Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 (53 page)

Valo said, “You're a lot farther along since I was here last. How tall now?”

Kit got this question a lot. “A hundred and five feet, more or less. A little over a quarter finished.”

Valo smiled, shook his head. “Hard to believe it'll stay up.”

“There's a tower in Atyar, black basalt and iron, five hundred feet. Five times this tall.”

“It just looks so delicate,” Valo said. “I know what you said, that most of the stress on the pillar is compression, but it still looks as though it'll snap in half.”

“After a while you'll have more experience with suspension bridges and it will seem less . . . unsettling. Would you like to see the progress?”

Valo's eyes brightened. “May I? I don't want to get in the way.”

“I haven't been up yet today and they'll be finishing up soon. Scaffold or stairwell?”

Valo looked at the scaffolding against one face of the pillar, the ladders tied into place within it, and shivered. “I can't believe people go up that. Stairs.”

Kit followed Valo. The steep internal stair was three feet wide and endlessly turning, five steps up and then a platform, turn to the left and then five more steps and turn. Eventually the stairs would be lit by lanterns set into alcoves at every third turning, but today Kit and Valo felt their way up, fingers trailing along the cold damp stone, a small lantern in Valo's hand. The stairwell smelled of water and earth and the thin smell of the burning lamp oil. Some of the workers hated the stairs and preferred the ladders outside, but Kit liked it here. For these few moments he was part of his bridge, a strong bone buried deep in flesh he had created.

They came out at the top and paused a moment to look around the unfinished course, and at the black silhouette of the crane against the dulling sky. The last few workers were breaking down a shear-leg that had been used to move blocks. A lantern hung from a pole jammed into one of the holes the laborers would fill with rods and molten iron. Kit nodded to them as Valo went to an edge to look down.

“It is wonderful,” Valo said, smiling. “Being high like this—you can look right down into people's kitchen yards. Look, Teli Carpenter has a pig smoking.”

“You don't need to see it to know that,” Kit said dryly. “I've been smelling it for two days.”

Valo snorted. “Can you see as far as White Peak yet?”

“On a clear day, yes,” Kit said. “I was up here two—”

A heavy sliding sound and a scream. Kit whirled to see one of the workers on her back, one of the shear-leg's timbers across her chest. Loreh Tanner, a local. Kit ran the few steps to Loreh and dropped beside her. One man, the man who had been working with her, said, “It slipped—oh, Loreh, please hang on,” but Kit could see already that it was futile. She was pinned against the pillar, chest flattened, one shoulder visibly dislocated, unconscious, breathing labored. Foam bloomed from her lips, black in the lantern's bad light.

Kit took her cold hand. “It's all right, Loreh. It's all right.” It was a lie and in any case she could not hear him, but the others would. “Get Hall,” one of the workers said and Kit nodded: Hall was a surgeon. And then, “And get Obal, someone. Get her husband.” Footsteps ran down the stairs and were lost into the hiss of rain just beginning and someone's crying and Loreh's wet breathing.

Kit glanced up. His chest heaving, Valo stood staring. Kit said to him, “Help find Hall,” and when the boy did not move he repeated it, his voice sharper. Valo said nothing, did not stop looking at Loreh until he spun and ran down the stairs. Kit heard shouting far below as the first messenger ran toward the town.

Loreh took a last shuddering breath and died.

Kit looked at the others around Loreh's body. The man holding Loreh's other hand pressed his face against it crying helplessly. The two other workers left here knelt at her feet, a man and a woman, huddled close though they were not a couple. “Tell me,” he said.

“I tried to stop it from hitting her,” the woman said. She cradled one arm: obviously broken though she did not seem to have noticed. “But it just kept falling.”

“She was tired. She must have gotten careless,” the man said, and the broken-armed woman said, “I don't want to think about that sound.”

Words fell from them like blood from a cut. This was what they needed right now, to speak and to be heard. So he listened, and when the others came, Loreh's husband Obal, white-lipped and angry-eyed, the surgeon Hall, and six other workers, Kit listened to them as well, and gradually moved them down through the pillar and back toward the warm lights and comfort of Farside.

Kit had lost people before and it was always like this. There would be tears tonight, and anger at him and at his bridge, anger at fate for permitting this. There would be sadness and nightmares. And there would be lovemaking and the holding close of children and friends and dogs—affirmations of life in the cold wet night.

 

* * *

 

His tutor at University had said, during one of her frequent digressions from materials and the principles of architecture, “Things will go wrong.”

It was winter, but in spite of the falling snow they walked slowly to the coffee house, as Skossa looked for purchase for her cane. She continued, “On long projects, you'll forget that you're not one of them. But if there's an accident? You're slapped in the face with it. Whatever you're feeling? Doesn't matter. Guilty, grieving, alone, worried about the schedule. None of it. What matters is
their
feelings. So listen to them. Respect what they're going through.”

She paused then, tapped her cane against the ground thoughtfully. “No, I lie. It does matter but you will have to find your own strength, your own resources elsewhere.”

“Friends?” Kit said doubtfully. He knew already that he wanted a career like his father's. He would not be in the same place for more than a few years at a time.

“Yes, friends.” Snow collected on Skossa's hair but she didn't seem to notice. “Kit, I worry about you. You're good with people, I've seen it. You like them. But there's a limit for you.” He opened his mouth to protest but she held up her hand to silence him. “I know. You do care. But inside the framework of a project. Right now it's your studies. Later it'll be roads and bridges. But people around you—their lives go on outside the framework. They're not just tools to your hand, even likable tools. Your life should go on, too. You should have more than roads to live for. Because if something does go wrong, you'll need what
you're
feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.”

 

* * *

 

Kit walked through Farside toward The Bitch. Most people were home or in one of the taverns by now, a village turned inward; but he heard footsteps running behind him. He turned quickly. It was not unknown for people reeling from a loss to strike at whatever they blamed, and sometimes it was a person.

It was Valo. Though his fists were balled, Kit could tell immediately that he was angry but that he was not looking for a fight. For a moment Kit wished he didn't need to listen, that he could just go back to his rooms and sleep for a thousand hours, but there was a stricken look in Valo's eyes: Valo, who looked so much like Rasali. He hoped that Rasali and Loreh hadn't been close.

Kit said gently, “Why aren't you inside? It's cold.” As he said it, he realized suddenly that it
was
cold. The rain had settled into a steady cold flood.

“I will. I was, I mean, but I came out because I thought maybe I could find you, because—” The boy was shivering.

“Where are your friends? Let's get you inside. It'll be better there.”

“No,” he said. “I have to know first. It's like this always? If I do this, build things, it'll happen for me? Someone will die?”

“It might. It probably will, eventually.”

Valo said an unexpected thing: “I see. It's just that she had just gotten married.”

The blood on Loreh's lips, the wet sound of her crushed chest as she took her last breaths— “Yes,” Kit said. “She had.”

“I just . . . I had to know if I need to ready for this. I guess I'll find out.”

“I hope you don't have to.” The rain was getting heavier. “You should be inside, Valo.”

Valo nodded. “Rasali—I wish she were here. She could help maybe. You should go in too. You're shivering.”

Kit watched him go. Valo had not invited him to accompany him back into the light and the warmth. He knew better than to expect that, but for a moment he had permitted himself to hope otherwise.

Kit slipped through the stables and through the back door at The Bitch. Wisdon Innkeep, hands full of mugs for the taproom, saw him and nodded, face unsmiling but not hostile. That was good, Kit thought, as good as it would get tonight.

He entered his room and shut the door, leaned his back to it as if to hold the world out. Someone had already been in his room. A lamp had been lit against the darkness, a fire laid, and bread and cheese and a tankard of ale set by the window to stay cool. He began to cry.

 

* * *

 

The news went across the river by signal flags. No one worked on the bridge the next day or the day after that. Kit did all the right things, letting his grief and guilt overwhelm him only when he was alone, huddled in front of the fire in his room.

The third day, Rasali arrived from Nearside with a boat filled with crates of northland herbs on their way east. Kit was sitting in The Bitch's taproom, listening. People were coping, starting to look forward again. They should be able to get back to it soon, the next clear day. He would offer them something that would be an immediate, visible accomplishment, something different, perhaps guidelining the ramp.

He didn't see Rasali come into the taproom, only felt her hand on his shoulder and heard her voice in his ear. “Come with me,” she murmured.

He looked up puzzled, as though she were a stranger. “Rasali Ferry, why are you here?”

She said only, “Come for a walk, Kit.”

It was raining but he accompanied her anyway, pulling a scarf over his head when the first cold drops hit his face.

She said nothing as they splashed through Farside. She was leading him someplace but he didn't care where, grateful not to have to be the decisive one, the strong one. After a time she opened a door and led him through it into a small room filled with light and warmth.

“My house,” she said. “And Valo's. He's still at the boatyard. Sit.”

She pointed and Kit dropped onto the settle beside the fire. Rasali swiveled a pot hanging from a bracket out of the fire and ladled something into a mug. She handed it to him and sat. “So. Drink.”

It was spiced porter and the warmth eased the tightness in his chest. “Thank you.”

“Talk.”

“This is such a loss for you all, I know,” he said. “Did you know Loreh well?”

She shook her head. “This is not for me, this is for you. Tell me.”

“I'm fine,” he said, and when she didn't say anything, he repeated with a flicker of anger: “I'm
fine,
Rasali. I can handle this.”

“Probably you can,” Rasali said. “But you're not fine. She died and it was your bridge she died for. You don't feel responsible? I don't believe it.”

“Of course I feel responsible,” he snapped.

The fire cast gold light across her broad cheekbones when she turned her face to him, but she said nothing, only looked at him and waited.

“She's not the first,” Kit said, surprising himself. “The first project I had sole charge of, a toll gate. Such a little project, such a silly little project to lose someone on. The wood frame for the passageway collapsed before we got the keystone in. The whole arch came down. Someone got killed.” It had been a very young man, slim and tall with a limp. He was raising his little sister. She hadn't been more than ten. Running loose in the fields around the site, she had missed the collapse, the boy's death. Dafuen? Naus? He couldn't remember his name. And the girl—what had her name been?
I should remember. I owe that much to them.

“Every time I lose someone,” he said at last, “I remember the others. There've been twelve in seventeen years. Not so many, considering. Building's dangerous. My record's better than most.”

“But it doesn't matter, does it?” she said. “You still feel you killed each one of them, as surely as if you'd thrown them off a bridge yourself.”

“It's my responsibility. The first one, Duar—”
that
had been his name; there it was. The name loosened something in Kit. His face warmed: tears, hot tears running down his face.

“It's all right,” she said. She held him until he stopped crying.

“How did you know?” he said finally.

“I am the eldest surviving member of the Ferry family,” she said. “My father died. My mother. My aunt died seven years ago. And then I watched my brother leave to cross the mist, three years ago now. It was a perfect day, calm and sunny, but he never made it. He went instead of me because the river felt wrong to me that day. It could have been me. It should have, maybe. So I understand.”

She stretched a little. “Not that most people don't. If Petro Housewright sends his daughter to select timber in the mountains and she doesn't come back—eaten by wolves, struck by lightning, I don't know—is Petro to blame? It's probably the wolves or the lightning. Maybe it's the daughter, if she did something stupid. And it
is
Petro, a little; she wouldn't have been there at all if he hadn't sent her. And it's her mother for being fearless and teaching that to her daughter, and Thom Green for wanting a new room to his house. Everyone except maybe the wolves feels responsible. This path leads nowhere. Loreh would have died sooner or later.” Rasali added softly, “We all do.”