Rich Horton - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

The eyebars that would make up the chain were each ten feet long and required considerable manhandling to be linked with the bolts, each larger than a man’s forearm. The links became a chain, even more cumbersome. Winches pulled the chain’s end up to the saddles, and out onto the catwalk.

After this, the work became even more difficult and painstaking. Feinlin and her people moved individual eyebars and pins out onto the catwalks and joined them in situ; a backbreaking, dangerous task that had to be exactly synchronized with the work on the other side of the river so that the cable would not be stressed.

Most nights Kit worked into the darkness. When the moons were bright enough, he, the high-workers, and the bridgewrights would work in shifts, day and night.

He crossed the mist six more times that fall. The high-workers disliked having people on the catwalks, but he was the architect, after all, so he crossed once that way, struggling with vertigo. After that, he preferred the ferries. When he crossed once with Valo, they talked exclusively about the bridge—Valo had decided to stay until the bridge was complete and the ferries finished; but his mind was already full of the capital—but the other times, when it was Rasali, they were silent, listening to the hiss of the V-shaped scull moving in the mist. His fear of the mist decreased with each day they came closer to the bridge’s completion, though he couldn’t say why this was.

When Kit did not work through the night and Rasali was on the same side of the mist, they spent their nights together, sometimes making love, at other times content to share drinks or play ninepins in The Deer’s Heart’s garden, at which Kit’s proficiency surprised everyone, including himself. He and Rasali did not talk again about what she would do when the bridge was complete—or what he would do, for that matter.

The hard work was worth it. It was still warm enough that the iron didn’t freeze the high-workers’ hands on the day they placed the final bolt. The first chain was complete.

Though work had slowed through the winter, the second and third chains were in place by spring, and the others were competed by the end of the summer.

With the heavy work done, some of the workers returned to their home-places. More than half had taken the name Bridger or something similar. “We have changed things,” Kit said to Jenner on one of his Nearside visits, just before Jenner left for his new work. “No,” Jenner said: “ You have changed things.” Kit did not respond, but held this close, and thought of it sometimes with mingled pride and fear.

The workers who remained were high-men and -women, people who did not mind crawling about on the suspension chains securing the support ropes. For the last two years, the rope makers for two hundred miles up and downstream from the bridge had been twisting, cutting, and looping and reweaving the ends of the fish-skin cables that would support the road deck, each crate marked with the suspender’s position in the bridge. The cartons stood in carefully sorted, labeled towers in the field that had once been full of sheep.

Kit’s work was now all paperwork, it seemed—so many invoices, so many reports for the capital—but he managed every day to watch the high-workers, their efficient motions. Sometimes he climbed to the tops of the pillars and looked down into the mist, and saw Rasali’s or Valo’s ferry, an elegant narrow shape half-hidden in tendrils of blazing white mist or pale gray fog.

Kit lost one more worker, Tommer Bullkeeper, who climbed out onto the catwalk for a drunken bet and fell, with a maniacal cry that changed into unbalanced laughter as he vanished into the mist. His wife wept in mixed anger and grief, and the townspeople wore ash-color, and the bridge continued. Rasali held Kit when he cried in his room at The Red Lurcher. “Never mind,” she said. “Tommer was a good person: a drunk, but good to his sons and his wife, careful with animals. People have always died. The bridge doesn’t change that.”

The towns changed shape as Kit watched. Commercial envoys from every direction gathered; many stayed in inns and homes, but some built small houses, shops, and warehouses. Many used the ferries, and it became common for these businessmen and women to tip Rasali or Valo lavishly—”in hopes I never ride with you again,” they would say. Valo laughed and spent this money buying beer for his friends; the letter had come from University that he could begin his studies with the winter term, and he had many farewells to make. Rasali told no one, not even Kit, what she planned to do with hers.

Beginning in the spring of the project’s fifth year, they attached the road deck. Wood planks wide enough for oxen two abreast were nailed together across the iron struts that gave stability. The bridge was made of several hundred sections, constructed on the worksites and then hauled out by workers. Each segment had farther to go before being placed and secured. The two towns celebrated all night the first time a Nearsider shouted from her side of the bridge, and was saluted by Farsider cheers. In the lengthening evenings, it became a pastime for people to walk onto the bridge and lie belly-down at its end, watching the mist so far below them. Sometimes dark shapes moved within it, but no one saw anything big enough to be a Big One. A few heedless locals dropped heavy stones from above to watch the mist twist away, opening holes into its depths; but their neighbors stopped them: “It’s not respectful,” one said; and, “Do you want to piss them off?” said another.

Kit asked her, but Rasali never walked out with him. “I see enough from the river,” she said.

Kit was in Nearside, in his room in The Fish. He had lived in this room for five years, and it looked it: plans and timetables pinned to the walls. The chair by the fire was heaped with clothes, books, a length of red silk he had seen at a fair and could not resist; it had been years since he’d sat there. The plans in his folio and on the oversized table had been replaced with waybills and receipts for materials, payrolls, copies of correspondence between Kit and his sponsors in the government. The window was open, and Kit sat on the cupboard bed, watching a bee feel its way through the sun-filled air. He’d left half a pear on the table, and he was waiting to see if the bee would find it, and thinking about the little hexagonal cells of a beehive, whether they were stronger than squares were, and how he might test this.

Feet ran along the corridor. His door flew open. Rasali stood there blinking in the light, which was so golden that Kit didn’t at first notice how pale she was, or the tears on her face. “What—” he said, as he swung off his bed. He came toward her.

“Valo,” she said. “The Pearlfinder. ”

He held her. The bee left, then the sun, and still he held her as she rocked silently on the bed. Only when the square of sky in the window faded to purple, and the little moon’s crescent eased across it, did she speak. “Ah,” she said, a sigh like a gasp. “I am so tired. “ She fell asleep, as quickly as that, with tears still wet on her face. Kit slipped from the room.

The taproom was crowded, filled with ash-gray clothes, with soft voices and occasional sobs. Kit wondered for a moment if everyone had a set of mourning clothes always at hand, and what this meant about them.

Brana Keep saw Kit in the doorway, and came from behind the bar to speak with him. “How is she?” she said.

“Not good. I think she’s asleep right now,” Kit said. “Can you give me some food for her, something to drink?”

Brana nodded, spoke to her daughter Lixa as she passed into the back, then returned. “How are you doing, Kit? You saw a fair amount of Valo yourself.”