The Fragile Tower - Book 1 of the No.1 magical fantasy series

The Fragile Tower Chapter 32 - The Garden

 

Her left hand clutched at stone which broke off, but her right hand found something firm. She felt her body swing round and slam into the outside of the wall, the force of it coming so close to making her lose her grip that she expected to fall. But her clenched hand stayed where it was while she scrabbled with her left to find something else to hold.

Her fingers snagged on something and clutched on, a precarious grip on a bump in the stone that didn't feel it could hold up against the wind tearing at her. And the breeze was so cold that her fingers began to burn with it and she knew they would start to go numb soon.

You have to find a foothold, she thought, remembering climbing at Lake Placid leisure centre with Dad. Your arms aren't strong enough to take your weight. But her legs were hanging in air, and when she looked down she saw that the room hung free of its surroundings, with nothing below it. Her lower legs were dangling beneath its floor, and there was nothing between her and a level far below.

Her eyes were drawn down further, to the kingdom thousands of feet below, and she watched it spin sickeningly. She couldn't quite believe she was here, her hands holding her above a drop that she could never survive. It was like so many of her bad dreams, where she woke up in a rush of terror as she began to fall, that there was a feeling that this couldn't be real.

Her left hand moved as the lip of rock she clutched fractured and started to pull away.

No, she thought. That isn't fair!

As she tugged off her straining right arm muscles and found another grip, she realised that the link was no longer working, and that meant that the magic of the tower was failing. It was crumbling away with nothing to hold it up.

How long will these rooms stay up without it? She thought, but it was too much to worry about right now. She had to survive, and right now that seemed almost impossible.

She tried to heave herself up and back into the room, choosing immediate survival over the threat of standing in front of the mage again. But she simply wasn't strong enough. She had never managed to complete a pull-up at the gym, even with a proper bar to hold on to instead of a tenuous and awkward grip on crumbling stone.

Her arms began to burn with the effort just of keeping there, and she knew she had moments in which to do something. She looked down at her feet again and wondered if she could swing one of them upwards and find a toe-hold.

And then, drifting in the air below her feet, she caught sight of the blue-white magic of one of the intention winds. In a rush, she remembered the little threads of light that had seemed to connect the tower as she had looked at it from a distance. Of course there had to be intention winds between the rooms that weren't properly connected with the rest of the tower; winds that hung out in the air and must be terrifying to use.

Though using them would be far less terrifying than what she now realised she was going to do: to let go and try to fall into one.

It wasn't close to her, she saw, as she craned her head as far as she could without losing her grip. She would have to swing herself under the room if she was going to reach it. And it might be further away than it seemed from this angle. She had no real way of telling.

Which symbol had she used to call the travelling wind before? Summoning?

She couldn't remember it. With the pain in her arms and the cold wind knifing through her, she couldn't bring anything to mind except the drop below her.

She squeezed her eyes shut, and willed herself to bring to mind the last page of the book, with its diagram of all thirteen of the symbols laid out in a circle with the symbol of wholeness at the centre. She had pored over it in Afi's hut, and glimpsed it again and again since.