The Savior

by David Drake

  “Let’s have a look,” said Abel. He cast his gaze around. “I think the rest of the staff would rather be as far away from this thing is they can possibly be. Let’s you, me, and Timon go.”

  They had come to a stop on a deep, but dry, gulch. Across it stretched a wooden bridge. Abel led his staff and the troops to one side of the bridge, then motioned the troops to halt. He, Landry, and Timon clopped onto its wooden planking. The middle of the bridge provided a grand view of the elevator.

  Abel motioned for them to dismount. They hitched their donts to the bridge railing and left them there, then climbed up a single-file trail that led to the bottom of the apparatus.

  “It’s not broken, I think,” Timon said. He put a hand on one of the huge ropes that held the elevator platforms in place. They were hemp, but as thick as a tree trunk.

  Timon may have been a zealot, but his conception of his duties was ethical and spiritual. Unlike many far less religious men, he was not superstitious about touching or handling nishterlaub. It was the concept he abhorred.

  “These ropes are fairly new. See? The twist is lefthand lay.” He bent closer, examined the strands. “They’ve been reinforced somehow.” He looked closer, teased apart several strands. “Metal,” he said. “One of the strands is metal. But to draw out such a long strand—it’s impossible. Can’t be done.”

  Progar has mastered the drawing and annealing of steel.

  At least someone in Progar has, said Raj.

  “It’s obviously not impossible.” Abel turned to Timon. “We will make use of this.”

  Landry walked around behind the elevator works as they spoke. There was plenty of room for a man between the suspension ropes and the cliffside.

  “Operating lever!” he suddenly shouted. “I’ve found the way to turn this thing on!” He charged back around to stand beside them. “There are two flues sticking out of the cliff about halfway up. I can see them from back there. They feed right into those buckets. That’ll be the water supply for turning. I’d say there’s a reservoir up there, cut back in the cliff. I doubt they lifted the water up. Probably fed by an underground stream or spring or something . . .”

  More likely a seep, Center said. It would appear to be an extrusion of the Redlands plateau water table. Note the mineral buildup approximately halfway up the Escarpment cliff. There are seeps all along the wall in this vicinity. These are, collectively, the source of the Forks River.

  “—dammed up with a headgate that’s controlled from down here by a pull rope. They’ve got it well-secured down here, but nothing I can’t undo with a sharp blade. They obviously shut it down temporarily and intended to come back and make use of it again.”

  “When you undo it, what will happen?”

  “Not completely sure, but I suspect the lever controls a headgate or valve on the reservoir up there. Water will pour down both of those flues and empty into those half barrels. It’ll weigh them down, and the whole contraption will start to move, to rotate. This front side will move up, and the backside with move down—and all of it powered by those water-heavy half barrels. The half barrels turn round the bottom side here, empty into the sluice here”—he pointed at the ditch leading away from the base of the machine under the bridges and into the gulch—“and the gulch that passes carries the water away to the Forks.” Landry gazed up at the elevator in awe. “It’s quite something. Elegant. And all done with water power.”

  Timon had stepped away to do some scouting around, and now returned. “This place was bustling not long ago. Tools seem to have been left where men dropped them. I’ll wager the men who work here got called away to the militia. This site is not secure. No one expected us to come this route, I’m certain.”

  “Not in a thousand years,” Abel said. “But here we are. Can you make it work, Landry?”

  “You bet I can.”

  “Caution, Abel,” Timon put in. “Consider the effect this will have on the troops.”

  “Religious effect, Major?”

  Timon nodded. “To use such a thing would be in contradiction to all the Combination Edicts. If we had a chaplain along, he would tell you as much. I can see an argument that, since it is already in place, we might make use of it. But that’s a thin reed on which to hang the trust of superstitious men.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean, Timon. What do you suggest?”

  “A council of war. We listen to the captains’ opinions, make an effort to convince them this is the best course.”

  “Do you think it’s the best course?”

  “As your adjutant, I would say you are dakshit crazy to consider this. They’ll burn you for sure,” Timon answered. “As your friend . . . I still think it’s probably a bad idea. But as a soldier . . .” Timon smiled his icy, carnadonlike smile. “As a soldier, I say we have the opportunity to make our way north along that Rim, bypass every patrol, cavalry recognizance, and skirmisher in the valley below, and pick our moment to descend on the Progar militia like death raining from above. Furthermore, I believe that’s what you’ve been thinking all along.”

  Abel nodded. “You’re right about that.”

  “So I say let’s go and convince those pukes to trust their life and limb to this infernal contraption, Colonel Dashian, sir.”

  “Let’s talk to the captains,” Abel said.

  * * *

  He began with what he hoped was his most reasonable tone. “Do you remember the boats that took us across the Canal? These are transports that will take us up that cliff. As you know, General von Hoff is facing a force that is many times the size of ours. Goldies are worth two or three of them, no doubt. But I put it to you that there are three or four of them to each one of us. That is too many. We need a way to even those odds, and this is it.”

  “What is your plan, Colonel?” said a captain.

  Abel smiled. “To disappear from Manahatet Valley, then reappear where the enemy does not expect us. To hit him hard and draw his force off of General von Hoff.”

  “Whether or not we can get them to climb upon that beast, the men are dead tired, sir,” said another captain.

  “They’ll keep going,” Abel said. “We all will.”

  “You’re asking the impossible, and asking us all to become heretics in the bargain, Colonel,” said a third company commander.

  “I spent half my life traversing the Rim as a Scout, gentlemen. We’ll find our way once we’re up there. As for heresy—we didn’t build this thing, but, thrice-damn it all, we’re going to use it. We’ll use it for our brothers’ sake. And we’ll use it because we marched three hundred leagues to win, not to lose. We’re not going to go home beaten or get ourselves dead because I left something undone that might have been done.”

  “Some of the men won’t do it,” the company commander replied.

  Abel turned to Timon. “Captain Athanaskew.” Timon had been standing at the edge of the circle of captains, listening carefully, but remaining his usual aloof self. He stepped forward.

  “Yes, Colonel?”

  Abel stared him in the eyes.

  “Will you do it, Captain?”

  A moment of hesitation. Then Timon’s jaw clenched and a tremor went through him. His answer was low, almost a whisper. “Yes, sir,” he said. Then louder: “Yes, sir. After what you did at Tamarak and Sentinel, I believe I’d follow you to cold hell and back. You fight, Colonel. That’s why we’re here.”

  “So be it,” Abel said. He addressed the others. “Put it to the men the way I have done to you. There’ll be no shame if they don’t want to go. I’ll send those who wish to remain here back to the garrison at Siegan to await orders. But let’s show them what they’re in for if they come with me.” He turned to Landry. “Captain Hoster, go and open that gate.”

  * * *

  In the end, only a few men refused to board the elevator. They gathered sullenly to the rear, defiance and misery on their faces in equal measure. Two were lieutenants, and Abel put these in charge of the fifty or so men who would
be heading back down the Fork.

  All of his captains were with him.

  Psychological interpolation indicates that most of these officers and men believe they may be endangering their eternal well-being, yet are willing to do so on your say-so, Abel. This is an interesting outlying condition on several Seldonian self-preservation curves.

  They want to win, Raj said. Abel has convinced them that this is the way.

  I could have told you that, Abel thought. Despite what you’ve taught me over the years, that thing scares the cold hell out of me, too. If I get on it, it will be because I trust you both. Listen to it turn and grind! And thrice-damn whether or not it’s nishterlaub; I’m just as worried about it crashing down and killing us all.

  An inflection point has been achieved, Center said. Further calculations are necessary, but turning back is no longer an option.

  For the first time Abel could remember, Center seemed . . . sad.

  * * *

  Abel rode up first with Timon by his side. Landry remained below at the controlling rope. They rose for a good twenty elbs, then lurched to a stop. The ground grew farther away, and the soldiers below gawking up at them smaller and smaller. After a moment, the contraption got going again. Then another, smoother pause, as Landry got the hang of the levering system. Of course each platform would have to be held in place while men and equipment were piled aboard. The ascent would be a slow rise with a lot of stops on the way.

  If Abel hadn’t known the elevator was powered by scientific principle, he’d have believed in magic. First of all, the thing was huge, its scale beyond the human. Even wagons loaded onto its platforms seemed puny. This was a machine designed to move mountains, to move tons of ore and material. He felt as if he’d been thrust into a new reality when he boarded. So this was what civilization was capable of, what men could do when they put their minds to it. This and much, much more.

  With each move upward the sound grew fantastically loud, an enormous rumble, along with a grinding, clacking, squeaking, and squealing amalgam of every noise he’d ever heard hitting his ears all at once. It was impossible to communicate without shouting while the platform was in motion.

  And there was a smell. The damp wood, the fresh spray of water in the sloshing buckets that powered everything, the faint scent of smoldering wood. How was this thing lubricated, anyway? Was it just the water that kept the turning ropes from burning in two?

  There is a great deal of rendered dak grease involved in the lubrication. Some has dried from recent disuse, but the mechanism is still completely functional.

  He was traveling as fast as a dont could trot. Each jolt upward felt inexorable, one platform stop at a time. If a man fell into the mechanism, would it even jam this monster?

  The gearing would grind a human to pieces. Please mind the edge.

  They rose over the edge, and Abel saw what Landry had told him to look for: a signal lever to tell the operator below to stop the platform so its occupants could get off. He pulled it up as they passed it. The action did nothing more than release two signal flags that popped out on either side of the elevator and hung off the side of the cliff just below the Rim. But Landry had placed one of his men a half fieldmarch away to watch for any sign. He must have wigwagged Landry the information, for the platform suddenly came to a jolting stop, more-or-less at the top.

  The two men got off the platform onto a wooden plank scaffolding that extended a little way out from the cliff. It had a walkway that bridged from elevator to Rim. They walked over, and for the first time in five years, Abel was in the Redlands once again.

  The highland stretched to the east, north, and south. Its rolling, arid brokenness extended as far as the eye could see. Pricklebushes and onyxwood shrubs dotted the hillsides, which were streaked with lines of eroded minerals. Everywhere, in large rocks and fine-grained sand, was the red sandstone from which the vast domain took its name.

  “It is a beautiful place,” Timon said. He was gazing out alongside Abel. “You told me how big the sky was, but I could hardly picture it. Now I see that what you said was true, and more.”

  “Yes,” Abel said. “I’ve missed it.” Then he turned to Timon. “But time to go back down and prove to the men that we took the ride up and managed to live through it.”

  He and Timon walked over to the other side of the bridge, and down a short plank gangway to where the platform they had ridden up stood turned over. They stepped onto what had been its underside. Abel pulled the nearby lever downward and the twin signal flags were raised back to position, upright against the cliff and out of sight from below.

  Landry’s man signaled the engineer. The platform jolted as water fell once again into the buckets. The remainder was a smooth descent. With only Abel and Timon aboard and his practice accomplished, there was no need for the jolting progress of the ascent.

  As they neared the bottom, Abel could see the whole brigade looking up at him and Timon through the woodwork of the elevator. He gave them a chest-thumping salute. This brought out a cheer from below.

  Then Abel and Timon reached the bottom and disembarked. Abel nodded to Randolph, the Tuesday Company captain. He stepped on the lowest platform along with his senior staff sergeant and a select group of his men. All the men mounted the platform grimly, tension—even fear—in their faces.

  “Hold on to whatever you can grab that’s not moving, and try not to piss your pants,” he shouted to them. “That’s what I did going up.” He smiled and gave another salute. Landry raised them up until the next platform emptied its half-barrel buckets into the sluice and moved to the bottom for loading.

  After a few of these stop and start maneuvers, Landry gave over the details of the operation to his engineering corps. Two eight-man squads of engineers took control of the headgate rope, oversaw the loading, and kept an eye on the signal flags above, as the men hesitantly but inexorably stepped onto the platforms and were lifted out of the Valley.

  In increments, the entire brigade made its way to the Rim. Abel watched them as they loaded, occasionally nodding to a man he knew, and returning all salutes sent his way.

  Landry rode back up and ascertained there was a cut-off switch from above, just as there was below. He rode back down to inform Abel; then the two of them, along with their donts, became the last platform up.

  When Abel got to the Rim once more, he saw that the platoon sergeants all had their men well in hand. There was no shade to be had, but they were at least sitting. Some were taking the chance to catch a few moments of sleep.

  Abel rode Nettle north along the Rim. There was a smooth, well-defined wagon trail that ran not twenty elbs from the precipice. He signaled Timon to come up to him, and gave the order for the march to start again.

  The men were oddly silent moving along the Rim trail. Except for a few Scouts assigned to the division, they had lived all their lives within the confines of the Valley. They were always down in the Land, with the rising Escarpment to west and east. There were crops, trees along the River, and large irrigation waterways. And always the Valley walls to contain it all. The donts and daks did better. For them, a trail was a trail.

  Here there was nothing but sky. This was above. And, for a Valley man, the first emotion “above” awakened was deep anxiety.

  Above is unsafe.

  Abel understood those feelings. He’d had them himself when he’d first climbed the Rim as a teenage water bearer to the Treville Scouts.

  You got over it and learned to love the expanse. At least, he had.

  They marched northward one league, two. Abel called breaks as short as he had in the Valley below. It was during the third of these that Burridge, one of the brigade scouts riding picket through the brush beside the Rim Road, came charging back on his dont.

  “Clouds of dust to the east, sir.” Abel rode a fieldmarch apart from his column, away from the dust it was kicking up itself for better sight. Timon and a guard of six men followed. Abel called a halt and gazed eastward.


  Curse it to cold hell. Burridge was right.

  There was a cloud. And Abel knew what it was.

  “Men traveling,” he muttered. “Hundreds.”

  “Pardon, Colonel?” said Timon.

  “It’s a Blaskoye horde,” Abel said, more loudly. “They are heading south. I hope they haven’t seen us. They might drive us off the Rim with a single sweep. Thrice-damn it, I knew this was too easy. We have to prepare for the worst. Get back and order the men down on their stomachs.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Timon. He thundered off through the brush and prickleweed on his dont.

  Within moments, the division was hidden among the desert vegetation. Abel didn’t deceive himself. Blaskoye scouts were very difficult to fool. This was their home. The Third would likely be seen sooner or later.

  At least he could try to make it later.

  He looked out at the red cloud of the Blaskoye passing. He’d underestimated. It was an enormous group. The dust cloud stretched away north as far as he could see.

  “What do you think, Burridge?” he asked his Scout. “How many?”

  Burridge shook his head. “Seem to be like the stars, Colonel.”

  “Yes. That’s what I see, too.”

  “What do you make of it, if I might ask, sir?”

  “There’s only one place of military significance north of here. It is Orash,” Abel said. “I believe that’s where they are coming from. Why they went there, and what they may have done, I don’t know.” He faced Burridge. “Lieutenant, I want you to take a mounted squad of scouts out there and have a look. I’m going to accompany you, and I want no guff about that, but you’ll be in operational command and—”

  For a moment, Abel sat on his mount without speaking. Was that? Yes, it was. A section of the dust cloud had split off.