Page 77 of Elvenbred

All right, time to get down. She had an idea to slide down as she had started to before, but this time keeping her feet under her. She stepped towards one side, where she could grab one of the four remaining rods and steady herself for a bit. She looked down, now painfully aware that she stood as high as the roof of a one story building. Still, she could not remain up here.

She made the leap before she could stop and really think about what she did. She slid down Rock’s side, grabbing the nearest rod to stop her dangling over his side, then let go. The angle took some of the speed off, but the slope soon turned into a drop and she fell feet first for what she thought was her own body-length. She tried to catch her fall, using her legs and back to absorb the impact. That mostly worked, and she landed without injury, except to turn the ankle she had already twisted once. She knew she looked ungainly, but doubted Rock to be much of a connoisseur of pratfalls.

This would be so much easier if I had my magic. She stood, limped. Rock didn’t seem to be in any hurry to step in with his healing.

The survey of the bronze rods in Rocks back had taken too much time. She would have to hurry if she wanted to eat. She got her shovel, scraped the ash that Rock had left behind while she baited him with food, then started the eat … ash cycle. Even with a sore ankle, she had to work.

It took her five sets of sleep cycles to work out a way that might … just might … remove the rods.

She had just topped off the bucket when she recalled her daft cousin, Kyrtian, showing her a model he’d built from one of his dusty old books. A shebushet, or trebuchet, or something like that he had called it, or some such thing. The interesting bit that she remembered was that it had a short arm, and a long one, and that force applied to one side got magnified by the other. The long arm slung a small bag, and magnified the force, enough that a squad of soldiers could all haul on ropes at the same time and hurl a good sized stone ball a considerable distance. She didn’t understand the language he used … blather about “mechanical force” and “golden ratios” and typical Kyrtian word-noise, but he’d been quite clear on how simple the basic principle remained. A level. No … a lever. If she could figure out how to make a lever that she could attach to one of the rods, she might be able to draw the rods out Rock’s back as simply as removing splinters. Plus, pushing down was a lot easier than pulling up.

She quickly realized that while the idea might be simple, the execution would be anything but. She had neither paper nor pencil, so spent a good deal of time working out portions of her scheme in her head while feeding Rock. The first bit she sorted out was that this would have to work the opposite as Kyrtian’s trebuchet. She would need to put the weight on the long end, and transfer it to the short end, and she would need something that would be strong enough to handle the force, without bending or breaking. The bronze rod she had already extracted fit that bill, but she wondered if it was long enough. Kyrtian’s trebuchet had a very long arm. Had it been built to scale the long arm would have been five or six times the length of a horse … with the short arm being barely one.

Still, the bronze rod was what she had, and the only thing she could see that would be strong enough to bear her weight. So, she would use what she had. She had the shovel for the pivot … the fulcrum Kyrtian had called it. Metal, and with enough of a rise in the middle to set down on Rock’s back and then put the lever on top of that.

She found a way to test elements, setting the shovel down and placing the short end under the edge of the hopper that held Rock’s food. She stood on the long end, and nearly split her skull again as the rig came apart. She escaped that teachable moment with a swollen lip and a ringing headache. Another piece of blanket to tie the lever to the shovel, and it held together. She was able to stand on the long end, use the shovel for the pivot, and with some bouncing up and down, get the hopper to rise up a bit.

She stood back, pressing the back of her hand to the lip, still bleeding and already puffy. One step forward. Now, how to tie this all in place so I can do this from the height of a roof that’s also smooth as an egg.

It took her another couple of days to come up with an altogether unsatisfactory solution, but it was the best she had. Another strip of her diminishing blanket to tie the flattened end of the lever to the rod she wished to extract. It took her a while to sort out how to soak the blanket material, then twist it around the lever, and the rod she wanted to extract. Rock had stopped reacting when she held the leveh, even when she pointed it at him. Water to soak the material and enough twists, and it held fast to the bar, even when she jumped on it.

She tried tying the shovel to the bar itself, but found there were no good ways to test this part. She would just have to hope she could figure out how to make it work once she started. Rock’s back was broad enough to walk on, but still sloped off enough on both sides, that a misstep would put her on the floor, concussed, and with every likelihood that her mealtime guards would walk in, see the contraption on Rock’s back, and even their dim little minds could add one and one.

She tried using ash from the floor as something that might give her purchase on Rock’s back, but it had the opposite effect, and she had come down hard. What did work, and which broke her heart, was the gruel in her bowl. The liquid, mixed with the ash, made a rough and gritty paste that adhered to Rock’s pearlescent outer layer, and which provided enough purchase for Triana to walk more freely. She reasoned she would need an entire bowl, an entire meal, that she could spread around once she went to work. Her stomach already protested the decision.

She had worried that the guard might see the dried gruel and ash mix streaking Rock’s side, but the creature was able to clean itself somehow. She noticed after her sleep period that the marks she’d left had disappeared, and its side glistened, with no sign that she had smeared precious food and gray ash over its top center.

The guards rarely entered at any point except at mealtimes to collect the ash bucket, and in the days since she had taken ill, rarely became “never” and two guards had most often become one, the least obnoxious of the group. Triana hoped the lack of replacements indicated either Haldeen’s guards were shorthanded, or they had concluded she was no threat. Either worked to her advantage.

She remained quite aware that at any point the guard, or the Overseer, might enter, and she knew with absolute certainty that would occur the moment she had her contraption on Rock’s back, the goo spread out to give her purchase, and was bouncing on the bronze rod and trying to lever out its mate. Luck was a fickle bitch, but her cousin, Misfortune, had impeccable timing.

Triana tried to sort out when she would be the least likely to be discovered. Just after a meal, when the task was done for a half-day, or would that be when the guard might turn around, having forgotten whether he checked something? Midway through a watch, but with the mage-lights always on, she still had no idea of day or night. She’d tried counting heartbeats, but had nothing to measure against, and wound up with wildly different counts … when she didn’t lose track completely.

She wasn’t able to trace any clear patterns, and her various counting schemes all came apart. Eventually, it came down to counting a thousand heartbeats after her next feeding. She put it off for a day, trying to work out a better pattern, then recognized that she was procrastinating.

Beforehand, she felt nervous and pent up, and unable to sleep, even after she had her bucket filled. She spent the time instead talking to Rock, trying to explain what she was going to do, and what she hoped Rock would do. Once freed from the rods, Rock would use his magic to break them out, the next time the guard came in. She hoped he heard and understood. Rock might be intelligent … enough … for what she wanted to do, but she had no idea how he communicated, or whether he even heard her. She continued anyway. She saw no obvious sign that he had any notion of what she was talking about. On occasion Rock would shift, and she would move with it. Rock didn’t move far, suggesting he was aware of her alongside his space. She put a hand on his warm side, and felt a bit reassured.

Once the ash bucket had been replaced, she held the food bowl, rather than diving in. She’d planned to wait a thousand heartbeats, but the food in the bowl and her very noisy stomach undercut her resolve. She had barely gotten to the point when she’d started making deals with herself. She could eat a little, the most solid part of the gruel, maybe a third, and save the rest for her work. She knew that once she started down that road, she wouldn’t stop.

Time to go. If I sit here any longer, I’m going to eat. Ancestors, I’m hungry!

She gathered her resolve and coaxed Rock to where she wanted him. She used the most tried and true method she had for moving him to where she wanted him, a trail of manure and straw. She did what she could to position Rock so that his bulk might shield what she did, but she knew that would buy only a few heartbeats, and wouldn’t conceal the lever contraption once someone looked up. She just had to count on no one looking up, if this took longer than she thought it would.

She’d worked out a safer and faster way to scale the Rock. She soaked the blanket material she planned to use to tie everything together with water, then put a pile of manure of straw where it would take him a while to chew through, with him placed right alongside the cage bars. She had already used the last of her blanket to rig a sort of harness that she could use to carry the smaller pieces up and tie them to control rods so they didn’t roll away. She scaled Rock’s side by putting her back against him, and her feet against the bars, and then walking up until she was high enough to reach the lowest of the control rods, this one rammed halfway into his back, right about where the kidneys would be, if Rock had legs and were a person. From there, she could get her foot on top of the rod, brace herself, and walk up the rest of the way.

Once on top, she went forward, to the highest, and least angled rod. She’d noted that the rods were in only the loosest of patterns, which gave her the sense that when he had been captured, speed had trumped quality. That told her something, but she wasn’t quite sure what.

She got to where she wanted to place her lever, then set the shovel down, with the convex side up, and the flat edge of the spade pointing away from the rod. She used her blanket strips to tie the shovel handle to the control rod to hold it in place, and took the bronze rod and used it to tap around the edges where the carapace met the embedded rod, hoping to crack it a little to make her job easier. She was rewarded with a crackling sound, and the sight of very small cracks all around that edge. She then tied the bronze rod to the rod sticking up and out of Rock’s back, using the end that had been mashed and split by the hammer-blows that drove it in. Once she had the two rods tied together, she gave the first two full turns to tighten the knot and hopefully keep the bronze rod from slipping up the embedded rod, rather than pulling it out. She gave the rig a tentative tug. The bronze rod had a tendency to slip off the shovel, and it slid around a bit on Rock’s smooth back. She tied it all together so when it came apart, the pieces wouldn’t slide off his back.

She quickly descended and got her congealed gruel. Once she added the ash, and more water, she worked it into a paste that adhered to Rock’s back. He radiated enough heat for the mix to dry quickly. Rock had worked his way through the manure pile she had set down, so that would take more time she didn’t have in order to reload the pile from the hopper. She nearly jumped out of her skin as she turned away, and the chute above opened, dumping another mass into the bin.

It would take Rock some little time to work through what she had left, enough for her to test the rig. She got the gruel bowl and ascended again, holding it steady in one hand and climbing with the other. She did well, with one little bobble when she went to stand, and had to balance on one angled foot and one hand, when she went to rise.

Once on top, she quickly spread the paste out where she planned to work, then spent the next few hundred heartbeats returning her dish to the step below. She didn’t know if the guards would carry through on their threat to stop feeding her if she broke her bowl, but she had no desire to find out.

The latest climb revealed that Rock’s back had dried enough to begin her plan. She moved to where her rig was tied to the bronze rod she wanted to extract, positioned her lever low against the rod, and tied it in place. She positioned the shovel under the lever, to use as her fulcrum. The short end stayed firmly tied to the embedded rod, while the long end angled up into the air … rather higher than Triana had hoped, but she wasn’t going to start over. She put her foot on the lever, and flexed it a few times, feeling the tension in the metal and testing her purchase on dried gruel and ash. She gave it three little test bounces, then lifted herself up on her bent leg and brought her full weight down onto the bronze rod. She got two good bounces in before the shovel slipped and the lever came clattering down onto Rock’s back with a sound she felt certain would wake the dead. She stumbled to one side as the level slipped off the shovel, caught herself, and landed facedown on Rock’s back. She splayed her arms and legs out to prevent slipping off of Rock’s back. The grit on his pearlescent back gave her just enough purchase that she didn’t slide, and was able to get to her feet.

Somehow, she had torn a toenail, and left a bloody smear on Rock’s back.