To which Radmer answers, “If he’s not, Your Honor, then you should spend the money while you can. The Glimmer King has scouting patrols in this pass already. I fear it won’t be long before they’re coming for Tillspar in force.”
Her smile is vaguely condescending. “The bridge has stood since the Shattering itself, General. It was built, I understand, by the very architect who crushed this world from the husk of a lifeless moon. Chairmain Kung of the Gower Monopoly once struck it with a blitterstaff, if I recall the story correctly, and the bridge rang like a gong and stood firm. And there’ve been lesser attempts by lesser villains, which accomplished nothing at all.”
“Kung struck only one blow,” Radmer says, “before I pitched him over the railing. Two minutes later you could still hear him screaming, all the way down. We never did find the staff. If we hadn’t been there to stop him, he’d’ve fared a lot better.”
She arches an eyebrow. “Your point being?”
“I won’t be here to help, Your Honor. Not this time.”
“We’ve got a full garrison,” she reminded him, sounding annoyed.
“So did every outpost in Nubia. Against this enemy, a few hundred men are no defense at all.”
She leans close, dropping her voice to a murmur. “What do you want me to say, Rad? We’ll hold it for as long as we can, and if we fail we’ll go down fighting. Is that what you want to hear? This is Highrock. It’s our bridge, and anyway we’ve got a few surprises up our skirt.”
“I expect you do,” he concedes.
The two of them look at each other for a long moment, until Radmer finally asks, “Where are Orange and Mika?”
“On the bridge, if you can believe it. Cocking the VLC for a shot down the pass.”
“Well, bless their little hearts.”
“Yes.”
Another long moment passes.
“You’re not staying,” she says. “Not even for a few hours.”
“No. I’m sorry, but we’ve had enough delays already. We need to be through the Stormlands before the midmorning thermals kick in.”
“Stormlands.” She clucks, shaking her head slightly. “You sure know how to pick your battles, General.”
“Aye,” he agrees sadly. “It’s always been my greatest talent.”
Soon the riders are rolling on, right through this gingerbread town, leaving the gate and the guards and the mayor behind.
“So, Radmer,” Zuq wants to know, “what color are her nipples?”
The buildings of Highrock have straight, high, rectangular walls of gray mortar and smooth yellow river rock, ranging from fist sized to head sized. The roofs are of wooden shingle, sprouting key-shaped chimneys of tin tied down with steel cables. The whole place smells of burning wood, and Bruno can see wagonloads of cut-up logs in alleys and behind the houses, awaiting their own turn in the furnace.
Apparently the weather is highly thought of here, for every roof seems to sport a vane to indicate the wind’s direction, and a cup anemometer to gauge its speed. There are black-painted water tanks on the roofs as well, nestled close to the chimneys to keep from freezing. At first glance, the bridge doesn’t seem like anything special. The far side of the Divide, perhaps a kilometer distant, gives no real clue as to just how far down the bottom is. But as they draw nearer, the walls of the chasm go down, and down, and down some more.
On the bridge itself, Bruno quickly realizes that this “Divide” is no mere riverbed. Its sides—separated by a thousand meters of blackness—drop away almost vertically, and although the edges are jagged as lightning, the overall course of the thing is almost perfectly east-west. In total darkness it might’ve baffled Bruno’s senses completely, but during the long night, Murdered Earth has overshot the sun and can be seen on the eastern horizon, right through the crack of the Divide itself. And in the other direction, through haze and darkness, Bruno fancies he can see all the way down to the Imbrian Sea, now hundreds of kilometers west of him, and ten kilometers down. Indeed, what else could that be? That muzzy juncture between ground and sky?
Where the mountains fall away to the east, below the rising Earth, the crack runs together as a pair of converging lines before seeming, at some impossibly remote point, to take a sudden and decisive turn to the northwest. Below, there is only darkness and the howl of wind. And this is telling indeed, if Bruno can see the horizon through the gap in the rock!
“This is a crevasse,” he diagnoses for Radmer’s assessment. “A single seismic crack down the spine of the entire mountain range. Very deep.”
“Very,” Radmer agrees. “Beneath Tillspar, the river Arkis sits only two hundred meters above sea level. Its source, a wellspring eighteen kilometers upstream, is only two hundred meters higher than that.”
Although Bruno has seen some large artifacts in his day, he cannot help being impressed. A crack in the earth ten kilometers deep! The Shattering must have been a violent event indeed, and a sudden one. No wonder the world had fallen again into ruin!
The bridge itself is an interesting bit of retrofit; the road runs right to its edge and then turns to a bed of wooden planks that look as though they’ve been freshly laid. And these planks are secured at the center and edges by simple iron bolts, whose patina of recent oxidation is evident even by the weak electric lights strung up along the bridge. They’ve been in place for weeks, not millennia, and from the look of it they won’t last out the century.
As for what the planks are bolted into, why, that’s another story altogether. The superreflector gleaming of impervium and Bunkerlite is unmistakable, and yet these substances are encased in something translucent and ordinary: a glass, a clear resin. The suspension cables are thicker than Bruno himself, and they fire into the rock face at a twenty-degree angle, where they’re held fast by a larger-than-life system of plates and bolts and old-fashioned threaded nuts.
“Nice design,” he notes.
“Thank you,” Radmer acknowledges, “but I was only peripherally involved. The bulk of the engineering was handled by Bell Daniel.”
“Of Lunacorp Construction? My goodness, I remember him.”
“He lived a couple hundred years past the Shattering. Died of electrocution, if you can believe it, trying to wire up some old apartment building. Anyway, yes, there were a lot of Olders still around back then, looking forward to a long future, and they financed Tillspar, which was consequently built to last. These cable stays are longer than the bridge itself, anchored a full kilometer into the toughest bedrock in the whole region. The structural members are layered composites of programmable and traditional materials, and the programmable ones have every security feature and safety lockout we could scrape together at the time. I don’t want to use the word ‘tamper-proof,’ because nothing ever is. But it’s certainly tamper-resistant. I’d have a hard time changing the thing myself; Bell scrambled all the passwords at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.”
“And it was from here that you launched yourself to Varna? That’s your Very Large Catapult, there?”
Bruno points at a system of large reels and pulleys mounted behind one of the railings, near the center of the bridge.
“Yep, that’s it. Thirty turns on a block-and-tackle, plus a counterweight thirty times the mass of the capsule. If you allow ten kilometers of throw, the pull of gravity really adds up! It’s not a ride I’d recommend—not so gentle as the explosion that kicked us off Varna—but it’s tolerable.”
“Gentle? I don’t recall anything gentle about that.”
“Well it’s all relative, isn’t it? It depends how badly you want to go. The only really difficult part was hacking the bridge to harvest a sufficient length of impervium wire. It made such a mess that we finally had to replace the whole road surface, as you can see. It’s a rush job; someday I’ll come back and fix the thing properly.”