The three-dimensionality both alarmed and comforted Rashmika. The bridge now appeared to be more than just an assemblage of infinitely thin lines, and although many of its structural parts were still very fine in cross section, now that she was seeing them at an oblique angle the structural components didn’t look quite so delicate. If the bridge could support itself, surely it could support the caravan. She hoped.
“Miss Els?”
She looked around. This time it really was Quaestor Jones. “Yes,” she said, unhappy at his attention.
“We’ll be over it before very long. I promised you that the experience would be spectacular, didn’t I?”
“You did,” she said, “but what you didn’t explain, Quaestor, was why everyone doesn’t take this short cut, if it’s as useful as you claim.”
“Superstition,” he said, “coupled with excessive caution.”
“Excessive caution sounds entirely appropriate to me where this bridge is involved.”
“Are you frightened, Miss Els? You shouldn’t be. This caravan weighs barely fifty thousand tonnes, all told. And by its very nature, the weight is distributed along a great length. It isn’t as if we’re taking a cathedral across the bridge. Now that would be folly.”
“No one would do that.”
“No one sane. And especially not after they saw what happened last time, But that needn’t concern us in the slightest. The bridge will hold the caravan. It has done so in the past. I would have no particular qualms about taking us across it during every expedition away from the Way, but the simple truth is that most of the time it wouldn’t help us. You’ve seen how laborious the approach is. More often than not, using the bridge would cost us more time than it would save. It was only a particular constellation of circumstances that made it otherwise on this occasion.” The quaestor clasped his hands decisively. “Now, to business. I believe I have secured you a position in a clearance gang attached to an Adventist cathedral.”
“The Lady Morwenna?”
“No. A somewhat smaller cathedral, the Catherine of Iron. Everyone has to start somewhere. And why are you in such a hurry to reach the Lady Morwenna? Dean Quaiche has his foibles. The Catherine’s dean is a good man. His safety record is very good, and those who serve under him are well looked after.”
“Thank you, Quaestor,” she said, hoping her disappointment was not too obvious. She had still been hoping he might be able to find her a solid clerical job, something well away from clearance work. “You’re right. Something is better than nothing.”
“The Catherine is amongst the main group of cathedrals, moving towards the Rift from the western side. We will join them when we have completed our crossing of the bridge, shortly before they begin their descent of the Devil’s Staircase. You are privileged, Miss Els: very few people get the chance to cross Absolution Gap twice in one year, let alone within a matter of days.”
“I’ll count myself lucky.”
“Nonetheless, I will repeat what I said before: the work is difficult, dangerous and poorly rewarded.”
“I’ll take what’s available.”
“In which case you will be transferred to the relevant gang as soon as we reach the Way. Keep your nose clean, and I am sure you will do very well.”
“I will certainly bear that in mind.”
He touched a finger to his lips and made to turn away, as if remembering some other errand, then halted. The eyes of his green pet—it had been on his shoulder the whole time-remained locked on to her, blank as gun barrels.
“One other matter, Miss Els,” the quaestor said, looking back at her over his shoulder.
“Yes?”
“The gentleman you were speaking to earlier?” His eyes narrowed as he studied her expression. “Well, I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
“You wouldn’t what?”
“Have anything to do with his sort.” The quaestor stared vaguely into the distance. “As a rule, it’s never wise to circu-late amongst Observers, or any other pilgrims of a similarly committed strain of faith. But in my general experience it is especially unwise to associate with those who are vacillating between faith and denial.”
“Surely, Quaestor, it is up to me who I talk to.”
“Of course, Miss Els, and please don’t take offence. I offer only advice, from the bottomless pit of goodness which is my heart.” He popped a morsel into the mouthpiece of his pet. “Don’t I, Peppermint?”
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” the creature observed.
The caravan surmounted the eastern approach to the bridge. A kilometre from the eastern abutment, the road had veered back into the side of the cliff, ascending a steep defile that—via scraping hairpins, treacherous gradients and brief interludes of tunnel and ledge—brought it to the level of the bridge deck. Behind them, the landscape was an apparently impassable chaos of ice boulders. Ahead, the road deck stretched away like a textbook example of perspective, straight as a rifle barrel, un-fenced on either side, gently cambered towards the middle, gleaming with the soft diamond lustre of starlit ice.
Gathering speed now that it was on a level surface with no immediate worry of obstructions, the caravan sped towards the point where the ground fell away on either side. The road beneath the procession became smoother and wider, no longer furrowed or interrupted by rock-falls or man-deep fissures. And here there were, finally, very few pilgrims to be avoided. Most of them did not take the bridge, and so there was minimal risk of any unfortunates being trundled to death beneath the machines.
Rashmika’s grasp of the scale of the structure underwent several ratchetting revisions. She recalled that, from a distance, the deck of the bridge had formed a shallow arc. From this approach, however, it appeared flat and straight, as if aligned by laser, until the point where it vanished into convergence, far ahead. She was trying to resolve this paradox when she realised—dizzyingly—that at that moment she must only be seeing a small fraction of the distance along the deck. It was like climbing a dome-shaped hilclass="underline" the summit was always tan-talisingly out of reach.
She walked to another viewing point and looked back. The first half-dozen vehicles of this flank of the caravan were now on the bridge proper, and the sheer walls of the cliff were drop-ping back to the rear, offering her the first real opportunity to judge the depth of the Rift.
It fell away with indecent swiftness. The cliff walls were etched and gouged with titanic geological clawmarks, here vertical, there horizontal, elsewhere diagonal or curled and folded into each other in a display of obscene liquidity. The walls sparkled and spangled with blue-grey ice and murkier seams of darker sediment. The ledge that the caravan had traversed, visible now to the left, appeared far too narrow and hesitant to be used as a road, let alone by something weighing fifty thousand tonnes. Beneath the ledge, Rashmika now saw, the cliff often curved in to a worrying degree. She had never exactly felt safe during the traverse, but she had convinced herself that the ground beneath them continued down for more than a few dozen metres.
She did not see the quaestor again during the rest of the crossing. Within an hour she judged that the opposite wall of the Rift looked only slightly further away than the one that was receding behind them. They must be nearing the midpoint of the bridge. Quickly, therefore, but with the minimum of fuss, Rashmika put on her vacuum suit and stole up through the caravan to its roof.
From the top of the vehicle things looked very different from the sanitised, faintly unreal scene she had observed from the pressurised compartment. She now had a panoramic view of the entire Rift, and it was much easier to see the floor, which was a good dozen kilometres below. From this perspective, the Rift floor almost appeared to be creeping forwards as the flat ribbon of the road bed streaked backwards beneath the caravan. This contradiction made her feel immediately dizzy, and she was gripped by an urgent desire to flatten herself on the roof of the machine, spread-eagled so that she could not possibly topple over the edge. But although she bent her knees, lowering her centre of gravity, Rashmika managed to screw up the courage to remain standing.