Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(123)

They all climbed down from their chairs and hurried to the exit. Water wasn’t just spilling from beneath the doors now—it was coming between them, as high as waist level, And there was someone banging on the other side. They could hear his voice over the high walls of the chamber.

“Your Excellencies,” they heard him say. “Can you hear me? You have to get out of there! There’s no more time!”

Supreme Blade Kahlo palmed the door, but it wouldn’t open. She tried again. Nothing.

“We could climb out,” suggested Xenocrates.

“And how would you suggest we do that?” asked Hideyoshi. “The wall is four meters high!”

“Perhaps we could climb on each other’s backs,” suggested MacKillop, which was a plausible suggestion, but no one seemed willing to suffer the indignation of a human pyramid.

Kahlo looked up to the sky above the roofless council chamber. If the council complex was sinking, then eventually water would come spilling over the edge of the wall. Could they survive a deluge like that? She didn’t want to find out.

“Xenocrates! Hideyoshi! Stand against the wall. You’ll be the base. Amundsen, get on their shoulders. You’ll help the others up and over the edge.”

“Yes, ?Your Exalted Excellency,” Xenocrates said.

“Stop it,” she told him. “Right now it’s just Frida. Now let’s make this happen.”

? ? ?

Anastasia wished she could say she leaped into action when the bridge collapsed, but she didn’t. Both she and Rowan just stood there, staring in disbelief like everyone else.

“It’s Goddard,” said Rowan. “It has to be.”

Then Scythe Curie came up beside them. “Anastasia, did you see it?” she asked. “What happened? Did it just fall into the sea?” And then she caught sight of Rowan and her entire demeanor changed.

“No!” Instinctively she pulled a blade. “You can’t be here!” she growled at him, then turned to Anastasia. “And you can’t be talking to him!” Then something seemed to occur to her and she turned on Rowan with a vengeance. “Are you responsible for this? Because if you are I will glean you where you stand!”

Anastasia forced her way between them. “It’s Goddard’s doing,” she said. “Rowan’s here to warn us.”

“I sincerely doubt that’s why he’s on Endura,” Scythe Curie said, full of fiery indignation.

“You’re right,” Rowan told her. “I’m here because Goddard was going to throw me at the feet of the Grandslayers to buy their support. But I escaped.”

The mention of the Grandslayers brought Scythe Curie back to the crisis at hand. She looked toward the council complex in the center of the island’s eye. Two bridges still held it in place, but the complex was much lower in the water than it should be, and listing to one side.

“My God—he means to kill all of them!”

“He can kill them,” Anastasia said, “but he can’t end them.”

But Rowan shook his head. “You don’t know Goddard.”

Meanwhile, several miles away, the shoreline gardens on the outskirts of the island slowly began to flood with sea water.

? ? ?

With communications down all over the island, Buoyancy Control’s only method of reconnaissance was the view from its window, and runners reporting back to them on things they couldn’t see. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, the Grandslayers were still in the council complex, which was beginning to founder, even as the rest of the island lowered itself to keep the strain on the two remaining bridges from rupturing them. If that happened, the entire council complex would be lost. While submersibles could be sent down to recover the Grandslayers’ bodies for revival, it would not be easy. No one in Buoyancy Control had immunity, and although Endura was a glean-free zone, they suspected heads would very literally roll if the Grandslayers drowned and had to be revived.

The control console was now lit like a holiday tree with angry warning lights, and the blare of alarms had everyone’s nerves frayed to snapping.

The technician was sweating uncontrollably. “The island’s at four feet below high tide now,” he told the others gathered. “I’m sure the lowlying structures have already begun to flood.”

“You’re gonna have a whole lot of pissed off people in the lowlands,” said the buoyancy chief.

“One crisis at a time!” The city engineer rubbed her eyes nearly hard enough to press them into her skull. Then she took a deep breath and said, “All right, shut the valves and hold here. We’ll give the Grandslayers another minute to get out before we blow the tanks and elevate the island to a standard position.”

The technician began to follow the order, then stopped. “Uh . . . there’s a problem.”

The city engineer closed her eyes, trying to find her happy place—which was currently anywhere but here. “What now?”

“The valves on the ballast tanks aren’t responding. ?We’re still taking on water.” He tapped screen after screen, but everything now showed an error message that couldn’t be cleared. “The whole buoyancy system’s crashed. We have to reinitialize it.”

“Great,” said the engineer. “Just great. How long will it take to reboot?”