roof backwards and upside down, which was no good at all. She quickly flung her legs around at the hips, performing a kind of half-turn, half-roll manoeuvre that righted her so that she now slid feet first and on her behind, but with only a second to spare before she reached the roof's edge.
A hazardous rain of broken tiles and mortaring preceded her over the lip and tumbled towards the street below, soliciting another cry of alarm, and then Kali felt the soles of her feet slam into the iron guttering that lined the lip of the roof, the bolts holding it there loosening from the stonework with her impact. She didn't attempt to halt her descent as she was still sliding far too fast and the impact would have flipped her over and sent her flailing towards the street herself, so instead she used the disintegrating guttering to her advantage. She quickly scanned the buildings opposite, their roofs perhaps fifteen feet away and a storey or so below and, calculating the way the guttering was breaking, chose her target, the chimneystack-crowded roof of a seedy-looking boarding house called Dorweazle's. As the bolts on the guttering sheared Kali dug in her heels and — arms outstretched for balance — stood and rode it as it came away from the roof, using it and the drainpipe it served as a giant stilt to stride the gap between buildings.
It wasn't going to take her all the way, she knew.
The precarious assemblage of metal buckled beneath her when she was halfway across, and more evidence of her passage rained into the street below with a series of resounding clangs. Again, cries of alarm drifted up to her, but again she could only apologise in passing as she really had little choice but to keep moving, flailing and running through the air now as if she were some heavenly messenger who'd lost the power of flight but remained intent on delivering a missive to Dorweazle.
With a loud cry of exertion Kali made it — just — thudding down onto the roof of the boarding house in a crouch, though she knew her problems weren't yet over. The steep, badly maintained and rain-slicked roof offered little purchase and she found herself skidding backwards amongst streams of rainwater towards its lip, one still too far from the ground for her liking. She instinctively assessed her situation once more then quickly grabbed the edge of a passing chimneystack to brake her sliding form. The brickwork crumbled in her hands but she didn't stay around long enough for that to matter, instead throwing herself away from the chimneystack and increasing her downward momentum while at the same time skewing herself diagonally across the roof to where another stack jinked crookedly from the tiles. As bricks from the first clattered past her and down, Kali grabbed onto the second, used it as a pivot to spin around, and then flung herself away from it as she had done with the first. Th
e second stack collapsed behind her completely, its bulk rumbling down the roof in her wake, but though Kali suspected Dorweazle might be less than pleased with her fleeting visit she was beyond apologising now — because for the first time she was starting to think that her suicidal manoeuvres just might work.
She was now sliding upright and face first towards the lip of the roof, in exactly the position she wanted to be. Only a couple of storeys separated her from the ground, the last leg as it were, and with luck she'd make it without breaking her own. For the final time she scanned the buildings ahead of her, decided on the way to go and then skied right off the roof of Dorweazle's.
She angled forwards, turning her ski-jump into a dive, and then curled into a ball. Tracing a perfect arc downwards, she fell for two seconds and then impacted with a shop's awning positioned between storeys, breaking her fall halfway. As she hit, and bounced, she uncurled herself from the ball and allowed herself to bounce again, flipping head over heels off the edge of the awning and laughing out loud as she saw her feet approach the ground. By all the gods, she'd made it. She was dow -
Something snagged and she jerked to a halt, toes a foot above the street. She dangled there for a second and then there was an ominous tearing sound. Suddenly, she dropped, the remains of her underwear remaining behind, fluttering from the awning like a flag.
Kali stared. She couldn't believe it. After all she'd just been through!
The second chimneystack, caught until now on guttering, smashed into the ground right behind her and exploded into a cloud of debris and dust. For a second she couldn't see a thing, and then the cloud cleared, and she could.
A small crowd of people stared, murmuring and pointing at her. The naked, ashen-white woman who'd just fallen from the sky. Oh, this is just great, she thought. It was the Curse of Slowhand, come to get her from beyond the grave. Damn him.
"What?" she yelled, holding her arms out. "They kicked me off Kerberos, all right?"