The Long Bridge hung between the Eighth Rib and the Ninth like a piece of string between two fingers.
Creed had seen bridges between the rib-cities from below, from the Belly, his whole life — thin dark lines in the lantern-light, strung across the gaps, sagging. He’d crossed little ones in Halden, the footbridges between terraces. He’d never stood at the end of one like this. Six hundred meters long. A deck of steel plate, three tram-widths wide, with a dead rail running down the middle where the Ninth’s trams used to cross before the Concord shut them down. Railings on both sides, waist-high, rusted. And holding it all up, not from below but from above — cables. Two great carbon cables, one on each side, running from towers at each end in a long slow curve, and from the cables, every ten meters, thinner cables hanging down to the deck. Like the web around Halden. Like the strings of a dead-world instrument in one of Kon’s glass cases.
Under it, the gulf. Four kilometers of dark, to the embers of the Belly.
At the far end, six hundred meters off, the Eighth. Its terraces climbing the curve of its rib, lit brown-blue, tempered, the Concord’s light. And at the bridge-head on the Eighth’s side, gathering, he could feel them. Hearts. A hundred and forty-four of them. Twelve squads. Gilt — the channels crude and bright and full. And among them, fewer, finer, denser: Lancers. Twenty.
And one more.
He felt it and went still.
It wasn’t like a Gilt’s heart. It wasn’t like a Lancer’s. It wasn’t like any heart he’d felt since the dark. There were no channels in it. No tempered Catalyst. No frost, or almost none. Just a heart, steady, strong, and the blood going out from it into the body — and in the blood, threading all through it, something. Red-gold. Fine. Branching. Like cracks in porcelain. Like the lines of light under his own skin.
It felt like him. Not the same. A copy. A rough one, smeared, the way the bleeders’ blood-marks on the doors of the Hollow had been a rough copy of the sigils on his blade. But reaching for the same thing.
“Oh,” said Snake. Very low. “Oh, that’s — that’s you. That’s a bit of you, in somebody else.”
“The vial,” said Lamp. Quietly. “Your blood. The sample the Prior took on the slab.”
Dorne, Creed thought. The Prior’s girl.
“Six hours,” said Sabine, beside him at the Ninth’s bridge-head, with her arms folded and her burned face lit gold by the new lamps behind them. “Wick’s counting. They’re waiting for the night cycle on the Eighth. For their light to go down.” She spat over the railing into the gulf. “So they can see ours.”
He looked back over his shoulder at the Ninth. At the gold patches spreading up its terraces, among the brown and the dark. Eleven tanks’ worth. Half a rib.
From the Eighth, in the dark, it would look like a fire.
“Then we’ve got six hours,” said Creed.
They used all six.
Sabine went out onto the bridge with her crew and every cutting charge they’d brought up from the Belly, and walked it end to end — or as near the Eighth’s end as she dared, two hundred meters out, with Gilt scopes watching her from the far towers — and looked at it the way she looked at a gallery face before she drilled it. She came back an hour later with her mouth pulled up on the burned side.
“Deck’s on hangers,” she said. “Every ten meters. Cut the hangers on a section and the deck drops out. Doesn’t touch the main cables. Bridge stays up. There’s just a hole in it.” She looked at Creed. “A hole a Gilt can’t jump. Not in armor.”
“Can they kite it?”
“Lancers can. Gilt can’t. Gilt don’t carry kites. Too heavy.” She jerked her chin at the bridge. “I’ll give you three holes. Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred meters out. They’ll have to come through each one.”
“How?”
“Planks. Ladders. Grapples. Slowly.” The burned half of her mouth went up further. “Under the lamps.”
Hanne Dray brought the Ninth.
Not all of it. But enough. Loaders and crane-crews and tank-hands from the depot, and people from the gold streets — people who’d stood in the street at the bottom of her terrace when the first lamp lit, and felt the frost thin. They came down to the bridge-head with crane-hooks and pry-bars and pieces of girder, and with something else. Tanks. Small ones, from the depot — the little pressure cylinders the crane-crews used to run their rigs, a hand-span wide, a meter long. Pell Varrow, the nervous young tank-hand, had filled them. From the golden tanks. Calm blue-gold.
“Lamps,” said Hanne Dray, when Creed looked at them. “For the bridge. If they’re coming in the dark, we want to see them.”
They ran the cylinders out along the bridge-head and lashed them to the railings and opened the valves, and the gold lamps came on, one after another, along the Ninth’s end of the Long Bridge. Warm. Soft. Lighting the deck.
Lighting the faces of the people behind the barricade they’d built across the bridge-head out of crates and girders and a dead tram-car hauled off its rail.
And Oriel Haske came.
She came down from the depot with her ten Lancers behind her. Silver scale. Flower-staves. Helms under their arms. They’d been sitting against the depot wall since the end of the fight, guarded by loaders with crane-hooks. Nobody had told them they could get up.
They got up anyway. They came down to the bridge-head and stopped at the barricade, ten silver shapes in the gold light, and Haske looked at Creed.
“Six of mine are Ninth-born,” she said. Her gauge-face didn’t move. “Two of them have family on Hanne Dray’s terrace. Under the gold lamps.” She looked past him, down the bridge, at the hearts gathering on the Eighth’s side. “We know the twelve squads coming across. We’ve drilled with them. We know how they move.” A pause. “And we know the twenty Lancers. Some of them are ours. Were ours.”
“What are you asking?” said Creed.
“I’m not asking anything.” She set her helm down on top of the barricade. “I’m telling you that ten Lancers will be at this bridge-head when they come. With staves. Not frost. We left the tubes on the depot catwalk.” She looked at him. “If you’d rather we weren’t, you’ll have to stop us.”
He looked at her for a long moment. At the ten behind her.
“Ha,” said Snake. “I like her too.”
“Why?” said Creed.
Oriel Haske looked at the gold lamps on the railings. At the old woman in the shawl, sitting on a crate behind the barricade with her face turned up into the light.
“My mother’s on the Fifth,” she said. “In a house with a window. She hasn’t looked up in sixty years.” A pause. “I’d like her to.”
“I’ve got something,” said Wick.
His voice came through the comm-plug at Creed’s collar, thin and crackling, from the listening post four kilometers below. He’d been quiet for an hour. Creed had felt the silence on the channel the way he’d felt Wick’s silence in the crawlway: not nothing. Working.
“What?”
“An idea.” A pause. Crackling. “It’s stupid. It’s probably very stupid. Sabine laughed at me.”
“Sabine laughs at everything.”
“She laughed for a long time.” Another pause. “Then she said do it.”
“Do what?”
“Every one of them,” said Wick, “was raised in the Ribs. Every Gilt. Every Lancer. Every one. Mid-born, Verbous-born, some of them Belly-born, bought up out of the crèches. And every one of them, from the day they could stand, was taught one thing. Before anything else. Before they could count.”
Creed didn’t say anything.
“When the Bell rings,” said Wick, “you stop.”
The comm crackled.
“I’ve got it,” said Wick. “The Bell. The Vesper Bell. I recorded it off the Concord net three weeks ago — they broadcast it on every channel, did you know that, at every ring, so the Gilt in their helms hear it even when they’re nowhere near a Lumen. It’s in every helm. Every Gilt, every Lancer, three times a day.” A breath. “I can put it on their channel. Any time I want. On every helm on the bridge at once.”
Creed stood very still at the barricade.
“It won’t stop them,” said Wick, fast. “Not for long. They’re soldiers. They’ll know it’s wrong, the timing’ll be wrong. But —”
“But they’ll stop,” said Creed slowly. “For a second. Before they know.”
“For a second.” Wick’s voice cracked a little. “Every one of them. All at once. Their bodies’ll do it before their heads catch up. Like hour nineteen. Like you put your hand on a hot pipe and you’ve let go before you know it’s hot.”
“Oh,” said Snake. Very softly. “Oh, that little —”
“How many times can you do it?”
“I don’t know. Twice? Three times? After that they’ll be ready for it. They’ll fight through.” A pause. “You tell me when.”
Creed looked out along the Long Bridge. At the gold lamps on the railings. At Sabine’s three charges, waiting. At the dark, six hundred meters off, and the hundred and forty-four hearts in it.
And the one heart that was like his.
“Wick,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“That’s not stupid.”
A long crackling silence.
“Sabine laughed for a really long time,” said Wick. But his voice had changed.
The Eighth’s lights went down at the start of the night cycle, the way they always did. Not to dark — the Concord’s night was dim, not dark, a brown-blue half-light. And in the half-light, at the far end of the Long Bridge, the Gilt came.
He heard them before he saw them. Boots on steel plate. A hundred and forty-four pairs. Coming across the deck in step, the way soldiers walked, the way the shift column never had. The bridge felt it. The great cables at the sides hummed with the load and the deck under Creed’s feet trembled, faintly, all the way from the far towers.
Then he saw them. Gold. Coming out of the half-light into the edge of the gold lamps, two hundred meters out, in a wedge. Twelve squads. Lances leveled, tips crackling blue. And above them, over the railings, silver — Lancers, on their kites, gliding out from the far towers over the gulf in long arcs, flower-staves glinting.
Twenty Lancers. Haske’s ten stood up at the barricade behind him. He felt their hearts jump.
And in the middle of the wedge, walking. Not in step. At her own pace. Square-shouldered, thick-armed, plain grey Rib Eight militia uniform, no armor at all. No lance. No staff. Nothing in her hands.
Her eyes, in the gold light, glinting red-gold at the whites.
The first squad reached Sabine’s first charge.
Sabine had set it in the hangers of a twenty-meter section, and it went off with a sound like the press finishing its stroke, ten times over, and the section of steel deck under the front of the wedge dropped out of the bridge like a trapdoor opening.
Not all at once. The hangers on the near side went first and the deck hinged down from the far edge, and the Gilt on it slid — a dozen of them, two dozen, in gold armor, sliding down the tilting plate toward the gulf, grabbing at nothing. Some of them caught the edge. Some of them caught the hangers. Some of them didn’t. He felt their hearts go. Down. Into the dark. Four kilometers. He didn’t count them.
He counted them.
The deck section hung for a moment from its far hangers, swinging, empty. Then those went too and it fell. Turning slowly. Into the dark.
The wedge stopped at the edge of the hole. Twenty meters of nothing between them and the next stretch of deck. The Gilt at the front stood on the edge with their lances leveled and the gulf at their feet, looking across.
The Lancers didn’t stop. They came over on their kites, twenty silver shapes gliding across the gap and the next stretch of deck toward the Ninth’s bridge-head, and as they came, their flower-staves opened, and they fired.
Not at Creed. They’d learned. At the barricade. At the gold lamps. At the people behind it.
Haske’s Lancers fired back.
He’d never seen Lancer fight Lancer. Nobody had. Ten silver shapes at the barricade, firing up into the dark, and twenty silver shapes on kites, firing down, and the bolts crossing in the air between them, white-blue, narrow, fast, crack-crack-crack, like sparks off a grinder. A kite took a bolt through its fabric and folded and its Lancer went down into the gulf. A Lancer at the barricade took a bolt in the chest and went over backward into the crates. The gold lamps on the railings shattered, one, two, three.
Creed went over the barricade.
He ran down the bridge toward the hole. A hundred and eighty meters of steel deck, under the crossing bolts, past the shattered lamps, toward the edge where the wedge stood looking across.
He didn’t stop at the edge.
He jumped it.
Twenty meters. He’d jumped thirty at the Root Gallery and fallen short. He’d been starving then. He’d fed on the cable since. And spent most of it on eleven tanks. And he was hungry again — but not empty. Not yet. He went out over the gap with the gulf under him and the bolts crossing over his head and his scars blazing red-gold, and landed on the far side, on the edge, among them, in the front of the wedge.
He went through the front squad before they could turn their lances. Stopping them — hand on a breastplate, hand on a breastplate, hand on a breastplate. Down. Down. Down. And the fourth he didn’t stop. He caught his lance behind the tip and pulled.
He needed it. He felt himself need it. The hunger had been coming up since the eleventh tank and the stops cost him every one, and he needed to eat. The Catalyst came up the haft into his palm, and his blood took it, and he burned the frost out as it came, the way he had on the cable, and it filled him.
“Enough,” said Lamp. And he let go.
The next. Stop. The next. Pull — enough — let go. The next.
He went down the wedge like that. Stopping and pulling, stopping and pulling, the Gilt going down around him into heaps of locked gold armor, some of them empty-channeled and alive and some of them only frozen, and every pull filled him a little more, and every stop spent a little, and he balanced it — the way Teo said the primaries balanced the load. Pull and stop. Fill and spend.
“More,” said Snake. Every time. “More. You don’t need to stop. You’ve got a hundred of them.”
“Enough,” said Lamp. Every time.
And he listened to Lamp. Every time. It was harder each time. Every pull, he felt the warm red thing under the channels, and every pull, it was harder to let go before he reached it.
But he let go.
The second squad got their lances up. And the third. They’d seen what he did to the first. They came at him together, the way Sabine taught her crews — three to one, four to one — and there were a lot of them. Forty. Fifty. A wall of gold and crackling blue on the narrow deck between the hole behind him and the wedge in front, and he couldn’t stop them all at once and he couldn’t go round them and there was nowhere to step.
“Wick,” he said. Into the comm. Not under his breath.
“Now?”
“Now.”
And in every helm on the Long Bridge, the Vesper Bell rang.
He didn’t hear it. It wasn’t in his ears. It was in theirs. But he saw it.
The wall of gold stopped.
All of it. At once. Fifty Gilt in a wedge with their lances leveled — and every one of them went still. Every head went down. Not all the way. Not chin to chest. But down. A jerk. A flinch. Like hour nineteen. Like a hand off a hot pipe before you know it’s hot. Fifty faceplates dipping toward the steel of the deck at exactly the same moment, fifty lances wavering, fifty bodies doing what they’d been made to do before they could count.
When the Bell rings, you stop.
Overhead, the Lancers on their kites flinched too. One of them lost his line and his kite tipped and slid sideways and he caught it just in time. Another’s bolt went wide, into the dark.
It lasted less than a second.
He was through the wall before it ended.
They’d used the first Bell. Wick had two more, maybe.
Sabine’s second charge went off as the remains of the wedge fell back across the bridge toward it — at three hundred meters, under the second squad’s feet, the deck dropping out from under them. He felt more hearts go into the dark. He didn’t count them.
He counted them.
The Lancers on their kites had stopped firing at the barricade. Half of them were down — in the gulf, or on the deck, or tangled in the hangers. The rest had turned. They were coming for him now, the way Quill had. Firing. And every bolt he caught on the blade and every bolt fed him, and they knew it and they fired anyway, because there was nothing else they knew how to do. And then two of them drew frost-tubes.
He felt the darts before they fired. The dense crystalline cold, in glass.
He caught the first one in his hand.
He melted it. Clear water.
The second hit him in the arm.
And he felt the frost go in, and settle, and start to spread — and the gold in him came up to meet it. Not the blinding flare from the depot. He didn’t need that. Just the gold that was in him now, all the time, in every scar. It met the frost the way a lamp meets the frost on a window, and the frost thinned, and went clear, and ran out of the dart-hole in a thin white wisp.
He pulled the dart out of his arm and dropped it on the deck.
The Lancer who’d fired it was hanging in the air on her kite thirty meters away over the gulf, staring at him. He could feel her heart. Hammering.
He didn’t fire at her. He didn’t need to. He looked at her.
She turned her kite and went away into the dark.
There were sixty Gilt left. Maybe fewer. Holding the last stretch of deck, between Sabine’s second hole and the Eighth’s bridge-head, two hundred meters. They’d stopped coming. They’d made a line across the deck, three deep, lances out, the way you’d shore up a gallery that was coming down.
Waiting for him to come to them.
He stood at the edge of the second hole and looked across at them. Behind him, at the Ninth’s end, the barricade, the gold lamps — half of them shattered now — and Haske’s Lancers, six of them still standing. Behind them, Hanne Dray and the Ninth. And Sabine, at the railing, with her switch-box in her hand, waiting.
“Third charge,” said Sabine, in his comm. “Four hundred. It’s right under them. You want it?”
He looked at the line of Gilt. Sixty of them. Three deep. If the third section dropped, half of them would go into the dark.
He felt their hearts. Sixty. Hammering. Afraid.
They’ve got mothers on the Eighth, he thought.
“Take it,” said Snake. “Take it, take it. They came here to take the Ninth back. They came here to put those lamps out. Drop them.”
Lamp didn’t say anything.
He waited. Lamp didn’t say anything. It was there, behind his eyes, cold and still and watching. And it didn’t say enough. It didn’t say stop. It didn’t say anything at all.
It was letting him choose.
“Wick,” said Creed. “Bell.”
“Second one. Now?”
“Now.”
The Bell rang in sixty helms.
Sixty faceplates dipped. Sixty lances wavered.
And in that half-second, Creed spoke. Not into the comm. Out loud. Across the second hole, across the gulf, across two hundred meters of steel deck, in a gallery voice, made for shouting over a press. He’d learned on the catwalk at Sump-Nine that it carried. On the bridge, over the gulf, in the half-second of silence the Bell had made, it carried farther.
“Go home.”
Sixty faceplates came back up.
“There’s a charge under your feet,” said Creed. “You can hear it. Three hundred kilos of breaching powder, in the hangers, under the plate you’re standing on. The woman holding the switch has set ten thousand charges in her life. She’s never missed.” He let that sit. “You can stay there and she’ll drop you into the Belly. Or you can turn around and walk back to the Eighth and go home.”
Nobody moved.
“I’m not going to follow you,” he said. “Nobody here is. We don’t want the Eighth. We don’t want your Concord. We don’t want you.” He pointed back, at the gold lamps behind him. “We want that. For everybody. For your mothers too.” He looked at the line of gold faceplates. “Go home and look at the Ninth from your window tonight. And ask yourself why the Concord sent you to put it out.”
The bridge was silent. Except for the cables, humming.
At the back of the line, one Gilt lowered his lance.
Then another.
Then the line broke — not running, not like the Gilt on the catwalk at Sump-Nine. Walking. Turning, one by one, two by two, and walking back along the deck toward the Eighth’s bridge-head, lances lowered, faceplates down. Not at the Bell. Just down.
Sixty Gilt. Walking home across the Long Bridge.
Creed stood at the edge of the second hole and watched them go, and his whole body was shaking.
“You let them go,” said Snake. Wondering. Not angry. “Again. You keep doing that.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to say it. Something about the young Gilt with his faceplate off on the pressing floor. Something about Hesk at hour nineteen. Something about his mother’s voice in the dark. Don’t keep it.
Behind his eyes, Lamp was very quiet.
And then — very softly, so softly that Creed would wonder afterward if he’d imagined it — Lamp said: “Thank you.”
He didn’t know what it was thanking him for.
He thought, later, that it didn’t either.
The Gilt were gone. The last of them, off the far end of the bridge, into the Eighth’s brown-blue half-light. The Lancers who were still flying had gone with them, kites gliding back to the far towers. The bridge was empty. Two holes in its deck, and the third charge still waiting in its hangers, and gold armor lying in heaps on the steel where he’d stopped them, the frozen Gilt beginning to thaw, groaning, trying to sit up.
And one figure.
She hadn’t gone back with the others. He’d felt her stay. Standing on the far side of the second hole, two hundred meters out, in the middle of the deck. Alone. In her plain grey Rib Eight militia uniform. No armor. No lance. No staff. Nothing in her hands.
He’d felt her through the whole fight. That heart. Steady, strong, and the red-gold threading all through her blood, like his and not like his. She’d walked across the bridge in the middle of the wedge, and when the first charge went, she’d stepped back from the edge of the hole as calmly as stepping off a tram. When the Bell rang in every helm on the bridge, her head hadn’t dipped.
She didn’t have a helm.
She’d stood in the middle of the bridge the whole time. Watching him. Not fighting. Just watching. The way Sere had watched from the stair in the lab.
Now she walked forward. To the edge of the second hole. Twenty meters of nothing between her side and his.
He could see her face, in the light of the last gold lamps. Plain. Hard. Thirty. Cropped hair. The red-gold threads in the whites of her eyes, glowing faintly.
“You’re the Anomaly,” said Ilka Dorne. Her voice was flat. A militia voice, made for shouting over noise. It carried across the gap without her raising it.
“I’m Creed.”
“Creed.” She said it like she was testing the weight of it. “The Prior talks about you all the time. Courier fifteen. Like you’re a thing he made.” Her red-gold eyes went over him. His scars. The sword. The gold in the red. “You don’t look like a thing he made.”
“I’m not.”
“No.” She looked at the heaps of gold armor on the deck behind him. The stopped Gilt, beginning to move. “You didn’t kill them.”
“Most of them.”
“You told sixty of Marchetti’s best to go home and they went.” Something moved in her plain face. Not quite a smile. “I’ve been a militia captain on the Eighth for eleven years. I’ve never once in my life seen a Gilt do what they’re told by somebody who isn’t paying them.”
“They weren’t doing what they were told,” said Creed. “They were doing what they wanted. Nobody’d ever asked them before.”
Ilka Dorne looked at him across the gap for a long time.
“That’s very pretty,” she said at last. “I’m sure it sounds good in your caves.” She rolled her shoulders. Thick, square. A loader’s shoulders. A fighter’s. “But there are nine thousand people on the Eighth. My mother’s one of them. And the Concord’s told them that the gold on the Ninth is fire, and that the Belly’s coming up the cables to burn them in their beds.” She tilted her head. “And tonight you came across a bridge and dropped forty Gilt into the gulf.”
“They came across the bridge.”
“They did.” She nodded. “And I’m sure from where you’re standing that’s the whole story.” She took one step back from the edge. Then another. Measuring. “From where I’m standing, there’s a man with a burning sword on a bridge to my rib, and every weapon we have feeds him, and the only thing in the Ribs he can’t eat is me.”
He felt it before she moved. Her heart. Going from steady to something else. Not faster — harder. And the red-gold in her blood, all through her, lighting.
Like his did.
“So I’m going to come across,” said Ilka Dorne, “and find out what you are.”
She ran at the gap.