Chapter 152: The Stone Span

Vina tugged on Rishin’s sleeve.

She had been staring at the amber lantern ever since they stopped, and she had clearly been saving the question up.

"Grandpa Rishin. What is a relic?"

Rishin did not look away from the door.

"A thing that keeps somebody alive," he said. "Once. For a price."

Vina thought about that, and then she looked at Billy parked between her and the door with his wheel angled like a shield. She did not ask anything else. She took Rishin’s hand again, and this time she held it with both of hers.

"Come," Rishin said. "It will still be here after we have learned to hate it."

The path beyond the shop door ran on for another few hundred paces, dipping and climbing as the wall bulged in and out. Then it simply stopped.

Rishin saw it first and raised a hand. The whole line halted behind him.

A section of the path had fallen away. Where the carved ledge should have continued along the wall, there was a jagged gap roughly eight meters across.

On the far side, the path picked up again as though nothing had happened, level and worn smooth down the middle.

Between the two edges there was only the drop.

Someone had bridged it once. Two thick iron rings were set into the rock on the near side, and two more matched them on the far side.

From each ring hung a length of old rope, grey and furred with rot. Nothing connected them anymore. A single warped plank dangled from one of the near ropes and turned slowly in the draft coming up from below.

"Well," Garen said. "That is inconvenient."

Sonic had already drifted forward to the edge. He looked across the gap, and then down, and then across at the far wall with its thousands of watching holes.

"Boss," he said. "It is eight meters. I could carry everyone over in about forty trips."

"Forty trips through open air," Rishin said, "past a wall that has already seen what happens to things that fly."

Sonic’s shoulders sank. He drifted back from the edge without being told twice.

Logan measured the gap with his eyes.

’I could clear it with Reaper’s Stride,’ he thought. ’So could Alice, and Garen and Isolde could probably step across it without trying. But Mom and Dad cannot. Vina cannot. And half our units weigh as much as a house.’

"We build," he said.

Xairon slid out of the line of units before anyone called it.

The Creation Sage flowed between shapes as it came, a tall thing and then a squat thing and then something with far too many hands.

It settled on the last one and stopped at the edge of the gap. It looked down at the broken rock with the air of an artist examining a very poor canvas.

"Stone," it said. "Good. I can work with stone."

"How long?" Garen asked.

"That depends on whether you want it to hold." Xairon turned several of its hands over. "If you want it to hold, it will take as long as it takes."

Rishin nodded once. "Slowly," he said. "Nothing here moves fast."

"I never move fast," Xairon said with dignity. "I move correctly."

Before Xairon could lay a single stone, Logan stepped up to the edge beside it and opened Sword Intent.

The world changed around him the way it always did. Every object in sight grew threads, faint lines of connection that ran from one thing to the next and showed him exactly what was holding what together.

Logan had first learned to see them on Rishin’s mountain. In the Warlord match, he had used them to cut apart things that should not have been cuttable.

Here he used them to read rock.

The near edge of the gap was sound. The threads there were thick and dense, and they ran deep into the wall like roots into good soil. The iron rings were well set, and the stone around them held them tightly.

The far side was worse. The threads there were thin, and a web of fine cracks spread out beneath the surface of the path for several meters past the break.

’That is why it fell,’ Logan thought. ’The whole far edge is barely holding itself up.’

"Do not anchor anything over there," he told Xairon. He pointed. "Not within four meters of the edge. It will go."

Xairon swiveled several of its eyes to follow his finger. "Noted," it said.

Logan was about to close Sword Intent when he saw the other thread.

It did not belong to the rock. It was warm and pulsing, and it ran out from under the lip of the near edge, directly below his boots.

It led to a cluster of smaller threads gripping the stone from underneath, like fingers clamped around the edge of a table.

A living thing was clinging to the underside of the path.

’Another wallclinger,’ he thought. ’Hanging upside down under the ledge, right where anyone working on a bridge would have to reach.’

"Nobody step past me," he said quietly.

Everyone stopped. Alice’s bow came up without a word.

Logan thought through his choices. He could cut its grip with Broken Chain. But then it would drop, and a two-meter body tumbling down the open drop was exactly the kind of fast, falling thing that would pull every hookwing off the far wall.

It had to die where it was.

Logan drew Grimlord’s Blade and knelt at the very edge of the path.

[ Grimspire Lance ]

The blade lengthened in his hand until it reached a full eleven feet. He lowered it over the lip slowly, point first, and followed the warm thread down with his eyes half closed.

It led him to the place where the clinger’s narrow head was pressed against the stone.

He did not swing. He placed the point against the underside of the rock, a hand’s width from the thread, and then he pushed.

The blade went in with barely a sound. He felt the clinger jerk once through the hilt, and then its grip loosened. The warm thread faded to nothing.

Logan drew the blade back up just as slowly. The dead clinger came with it, still skewered on the tip, and he laid it down on the path behind him.

[ Pallid Wallclinger slain. ] [ Logan Wolf: +50 Tower Points ]

Alice lowered her bow and looked at the number on his panel.

"Fifty," she said. "Congratulations. You are now as poor as I am."

"I found mine right under my feet."

"I found mine falling on your father. I think mine was more heroic."

Daniel looked from the dead clinger to the edge where it had been hiding, and then very deliberately took two steps away from the drop.

"I would like to stop standing near edges," he said.

"You are in the Abyss, Dad," Logan said.

"I am aware," Daniel said.

After that, the bridge took shape one careful piece at a time.

Vulkarn came forward first. The production unit’s chest held a slow red glow like coals banked in a furnace, and heat rolled off it in waves.

It knelt at the near edge and pressed both palms flat against the rubble that had fallen onto the path when the old bridge failed.

Small grey shapes wriggled out from between its fingers and burrowed into the stone. They were Ore Grubs, the same creatures that had collapsed the ground under half the Warlords in the last match.

Here they were doing the opposite. They chewed through the loose rubble and packed it together again as solid rock, shaping it into thick, smooth blocks.

Xairon took each block as it came and fitted it to the next. It worked outward from the sound near edge, where Logan’s threads ran deepest, laying a narrow span out over the drop like a hand reaching slowly for the far side.

Draventh followed behind it. Its hands left runes glowing on every seam, and each rune bound one block to the next so tightly that Logan could no longer see the joins with Sword Intent.

The threads simply ran on through the new stone as though it had always been part of the wall.

The only sounds while they worked were the grind of stone and the drip of water down the wall.

The span crept outward a block at a time. Across the drop, every beak stayed turned toward them. Not one hookwing left its hole.

Helen sat with her back against the wall, holding Vina in her lap. She watched the stone reach across the gap, and Logan saw some of the tension drain out of her shoulders with every block that settled into place.

Rishin stood at the edge the whole time with his hands folded into his sleeves. He did not offer advice.

Xairon hesitated once over the angle of a block. The old man nodded very slightly, and Xairon set it down exactly where it had been hovering.

Where the span met the far side, Xairon did not stop at the broken edge. Following Logan’s warning, it carried the bridge on across the cracked stretch for four more meters and anchored it into sound rock beyond.

When the last block settled into place, Draventh laid a final rune across the seam. The whole bridge glowed faintly blue from end to end and then went dark.

[ Construction complete: Stone Span ]

Terry crossed first, because Terry was the heaviest thing in the party that could walk.

He went slowly, one step at a time, with the plates on his legs shifting and settling as he moved. The span did not so much as tremble under him.

When he reached the far side, he turned around and planted himself at the end of the bridge like a gatepost.

"Holds," he said.

The family crossed after that, one by one. Vina went between Rishin and Helen with a hand in each of theirs. She kept her eyes on Terry at the far end, exactly as Rishin told her to, and she did not look down once.

Billy crossed last of all. He rolled onto the span with enormous care, and the entire party held still and watched him inch across.

"I have excellent balance," he announced halfway over.

"Do not be excited," said several people at once.

The far side of the gap opened onto a short ledge before the path dipped down again.

Once Billy was safely across, Logan turned to look back at the span. It was a clean stone arch reaching over the drop from sound rock to sound rock, faintly etched with Draventh’s runes, and it would still be standing long after they were gone.

’Whoever comes down this wall next will walk across it,’ he thought. ’They will never know who built it.’

Then Vina gasped.

She was standing at the front of the ledge beside Rishin, pointing down. Logan followed her finger.

Below them and a little further along the wall, another ledge jutted out of the rock. It glowed green with stalks like the first shelf. There were people on it.

There were four of them, gathered around a small fire. Two were tall and broad-shouldered. Two were small.

One of the small ones had stood up and was looking straight up the wall at them. It was a child about Vina’s size.

It lifted one arm and waved.