The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  “How can you move on this?” Kit said, fascinated. “Or even float?” The hillock immediately before them was flattening as he watched. Beyond it something like a vale stretched out for a few dozen yards before turning and becoming lost to his eyes.

  “Well, I can’t, not today,” Rasali said. She sat on the gunwale of her boat, one leg swinging, watching him. “I can’t push the Crossing up those slopes or find a safe path, unless the mist shows me the way. If I went today, I know—I know—” she tapped her belly—“that I would find myself stranded on a pinnacle or lost in a hole. That’s why I can’t take you today, Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

  When Kit was a child, he had not been good with other people. He was small and easy to tease or ignore, and then he was sick for much of his seventh year and had to leave his crèche before the usual time, to convalesce in his mother’s house. None of the children of the crèche came to visit him, but he didn’t mind that: he had books and puzzles, and whole quires of blank paper that his mother didn’t mind him defacing.

  The clock in the room in which he slept didn’t work, so one day he used his penknife to take it apart. He arranged the wheels and cogs and springs in neat rows on the quilt in his room, by type and then by size; by materials; by weight; by shape. He liked holding the tiny pieces, thinking of how they might have been formed and how they worked together. The patterns they made were interesting, but he knew the best pattern would be the working one, when they were all put back into their right places and the clock performed its task again. He had to think that the clock would be happier that way, too.

  He tried to rebuild the clock before his mother came upstairs from her counting house at the end of the day, but when he had reassembled things, there remained a pile of unused parts and it still didn’t work; so he shut the clock up and hoped she wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t ticking. Four days more of trying things during the day and concealing his failures at night; and on the fifth day, the clock started again. One piece hadn’t fit anywhere, a small brass cog. Kit still carried that cog in his pen case.

  Late that afternoon, Kit returned to the river’s edge. It was hotter; the mud had dried to cracked dust, and the air smelled like old rags left in water too long. He saw no one at the ferry dock, but at the fisher’s dock upstream people were gathering, a score or more of men and women, with children running about.

  The clutter looked even more disorganized as he approached. The fishing boats were fat little coracles of leather stretched on frames, tipped bottom up to the sun and looking like giant warts. The mist had dropped so that he could see a band of exposed rock below the bank. The dock’s pilings were clearly visible, which were not vertical but set at an angle: a cantilevered deck braced into the stone underlying the bank. The wooden pilings had been sheathed in metal.

  He approached a silver-haired woman doing something with a treble hook as long as her hand. “What are you catching with that?” he said.

  Her forehead was wrinkled when she looked up, but she smiled when she saw him. “Oh, you’re a stranger. From Atyar, dressed like that. Am I right? We catch fish . . . ” Still holding the hook, she extended her arms as far as they would stretch. “Bigger than that, some of them. Looks like more storms, so they’re going to be biting tonight. I’m Meg Threehooks. Of Nearside, obviously.”

  “Kit Meinem of Atyar. I take it you can’t find a bottom?” He pointed to the pilings.

  Jen Threehooks followed his glance. “It’s there somewhere, but it’s a long way down, and we can’t sink pilings because the mist dissolves the wood. Oh, and fish eat it. Same thing with our ropes, the boats, us—anything but metal and rock, really.” She knotted a line around the hook eye. The cord was dark and didn’t look heavy enough for anything Kit could imagine catching on hooks that size.

  “What are these made of, then?” He squatted to look at the framing under one of the coracles.

  “Careful, that one’s mine,” Meg said. “The hides—well, and all the ropes—are fish-skin. Mist fish, not water fish. Tanning takes off some of the slime, so they don’t last forever either, not if they’re immersed.” She made a face. “We have a saying: foul as fish-slime. That’s pretty nasty, you’ll see.”

  “I need to get to Farside,” Kit said. “Could I hire you to carry me across?”

  “In my boat?” She snorted. “No, fishers stay close to shore. Go see Rasali Ferry. Or Valo.”

  “I saw her,” he said ruefully.

  “Thought so. You must be the new architect—city folk are always so impatient. You’re so eager to be dinner for a Big One? If Rasali doesn’t want to go, then don’t go, stands to reason.”

  Kit was footsore and frustrated by the time he returned to The Fish. His trunks were already upstairs, in a small cheerful room overwhelmed by a table that nearly filled it, with a stiflingly hot cupboard bed. When Kit spoke to the woman he’d talked to earlier, Brana Keep, the owner of The Fish (its real name turned out to be The Big One’s Delight)—laughed. “Rasali’s as hard to shift as bedrock,” she said. “And, truly, you would not be comfortable at The Heart.”

  By the next morning, when Kit came downstairs to break his fast on flatbread and pepper-rubbed fish, everyone appeared to know everything about him, especially his task. He had wondered whether there would be resistance to the project, but if there had been any, it was gone now. There were a few complaints, mostly about slow payments, a universal issue for public works; but none at all about the labor or organization. Most in the taproom seemed not to mind the bridge, and the feeling everywhere he went in town was optimistic. He’d run into more resistance elsewhere, building the small bridges.

  “Well, why should we be concerned?” Brana Keep said to Kit. “You’re bringing in people to work, yes? So we’ll be selling room and board and clothes and beer to them. And you’ll be hiring some of us, and everyone will do well while you’re building this bridge of yours. I plan to be wading ankle-deep through gold by the time this is done.”

  “And after,” Kit said, “when the bridge is complete—think of it, the first real link between the east and west sides of Empire. The only place for three thousand miles where people and trade can cross the mist easily, safely, whenever they wish. You’ll be the heart of Empire in ten years. Five.” He laughed a little, embarrassed by the passion that shook his voice.

  “Yes, well,” Brana Keep said, in the easy way of a woman who makes her living by not antagonizing customers, “we’ll make that harness when the colt is born.”

  For the next six days, Kit explored the town and surrounding countryside.

  He met the masons, a brother and sister that Teniant had selected before her death to oversee the pillar and anchorage construction on Nearside. They were quiet but competent, and Kit was comfortable not replacing them.

  Kit also spoke with the Nearside rope-makers, and performed tests on their fish-skin ropes and cables, which turned out even stronger than he had hoped, with excellent resistance to rot, and catastrophic and slow failure. The makers told him that the rope stretched for its first two years in use, which made it ineligible to replace the immense chains that would bear the bridge’s weight; but it could replace the thousands of vertical suspender chains that would support the roadbed, with a great saving in weight.

  He spent much of his time watching the mist. It changed character unpredictably: a smooth rippled flow; hours later, a badland of shredding foam; still later, a field of steep dunes that joined and shifted as he watched. There was nothing level about the mist’s surface, but he thought that the river generally dropped in its bed each day under the sun, and rose after dark.

  The winds were more predictable. Hedged between the levees, they streamed southward each morning and north each evening, growing stronger toward midday and dusk, and falling away entirely in the afternoons and at night. They did not seem to affect the mist much, though they did tear shreds off that landed on the banks as dried foam.

  The winds meant that there would be more dynamic loa
d on the bridge than Teniant Planner had predicted. Kit would never criticize her work publicly and he gladly acknowledged her brilliant interpersonal skills, which had brought the town into cheerful collaboration, but he was grateful that her bridge had not been built as designed.

  He examined the mist more closely, as well, by lifting a piece from the river’s surface on the end of an oar. The mist was stiffer than it looked, and in bright light he thought he could see tiny shapes, perhaps creatures or plants or something altogether different. There were microscopes in the city, and people who studied these things; but he had never bothered to learn more, interested only in the structure that would bridge it. In any case, living things interested him less than structures.

  Nights, Kit worked on the table in his room. Teniant’s plans had to be revised. He opened the folios and cases she had left behind and read everything he found there. He wrote letters, wrote lists, wrote schedules, made duplicates of everything, sent to the capital for someone to do all the subsequent copying. His new plans for the bridge began to take shape, and he started to glimpse the invisible architecture that was the management of the vast project.

  He did not see Rasali Ferry, except to ask each morning whether they might travel that day. The answer was always no.

  One afternoon, when the clouds were heaping into anvils filled with rain, he walked up to the building site half a mile north of Nearside. For two years, off and on, carts had tracked south on the Hoic Mine road and the West River Road, leaving limestone blocks and iron bars in untidy heaps. Huge dismantled shear-legs lay beside a caretaker’s wattle-and-daub hut. There were thousands of large rectangular blocks.

  Kit examined some of the blocks. Limestone was often too chossy for large-scale construction, but this rock was sound, with no apparent flaws or fractures. There were not enough, of course, but undoubtedly more had been quarried. He had written to order resumption of deliveries, and they would start arriving soon.

  Delivered years too early, the iron trusses that would eventually support the roadbed were stacked neatly, painted black to protect them from moisture, covered in oiled tarps, and raised from the ground on planks. Sheep grazed the knee-high grass that grew everywhere. When one of the sheep eyed him incuriously, Kit found himself bowing. “Forgive the intrusion, sir,” he said and laughed: too old to be talking to sheep.

  The test pit was still open, a ladder on the ground nearby. Weeds clung when he moved the ladder as if reluctant to release it. He descended.

  The pasture had not been noisy, but he was startled when he dropped below ground level and the insects and whispering grasses were suddenly silenced. The soil around him was striated shades of dun and dull yellow. Halfway down, he sliced a wedge free with his knife: lots of clay; good foundation soil, as he had been informed. The pit’s bottom, some twenty feet down, looked like the walls, but crouching to dig at the dirt between his feet with his knife, he hit rock almost immediately. It seemed to be shale. He wondered how far down the water table was: did the Nearsiders find it difficult to dig wells? Did the mist ever backwash into one? There were people at University in Atyar who were trying to understand mist, but there was still so much that could not be examined or quantified.

  He collected a rock to look at it in better light, and climbed from the pit in time to see a teamster leading four mules, her wagon groaning under the weight of the first new blocks. A handful of Nearsider men and women followed, rolling their shoulders and popping their joints. They called out greetings, and he walked across to them.

  When he got back to The Fish hours later, exhausted from helping unload the cart and soaked from the storm that had started while he did so, there was a message from Rasali. Dusk was all it said.

  Kit was stiff and irritable when he left for the Tranquil Crossing. He had hired a carrier from The Fish to haul one of his trunks down to the dock, but the others remained in his room, which he would probably keep until the bridge was done. He carried his folio of plans and paperwork himself. He was leaving duplicates of everything on Nearside, but after so much work, it was hard to trust any of it to the hands of others.

  The storm was over and the clouds were moving past, leaving the sky every shade between lavender and a rich purple-blue. The large moon was a crescent in the west; the smaller a half circle immediately overhead. In the fading light, the mist was a dark, smoky streak. The air smelled fresh. Kit’s mood lightened, and he half-trotted down the final path.

  His fellow passengers were there before him: a prosperous-looking man with a litter of piglets in a woven wicker cage (Tengon whites, the man confided, the best bloodline in all Empire); a woman in the dark clothes fashionable in the capital, with brass-bound document cases and a folio very like Kit’s; two traders with many cartons of powdered pigment; a mail courier with locked leather satchels and two guards. Nervous about their first crossing, Uni and Tom Mason greeted Kit when he arrived.

  In the gathering darkness, the mist looked like bristling, tight-folded hills and coulees. Swifts darted just above it, using the wind flowing up the valley, searching for insects, he supposed. Once a sudden black shape, too quick to see clearly, appeared from below; then it, and one of the birds, was gone.

  The voices of the fishers at their dock carried to him. They launched their boats, and he watched one, and then another, and then a gaggle of the little coracles push themselves up a slope of the mist. There were no lamps.

  “Ready, everyone?” Kit had not heard Rasali approach. She swung down into the ferry. “Hand me your gear.”

  Stowing and embarkation were quick, though the piglets complained. Kit strained his eyes, but the coracles could no longer be seen. When he noticed Rasali waiting for him, he apologized. “I guess the fish are biting.”

  Rasali glanced at the river as she stowed his trunk. “Small ones. A couple of feet long only. The fishers like them bigger, five or six feet, though they don’t want them too big, either. But they’re not fish, not what you think fish are. Hand me that.”

  He hesitated a moment, then gave her the folio before stepping into the ferry. The boat sidled at his weight, but sluggishly: a carthorse instead of a riding mare. His stomach lurched. “Oh!” he said.

  “What?” one of the traders asked nervously. Rasali untied the rope holding them to the dock.

  Kit swallowed. “I had forgotten. The motion of the boat. It’s not like water at all.”

  He did not mention his fear, but there was no need. The others murmured assent. The courier, her dark face sharp-edged as a hawk, growled, “Every time I do this, it surprises me. I dislike it.”

  Rasali unshipped a scull and slid the great triangular blade into the mist, which parted reluctantly. “I’ve been on mist more than water, but I remember the way water felt. Quick and jittery. This is better.”

  “Only to you, Rasali Ferry,” Uni Mason said.

  “Water’s safer,” the man with the piglets said.

  Rasali leaned into the oar, and the boat slid away from the dock. “Anything is safe until it kills you.”

  The mist absorbed the quiet sounds of shore almost immediately. One of Kit’s first projects had been a stone single-arch bridge over water, far to the north in Eskje province. He had visited before construction started. He was there for five days more than he had expected, caught by a snowstorm that left nearly two feet on the ground. This reminded him of those snowy moonless nights, the air as thick and silencing as a pillow on the ears.

  Rasali did not scull so much as steer. It was hard to see far in any direction except up, but perhaps it was true that the mist spoke to her, for she seemed to know where to position the boat for the mist to carry it forward. She followed a small valley until it started to flatten and then mound up. The Tranquil Crossing tipped slightly as it slid a few feet to port. The mail carrier made a noise, and immediately stifled it.

  Mist was a misnomer. It was denser than it seemed, and sometimes the boat seemed not to move through it so much as over its surface. Tonight it seeme
d like sea-wrack, the dirty foam that strong winds could whip from ocean waves. Kit reached a hand over the boat’s side. The mist piled against his hand, almost dry to the touch, sliding up his forearm with a sensation he could not immediately identify. When he realized it was prickling, he snatched his arm back in and rubbed it on a fold of his coat. The skin burned. Caustic, of course.

  The man with the pigs whispered, “Will they come if we talk or make noise?”

  “Not to talking, or pigs’ squealing,” Rasali said. “They seem to like low noises. They’ll rise to thunder sometimes.”

  One of the traders said, “What are they if they’re not really fish? What do they look like?” Her voice shook. The mist was weighing on them all: all but Rasali.

  “If you want to know you’ll have to see one for yourself,” Rasali said. “Or try to get a fisher to tell you. They gut and fillet them over the sides of their boats. No one else sees much but meat wrapped in paper, or rolls of black skin for the rope-makers and tanners.”

  “You’ve seen them,” Kit said.

  “They’re broad and flat. But ugly . . . ”

  “And Big Ones?” Kit asked.

  Her voice was harsh. “Them, we don’t talk about here.”

  No one spoke for a time. Mist—foam—heaped up at the boat’s prow and parted, eased to the sides with an almost inaudible hissing. Once the mist off the port side heaved, and something dark broke the surface for a moment, followed by other dark somethings; but the somethings were not close enough to see well. One of the merchants cried without a sound or movement, the tears on his face the only evidence.

  The Farside levee showed at last, a black mass that didn’t get any closer for what felt like hours. Fighting his fear, Kit leaned over the side, keeping his face away from the surface. “It can’t really be bottomless,” he said, half to himself. “What’s under it?”