“If you survive.”
“Aye. If any of us do.”
Even after watching half a dozen Dolceti roll out ahead of him, driving his treader onto the planks and out over empty space is, for Bruno, an act of faith. He has never trusted the flammable, frangible substance known as wood, and indeed it creaks and bends alarmingly under the weight of his treader, and the many other treaders around him. The planks are knotty, bumpy, warped, not with age but from having been harvested too young. Bruno remembers the sawmill near his father’s bistro, and the sorry planks it cut from local wood. There was a shortage of old-growth forest in Catalonia then, and clearly there was one on Lune now, at least in this mountainous region. And why not, when wood was at once an ornament, a structural material, a fuel, and a source of durable fiber? And electricity!
But Radmer, seeing his look, is quick to offer assurances. “Even in its current state, sir, Tillspar could easily carry ten times this load. There are greater problems to worry about.”
“Er, yes. Perhaps. But not deeper ones.”
The planks are separated by significant gaps—three or four centimeters in places!—through which Bruno can see rock walls converging down into a yawning blackness. From here, for all he can tell, the Divide might reach all the way to the center of the planette. And through these gaps the wind whistles, producing a light, tickly sensation on the soles of his feet, as though he’s not wearing boots at all. He can also feel the bridge swaying beneath him, a few centimeters back and forth, back and forth like the seat of a gigantic swing. Has this thing really stood for two millennia and more?
At first, the mountain slopes gently beneath the planks, but about thirty meters out the ground drops away sharply, and the wind picks up. It’s less bitingly cold than the air of the mountains, though; this is a warm draft welling up from the high-pressure spaces below. The bridge is suspended from a pair of towers, driven into opposite faces of the Divide at a sixty-degree angle. At the first tower is a plaque, bronze in color but utterly untouched by weather or corrosion or time. It might have been cast this morning. In the spotlights shining on it, it reads:
Tillspar
Highest known suspension bridge
Constructed Jun 4–Dec 7, Year 38 of the Fjolmes Dynasty
Chief Engineer Belliam K. Daniel
Consulting Engineer C. E. “Rad” Mursk
This property has been placed on the Global Register of
Historic Places by the order of Her Excellency
Babsie Fjolmes, Second Dynast of Imbria and North Astaroth
Beyond the plaque, the bridge begins to feel even less secure. It rises and falls by several centimeters at a time, and when Bruno looks along the handrail he sees little transverse waves rolling back and forth across it, faster than a man could run. Near the center of the bridge, it’s like walking on a ship, or the deck of a soaring flau. He can feel it rolling and swaying under him; when he looks at his feet or his wheels instead of the dim silhouette of the mountains, he feels mildly but immediately seasick.
To Bruno’s surprise, though, as they approach Radmer’s catapult mechanism at the center of the bridge, the Divide offers a wider view which includes several rows and banks of electric light on the near side, far below and behind them, like the view from an air car or a landing spaceship. He can even—to his much greater surprise—see boats down there, alive with tiny lights, slowly bobbing and swirling through what must be very large rapids.
“What industry is this?” he asks Radmer wonderingly. “Those lights, those boats! To pilot a ferry through such landscape as this must be a thrilling career.”
“And a short one,” Radmer says, “for the rapids are deadly and the loads very heavy.” Heedless of the half dozen Dolecti rolling out ahead of him, he stops and points beneath the railing on the side of the bridge. “Down there is the tin mine, from which Highrock got its start as a metalworking capital. There’s a gold mine further down, which you can just make out from here. Rare earths are mined upstream a ways. As you can see, there’s quite a lot of lithosphere laid bare in these walls. Easy pickings, prelayered by weight.”
Bruno can see no such thing in this darkness, and he says so.
Radmer grunts. “Well, I suppose you develop an eye for it after a while. If we had all night to linger here, you’d see all sorts of things in these walls, which have grown dusty with edible lichen, pale green and rusty orange. In the cities it’s considered a delicacy. Can you see it there in the spotlights? Those baskets are for lowering the harvest girls down along the face, looking for morsels choice enough for human consumption and scraping the rest into hog-slop buckets. They only do that in the daytime, though.”
“I wish I could see more,” Bruno offers politely.
“Yeah, well, in some ways the daytime view is actually worse, because the sunlight never penetrates more than two-thirds of the way down. But it washes out the artificial lighting, with the result that you can’t see anything down there at all.”
“Hmm.” This conversation is not without interest for Bruno, and in the past he has found reason to pause in places much scarier—much more tangibly deadly—than this. He was once trapped inside a Ring Collapsiter fragment, with only ion thrusters to turn his ship and keep it off the walls! But in the interests of moving along, he says nothing more, instead releasing the brake on his treader and rolling forward.
So when Radmer stops again at the center of the bridge, to speak to the two men fussing with the cranks and reels there, Bruno doesn’t know whether to see it as another interesting landmark or an unwelcome pause. Nor is he alone in this worry; the Dolceti—brave souls, to be sure—are aglow with anxiety, no doubt picturing themselves in a battle against gravity itself, a long fall during which their uncanny reflexes would avail them not at all.
“Let’s go, old man,” Zug mutters in a voice barely audible above the wind, whistling through the bridge cables.
“I hope you’re throwing something heavy,” Radmer says to the two men. “At someone truly deserving.”
They look up, and one of them says, “Oh. Hello, General.”
Radmer seems disappointed with that. “Is that all you have for me, Orange? No warm greetings? Aren’t you surprised to see me alive?”
“Should we be?” asks the other man, who must be Mika, the armorer. “All right, then, it’s good to see you. Alive. Can you give us a hand with this cocking latch?”
“Sure.” Radmer puts his kickstand down and dismounts. “What’s the payload? I’d dearly love to drop a greeting card right on the south pole. Just a note to say hello, right? But I’m afraid a show of defiance will tip our hand prematurely. Better to show our weakest face, until the last possible moment.”
“He’ll find us a bit sticky, if you’ll excuse my saying. This here’s eight tons of glue bombs, packed to scatter. That ought to hold the pass for a minute or two.”
Catching hold of a spring-loaded lever, Radmer laughs. “We can hope, yes. Are there oil traps as well, to tilt and slide your enemies into the Divide?”
“Course there are,” says Orange Mayhew.
“And other gifts,” says Mika, “fit for a Glimmer King. Where’re you heading?”