The next hours were the tensest of Kit’s life. For a time, the rope did not appear to change. The capstan moaned and clicked, and at last the rope slid by inches, by feet, through the saddle. He could do nothing but watch and yet again rework all the calculations in his mind. He did not see Rasali, but Valo came up after a time to watch the progress. Answering his questions settled Kit’s nerves. The calculations were correct. He had done this before. He was suddenly starved and voraciously ate the food that Valo had brought for him. How long had it been since the broth at The Fish? Hours; most of a day.
The oxen puffed and grunted, and were replaced with new teams. Even lubricated and with leather sleeves, the rope moved reluctantly across the saddle, but it did move. And then the pressure started to ease and the rope paid through the saddle faster. The sun was westering when at last the rope lifted free. By dusk, the rope was sixty feet above the mist, stretched humming-tight between the Farside and Nearside levees and the temporary anchors.
Just before dark, Kit saw the flags go up on the signal tower:
Kit worked on and then seconded projects for five years after he left University. His father knew men and women at the higher levels in the Department of Roads, and his old tutor, Skossa Timt, knew more, so many were high-profile works, but he loved all of them, even his first lead, the little tollgate where the boy, Duar, had died.
All public work—drainage schemes, roadwork, amphitheaters, public squares, sewers, alleys, and mews— was alchemy. It took the invisible patterns that people made as they lived and turned them into real things, stone and brick and wood and space. Kit built things that moved people through the invisible architecture that was his mind, and his notion—and Empire’s notion—of how their lives could be better.
The first major project he led was a replacement for a collapsed bridge in the Four Peaks region north of Atyar. The original had also been a chain suspension bridge but much smaller than the mist bridge, crossing only a hundred yards, its pillars only forty feet high. With maintenance, it had survived heavy use for three centuries, shuddering under the carts that brought quicksilver ore down to the smelting village of Oncalion; but after the heavy snowfalls of what was subsequently called the Wolf Winter, one of the gorge’s walls collapsed, taking the north pillar with it and leaving nowhere stable to rebuild. It was easier to start over, two hundred yards upstream.
The people of Oncalion were not genial. Hard work made for hard men and women. There was a grim, desperate edge to their willingness to labor on the bridge, because their livelihood and their lives were dependent on the mine. They had to be stopped at the end of each day or, dangerous as it was, they would work through moonlit nights.
But it was lonely work, even for Kit, who did not mind solitude; and when the snows of the first winter brought a halt to construction, he returned with some relief to Atyar, to stay with his father. Davell Meinem was old now. His memory was weakening though still strong enough; and he spent his days constructing a vast and fabulous public maze of dry-laid stones brought from all over Empire: his final project, he said to Kit, an accurate prophecy. Skossa Timt had died during the hard cold of the Wolf Winter, but many of his classmates were in the capital. Kit spent evenings with them, attended lectures and concerts, entering for the season into a casual relationship with an architect who specialized in waterworks.
Kit returned to the site at Oncalion as soon as the roads cleared. In his absence, through the snows and melt-off, the people of Oncalion had continued to work, laying course after course of stone in the bitter cold. The work had to be redone.
The second summer, they worked every day and moonlit nights, and Kit worked beside them.
Kit counted the bridge as a failure, although it was coming in barely over budget and only a couple of months late, and no one had died. It was an ugly design; the people of Oncalion had worked hard but joylessly; and there was all his dissatisfaction and guilt about the work that had to be redone.
Perhaps there was something in the tone of his letters to his father, for there came a day in early autumn that Davell Meinem arrived in Oncalion, riding a sturdy mountain horse and accompanied by a journeyman who vanished immediately into one of the village’s three taverns. It was mid-afternoon.
“I want to see this bridge of yours,” Davell said. He looked weary, but straight-backed as ever. “Show it to me.”
“We’ll go tomorrow,” Kit said. “You must be tired.”
“Now,” Davell said.
They walked up from the village together: a cool day, and bright, though the road was overshadowed with pines and fir trees. Basalt outcroppings were stained dark green and black with lichens. His father moved slowly, pausing often for breath. They met a steady trickle of local people leading heavy-laden ponies. The roadbed across the bridge wasn’t quite complete, but ponies could cross carrying ore in baskets. Oncalion was already smelting these first small loads.
At the bridge, Davell asked the same questions he had asked when Kit was a child playing on his work sites. Kit found himself responding as he had so many years before, eager to explain—or excuse—each decision; and always, always the ponies passing.
They walked down to the older site. The pillar had been gutted for stones, so all that was left was rubble; but it gave them a good view of the new bridge: the boxy pillars; the great parabolic curve of the main chains; the thick vertical suspender chains; the slight sprung arch of the bulky roadbed. It looked as clumsy as a suspension bridge ever could. Yet another pony crossed, led by a woman singing something in the local dialect.
“It’s a good bridge,” Davell said at last.
Kit shook his head. His father, who had been known for his sharp tongue on the work sites though never to his son, said, “A bridge is a means to an end. It only matters because of what it does. Leads from
It was a big party, that night. The Farsiders (and, Kit knew, the Nearsiders) drank and danced under the shadow of their bridge-to-be. Torchlight and firelight touched the stones of the tower base and anchorage, giving them mass and meaning, but above their light the tower was a black outline, the absence of stars. More torches outlined the tower’s top, and they seemed no more than gold stars among the colder ones.
Kit walked among them. Everyone smiled or waved and offered to stand him drinks, but no one spoke much with him. It was as if the lifting of the cable had separated him from them. The immense towers had not done this; he had still been one of them, to some degree at least—the instigator of great labors, but still, one of them. But now, for tonight anyway, he was the man who bridged the mist. He had not felt so lonely since his first day here. Even Loreh Tanner’s death had not severed him so completely from their world.
On every project, there was a day like this. It was possible that the distance came from him, he realized suddenly. He came to a place and built something, passing through the lives of people for a few months or years. He was staying longer this time because of the size of the project, but in the end he would leave. He always left, after he had changed lives in incalculable ways. A road through dangerous terrain or a bridge across mist saved lives and increased trade, but it always changed the world, as well. It was his job to make a thing and then leave to make the next one, but it was also his preference, not to remain and see what he had made. What would Nearside and Farside look like in ten years, in fifty? He had never returned to a previous site.
It was harder this time, or perhaps just different. Perhaps
Rasali—what would her life look like?
Valo danced by, his arm around a woman half again as tall as he—Rica Bridger—and Kit caught his arm. “Where is Rasali?” he shouted, then, knowing he could not be heard over the noise of drums and pipes, mouthed:
Rasali was alone, flat on her back on the river side of the levee, looking up. There were no moons, so the Sky Mist hung close overhead, a river of stars that poured north to south like the river itself. Kit knelt a few feet away. “Rasali Ferry of Farside?”
Her teeth flashed in the dark. “Kit Meinem of Atyar.”
He lay beside her. The grass was like bad straw, coarse against his back and neck. Without looking at him,
