I buckled myself into my harness and hooked its lanyard to the cable which ran alongside the great chain links. The chains formed a long, slow swag several hundred yards long between the towers of what will be—if it ever gets finished—Bar-Selehm’s first suspension bridge. The saddles on the tower tops where I was working featured a series of great pulley wheels which allowed the massive chains a little movement, and while that would mostly stop once the carriageway was hung, without it—and in this foul weather—the chains were constantly straining and relaxing so that the entire skeletal frame of the bridge groaned unnervingly. Occasionally, an entire link would shift over the pulley and the chain would suddenly drop a couple of feet all along its length. If you were caught under it, the weight might tear you out of your harness and send you hurtling down, so you got used to listening for the humming creak of the iron vibrating from link to link. Though I had not admitted it even to Tanish, my eleven-year-old apprentice, I was afraid of the river, and not just because of the creatures that lived in it.
