The final clockwork preparation was one his father had taught him during their last summer together along the boundary line: inspecting the copper wire woven into his harness traces.
Len halted the handcart eighty yards before the shadow line. He stepped out from between the oak tines to run his fingers along the heavy bridle-leather straps that crossed his chest and linked his shoulders to the barrow’s pulling harness.
Every major strap in the Tern Road equipment was heavy with four-ply braided copper wire, stitched directly into the center groove of the steer-hide with heavy shoe-thread and sealed with beeswax. The wire was not decorative. It ran in an unbroken current-carrying circuit from the brass buckle at his left collarbone, down across his chest bone, through the side rings at his hips, and down the leather traces to the forged iron axle of the handcart.
Deren had been fanatical about copper grounding. In the northern mountains, where static discharge from territorial ward stones could foul magnetic compass needles, rust steel buckles in a single night, and shock draft horses into blind panics, a grounded harness was an essential piece of land-mapper’s equipment.
Deren had always kept that copper was an honest, moral metal. It conducted heat, faded away static. Then it grounded a human frame against the unnatural sky charges that leaked from military holding barriers.
Len ran his thumbnail across the dull red glint of the wire on his chest strap. Then, he felt a strange, cold shaking tingling in the skin beneath the leather.
It wasn’t imagination. Three hundred yards ahead. There, the massive iron rafters of the Redstone Canopy met the granite cliff-faces, the air was dense with an unnatural static-electric potential. The hair on the backs of his wrists was standing on end. A metal, coppery taste coated his tongue. And the small compass pinned to his satchel strap was spinning slowly in three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circles, fully blind to the magnetic north.
The air smelled of wet slate, ozone, and cold coal soot. The distinct, choking breath of a province that had burned forty thousand tons of fuel in an enclosed basin without a single gust of clean ocean wind to clear the chimney pipes.
Above him, the shift was terrifying in its physical mass.
The steel canopy was not an abstract roof. It was a heavy-duty superstructure of blackened wrought-iron roof beams, four feet deep, bolted to fluted cast-iron pillars twenty paces apart. It extended across the entire valley gap like the roof of a huge underground railway end-post. Beneath the canopy, the daylight didn’t merely shrink. It died within thirty feet, choked by an artificial heat inversion that held the cold, high-pressure air of Rookvale trapped against the basin floor.
Len looked back over his shoulder one last time.
Behind him lay the sunny valley of Oakhaven: the golden rye fields waving in the autumn breeze, the white smoke rising from farmhouse chimneys, the blue sky stretching vast and clean to the northern lakes. It was his home—poor, debt-ridden, and hard, but open to the sun.
Ahead lay the permanent night.
He checked his pocket watch: twenty minutes past one in the afternoon.
Ten hours and forty minutes remained before the stroke of global midnight. Ten hours and forty minutes to cross the gate, deliver his dispatch, unload his crates, collect his thirty silver sovereigns, and return to this sunny gravel before the legal claim day could close forever.
He took a long, deep draft of the clean northern air. That let his Long Breath expand his chest to its total limit. He settled his hands upon the polished oak handles of the handcart, felt the solid weight of the eighty-five-pound cargo balance over the axle. Then he leaned his chest into the leather harness.
The copper wire pressed cold against his chest bone. The iron tires ground against the crushed chert with a dry, crunching roar.
Step by step, his Surefoot carrying him across the shadow line, Len Vey wheeled the fever crates beneath the iron rafters. He stepped into the twelve-year dark. Eighty paces before the steel canopy, the turnpike crossed the boundary ditch. A five-foot trench lined with dry-stacked fieldstones that marked the historic border between the Kingdom of Oakhaven and the Province of Rookvale.
Beside the ditch stood the boundary farmstead of farmer Kester Holt, Matthew’s brother.
It was an eerie, tragic ruin of an agricultural estate. The northern half of the farmyard—the timber farmhouse, the apple orchard, and the chicken runs—sat bathed in the bright, golden midday sun, where yellow leaves drifted from the fruit trees and a fat gray cat slept on a stone well-curb.
The southern half of the yard—the big cattle barn, the sheep pens, and thirty acres of cornfields—sat directly beneath the iron overhang of the steel canopy. It was locked in unending, freezing twilight. The corn in the southern field was not corn. It was a gray, rotten tangle of withered stalks, coated in white bitter-salt mold and frozen into brittle crusts by twelve years of unvarying frost.
Sitting on an unpainted rocking chair on the sunny porch sat an elderly man wrapped in three patched sheepskin coats, an unlit clay pipe clenched between his yellow teeth. His hair was long, white, and matted like sheep’s wool. His eyes were fixed with unblinking, glassy intensity upon the dark ditch fifty yards away.
Len stopped his handcart on the bridge over the ditch, his boots resting on the granite doorstep.
“Master Holt?” Len called out, his voice quiet, respectful of the old man’s madness.
The old farmer didn’t turn his head, but his dry lips parted, his voice raspy and thin as dead grass:
“Don’t you go stepping into that ditch, boy,” Kester Holt muttered. His eyes never left the shadow line. “The ditch has ears today. The wind from the south brought my cousin’s voice two hours ago. My cousin Deren, who went south with his survey chains seven winters back. He was whistling through the drainage pipe, boy. Whistling the sheep-shearing tune we used to sing when we were twelve.”
A cold, sharp shiver ran down Len’s spine, prickling the fine hairs along his jaw.
“Your cousin Deren Vey?” Len asked, his voice tightening.
“Aye, Deren,” the old man whispered, rocking slowly on his creaking chair. “He sounded young, boy. Sounded like he had all his teeth and his knees didn’t ache from the frost. He asked me to throw down a coil of well-rope so he could climb out of the under-road drain. But I didn’t throw it. No, sir. I looked into the pipe with a tin mirror, and what was looking back at me had Deren’s eyes. But it didn’t blink when the sun hit the glass.”
The old man turned his head then, his bloodshot, watery old eyes fixing on Len’s face for the first time. He stared at Len’s cheekbones, at his dark hair, and at the yellow postal satchel at his hip.
“You look like him, boy,” Kester Holt whispered, his jaw trembling with sudden terror. “God almighty, you look just like him when he was nineteen. Did he send you from the ditch? Did he send you to fetch his rope?”
“I’m his son, Master Holt,” Len said gently, stepping back from the ditch. “I’m carrying the mail to the Survey Office.”
The old man let out a long, shuddering gasp, turning his face back toward the dark cornfield.
“Then God have mercy on your soul, son of Deren,” the old man cried into his sheepskin collar. “Because the ditch don’t give back what it takes.”
Len took a long, steady breath through his nose. That let his Long Breath purge the horror from his blood. He squared his shoulders, gripped the polished ash handles of the handcart. Then he leaned into the copper-threaded harness.
The iron tires rolled across the boundary bridge. That left the sunlight behind, and entered the permanent night of Rookvale. The air beneath the steel canopy was five degrees colder than the sunny valley behind him. It dropped with the sudden, shocking chill of an underground icehouse. The iron wheels crossed the threshold doorstep. Then, Len felt his Road Sense wake up with extraordinary intensity. The granite flags under his boots were cold. It shook with a low, deep underground deep ring that hummed through his calcaneus bone. A clockwork pulse that told him millions of gallons of water were moving through high-pressure channels fifty feet below the street.
He looked up into the twilight of Gate Street. On either side of the wide raised stone road, massive stone apartments of dark stone rose four stories into the artificial gloom, their windows shuttered and barred with iron grates. Copper lamps, suspended from overhead gantries on iron chains, flickered with pale green glow-stone flames, casting sickly cones of light onto the wet cobblestones below. Between the lamps lay thirty paces of dense, freezing shadow where the damp hung in the air like grease.
He took his first full stride into the province, his Long Breath cycling steadily through his nose, his boots locked in Surefoot balance. The twelve-year night had closed over his head.