by AC Cobble
“What are you considering?” asked Anne.
“Let’s go back to your friend’s place,” said Rew. “You and the children can get some rest. I’ll go walk around for a bit.”
“We’re not children,” complained Raif.
“Of course not,” said Rew, standing and quaffing the rest of his coffee. “You all must be tired. Let’s go.”
“You won’t tell us your plan?” asked Cinda.
“I’ve got to make one first.”
20
The next evening, they stood at the backside of Duke Eeron’s keep, in between it and the tower where they hoped Baron Fedgley was held. They all stared straight up into the sky at the soaring bridge that jutted overhead in two arches like a stone elemental skipping across the sky. The setting sun, just now hanging above the tips of the Spine, made it look as if the bridge was afire with orange and red.
“When you said you had a plan, I thought it’d be a better one than this,” complained Anne.
“We cannot go across the top of that bridge and fight through the guards,” said Rew, “and we cannot scale five hundred paces up the side of the tower while half of Spinesend is watching us. Duke Eeron will have warded the prison against portaling, so even if we recruited a friendly spellcaster with the capability, that’s not an option. What other choice do we have?”
“We could bribe a guard,” suggested Anne.
“With what?” asked Rew. “We’d have to bribe an entire shift of them, and my coin purse can’t support that. We could try to visit a bank and draw on the king’s account, but Vyar Grund may have already blocked my access, and that’s a certain way to let anyone hunting for us know where we are. Maybe we could steal some coin, but even then, we’re assuming the guards wouldn’t just take our bribe and report us to their captains after. It’s a risk we cannot take.”
The empath grunted and pointed above their heads. “Not taking any risks, are we?”
Rew grinned but did not respond. He didn’t like what was coming any more than she did, but what other choice did they have? Like so much of the journey, it was take the leap or flee. So close to their father, the children weren’t going to flee. That meant the only thing to do was try to catch them when they jumped.
“Up we go, then,” said Rew.
He glanced around, seeing that no one was nearby. Then, he started up the slope of the hill that Duke Eeron’s keep was built upon. So far below the seat of power, opposite the main entrance to the keep, the neighborhood was comprised of slums and closed shops. There were few people on the streets, but those people paid no attention to anything but their own misery. Still, it was best to be cautious, so Rew crouched low and found cover where he could.
For three hundred paces, they climbed natural stone and scree, using small bushes and scrubby trees to haul themselves up. If it wasn’t for the risk of being spotted, the climb was no more difficult than the hiking they’d done in the wilderness and crossing the Spine, and they were starting out well-rested. Without complaint, the younglings followed Rew, and within half an hour, they’d ascended to the base of the back of Duke Eeron’s keep.
There was nothing there except a blank wall of stone that rose one hundred paces above their heads. At that point, narrow windows began to dot the side of the structure, and another hundred paces above that was the start of the first arch that supported the bridge to the tower. Rew glanced at the tower, a black obelisk in the evening sky, rising like a spear thrust through the lower sections of Spinesend. Climbing the slope beneath the keep got them half the distance to the top of the tower, and on the backside of it they’d avoided any watching eyes, but now they had the tricky part. They had to get to the tower.
Rew shook himself and looked around cautiously again.
There were no soldiers in the vicinity, as Rew had expected. He’d scouted the site earlier, but with such little time, he hadn’t been completely sure. They were so far below the battlements and the bridge that he doubted anyone had ever tried to enter the keep from this direction, and if they had, they’d find the keep guarded by a score of armed men and a closed portcullis. Assailing the keep from this side would be virtually impossible by any but the most skilled climbers, but they were not going to the keep. They were going to the tower.
Rew, not wasting time and the little daylight they had, took a length of rope from Raif and settled it across his shoulders on top of one he already carried. He staggered under the weight and took a moment to settle himself. He grunted, guessing it was at least ten stone worth of rope, nearly half his own weight. Nothing to do about it, though. They needed all of it.
He picked up a bag of iron spikes and a small hammer and hung them on his belt. He took several deep breaths. The sun had finally set, and darkness fell across Spinesend.
“You sure about this?” worried Anne.
“No,” replied Rew.
“If you fall from up there, I won’t be able to heal the damage,” she warned.
“I’ve been refusing your healing for months now, Anne. No reason to change that.”
She shook her head, worry evident in her eyes, but there was nothing else to say about it. What he was going to attempt was incredibly dangerous, but she knew as well as he that the children wouldn’t be dissuaded, and the best they could do was to give them a chance.
Rew knelt and dug up a handful of dirt. He rubbed it on his hands, wishing he’d thought to borrow a stick of chalk from the herbalist, but it was too late now. Besides, given the other macabre implements the woman sold, he worried about where that chalk had come from. Turning, forcing himself to focus on the moment, he put a hand on the rough, pitted stone of Duke Eeron’s keep, and then, he found a toehold. He hauled himself up, gasping from the strain of climbing with the rope, the iron spikes, the hammer, and his weapons. It was like climbing with a small man on his back.
In moments, he could feel the chill from the stone seeping into his fingers. He reached up, found another hold, and pulled himself higher, clinging to the wall like a spider, hand and foot, hand after foot.
The wind whipped against him once he cleared the sparse cover they’d had on the hill, and he knew he was exposed if any stray eye turned up from below. He tried not to think of what he’d do if he was spotted and the soldiers came searching through the scrabble at the base of the keep. They were hundreds of paces above the nearest buildings, but still… He climbed, hand and foot, hand after foot.
The wind battered him, like it was trying to rip him off the wall, and by the time he reached the elevation of the windows, his fingers felt like clumsy sticks, banging against the stone senselessly. The fingers retained just enough sensation that he could feel the pressure against the stone, and he hoped he could keep trusting the digits with his weight. The windows were darkened, all storerooms or dungeons at that level as he had guessed, just one floor above the living rock of the Spine and the stone foundation the keep was built upon.
Rew kept climbing, nearly blind as the moon hung above the bridge that spanned over his head. Bats flapped by, ignoring the interloper ascending into their domain, caring only for the few insects they could find on the cold, autumn night.
His arms trembling, hand and foot, hand after foot, he kept climbing until he reached the bottom of the first of the two arches that spanned the gap between the keep and the tower. Finally, he risked a look down, but he could see nothing in the darkness below. He glanced back up, and beneath the bridge, he saw a network of ancient wooden spars that were arranged in a matrix, spreading like the fractals of a snowflake, just like he’d seen in his spyglass that morning. The wooden beams had been placed there centuries before, either during construction or during some repair project since, and supported the path of stone above. Rew clambered a little higher and rolled on top of one of the huge wooden support struts.
For a brief moment, his breath caught. The strut was half the width of his back, and as he lay on it, he could feel the cold air kissing his shoulders as they hung over open space
. He knew there was nothing but two hundred paces of air beneath him.
Sitting quickly and dangling his legs down on either side of the strut, Rew pulled one of the heavy loops of rope off of his shoulders. He tried to flick one end of it down and around the support beam he was sitting on, but after several failed attempts, he tied a spike to it and tried again. With the extra weight, the end of the rope came swinging up out of the darkness, and he caught it. Blowing on his hands to warm them, he flexed to try and get some feeling back into his cold-numbed fingers. He wiggled the digits and stretched them, sore from the climb and torn from the stone. Then, he tied a knot in the rope. He tugged on it to test how secure it was, and he dropped it so the length slid through his hands and dangled hundreds of paces below him.
With any luck, it would be long enough to reach the ground where the others waited. They’d had to guess the measurement, and it’d taken several shorter lengths tied together to get it as long as they needed. How much length had they lost by tying the strands together? Had he climbed higher than they’d estimated when looking up from below? He wasn’t sure, but it was too late to worry about it now.
Hopefully the others would see the rope hanging down, but Rew couldn’t wait to be sure. There was much to do before daylight. Rew removed the other rope and stood on the wooden beam. As wide as his shoulders, there was plenty of room for his boots, but when he looked down, all his mind could see was the yawning black that lay on either side of the wooden spar.
He shuddered and reached up to brace himself against a beam that passed overhead. Grunting, he tied the end of his second rope loosely to that beam and adjusted the rope back on his shoulder, feeling the weight tugging him to one side. He glanced down, could not see his boots in the shadow beneath the bridge, and cringed. Walking slowly, his legs trembling, Rew began to move up the slope of the support beam, using spars that passed overhead to steady himself, forcing his eyes ahead and not down. Not that he could see anything below. He was having to feel his way forward, tapping his toe along the support, moving nearly blind.
It was a shade lighter than pitch black beneath the bridge, and as his eyes began to adjust, he could see the shadows of a forest of ancient beams extending ahead of him. The wood was hard, petrified by age, and it held none of the life it once did. When he touched it, he ached to feel the life of living wood, to be within the forest again where trees as massive as these supports grew, but he forced the thought down. He had work to do.
Rew kept walking and unspooled more of the rope from his shoulders, keeping the line going behind him, occasionally feeling the wind tug at it, pulling him toward the open air.
It was cold, nearly freezing, but sweat beaded on his forehead and rolled down his back. To distract himself, he speculated whether the others would be able to ascend the wall even with the help of the knotted rope. Zaine would climb up easily, he thought. The others, probably. For a second, he had a vision of Anne plummeting down the side of the keep and splattering on the rocky soil below. He closed his eyes, and when he reopened them, he decided not to think about that any longer.
It was dry, so he didn’t have to worry about slipping down the steep slope of the strut he was climbing, and the bridge was as solid as the bones of the Spine, but the bats were an unforeseen complication. In the darkness beneath the bridge, he could barely see anything, and the small flying rodents came whizzing out of nowhere like bolts from a crossbow. They did not strike him, but they came close before screeching and veering away at the last instant. Several times, his heart lurched, and he nearly jumped at the shrill squeal of the little creatures. If he lost his footing and fell, the King’s Ranger killed by a bat… One hand dropped down to his hunting knife, but he wasn’t sure what he meant to do with it.
Steadying himself, trying to ignore the squeaking denizens of the underside of the bridge, he continued on, stepping from one strut to another as he crisscrossed the space beneath the bridge. After what seemed most of the night, he reached the peak of the arch, where the struts reached their apex and then started going back down the other way. On his shoulder, he still had several dozen paces of rope. He took it off, found a suitable place near the center, and then tied it tight.
He looked ahead, and as he’d seen from below during the day, the struts culminated at the base of the bridge, and there was a span of about a dozen paces where he’d have no place to put his feet. He’d have to reach up and climb with only his hands across the yawning abyss.
Behind him, a trilling voice asked, “Is this as far as you’ve gotten?”
He jumped, stumbling.
“Be careful, Ranger. It’s quite a drop from here.”
Rew peeked back over his shoulder and saw in the gloom that Zaine was standing on one of the struts looking as comfortable as if she was strolling down a city street. She told him, “I thought you’d already be down to the other pillar by now.”
“Not yet,” he rasped.
“A quarter hour, you think, and I’ll tell the others to swing?”
Not trusting his voice, he nodded.
Zaine said, “They’re barely making it up that knotted rope. You were right. There’s no way the nobles could have traversed the underside without plummeting down below. Did you see those bats? The first squeak and Cinda would have been airborne. I’ll send her over first, I think.”
Wordlessly, Rew nodded again.
“This might work,” said Zaine. “I really didn’t think it would.” She paused, leaning to the side to look around him. “Is that climb as far as it looks? It looks far. That’s a lot of open space, Ranger.”
He didn’t respond.
“Well, good luck. A quarter hour, and Cinda will come your way, if you’ve made it.” Zaine turned and disappeared back down the strut into the darkness.
Legs quivering like an arrow the moment it struck the target, Rew reached up and grasped a chilly spar of wood with both hands. His breath was fast, panicked even. He practiced lifting himself with his hands, then mumbling a litany of prayers to the Blessed Mother, he reached out with one hand and stepped off the support beam he’d been standing on.
Dangling over the open air, hundreds of paces above a rocky slope, hand over hand, Rew swung out and worked his way across the bottom of the bridge. His heart was hammering, and halfway across, he stopped taking breaths at all. Hand over hand, he climbed, his legs kicking slowly, uselessly beneath him.
Finally, his toe thumped into another beam, and he hauled himself forward to rest his weight on his feet. His arms were quaking uncontrollably, and his vision swam. He looked back into the darkness, only seeing the shadows of what was behind him. Blessed Mother. He started moving again, taking his time now that the slope of the supports had changed and he was moving lower, headed toward the stone pillar that supported the center of the bridge.
When he made it there, evidently in less than a quarter hour, he turned and waited. There was ample room to stand on top of the stone column, so he was comfortable for the first time since he started the climb, but there’d be no warning when someone was coming, so he readied himself and waited nervously.
Suddenly, there was a high-pitched wail, barely audible over the rush of the wind. Out of the darkness, Cinda came swinging at him like a boulder fired from a catapult. Her keening cry seemed to trail her on the air, and for a moment, Rew worried she’d come crashing into him too fast and smash against the hard wood and stone of the underside of the bridge. But as she rose toward him, dangling from the rope, her momentum faded, and Rew reached out, one hand locked around a bolt on the strut, the other grasping for Cinda.
He caught her by the neck of her robe and pulled her tight.
“Blessed Mother!” she choked, her breaths coming in ragged, uneven gasps. Tears were streaming down her face, and as he hugged her tight, he could feel the furious beat of her heart.
He untied her and helped her move to where she could sit.
“Trust me, Ranger,” she said, “you’re lucky you didn’t have to
do that.”
He thought of climbing hand over hand across the gap and shook his head, not trusting himself to respond. Cinda watched him, and in the dark, he could see the gleam of her white teeth, lips spread in either a rictus of fear or a big grin. Both? Rew snorted and turned back to the open air. He tied the bag of iron spikes to the rope, and he swung it out in front of him, aiming it into the black along the center of the bridge, hoping it’d go directly toward the others.
“That was quite frightening when they pushed me out, but it was easier than I thought it’d be,” remarked the young spellcaster from half a dozen paces above Rew’s head. “Now that I’m getting my breath, I can admit, not a bad plan, Ranger. Not a bad plan.”
Easier? He didn’t respond. Instead, he waited for the next member of their party to appear out of the darkness.
“I think I broke a rib,” groaned Raif, his voice tight, his hand pressed to his side.
Anne reached down and put her hands on his head. After a moment, she assured him, “A bruise only. I’ll do what I can, but this situation is less than optimal for healing.”
Rew grinned. They were clinging to the side of the tower after crossing beneath the two arches of the bridge. It was nearly dawn, but they’d made it without being seen, and they’d all survived, which after making the attempt, he decided was a bit surprising.
“At least you weren’t stuck out there!” exclaimed Cinda.
“You didn’t get stuck,” retorted Zaine.
“I almost did,” muttered the young spellcaster.
“I caught you.”
It was true. The thief had reached out and caught the noblewoman on her second swing when Cinda didn’t quite make it all the way to the tower, but Zaine had been in Rew’s grip, extending out past his own reach, hanging above the drop below. If she’d missed, Cinda would have been left hanging, tied to the peak of the arch without the momentum to reach either side of it. Rew hadn’t considered that issue when he’d originally concocted the plan, and now that he fully appreciated the risks of missing with the swing or getting stuck dangling in the middle, not to mention his own difficulty climbing hand over hand across the gaps like a monkey, he wasn’t sure they should return the way they’d come in.
