The Ledger of Deadfall

A splintered ironwood beam does not lie about the direction of a blow, but Scout Chukwuma-eke insisted on arguing with the timber anyway.

"A gale from the southern drop," the boy said, ducking under a sagging safety rope to peer into the fog. His bark-shingle cuirass rattled like loose teeth. "The wind took the corner post, Captain. It tore out the pegs and dumped the floor into the cloud-bank."

Nkeoma stepped over a severed brace without looking at him. The cantilevered deck of Watchpost Seven hung twelve paces out over an endless drop of white stratospheric vapor, shuddering every time a gust whipped through the lower canopy. Two hundred yards below, the ironwood trunk vanished into the freezing grey gloom where the root-spire descended toward Oru-Obu.

For eight years, Nkeoma's daily life had followed the rigid, unbending routine of the Red-Branch watch: inspect the perimeter lines, check the tension on the balance ropes, and execute any freezing climber who crawled out of the mist. She had obeyed every edict without doubt, believing Chieftain Ogu-Ndu when he declared that every life sacrificed on the boundary protected the shared warmth of the commons. Six lunar cycles remained before the planetary drift sheared the root-spires apart for four centuries, severing the worlds forever.

Yet standing over the pulverized wood, the central question of the looming cataclysm seized her: when the celestial bridges snapped, would either world survive the endless freeze, or were both peoples being herded toward slaughter while someone above stole the fire?

She knelt by the southern corner post. The eight-inch baulk of cured timber had not been torn from its socket. It had been smashed inward, its fibrous core crushed into pale meal.

"Wind," Nkeoma said, tapping the pulverized stub with her curved flint-saw. "A very thoughtful wind, Chukwu. One that picked up an eight-inch heartwood spar and drove it inward against the squall, without tearing the moss-thatch off the ceiling rafters ten feet above."

Chukwuma-eke swallowed, glancing at the railing. "A falling stone, then. Loose rim-ice from the upper terraces."

"Rim-ice melts on friction, leaving water in the grain. Put your bare thumb in that splinter."

The boy crept forward on trembling knees and pressed his flesh against the fractured heartwood. "It's dry. And warm."

"Not warm," Nkeoma said. "Ochre-burned."

She worked the thin slate tip of her skinning knife between two crushed ribs of wood until the blade struck something hard with a dull click. She pried the object loose into her palm.

It was an ordinary river pebble, grey, smooth, and no larger than a dried plum. Around its circumference ran a dried red crust, a thin film of cinnabar paste mixed with tree-wasp venom. Where the pebble had struck the eight-inch beam, the wood was pulverized into a cavity three inches deep.

Chukwuma-eke stared. "A sling-bullet? No sling on the terraces could crack a heartwood post like that."

"A sling carries the weight of the stone in the pouch," Nkeoma said. She turned the pebble between her fingers. "This carried the mass of a fifty-pound river boulder sitting in a harness sixty paces away."

She stepped to the outer edge of the deck, pointing her saw toward a shelf of dead rime forty paces below. On that shelf lay the shattered halves of a black river boulder, cracked by explosive recoil.

"The lower-world raiders," she said. "They coat the pebble and the boulder with the same measure of paste, matching the surface area to a hair. One hunter casts the pebble from below. The boulder takes the motion, the pebble takes the mass, and forty paces of air turn a skip-stone into a battering ram."

Chukwuma-eke stepped back, clutching his ashwood sling. "Kinetic tethers? Here? The clan elders swore the ditch-dwellers had nothing left down there but cold tallow."

"The clan elders sit thirty levels above the frost-line," Nkeoma muttered, "where the sun hits their porridge and nobody patches severed ropes in a gale."

She walked toward the guard shelter. The small hut of ironwood shingles was intact, its rawhide door flap tied with patrol cords. Sentry Obasi-eke had not died on the deck; his blood was nowhere in the wreckage. The raiders had merely pulverized the structural anchor, collapsed the floor, and bypassed the outpost while the watch scrambled for their lifelines.

Nkeoma pushed the flap aside and stepped into the dim interior.

The hut smelled of stale dried fish and cold stone. On a low bench sat the outpost's cedar tally-box, bound in braided sinew and sealed with green pine resin. She cut the seal and lifted the lid.

Inside lay three rolled sheets of flattened root-bark. She unrolled the transit manifest. Watchpost Seven guarded the lower winch-line, the only counterweighted route connecting the wild lower orchards to the fortified inner granaries. Every basket of living ember-moss harvested by the gatherers had to pass through this post to be weighed and stamped.

Nkeoma read the tally marks down the right margin.

The first six entries were ordinary: twenty baskets of dried lichen, fourteen jars of wasp-oil, nine bundles of rope.

Then came the seventh entry, penned four suns ago.

Beneath the standard tallies, a different hand had cut into the fiber:

Thirty woven hampers of living ember-moss. Prime root-cuttings. Diverted from public hearth distribution by direct decree of Chieftain Ogu-Ndu. Hauled north along the Upper Spire bypass toward Okoloma.

Beneath the entry sat a circular seal in red beetle-wax: the coiled three-ring serpent of Chieftain Ogu-Ndu.

Nkeoma stared at the vermilion wax.

Thirty hampers of living ember-moss. That was not a seasonal harvest surplus. That was enough heat-radiating bryophyte to warm three entire residential terraces through the deep dark of the winter months. For three weeks, public heralds had announced that the harvests were dying, that the frost was creeping up the bark, and that every family on the lower tiers must cut their hearth rations by half to preserve the clan's core seeds. Her own scouts had been shivering on half-rations of cold tallow, ordered to fight and die on the perimeter while the cold crept inward.

Her fingers pressed into the bark scroll until the fibers groaned against her knuckles. The garrison was not defending a homeland; they were cattle tethered in the frost while the elders hauled the warmth away.

"Captain?" Chukwuma-eke stood in the doorway, framed against the swirling mist. "Did you find Obasi-eke's report?"

Nkeoma did not roll the bark scroll. She placed the ochre pebble directly onto the Chieftain's wax serpent.

"Obasi-eke didn't write an accident report," she said quietly. "He wrote a bill of sale."

"A sale?" Chukwuma-eke stepped inside. "To who? The ditch-dwellers have no grain."

"Not to the ditch-dwellers," Nkeoma said, pointing her knife at the destination line. "Look at the winch-haul, boy. Does Okoloma sit in the frost trenches?"

Chukwuma-eke read the script. His face went white. "The highest sphere? But the Spire bypass is closed. Chieftain Ogu-Ndu condemned the high bridges two moons ago because of the orbital drift."

"He told the people it was condemned," Nkeoma said, sliding the scroll into her breast pocket beneath her cuirass. "He didn't tell them he was moving the fires up the ladder ahead of them."

She stepped back out into the wind, checking her sling cord and the flint-saw at her hip. The routine of the border guard was gone forever; her mission had changed from hunting raiders to preventing an entire cosmos from going dark.

Below them, the root-tower groaned, a long harmonic shudder that set the balance ropes humming. The raiders were down there in the fog, climbing toward a pantry already pillaged by its own master.

"Gather the spare pitons from the rack," Nkeoma said, stepping onto the narrow bark ledge. "We are going down to the Hanging Spans."

"Down?" Chukwuma-eke choked on the word. "Into the fog? But the raiders—"

"The raiders are looking for fire, Chukwu," she said over her shoulder. "If we stay up here, we freeze before they even reach the steps."