The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 30

“Mind if I pick your brain for a bit?” Sorin asked Nemari.

They were at the front of the formation, him using Blind Sense to watch out for ambushes and her burning away fog so that they could see past the ends of their noses. It was slow progress, and the fact that defeating the weather didn’t give anima drove home Sorin’s decision to spend as little time as possible on this floor.

“Sure. What’s up?”

“I need a broad overview of how Floor 0 functions. I know there are mid families like yours and high families like Yoru’s, but who’s actually in charge? What’s happening with the taxes the portal guards collect? Who’s profiting from the Climber’s Union?”

“That’s a complicated question. Yoru probably knows a lot more than I do about it,” she said.

“Maybe, but I trust you, and I need to know what I’m dealing with if I’m going to be involved with these people.”

She shot him a sharp glance. “Are you?”

“I don’t know yet. This whole Void Wall thing caught me by surprise. It seems like I’ll have to find a way to work with them sooner or later. It might be better to start a relationship on my terms now.”

“That was news to me, too. The mid families aren’t really told much. Maybe my uncle and my father knew about it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were cut out. The high family inner circle is an exclusive club.”

“You still know more about how it all functions than I do,” Sorin said.

He’d avoided asking about this, not wanting to give away that he knew absolutely nothing about how a city he supposedly grew up in operated. All he was sure of was that it functioned very differently than the one he’d actually been born in. Initially, he hadn’t expected it to matter since he was rapidly reaching the point where he wouldn’t expect Floor 0 to have much to offer him. Finding out that the whole tower was stuck on Floor 24 had changed the paradigm.

“Okay,” Nemari said. She paused to let out a burst of heat that drove back the mist around her and blew Sorin’s hair around. He shook his head and raked a finger across his forehead to get it out of his eyes. “Okay… There are five high families, including Yoru’s. In theory, they collectively manage all taxes, which are divided up among them equally. They each have an area of the city they oversee, and supposedly, they provide guards and keep the infrastructure in good working order.”

“And how does that work in reality?” Sorin asked.

“Well, you know. There are never enough guards. The climbers who are officially contracted to bring back edible monster meat can’t keep up with the demand. Agriculture is too space-intensive on Floor 0 and impossible anywhere else.”

Those were all problems Sorin was familiar with, but in his home tower, powerful rank 30s or 40s stepped in to help. With their strength and speed, they were easily able to hunt kills and fund public infrastructure. It seemed like the red tower’s growth had been severely stunted by the Void Wall, but Sorin suspected there was more to it.

The Void Wall can’t be that old. These people know there are floors on the other side, and the common climber doesn’t even realize it’s there. It must have shown up relatively recently, maybe a few years ago. Maybe… Did Samael do something that caused it? I’ll have to ask Yoru how long it’s been there.

“So it’s lawlessness and starvation for the rank 0s who can’t climb to support themselves,” Sorin said.

“Yeah,” Nemari agreed unhappily. “I don’t know what kind of upbringing you had, but just ask Rue and Odric about their childhoods sometime. It’s not surprising she got involved with gang life, though I wish it hadn’t been the Black Hellions.”

“The gangs took control of all the space the high families were ignoring,” Sorin guessed.

“And then the Black Hellions started up a few years back. They started on the outside edges of the city, eating up gang territory one block at a time. Before anyone realized it, they were in control of half the city. Samael was strong enough to challenge anyone from the high families individually, and he was directing a lot of time and money toward building an army of loyal climbers.”

“Making him the de facto power of Floor 0, since he outnumbered the people who were supposed to be in charge,” Sorin said.

He knew better than anyone that a single high-ranked climber was worth hundreds of low-rankers. One guy at rank 30 could easily beat a whole city full of rank 5s, and that only got worse at even higher ranks. But if no one was above rank 24, or at least anyone who was couldn’t return to Floor 0, then Sorin didn’t need to worry so much about being captured by someone he couldn’t defeat.

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Rank 15 would be risky, but by rank 20, I doubt there’d be anyone besides Samael who could beat me in a fight.

“What ranks are the members of the high families?” he asked.

Nemari shrugged. “They don’t exactly make it public. I was always told to assume anyone with one of their surnames was at least rank 15 or could call on someone who was. We’re lucky we ran into Yoru the first time out on a climb and not in the city.”

“And also that he’s too proud to call in backup,” Sorin muttered.

He sent out a handful of razor-edged force blades into the mist, causing something that had been sniffing around for their scent to squeal in pain and dart off. “Didn’t kill it,” he said. “But I don’t think it’ll be back.”

“What was that?” Rue called out from twenty feet behind them where the rest of the team was walking.

“No idea. Something big and bulky. Four legs.”

He chuckled softly at the sound of her grumbling, but she subsided soon enough. Rue was at the very back of the group, about ten feet behind everyone else, and responsible for making sure nothing snuck up on them from the behind. She’d protested the assignment until Sorin had demonstrated his ability to Speed Burst from his own position to hers in under a second.

“So, the high families are ostensibly in control of the city, but they’re understaffed and, for various reasons, have done such a piss poor job of it that a new guy was able to come in and outmuscle them in the span of a few years,” he said, resuming his conversation with Nemari.

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Presumably, the high families aren’t happy about the state of affairs.”

Nemari shrugged. “I always wondered why they let it happen. Speculation was that they couldn’t let go of each other’s throats long enough to take care of the Black Hellions before they got too big, but now I wonder if it’s this Void Wall thing. Were they scrambling to try to contain it, and that gave Samael the opening to do what he did? And now he’s keeping it at bay, so they need him.”

“Only as long as the Void Wall exists. What do you want to bet that they’re all marshaling their strength, raising up people like Yoru in a hurry, so that the day Samael wins, they can descend on him like a pack of wolves?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it,” she said.

It’s still a risk, but it’s a lot smaller than it was before.

“Can I trust any of them?” he asked her.

Nemari’s eyebrows rose, and she glanced back at Yoru, who was staring into the fog on the right side of the group. Whatever vision augmentations he had, the fog wasn’t bothering him too much. Sorin’s Clear Eyes helped, but Blind Sense had a better range and saw in every direction, so he was relying on that to do the heavy lifting.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “The Telpikes have a reputation for honorable dealings—probably the reason they’re the weakest of the high families. I wouldn’t want to strike a bargain with them. They’d honor it, at least as much as anyone in a position of power feels bound to honor their word, but I’m sure it would be lopsided in their favor. I could probably find what I was looking for somewhere else. Why, what are you thinking?”

“A sponsor would help us keep up with our soulprint and gearing needs,” he said. “It’s not even a matter of money. Yoru’s family almost certainly has an armory full of all kinds of stuff just waiting for someone who can use it.”

“And that works out great for Daddy Telpike’s favored son back there, but I don’t think they’re looking to share.”

“Maybe, but you said they were the weakest of the high families. Is that why Yoru was out with mercenaries instead of being carried by his older cousins or siblings? If the goal is power as quickly as possible, that’s a poor way to go about it. Why, his mercenaries might betray him at any moment.”

“You want to recruit him permanently, carry him up with us? You’d have to… you know…” Nemari’s voice dropped, “... let him in on a few things.”

The conversation stopped there, but only because a river appeared in front of them. It was swollen far past its banks, its waters muddy brown and frothing as they surged past Sorin. “I guess that rain had to go somewhere,” he said. “I’m not sure we’re getting past this one until the water level goes down.”

The others came up behind Sorin and Nemari. “Why are we sto—Oh,” Yoru said. “That… is going to be a problem.”

“Do you think you could walk across it?” Sorin asked.

“Maybe, but I don’t know what might be in that water. Having a massive fish object to my passage would be a disaster, and besides, we’ve got three people who can’t walk on water to consider.”

“It looks like our options are to wait it out or start walking down the bank and hope we find a place where it’s a bit calmer,” Sorin said. “I don’t see us making an ice bridge across this in the state that it’s in.”

“Maybe it’s shallow enough to wade across,” Odric offered.

Even though the river was churning with mud and silt, Sorin could still see through it well enough to get an idea of its depth. “It’s not. Looks like twenty feet for most of it, thirty in the middle.”

No one bothered to suggest swimming. Briefly, Sorin wondered if he and Nemari working together could calm the water down enough to build the ice bridge, but it was at least a hundred feet across the river. He didn’t see it working. At best, they might ride a chunk of ice downstream while magically pushing it to the far bank. Even that was risky, because there definitely were monsters in the water.

Could I build a temporary bridge with Earth Warder? That’s a lot of distance to go without any supports for the weight. It might just be our best option, but not here.

“Let’s turn north and follow the river back to its head. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and it’ll thin enough for us to attempt a crossing somewhere else,” he decided. “And if not, we’ll figure some other way.”

Nobody had a better idea, so they did as Sorin had suggested. Resuming the same formation, he and Nemari led, though this time Yoru switched sides with Odric under the assumption that monsters were more likely to come at them out of the river than from semi-dry land.

“So, are you going to do it?” Nemari asked softly as she burned away enough fog to keep the edge of the river in sight.

“I’ll feel out Yoru on the subject first. The goal is still to get rid of Samael, but if he’s really blocking the void from advancing, that makes things a bit more complicated. We can’t just kill him and let voidlings devour another floor. I’m also a bit worried, because if they took Floor 25, and we’re preventing them from doing the same to Floor 24…”

“Who’s keeping them from consuming Floor 26?” Nemari finished for him.