The Masked City (The Invisible Library #2)(85)
Screams carried over the noise of falling rocks from ahead of them. Beneath Irene’s feet a long crack ran through the bridge, black against the white marble, tracing across it like a child’s scribble. The bridge groaned underneath them in a long roar of fracturing stone, but it stayed in one piece.
Irene and Vale exchanged a glance, then decided that an ambush was the lesser danger. The marble paving was a heaving surface under them as they ran, still holding together but trembling against the forces threatening to shake it apart. It was barely possible to hear anything now, above the shuddering tumble of stone and the screaming wind.
‘Over here!’ Kai roared in a voice almost too loud for human lungs. ‘I’ve cleared our path!’
There was a clear ping as something rang against the marble rail beside Irene. At first she thought it was a fragment of stone, then she recognized it as a bullet. ‘Oh no, he hasn’t,’ she muttered.
‘It may be the best he can do,’ Vale shouted through the wind. He had paused at the sound of the bullet, like her, and was looking around desperately. ‘Winters, there’s no other way out of here, we must risk it. Come on!’
It was quite true. But a Librarian couldn’t speak fast enough to stop a bullet. They were about halfway across, so the considerable remaining length of bridge was downhill, but that wasn’t much help …
Oh yes, it was. ‘Kai, get ready to catch us!’ she screamed. ‘Marble bridge surface, become a hundred times more slippery!’
She launched herself into a desperate skid, and the next tremor tumbled her onto her rear. That only speeded her velocity. Like a child coasting down a hill, she skimmed helplessly and unstoppably down the curve of the bridge, far quicker than if she’d been running. The shuddering stone also pitched her unpredictably from side to side. She hoped that would foil the snipers as she shot forward. From the curses behind her, Vale was just as unable to control his motion, and a scatter of bullets cracked against the stone a few yards behind them.
Kai was standing on the now-ruffled surface of the sunken reservoir, where the end of the bridge met the paving. And he was surrounded by a moving coil of water, which had formed itself into a shield around him. Half a dozen guards were strewn unconscious on the ground, or groaning in the aftermath of being hit by the giant wave. No doubt their gunpowder was as soaked as they were. And twenty yards further on their goal was in sight at last: the metal stairway that had brought them here from Venice, standing upright within the yawning dark chasm that became the Campanile. The metal bridge that spanned that abyss to join the paving lay before them. Kai nodded as he caught sight of them, his posture braced and ready, and as Irene and Vale came skidding towards him, he flung his arms high in the air.
The water came shooting upwards around him, encasing him in a rising pillar of water. Like an unnatural tornado, the water moved upwards towards the far-distant ceiling with a roar that was audible even against the falling stone. Then it stopped, its power harnessed on the edge of breaking. Within its grip, Kai’s hair floated around his head as if blown back by a wind, and the sleeves of his shirt rippled from the strength of the flow.
A wave reached out to engulf Irene and Vale, sweeping them off the ice-smooth marble and holding them in its grasp. Those of the soldiers who could move scrambled for cover, abandoning their guns. Irene screamed as the waters boiled up around them and struggled to keep her head above the wave, her skirt a constricting mass around her legs.
‘Get ready!’ Kai’s voice rang in her ears, even through the tumbling water. ‘I’ll be able to control the beginning of the descent down the Campanile, but probably not the end, so hold your breath!’
The thought This is going to hurt stood out in the chaos. She emptied her lungs and then took in as much air as possible, trying to store as much oxygen as she could. She and Vale were several feet off the ground now, being dragged by the waters towards Kai’s water-spout. Hanging above the ground, she felt a new sense of awe. The immense waves Kai had raised were still dwarfed by the immensity of this prison, which was for much larger, much more powerful entities than them. Things that, even if they won free, could scarcely fit down a tiny staircase - she hoped.
The pseudo-tornado’s waters curved in a high arc over the iron bridge, to rest poised above the staircase where they had originally entered the prison. Then it fell down into the chasm, a twisting stream of liquid darkness that centred on the staircase, making the whole structure shudder and thrum as water hit iron. The sound was so loud that Irene raised her hands to cover her ears, trying to block it out. She could imagine the gush of water as it followed the spiral of the staircase. Jets would spout in all directions through the gaps in the panelling, but the main force of it would surge ever downwards. And as the dark shaft around the staircase narrowed and drew back to the dimensions of the Campanile below, there would be even less room for the water to escape. There would be nowhere for it to go, except down and out.
She hoped that anyone in the way had the sense to run.
Then Kai gestured towards her and Vale, and the waters pulled them towards him, like mere straws caught in an undercurrent. She took a last deep breath, her stomach knotting in pure terror, and then the rush of water swept all three of them giddily up through the air within the water-funnel. She was relieved, because if there was air, Kai was keeping them safe as he’d promised. They swung up and over the chasm in a single smooth arc, like an arrow’s flight, and then they plunged down into the stairwell.