“Stormlands.”
“Ah. Bad luck, that.”
“Eh. No worse than usual. I saw Manassa from orbit—a hidden ruin, perfectly preserved right there in the center—so we’re hoping to collect a few surprises of our own.”
“Hmm,” says Orange Mayhew. “Well. Do me one favor, Generaclass="underline" don’t get killed.”
“I’ll take that under advisement. You too, hey?”
But Orange just shrugs. “We’re human beings, sir, Mika here and myself. Living forever, well, it ain’t on our list of options.”
Chapter Twenty
in which darkness proves an ally
On the other side of Tillspar, the highway is less icy but in generally poorer condition. As the road snakes down the eastern slope of the Sawtooth Mountains there are shelves and valleys with highways of their own—opportunities to turn north or south—but the riders follow the Junction Highway east and down. The air gets warmer, thicker, easier to breathe, and Bruno’s ears pop again and again as the pressure upon them slowly increases.
But every kilometer of road seems to be in greater disrepair than the one before it. As the treaders pass through East Black Forest, potholes give way to craters. And as the solar trees thin out to a simple pine forest, the craters become larger and more frequent. Ironically, just as the road is beginning to straighten and level out, it becomes impossible to follow anything like a straight-line course along it. A treader must needs zigzag between the holes at half speed.
“I’m surprised there’s any pavement here at all,” Radmer says when Bruno remarks on it.
“Nobody looks after this road,” Natan agrees. “It don’t go anywhere.”
At that Radmer muses, “It used to go straight to Crossroads, near the triple point where Imbria and Nubia and Viense come together. It was bigger than Timoch, which back then was a sheep-and-cow town. Manassa was the largest city in the hemisphere, a center of commerce easily rivaling Tosen and Bolo on the south coast. Keep in mind, there were a lot more people then.”
“I remember the Iridium Days well,” Bruno tells him, “if not happily. Lune was the rotting corpse of our Queendom; I couldn’t love it. Couldn’t bear it. I fled because my soul had died and my body refused to follow. But I do remember Manassa. The towers of wellglass all strung together with bridges, and every morning a silence field enforcing ten minutes of meditation… When I left they were in a blue period, with every surface glowing in the sun like crystalline bits of sky.”
“Well,” says Radmer, “after the Shattering, Manassa was gone and the Junction Highway led straight into permanent storm, and you had to take the long way around to get to Crossroads. The little towns along the way continued for quite some time afterwards, but one by one they sort of dried up and blew away. This road is two thousand years old, and it’s been, I’ll guess, almost three hundred years since it saw any attention. So like I say, the surprising thing is that there’s any road left.”
Bruno snorts at that. “When I was a boy we were still using Roman roads, older than this one and in far better condition.”
“The Catalan weather was kinder,” Radmer says. “For what it’s worth, there are diamond highways here on Lune that will last until the end of time. This pavement was a high-end temporary, never meant to last so long.”
Ahead of them, finally, the sky above another mountain range has begun to show signs of impending dawn. Even on Lune, the night cannot last forever. And the extra light is welcome, because the riders have finally abandoned the idea of avoiding the rough spots, and are now riding straight through them in a clattering mass. At first the clever six-wheeled suspension of the treaders is adequate to the task, but as the ruts deepen and their shapes become more complex, the wheels begin to exceed their vertical travel limits.
Soon, the heaving bodies of the treaders are pummeling their riders’ legs, and headlight beams are waving up and down so madly that the road might as well be illuminated by strobe lights. Progress slows yet again. They’re still going faster than they would on foot, but that margin is shrinking. Still, Bruno finds he can minimize the beating by crouching in his stirrups—essentially using his legs and back as an extension of the vehicle’s suspension system. And once that principle is established, there’s no reason not to straighten out his back, to stand tall for a better view, to gun the throttle and dance with the bumps.
To his surprise, he’s having a good time, and not feeling guilty about it. Not all the problems of this world are his fault, after all, and this ride is in the service of a noble cause, from which he may very well not return. And that, in truth, may be part of why he’s feeling good; the possibility of death hangs all around him. He nearly died back there in the pass; for Parma and that unlucky rider there was no “nearly” about it.
Bruno has been without useful work for so long that he hasn’t even bothered to count out the span. Thousands of years, certainly. But here he is again, doing something. And his time on this world, on any world, may at last be nearly over—his sins all called to account—so what’s the point in holding back? There’s nothing to keep him from riding to the limits of his ability, and even slightly beyond.
Eventually, he finds himself leading the pack, the wind whipping his hair out behind his helmet as the countryside slowly brightens ahead of him. He doesn’t notice that he’s left his escort behind, or else he notices but manages not to formulate any sort of conscious plan to correct it. But Captain Bordi’s voice calls ahead angrily, “Ako’i, back! Fall back! We’re supposed to be protecting you, damn it! Slow down!”
And when he does so, dropping back among the Dolceti, Bordi glares sternly at Natan and Zuq, telling them, “Stay within arm’s reach of him. Let nothing happen. You boys have taken the berry, taken the vow. You’re expendable; he isn’t.”
“Yes, sir!” the two of them call out ruefully, then cast baleful glares at Bruno.
But when Zuq finally speaks, all he says is, “Where in the hell did you learn to ride like that? You’ve never been on a treader, you said.”
And Bruno’s only answer is a muttered “Beginner’s luck.” Because there’s no point explaining to this boy that he’s ridden a scooter, ridden a car, ridden a skimmer and a broomstick and a horse. Not to mention a grappleship. He’s tried his hand at more different vehicles than Zuq will ever see or imagine; one more doesn’t tax him in the least. And he was never exactly a motor fanatic; he’s simply lived a long time.
Too, there’s the matter of being comfortable in one’s own skin. Bruno knows exactly what his body is and isn’t capable of. If he falls, he knows roughly what injuries he can survive. And he’s far more afraid of embarrassing himself than he is of getting killed, so he will drive this instrument, his body, exactly as he pleases. Indeed, for all their courage and reflexes the Dolceti are indifferent riders, and their pace begins to seem unnaturally slow.
Still, he grits his teeth and perseveres, and hour upon hour the Sawtooth Mountains shrink behind them, while the equally jagged Blood Mountains draw nearer up ahead. They pass a lake, which Natan calls The Lake of the Maidens. They pass a grove of peach pie trees, and another of peach cobblers. They pass five flocks of sheep, and once a shepherd looking down on them from a hilltop, the traditional crook-ended glowstaff in his hands.
Says Zuq, “The shepherds here have magic bottles, in which the milk never sours. Or so the story goes.”
And Bruno answers, “I believe it. Those bottles were common, once.”
“Really? And were there trolls in the hills back then, and mermaids in the sea?”