The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (147 page)

“The one in red” was tall, her skin as pale as that of the rest of the locals, with a black braid so long that she had looped it around her neck to keep it out of the way. Her shoulders flexed in the sunlight as she and the youth forced a curved plank to take the skeletal hull’s shape. The other woman, slightly shorter, with the ash-blonde hair so common here, forced an augur through the plank and into a rib, then hammered a peg into the hole she’d made. After three pegs, the boatwrights straightened. The plank held.
Strong,
Kit thought;
I wonder if I can get them for the bridge?

“Rasali!” a voice bellowed, almost in Kit’s ear. “Man here’s looking for you.” Kit turned in time to see the man with the mugs gesturing, again with his chin. He sighed and walked to the waist-high fence. The boatwrights stopped to drink from blueware bowls before the one in red and the youth came over.

“I’m Rasali Ferry of Farside,” the woman said. Her voice was softer and higher than he had expected of a woman as strong as she, with the fluid vowels of the local accent. She nodded to the boy beside her: “Valo Ferry of Farside, my brother’s eldest.” Valo was more a young man than a boy, lighter-haired than Rasali and slightly taller. They had the same heavy eyebrows and direct amber eyes.

“Kit Meinem of Atyar,” Kit said.

Valo asked, “What sort of name is Meinem? It doesn’t mean anything.”

“In the capital, we take our names differently than you.”

“Oh, like Jenner Ellar.” Valo nodded. “I guessed you were from the capital – your clothes and your skin.”

Rasali said, “What can we do for you, Kit Meinem of Atyar?”

“I need to get to Farside today,” Kit said.

Rasali shook her head. “I can’t take you. I just got here, and it’s too soon. Perhaps Valo?”

The youth tipped his head to one side, his expression suddenly abstract, as though he were listening to something too faint to hear clearly. He shook his head. “No, not today.”

“I can buy out the fares, if that helps. It’s Jenner Ellar I am here to see.”

Valo looked interested but said, “No,” to Rasali, and she added, “What’s so important that it can’t wait a few days?”

Better now than later,
Kit thought. “I am replacing Teniant Planner as the lead engineer and architect for construction of the bridge over the mist. We will start work again as soon as I’ve reviewed everything. And had a chance to talk to Jenner.” He watched their faces.

Rasali said, “It’s been a year since Teniant died – I was starting to think Empire had forgotten all about us, and your deliveries would be here ’til the iron rusted away.”

“Jenner Ellar’s not taking over?” Valo asked, frowning.

“The new Department of Roads cartel is in my name,” Kit said, “but I hope Jenner will remain as my second. You can see why I would like to meet him as soon as is possible, of course. He will—”

Valo burst out, “You’re going to take over from Jenner, after he’s worked so hard on this? And what about us? What about
our
work?” His cheeks were flushed an angry red.
How do they conceal anything with skin like that?
Kit thought.

“Valo,” Rasali said, a warning tone in her voice. Flushing darker still, the youth turned and strode away. Rasali snorted but said only: “Boys. He likes Jenner, and he has issues about the bridge, anyway.”

That was worth addressing.
Later.
“So, what will it take to get you to carry me across the mist, Rasali Ferry of Farside? The project will pay anything reasonable.”

“I cannot,” she said. “Not today, not tomorrow. You’ll have to wait.”

“Why?” Kit asked: reasonably enough, he thought, but she eyed him for a long moment, as if deciding whether to be annoyed.

“Have you gone across mist before?” she said at last.

“Of course.”

“Not the river,” she said.

“Not the river,” he agreed. “It’s a quarter mile across here, yes?”

“Oh, yes.” She smiled suddenly: white even teeth and warmth like sunlight in her eyes. “Let’s go down, and perhaps I can explain things better there.” She jumped the fence with a single powerful motion, landing beside him to a chorus of cheers and shouts from the inn garden’s patrons. She gave an exaggerated bow, then gestured to Kit to follow her. She was well liked, clearly. Her opinion would matter.

The boatyard was heavily shaded by low-hanging oaks and chestnuts, and bounded on the east by an open-walled shelter filled with barrels and stacks of lumber. Rasali waved at the third boat-maker, who was still putting her tools away. “Tilisk Boatwright of Nearside. My brother’s wife,” she said to Kit. “She makes skiffs with us, but she won’t ferry. She’s not born to it as Valo and I are.”

“Where’s your brother?” Kit asked.

“Dead,” Rasali said, and lengthened her stride.

They walked a few streets over and then climbed a long, even ridge perhaps eighty feet high, too regular to be natural.
A levee,
Kit thought, and distracted himself from the steep path by estimating the volume of earth and the labor that had been required to build it. Decades, perhaps, but how long ago? How long was it? The levee was treeless. The only feature was a slender wood tower hung with flags. It was probably for signaling across the mist to Farside, since it appeared too fragile for anything else. They had storms out here, Kit knew; there’d been one the night before, that had left the path muddy. How often was the tower struck by lightning?

Rasali stopped. “There.”

Kit had been watching his feet. He looked up and nearly cried out as light lanced his suddenly tearing eyes. He fell back a step and shielded his face. What had blinded him was an immense band of white mist reflecting the morning sun.

Kit had never seen the mist river itself, though he bridged mist before this, two simple post-and-beam structures over gorges closer to the capital. From his work in Atyar, he knew what was to be known. It was not water, or anything like. It did not flow, but formed somehow in the deep gorge of the great riverbed before him. It found its way many hundreds of miles north, upstream through a hundred narrowing mist creeks and streams before failing at last, in shreds of drying foam that left bare patches of earth where they collected.

The mist stretched to the south as well, a deepening, thickening band that poured out at last from the river’s mouth two thousand miles south, and formed the mist ocean, which lay on the face of the salt-water ocean. Water had to follow the river’s bed to run somewhere beneath, or through, the mist, but there was no way to prove this.

There was mist nowhere but this river and its streams and sea; but the mist split Empire in half.

After a moment, the pain in Kit’s eyes grew less, and he opened them again. The river was a quarter mile across where they stood, a great gash of light between the levees. It seemed nearly featureless, blazing under the sun like a river of cream or of bleached silk, but as his eyes accustomed themselves, he saw the surface was not smooth but heaped and hollowed, and that it shifted slowly, almost indiscernibly, as he watched.

Rasali stepped forward, and Kit started. “I’m sorry,” he said with a laugh. “How long have I been staring? It’s just – I had no idea.”

“No one does,” Rasali said. Her eyes when he met them were amused.

The east and west levees were nearly identical, each treeless and scrubcovered, with a signal tower. The levee on their side ran down to a narrow bare bank half a dozen yards wide. There was a wooden dock and a boat ramp, a rough switchback leading down to them. Two large boats had been pulled onto the bank. Another, smaller dock was visible a hundred yards upstream, attended by a clutter of boats, sheds, and indeterminate piles covered in tarps.

“Let’s go down.” Rasali led the way, her words coming back to him over her shoulder. “The little ferry is Valo’s.
Pearlfinder. The Tranquil Crossing’s
mine.” Her voice warmed when she said the name. “Eighteen feet long, eight wide. Mostly pine, but a purpleheart keel and pearwood headpiece. You can’t see it from here, but the hull’s sheathed in blue-dyed fish-skin. I can carry three horses or a ton and a half of cartage or fifteen passengers. Or various combinations. I once carried twenty-four hunting dogs and two handlers. Never again.”

A steady light breeze eased down from the north, channeled by the levees. The air had a smell, not unpleasant but a little sour, wild. “How can you manage a boat like this alone? Are you that strong?”

“It’s as big as I can handle,” she said, “but Valo helps sometimes, for really unwieldy loads. You don’t paddle through mist. I mostly just coax the
Crossing
to where I want it to go. Anyway, the bigger the boat, the more likely that the Big Ones will notice it; though if you
do
run into a fish, the smaller the boat, the easier it is to swamp. Here we are.”

They stood on the bank. The mist streams he had bridged had not prepared him for anything like this. Those were tidy little flows, more like fog collection in hollows than this. From their angle, the river no longer seemed a smooth flow of creamy whiteness, nor even gently heaped clouds. The mist forced itself into hillocks and hollows, tight slopes perhaps twenty feet high that folded into one another. It had a surface, but it was irregular, cracked in places, or translucent in others. It didn’t seem as clearly defined as that between water and air.

“How can you move on this?” Kit said, fascinated. “Or even float?” The hillock immediately before them was flattening as he watched. Beyond it something like a vale stretched out for a few dozen yards before turning and becoming lost to his eyes.

“Well, I can’t, not today,” Rasali said. She sat on the gunwale of her boat, one leg swinging, watching him. “I can’t push the
Crossing
up those slopes or find a safe path, unless the mist shows me the way. If I went today, I know – I
know”
– she tapped her belly – “that I would find myself stranded on a pinnacle or lost in a hole.
That’s
why I can’t take you today, Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

When Kit was a child, he had not been good with other people. He was small and easy to tease or ignore, and then he was sick for much of his seventh year and had to leave his crèche before the usual time, to convalesce in his mother’s house. None of the children of the crèche came to visit him, but he didn’t mind that: he had books and puzzles, and whole quires of blank paper that his mother didn’t mind him defacing.

The clock in the room in which he slept didn’t work, so one day he used his penknife to take it apart. He arranged the wheels and cogs and springs in neat rows on the quilt in his room, by type and then by size; by materials; by weight; by shape. He liked holding the tiny pieces, thinking of how they might have been formed and how they worked together. The patterns they made were interesting, but he knew the best pattern would be the working one, when they were all put back into their right places and the clock performed its task again. He had to think that the clock would be happier that way, too.

He tried to rebuild the clock before his mother came upstairs from her counting house at the end of the day, but when he had reassembled things, there remained a pile of unused parts and it still didn’t work; so he shut the clock up and hoped she wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t ticking. Four days more of trying things during the day and concealing his failures at night; and on the fifth day, the clock started again. One piece hadn’t fit anywhere, a small brass cog. Kit still carried that cog in his pen case.

Late that afternoon, Kit returned to the river’s edge. It was hotter; the mud had dried to cracked dust, and the air smelled like old rags left in water too long. He saw no one at the ferry dock, but at the fisher’s dock upstream, people were gathering, a score or more of men and women, with children running about.

The clutter looked even more disorganized as he approached. The fishing boats were fat little coracles of leather stretched on frames, tipped bottom up to the sun and looking like giant warts. The mist had dropped so that he could see a band of exposed rock below the bank, and he could see the dock’s pilings clearly, which were not vertical but set at an angle: a cantilevered deck braced into the stone underlying the bank. The wooden pilings had been sheathed in metal.

He approached a silver-haired woman doing something with a treble hook as long as her hand. “What are you catching with that?” he said.

Her forehead was wrinkled when she looked up, but she smiled when she saw him. “Oh, you’re a stranger. From Atyar, dressed like that. Am I right? We catch fish . . .” Still holding the hook, she extended her arms as far as they would stretch. “Bigger than that, some of them. Looks like more storms, so they’re going to be biting tonight. I’m Meg Threehooks. Of Nearside, obviously.”

“Kit Meinem of Atyar. I take it you can’t find a bottom?” He pointed to the pilings.

Meg Threehooks followed his glance. “It’s there somewhere, but it’s a long way down, and we can’t sink pilings because the mist dissolves the wood. Oh, and fish eat it. Same thing with our ropes, the boats, us – anything but metal and rock, really.” She knotted a line around the hook eye. The cord was dark and didn’t look heavy enough for anything Kit could imagine catching on hooks that size.

“What are these made of, then?” He squatted to look at the framing under one of the coracles.

“Careful, that one’s mine,” Meg said. “The hides – well, and all the ropes – are fish-skin. Mist fish, not water fish. Tanning takes off some of the slime, so they don’t last forever, either, not if they’re immersed.” She made a face. “We have a saying: foul as fish-slime. That’s pretty nasty, you’ll see.”