Kate flung the binoculars from her, clambered over the boulder, and began lowering herself into the fissure that separated her ridge from the citadel crag. The rocks were slippery. Slick, she thought. Fifty feet down and the fissure narrowed to a rocky crevasse that dropped another eighty or a hundred feet like the inside of a ragged chimney. It was only five feet across here and from the reflected lights from the torches above, Kate could see a fairly flat rock.
She did not think. She jumped.
Her cheap Romanian shoes scrabbled on stone and she realized that she was missing part of a heel. Shot off when we ran the roadblock. She was sliding back toward the narrow abyss.
In a technique that Tom had taught her during one of their few joint rockclimbing exercises, she spreadeagled herself on the steep rock face, bringing her entire body to a friction point.
She quit sliding.
A hundred feet to her right, the bridge rose above the fissure, connecting the stairway and path to the citadel. Guards paced back and forth on the echoing timbers.
Kate began edging right, finding handholds and footholds more by faith than by vision or feel. Once a rock came loose and she held her breath while pebbles rattled down into the fissure that was at least thirty feet wide here. The sound of sliding rock seemed terribly loud to her, but none of the shadows on the walkway above stopped or shouted.
Kate moved under the bridge, clambering over lashed timbers the size of trees. She could climb up here, but that would avail her nothing. She could hear the footsteps of the guards twenty feet above her, listen to the chanting of the hundreds of strigoi.
Kate kept clambering right, always keeping three points in contact with the rock the way Tom had taught her, until suddenly the rough rocks ended and she was staring out at the river canyon itself.
Under Kate's right foot now, the cliff fell away for a thousand feet into darkness. Torchlight illuminated only snatches of the stone wall ahead of her, but she realized that the south wall of the citadel along this face rose directly from the stone of the mountain.
This end of the castle was not broad, a hundred and twenty feet at most, but the wall was sheer, seeming to overhang at places, and torches crackled on the battlements above. The stones here were part of the original structure, chipped and eroded in places, cracked by ice, and overgrown by weeds and even small shrubs in places. Vegetable holds, Tom had called such plant growth on a cliff face. Don't use them.
Kate saw immediately that if she started sliding at any point along this traverse, she would not stop until she slid off the wall into the void above the canyon. She looked at her watch.
12:14.
Just time enough to get to the terrace in time for the end.
She shook her head. Without looking down, without looking back, Kate edged her way out onto the vertical wall of Castle Dracula and began the traverse in a steady crablike motion.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The graduation exercise of Kate's shortlived climbing experience with Tom had been the climb of the Third Flatiron, a giant limestone slab that lifted above Boulder like a piece of broken sidewalk tilted on end. That climb had taken most of a Saturday morning; Kate figured that she had five minutes maximum to make this traverse.
There were more footholds and handholds on the castle wall than there had been on the Flatiron. Kate continued sliding to her right, slowing frequently but never completely stopping. She remembered from climbing with Tom and from watching Tom climb that sometimes speed itself substituted for friction, the very act of moving quickly over rock allowing one to cling like a fly where there was not enough friction to hold one on if the climber stopped.
Kate did not stop.
Fifty feet out and the pitch of the wall increased, becoming true vertical and worse than vertical in places. The torches above shed some light here, but what might look like a promising foothold often turned out to be a millimeterthin ledge of rotting rock, an apparently sturdy handhold would become a weed with twoinch roots. But Kate kept moving, climbing when she had to get above some obstacle, reluctantly dropping lower when she had to pass under an overhang or avoid a smooth stretch of stone. At one point she felt the hilt of the silly little dagger cutting into her waist, but it was too dangerous to leverage her body in such a way she could get at the knife to throw it away. She left it poking her and continued moving.
Her mistake was thinking that it would be faster halfway across to follow a fourinch ledge of soil where ice had fissured the stone. For a moment it was, and then the ledge slid away with the noise of sand collapsing and she was sliding down the wall with no points in full contact, no handholds, and the toes of her cheap shoes rattling uselessly against stone.
Kate closed her eyes and curled her fingers into claws. Her right hand slammed into a narrow ledge where a block of stone had been displaced an inch by some forgotten earthquake, three of her fingernails snapped off, but she kept her fingers curled and hung on, all of her weight supported by three fingers of her numb right hand.
Kate slapped the wall with her left hand, but there were no handholds. Her toes scrabbled without finding a crack or ledge. Finally she remembered Tom's technique of wedging the toes and palm and just finding a friction point to balance gravity.
She pulled her knees up, forced her feet against the near vertical stone, pressed her left palm tightly against rock, and was able to lift some of the weight from her cramping right hand. She was panting so loudly now that she was afraid they would hear her on the terrace twenty-five feet above, but no sounds came down to her except the crackle of torches and the incessant chanting, rising to some peak now. She did not turn her head to look at her watch.
The friction point would not hold for long. Two feet to the right of her tiny handhold, another stone jutted farther out, offering a hypothetical hold for both hands. Cracks four feet below that should serve for her feet. If she could only shift her left hand across her body . . .
She could not. Any movement of her palm or arm put all of her weight on the bruised fingers of her right hand. Her toes were slipping and she did not have enough grip anywhere to lift her feet again. The only thing she could do was let go of her one hold and try to scrabble the two feet to her right.
One, she thought, two . . . her legs were beginning a sewingmachine shake, her fingers were surrendering the grip . . . fuck it. Kate shifted her hand, slipped, kept all four points in touch as she scrabbled to her right, slipped again . . . too far! . . . and then caught one of the “toeholds” as she started to slide past it. It was deep enough for eight fingers to wedge full length between the stone. She set her chin against the tiny fissure and gasped into it. A bat exploded from the hole, its leathery wings brushing her face. Kate did not even consider letting go.
I could stay here a few minutes. Rest.
The hell you can. Move!
She opened her eyes. Another thirty feet should put her where she wanted to be under the edge of the terrace where the ceremony chanted on. She carefully turned her head and looked at her watch.
12:19. She did not have time for the rest of the traverse.
What if my watch is slow? Kate shook with sudden giggles until she used her wrist to wipe her nose and bring her out of the hysterics. Her arms were shaking again.
She looked above her, picked out a route from crack to crack, stone to stone, and began climbing.
Kate came up over the battlements less than twenty feet from where she wanted to be. All eyes were on Radu Fortuna, who was holding Joshua above him like an offering. A strigoi with a black hood stood next to Mike O'Rourke with a curved blade lifted to the expriest's throat. The chanting was very loud.