Fourteen Minutes

"Time is the only dimension in which fear has any use. It tells us how much we still have to spend."

Fourteen minutes.

She counted them against the beating of her heart. It was a bad clock. It ran fast when she was frightened, which was now, and slow when she was calm, which was never; but it was the only one she had, and she kept her eyes on the man climbing the wall.

He had gone eight feet.

He went up the column like a man going up a wet rope, in short hard heaves, with his whole weight hanging from the one good arm. The crystal was white and fine and wickedly sharp. It cut the linen on his hands. It cut the shirt on his chest. Where it did not cut, it slid: the brine ran down its face in a thin bright film, and his boots found no purchase, and twice she saw him slip, and catch himself, and hang there, swaying, for the space of three breaths. Then he went on.

"Don't look," said Vespera, beside her.

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm monitoring."

"You are holding your breath."

She let it out. It came in a gasp, and with it a gust of the gas, sour and thick, and she coughed until her eyes streamed. The mask was damp and heavy on her face. It smelled of ammonia and burnt cork. She pressed it tighter and breathed through it, shallowly, in short sips, and tasted salt.

Thirteen.

The haze had risen. It was above her knees now. It lay across the vault in a smooth gray sheet, level as water in a trough, and the bases of the lamps were drowned in it, so that the twenty-one golden flames seemed to float on a lake of smoke. The farther end of the crypt had vanished. The table was an island. She stood on it with her skirts about her ankles and the white cloth torn up beneath her feet, and the ammonia bottle in her hand.

"Now," she said.

"Now what?"

"The lamps." She turned. "We have been using them for light. I propose to use them for heat."

Vespera blinked above her mask. "Heat?"

"Hartshorn is a volatile spirit. It boils at a low heat, and gives off a vapor. I want that vapor in the air. I want it spread through the vault as evenly as possible, at as many points as possible, as fast as possible." She was already uncorking the bottle. "I want the whole crypt breathing ammonia, in a thin mist, so that every cubic inch of the sulfur is met by an equal volume of the base."

"A mist."

"A fog. White. A little like steam. You will see it." She poured, carefully, a few spoonfuls of the pungent liquid into the glass dish. "I need twenty-one little dishes. Anything that will hold a spoonful. Cups, plates, the lids of the jars. Put them over the lamps."

"Over the flames?"

"An inch above. On a stand. A cork, a coin, a bit of the iron." She thrust the dish into the girl's hands. "Go."

Vespera went.

She moved down the table with the quick certainty of a woman who has done a hundred things in the dark, stooping at each lamp in turn. She propped a cup on three corks. She set a saucer on a wire. She balanced the lid of a jar on a stack of coins. Behind her, Thalessa came with the bottle, tipping a little spirit into each as she passed, and the flames bent, and sputtered, and recovered.

Twelve minutes.

A thin pungent vapor began to rise.

…

It rose gently at first. A pale transparent shimmer, such as one sees above a kettle, that spread a hand's breadth above each dish and thinned into nothing. Then, as the liquid warmed, it thickened, and curled, and moved, and went out across the vault in wandering threads. Where it met the yellow haze above the floor, something strange happened.

The two vapors touched.

And between them, in a ghostly line, a whiteness appeared. It grew, and spread, and became a fine, soft, drifting cloud, like a mist on a winter pond. It rolled out across the floor. It rose in curling wreaths among the lamps. It wrapped itself round the white columns. It clung to the roof in feathery rags.

The sharp stinging smell of brimstone faded.

In its place came another, hardly less unpleasant: the thick, flat, sweetish reek of the hartshorn. But it was a smell that could be borne. It did not burn the eye. It did not catch the throat.

Thalessa lowered her bottle.

"It works," she said.

"It's white," said Vespera. She was staring at the fog with her hands at her sides. "It's like snow."

"It's a salt. Ammonium sulfite. The two gases make it. It drifts down as a dust, quite harmless." Her voice cracked on a laugh. "I wrote it in my notebook ten minutes ago, and I did not believe it."

"How long will it last?"

"As long as the spirit does. I have a pint. I have used a quarter." She held up the bottle to the light. "Ten minutes, with this rate. Perhaps fifteen, if I eke it."

"And then?"

"And then the furnace is still burning, and the pipes are still open." She took a deep breath, and winced. "It is a delaying action. It is not a victory. For that we need the lens."

They both looked up.

…

Eleven.

He was at the twelve-foot mark. Halfway. He had paused at a knob of crystal, a bulge on the column, and was clinging to it with both arms and one knee, his forehead resting against the wet stone. His breath came in great rasping gasps. She could hear them across the length of the crypt, thin and tearing, even through the cloth.

"Roderick!" she called.

He lifted his head.

"Rest!"

"No."

"You'll fall!"

"I'll fall later."

He forced himself up again. She saw the tendons stand out in his neck. She saw a thread of blood spring bright from his hand where the crystal had gashed the linen. He found a new hold, and a new, and moved, one inch at a time, up the face of the pillar.

"He's mad," said Vespera.

"Yes."

"He'll kill himself."

"Quite probably."

"And you let him."

"I let nobody do anything." Thalessa's voice was tight. "I have known him for a fortnight, Vespera. In that time I have learned a great deal about him. I have learned that he walks into locked rooms with a revolver. I have learned that he cuts the line under a ton of rock. I have learned that he kisses a woman while she is stitching him. He is the most obstinate and unreasonable man I have ever met."

"You love him."

The words fell like a dropped glass.

Thalessa stood motionless. She felt her face grow hot beneath the mask. She had not said it. She had not even, in the privacy of her own head, put it into words. But the girl had said it as one states the weather, quite simply, in the middle of a catastrophe.

"Yes," she said.

"I thought so."

"It is a thing I have only just discovered."

"It's usually so." The girl's eyes crinkled above the cloth. "I discovered mine about my brother on the fourth day after the news. I was sitting on the end of the pier, and I thought: I'm never going to see him again, and I never told him he had a ridiculous nose."

"Did he?"

"Enormous." She laughed, and it turned into a cough. "Like a ship's prow."

Thalessa found that she was crying.

It was absurd. It was monstrous. She stood on a table in a gas-filled tomb, with a pint of ammonia in her hand and a man climbing a wall of salt, and she laughed and wept at once, and could not tell which was which.

Ten.

…

"Up," said Vespera, suddenly.

"What?"

"Look up. Look up!"

Thalessa looked.

Roderick had reached the top.

He was clinging to the head of the column, twenty-five feet above the floor, where the white crystal merged into the roof. He hung there, a dark figure in the drifting fog, with one arm hooked round a spur of stone and the other swinging free. His body was shaking. She could see it from below, the long steady shudder of a man at the end of his strength.

He was six feet short.

The lens glowed above him, a pale green moon, and between it and his reaching hand lay a stretch of bare black basalt, glistening, unbroken, without a crack or a knob or a fold.

"He can't reach it," said Vespera.

"No."

"It's too far."

"Yes."

"He'll have to jump."

"He'll have to throw," said Thalessa.

She did not know where the thought had come from. It rose in her mind fully formed, as thoughts do in extremity, from some deep cold well. She turned. Her eyes went to the table, to the iron stand, to the heavy base of the twenty-first lamp.

"The stand," she said. "The one he's carrying. It's three feet. Iron. If he can reach it up to the glass—"

"He can't, from there."

"He can throw it."

"From a hundred feet—"

"From twenty-five. From the top of the pillar. At a target the size of a plate." She was already moving. "Roderick! The stand! Throw it!"

He heard.

He turned his head, and she saw the mask, and the eyes above it, enormous in the fog. He understood in an instant. His good hand went to his back, and fumbled at the linen strip, and drew the iron out. It gleamed, long and black. He took a grip. He measured the distance with his eye.

Nine minutes.

"Now!" screamed Thalessa.

He hurled it.

It went up, spinning, end over end, glittering in the lamplight, and for a second the whole crypt held its breath. Vespera's hand had closed on Thalessa's arm. The rod turned once, twice, three times in the golden air, a long, slow, perfect arc.

It struck the lens.

The sound was not what she had expected. It was not a crash. It was a single clear ringing note, such as a glass makes when a finger is run round its rim, and it rose and rose and went on rising, sweet and thin and terrible, until it seemed to fill the whole vault. A crack ran across the green disc, fine as a hair. Then another. Then a third.

And from somewhere far above them, in the throat of the shaft, a draft began to blow.