"Tug-of-war what?" Zeeleepull demanded as we raced up the slow-sloping ramp to the next floor. My heart was pounding. Even the placid workers were gabbling excitedly amongst themselves. "If the tail won’t come to our anchor," Festina told him, "that means there’s another anchor somewhere in the city. Pulling hard in a different direction."
"Samantha might have an anchor," I said. "She probably kept all kinds of navy stuff."
"My thought exactly," Festina agreed. "She let us land, but doesn’t want us getting away. Now she’s trying to steal the tail from us."
"So what are you going to do?" Counselor asked.
"Boost our anchor’s power by feeding it juice from other sources: a Bumbler, or a tightsuit’s battery pack."
Counselor panted, "Won’t the bad queen increase her anchor’s power too?"
"That’s what makes tug-of-wars interesting," Festina said. "Now less talk, more speed,"
The ramp took us up to the palace’s main gallery: a big wide hall like a spine running the length of the building. In Verity’s time, the gallery had been lined with memorials to Troyen’s medical achievements — paintings of famous doctors, first editions of medical books, and even (I’m not kidding) labeled dissections of all four Mandasar castes including crazy old Queen Spontaneity encased in clear plexi. Now, all I could see was a hot red glow fifty paces in front of us, like staring into an open furnace… the Balrog, clotted on floor, walls, and ceiling. Thick as carpet, stretching off hundreds of meters, all the way to the front nose of the palace.
"Holy shit," Festina whispered. "We don’t have to go through that, do we?"
"No," I answered, pointing. "There’s our way to the roof."
The door we wanted lay in the opposite wall of the gallery, maybe halfway between us and the glowing moss. Cautiously I led the group forward, keeping my eyes on the stone floor to make sure I wouldn’t step on stray spores that had drifted ahead of the main body. The gallery was unnaturally quiet with the moss’s muffling effect — it absorbed noise like crushed velvet laid over every surface. The pressure of sheer silence pushed against my eardrums, muting the sounds of our footsteps. I found myself holding my breath… but that wasn’t enough to keep from smelling the reek of buttered toast filling the air.
"Teelu" Counselor whispered, tiptoeing at my heels, "I am very very scared."
"Who isn’t?" I whispered back. "But remember, Tobit and the others must have come this way too. Nothing happened to them."
"Explorers are just normal humans," Counselor replied. "You are special, Teelu. What was it the moss woman said? The Balrog will act if it finds a host too good to pass up."
I winced. In the past few weeks I’d figured out two basic facts about the Balrog:
1. The moss got a kick out of scaring the pants off lesser species.
2. It preferred waiting to pounce till someone spoke a good straight line… like, "We should be safe now," or, "I don’t think it knows we’re here," or, "The Balrog will act if it finds a host too good to pass up."
Um.
The gallery’s silence was broken by a ripping sound, starting at the far end of the palace and racing our way. The moss on the walls and ceiling came sloughing off in great flat sheets, peeling from the stone and falling to the floor. Like mounds of snow sliding off trees, the moss slopped onto the ground, building up higher and higher… until it reached some critical mass and began to spill forward.
Rolling heaps of scarlet fuzz tumbled toward us with all the surging unstoppability of an avalanche.
"Run!" Festina shouted. As if we needed to be told.
I sprinted the last few steps to the doorway and threw myself inside, flattening against the wall of the stairwell. Outside, the moss had started to make a skittering scratchy sound — alien spores tripping over each other as they flowed after us. I waved the others to pass me and hightail it for the roof; but Festina planted herself against the wall opposite me, clutching the lantern in her gloved hand. She had the air of a woman who intended to make sure everyone else was safe before she headed up herself.
Zeeleepull seemed to have the same idea: stopping with Festina and me just inside the stairwell, all of us playing the hero, no one wanting to make a break for it till the others were safely on their way. Then Counselor gave her warrior-mate a tremendous shove that practically knocked him off his feet, forcing him to stagger a few steps up the ramp in spite of himself. She barreled forward and shoved him again: no delicacy at all, just whomp, like a small brown bulldozer plowing into an obstacle she was determined to move. One more shove and Zeeleepull accepted the inevitable — he ran, Counselor ran, Hib Nib Pib ran, with Festina and me racing close on their heels.
I had just reached the first landing when the stairwell behind me flushed bright with a crimson glow. The Balrog was coming up too.
Nothing to see in the stairwell but Festina’s lantern and the bloom of Balrog creeping up behind us. The moss didn’t move nearly so fast on the rarnp as it did on a level floor — the upslope slowed it to a baby’s crawl. We’d have no trouble staying ahead in the short run, but the long-term picture didn’t look so rosy. There was no way out of this stairwell but the parapet on the roof; and there was no way off that parapet but a bunch of ramps at the front of the building, where the Balrog was already in total control.
Oh well — at least the moss meant we had an alternative to getting killed by my sister.
The ramp went through half a dozen switchbacks, till I could no longer see crimson glimmering up from below. I could still smell buttered toast, strong and clear… but I could also catch a whiff of fresh night wind breezing down from the roof’s open air. It carried the scent of human sweat, and gusts of ozone too — the fragrance of lightning. Whatever the Explorers were doing, it used a lot of electricity.
By the time I topped the last ramp, the roof was getting crowded, what with five Mandasars and the same number of humans, three wearing big bulgy tightsuits. Once upon a time, the parapet had run along the whole west side of the palace… but some kind of explosion had blown out a big chunk of stone, leaving a gap of ten meters between us and the next intact section of walkway. The good news was the missing hunk of masonry made it hard for Balrog to migrate from the front of the palace back to us; the bad news was we were squeezed onto a patch of roof no more than three Zeeleepulls long. Lucky for us, the parapet was three Zeeleepulls wide too: you needed that much for bull-sized warriors to get past each other when they were marching sentry on the ramparts.
Even if we’d had more space, I doubt we would have used it — everyone was too busy crowding around Tobit, Dade, and Plebon to see what they were doing. They’d planted our remaining anchor atop the stomach-high wall that edged both sides of the parapet. Standing on either side of the box were two Bumblers, ours and Plebon’s, with back panels pried off to reveal tidy bundles of wires. Neat connections had already been spliced between those wires and some handy electrode knobs jutting out from the base of the anchor machine. The equipment was clearly built to make such rewiring easy; it made me wonder how often Explorers got into tug-of-wars, if navy engineers designed everything for exactly this situation.
But no design is perfect — the Explorers needed more power than just the two Bumblers. Both Tobit and Dade had the fronts of their tightsuits sliced open, cut very delicately by some kind of knife. The incisions were only deep enough to slit off the top layer of fabric, revealing the snarl of circuitry that ran the various functions of the suit: radios, temperature control, all that. Someone had yanked a finger-thick cable out of each suit’s belly and connected the cables to the anchor box too… making it look like each man had a length of intestine pulled out of his gut and hooked up to the anchor. Tobit and Dade stood side by side in front of the parapet wall like guys at adjacent urinals, not looking at each other, occasionally giving self-conscious glances down at the cables that were pumping power into the little black box.