Mortar Over the Fog

Hemp rope had a sour smell when wet, like dead river weed rotting in the sun. Ebele-oma swung sixty yards below the carriage deck of the Great Span, her boots braced against the curve of the seventh rib, waiting for the wind to drop so she could wedge another pound of slaked lime into the crack. If the mortar dried before she drove it into the fissure, the foreman at the northern gatehouse would dock her wage four copper bits for wasted paste.

Below her swinging stirrups, white vapor hid the canyon floor. Somewhere beneath that blank floor of cloud, eight hundred feet down in the ravine mud, water was gnawing at the petrified flanks of the sky-beast. Up here, the air tasted of cold grit and river salt.

She ran her thumb down the seam. A fissure could be superficial—chalky crust sloughing from the animal’s ancient hide after an autumn frost—or it could run straight to the marrow canal.

She took her flat tapping-iron from her tool roll and struck the rib three inches above the joint.

A true stone pillar would have rung clear, like an anvil under a hammer. The beast’s petrified bone gave back a damp, shuddering thud that rattled the fillings in her molars. The pitch died immediately.

"Two inches of skin," she muttered, her breath condensing against the cold calcium face. "Nothing behind it but porridge."

She shifted the bucket of slaked mortar down to her knee tether. The wooden pail swung against her shin, heavy with lime, animal blood, and pulverized river shale. It was northern guild mixture, boiled thick enough to resist the damp wind for half a season. The guild elders in the upper towers called it sealing-grease, as if the ancient dead spine were a common merchant skiff requiring fresh pitch along its gunwales.

A crow called from the timber bracing forty paces east. Masons who worked the drop lines had a saying about the birds: if you slip, pray you hit the north bank or the south bank, because if you drop down the middle, the toll-clerks will argue over who collects the salvage duty before the crows finish your eyes.

She jammed the iron trowel into the pail, scooped a gray wedge of binder, and drove it hard into the split.

The bone answered with a twitch.

It was not a tremor from the earth. When the mountain fault slipped, the vibration came as a broad, rolling roll that set the iron suspension chains humming from shore to shore. This was a localized contraction, sudden and tight, like a muscle jerking under a needle.

Ebele-oma froze, her boots sliding half an inch on the lichen-slick bone. Her left hand clamped on the primary suspension line. The three-ply hemp strand was taut as iron cordage, pinned to an iron ring-bolt driven sixty feet above into the beast’s neural arch.

A second twitch followed, sharper than the first. Deep within the core of the rib, something popped.

It sounded like dry timber snapping beneath an ox wagon. Through the mouth of the fissure, where her wet mortar still clung, a hiss escaped. A greasy yellow bead welled from the split, glistening against the dull gray chalk.

The stink hit her face before the vapor could disperse: boiled sulfur, bitter copper, and vinegar.

"Out," she told herself. Her voice came small and hard against the howling fog. "Clear the line."

For three centuries the toll-clerks had sworn the sky-beast was mineral, inert as granite, a ridge of petrified ivory gifted to bridge the chasm. Masons were paid to caulk cracks, not question what lay beneath the calcium.

The yellow bead burst into a thin, sizzling froth. Where the fluid touched her fresh mortar, the lime began to boil, throwing off curling tendrils of acrid smoke that stung her nostrils and made her eyes flood with tears.

Ebele-oma kicked off from the rib with both heels, letting the harness swing her out into open mist. The drop ladder hung five feet to her right, its rungs of split hickory swaying in the canyon drafts.

As she reached for the lower rung, a drop of the yellow froth splashed against the main suspension rope three feet above her hip.

The hemp did not smolder. It vanished. The corrosive sweat dissolved the outer plies with a vicious hiss, turning the tight-twisted fibers into black sludge. The braided core frayed under her weight, two strands unraveling into gray fuzz.

Her stomach leaped into her throat as the rig dropped six inches with a sickening jerk.

One strand held. A single thread of greasy hemp kept her suspended over the fog-choked abyss.

She did not kick. Wild movement would saw the remaining fibers across the burning edge of the knot. Instead, she transferred her grip to the secondary safety loop at her shoulder, shifting her center of gravity an inch at a time until her right hand found the hickory rung of the ladder.

Her knuckles locked around the wood. She hooked her left boot through the bottom loop, throwing her whole weight onto the ladder frame just as the last fiber of the rope parted with a dry snap.

Her tool bucket fell away. It tumbled through the white blanket below, turning end over end until the mist swallowed it without an echo. The heavy tapping-iron, still looped to her leather wrist thong, banged against her knee.

She began to climb.

Every mason learned the ladder drill blind, but panic had a way of turning fingers into wood. She kept her chin tucked into her collar, moving hand over hand, boot after boot, ignoring the scrape of the calcified wall against her shins. Five rungs up. Ten rungs.

Below her, from the fissure she had tried to caulk, the hiss turned into a rhythmic bubbling. The rib was weeping yellow marrow-sweat now, thick ribbons of bile that streaked down the curve of the bone toward the belly plates. Wherever it ran, the old gray stone pitted and steamed.

It was eating its own skeleton. The creature’s preserved interior was turning into poison, shedding the lime shell that kept two warring kingdoms joined at the waist.

She reached the top platform under the span's main overhang, dragging herself over the timber lip with her forearms. She lay belly-down on the rough fir planks, her lungs burning, her palms gray with sweat and chalk dust.

Above her, the wooden planks of the upper carriage road rattled. Carters were moving, their draft mules plodding rhythmically toward the northern scales. Up there, men were arguing over sacks of sorghum, salt tariffs, and the axle-tax on dried peppers. None of them could smell the vinegar beneath the floor.

She rolled onto her back, cradling her bruised right wrist. The tapping-iron was intact, its square nose coated in fine white bone-meal.

Then, through the morning damp, a sound rolled across the gorge from the south.

It was not the high whistle of a toll-marshal or the bell of a pilgrim caravan. It was the low, brassy bellow of an Ikenga war-horn, blown three times in the cadence of a royal herald.

Ebele-oma sat up, peering through the gaps between the road planks.

On the southern cliff, through the lifting mist of the ridge road, iron points caught the pale morning sun. An army’s baggage train was winding down from the heights—not light trade wagons, but lumbering three-team wains loaded with the iron timbers of siege engines.

Judging by the siege gear, the southern constable was not waiting for the winter truce to expire. He was bringing his lord's war-iron onto the span before midday, and the bone beneath them was already turning to water.