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whistling through the bridge cables.
I hope you re throwing something heavy, Radmer says to the two men. At
someone truly deserving.
They look up, and one of them says, Oh. Hello, General.
Radmer seems disappointed with that. Is that all you have for me, Orange? No
warm greetings? Aren t you surprised to see me alive?
Should we be? asks the other man, who must be Mika, the armorer. All
right, then, it s good to see you. Alive. Can you give us a hand with this
cocking latch?
Sure. Radmer puts his kickstand down and dismounts. What s the payload?
I d dearly love to drop a greeting card right on the south pole. Just a note
to say hello, right? But I m afraid a show of defiance will tip our hand
prematurely. Better to show our weakest face, until the last possible moment.
He ll findus a bit sticky, if you ll excuse my saying. This here s eight
tons of glue bombs, packed to scatter.That ought to hold the pass for a minute
or two.
Catching hold of a spring-loaded lever, Radmer laughs. We can hope, yes. Are
there oil traps as well, to tilt and slide your enemies into the Divide?
Course there are, says Orange Mayhew.
And other gifts, says Mika, fit for a Glimmer King. Where re you heading?
Stormlands.
Ah. Bad luck, that.
Eh. No worse than usual. I saw Manassa from orbit a hidden ruin, perfectly
preserved right there in the center so we re hoping to collect a few surprises
of our own.
Hmm, says Orange Mayhew. Well. Do me one favor, General: don t get
killed.
I ll take that under advisement. You too, hey?
But Orange just shrugs. We re human beings, sir, Mika here and myself.
Living forever, well, it ain t on our list of options.
chapter twenty
in which darkness proves an ally
On the other side of Tillspar, the highway is lessicy but in generally poorer
condition. As the road snakes down the eastern slope of the Sawtooth Mountains
there are shelves and valleys with highways of their own opportunities to turn
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north or south but the riders follow the Junction Highway east and down. The
air gets warmer, thicker, easier to breathe, and Bruno s ears pop again and
again as the pressure upon them slowly increases.
But every kilometer of road seems to be in greater disrepair than the one
before it. As the treaders pass through East Black Forest, potholes give way
to craters. And as the solar trees thin out to a simple pine forest, the
craters become larger and more frequent. Ironically, just as the road is
beginning to straighten and level out, it becomes impossible to follow
anything like a straight-line course along it. A treader must needs zigzag
between the holes at half speed.
I m surprised there s any pavement here at all, Radmer says when Bruno
remarks on it.
Nobody looks after this road, Natan agrees. It don t go anywhere.
At that Radmer muses, It used to go straight to Crossroads, near the triple
point where Imbria and Nubia and Viense come together. It was bigger than
Timoch, which back then was a sheep-and-cow town. Manassa was the largest city
in the hemisphere, a center of commerce easily rivaling Tosen and Bolo on the
south coast. Keep in mind, there were a lot more people then.
I remember the Iridium Days well, Bruno tells him, if not happily. Lune
was the rotting corpse of our Queendom; I couldn t love it. Couldn tbear it. I
fled because my soul had died and my body refused to follow. But I do remember
Manassa. The towers of wellglass all strung together with bridges, and every
morning a silence field enforcing ten minutes of meditation . . . When I left
they were in a blue period, with every surface glowing in the sun like
crystalline bits of sky.
Well, says Radmer, after the Shattering, Manassa was gone and the Junction
Highway led straight into permanent storm, and you had to take the long way
around to get to Crossroads. The little towns along the way continued for
quite some time afterwards, but one by one they sort of dried up and blew
away. This road is two thousand years old, and it s been, I ll guess, almost
three hundred years since it saw any attention. So like I say, the surprising
thing is that there s any road left.
Bruno snorts at that. When I was a boy we were still using Roman roads,
older than this one and in far better condition.
The Catalan weather was kinder, Radmer says. For what it s worth, there
are diamond highways here on Lune that will last until the end of time. This
pavement was a high-end temporary, never meant to last so long.
Ahead of them, finally, the sky above another mountain range has begun to
show signs of impending dawn. Even on Lune, the night cannot last forever. And
the extra light is welcome, because the riders have finally abandoned the idea
of avoiding the rough spots, and are now riding straight through them in a
clattering mass. At first the clever six-wheeled suspension of the treaders is
adequate to the task, but as the ruts deepen and their shapes become more
complex, the wheels begin to exceed their vertical travel limits.
Soon, the heaving bodies of the treaders are pummeling their riders legs,
and headlight beams are waving up and down so madly that the road might as
well be illuminated by strobe lights. Progress slows yet again. They re still
going faster than they would on foot, but that margin is shrinking. Still,
Bruno finds he can minimize the beating by crouching in his
stirrups essentially using his legs and back as an extension of the vehicle s
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suspension system. And once that principle is established, there s no reason
not to straighten out his back, to stand tall for a better view, to gun the
throttle and dance with the bumps.
To his surprise, he s having a good time, and not feeling guilty about it.
Notall the problems of this world are his fault, after all, and this ride is
in the service of a noble cause, from which he may very well not return. And
that, in truth, may be part of why he s feeling good; the possibility of death
hangs all around him. He nearly died back there in the pass; for Parma and
that unlucky rider there was no nearly about it.
Bruno has been without useful work for so long that he hasn t even bothered
to count out the span. Thousands of years, certainly. But here he is again,
doing something. And his time on this world, on any world, may at last be
nearly over his sins all called to account so what s the point in holding
back? There s nothing to keep him from riding to the limits of his ability,
and even slightly beyond.
Eventually, he finds himself leading the pack, the wind whipping his hair out
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