Cold Grain and Cordage

Rawhide cord tasted of salt and rancid seal fat where Kayadu clenched it between his molars. He needed both hands free, and the wind along the petrified bark flute had teeth enough to tear fingernails from their beds.

Below his boots, ten thousand miles of white stratospheric fog boiled in the gap between worlds. The single remaining strand of their three-ply safety line quivered against the timber lip like a plucked gut string. If that ply parted before he seated the wedge, Boma-adu, the fifty-pound ballast sack, and the two trailing boys would drop into the silence without making a sound.

Kayadu jammed his knee into a frost-rimed fissure, leaning his weight against the ironwood trunk. The blowback from the ochre throw had sheared his secondary shoulder harness at the brass cinch, leaving his left arm to drag under the weight of his slate pack. The skin across his left palm was raw meat beneath the shredded walrus glove, oozing clear serum that froze into beads before it could drop.

He spat the cord. "Boma!"

The wind whipped the name into the cloud-banks. A moment later, the rope went taut, vibrating with the slow heave of a man dragging an elk up an ice cliff.

"Still breathing," Boma-adu's gravel rasp drifted up through the vapor. "The ballast sack took a bite out of my ribs on that last gust. If you drop me now, Kaya, I will haunt your hearth and piss in your tallow."

"Climb," Kayadu muttered. "The line has one ply left."

"I can count threads through my mitts," came the rumble from below. "Move your heels."

Kayadu drove a split-bone wedge into the bark seam with the heel of his stone axe, testing the bite with three hard jerks. The wedge held. He threw a bight of the braided rawhide around the horn, braced his hips against the vertical wood, and hauled.

Muscles in his back knotted against the frozen hide vest. Each pull brought three inches of frosted hemp over the lip. Five minutes of grinding labor brought a broad, flat head of seal-fur into view over the shelf, followed by shoulders wide as an ox-yoke.

Boma-adu rolled his bulk onto the narrow bark recess, his grey-bearded chin tucked into his chest. Tied to his broad hip was the fifty-pound slab of river slate, wrapped in oiled cloth and bound with sinew. He unclipped the anchor hook with stiff, black-tipped fingers, rolled onto his back, and blew a plume of grey breath toward the ironwood sky.

"The boys are twenty paces down," Boma-adu wheezed, rubbing a swollen shoulder. "They tied into the second ring. Scared their spit would turn to hail."

"Let them hang there till we clear the cleft," Kayadu said. He peered into the hollow behind the shelf.

The recess was an ancient split in the ironwood trunk, six paces deep and three paces across, sheltered from the shearing stratospheric gusts by an overhanging ridge of petrified bark. Out here, where the world stood on edge, such a chimney was worth more than dried meat. It gave a climber space to unbuckle, warm grease between his palms, and rest without dreaming of falling.

Except the chimney was already occupied.

Deep in the shadow, four shapes sat slumped against the curved timber wall.

Kayadu dropped his hand to the flint scraper at his hip, his boots making no sound on the crusted rime. "Stay on the line, Boma."

Boma-adu sat up, his cudgel sliding into his grip. "More leeches?"

"No," Kayadu said.

The cold inside the cleft was dry and still, smelling of old leather and bitter dust. Kayadu stepped past a frost-crusted root rib and crouched beside the first figure.

It was an Oru-Obu raider. The man wore the triple-layered mammoth tunic of the lower trenches, the breast stitched with the white-clay spiral of the southern frost warrens. His face was turned up toward the chimney ceiling, his mouth frozen open around blackened gums. Ice crystals had bridged his open eyelids, turning his gaze into cloudy stone.

Three more bodies sat beside him in a tight semicircle, their knees drawn to their chests, frozen stiff as carved pine.

"Garo's party," Boma-adu muttered, crawling in on hands and knees. The big man stared at the nearest corpse, his jaw set hard. "They went up the spire twelve suns ago. Matron Tobe-oma said the wind took them over the rim."

"The wind did not touch them," Kayadu said.

He leaned close, his breath fogging the dead man's collar. The raiders' pack-harnesses had been slit open. The heavy wicker baskets designed to hold living ember-moss were gone, their rawhide straps cut with swift, deliberate strokes. Even the tallow bags at their waists had been sliced away.

Kayadu lifted the severed end of the lead climber's main suspension line.

It was eight-ply caribou sinew, thick as a wrist, built to bear three men through a stratospheric squall. The break was not the ragged, shredded mess of a stress snap, nor was it the chewed, pulpy ruin left by frost-leeches. The cut was flat as water. The bevel angled cleanly at thirty degrees, the fibers sheared in a single downward shearing stroke.

"Flint shears," Kayadu said, his voice flat. "Double-edged. High-altitude bevel."

Boma-adu bent over the severed rope, his brow furrowing as he traced the flat cut with a calloused thumb. "Our boys carry scrapers and wedges. Who cuts like this?"

"Canopy patrol," Kayadu replied.

A heavy silence settled in the chimney, thicker than the cloud bank outside.

"They were waiting here," Boma-adu said slowly, his voice dropping an octave. "In this cleft."

"They knew the route," Kayadu said.

The climb from the lower sphere followed thousands of vertical channels across the root-tower, but viable chimneys with anchor ledges were rare. An ascent squad had to map their pitches weeks in advance, calculating rope weight and water skins down to the half-ounce. In Oru-Obu, those route maps were scratched on slate and kept under lock by the hearth-priestesses in the central warren. No climber left the lower trenches without Matron Tobe-oma blessing the cord and registering the ascent line.

Kayadu knelt beside the fourth body, which lay half-buried under a drift of dry lichen dust. The dead skirmisher had fallen forward, his torso curled protectively over his lap.

Kayadu gripped the frozen shoulder and hauled the corpse back. The stiffened leather creaked like dry cedar.

Beneath the dead raider's ribs lay an object half-pressed into the bark floor. Kayadu reached down and prized it loose from the frost.

It was a palm-sized slate marker, rounded at the corners and drilled with a single cord-hole at the top. The stone was not the dull grey shale of the lower trenches; it was fine green river-slate, polished smooth with beeswax. Across the center, carved in deep strokes and filled with vermilion resin, was the emblem of a three-pronged branch crossed by a hunter's sling.

The mark of the Red-Branch border patrol.

Kayadu ran his thumb over the hardened resin. On the reverse side of the marker, three notches were scored into the rim, fresh enough that stone dust still clung to the grooves.

"A counter-slate," Kayadu said. "The patrol leads use them to log kills along the boundary perimeter. One notch per corpse."

Boma-adu stared at the green stone, his throat working. "There are four dead men here, Kaya. Why three notches?"

"Because the fourth one was not killed," Kayadu said.

The fourth climber from Garo's squad had not died fighting; his throat had not been cut, and his fingers bore no defensive bruising. When Kayadu examined the skull beneath the frost-stiffened hood, he found only the purple collapse of starvation, his hands empty and his pack untied from within.

The Red-Branch patrol had come down the line with shears, cut the ascent cords, stripped the ember-moss baskets, and left three bodies behind as cold meat while the fourth was either taken alive or allowed to starve in the dark.

"Someone sold the pitch," Boma-adu whispered. The heavy warrior leaned his forehead against his ironwood cudgel. "Before we even tied our harnesses in Oru-Obu, someone told the canopy watch which chimney we would use."

Kayadu slipped the green slate into his belt pouch beside his flint scraper. The cold stone pressed against his hip, hard and real.

"Bring the boys up," Kayadu said, his gaze fixed on the vertical crack leading higher into the mist. "We do not sleep in this chimney."

"We climb through the dark?" Boma-adu asked. "The wind is freshening. The bridge is groaning every three hundred breaths."

"If we stay here," Kayadu said, tying a fresh sinew cord around his split shoulder strap, "we freeze in the same circle."

Boma-adu looked at the four grey faces against the wall, then spat into the dust. "May the frost take whoever wrote that ledger."

He turned back toward the ledge and whistled twice down the rope. Kayadu stood at the entrance of the recess, watching the white mist swirl past the ironwood ridges. Somewhere three hundred paces above them, past the cloud-banks and the frost-line, the upper canopy watch was waiting with flint shears, watching the lines they already knew.