The Kestrel Bridge

They came up the last of the Stair in the blue hour before sunrise, and nobody talked.

After Ash and Tolly there had been nothing to say. They had lain on the stones with the cold coming up through their blankets and listened for hounds until morning.

Now the road climbed through rock and old snow, and the great paving stones of the Survey showed through the scree, each one as big as a table. Barrow walked with his head low under every pack the company owned, and Pip walked at his shoulder with one hand on the pack-saddle, talking to him.

"Nearly at the top," Pip told the mule. "Then it's all downhill, and downhill's easy."

"Downhill's where you fall off," said Bracken, behind him.

"I wasn't talking to you, Sergeant."

"Nor was I. I was talking to the mule."

Wren was behind them with the Waybook in its satchel against her ribs and her sling in her belt. She had not slept, and the air up here was so thin that she had to breathe twice for every step. She kept hearing the sound Nettle had made going over the edge, and she put it away and thought about her feet.

Merritt and Corporal Fenn came last, with torches ready at their belts. Fenn walked as he always walked, square and unhurried, with his bitten arm bound up under his sleeve. Merritt was younger and quicker and had a laugh like a pan dropped on flagstones, though nobody had heard it since the hounds.

The road turned one more time, and they were on the saddle of the Stair between the two peaks, and the Doors of Cloud stood in front of them in the dawn.

The pillars were each as tall as the mill tower at Dallbridge, and every inch of them was carved. A road wound up each one in a spiral, with tiny travelers on it, and carts, and men with measuring rods and chains, and at the top the road ended in a carved flame. Frost had eaten the carving soft, so that the travelers had no faces.

Between the pillars was the Ice. It filled the saddle from rock to rock, a wall a hundred feet high, and it was the blue of a jay's wing, deep and clear, a color Wren had not known ice could be. The dawn behind them came into it and lit it from inside.

A crack ran from the top of the wall to the bottom, black and jagged, a thread at the top and wide enough at the bottom to drive a cart through. Water ran out of it over the road in a thin, bright sheet.

"Wystan's Ice," Alder said. He had pushed back his hood. "Look well at it. No Warden has seen it in two hundred years."

"It's melting," said Dorrit.

"It is breaking. There is a difference."

"Not to my feet there isn't."

Wren walked forward until she was close under the wall, where the cold came off it and stung her face, and she looked into it.

There were people in the ice.

At first she thought they were flaws in the blue. A few yards in, a woman was walking with a basket on her hip and her head down. Behind her, deeper, a man was carrying a small child on his shoulders, and the child had both fists in his hair, and a dog trotted at his heels with its tail up. There was an old man leaning on a stick, and more behind them, dim and blue and farther away, a whole road of them going back into the ice farther than Wren could see.

They were all walking toward her, east, toward Dall. The woman with the basket was so close to the face of the wall that Wren could see the stitching on her sleeve.

"Mother of mercy," said Dorrit, very quietly, at her shoulder.

Pip had come up on her other side. He was staring at the child on the man's shoulders. "They was nearly out," he said. "Look at them. They was nearly through."

"He sealed the road with his people still on it," said Iyene.

"The records say the road was empty," said Alder. "The records say Wystan Fallowmere waited at the summit until the last of the refugees had passed."

"Then the records are wrong, Warden."

Alder said nothing to that. He looked at the woman with the basket, and then he drew his hood up again.

Pip turned around. "Sir. It's the summit."

Iyene was studying the crack. "I can see that, Sandover."

"You said you'd open the King's letter at the summit."

"When we are over it, Sandover." She did not look round. "Sergeant, the crack. How far through?"

Bracken went to the mouth of it and peered in, holding his spear low. His breath smoked. "Can't see the end, Sir. Light at the far side, I think. It bends."

"Wide enough for the mule?"

"If he breathes in."

"Torches," Iyene said. "Sergeant in front with the mule. Then the Warden, the keeper and Mistress Fallowmere. Sandover with me. Corporal, Merritt, rearguard. Nobody stops. Nobody touches the walls."

Inside the crack the light was blue and the air was cold enough to hurt the teeth.

The walls went up sheer and wet to a white thread of sky far overhead. Water ran under their feet, and under the water was another sound, a slow creak and tick, a great weight of ice easing itself. Bracken's torch threw orange light up the walls, and the blue swallowed it.

Wren walked behind Alder with her torch in one hand and the other on the satchel. The people were closer in here. The crack had been cut right through the road of them, and they stood on both sides of the passage a hand's breadth under the surface. As the torchlight passed they rose out of the blue one after another: a boy with a pack, a woman with her mouth open, a man in a long coat with a bundle of iron rods over his shoulder.

The passage bent to the right. Beyond the bend the walls drew back a little and the floor widened, and on the north side a second, narrower rift opened off the main crack, going away into the dark of the ice. The water was deeper here, and Barrow balked at it, and Bracken hauled him on.

Wren looked into the side rift as she passed. It was packed with people, standing in the ice shoulder to shoulder, so close that there was no blue between them, a whole crowd caught at a narrow place in the old road. The rift had split right through them. Some were half in the ice and half out of it, their arms and shoulders standing clear, rimed white. One of them turned its head.

"Captain," Wren said. Her voice came out small. She said it again, louder. "Captain!"

The thing in the rift pulled. The ice cracked around its chest, and it came out of the wall in a shower of blue splinters and fell on its hands and knees in the water. It had been a man. It wore a coat of a cut she had only seen in the Waybook's margins, and its eyes were white as milk.

Behind it, the whole crowd in the rift began to move.

"Go," said Iyene. "Go, go, go."

Ice broke all down the rift with a noise like hail on a slate roof. The dead came out of the walls, pulling free of themselves, leaving hands and scraps of cloth behind in the blue. The first one up came at Alder, and Wren pushed her torch into its face.

It caught with a hissing roar and reeled back into the one behind it, and the fire went from one to the other.

"Keep moving!" Iyene had her sabre out. She took the arm off a dead woman at the elbow, turned, and shoved Pip ahead of her. "Keeper! Move!"

Wren moved. Dorrit had her by the belt and was dragging her. Ahead, Bracken was hauling on Barrow's halter with his good arm, and the mule was screaming and throwing his head. The water came up to Wren's shins, so cold it burned. She looked back.

Fenn and Merritt had stopped at the mouth of the rift. They stood side by side in the water with their torches up, and the dead were coming at them out of the ice in a crowd.

"Corporal!" Iyene shouted.

"Get them through, Captain," Fenn called back. He did not turn his head. He swung his torch in a flat arc and two of the dead went back burning. "We've got this door."

Merritt laughed, the dropped-pan laugh, too loud, ringing off the ice. She thrust her torch into a dead man's chest and kicked him back into the rift.

Iyene stood for a heartbeat in the middle of the passage with her sabre in her hand, looking back at her two riders. Then she turned and ran, pushing Pip ahead of her.

Wren ran too. The passage bent again, and the blue light went white, and there was sky. Bracken and Barrow burst out onto open ground, and the rest came tumbling after them.

Behind them, in the crack, somebody screamed.

Bracken dropped the halter and went back in, and Wren stood at the mouth of the crack with her torch and watched him go, a huge dark shape against the blue, his spear low. The screaming went on. It was Merritt. There was fire in there, and shapes, and the sound of iron on bone.

Then Bracken came back out of the blue light, walking backward, dragging Merritt by the collar of her coat while she kicked and swore. A dead thing had her by the leg. It came along the floor after her with both hands locked around her thigh, and Bracken turned and drove the iron head of his spear down through its neck and into the ice beneath it. It let go. He hauled Merritt clear and dropped her on the stones outside.

"Fenn," Merritt said. She was trying to get up. "Fenn's in there. Fenn's still..."

Wren looked past her into the crack.

Far back in the blue, at the bend, a torch was burning low down, near the floor, with shapes all around it. The dead were packed so close that the light came through them only in pieces. For a moment Wren saw an arm lifted, with a short sword in the hand. Then the shapes closed over it, and the torch went down into the water and out.

The dead in the passage turned together, slowly, and looked toward the daylight.

"Sergeant," said Iyene. "Fire."

Bracken took the torch from Wren's hand and threw it into the crack, and Iyene threw hers after it. Alder had the oil jug out of Barrow's pack, and he flung half of it after them, and the fire went up in the mouth of the crack with a roar and a wall of heat. Through it Wren could see them standing, not coming on, the flames reflected in their white eyes.

"They won't cross that," said Alder. "Not while it burns."

"How long will it burn?" said Dorrit.

"Not long."

Iyene was on one knee beside Merritt. "Can you walk?"

"Yes, Captain." Merritt's face was gray. Her leg below the hip was bare where the thing had torn the cloth, and the skin was a hard dead white in the shape of two hands. "Fenn, Captain. Fenn's in there."

"I know."

"We could..."

"No." Iyene stood up. She looked at the fire in the mouth of the crack, and her face did not change. "Corporal Fenn held his door. Get her on the mule."

They had come out on the western side of the Stair, and while Bracken shifted the packs and Dorrit and Pip lifted Merritt onto Barrow's back, Wren looked out.

The sun had come over the Cloudwall while they were in the ice, and it threw the shadow of the mountains out ahead of them, long and blue, down the western slope. Beyond the shadow lay the West.

It went on forever. That was her first thought, and she was not given to large thoughts. Hills went away below her, fold after fold, gold and brown and dark green, with mist lying white in the valleys and woods between them, and a river a long way off, catching the light. There were no roofs and no smoke. Nothing moved anywhere in all that country except the mist, and far away, so small she could barely see them, a line of birds.

The road went down from the Doors in long loops across the slope below. Five miles on, where the hills began, a dark line ran across the land from north to south, as straight as a ruled line, and the road ran down to it and stopped at its edge.

"The Kestrel," said Iyene, beside her. "Four hundred feet deep. The bridge fell before the Frost."

"How do we get over?"

"We find a way."

Pip had climbed up on a rock for a better view. "There's someone on the road," he said.

Far down the slope, on the lowest loop of the road, where it climbed out of the woods, something was walking. It was white, and very tall. At that distance it was no bigger than a pin, but Wren could see it clearly, because it was the only thing in all that country that moved, and it glittered. Something wound about it caught the sun and flashed with every step.

Behind it a long white trail ran back down the loops of the road and into the trees. It was walking up, toward the Doors, toward them.

"Down," said Iyene. "Everyone off the skyline. Now."

The others dropped behind the rocks, but Wren stood where she was, with her hand on the satchel, and watched the white figure on the road below. It stopped.

It was a mile off, and it could not possibly see her. But it had stopped on the road and lifted its head, and Wren felt it look at her, as she might feel a bee land on the back of her neck before she heard it. The book under her hand was cold through the leather.

Dorrit grabbed her arm and pulled her down behind the rock.

"Are you mad?"

"It saw me."

"From there? Nothing sees that far."

"It saw me, Dor."

Alder had gone the color of old paper. Neither he nor Iyene said what it was, but Wren knew anyway. She had skipped to the rhyme in the lane at Dallbridge a hundred times, jumping out of the rope on the last word.

"We can't go back," said Bracken. "Not through that."

"And we can't go down the road," said Iyene. "Keeper. The book. Now."

Wren pulled the Waybook out of the satchel and opened it on the rock with her cold fingers. She knew the page: the Doors of Cloud drawn small at the top, and the road coming down in its loops, and the gorge, a double line of ink with little hatchings for its cliffs. The Kestrel Bridge was drawn with great care, three arches over the river, every stone of them drawn in.

To the south of the road ran a thin dotted line she had never noticed. It left the road just below the Doors and went straight down a fold in the mountain, a ravine, to the edge of the gorge at the eastern end of the bridge. Beside it, in tiny letters, someone had written steps.

Iyene put her finger on it. "There."

"That goes to the bridge," said Dorrit. "The bridge that isn't there."

"It goes off the road. That's enough for now. Sergeant, lead."

The steps were real, and that was the only good thing about them.

The Survey had cut them into the side of the ravine long ago, narrow ledges going down beside a stream, and frost and rockfall had done their best to erase them. In places they had fallen away altogether. Bracken went first and tested the rock with his spear-butt while the rest waited, pressed against the cliff, with the stream roaring white beside them.

Barrow hated it, and Merritt, tied onto his back, hated it more. She did not complain. She held on to the pack-saddle with both hands and kept her eyes shut and swore under her breath in a long, even, patient stream.

Pip went down with his face to the rock. "It's fine," he kept saying. "It's fine. It's just a ladder. It's just a big ladder with a river at the bottom."

The walls of the ravine shut out the road. They were halfway down when Wren heard it, very faint over the noise of the water, coming down the ravine from above and behind them. It was a long dragging rattle of iron on stone, and a pause, and then the rattle again. She had heard it come down the valley to the bee-yard, the night she told the hives she was leaving. She had not known then whose it was.

"He's left the road," said Bracken.

"He's following the book," said Alder.

"Then walk faster," said Iyene.

They came down the last of the steps at a slithering run, and the ravine opened out, and they were standing on a shelf of flat rock at the edge of the world.

The Kestrel Gorge went down in front of them, sheer, four hundred feet of gray rock streaked with white. At the bottom a river ran, so far down that its roar came up to them soft, and the far rim was a long stone's throw away across the air. At their feet a great block of fitted stone jutted out over the drop and ended in a ragged edge. On the far rim another stump jutted back toward them, and between the two there was nothing.

At the bottom of the gorge lay the rest of the Kestrel Bridge: huge squared blocks tumbled in the river, green with weed, with the water breaking over them.

"Well," said Dorrit. "That's that, then."

"South," said Iyene. "Along the rim. There'll be broken ground. We hide."

The chain sounded again from the ravine, louder now. On the rocks at the foot of the steps, where they had come down a minute before, a thin white bloom was spreading over the stone, and the moss went pale.

Alder turned to face the ravine. He looked up at its walls, where the gray rock stood split and leaning over the steps, and he planted his staff on the shelf.

"Get back from the foot of it," he said. "All of you. Back to the edge."

They went. Alder spoke a Word, and the air went cold.

The cliff above the steps broke. It came away from the mountain in slabs the size of houses and fell into the ravine with a roar that shook the shelf under Wren's feet. A cloud of gray dust came rolling down after it. When the dust thinned, the steps were gone. A slope of broken rock filled the ravine from wall to wall, higher than a barn, and the stream came out from under it brown.

Alder was down on one knee with both hands locked on his staff, his lips blue and his whole body shaking.

"That will not hold him," he said. "It will slow him. Minutes, perhaps."

"Then we use them," said Iyene. "South. Sergeant, get the Warden up."

Wren took the Waybook out of the satchel.

She did it before she had decided anything. She sat down on the stone stump of the bridge with the book on her knees and opened it to the gorge, where the Kestrel Bridge stood in black ink, three arches over the river.

"Wren," said Alder.

She took Tansy's pen out of the satchel, the old steel nib in its bone holder, and the squat black bottle of the good ink. Her fingers were shaking, and she got the stopper out with her teeth.

"Wren. You know what it will ask of you."

"Granna told me." She dipped the pen. "Something I love. The book picks."

"Then think."

"I'm thinking." Her eyes were on the drawing. "Can I do it? Could Granna have done it?"

"Your grandmother wrote a ford back out of a flood."

"Then I can write a bridge."

"Keeper," said Iyene. She was standing over her with her sabre drawn, facing the ravine. "If you can do this, do it. If you can't, get up, and we run."

"Leave her be," said Dorrit. "Don't you rot-well rush her."

Behind the rockfall the chain rattled, and a stone high on the slope shifted and came bouncing down. Wren did not look up. She put the nib to the page beside the drawing of the bridge, where there was a little space of empty paper under the arches, and she wrote.

It had to be short, Tansy had said. You wrote what you wanted as though it already was.

The Kestrel Bridge stands.

The cold went into her hand as the nib touched the paper, into her fingers and her palm and up to her wrist, and stopped there, a hard ache. The ink came off the pen silver. It ran into the letters bright as a fish's belly and lay there shining, and up behind the rockfall, the chain stopped.

And under her, the stone moved.

It began at the bottom of the gorge, with a deep grinding that came up from the river, louder than the water, louder than anything. The rock under her shook. Wren grabbed the book to her chest and looked over the edge.

The river was boiling. The great tumbled blocks of the old bridge were rolling over in it, and they rolled out of the water, streaming, and rose into the air, turning slowly, with weed and water pouring off them. More came up after them, hundreds, grinding against each other with a noise like the biggest mill in the world. Spray went up, and dust, and the whole gorge roared.

The first stones reached the stump under her and fitted themselves to its broken edge, and she felt each one lock home through the seat of her breeches. The arch went out from under her across the air, stone by stone, curving down. Far below, a pier climbed block on block out of the river to meet it, and a second arch went out from the top of it, and then a third. They met the stump on the far rim with a last deep thud that she felt in her teeth.

The Kestrel Bridge stood over the Kestrel Gorge. It had lain three centuries in the river, and the river was in it still. Water ran out of every joint and off the parapets in a hundred streams, and fell away into the air in threads of silver. Weed hung from the stones, and a small fish flapped on the paving at her feet.

On the page, the ink had gone from silver to black.

Pip whispered a word from the Merrow docks that nobody asked him to repeat.

"Cross," said Iyene. "Now. Go."

Bracken went first, leading Barrow with Merritt on his back, and the mule went over the wet stone with his ears flat and his hooves skidding. Pip went next with his eyes shut and one hand on Barrow's tail. Iyene came after with Alder's arm over her shoulders, half carrying him, and Dorrit dragged Wren by the wrist. The drop went by on either side of them, four hundred feet of air and white water, and the parapet was no higher than her knee.

Halfway over, Wren looked back.

The rockfall was turning white. Frost ran down over the broken slabs from the top of the ravine, and the stones at the top of the slope heaved, and slid, and a shape came up out of them.

The Chainman climbed over the rockfall. He was taller than a man on a horse, and white all over, rimed thick with frost from head to foot, and wound in chain. It went around and around him, over his shoulders and chest and arms, long loops of old iron links, and the loose end of it dragged behind him over the stones. He came down the slope of fallen rock without haste, and his face was turned toward her. She looked right at it, and a moment later she could not have said what she had seen.

"Wren!" Dorrit yanked her arm. "Run, you idiot!"

Wren ran. They came off the bridge onto the far rim, where Bracken was waiting, and they turned.

The Chainman reached the shelf of rock at the east end of the bridge, where she had sat to write. He did not hurry. He stepped onto the bridge.

Frost went out from his foot across the wet stone, faster than he walked, white feathers racing over the paving. The water running off the parapets froze as it fell, and hung there in icicles. And the bridge began to make a sound.

It was a sharp, high cracking, like the millpond on the hardest night of January, but a hundred times louder, and it came from inside the stone. The cold was going into the joints, and into the blocks themselves, into every seam and pore where the river had soaked them. The water in the stone was turning to ice.

"Back," said Iyene. "Back from the edge."

The Chainman walked on. A crack ran across the first arch behind him, from parapet to parapet, and white dust spurted from the joints. Another opened ahead of him. Blocks began to split along their length with sharp reports, and chips of stone flew out over the gorge and spun away glittering.

He was on the middle arch when the pier under it burst.

It burst from the inside, where the ice had swelled in it, and the middle arch sagged and broke and went down. The Chainman went with it. Wren saw him fall among the tumbling blocks, a white shape wound in chain, turning slowly in the air, and he made no sound. The other arches followed, cracking apart as they fell, until the whole bridge was going down into the gorge in a long roar of stone and ice.

He struck the river in a burst of white spray, and the stone came down on top of him, and the gorge filled with dust.

When it thinned, the Kestrel Gorge was as it had been. The old stumps jutted out from either rim over nothing, and the river at the bottom was full of broken stone.

"Is he dead?" said Pip. "Tell me he's dead."

Far below, the white water heaved. The Chainman stood up out of the river among the fallen blocks, with the water pouring off his chain, and where it ran round his legs it slowed and whitened. He did not look up. He waded to the east bank and walked into the shadow under the east wall of the gorge, unhurried, as if the fall had been nothing, and the shadow took him.

Iyene got them moving before the dust had settled. They went west into a scrub of juniper and rowan, away from the edge, until the rim of the gorge was hidden by the trees. Then they stopped, because Merritt was sliding off the mule and Alder could not walk any farther.

Wren sat down on a stone and put the Waybook away in its satchel. Her right hand was still cold to the wrist, and when she flexed the fingers they ached as if she had been holding snow.

The book had taken something. You would know, Tansy had said, and then you would have to go and look for it.

She reached for Fallowmere first: the kitchen, and Tansy in her chair, and the hives in their rows. It was all there, and Dorrit, and Hobb, and the Old Reel.

She thought about her mother's fiddle, because it was on her back. Her mother had played it at weddings, as Wren did now. Her mother had worn a green shawl, and sung while she worked, badly and happily, "Low Down in the Barley" over and over.

She closed her eyes and could hear it, the voice singing in the bee-yard. She went to look at the face that went with the voice.

There was nothing there.

She knew there had been a face. She knew her mother had dark hair, because Tansy had told her so. She knew about the gap in her front teeth, because Dorrit had once said so, laughing, and Wren had been angry for some reason and hit her. She knew all of it. But when she went looking for the face itself, the picture that had always been there, as clear as the kitchen, there was only a cold place where it had been.

She sat on the stone and tried again, and again. The voice sang, and the green shawl moved, and above it there was nothing.

Her hands had begun to shake, and she held them together between her knees.

Dorrit came and crouched in front of her. She looked at Wren's face and did not ask anything. She put both her big arms around her and pulled her in, hard, against her shoulder, and held on.

Over Dorrit's shoulder there was nothing to see but juniper and rowan. But under the roar of the river, far down in the Kestrel, the chain had begun again.