A fragment, written circa '06.
There's blazing sunshine above the smogline.
We've climbed above the soapy grey tidemark that the airborne crud leaves around the thirty-fourth floor, and broken into the sky, anchored to the building by charmed and steel-cored cable, anchored to the city by grounding wristlets and the tinny warble of Devereaux's wireless.
It'll be an hour or so of ropework and careful swearing until we reach it, but the problem's clearly visible already - near-certain even from the ground, before we reached the site, before their facilities manager had finished describing the building's symptoms. This high, the voidscraper's face is built in vast photovorous sigils, drinking light and shitting distilled power. This is the Tower of Law, though, one of the old old buildings, constructed before the Eaststone dwarves licensed their highly efficient solar-powered runes. To get enough juice out, the Law's obsolete, quarter-mile-wide elven squiggles of copper on glass bristle with curlicues and tricky serifs. In places, they form a mesh fine enough for the wingtips of a roosting voidbird to short two strands, flash-frying the luckless bastard and knocking out the generators for this entire face.
A couple of careful taps with an insulated mallet should shift the crispy quasi-avian remains, and then we can reset the breakers and wake the building back up. The climb back down to the access hatch is going to be a bitch - when the sigils are running, structures like this develop all kinds of weird thermal and magical gradients across the faces. Highly localised, delicately balanced weather systems form. This one's been heavily disrupted - long enough for the gale-whipped rains of blood and fish to have stopped, long enough to seek a new equilibrium.
Now we're going to kick it in the arse again, so of course it's going to kick us back.
We scale another floor, and reach one of the ledges that provide the Law's infinitesimal taper, a bleak manspan of corroded stone, slicked with decaying fish and gore.
The sun's raising quite a stink, but it's better than no rest stop.
We haul our gear over the edge, huffing and cussing, Bren and Shiny with the winches and Vector Hexes, Devereaux with the voxbox and the work docket, Daddyfly and the Gremlette with the sprays and rods. The equipment goes in a pile next to the wall while we have a breather.
"Orc turds," the Gremlette says succinctly, scraping her auburn fringe back into the hairclips it's escaped from, raising a laugh. Bren offers her a capful of stewed tea from his inevitable flask.
Devereaux shrugs off the massive backpack housing the voxbox, and retunes the illicit commercial receiver hooked into it until he finds Southstone One, cranking out the latest sticky ballad by close-harmony elfboys, fatuous nothings crooned to human girls impressed by pointy ears and shiny hair.
"What's that, Devs?" Bren says with elaborate innocence. Devereaux scowls at the obvious windup.
"It's Bramlin of Hewell and his Oak Leaf Troubadours singin' Dancing in the Fields," he says with chill dignity. He takes a bit of ribbing for knowing what boybard-of-the-minute his teenage daughter's listening to.
"Catchy," the Gremlette deadpans, and gives him a friendly nudge. "Don't it make you feel like dancing?"
"Gerroff," Devereaux says in wounded tones.
"You're too tall and skinny to dance," Shiny tells the Gremlette. "You'd have someone's eye out if you shook your thang."
She puffs up like an enraged scarecrow, and give him a corrosive stare.
"Don't get your humph on, Grem," Bren says generously, patting her arm. "Lots of men are hot for women like sacks of bony."
She stabs the back of his hand with a fingernail. The fingernail, in fact, on a double handful of chipped and nibbled stubs - useful for poking, scraping, and inflicting vengeance on Bren.
"I hates all of you," she says adamantly.
"Give my tea back, then," Bren says, nursing his hand.
She pouts and cuddles the steaming brew to her.
Bookending them in comfortable silence, the Daddyfly and I exchange a peaceful glance. We've got good engineers here, every horrible one of them.
Over the music, the voxbox crackles and squawks.
As usual, manning the other end is Andy, otherwise known as Mad Cackle. "Oop?" he says, distorted by the voxcast spells and Bramlin of Hewell's warble. "Oop, Rod? Tha layin'?"
Cackle runs the repeatedly-forbidden Engineering betting pools, and the hot bet today is Stone Cold Castle's replacement.
Engineer-Lieutenant Primus is not a title lightly earned. Traditionally, one acquires it when the previous incumbent dies, and engineers seldom die easy or pretty. The incumbent in question was the late Alberto 'Stone Cold' Castle, though, and he'd once spent an entire night dangling at the end of a safety line when a voidstorm ripped half a ton of scaffolding off the side of a 'scraper. They finally pulled him back out of the Void half-mad and nigh indestructible, massive unseen changes wrought on his tissues.
I say nigh indestructible. Seems Mistress Erin's House of Correction finally did for the rascally old lobster - his heart gave out while a petite nineteen-year-old redhead was laying into him with a cane.
All things considered, she might have been even more distressed if he'd held out another half hour and died while she was doing something else. But we won't go into that, because today they announce his replacement with pomp and circumstance, some ambitious fool who thinks that Chief of the Chaos Engineers of the Southstone Nexus is a title, not a death warrant. With our luck, he'll never have held a spanner or drawn a rune in his own blood. He'll be somebody's pale, inbred nephew. Or, you know, an elf.
If it wasn't for the bad luck, we'd have no luck at all, except for Bren's trinket. It's an ingot of what he swears is genuine, Eaststone-forged denatured luck. He keeps it in his toolbox, where it serves the dual purpose of enforcing the natural and proper forces of probability, and making sure his toolbox never blows away. Denatured luck is heavy.
The only thing worse than our luck is the paperwork. Ever tried to account for seven years' worth of mithril-plated three-eighth rivets, on a site plagued by hurricane-force winds, magnetic anomalies up to twelve-K Gloins, and sudden Fundamental Disturbances? You don't want to, especially when you know that somebody's mate had the best part of a cartful last Samhain, so they'd have something to anchor spells to in the chassis of their entry for the Stuff That Flies art festival.
I take a look at the someone, trying to wrestle the cap of his teaflask back off the Gremlette, and shrug philosophically, reaching out for one of the voxbox handmikes.
"Hey-up, Andy. Aye, we're up the Law, over the smog."
"Rod, lad! Tha good? How's tha layin', en lads and lassie?"
"Fine, fine. I'll ask 'em, Andy. What's the favourite?"
Cackle gives us his trademark mad laugh. "Ahhh, it a' gang wrang!" he says delightedly.
"Twenty on the Munro!" the Gremlette shouts over Bren's shoulder.
"The Munro? The Munro? I'll nae tak' yer money for tha, lassie! It's like robbin' a babby!" Andy heckles. "Ye wouldna rather bet on a wet custard puddin', or similar superior thing?"
"Twenty on the Munro, you robber!" she yells.
"Ah, the Cackle's right, the Munro don't gonna gets it," Bren chimes in - any excuse for an argument. "Twenty on Hulme ap Jewell, there's a bet."
Cackle cackles.
Shiny unhooks the second handmike. "Put me and Bren down for a score each on ap Jewell," he says. "Devs?"
Devereaux rubs his hands together. "I've got an in," he says conspiratorially. "One of the clerks in the Pontiff's office - it'll be the Overmorian, sees."
The Overmorian's crooked as they come, and cornered too. It's only a matter of time before he goes down and they put the boot in, and the selection committee won't want to link him to them. Still, there's no arguing with Devereaux when he's got an idea.
Cackle coughs sceptically. "En the Daddyfly?"
The Daddyfly gives the view a slow, golden smile. "I'm no good at guessing games. I'll bet the way the gaffer bets."
"No bet," I say, as if anyone needed to ask.
"Ah, now," Cackle protests. "No even a flutter fer the Daddy?"
The Daddyfly laughs like distilled thunder, then ruthlessly puts his smile away. "No."
Cackle pauses a second, then petulantly demands, "Whut's the big man know?"
I crack a smile. "Lay the bets, Andy. Time we were off up."
"Aye, and watch where yer settin' yer feet," he grumbles.
It takes a minute for everyone to tether up and rejig the equipment, complaining every second moment, and then, roped only with a grounding cable and a lifting line, I scale the access pegs to the next anchor point. The lifting line brings up the grounding cable and safety lines for the others to clip to, and I fix them securely before starting up for the next anchor point, lifting line and ground a steady pull on my harness.
It's a dangerous job. When this voidscraper was built, exterior work would have been done by slaves, and nobody cared if they fell off.
I pause at the next anchor, until the Daddyfly hollers up, and I draw the lifting line up with the next set of cables. It's a familiar job, and we fall into the routine, climbing, pausing, hauling, heading for the next rest stop, the last before we reach the short.
A practised flick of my foot sends a fat, dead fish arching outwards into space from one of the pegs, and I stretch up for the next one, feeling the complementary burns of exerted muscles in and sunlight on my back.
The faint tones of Southstone One's hourly news report drift up, rendered unintelligible by distance, followed hard by the Gremlette's scathing yap and Bren's laugh.
Stretch, grip, burn.
It's a long while before we hit the next stop, and feels longer. High, stippled clouds throw rapid strips of shade across this ledge, and I kick aside frilled heaps of seaweed with a leaden foot to find a relatively clean spot to sit. The Daddyfly silently commandeers Bren's flask and hands me a capful of bitter, booze-laced brew.
Only a handful of voidscrapers still draw level with us.
Devereaux can't find Southstone One this time, and settles for Vox Pop Rock. It's mostly the same music.
The Gremlette leans against the wall and breathes deeply as she can, fighting not to hyperventilate. "Turds," she gasps, and nobody laughs this time.
It's a harder climb than it should be. The Void's bearing down hard on us today. I think of old Stone Cold and his indestructible flesh, and shudder - the sooner we're up and down and done, the better. There's an undeniable tension in the air, the long shadow of a hammerblow of pure chaos, our element and our nemesis.
The moment's broken by the tinny strains of Bramlin of Hewell, starting up again to blather about fields. The Gremlette snorts and bends over her Rubik's cube; Bren laughs like a high hyena.
It doesn't do to stare into the Void. Better to laugh and ignore it.
The next section is the worst. Up and down, crisscrossing the carbonised spot with rigging. Reaching the short is easy; planning our retreat is tricky. There are ways to do it without leaving any cables up here for the weather and the magic to rot them away, but nothing we could pull off without more manpower or equipment. I feel like a wrung and sodden rag by the time everything's set, and let myself hang limply from a safety line while the Daddyfly, skin greased with sunlight, gently puffs clouds of solvent spray at the fused and blackened mess on the glass. A stiff-bristled brush screwed onto one of the rods helps to flake it away, charnel snow falling on the Southstone's unsuspecting roofs.
We do a good, clean job, then retreat to the ledge below and man the voxbox again to call in for a reset. Ancient but well-built, the sigils wake in an orderly fashion, no arcing or bleedoff into the air, and start to hum softly to themselves.
Then it's a scramble to take down as many of the cables as we can, the climbing harder now that we have to be careful of the energised strokes and swashes across the building's face, the heat radiating off them already perceptible. I look up as we're reeling in one of the grounding lines, seeing the strips of cloud starting to stitch together between us and the sun, and fight to free a hand to wave downwards.
"Forget the rest! Time we got moving!"
The way down is just as taxing as the way up. The others go down on the safety lines, and I climb down the pegs after them, reeling the lines in as I go. It's different, but a similar rhythm, and we find the same steady pace to the first stop, where we redistribute the equipment and hand out the Vector Hexes, clipping the metal cans securely between each others' shoulder blades, feeding the pullcords into easy reach. As safety measures go, the Vectors are chancy. Climbing weight limits restrict the life of the chemical fuel pack, turning the calibration of the velocity-induction spell into a balancing act. Reduce the speed of a falling body too much, and you run out of juice long before you reach the ground. Reduce it too little, and it makes no difference when you hit bottom.
There are stories that unlucky engineers, using Vectors this close to the Void's disruptive influence, have been powered upwards out of sight and not returned.
They're arguably better than nothing. I clip the Daddyfly's, yanking at the straps a couple of times to make sure it's secure, then clap him on the shoulder and glance over the others, getting a ragged line of affirmative gestures. The Gremlette surreptitiously touches the pouch on her belt that holds her Rubik's cube and Technician-Sergeant's badge, a good-luck gesture that none of us would grudge her. I give her a slight nod, and check that the wrist lacings on my fingerless gloves are tight.
"In your own time," I tell the Daddyfly, trusting them to him while I take care of the cables. He gives me his own nod, and we start down carefully. The building is hot, but the air temperature is dropping fast, and my neck prickles.
We're past the next anchor point when the first gust of wind hits, blowing nearly parallel to the tower's face, strong enough to pick up the coils of cable clipped to my harness and whip them bruisingly hard around me. The Vector slaps against my shoulder blade where the flesh is thinnest. I sway on the pegs, pull as close to the wall as I can, and ride it out.
It stops as suddenly as it came, and I crane to see downwards. "Everyone still there?" I yell, feeling for the next peg.
"Aye," the Daddyfly roars back, and the climb goes on, every few cautious handholds punctuated by a brutal hustle of cold air, each gust carrying stronger hints of rain. I can feel a throbbing bruise developing where the Vector keeps jolting against my shoulder.
The next stretch of cable takes us on a diagonal, skirting a long serif. The gusts die off as we pass it, and a little of the tension in me is unwinding when Devereaux's wireless abruptly sputters and finds Southstone One mid-song. I have a second to think of changing atmospheric conditions before the wind and the rain strike together, driving nearly horizontal into our backs. The pegs turn instantly slippery under my hands.
Only a few grim manspans later, a large prawn bounces off the wall next to my head, the Daddyfly's warning shout of "Fish!" lagging by only a moment. I'm still dredging for a curse vile enough when something slaps the back of my head, its own wriggling flinging it back into freefall.
The descent slows to a paranoid creep, footing checked and double-checked, hugging the wall and moving carefully. I hunch into the collar of my jacket and snarl, briefly showered with painful whelks. The world narrows to this peg and the next, cable and rain. The next ledge is a surprise, sudden under my feet after an eternity of climbing, and the Daddyfly and Shiny are abruptly there to grab my shoulders and hustle me to sit against the wall. I slick water and wet hair away from my eyes, blinking and grimacing around.
"All still in one piece?"
"Aye, Rod," the Daddyfly says calmly, helping Devereaux adjust the harness on the voxbox.
I experimentally clench my swollen hands, assess the hammering ache in my shoulders. "Aye. Good."
Shiny's methodically checking his harness over, near as steady as the Daddyfly. Bren's battened down grimly under the pressure, ready to ride it out. Devereaux's a little drawn, the weight of the voxbox telling this far into the climb - might have to hand it to Shiny at the next stop.
The Gremlette is staring into the weather, jaw set defiantly, almost begging for worse to measure herself against. She glances sideways suddenly to meet my eyes, then cuddles in on herself shyly, pretending there's nothing to see.
I let my head drop back against the wall, grinning.
Fine engineers.
The stop lets me distinguish every separate hurt, just in time for the next stretch. The pegs down here are wet with something slicker than water, and I grip tightly, wondering what else it's been raining. I'm dimly aware of a brightening above us, and when I next pause for breath, I risk a glance upwards to search for the sun.
Instead, the Void has dipped into the sky like a misty grey icicle, the intersection with the Southstone's robust reality generating a boundary layer of raw magic, shedding a pearlescent glow. Thin strings of it brush the voidscrapers like sparking cobwebs. I break a cold sweat all over, and drag in a lungful to bellow, "Voidstorm!"
White tendrils of magic jump around the peak of the Core, the only voidscraper older and taller than the Tower of Law; traceries that look delicate only with distance, each thick enough to swallow a roomful of engineers and carrying enough power to annihilate every one entirely. We're a long way down from the peak of the Law, but not far enough for comfort.
Even as I tear my eyes away, there's a momentary arc that grounds itself on the Law's mist-ringed tip. A surge of magic streams down the building, throwing showers of sparks off grime-coated sigils, lighting them electric blue with a surfeit of power. In a handspan of heartbeats, we're bracketed by glowing elvish characters, stories high.
I guess before I smell the ozone that there's too much for the building to take at once. Already buffeted by sudden turbulence, I squeeze my eyes shut and cling to the pegs. It takes only another second for the tower to start spilling the excess, the glass surface turning first black and then brilliant, seething white, a tide of light burning through closed lids to paint brilliance on the back of my skull.
Distantly, I hear the safety lines thrum, a clatter, and the distinctive pop of a Vector Hex igniting.
The pegs run through my hands like sand, loops of cable slung roughly over my shoulder. The anchor point brings me up short, and I pry weeping eyes open a crack, looking down, as if I'll see anything against the glare. It's a few long seconds more before the wall flickers dim and turns abruptly dull. Below me, the others are trading yells, cables singing and drumming on the building's face.
"What's going on?" I shout down.
"Bren slipped!" the Daddyfly shouts back. "No worries, Rod, we got him!"
I swallow a mouthful of oaths. "Bren, man, you in one piece?"
"Pissing himself!" the Gremlette yells instantly, reassuring as a doctor's all-clear. I curse anyway, for the shock.
"We're good to keep moving, Rod," the Daddyfly calls up.
"Aye," I yell back, sparing another mutter at our luck when I make out what a mess I've made of the cables.
It's not until the next welcome stop that I find that the sting in my hands is due to taking half the skin off my fingers. I stalk the ledge on rubbery legs to clap a hand on Bren's hunched shoulder, and leave a sticky print for the pelting rain to wash off.
"All right, aye?" I ask as steadily as I can.
His answering smile is pale and embarrassed. "No harm done," he says.
"Grand." I give him a nod and turn. "Ready for Shiny to take that, Devereaux?"
"Your hands," the Gremlette says, sounding surprised and aggrieved.
"Aye, more gloves ruined," I agree. "Any tea left, Bren?"
Only a capful, cold and tasting like raw tar. I take a swallow and decide to pass it round. They take it like a blessing, even the Gremlette, who grimaces and sticks her tongue out after.
It takes a few minutes to free Devereaux from the voxbox and strap Shiny onto it, a few priceless minutes of sitting down. Only the ruthless glow of the Void's incursion is a significant spur to keep moving against exhaustion. The Daddyfly tries the voxbox, and gets only the warbles of the Voidstorm hacking at reality, far over our heads. At least it saves us from any more of the Oak Leaf Troubadours.