Freya said, “Talk them into what?”
Inga smiled. “Letting you join the fair, along with a new exhibit: either a tower of ice that weighs so much it might as well be infinite, supported by a sheet of ice a fraction of its height… or a tower of ice that shatters that support, and shows us the way to make geysers. But whichever it is, it will be in aid of something marvelous: a bridge to Tvíburi, or the pick to end all picks, rising up from the ice field into the sky.”
Freya watched from the ground as Inga and Naja fitted the final level to the scaffolding. She hated standing by when other people were working, but her new friends had spent half their lives performing similar tasks, and she’d already slowed down the construction too much by getting in the way and trying to learn everything at once.
“Done!” Naja called down, before jumping off the edge of the platform. Inga took the ladder, and she had advised Freya to do the same. “Falling eight or ten strides is painless—and mildly entertaining the first few times—but your older self will thank you for protecting your knees from unnecessary jolts.”
Inga and Freya rolled the last piece of the column over the ice field to the edge of the structure, and maneuvered it into the sling. Freya’s hands were still tender from the dozens of small cuts she’d acquired while learning to carve a roughly hewn slab into a cylinder like this. But the version in front of them now had been rolled back and forth over five different grades of abrasive sand, to the point where it was almost smooth. Inga had promised that if they went ahead and took the exhibition to the public, she’d show Freya how to give the cylinders a near-optical polish, so they gleamed in the sunlight.
While the two of them hauled on the pulley rope together, Naja climbed the ladder beside the ascending cylinder, steadying it and making sure it didn’t slip or start swinging. They were lucky: there was almost no wind today.
When the cylinder reached the top platform, Naja adjusted the ropes connected to the sling so that Freya and Inga’s next few pulls would make the thing vertical. Then they clamped the rope and rested for a moment, before taking the ladder to join Naja.
“This is it!” Inga marveled. “Once we add this piece, the tower will be as good as infinite.”
Freya remained silent; she didn’t know what she was hoping for any more. The work had proved so exhausting that by the time they were raising the third piece, she’d been desperately willing the surrogate crust to shatter, just to spare her any more labor. And if it had happened then, or with the addition of the fourth, the result might have been convincing enough to persuade her that Gro’s project was the only one to back.
But if it happened now? Nobody knew exactly how thick the real crust was, or what other errors their imperfect model might contain. If their mock-infinite tower broke its supporting base, that would be enough to put an end to any hope of proceeding with the bridge, but Freya would be dead long before it was certain that geysers could be summoned this way.
The three of them worked together, unhooking the cylinder from the vertical rope that had raised it and attaching it to the horizontal loop that would carry it for the last stage of its journey. Freya imagined a crowd of spectators below, some of them still hoping to win prizes for guessing the correct breaking point, or wagering on the crust’s invincibility.
“Won’t word of the result spread between the villages?” she’d asked Inga.
“It will, but no one will believe what they haven’t seen with their own eyes. People will bet on their own instincts about the forces at play here, not someone else’s claims that contradict those feelings.”
Freya tugged on the rope, while Inga and Naja walked beside the cylinder toward the hole in the center of the platform, from which a stubby portion of the existing tower could be seen protruding. When the new piece was hanging right over its four predecessors—each one a little narrower than the last—Freya joined them. If something went wrong in this final stage, the more hands there were to steady the tower, the better their chances would be to keep it from toppling.
“Ready?” Inga asked, kneeling down at one side of the cylinder while Naja kneeled at the opposite point.
“Yes,” Freya replied.
Inga spoke a brief, guttural word in the fair’s dialect that had no precise translation, though its present usage was transparent: as she finished uttering it, she and Naja simultaneously sliced through two cords at the bottom of the sling, which were holding its two halves together. The tensed, elastic structure snapped apart and the cylinder began to descend.
The final piece of the column had barely a thumb’s breadth to fall. It landed squarely in place with a thud, and with the sling clear of the impact. Freya waited, arms spread, ready to respond as Inga and Naja climbed to their feet. But nothing had skewed the release, and as far as she could tell the cylinder wasn’t shaking or swaying at all. Let alone falling.
They’d placed the thin sheet of ice that was supporting the whole structure on top of two square blocks half a stride high, and two strides apart. If that crust cracked and the base of the tower dropped to the ground, the effect would not be subtle. But so far, it was holding.
The three of them stood motionless for a while, their eyes fixed on the top of the tower. Then Inga said, “Let’s go down and see what’s happening.”
As they walked across the platform, Freya kept looking back, expecting the cylinder to plummet at any moment. She was last onto the ladder, and she gripped the side rails tightly, prepared for the scaffolding to lurch wildly if the tower collapsed, with the five pieces tumbling as they fell, crashing into the beams around them.
Back on the ground, as they approached the sheet of ice, Freya would have sworn she could discern a subtle change in its shape. But when it came to her turn to squat down and inspect the graduated rods beside it, there was no sign that it had sagged, buckled or bent. No cracks or flaws had appeared. The strain of holding up the completed tower was not enough to deform it to any measurable degree, let alone tear it apart.
Freya remained as she was, too unsteady to rise, but Inga reached down and clasped her shoulder. She said, “It’s starting to look as if my great-grandchildren might just get a chance to visit Tvíburi.”
4
Gro finished her inspection of the double doors at the top of the stairs. “One down, twenty-six to go,” she said.
Freya glanced over her shoulder at the next platform they’d be visiting. The slanted legs of the would-be tripod had come a long way toward their meeting point, but though the straight-line distance between the tops of the columns was barely fifty strides now, the trip down to the ground then up again would take at least half a day. “I won’t be happy until the ice has grown around the frames, and we can check that the gap can be made airtight,” she replied. All they’d shown so far was that the doors themselves, and the box between them, wouldn’t leak.
Gro gathered up her tools into her pack, and motioned for Freya to go before her. There was something dreamlike about stepping through a door whose frame was surrounded by thin air, into a dark wooden box, and emerging through a second unwalled doorway to confront a flight of stairs so long that its lower reaches were impossible to perceive, shrunken by perspective into a crack in the side of the tripod’s leg.
Freya hooked her safety ropes onto the stair rail and waited for Gro to join her. There was plenty of room for two people to descend side-by-side, and Freya hated having someone behind her, an invisible presence constantly threatening to stumble and send her sprawling.