The Upward Crawl

Eight hundred feet of petrified bone rose straight into the river fog, and Tobechi-adu wanted only one thing: to reach the dry maintenance cradle beneath the upper ribs before the venom from his bitten wrist climbed into his shoulder and dropped him back into the mud. He had two clay gourds of living marrow-sweat and his charred-bone ash-pouch at his belt, the southern duke's heavy bronze armlet tucked safely at the bottom of his woven creel, and a useless left hand. If he stayed on the canyon floor, the numbness would take his neck by twilight; if he reached the masons' hanging catwalks, he had rope, dry timber, and a chance to burn the poison out.

He drove his bamboo stilts deep into the riverbed clay and lashed them to an ancient iron mooring ring. The Northern Guild taxed handcarts by the axle, but left mud-trackers alone because no toll collector cared to ruin silk slippers in three feet of acidic silt for four groats. Leaving the stilts behind was a risk, but stilts were worthless on a vertical wall. He took his horn scraping-knife between his teeth, hitched the creel higher on his good shoulder, and set his bare toes into the first notch in the bone.

His left wrist burned with a dull, rhythmic throb. The puncture marks from the leech had swollen into two violet ridges under the wet linen wrapping, hot to the touch and leaking a pale, oily fluid that smelled of copper filings and cold tallow. Every four heartbeats, a thin needle of fire crawled from the meat of his thumb toward the elbow joint. He could still curl the fingers into a fist, but the knuckles felt thick, packed with cold lard.

Down here in the silt, the only sound was the hollow sucking of the mud flats and the low, metal hum vibrating through the calcified roots beneath his feet.

He climbed by the fluting. In the three centuries since the grandfathers pinned the beast to the gorge, seasonal floods had carved vertical gutters down its petrified flanks, deep enough to seat three fingers and the ball of a foot. The bone was dense, pale yellow, and cold as river ice.

Thirty feet above the mud, the first updraft caught his mantle, fluttering the stiff leather against his ribs. The canyon air carried the stench of the upper roadway: charred spruce smoke, oxen dung, and the sharp vinegar reek of freshly sheared calcium.

Tobechi-adu wedged his right foot onto a fossilized tendon ridge and paused to shift the weight of his creel. His left fingers were already stiffening. He had to pry them open against his thigh before they would close around the strap.

Sixty feet up, the tendon flutes narrowed into a vertical chimney where the spray from the lower rapids never dried. A colony of juvenile bone-leeches had taken root in the cleft. They were small, none longer than a finger, their pale segmented bodies clustered over the damp rock. They stirred at the tremor of his approach, dozens of horn-rimmed mouthparts flexing toward the warmth of his blood.

Iron would only split their skins and spill caustic acid over his bare hands. Ash would choke them, but dry bone-ash was useless against sixty hungry mouths in a howling vertical draft; the wind would tear the powder away before it touched the stone.

Tobechi-adu hung from his right elbow in the narrow cleft, ignoring the cramp biting into his shoulder. With his teeth and his good right hand, he loosened the cork of the first clay gourd at his belt.

The grease inside was dark violet, shimmering with iridescent scum under the grey daylight. He dipped the horn tip of his scraping-knife into the neck, drawing out a single droplet of living marrow-sweat. Instead of flinging it into the nest, he reached across the chimney and drew a thin, greasy line down an abandoned drainage rut four feet to his left.

The scent hit the chimney like burning fat.

Inside the crevice, the white bodies went rigid. Then they boiled out of the rock, tumbling over one another in a frantic, blind crawl toward the fresh smear of their mother's fluid. They snapped at the slick rock, gorging on the droplet, hissing as their segmented rings expanded.

The main fissure cleared. Tobechi-adu pushed the cork home with his teeth, jammed his boots into the vacated crevices, and hauled himself upward before the trail cooled.

At three hundred feet, the fog thickened into a blind, clinging drift. The canyon floor vanished beneath a carpet of dull grey fleece, leaving him suspended between the vertical bone and the empty air.

Here the beast's flanks flattened out into the underside of the first thoracic arch. Hammered into the petrified bone beside an ancient survey pin hung a weathered oak board, its painted Northern runes cracked by frost. It announced a toll of twelve copper pieces for any unauthorized scavenger caught using the guild's service cleats, payable upon arrest at the gatehouse above.

Tobechi-adu spat against the board. A clerk who believed a man falling from three hundred feet would survive long enough to pay twelve coppers deserved every bad winter that came down the canyon.

He gripped the iron service cleat beside the sign. The metal was loose in its bore. Around the square shank, the bone had shrunk back, surrounded by a ring of crumbly yellow dust that tasted like dry bile on his tongue.

The upper winds hit him hard as he cleared the cloud line.

Above him stretched the underbelly of the Great Span: petrified rib-arches, timber catwalks, and hanging coils of old hemp tackle. Directly overhead, the massive fourth vertebra loomed out of the mist.

Tobechi-adu hauled his chest over the lip of a cedar maintenance platform slung thirty feet beneath the deck.

His boots struck the wet planks. He sank onto both knees, holding his swollen left arm against his ribs. His fingers would not uncurl; the skin across his forearm had turned a dull, waxy grey. He breathed through his teeth until the dizziness passed, then dragged an abandoned wooden tool chest toward him.

The lock had rusted off years ago. Inside lay three sticks of red carpenter's chalk, a heavy lead plumb-bob on a braided cord, and thirty feet of dry hemp line preserved in sheep tallow. He took the chalk and the plumb-bob and stowed them deep into his creel; the lead alone was worth five silver bits in the lower settlements, and heavy enough to crack a skull if a leech climbed onto the boards. He uncoiled the dry line, wrapped it twice around his waist, and knotted the bitter end to the platform's main cedar outrigger. For the first time since leaving the mud, he was tethered to dry wood.

A shower of pale yellow shavings drifted down through the deck seams, settling on his leather mantle.

He caught a pinch between his thumb and forefinger. It was fresh spruce sawdust, pale, dry, and sticky with resin.

Tobechi-adu tilted his head back toward the darkness beneath the roadway timbers.

Further north, near the seventh rib, the halted vanguard carts sat quiet and unhitched. But directly above this platform, the fourth vertebra showed a fissure four inches wide, weeping thin marrow down the stone. Crammed into the gaping crack were three dozen fresh spruce wedges, their split ends hammered flat by panicked iron sledges. The drivers of the southern lord's heaviest war-wagon had not unhitched their team; they had jammed soft timber into the living bone to keep their iron wheels rolling across the seam.

"Spruce," Tobechi-adu said aloud into the rising wind. "They brought spruce to hold a god."

He leaned back against the outrigger, tightened the dry hemp knot at his waist, and watched the yellow shavings tumble past his knees into the blank white mist below.