Wandering Star (The Quintana Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Torre disliked the ash and rough clothes, and had never once in his life flogged himself, either—so much of that was superstitious nonsense—but neither would he ever flaunt his pleasures during the penance weeks. Overindulgence would rot the soul any time of the year.

  Surely Daniel’s wife knew about his dalliances with other women—she was too much of a gossip to not have heard it from multiple sources—but if it bothered Naila Roja, she never let it show.

  “It’s almost sixteen bells, Uncle,” Pedro said. “May I open the doors?”

  Torre rose to his feet, back creaking and joints popping in his knees. A twinge in his hip. Straightening his posture brought further pain, and he resisted the urge to hunch either his shoulders or his back. Do that and in five years he’d be walking with a perpetual stoop. Assuming he made it that long.

  Pedro threw open the doors to the balcony, and a gust of cold wind blew in. Pedro and Daniel strode outside, and Torre followed, fighting aches with every step, but refusing to let his discomfort show.

  The balcony was about ten feet wide and wrapped around the upper part of the mansion. A wrought iron balustrade topped with painted wooden carvings of fantastical beasts and even more fantastical flying machines kept the unwary and the drunk from stumbling over the edge, where they’d fall thirty feet onto a lower balcony. Heavy planters contained small trees and masses of flowers, giving Torre a privacy screen when he was at his desk with the doors open.

  Standing on the balcony presented them with a vast, sweeping view. Directly below lay the layered gardens and estates of the Quinta Terrace, with their gleaming white mansions and their clusters of servant homes tucked against the hillside.

  The Forty Terrace layered down the hillside below the Quinta, somewhat less lush and more crowded, followed by steep cobbled alleyways and stone staircases leading to the wall that separated the Forty Terrace from the Thousand Terrace—this wall patrolled not by de Armas’s men, who were forbidden from entering the city, but by Captain Diamante and his men of the upper watch.

  The Thousand Terrace, on the middle level of the city, was a collection of hive-like markets and tidy, but cramped homes bisected by snaking alleys and corridors. A thousand families lived on that stretch of the hillside, all packed in, one on top of another, but still enjoying wealth and privileges that were not to be had by those living below. Another wall, this one thick and serious and marked by watchtowers and the tiny figures of gunners, separated the Thousand Terrace from the lower terraces of the dumbre, which clung haphazard and ramshackle down the hillside.

  Where the Thousand Terrace was marked with brightly colored houses—reds, greens, and yellows—the dumbre was all brown and black. Smoke from ten thousand cook fires leaked from rooftops and chimneys and swept over the Rift, obscuring the lower reaches of the gorge with a gritty brown haze.

  Torre had never descended to the dumbre, of course, not in all of his seventy-five years, but in earlier, more curious days had sometimes watched with a spyglass. In spite of what others claimed, the dumbre seemed busy enough, not a bunch of layabout drunks.

  Women hauled baskets on their heads, and men pushed wheelbarrows carrying goods. Others carried rags, or did commerce on wooden walkways that lurched drunkenly from one building to another. Figures squatted on rooftops, hauling in their lines from the bottom of the Rift, catching enormous, struggling bats for the markets.

  Giant carriages, each one capable of holding thirty or forty people, were winched up and down the hillside on vertical rails to get workers from the dumbre to the Thousand Terrace or to Carbón’s rail yard so they could be carried up to the mines on the plateau. A heavy wooden road girdled the lower terraces, serving as a highway along which everything and everyone seemed to flow. Someone had to organize that labor, and he didn’t think it was merchants from the Thousand.

  Lord Torre enjoyed a magnificent view, unmatched anywhere in Quintana. Only Lady Mercado’s palace-like mansion was higher in the Quinta than Lord Torre’s, and she didn’t have a clear view of the Great Span. The bridge stretched from the Thousand Terrace, crossed fourteen hundred feet of open air above the Rift, the depths of which lay eight hundred feet below, and gained the plateau on the other side, where a pair of slender anchoring towers stood like sentinels, companions to the pair rising from the mountainside on the edge of the city.

  Torre hadn’t built the bridge. Nobody knew who had. But it was his all the same, his inheritance, the legacy of generations of ancestors before him, Lords and Ladies Torre. It was a legacy of an earlier era, one of the great plenties of mankind, when men could work magic from iron and stone and other, strange, materials. It was hard to say what even held it up, as it crossed that impossible distance with no means of support other than the anchors on either side. And that wasn’t even the most miraculous thing about the Great Span.

  The breeze shifted, and Torre clutched his flapping cloak and wrapped it around him. His son and nephew stood on either side, their own cloaks swept back and their linen shirts billowing. The cold didn’t seem to bother them.

  He couldn’t help himself. “Almost sixteen bells, you say? What time was it when you came up?”

  Pedro started to answer, but then came a deep, ringing gong from the Luminoso temple in the Forty below them. The note hung in the air a long moment, then slowly came the next ring. And the next. Counting the hours since midnight.

  Hurry up, you fool. Ring the damn hour.

  Finally, the gong stopped.

  Sixteen bells, thank God. The minutes had been crawling by all day. How was it that the days were so long, but the years raced past? That the decades themselves seemed to have wings? Worries about what Aquino had returned for his inspection worsened his insomnia, and Torre had already been awake in the darkness that morning when he heard five bells.

  The Great Span was empty of traffic, except for several dozen tiny figures heaving at chains on the far end. They were working the uncouplers, and soon disappeared off the end, their work finished.

  From far below Torre’s estate, where the bridge met the Thousand Terrace, came the roar of gushing water. A small river shot from the Thousand in an instant waterfall and tumbled over the edge of the cliff. The air below, descending to the forests at the bottom of the Rift, had been relatively clear, except for the haze of cook fires drifting out from the lower terraces, but the falling water filled the sky with mist. A rainbow mirrored the Great Span. The roar of cranking gears rose above the sound of flowing water, followed by a sound like a metal beast clawing its way from the center of the earth, as if wakened by Carbón’s endless digging at the coal seams.

  Torre gripped the railing to steady his trembling hands. He stared without blinking, no longer worried about the gusts of cold wind blowing here at the top of Quintana, no longer thinking about anything but that lump of rotten stone tucked into the desk drawer.

  You should have called for Carbón as soon as you knew. You should have stopped the bridge. Delayed the whole damn thing until you were sure.

  Except that would have been admitting a problem before he knew it existed, weakening his power in the city, sowing panic in the upper classes, and fomenting chaos among the uncounted thousands of the dumbre.

  “There it goes,” Daniel said.

  The Great Span began to move. It separated from the towers on the opposite side of the Rift, and the far edge of the bridge’s roadway began to swivel north, even as a smaller segment of the inner edge swiveled south. The northern side of the bridge was soon suspended entirely over the air, no longer connected to the far side, but angled with a gap some hundred and fifty feet from landfall. The waterfall stopped, reduced now to a trickle that spilled over the side.

  The Great Span wasn’t merely Quintana’s artery to the nations and people beyond her borders, but the city’s final defense. Open it, and the Rift was impassable. Open it, and an enemy could seize the city’s port, defeat de Armas’s troops on the road, overthrow Torre’s watchtowers, and reach the edge of th
e bridge, but there they would be stopped by the massive gorge. Attempting to hook around and reach the city’s plateau and promontory from behind would take them through uncut forest and high, snow-blocked mountain passes.

  There was no greater proof of Quintana’s age, or that the rich coal seams of the plateau were the source of her wealth and power, than the bridge built to transport it. Torre didn’t know what sorcerous science had created it, had constructed this massive device strong enough to not only support Lord Carbón’s coal cars, but to hold its own weight suspended fantastically over hundreds of feet of air, able to be unmoored on one side, but it was beyond anything possible in this fallen age.

  More sorcery had once powered the bridge’s opening and closing; rusting machinery buried in the Thousand Terrace had powered the huge levers and gears, even apparently uncoupled the bridge from the far towers. Nobody knew what had powered that machinery, but the machinery was long dead.

  “Is something wrong, Uncle?” Pedro asked. He wore a leather thong around his neck with a tiny carving of a finch on the end, and now rubbed it idly.

  Daniel glanced at Torre. “Nothing is wrong. My father is enjoying his glory. Look at them all—they know the true source of Quintana’s power.”

  Torre followed his son’s gaze. Men and women had come onto the balconies and entered the open parks of the Forty Terrace at the ringing of sixteen bells. Both the upper and lower watch stood on their respective walls, pointing and staring. People leaned out of windows or gathered on rocky outcrops throughout the Thousand. Below them, in the lower terraces, crowds of ant-like figures gathered on rooftops or massed on rickety wooden walkways held up by wobbly scaffolding.

  Then, almost as a single movement, thousands of pairs of eyes swung up the hillside toward the Quinta Terrace. Toward Lord Torre’s manor, which sat like a fortress above them. Could they see him? He thought they could.

  “Enough,” he said. “Why don’t they close the blasted thing? Who is our man down there? Jacobo, isn’t it?”

  “It hasn’t been five minutes, that’s why,” Pedro said.

  Pedro was watching him with a curious expression, and Torre forced his brow smooth, his expression neutral.

  “Close enough,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I’m growing cold, and it’s time for my afternoon tea.”

  Pedro kept studying him. Torre was fumbling for something to say to cover his mood, when the water gushed through its channel a second time—hundreds of thousands of gallons flowing from massive cisterns carved into the rock. Given force by its tumble down the hill, the water turned the great wheels to reverse the process begun a few minutes earlier.

  The bridge began to swing shut. Torre released his grip on the railing. The Great Span had held. His relief was so great he nearly swooned.

  “Never forget that it was your grandfather who built the waterworks,” he told Daniel and Pedro. “That it was our family’s ingenuity, our initiative, that replaced the old system when it no longer worked.”

  Daniel snorted—Torre had reminded him of this far too many times, apparently. Pedro looked sufficiently solemn.

  “My mother says it used to take dozens of men to open the bridge,” Pedro said.

  “Hundreds,” Torre corrected. “And the better part of a day to get it open and then close it up again. Imagine if an enemy cavalry came charging up the road. They’d be in the city before we got it open.”

  “She says it’s genius,” Pedro said. “Like the opening of a new plenty.”

  “Your mother should keep her mouth shut,” Torre said sharply. “That kind of careless talk broke my father. Too much boasting, idle comments about entering the Fourth Plenty. The cabalists accused him of blasphemy.”

  Daniel suddenly looked more interested. It wasn’t something Torre talked about very often. “What did they do to him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe threatened, maybe they put their hands on him. He wouldn’t say, but it was ugly.”

  “Grandfather was Quinta,” Daniel protested. “How could they do that? Cabalists don’t have that sort of power.”

  Torre gave his son a sharp look. “Is that what you think? Who do they answer to? Think about that for a moment.”

  Daniel looked away. “I’m not worried. Bring on the Master of Whispers himself. I’ll break him. If Grandfather hadn’t lost his nerve, if he’d built more devices like that one”—he gestured at the gush of water over the cliff, now slowing to a trickle as the bridge closed again and Jacobo and his men shut the sluices—“then maybe we would be living in the Fourth Plenty by now.”

  “By the Elders, will you watch your tongue?”

  “Fine, I won’t say it again. And I’m not dumb enough to mention it outside these walls.” Daniel glanced one more time at the Great Span. “The bridge is closed, Father. I’ve done my duty and verified that it’s sound. Can I go now?”

  Torre nodded. Instead of returning through the open balcony doors to his father’s library, Daniel made his way down the stone stairway to the terrace below, where servants were wheeling out more planters, these containing small peach trees, removed from the greenhouses where they’d been kept. Blossoms covered the trees, and the head gardener must have determined that the risk of frost had passed, although Torre couldn’t feel a change in the wind knifing down from the plateau at their back.

  Once down below, Daniel passed through an arched doorway that cut through a brick wall and into another terraced garden. He was no doubt on his way to the stables to fetch a horse, and from there to take the road up the hillside and out of the city toward the plateau, where he’d exchange his mount for a fresh one at the stables there. He’d spend the night up top, most likely.

  Daniel was thirty, married, and with two children. He did his duties for his father, for his family, but no more than that, and certainly with no sense of pride or accomplishment. Instead, he spent most of his time riding the windswept plateau. Sometimes just riding, but mainly hunting, accompanied sometimes by his dogs.

  “It’s only twice a year,” Pedro said. Torre had almost forgotten that his nephew was still with him. “And it isn’t so much about watching the bridge open, is it? It’s about being watched watching it open.”

  “That’s right,” Torre said. “And why do you think that’s important?”

  “Mercado earns her money. So do Carbón and Puerto. De Armas is rich because of taxes, but not many people resent that. The city must be protected, no matter the cost.”

  “We’re important for the city’s defense, too,” Torre said. “If the Great Span is ever captured, an enemy could walk right in.”

  “But Uncle, everyone sees de Armas’s men on the road, and there are just enough fights with bandits and wandering tribes to remind them why we need troops. Then there are the Dianans and the Scoti, with armies of their own.” Pedro shrugged. “Our family owns a bridge, that’s all.”

  “Not just a bridge. Watchtowers, too. So that de Armas—”

  Pedro talked over him. “Towers that de Armas could easily maintain. That’s what people think—I’ve heard them talking. Even my mother doesn’t understand the balance that keeps de Armas’s men out of the city and out of our towers so he can’t seize power.”

  Torre had stopped talking to let the boy explain. Pedro had clearly puzzled his way to conclusions not openly stated.

  “Anyway, we can’t justify our position in the Quinta from watchtowers,” Pedro continued. “It’s the Great Span that matters. We charge people to cross the bridge. We charge people a lot. The duties are taxes of a sort, and people know it, even if it isn’t called a tax. Every meal the dumbre eats, every bit of cloth, spice, or manufacture that Mercado ships in and out gets a tax that goes to our coffers.”

  “Have you thought about what would happen if the Great Span were to fail?” Torre asked.

  “You said it yourself. An enemy army could march straight into the city.”

  “That’s if it’s captured. What if it were to fail?”

&nb
sp; Pedro had been calm and thoughtful in this conversation, a direct contrast with his cousin Daniel’s bored dismissal, but now he scoffed.

  “How would it fail? It was built in the plenties, built by the Elders. You could walk every man, woman, and child in the city across it and send Carbón’s coal cars, too, and it would hold our weight.”

  “Nothing lasts forever.”

  “A bridge built by the Elders does. Or close enough, anyway. It must be six hundred years old and as strong and useful as the day it was built—thanks to Grandfather’s water device.”

  “What if an enemy did it?” Torre pressed. “Imagine if sappers toppled the far towers.”

  “You just proved it can stand without towers—that’s the point of the demonstration, right? If an enemy knocked down the towers we’d wait them out and reanchor it to the other side when they were gone. We can certainly manage that much.”

  “And if after knocking down the towers, the enemy heaped the bridge with gunpowder and blew it up?”

  “It’s too strong. Wouldn’t the flames just shoot into the air? You’d need some sort of concentrated explosive like the ancients had.”

  “Your engineering knowledge is better than your imagination,” Torre said. “Imagine that the Great Span has collapsed. Never mind how it happened. What would be the consequences? Quickly, now—you seem to have thought of everything else, so this shouldn’t be hard. What would happen?”

  Pedro blinked. The certainty of youth faded from his expression.

  “Quintana would die, wouldn’t it?” Pedro said. “The coal couldn’t reach the sea. The markets would have nothing to sell. We don’t grow enough food, either. The dumbre would starve right away, those who couldn’t live on the produce of rooftop gardens and bats snared from the sky.”

  “The dumbre would flee, if they could,” Torre said. “Before they starved, I mean. They are poor, not stupid.”

  “What about Lord Puerto?” Pedro asked. “He lives outside the city, down on the river. He’d be okay.”