Bridges
Berend wanders back the way he came, down the hill past the temple of Ondir. The doors are shut, and the low dome sits like the carcass of an enormous beetle, hollow and still. Presumably, there are still people inside, but they don’t show their faces.
Maybe all of Ondir’s holy men are hiding. The ghosts lingering around the Temple District followed Isabel when she left, but Berend is sure there are more—there certainly will be, if the world shifts again and the district falls into a chasm, or if either of the walls holding back the many-eyed thing (or is it a place? Berend can’t keep it straight) finally fall.
He’d feel better if there were four walls, but at this point, he’s taking what he can get. It probably doesn’t matter, either way, because the walls are just ideas. Or something.
Berend has never liked magic, but he would take the itchy feeling of a ghost-summoning ritual over the state of things as they are now. He liked it much better when ghosts were invisible most of the time, and concept-creature-places that ate them stayed in the other world where they belonged.
He would feel much better if he had his sword, even if it might not do anything against a spirit or an idea. He’d like to have more shot and powder, too, but he’ll take what he can get. His coat isn’t quite big enough to hide his saber once he finds it, but he’s starting to think that the Belisias might finally leave him alone. What use is the reputation of their house anymore? The world is ending. They’ll be lucky if anyone is left to remember their name.
I shouldn’t think that way. The world might not end. It looks reasonably hopeless, though, and he finds that maintaining a cheerful nihilism about the inevitability of it all is keeping him from collapsing in despair. He’ll do his best, but it’s really out of his hands. No one can blame him if and when things go wrong in a previously unimaginable way. It’s strangely freeing.
Under ordinary circumstances, Berend would be nervous not having a contract lined up, ensuring he continues to be paid. He has a warm coat and enough bread to last him the day, which is about how long he can be sure he’ll live, so he’s content. If he sees tomorrow, he’ll worry about providing for it then.
Technically, he supposes, he is under contract: a handshake deal with Herard Belisia made while Berend was still recovering in the hospital. The chances that Herard has acquired any money to follow through, even if Berend were to do as he asked and prove his brother a murderer, are slim. No, Berend is trying to do right by Bessa Kyne and all the other broken spirits for the principle of the matter, not because he’s hoping to be paid.
He’d like to be paid, sure, but he’s not going to get his hopes up.
The coat is heavy gray wool, a little too warm for the season, but with the sun taking all morning to clear the vertical forest and reach the city streets, the extra warmth is welcome. It smells distinctly of pipe smoke, a luxury in which Berend can rarely indulge. He wonders, briefly, about the man who owned it before it ended up at Isra’s temple. He’s probably dead, but maybe he was wealthy and generous enough to donate an extra coat. It’s a nice thought. Berend puts his hands in the deep pockets and feels the rough seams where they’ve been repeatedly mended.
The main road between the university hospital and the Temple District is still empty, strewn with broken bodies and the remains of barricades. As he crosses into the University District proper, living people emerge into the strange red dawn. A group of a dozen ventures out from the library, and a lecture hall disgorges another fifty or so survivors. Berend falls in behind them as they walk toward the district’s new geographic feature: the fifty-foot cliff upon which most of the boarding houses rest.
“Fascinating,” murmurs one gray-bearded, professorly type, the foot of his walking cane smeared with something dark and foul-smelling that suggests a fight with the reanimated dead.
A younger man squints at the cliff through smeared lenses. “My house is up there,” he says, and sighs, as though this is just one more inconvenience after a night full of them.
There are already people at the split, putting up ladders and lowering ropes and lengths of sheet knotted together. Even the tallest ladders don’t reach, and as he comes closer, Berend can see why: there’s a chasm several feet across at the base of the cliff. The earth has split apart, neatly dividing one north-south street in half, before the eastern part lifted into the sky. A few cobblestones have fallen into the abyss, leaving hollows behind like missing teeth.
Berend approaches the edge. Tiny lights like fireflies hover above the blackness below, and the people trying to bridge the gap mostly ignore them as they drift lazily to and fro. The smell of wet earth pervades the area, though the exposed face of the cliff has already begun to dry. A fringe of tree roots sticks out overhead, waving in the breeze.
Emryn Marner’s house, and Berend’s sword, are somewhere up there. Despite the state of things, Berend is reasonably sure that he’ll be able to find it again once he’s found a way up. He’s always had a fair sense of direction.
A brave soul in shirtsleeves and trousers rolled up to the knee, his shoes abandoned at the top of the cliff, begins to make his way down. A rope is tied around his waist and knotted across his chest, the other end presumably secured somewhere Berend can’t see from below. The rope lets out, and the young man pushes off, bare feet dislodging the dirt in a shower of dust and clods.
He reaches the level of the other half of the district—Berend isn’t sure which he should call ground level—in a few minutes, dangling over the abyss. Checking his knots, he reaches his arms out and pushes himself toward the waiting arms of two more men. They reach for him, but he doesn’t swing quite far enough. They catch themselves before they can topple over the edge.
Berend doesn’t have great faith that he could make that climb. Sure, he’s strong enough, especially considering he isn’t the spry young age as these student adventurers, but he’s been accumulating injuries at a steady rate for several days now. The thought of a rope around his chest makes his scabs hurt.
A cheer goes up as the man on the rope arrives safely at his destination, but it’s short-lived. He’s down, but what now? “Well, come back up!” someone shouts from above, but the look on the young man’s face is skeptical.
More fireflies are accumulating in the dark space between landmasses, spreading out among the people gathered at the edge. Berend holds out a hand and curls his fingers around one point of light. Its green glow turns his fingers a sickly color.
It’s not a firefly at all. Tiny, hair-like fibers surround the brilliant center, like the kind of hardy seed that the wind carries into the fields of the rich and poor alike. It bobs and darts in the confines of Berend’s hand, moving of its own will. He lets it go.
A triad of young men, supervised by a professor wearing a vest stained with what is probably blood, are lashing two ladders together into a sort of bridge. When they lift it up, it bends at the middle with vertigo-inducing abruptness.
“You’ll want to get some nails,” Berend says. He’s scaled fortress walls before, usually with taller ladders built the day of for that specific purpose, but there aren’t nearly enough trees for that here in the city—unless he counts the vertical forest, but who knows what might happen if someone ventured in to cut down any of those trees. The image of a huge felled log falling from a great height to squash whatever was on the city street below makes him cringe involuntarily.
The students look at each other and shrug. “There might be some in the warehouse behind the library,” the one not currently holding a ladder says.
“Is it unlocked?” Berend asks. “I can go.” He’d like to be doing something useful, rather than standing around and waiting for someone else to figure it out.
“Should be,” another student says. He drops his end of the grafted ladder, letting it clatter on the broken street and disrupt a gathered cloud of tiny, fuzzy lights. “Do you think it’ll work?”
Berend was rather hoping that these young, brilliant minds would tell him. Sure, he’s climbed a few castles, but he never went to university. “Might as well try,” he says.
He walks back to the library. The strange red light in the west—not the sun, as it turns out, because the actual sun is behind the plane of the forest—turns the street a dull orange and the spindly trees on either side charcoal black. A few more people wander toward the Temple district, but it’s still so empty, especially for the middle of the day. I suppose all the lectures are canceled today, Berend muses, on account of the end of the world.
The warehouse is little more than a shoddy lean-to attached to the back of the grand library, well out of sight of the road. The wooden door has warped so badly that it’s perfectly clear why it wasn’t locked. After several minutes of fruitless tugging at the rusty handle, Berend decides that decorum should be set aside in apocalyptic circumstances and kicks the door in.
A roughly man-size hole erupts under his boot. He ducks inside, where the strong smell of moldering paper assaults his nostrils and scratches his throat. Softening reams fill the shelves at the back of the small room; bottles of ink, bales of twine, and small wooden boxes line the rest. Berend picks up a box and shakes it. It sounds like nails, but he can’t imagine they’re in good condition, so he takes two more boxes and hopes for the best.
He’s never been much of a reader, and certainly was never a scholar, but the sight of the library fills him with a sadness he can’t name. It’s almost like a temple, with its domed ceiling and elegant pillars—a temple to human achievement, rather than one of the gods. If the world ends, how much of the knowledge contained in there will survive? Does the thing beyond the wall eat books like it eats the souls of the dead? Maybe the library will remain even after everyone has been devoured, empty even of ghosts, for all of time.
That is, if time still exists. Trying to imagine a world without time makes Berend’s head hurt, and he resolves not to try again. He’s just an aging soldier. His goal is to recover his sword, and he can leave the rest to the philosophers.
He brings the nails back to the three budding siege engineers, and an hour and a half and four dismantled and reassembled ladders later, there is something of a bridge stretching from his ground level to the top of the cliff. It’s flimsy, and needs to be held at both ends by at least two men, but a person can climb up it more or less safely. Going down is another issue, one that Berend will deal with later.
The ladder creaks under his weight as he climbs on, but it holds. Below him is the lightless abyss, seeming to yawn wider with every rung he ascends. The tiny lights swarm around him, bumping into his shoulders and clinging to his clothes, but their green glow does nothing to penetrate the blackness.
Just before Berend steps onto solid ground, a single great eye opens in the crevasse. Its round pupil flares, and then it rolls shut, retreating into darkness.
Berend climbs onto the cliff and takes off for Emryn Marner’s house at a run.
Turns out that describing the breakdown of reality is hard? I’m giving it my best here, but I’ll be making some adjustments as I edit. Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
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