Astryx studied her with bemusement, but said nothing.
They passed between the murmuring bells and though their eerie song put Fern ill at ease, she was glad for their presence when the road disappeared entirely beneath drifts, with the low walls the only suggestion of their path forward.
As the road curved in a meandering arc around a white-crowned bluff of dark stone, an involuntary gasp escaped Fern.
Before them the icy slope fell away entirely into a vast chasm whose other side was just visible behind sheets of snowdust skirling from higher peaks.
Spanning this yawning emptiness, a great, stone bridge, onto which their path directly led.
It was clearly a Tarimite structure, although how old, gods knew. Twin pillars bracketed each end of the bridge, with a narrow span of stone between them, several stories up. With a start, Fern realized that these pillars were actually towers, and the slim notches that ringed the top were windows. The span between them was in fact an open-sided walkway, which gave her vertigo even to consider.
Carved into the caps of the towers were images of the Sixth God, hooded and cyclopean and overly tentacled, and below, ranks of Tarimite penitents marched across the stonework, their tails curved back above their heads with lanterns threaded on them.
She shivered, and not from the cold. Encrusted with ice, the tower windows vacant, wind tugging spills of snow from every edge, the bridge filled Fern with an unexpected sense of sadness, loss, and the frailty of legacy.
“Fuckbuttons,” she murmured, quietly enough that she hoped Astryx wouldn’t hear over the breath of the mountains. Then, louder, “Is it safe to cross?”
Astryx seemed distracted, a slight frown on her face as she flipped her hood back to scan the snowfields leading up to the bridge. “It’s absolutely safer than finding another way around.” Then, without waiting for comment, she flicked the reins, and they got moving.
As Bucket’s hooves rang on the wind-scoured pavers of the bridge, Fern braced herself for the whole thing to shiver or sway or crumble out from under them with a crack of shearing stone.
Nothing of the sort happened. Not so much as a tremble.
She began to relax.
Halfway across the bridge, everything went wrong.
A figure emerged from the right-hand tower at the opposite end of the bridge and strode to the center of the path where they stopped, facing the cart, their hair tugged sidelong by snow-flecked gusts.
“Well,” said Astryx grimly.
She didn’t pull back on Bucket’s reins, and he continued to advance.
Fern held up a paw to shade her eyes, as though that would help her to see any better.
Nearsighted or not, she still knew who it was.
The orc warrior with the many braids.
She was bundled in a quilted jacket and heavy pants, and she held a hooked axe down and away from her thigh.
“Oh shit,” Fern said, beginning to turn and look back the way they’d come.
Astryx brought her up short with a hand on the shoulder. “Behind us, too. Three of them.” She looked disgusted with herself. “I should have checked the towers before we rode out onto the bridge. Foolish.”
Then she reached up to bare an inch of her blade. “Nigel. I’m going to ask for quiet. If there’s speaking to be done, I’ll do it.”
Fern heard what sounded like a sharp intake of breath from him, then a miserable, “As you wish, my lady.”
“Another bounty hunter?” murmured Fern, gripping the clasp of her cloak so fiercely that the cold metal bit into her paw.
“Seems likely,” replied Astryx.
Fern had seen the Oathmaiden single-handedly defeat a small army of Four Fingers thugs, so she wasn’t sure why she was nervous this time.
Maybe it was the implication of patience on the part of the orc before them. She’d clearly been following them, biding her time until they were at their most vulnerable atop this forsaken bridge.
Maybe it was the memory of the look on the woman’s face when they’d bumped into one another back in Bycross.
