SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

We hit real trouble crossing into the Second ring.

Something came through the retreating line at the rear and it was the biggest thing I had seen so far, four metres and change, and it separated the two of us from the group inside about eight seconds.

The Captain did not panic about it.

"Left side," he said. "Do not be in front of it."

Then he set his feet.

> **[Bulwark — A activated.]**

I have watched Alasdair Muir take a Giant’s wrist on his forearm. Adamant goes through his whole body and he still goes backward with his boots tearing trenches out of the ground.

This was not that.

The thing hit his shield with everything it had and the Captain did not move one centimetre in any direction.

The *street* moved. The flagstones under his boots went down about four centimetres and cracked out in a ring, and every bit of that force went into the ground rather than into him.

And I understood the limitation in the same second, because to do it he had to be completely planted, and a man who is completely planted cannot go anywhere.

Which is what I was for.

---

> **[Talaria activated.]**

I came in at the back of its knee while it was still pushing on his shield.

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

>

> **[Mana: 210/240 → 192/240.]**

Nine seconds of fire into the crease and my forearms were shaking by the sixth, and the leg started going.

"Off." The Captain did not shout it. "Now."

I went, and he came off the plant and put his shield edge into its throat, and it went down between us.

Then he did the other thing.

> **[Muster — S activated.]**

The rear of the column was twenty metres behind us and somebody there had gone down under a second raider, and the Captain was standing over that man before I had finished turning my head.

He crossed it. I know he crossed it, because I saw him in two places on the way.

But he arrived silent, with both feet already set, and he had killed the thing before the man on the ground had rolled over.

That is why he is always where the line breaks.

---

The Bellkeeper took us under the Second ring rather than through its gate, because the gate had four thousand people in front of it.

There is a door in the base of the Second Bell Tower that does not look like a door.

Behind it, stairs going down, and then a passage that stopped being a passage and became something much older.

The walls changed. The bricks above were three hundred years old at most. Down here it was blocks the length of a coffin, laid without mortar, dry and cold and going off into the dark in both directions.

Water noise everywhere. Not dripping. Moving.

We went along a channel about two metres wide with black water in the bottom of it going somewhere fast, and there were chains overhead.

Enormous ones. Links the size of my head, running up into the dark, so rusted that scale came off them onto my shoulders as we passed.

"The bells hang off these?"

"The bells are on the end of them." The Bellkeeper did not slow down. "That is the whole design. Ringing a bell drops a counterweight, and the counterweight does something else at the same time."

"Does what?"

"Depends on the tower."

She pointed her lamp at a wall as we passed it and there was a sluice gate in it, three metres across, with a mechanism above it that had teeth on it the size of my forearm.

"The sea takes this city about once a generation. It has always taken it. So everything down here is older than everything up there, and every one of the seven towers is tied into some part of it."

"And the Seventh?"

She did not answer that either.

---

Then the ground moved and dust came off the ceiling.

The Sixth Bell.

Down here it did not arrive as a sound at all. It came up through the stone into the soles of my boots and into my teeth, one enormous slow beat, and then another, and the water in the channel shivered.

Six.

Nobody in that passage said anything.

The Bellkeeper had a hand on one of the chains and her fingers went white around it and stayed that way for the whole of it.

One of the defenders behind me sat straight down on the wet stone and somebody else pulled him up.

"Keep moving." The Captain’s voice came out completely level. "We are eleven minutes from the causeway. Keep moving."

Six rings gone. One left.

---

We came up into the light and I stopped walking.

There is a causeway between the Sixth ring and the Seventh, because the last ring of this city sits higher than everything around it and the ground falls away on both sides.

It is about a hundred and forty metres long and maybe twenty wide, and it goes up.

And there were thousands of people on it.

Not moving in a column. Packed, shoulder to shoulder, the whole width, all the way from the mouth to the gate at the top, and it was going forward at about the pace of somebody walking with a limp.

Carts abandoned at the edges where they had been dragged out of the flow. A man on the parapet passing children over the heads of the crowd to somebody twelve feet along.

Two soldiers hauling an old woman upright who had gone down and would not have got up again.

The noise was not screaming. It was worse than that. It was thousands of people breathing and shuffling and occasionally saying somebody’s name.

Behind us, the Sixth District had started to burn along its seaward edge, and there was movement in the smoke that was not people.

---

The Seventh Bell Tower stands beside the gate at the top of the causeway.

It took us nineteen minutes to get up there and I spent all of them with my hand on the cylinder.

The officer at the top had a face like a closed door and he did not want to touch it.

"From the outer wall," I said. "Fifth district, before it fell."

He looked at the seal, and at the print in the wax, and then he did something I did not expect. He looked past me at the Captain.

"You should read it," he said.

---

The Captain broke the wax with his thumb.

He read it in about four seconds because there was almost nothing on it, and I watched his hands rather than his face, and his hands were fine.

Then he did not say anything for a while.

"Say it out loud," the officer said.

"The Seventh Bell is to be rung immediately." The Captain’s voice came out flat. "Authority of the Council. Immediately, on receipt."

Somebody behind me made a noise.

"Immediately," the officer repeated.

"That is what it says."

---

I did not understand yet.

That is the part I have gone over. Three separate people looked at each other and went pale, and I stood there waiting for somebody to sign for it.

"What does ringing it do?"

The Bellkeeper answered me. She had gone the colour of the stone.

"The Seventh Bell drops the largest counterweight in the city. When it drops, the inner gates close and lock, and the same mechanism releases the causeway."

"Releases it."

"It is not a bridge. It is a wall with a road on top of it, and it is built to come down." She was not looking at the causeway.

"The sea has taken this city four times. The last ring is meant to survive that. So the causeway is designed to be dropped into the channel and seal it."

I turned round and looked at a hundred and forty metres of stone with several thousand people standing on it.

"Everyone on it dies."

"Everyone on it, and everyone still behind it."

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