Sling and Shadow

Cold wind rose out of the floorless white gulf, smelling of wet ironwood and ancient rime. Thirty paces below the rim terrace of Udumu-Eke, the Hanging Spans stretched into the gloom like the ribs of an unfinished barge, six braided bark hawsers slung across two hundred yards of open drop between the inner trunk and the western bastions.

Scout-Captain Nkeoma adjusted her hip harness against the damp chill, listening to the rattle of ill-fitted shingles behind her.

"Chukwu," she said without turning. "If your cuirass chatters any louder, the raiders will hear your liver shaking before they clear the second pitch."

Scout Chukwuma-eke froze, gripping the guide-stay with knuckles the color of peeled bark. His breastplate, hastily carved from green sapwood, gaped two inches wide at the collarbone. Behind him on the swaying platform, two flank-runners, Kalu-eke and Onu-adu, checked the toggle-pegs on their pack-frames. Kalu-eke spat into the fog, watching his spit vanish into the white void.

"The toggle is loose, Captain," Chukwuma-eke muttered, fumbling at his breast cinch with stiff fingers. "The resin froze on the latch."

"The resin is fine. Your fingers are clumsy because you are staring at the clouds instead of the wood beneath your boots." Nkeoma stepped onto the first suspension timber, testing the transverse brace with the heel of her hide runner. The hemp-bound beam groaned and settled under her weight. "Draw your patrol sling. Show me the lead knot."

Chukwuma-eke drew the split-ash loop from his belt, glancing toward the grey abyss beneath the planks. "We are setting an ambush on the third trestle, yes? If the frost-climbers come up the chimney, we have the high angle."

"If you shoot from this angle with your current grip," Nkeoma said evenly, "you will put a river pebble through your own ankle. You couldn't strike a sleeping mammoth from inside its belly."

"A mammoth's belly is dark, Captain," Chukwuma-eke said, earnestness leaking through his shivering voice. "There would be no line of sight."

Kalu-eke snorted behind them, though the sound died quickly against the roar of the stratospheric crosswind.

"Check your secondary clip," Nkeoma said. "The raiders down in Oru-Obu don't need a line of sight. They have ochre paste, fifty-pound river slates, and three days of starvation driving them up the bark. If you miss your first release, you do not get a second."

Beneath the folds of her bark cuirass, the stolen transit manifest pressed cold against her ribs. Entry seven. Thirty hampers of prime ember-moss, diverted north toward Okoloma under Chieftain Ogu-Ndu's private mark. Next to the bark scroll, nestled in a scrap of hide, sat the thumb-sized river pebble she had pried from the shattered spar of Watchpost Seven. The dried cinnabar crust on its face still smelled faintly of wasp-venom and marsh clay. Ogu-Ndu was stripping the lower garrison bare, starving the watch to grease his own escape up the highest root-spire before the celestial alignment snapped.

She had led her squad out under the guise of sealing the outer gorge before the raiders reached the upper terraces. If Ogu-Ndu knew what she carried in her tunic, her skull would already decorate a corner post.

"Forward," she commanded. "Single file. Four paces of spacing. Keep your weight centered over the main hawser."

The patrol moved out along the center catwalk. Below them, stratospheric cloud-banks rolled like boiling tallow, hiding the vertical root-shaft plunging down to the frozen trenches of the lower sphere. The wood groaned under their feet with the brittle ache of ironwood under astronomical strain. Every hour, the orbital drag of the three worlds tightened the slack along the vertical highways.

Halfway across the span, sixty paces from the outer bastion, the wind died abruptly.

In the mountains of the canopy, dead air was a vacuum created by displacement.

Nkeoma halted. Her eyes swept upward into the canopy rafters eighty feet above, where the great observation roost of the High Watch perched like a predatory nest. Dense mist clung to the woven branches.

"Halt," she said.

"Captain?" Onu-adu whispered from the rear. "Did you hear an anchor-hook?"

"No," Nkeoma said.

A dry crack echoed from the mist directly overhead. It was the sharp report of a heavy cedar release lever tripped on a winch-cradle.

Above the catwalk, the grey mist tore open.

Four massive boulders, banded with rusted ironwood hoops, plummeted out of the high fog. They fell with unnatural acceleration, thin crimson streaks tracing the air behind them in glowing ochre arcs.

"Scatter!" Nkeoma shouted, dropping flat against the main hawser. "Deadfall!"

The stones fell in a tight bracket directly upon the center timbers of the Hanging Span.

The first boulder struck thirty paces back. It sheared through the secondary suspension cable as if the wrist-thick rawhide were rotten grass. The shockwave lifted the footway into the air. Kalu-eke cried out as the deck snapped beneath him. He grabbed for a guide-line, but the second boulder pulverized the anchor post and crushed his chest before carrying his body downward into the fog.

Beside him, Onu-adu was whipped sideways by the severed stay-line. The cable lashed around his waist, snapped tight, and dragged him off the ledge into the floorless gulf. His scream lingered for three heartbeats before the wind swallowed it whole.

"Captain!" Chukwuma-eke gasped.

The third boulder smashed into the transverse beam two yards ahead of him. The heartwood spar shattered, tipping the boy's section of the catwalk into a steep tilt over the abyss. Chukwuma-eke fell forward, boots slipping on moss-slick planks. His harness carabiner caught in a split plank, but the twisting tension of the broken hawser wrapped around his ankle, dragging him toward the drop as sixty feet of timber rotated toward the void.

The fourth boulder struck the main roost anchor above, its kinetic recoil ringing out like a cracked gong.

Nkeoma did not look down. Looking down on a collapsing bridge was the difference between breathing and falling.

She kicked free of her pack-cord, drew the curved flint-saw from her hip sheath, and lunged along the bucking center line. The hawser whipped violently under her balance, tossing her knee into a splintered riser. Pain flared hot across the joint, but she drove her shoulder into the tilt, dropping her weight across the canted beam where Chukwuma-eke dangled.

The boy was half-submerged in mist, clawing at the broken deck as the counter-cable tightened around his boot. The main beam groaned, peeling away from its ironwood mortise.

"Stop kicking!" Nkeoma barked, pinning his thigh with her knee.

She set the serrated flint teeth against the three-ply rawhide cable. The saw bit deep, spitting cord-dust into her face. One stroke. Two strokes. The rawhide fibers frayed under three thousand pounds of transverse tension. On the third stroke, the cable parted with a sound like a slung stone.

The recoil jerked Chukwuma-eke free. Nkeoma seized his breastplate collar with both hands and threw herself backward, hauling him onto the narrow bark shelf where the inner span anchored into the mother trunk.

A heartbeat later, the entire center catwalk ripped loose. A hundred paces of ironwood, decking, and hemp plunged into the white ocean below, leaving only two severed guide-lines humming in the gale.

Chukwuma-eke lay against the vertical root-wall, gasping for air, retching onto his leather greaves. "Kalu... Onu... they went over the rim..."

Nkeoma sat on the damp shelf, chest heaving, the flint-saw still locked in her bleeding fingers. Her knee throbbed with heat, but the bone held. She caught the boy's jaw, forcing his face toward the stone.

"Breathe through your teeth," she said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "Shut your mouth and breathe."

Silence returned to the gorge, broken only by the steady vibration of the root-tower groaning under orbital drift.

Nkeoma stood slowly, leaning against the bark furrow. Her gaze followed the drop-line of the severed cables upward.

The stones had not tumbled by accident. They had not been slung from below by raiders climbing the rime-chimneys. The angle of entry was eighty degrees, dropped from the High Roost—the private observation platform accessible only by the chieftain's inner stairs.

She climbed three paces up the splintered winch-seat where the upper anchor hawser had rested. Among the pulverized oak-pegs and shredded cordage, an object lay lodged within the release slot.

Nkeoma pulled it free.

It was a sheared drop-pin of polished mountain cedar, six inches long, banded with beaten copper wire. On its flat bevel sat the coiled three-ring serpent crest of Chieftain Ogu-Ndu. A smear of sticky, freshly mixed cinnabar-wasp paste stained the copper collar.

She turned the pin in her palm. The wood was cold, but the red resin was wet.

Ogu-Ndu had not merely sent them to patrol a dead span. He had pulled the trigger himself.

Nkeoma wiped the crimson residue against her bracer and slid the heavy cedar pin inside her tunic, right beside the stolen manifest.

"Captain?" Chukwuma-eke whispered from the shelf. "Who did that to us?"

Nkeoma looked up into the canopy mist where the great lodge stood.

"Stand up, Chukwu," she said. Her voice was colder than the rime on the ropes. "We are going to see the Chieftain."