The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Thirteen

Quara would later tell the story, and say that the shaking went on for at least ten minutes, but whenever she made the claim when Lina was in the room, Lina would laugh and shake her head. Still she never corrected her sister.

When the shaking began Lina had begun to count. The first time she counted to ten. There was a pause. In that moment Lina was internally berating herself for bringing Quara down under the tower after the earlier explosions, as if she could have predicted the outcome of the nearby mining. The second time the shaking lasted for exactly thirty six seconds, although it did feel like it was much longer, particularly to Quara. Time has a tendency to stretch itself out so that seconds feel like hours when the world feels as though it has come crashing down about you.

The crack that they heard was the great spiral staircase, which was suspended along the interior wall of the tower, breaking free of its supports. If they had been up above, peering through the door, they would have seen it suspended for just a moment by its own rather flexible yet surprisingly sturdy structure before it came crashing down, from top to bottom, so that all that remained was an open space that ran from the map room on the top floor to the level area where the bottom of the staircase had once been. And had they been at the top of ladder they would have seen that it was no longer flat at all, but a jumble of stone stairs and metal supports, smashed into a variety of pieces that would in no way help them reach the large, arch shaped doorway that led to the library and that now opened from the library into a twenty length drop. When the half minute of shaking stopped the rubble was piled mostly up from the tower's base, on the far side, away from the door, rising nearly five lengths from where the first pieces had landed.

They would never see any of that though, at least as it was in that moment after the third blast, which had lasted for a mere twenty two seconds. Lina didn't manage to count when the shaking started up again. The two girls lay in the bed, eyes closed, hands clasped, nearly certain that the entire palace was going to come crashing down upon them. There was a sound, very much like thunder and as the sound came rushing towards them Quara squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her free hand against her forehead. The clatter and crashes around them, of things falling or tipping over in the room itself, seemed like nothing compared to the sounds that came from overhead.

Less than two minutes after the shaking began it stopped and silence descended over the entire City. Its outer walls remained standing. The trajectory of the vein that the miners were following had led them to blast just to the north of, and slightly below, the City itself, missing the City's old mine by a relatively small span of space. The girls stayed in the bed, staring up at the grey ceiling less than a length above their heads, for nearly ten minutes before either of them dared get up.

"Do you think it's over?" Quara was the first to speak and her voice shook, as though the adrenalin that was pumping through her veins caused even her words to tremble.

"For now. They detonated all three sets of explosives, which is how they usually work."

"What do you think that sound was?"

"I'm not entirely sure. But there were only two options of what could fall in the tower above us." Lina pointed and flexed her toes and then flung her legs over the side of the bed as she moved to sit up.

"And they are?" Quara bit her lip and continued to stay in the small safe bed as she waited for her sister's response.

"The staircase or the top level of the tower. I guess you could count the roof itself too, but for that to reach us the floor of the map room would have had to collapse too, which maybe isn't really a stretch if the roof caved in."