Free Faces by E.C. Blake Page B

day’s hard travel.
    The houses beyond the wall appeared ordinary enough, if a bit thicker-walled and lower-roofed than the ones in the capital, as though they had been designed to hunker down in the face of vicious winter storms—as, no doubt, they had been. But Mara barely gave them a glance. Her gaze was drawn upward, as it had been throughout the ride, to the fortress that clung to the top of the cliff that towered above the village.
    It looked to be made of ice, but she knew that had to be an illusion birthed from white stone and the season’s snow. The cliff face merged seamlessly into its outside wall, which rose up to battlements and guard towers. Beyond that wall rose the fortress itself, half-hidden by the curtain wall and the rising steam and smoke of the village below. It looked smaller than the Palace in Tamita, but not by much, and it clung to the rocks more as if it had grown there than been built. “Magic?” Mara breathed, staring up at the impossible structure.
    â€œOf course,” the Lady said. “Although the method by which we will ascend to it is considerably more prosaic.” She urged her horse followed. They crossed a bridge over the river, which flowed through the middle of the village, its winding path straightened and constrained by brick walls, and through the winding, cobblestoned streets. Snow lay in piles along every wall but had been shoveled from the middle of the road, allowing easy travel. There were many people about, all of whom moved aside to let them pass. There was something odd about the way they did it, though, and after a moment, Mara realized what it was: they didn’t look up, as though they were avoiding the Lady’s gaze. Mara resolved to ask the Lady about it later, but then promptly forgot about it altogether as their “prosaic” means of ascending to the fortress came into sight.
    She realized as she saw it that she’d been subliminally aware of the sound it made for some time: a low rumbling, more felt than heard. When she saw the device itself, she was surprised it had taken her so long to realize what she was hearing, after the time she had spent in the mining camp, for this rumbling had the same source as that one: a giant waterwheel, this one driven by the cascade she had spotted from the western end of the valley and wondered if it were frozen or flowing. It was definitely flowing, falling for hundreds of feet, the rock to either side of its narrow ribbon coated with ice but the stream itself defiantly liquid. At the bottom of its long fall, down a cliff so sheer that it hardly splashed at all for much of the distance, the stream dropped into a kind of funnel and then rushed out again onto the paddles of the waterwheel.
    The waterwheel in the mining camp had driven the man-engine, a terrifying device for moving workers up and down within the mine. This one, too, drove a device for lifting people, but of a quite different kind. The ever-rotating shaft of the waterwheel disappeared into a wooden tower attached to the side of the cliff. At the top, where the shaft entered, it was fully enclosed. Below that enclosure, the tower was more open, though its structure of exposed wooden beams was split down the middle by a wooden wall. At the very bottom of the tower was a matching enclosure to the one at the top. And constantly rising up the tower, emerging from the lower enclosure and disappearing into the top one, was a series of platforms, attached to each other by thick ropes at all four corners. No doubt on the other side of the wooden wall the platforms descended, flipping over out of their sight at the top tower. It seemed clear enough what they had to do: step onto one of those moving platforms and somehow not fall off until they stepped off it again in the structure that protruded from the fortress wall like a carbuncle.
    â€œCouldn’t we just fly?” Mara asked weakly. She remembered the man-engine with something