Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(54)

“My lord,” I said when all the Bo lieutenants were out of earshot. “I’ll notify the hundred captain.”

“No,” said one Anaander. “Your Var deck is empty.”

“Yes, my lord,” I acknowledged.

“I’ll stay there while I’m on board.” Nothing further, no why or how long. Or when I could tell the captain what I was doing. I was obliged to obey Anaander Mianaai, even over my own captain, but I rarely had an order from one without the knowledge of the other. It was uncomfortable.

I sent segments of One Esk to retrieve One Var from the hold, started one section of Var deck warming. The three Anaander Mianaais declined my offer of assistance with their luggage, carried their things down to Var.

This had happened before, at Valskaay. My lower decks had been mostly empty, because many of my troops had been out of the hold and working. She had stayed on the Esk deck that time. What had she wanted then, what had she done?

To my dismay I found my thoughts slipping around the answer, which remained vague, invisible. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t right at all.

Between the Esk and Var decks was direct access to my brain. What had she done, at Valskaay, that I couldn’t remember, and what was she preparing to do now?





13


Further south the snow and ice became impermanent, though it was still cold by non-Nilt standards. Nilters regard the equatorial region as a sort of tropical paradise, where grain can actually grow, where the temperature can easily exceed eight or nine degrees C. Most of Nilt’s large cities are on or near the equatorial ring.

The same is true of the planet’s one claim to any sort of fame—the glass bridges.

These are approximately five-meter-wide ribbons of black hanging in gentle catenaries across trenches nearly as wide as they are deep—dimensions measured in kilometers. No cables, no piers, no trusses. Just the arc of black attached to each cliff face. Fantastic arrangements of colored glass coils and rods hang from the bottoms of the bridges, sometimes projecting sideways.

The bridges themselves are, according to all observations, also made of glass, though glass could never possibly withstand the sort of stress these bridges do—even their own weight should be too much for them, suspended as they are with nothing for support. There are no rails or handholds, just the drop, and at the bottom, kilometers down, a cluster of thick-walled tubes, each one just a meter and a half wide, empty and smooth-walled. These are made of the same material as the bridges. No one knows what the bridges and the tubes beneath them were for, or who built them. They were here when humans first colonized Nilt.

Theories abound, each one less likely than the one before. Inter-dimensional beings feature prominently in many of them—these either created or shaped humanity for its own purposes, or left a message for humans to decipher for obscure reasons of their own. Or they were evil, bent on destruction of all life. The bridges were, somehow, part of their plan.

Another whole subfield claims the bridges were built by humans—some ancient, long-lost, fantastically advanced civilization that either died out (slowly, pathetically; or spectacularly as the result of some catastrophic mistake) or moved on to a higher level of existence. Advocates of this sort of theory often make the additional claim that Nilt is, in reality, the birthplace of humans. Nearly everywhere I’ve been, popular wisdom has it that the location of humanity’s original planet is unknown, mysterious. In fact it isn’t, as anyone who troubles to read on the subject will discover, but it is very, very, very far away from nearly anywhere, and not a tremendously interesting place. Or at the very least, not nearly as interesting as the enchanting idea that your people are not newcomers to their homes but in fact only recolonized the place they had belonged from the beginning of time. One meets this claim anywhere one finds a remotely human-habitable planet.

The bridge outside Therrod wasn’t much of a tourist attraction. Most of the jewel-bright arabesques of glass had shattered over thousands of years, leaving it nearly plain. And Therrod is still too far north for non-Nilters to endure comfortably. Offworld visitors generally confine themselves to the better-preserved bridges on the equator, buy a bov-hair blanket guaranteed hand-spun and handwoven by masters of the craft in the unbearably cold reaches of the world (though these are almost certainly turned out on machines, by the dozen, a few kilometers from the gift shop), choke down a few fetid swallows of fermented milk, and return home to regale their friends and associates with tales of their adventure.

All this I learned within a few minutes of knowing I would need to visit Nilt to achieve my aim.


Therrod sat on a broad river, chunks of green-and-white ice bobbing and crashing in its current, the first boats of the season already moored at the docks. On the opposite side of the city, the dark slash of the bridge’s huge trough made a definitive stop to the straggling edge of houses. The southern edge of the city was flier-parks, then a wide complex of blue-and-yellow-painted buildings that was, by the look of it, a medical facility, one that must have been the largest of its kind in the area. It was surrounded by squares of lodgings and food shops, and swaths of houses, bright pink, orange, yellow, red, in stripes and zigzags and crosshatches.

We had flown half the day. I might have flown all night, I was capable of it, though it would have been unpleasant. But I saw no need for haste. I set down in the first empty space I found, told Seivarden curtly to get out, and did so myself. I shouldered my pack, paid the parking fee, disabled the flier as I had at Strigan’s, and set off toward the city, not looking to see if Seivarden followed.