Abaddon - Chapter 27

6: Thin Man

"IT'LL NEVER CARRY THE PAYLOAD", yelled Kane, striding in out of the dark. His throat was glowing faintly emerald, and his voice gurgled slightly. He coughed up a gulletful of blood and spat into Du Mont des Chênes' furnace mouth. Emerald glittered unmistakably in the flames as nanoparticles boiled.

"You've cut your throat again, Kane", said Laszlo disapprovingly. With a minute circle of smoked glass screwed into one eye, he was welding the aluminium skin onto Thin Man with an electric arc gun powered by a turbine in the forge chimney. The wires connecting gun to dynamo to turbine were insulated by nothing more than greased sheaths of parchment, and Percival, sitting hunched and shivering by the furnace door, had already seen him electrocute himself several times.

"I was feeling the cold", said Kane. "Been bussing collaborators up to the Bridge and back all day." He winked at Percival. "They're preparing for your great sendoff. There's going to be a party."

Percival shot Kane an acidic glance.

"Don't be like that", said Kane. "The Franj's wind tunnel is the only viable method of testing an aircraft before launch."

"In my experience of wind tunnel testing", shuddered Percival, "which is admittedly limited, it is not considered necessary for the pilot to be in the machine during the test process. So they're going to have a party to celebrate me being spread thinly over the rocks a hundred miles down, are they?"

"There is going to be cake", said Kane, patting the warm, recently welded seams of Thin Man proudly. "And artful sugary confections created by Maxim's of Paris."

"I went to Maxim's for my honeymoon", said Percival sourly. "It is overrated. As are devices such as that. They're just another weapon. There's always a countermeasure to any weapon, no matter what its kilotonnage."

"Tush and hush! You never know who might be listening." Kane looked across the room at the massive wooden frame, inside which two immaculately upholstered leather seats opposed each other around a central spindle. "It'll never fly. Power-to-weight ratio. Leonardo had the same problem."

"We've increased the size of the props", said Laszlo. "And it doesn't need to fly, only autorotate. It's downhill all the way from here, remember."

"What happens when he gets to the midpoint?" said Kane. "He going to get out and walk uphill all the rest of the way?" Inside the furnace, combustible substances bubbled and crackled. The wind underground drew the flame up the chimney, raising it to a man's height for a second and making the turbine whirr crazily, then died down.

"He only has to get there", said Laszlo. "Once there, he's out of Milord's sphere of influence."

"And inside someone else's", said Kane. "What makes you think whoever built this place is any nicer than Milord?"

"Because if they'd wanted to destroy us", said Laszlo, flattening the head on a rivet with a harder piece of steel, "they'd have done so millennia ago." Sparks spat out of the furnace, rolling across a floor covered with aluminium swarf. Some of the swarf, hit by some of the brighter sparks, dissolved into puddles of liquid metal. One of them hit Laszlo's arm, puffing flesh instantly into vapour. He ignored it, and his arm remade itself quietly whilst he worked on the rivet.

"Maybe they haven't got time to deal with every threat. Maybe they want advance warning of it. Maybe they only wipe out peoples who prove themselves technologically sophisticated enough to get through their tunnel system."

"Abaddon", said Laszlo, "is more technologically advanced than we are, and has not yet made it through. Ergo, ability to penetrate the Abyss is not based on technology." He wiped his hand across the smooth surface of the metal. "There."

"You don't need to do take such pains", said Kane. "We're not precision bombing. The target can hardly be missed."

Lazlo breathed on the polished surface of the aluminium, wiped it so he could see a blurry version of his face. "A craftsman must take pride in his work."

***

A week into his selection for the Abyssonaut programme, Percival found himself nursing a glass of red wine and making polite conversation on the subject of Aristotle with a lady. Moreover, he was almost certain the lady was real.

Her name, he gathered, was Zaeyo. She had been hurled into the pit as a sacrificial offering before the Roman Empire, by a people who had heard of neither Christ, Zoroaster, nor Mohammed. She found all three of these figures fascinating, and the concept of one all-powerful unknowable deity seemed to intrigue her in particular. For his part, Percival found himself intrigued by the manner in which her breasts moved under the thin fabric of her evening dress.

"But isn't the fact that the existence of your God can never be proven tantamount to a licence to tell whatever divine lies you please?" she said.

"It would be", said Percival, nodding furiously and realizing with horrible certainty that he was drunk, "if the Church were evil. But the Church is good."

Milord's social function occupied several floors of the Bridge. Gentlemen and gentlewomen of all historical ages had attended, and Milord's hospitality was lavish, extending even to the clothing worn by the participants. Du Mont des Chênes' napoleonic uniform glittered with gold braid. Laszlo was standing rapt in conversation with a tittering group of Greek noblewomen, the SS unit insignia on his dress tunic made nanotechnologically new. Ahasuerus, meanwhile, wearing a dinner jacket with a rather fetching scarlet cummberbund and fez, was talking to a set of Roman legionnaires, clearly drunk, whilst Kane appeared to be sporting some sort of South American generalissimo's outfit.

"Do you think your priests are any less evil than mine were? Mine had me dragged to the edge of a precipice and then thrown in to appease Hades." Zaeyo was speaking Latin out of deference to Percival, though he was certain she would have been happier with Greek, Macedonian Celt, or some language entirely unknown to present-day linguistics.

"Your priests were misguided", he said, fixing Abaddon with his eyes, "but correct about one thing - there are monsters to be appeased in Hell."

Her smile froze, and he knew, instantly, that he had restricted the remainder of the conversation to mindless pleasantry. No matter. At one time my entire existence was devoted to finding ways to worm my way between the thighs of creatures as beautiful as this. But now, here, with Milord controlling all such access quite deliberately in order to keep us poor human males in line, all that seems strangely irrelevant somehow -

(...Though she was as pretty as a spring morning after a long hard winter, and her smile as welcome as rain on the parched throat of a becalmed sailor...)

But you are not my wife.

Kane's head bobbed into view at Percival's shoulder. "Well spoken, lad. Here comes one of Milord's highest-ranking monsters now. Watch the elevator."

Percival realized suddenly that, for the last twenty minutes, he had been standing on the mosaic manhood of an immense naked Lord Neptune. He stepped off it hastily. But all around him, on the floor, people were still mingling amid mosaic nereids and tritons. He had been on this balcony before. And on the wall opposite him, in a fretted cage of wrought iron art nouveau lilies, a set of coloured lights was counting slowly and logarithmically down towards zero. He became aware that the crowd of partygoers around him were counting with it. He felt oddly as if he should be standing in Trafalgar Square at midnight, feeling as if he should be enjoying himself more than he actually was, watching the seconds count down on a cheap digital display towards a meaningless New Millennium.

"THREE - TWO -ONE - BASEMENT!"

The doors whooshed back into their invisible housings, and Milord's man had arrived. Still wearing the same old blue business suit, immaculately pressed, with creases sharp as razors, he raised his hat to the applauding multitude. There was no hair beneath the hat., and scales of scalp adhered to his hat like scales sloughing off a snake. Despite his smile, his eyes were sunk deep into his head, and red as blood.

Behind him, cherubim who were, surely, not real ran out of the elevator, their aerodynamically unfeasible white-plumed wings folded. Tiny glistering smoke rings of haloes ringed their angelically curled heads. Percival wondered how it had been done.

The cherubim were bearing gifts - presents chosen carefully for the crowd. One ran up to Laszlo and deposited a massive glass flagon of cold beer in his hand. Another ran to Du Mont des Chénes with a slim volume whose cover identified it as a work by Otto Von Lilienthal . A third trotted up to Zaeyo and pressed a filigree creation into her hands - a silver-and-gemstone dragonfly with fearsome compound eyes made out of motes of ruby. The thing would have been a diamanté creation even in Hollywood, but in this underworld, Percival was certain, every inch of it would be real corundum, real silver, real diamond. Zaeyo gasped as if in orgasm.

Everyone in the crowd received a gift. Percival saw Etzel, dressed as a Ruritanian generalissimo rather than a South American one, have a cowboy saddle in cordovan leather pressed into his green-gloved hands. Ahasuerus gratefully accepted a bling-encrusted hammer, along with three silver nails. He accepted these in very good grace indeed, and waggled them meaningfully in Kane's direction. Kane looked back coolly, igniting a Havana cigar with a jewelled lighter bearing the royal crest of Logres.

Bertilak's present, however, was the largest. As he stood, clearly identifiable by sheer size alone, a human island in the crowd, two cherubim scampered to him with a long parcel wrapped in fine silk, bowed, and departed. Bertilak looked down, nonplussed, and began slowly to peel the wrapping back from the gift. Metal shone as he did so - not the gaudy sheen of ceremonial silver, but the dull, businesslike glimmer of metal forged for a deadly purpose.

It was half out of its scabbard, tied round with lengths of decorative ribbon. The gigantic Persian tore at the ribbons in irritation, then gently eased the enormous blade, thick as a man's hand, out of its housing. The hilt was neither inlaid with precious stones nor carved from a single piece of ivory, but was made of a dull grey heavy metal wrapped round with steel cable. The sword was intended to be used.

Bertilak drew the full length of the weapon from the sheath, its immense weight causing even his hand to wobble and nearly taking an eye out of a chambermaid. But despite the fact that it was clearly a two-handed weapon, he was holding it in one. His grip spanned the greater part of a hilt clearly made to be held two-handed. The sword was as long as a tall man was high, the handle protected by heavy steel cross-bars. The single piece of ostentation was a silver plate fastened across the shearing-guard, showing an engraved scorpion, and bearing the inscription AND THEIR TORMENT WAS AS THE TORMENT OF A SCORPION, WHEN HE STRIKETH A MAN.

Bertilak turned, and his gaze struck out across the crowd, right into Percival's. He raised the weapon in one hand, above his head, and an expression of malignant triumph spread across his features.

Percival frowned, and inspected his drink in detail. A cherub flickered past him and settled at his feet. The creatures, on closer inspection, were not built like babies, but were as slight as monkeys; Percival wondered whether they might actually be capable of using their miniscule wings.

The cherub held out adorable little baby arms. Percival bent over to inspect what was cupped in the palms.

A St. Christopher's medallion in tasteful solid silver. He turned it over in his own palm and inspected it. On the reverse had been engraved, in microscopically machined letters:

WOULD THAT I COULD AFFORD SUCH LUXURIES AS A GOD; MAY YOURS GO WITH YOU.
A.

Percival gripped the medallion in a closed fist, looked up at Abaddon across a sea of faces, and nodded acknowledgement. Milord nodded back.

***

Warmth and light and noise surrounded him as he drifted away from the press of partygoers. Drunkard breath and garlic and expensive ladies' perfume mingled in a sweet sick cloud. Female faces (well-briefed, well-prepared) looked up and opened into grins filled with expensive teeth on seeing him. He was asked, "Do come over and give us the very latest on the world above", and enjoined, "No, you're ours now, we saw you first." But despite attempts by well-meaning hostesses to drag him back as the guest of honour, he escaped onto an isolated balcony where a lone stone naiad poured water endlessly into the gulf. He noticed a movement in the crowd behind him, where a man a head taller than anyone around him was threading his way through knots of brightly dressed immortals, heading gradually towards Percival's position.

Percival stepped back from the parapet, and made for a staircase winding down between turrets. He glanced back into the crowd; eyes met his, eyes that had urgent murder in them. He clattered down the staircase in new leather shoes; he heard feet behind him on the flagstones, moving faster than his own, taking steps a yard long two at a time. The mosaic at this point was of Athene with an owl perched on her shoulder, defeating a thuggish Ares. Despite its being a mosaic, the figures seemed to flow within it, motion in stone.

The footsteps behind him increased in number, drumming more complex rhythms on the marble. He did not look back again.

Percival quickened his own pace; the feet above him accelerated to catch up. The steps wound down to an outlying balcony held up by buttressing worked into the shape of an upthrust devil's claw, and down here was what he had been hurrying to reach.

Ruined.

The glass fibre rotors, moulded and fashioned with such care, had been hit again and again until they had starred and splintered and been rendered entirely unaerodynamic. The leather seats, carefully cured and triple-stitched by hand out of the skin of the man who had stitched them, had been slashed like the back seat of a bus ridden on by hooligans. The handles had been twisted away from their mounts, leaving only dangerously sharp stubs of splintered wood. The central spindle had been chopped into like a treetrunk by a woodfeller's axe.

Leonardo's helicopter, so carefully prepared under conditions of such extreme secrecy, was not going to fly. Not now, and possibly never.

The same heavy footsteps sounded on marble behind him. He turned to a hiss of escaping steel rather than steam, as two yards of swordblade slithered out of a scabbard and rose to the level of his eyes.

"IT IS TIME FOR A REMATCH, ENGLISHMAN."

Bertilak's right hand was holding the two-handed sword, whose point was quivering less in fatigue than in anger. The scorpion glittered on its shearing guard. The left hand threw a glittering ribbon of steel out to Percival, who caught it, by the blade. Blood congealed slowly round the leading edge of the sabre he had caught, pooling into blood grooves, oozing down towards the hilt.

Other footsteps were clattering out of the dark now, down staircases approaching from several directions. A crowd of partygoers followed a phalanx of Orpheus's bodyguards armed with weapons varying from the Renaissance to the atomic age. Every stairway of escape was quickly filled with a rank of guardsmen, each one levelling a blade or barrel or magnetic accelerator at Percival; then, once the security of the area had been established, a figure of unremarkable height, with no striking physical features, strode through the serried rows of massive men like an Old Testament prophet parting a body of water.

Percival's fingers sparkled emerald, and the sword was physically pushed out of the deep cuts it had made in them by the force of healing nanobots. He took it gingerly by the hilt with his other hand.

"That was not", said Bertilak, "a promising start." He bowed low to Abaddon, scraping the ground with his sword. "My lord."

"Bertilak", acknowledged Milord - and though his figure was slight, his voice carried out across the crowd as if amplified. "We have been informed that Orpheus and yourself have uncovered a plot against us."

Bertilak jabbed out an enormous finger at Percival's chest. "My lord, this man has been conspiring against you since the beginning of his time in inferis. My lord Orpheus has discovered weapons he and his confederates have been building in the Franj's domicile, human weapons capable of destroying an entire city."

Abaddon frowned. "The capability of a human weapon to destroy a human city does not perturb me, Bertilak. I am far better protected than that. However, your loyalty does touch me, though I suspect it might be tinged with hatred for the man who defeated you in combat."

Bertilak's face twisted in anger. "Then believe your own seneschal, Milord, if you will not fully believe me."

A face pushed out of the crowd of bodyguards around Milord. The face was at less than normal human height. Percival's heart contorted like a used toothpaste tube. Orpheus, his face beaming as brightly as if it had been recently polished, swaggered forward.

"It is true, Milord", said the Greek. "We have the conspirators and their device. Kane was among them", he said, reaching back into the crowd and dragging out a sullen Semitic captive bound in chains. "They were attempting to effect a nuclear detonation in your lordship's Bridge. They were intercepted by my agents whilst attempting to smuggle an atomic device up into the Bridge by cart."

Kane glared at Bertilak like a bishop at a heretic.

"Betrayer!" he spat. "Serpent in our womb! This creature only pretends to be a devil! You are a devil pretending to be a man!"

Abaddon stared at Orpheus in wonderment. Then, his face split into a smile, which became a huge laugh that might take in all the world.

"Oh, Kane, Kane, you have surpassed yourself this time! I shall have to forge new torments to requite this transgression, though I doubt that I can match your level of invention. Atomic weapons indeed! Where is this famous device?"

Orpheus bowed decorously and turned, opening a passage through the press of bodyguards with his hand. "We have brought it on a handcart, Milord. It is disarmed."

A sheet was drawn back from a glittering sphere engraved with the letters THIN MAN. Abaddon had hysterics, going to the indecorous extent of throwing his head back and forth and hugging his knees. When his head came back up, there were tears in his eyes that were surprisingly human.

"Kane, you are going to succeed with hilarity where you have failed with force of arms. You are going to kill me with laughter. What did you hope to accomplish with this? Do you not think I am protected against such devices? The Bridge's security systems constantly scan all approaching individuals for weapons. Orpheus's security teams are well informed of all weapons that have ever been produced on Earth, and many that have not." He rapped on the aluminium casing of the device.

"Milord", growled Bertilak, whose eyes had still not moved from Percival, "there remains the matter of the Englishman."

"He was intending to steal away from Milord using this surreptitiously constructed flying machine, smuggled secretly into the Bridge and onto this balcony.", offered Orpheus. "We have known for some time that the Franj was replicating something from the notebooks of Da Vinci."

"Yes, yes, I know, I know", waved Abaddon boredly. "I'm aware. I also use the surveillance systems. I even observed the construction of the contraption in question; it looks ingenious, though highly dangerous. I suspect that by smashing it, arresting its pilot and preventing his crime, you have saved him from any number of horrible and painful deaths."

"But may I kill him now, Milord?" said Bertilak.

"Oh, certainly, if you insist", said Abaddon.

The blade came round, at frightening speed, without warning or hesitation. Percival's own sword collided with it at an oblique angle. The two-handed sword was heavy, and would certainly break Percival's blade if it caught it side-on. But Percival's weapon was quicker, and left a red stripe across Bertilak's ribcage before the big sword could come round again. But Percival had had to step in within the range of the claymore to engage his opponent, and had made the mistake of thinking there was no danger space immediately around Bertilak now that both the German's hands were occupied with swinging a six foot sword. A foot lashed out and punched into his stomach, and he toppled backwards, recovering almost instantaneously, but only just getting his sword to the next colossal overhead swipe, which struck sparks off the mosaic-work and left a gritty gash down the side of a cavorting Nereid.

Percival held his own sword up vertically, and Bertilak swung the heavy blade round at it. There was an ear-punishing shriek like a telegraph cable snapping as Percival's own blade shattered, sending sharp steel fragments into his face, leaving wicked gashes which healed instantly. A sigh rose from the crowd. The public's new darling was losing.

Percival backed away, holding the stub of his sword up in what he knew to be a futile effort to defend himself. The knot of bodyguards that had been standing around Abaddon crowded round to watch the kill. Even Abaddon himself stepped closer -

- and Bertilak's sword swung round behind him like a mowing scythe, lopping the heads off three of Orpheus's guardsmen. The bodies seemed to take a moment or so to realize their heads were no longer present, then toppled slowly onto the mosaic, their neck stumps fizzing with nanotechnological healing.

None of the remaining guardsmen could react in time - the shock of the event had frozen their fingers on their triggers, and they could only stand and watch as Bertilak barged through them, physically picked up Milord in a running bear hug, and ran with him over the edge of the balustrade.

There was no scream. Unregarded, Percival leapt onto the parapet, watching the writhing figures in their long drop downward. Bertilak's sword was clamped across Abaddon's throat; Bertilak was pulling back on both handle and blade, throttling Milord in flight, his own fingers glowing emerald from within as the edge bit into them.

There was a series of sickening impacts as their bodies hit outcrops of the rock; then they passed out of sight. Thin films of flesh they had left on the abyssite glowed greenly in the dark, marking a ragged audit trail down the face.

However, half the crowd did not seem to be watching Milord's descent. Percival turned to see the three guardsmen who Manfred had decapitated, prone and lifeless on the red-stained mosaic. Their necks were still bleeding, pumping out more blood than Percival would have believed could exist in a human body. It was true that, inside the spreading blood, flecks of emerald still sparkled - but men of Hell were not supposed to bleed and continue to bleed. The onlookers around the guardsmen stared in horror at the sight of death actually meaning death.

"What has happened?" said Orpheus, appalled. "What have you done?"

"Radioactivity", said Percival. "You were so sure we'd build a nuclear weapon with our stolen fissionables that you never bothered to check Bertilak's sword, which is forged of an alloy of iron and weapons-grade uranium. The handle had to be of lead so he could hold it without his skin blistering. Radioactivity confuses the nanobots that inhabit the blood of people down here - and, we gambled, Abaddon's as well. He'll begin to get well when he finally comes to a halt, but he won't heal in a hurry. Let's see how he likes dying again and again and again."

"Milord", said Orpheus, shuddering up to his full height with a face of obstinate anger, "will be sore annoyed when he discovers you have killed him."

"He won't be coming back", said Percival. "Not in a hurry. The link between Milord and his host body is, we suspect, maintained by gravity wave transmission. But gravity wave transmission breaks down outside the confines of the Bridge, and", he confided, staring at the snail-trail Bertilak and Abaddon had left down the rock, "you can't get much further out of the confines of the Bridge than that. Right now, Milord's real body, wherever it is and whatever it looks like, is experiencing the Milord equivalent of a network error."

He took several steps sideways, hopped off the parapet, and started running. Several of Orpheus's guards held sword-blades up as a barrier; Percival ran through it, his amputated blade sketching in guards' blood in the air, not pausing for breath even when his own left hand was lopped off. He could feel the tingling sensation of it reforming even as he staggered up the stairs. Clean steel, sweet healing.

Being lighter on one side by a hand made it hard to run. He staggered up and down steps, pursued by feet far faster than his own. Another pair of guardsmen confronted him, stepping out to block a colonnaded gallery. Percival slapped one sword aside, sustaining minor damage to his remaining hand, batted aside another, and continued the zig-zag motion of his shattered sword across both guards' throats. The men went down without even bothering to gurgle a scream, though Percival knew they would heal. He pushed on, able to move more quickly now his hand had regrown. Unfortunately, the stump of his sword had not. He turned and tossed it into the deep. It spiralled away to a spinning silvery dot, end-over-ending in the blackness.

He continued running. Without a weapon, he moved faster. His footsteps, unfortunately, clattered down the side of the Bridge like the percussion section of an orchestra, clearly marking out his path to his pursuers.

A massive stone abutment sloped down into the dark on his right, merging on his left with the stonework of the Bridge; he had reached the nearest buttress. The staircase stopped at a padlocked doorway leading back into the inside of the building; it was not intended for people to leave the building via this route. Only a single one-laned entrance, cobble-paved, broke the gently sloping face of the buttress. Percival knew that there were secret passageways aplenty, but he had only ever entered and left the Bridge via this narrow roadway, which linked with the endlessly zig-zagging road down to Pandaemonium-on-the-Mole below.

Right now, a horse-drawn supply cart, lit at all four corners by glass globes filled with dimly smouldering fairies, was trundling up the trench the entranceway ran along the bottom of. The driver, a short, thick-set man with a peculiarly elongated skull, a swarthy complexion, and small, deep-set eyes, had whipped his horses to a lather, and seemed to be in a tearing hurry.

Percival stood up on the stone balustrade and waved wildly. On the buckboard of the cart, the driver stood up whilst still driving and waved frantically back, then sat down to bring his horses to a panting halt. This done, he hopped into the the back of the cart, pulled out a featureless brown parcel, and leaned precariously over the side of cart and entryway to put the package, ever so gently, on the sloping surface of the buttress.

Percival made a frenetic thumbs-up and began working his way around the stone of the Bridge, too inured to death and resurrection by now to be truly afraid of heights, but taking more care than usual, since to die right now would be to reanimate in a world where Milord was back to life and very, very angry.

The stone used to build the Bridge had been dressed by hands too precise to be human. There was scarcely any room to jam a pinky in between the mortarless blocks. All the time, footsteps were converging on his location like vengeful thunder.

A voice shouted down from above.

"PERCIVAL! GIVE YOURSELF UP TO MILORD'S JUSTICE!"

A thrown stone took the wing off a gargoyle to his left. Heaven be thanked, they hadn't yet brought any proper projectile weapons to bear above. But it was only a matter of time.

"I'VE ALREADY ENJOYED MILORD'S JUSTICE", yelled Percival, scrambling down finally onto the nearly sheer beginning of the buttress, which rapidly changed gradient enough for him to cling on. "IT HAS EIGHT LEGS AND IS EXTREMELY ARBITRARY."

"YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THAT WAY", yelled the voice above uncertainly.

"YOU ARE WRONG", said Percival. "YOU ARE SO WRONG. YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE HOW WRONG YOU ARE."

"SUICIDE", yelled Orpheus, "IS ANATHEMA TO YOUR GOD."

"MY GOD", yelled Percival, "APPEARS TO BE A LYING MOTHERFUCKING SERIAL SUICIDE WHO MURDERED HIS OWN BROTHER." From high above, he heard Kane's answering "GO, LAD, GO!" Percival ran across the slabs of the buttress toward the brown package. A spear shivered off the stone a metre from him. He picked up the package, began hurriedly unfolding it.

"YOU SEE, NOT ONLY DID YOU CONCENTRATE SO HARD ON THE A-BOMB IN MY LEFT HAND THAT YOU MISSED BERTILAK'S SWORD IN MY RIGHT", said Percival, "YOU ALSO SMASHED THE WRONG LEONARDO MACHINE." He struggled into the straps that trailed from the assembly. "IN HIS LIFETIME, LEONARDO DESIGNED A GREAT NUMBER OF FLYING DEVICES -" a bullet, or worse than a bullet, took the whole top off a coping stone next to his left foot - "AND ALSO GLIDING ONES."

He gathered up the lion's share of the package, and stepped into space.

The remnants of the device, luckily, slithered cleanly off the stone surface of the buttress after him. He pushed himself clear of an unforeseen limb of the wall which swung into him with the force of a stone club swung by a giant.

And he was falling.

Very, very slowly, falling.