He thought he heard the wood creak beneath his weight, and he froze, tensing. But after a moment when the bridge didn’t give way and send him hurling into the chasm, he took another step, then another. This bridge was much smaller than the other, allowing him to grasp the ropes on both sides as he walked, a slight comfort that would make no difference at all should the whole thing come crashing down, but one which did, at least, aid him in keeping his feet as it began to rock from side to side beneath his weight.
In a life of terrifying situations, crossing that bridge ranked right up there with the worst, but in the end, he made it to the other side. As soon as his feet touched down on the mountainside the strength went out of his legs, and the next thing Dannen knew he’d collapsed to his knees. He didn’t quite kiss the ground like some character out of a storybook—the gods alone knew where it had been—but he wasn’t all that far from it. Once he got control of himself, he turned back and motioned to the others, not daring to shout for fear that it might send the whole structure plummeting into the abyss over which it hung.
Tesler came next and Dannen watched the man’s slow progress with a mixture of trepidation and relief that it wasn’t him. As he watched the man carefully negotiate the missing planks and the swaying bridge, Dannen found that he was glad he’d gone first for if he had not, witnessing the perilous journey of the others might well have left him frozen—figuratively and, considering that the wind was slowly picking up again, in time literally—in place.
The man took his time—the very least anyone should do, given the circumstances—but eventually he arrived at the other side with Dannen, his face seemingly bleached of all color but still alive. Even the squirrel, it seemed to Dannen, had grown paler, as if some of its dark brown fur had been turned white.
“Fun isn’t it?” Dannen asked as he took the man’s hand and pulled him off the bridge to stand beside him.
“Sure,” Tesler managed in a breathy voice, “a bla—” No way of knowing for sure what he’d meant to say, for in another moment he was hunkered over, spewing out the contents of his stomach onto the path and forcing the squirrel to scramble frantically lest it be thrown off its perch and risk falling into the chasm.
Mariana came next, and while Dannen and Tesler’s progress had been slow and uncertain, the woman seemed to glide across the bridge with ease, her feet barely touching the planks at all. And unless Dannen was seeing things, there was a fool grin spread across her face, as if crossing dilapidated bridges in the dead of winter was her idea of a good time.
Indeed, she was practically skipping along the bridge, not bothering to so much as hold onto the rope railings, and Dannen couldn’t help but feel a bit jealous considering that his own hands still ached from the death grip he’d kept on the ropes when he’d made his way across.
“She’s amazing.”
Dannen turned to look at the young man who was still on his knees but who had managed to take a break in his vomiting to stare with unabashed adoration at the woman, and he shook his head, turning back to her. There was a reason, he decided, why the young healed quicker than the old. Otherwise, no one would ever become old in the first place.
He was still watching in wonder and disbelief and more than a little envy, when one of the girl’s skipping feet slipped into the empty space where one of the bridge’s planks had fallen through. Then, suddenly, she wasn’t skipping but falling onto the bridge which, even from his position on the far side, Dannen heard creak threateningly.
“Mariana!” Tesler shouted, starting toward the bridge, but Dannen grabbed him by the arm, stopping him.
“Keep your damned voice down,” he hissed.
“B-but, but she needs our help,” Tesler said. “W-we have to do something.”
“Take it easy, lad,” Dannen said, “she’ll be alright.”
Though, when he glanced back, he decided that he wasn’t altogether sure about that last, not at all. The woman had fallen in such a way that her entire leg had gone through the space where the missing plank had been and was now hanging in the open air above a very, very long drop. Her other leg was splayed out behind her, and she lay on her stomach, her hands gripping the bottom part of the rope railing on either side of the bridge as if her life depended on it. Which, of course, it did.
“What do we do, Dannen?” Tesler asked, his voice breathless with fear.
There’s nothing we can do, Dannen thought, but since saying as much would likely send the love-stricken youth into a suicidal sprint across the bridge which could only end in both him and the girl plummeting to their deaths, he shook his head slowly. “Relax, lad. She’s fine—she’ll figure it out.”
It was clear that Tesler was still contemplating charging onto the bridge, but for the moment, at least, he remained still, watching anxiously. Dannen looked back and saw that the foolish grin was nowhere on the girl’s face, not now, and that, instead, she was staring forward at Dannen and Tesler with a face tense with terror.
Dannen forced himself to remain calm and gave the girl the most reassuring nod he could, and she took a slow, deep breath before nodding back, or perhaps simply shaking from the fear—there was no way to know for sure. In another moment, though, she was slowly lifting herself up, holding onto the rope rails as she did, easing her leg out of the deadly gap. Dannen watched, his own breath caught in his throat, but after several gut-clenching seconds, the girl managed to work her leg free.
A few seconds after that, she was standing again, resuming her progress across the bridge which, it had to be said, was considerably slower than at first. Eventually, though, she reached the other side, her face blotchy with terror, relief at being alive, or pure embarrassment, Dannen couldn’t tell and didn’t get much time to contemplate it for, before he could say anything, Tesler rushed forward and pulled her into a tight embrace.
“Thank the gods you’re okay,” he said.
She grunted, and Dannen thought he saw a smile flash across her face, only for an instant, before it was replaced by a look of mild annoyance. “Or I will be, at least, if you give me a chance…to breathe.”
“Oh, right,” Tesler said, releasing her immediately, his own face turning an angry crimson.
Dannen did his best to ignore them—lest he get the urge to push them both over the edge—turning instead to regard Fedder. The man stood on the far end of the bridge still, not having yet stepped onto it, a dubious expression on his face, one Dannen thought he understood. For one, the mage was considerably larger—and heavier—than Dannen and the others. For another, he didn’t doubt that the man’s last experience with a bridge, the one at the welven “city” and on which he had plummeted into a creek the contents of which were better not to consider too closely, was on his mind. After all, it was certainly on Dannen’s.
It wasn’t fear on the man’s expression—Dannen wasn’t sure if a man like Fedder the Firemaker was even capable of fear—but still he hesitated. No surprise, really. After all, Fedder was the sort of man used to solving his problems with fists, not avoiding or bypassing obstacles that arose in his path but instead charging through them like a pissed-off bull who broke through the wooden beams of its enclosure and then discovered, to its delight, that it enjoyed breaking things, decided to make a career out of it. The bridge, though, was not a man or a monster that might be beaten into submission, and any attempts to do so would only serve to increase the danger the man would face crossing it.
Finally, the mage took a slow, careful step onto the first plank of the bridge and Dannen held his breath, sure that the thing would collapse. The wood gave a threatening creak Dannen could hear even from this distance, but it held, and slowly, carefully, the mage began to work his way across.
Dannen was staring at him, willing him across—the mage might get on his nerves sometimes, but he’d be damned if he’d face a suicidal mission with only a couple of young, star-crossed lovers for company—and so could not help but notice when a figure appeared at the other end of the bridge. And not
just one figure but several more, even more climbing up the hillside as he watched like great ants scaling a tree. Only they were not ants, not these.
The undead.
Dannen stared, stunned, his heart racing. Apparently, one of the upsides to already being dead was that a several-hundred-foot drop into a chasm wasn’t anything more than a mild inconvenience. True, he noted that several of those undead climbing out of the ravine were missing parts—legs or arms, fingers and feet—but they came on anyway, not particularly put out by the absent limbs.
Most were weaponless—those notched, ill-used blades they’d carried before no doubt decorating the chasm beneath—but a few still wielded swords, and he was suddenly overcome with the absolute certainty that they would cut the supports connecting the bridge to their side of the mountain and send the unsuspecting mage plummeting to his death.
But the undead did no such thing. Apparently, one of the downsides to your brain rotting was that it had a way of robbing a person—or skeleton—of their out-of-the-box thinking. So while killing the mage would have been as easy as a single swipe of one of their blades, the undead, instead, clambered onto the bridge and began walking or, more often than not, dragging their way after Fedder who still had yet to notice them at all.
This was a problem, for while many of those undead pursuing the mage were missing limbs which made them considerably slower than they normally would have been, they were also missing the survival instinct which made Fedder move so slowly. So slowly, in fact, that the undead were gaining on him, missing legs and all.
Dannen hated the idea of shouting—experiencing one life-threatening avalanche, as it turned out, was more than enough—so he waved his hands, trying to get Fedder’s attention. The mage, though, was not looking at him, was instead watching his feet. Considering the state of the bridge and Mariana’s so recent fall, Dannen couldn’t blame him. Normally, it would have been the right thing, the smart thing, and Dannen felt a wave of annoyance and concern flash through him that the mage would choose this moment, of all moments to do the reasonable thing.
Since the reasonable thing, just now, meant that the undead were gaining on him by the moment and that, soon, they’d be on him, striking him down before he could even hear them thanks to the rushing wind.
“Oh gods,” Mariana said from beside him, “he doesn’t know they’re there. What do we do?”
Dannen winced. He didn’t like the idea of another avalanche, but neither did he like the idea of watching the mage get cut down when he might have stopped it, so he took a deep breath. “Fedder, behind you!”
The mage paused in his walking, looking up. “What?”
“Turn around!”
Even from this distance, he thought he detected a frown of confusion on the mage’s face. “Turn around?” he shouted back, “don’t know if now’s the time for jokes, Butcher.”
Dannen hissed. “What? No. the undead—they’re behind you!”
“Ha! Below me, more like.”
Dannen turned to stare at Tesler and Mariana in disbelief, and the two looked just as hopeless as he did himself. Dannen heaved a frustrated, worried sigh, and was turning back to the bridge to try again, when, suddenly, he saw a small, furry form running across the bridge. Or, more precisely, across one of the ropes that served as a handrail. With its sure footing and incredible dexterity, the squirrel made quick time, faster than Dannen, Tesler, even than Mariana before she had fallen.
In less than a minute, the squirrel reached the mage, standing up on its haunches and waving its little arms back behind Fedder in a gesture that, even on an animal so small, only a fool could misinterpret. Fedder, though, was apparently just that fool, and he turned back to Dannen. “Seems like the lad’s pet rat’s havin’ a fit, Butcher! Might be he ought to call it before it falls off and turns into squirrel mash!”
“Actually,” Tesler offered to Dannen, “squirrels can survive falls from any height—at least, just so long as they don’t suffocate, you know, or hit something. It has to do with their tails and how light weight their bodies are, which mean that they don’t fall nearly as fast as—”
“All really interesting, I’m sure,” Dannen said, “but maybe we can talk about this later, what do you say?”
Tesler cleared his throat, avoiding Mariana’s scowl. “Oh, um…of course. I just…right.”
Dannen gave his head a weary shake then turned back to the mage, preparing to try again. But just then, the squirrel chose to try a different tactic. It abandoned its perch on the rope hand-rail and scampered down to stand behind Fedder at his feet. Dannen was just trying to figure out what it meant to do when it lunged forward and buried its teeth in the mage’s ankle.
The mage might not have been able to hear clearly from so far away and with the wind, but Dannen could hear his roar of surprised pain without difficulty. Fedder spun, bringing his foot back, likely meaning to kick the squirrel and send it hurling into the chasm but froze as he noted the undead crowding the bridge.
The whole thing had taken only a couple of minutes but the undead had not been idle during that time, closing the gap between them and their quarry considerably so that the nearest—a skeleton missing a leg and one arm—was currently no more than a dozen feet away from the mage. Which was bad. What was considerably worse, though, was that as more and more of the undead began to make their way onto the bridge, it began to dip and sway noticeably, and even over the wind Dannen could hear the sounds of the wood planks struggling beneath the weight. He didn’t know how many undead it took to collapse a bridge—never had been much of a fan of brain teasers—but he thought he’d find out soon.
Tesler’s squirrel seemed all too aware of the peril of it and the mage’s situation, at least judging by the way it turned, abandoning the mage and sprinting toward the mountainside where Dannen and the others stood as fast as its little squirrel legs would carry it. Apparently, it wasn’t quite so prepared as Tesler to test his squirrels-can’t-die-from-falling theory.
Fedder, who was forced to hold onto both rope railings to keep from being tumbled over the side of the swaying bridge, couldn’t have helped but notice his peril, and Dannen was assured of this when, a moment later, the mage turned and started hurriedly toward where Dannen and the others waited.
He made far worse time than Tesler’s pet, but then Dannen couldn’t blame him, for Dannen’s own stomach lurched in protest at how dramatic the bridge’s swinging was becoming. His hands knotted into nervous fists at his sides, his forehead breaking out into a sweat despite the frigid temperatures, and Dannen was forced to face a truth.
Fedder was his friend. As much as the man annoyed him, as much as he put both of their lives in peril on more occasions than Dannen cared to contemplate, the man was his friend. Likely his only one, and he did not want to watch him plummet to his death, thrown from some shitty bridge between two shitty mountains for no good reason.
The problem, though, was that there was nothing he could do about it. Already, he could see the ropes which bound the bridge together beginning to slowly slacken and unravel, and for all he knew his weight would be enough to speed up the process, to bring the whole thing crashing down. So he only stood, waiting, fearing for his friend.
But despite all his concerns and dark imaginings, the mage reached the other side of the bridge without incident, his face a white mask as he stumbled off onto solid ground. The undead were crowding the swaying bridge now, its arc so dramatic that, even as Dannen looked, several were thrown free. Not that it seemed to bother those which remained and not that it would matter to him and the others, for those crowding the bridge—twenty at least and more still coming—would be more than enough to ruin their day should the bridge hold long enough to allow them to cross.
It was unlikely as even now the bridge was creaking dangerously, but Dannen decided that, the way the last few days—the way his life—had been, it was probably best not to take any chances. So he reached into his belt where he always kept his knife unti
l his hands clasped nothing but air and he realized that “always” had been many years and many pounds ago, and that he had nothing with which he might cut the rope.
Frantic, for the undead—at least those who had not already been thrown to their…undeath in the chasm below—were drawing close now, he began scanning the mountainside for something, a sharp stone perhaps, that he might use to sever the frayed ropes. In the end, though, he needn’t have bothered for the squirrel apparently had the same idea and skittered past him, climbing onto the ropes and beginning to chew.
Its small teeth made surprisingly quick work of the ropes and the nearest undead soldier was still nearly a dozen feet away when it and the rest of its companions plummeted, along with the bridge, into the chasm below. Dannen stared, stunned, as the squirrel turned a haughty look on him before scampering back up Tesler to perch on the man’s shoulder.
The immediate danger past, Dannen turned to glance at Fedder. “You okay?”
The mage gave a casual shrug. “Absolutely,” he said, before not so casually collapsing into a sitting position, his back resting against the mountainside seeming to be the only thing keeping him upright. Dannen glanced at the others. “Everyone else?”
“Oh, perfect,” Mariana said, her voice thick with sarcasm. “Couldn’t be better.”
Dannen grunted, glancing at the young man. “Tesler?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “A bit cold, though.”
Dannen blinked. A “bit” cold was one of the greatest understatements he’d ever heard, but then it seemed that the young man had a knack for those. After all, the wind had picked up again, the snow falling in heavy, sweeping gusts, stinging Dannen’s exposed face, and he thought that whatever relief they might have felt at evading their undead pursuers was likely to be short-lived as freezing to death was becoming a very real, very likely possibility. “Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together in a vain effort to work some warmth back into them, “at least the greatest danger’s past.”
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