could no longer be seen. When he noticed Rasali waiting for him, he apologized. “I guess the fish are biting.”
Rasali glanced at the river as she stowed his trunk. “Small ones. A couple of feet long only. The fishers like them bigger, five or six feet, though they don’t want them too big, either. But they’re not fish, not what you think fish are. Hand me that.”
He hesitated a moment, then gave her the folio before stepping into the ferry. The boat sidled at his weight but sluggishly: a carthorse instead of a riding mare. His stomach lurched. “Oh!” he said.
“What?” one of the traders asked nervously. Rasali untied the rope holding them to the dock.
Kit swallowed. “I had forgotten. The motion of the boat. It’s not like water at all.”
He did not mention his fear, but there was no need. The others murmured assent. The courier, her dark face sharp-edged as a hawk, growled, “Every time I do this, it surprises me. I dislike it.”
Rasali unshipped a scull and slid the great triangular blade into the mist, which parted reluctantly. “I’ve been on mist more than water, but I remember the way water felt. Quick and jittery. This is better.”
“Only to you, Rasali Ferry,” Uni Mason said.
“Water’s safer,” the man with the piglets said.
Rasali leaned into the oar, and the boat slid away from the dock. “Anything is safe until it kills you.”
The mist absorbed the quiet sounds of shore almost immediately. One of Kit’s first projects had been a stone single-arch bridge over water, far to the north in Eskje province. He had visited before construction started. He was there for five days more than he had expected, caught by a snowstorm that left nearly two feet on the ground. This reminded him of those snowy moonless nights, the air as thick and silencing as a pillow on the ears.
Rasali did not scull so much as steer. It was hard to see far in any direction except up, but perhaps it was true that the mist spoke to her, for she seemed to know where to position the boat for the mist to carry it forward. She followed a small valley until it started to flatten and then mound up. The
“Mist” was a misnomer. It was denser than it seemed, and sometimes the boat seemed not to move through it so much as over its surface. Tonight it seemed like sea-wrack, the dirty foam that strong winds could whip from ocean waves. Kit reached a hand over the boat’s side. The mist piled against his hand, almost dry to the touch, sliding up his forearm with a sensation he could not immediately identify. When he realized it was prickling, he snatched his arm back in and rubbed it on a fold of his coat. The skin burned. Caustic, of course.
The man with the pigs whispered, “Will they come if we talk or make noise?”
“Not to talking, or pigs’ squealing,” Rasali said. “They seem to like low noises. They’ll rise to thunder sometimes.”
One of the traders said, “What are they if they’re not really fish? What do they look like?” Her voice shook. The mist was weighing on them all: all but Rasali.
“If you want to know you’ll have to see one for yourself,” Rasali said. “Or try to get a fisher to tell you. They gut and fillet them over the sides of their boats. No one else sees much but meat wrapped in paper, or rolls of black skin for the rope-makers and tanners.”
“
“They’re broad and flat. But ugly…”
“And Big Ones?” Kit asked.
Her voice was harsh. “
No one spoke for a time. Mist—foam—heaped up at the boat’s prow and parted, eased to the sides with an almost inaudible hissing. Once the mist off the port side heaved, and something dark broke the surface for a moment, followed by other dark somethings; but the somethings were not close enough to see well. One of the merchants cried without a sound or movement, the tears on his face the only evidence.
The Farside levee showed at last, a black mass that didn’t get any closer for what felt like hours. Fighting his fear, Kit leaned over the side, keeping his face away from the surface. “It can’t really be bottomless,” he said, half to himself. “What’s under it?”
“You wouldn’t hit the bottom, anyway,” Rasali said.
The
People on the dock moved as they approached. Just loudly enough to carry, a soft baritone voice called, “Rasali?”
She called back, “Ten this time, Pen.”
“Anyone need carriers?” A different voice. Several passengers responded.
Rasali shipped the skull while the ferry was still some feet away from the dock, and allowed it to ease forward under its own momentum. She stepped to the prow and picked up a coiled rope there, tossing one end across the narrowing distance. Someone on the dock caught it and pulled the boat in, and in a very few moments, the ferry was snug against the dock.
Disembarking and payment was quicker as embarkation had been. Kit was the last off, and after a brief discussion he hired a carrier to haul his trunk to an inn in town. He turned to say farewell to Rasali. She and the man—Pen, Kit remembered—were untying the boat. “You’re not going back already,” he said.
“Oh, no.” Her voice sounded loose, content, relaxed. Kit hadn’t known how tense she was. “We’re just going to tow the boat over to where the Twins will pull it out.” She waved with one hand to the boat launch. A pair of white oxen gleamed in the night, at their heads a woman hardly darker.
“Wait,” Kit said to Uni Mason, and handed her his folio. “Please tell the innkeeper I’ll be there soon.” He turned back to Rasali. “May I help?”
In the darkness, he felt more than saw her smile. “Always.”
The Red Lurcher, commonly called The Bitch, was a small but noisy inn five minutes’ walk from the mist, ten (he was told) from the building site. His room was larger than at The Fish, with an uncomfortable bed and a window seat crammed with quires of ancient, handwritten music. Jenner stayed here, Kit knew, but when he asked the owner (Widson Innkeep, a heavyset man with red hair turning silver), he had not seen him. “You’ll be the new one, the architect,” Widson said.
“Yes,” Kit said. “Please ask him to see me when he gets in.”
Widson wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t know, he’s been out late most days recently, since—” He cut himself off, looking guilty.
“—since the signals informed him that I was here,” Kit said. “I understand the impulse.”
The innkeeper seemed to consider something for a moment, then said slowly, “We like Jenner here.”
“Then we’ll try to keep him,” Kit said.
When the child Kit had recovered from the illness, he did not return to the creche—which he would have been leaving in a year in any case—but went straight to his father. Davell Meinem was a slow-talking humorous man who nevertheless had a sharp tongue on the sites of his many projects. He brought Kit with him to his work places: best for the boy to get some experience in the trade.
Kit loved everything about his father’s projects: the precisely drawn plans, the orderly progression of construction, the lines and curves of brick and iron and stone rising under the endlessly random sky.
For the first year or two, Kit imitated his father and the workers, building structures of tiny beams and bricks made by the woman set to mind him, a tiler who had lost a hand some years back. Davell collected the boy at the end of the day. “I’m here to inspect the construction,” he said, and Kit demonstrated his bridge or tower, or the materials he had laid out in neat lines and stacks. Davell would discuss Kit’s work with great seriousness, until it grew too dark to see and they went back to the inn or rented rooms that passed for home near the sites.
Davell spent nights buried in the endless paperwork of his projects, and Kit found this interesting, as well. The pattern that went into building something big was not just the architectural plans, or the construction itself; it was also labor schedules and documentation and materials deliveries. He started to draw his own plans, but he also made up endless correspondences with imaginary providers.
After a while, Kit noticed that a large part of the pattern that made a bridge or a tower was built entirely out of people.
