The Thousandth Fall

Rasden discovered the wrong way to heal himself because Palla would not let him finish doing it properly.

He had missed the turn on the Midsky Cloister stair and gone shoulder-first into the rain trough. Water slapped over the tiles. His left arm hung numb, his ankle had folded somewhere beneath him, and Palla leaned over the rail above with the expression of a woman who had just won something.

“Seven landings,” she called. “You made seven.”

Rasden pushed wet hair out of his eyes with his good hand. “There were eight.”

“The trough isn’t a landing.”

“Then why am I on it?”

Laughing hurt his ribs. He pressed two fingers below his breastbone and drew the opening breath of a self-mend.

The working found the last sound shape of him: shoulder seated, ankle straight, ribs without their bright cracks. That was how a mend worked. It held the body’s last whole pattern and persuaded blood, bone, and breath to return to it. Warmth packed his shoulder. His ankle pulled straight with a deep, unpleasant click.

All that remained was the closing breath.

Palla vaulted the rail, dropped beside him, and plucked his sandal from the trough. “You owe me three honey cakes.”

“Two.” Rasden rose to take it from her.

He had answered before closing the mend.

The warmth should have faded. Instead it moved with him, quick and curious, down his thighs and into the foot he planted on the tiles. Rasden stopped. The working stopped with him, waiting.

“What?” Palla asked.

“Nothing yet.”

He jumped from the trough to the stair rail, a distance he usually crossed with an undignified scramble. His bare foot struck the narrow stone. His calf tightened, his ankle wobbled, and the open mend flashed through both, not dragging them back to their earlier state but holding the landing he had just survived. When he sprang to the next rail, the motion came cleanly. Easier.

Palla’s grin went crooked. “Do that again.”

He did. Then he jumped two rails.

They moved to the laundry roof, where the drop was high enough to make Rasden’s stomach float. He opened a fresh mend, stepped off, and landed in the herb bed with both feet under him. Pain flared up his shins. The spell followed it, learned the shape of the impact, and left him standing.

On the second drop, the pain was less. On the third, he barely bent his knees.

Palla pulled a courier’s cord from her belt and tied the first knot.

“One,” she said.

Rasden looked up at the bellhouse roof. “That hardly seems worth counting.”

“Good. Impress me.”

He tried the bellhouse next and discovered the first limit by arriving on his back. The mend repaired him, but it repaired him to the last landing he had actually completed. It would not pretend a failure had been a success. It could not invent strength, quickness, or balance. It could only accept what his living body had done and make that achievement the new whole.

So they went higher by honest increments. The right way to use a self-mend was to remain still and let yesterday’s body rescue today’s. Rasden’s way was to leave the working open and give it a better body to remember.

By the end of the afternoon, Palla’s cord held twelve knots. By sunset, Rasden had stopped hearing the ground as a warning. It had become an answer coming up to meet him.

Over the next season, they learned that the spell remembered motions, not wishes. A harder fall taught him to fall. It did nothing for his arms until Palla began piling monastery grindstones on a carrying bar and Rasden began lifting them, one more each time, while the mend listened. Running required its own progression: stair, courtyard, ridge road, mountain circuit. Every gain had to be completed alive. Every new effort began just beyond the last one.

They loved it.

At one hundred falls, Rasden stepped from the cloister wall and landed hard enough to crack the paving beneath his heels. Palla inspected the cracks, then deducted two falls because he had used the same paving stone twice.

“The ground doesn’t care,” he told her.

“The ground doesn’t keep the cord.”

At three hundred, he could drop from the bellhouse, rebound from the courtyard, and clear the outer wall without touching the stair between. At six hundred, he began using the quarry shelves below the cloister. Palla would stand at the top and throw pebbles after him. He always reached the bottom first.

Strength announced itself on the east road after three days of rain. A grain wagon had sunk to its hubs on the uphill turn. Twelve oxen leaned into the traces until their flanks shone, and the wagon did not move the width of a fingernail.

Palla looked from the stalled team to Rasden. “Absolutely not.”

“You brought me here.”

“To help push. In a humble, monk-like manner.”

The drovers unhitched the oxen. Rasden crouched under the wagon’s rear beam, found his grip, and opened a mend. Grain filled the bed higher than his head. The iron-rimmed wheels were sunk halfway into black mud.

He lifted.

The first pull tore every muscle across his back. The working swept through the damage, preserving the completed inch. He reset his feet and lifted again. Mud released the wheels with four enormous sucking sounds. The whole laden wagon rose until daylight showed beneath every wheel.

Rasden walked it forty paces uphill and set it on dry road.

No one spoke. Even the oxen watched him.

Palla recovered first. “You tilted it.”

“Did I?”

“Terribly. Grain could’ve shifted.”

“Take a knot away.”

“Strength isn’t falls. I keep standards.”

Stamina took longer to become ridiculous. Rasden ran from one sunrise to the next along the ridge circuit, never letting the mend close. Palla rode beside him to count the laps. She changed horses at noon, changed again at moonrise, and borrowed a fourth before dawn. The fourth horse was blowing foam when the sun returned. Rasden was still taking the uphill turn at the same pace as the first lap.

Palla swayed in the saddle. “If you say ‘again,’ I will push you off a mountain.”

“Would you count it?”

“No.”

He ran another lap while she thought of a worse answer.

For speed, Palla planted a red pennant at a target half a mile across the high meadow. She carried the strongest courier bow and a flight arrow fletched in white so Rasden could not claim he had lost sight of it.

“You leave when I loose,” she said. “Not when I breathe. Not when I blink. When the string speaks.”

“You blink loudly.”

The bow snapped.

Rasden drove one foot into the earth. The meadow flattened into a green roar. Wind crushed his robe against his chest, then lost hold of it. He reached the target, tore free the red pennant, and turned while Palla’s arrow was still a white fleck climbing through the blue. It struck the straw butt as he passed the halfway stone on his return.

He stopped beside her with the pennant streaming from his fist.

Palla stared at the target, then at him. “I blinked.”

“Loudly.”

She hit him with the bowstring cap. She was laughing too hard to make it hurt.

The cord filled, and Palla retied its single knots into tens and its tens into hundreds. She miscounted twice, accused Rasden once, found both missing knots in her own work, and refused to apologize. Nine hundred became nine hundred and fifty. They moved their falls to the gorge shelves where cloud shadow passed below their feet.

Fall nine hundred and ninety-nine began on the highest shelf above Midsky Cloister.

“Make this one ugly,” Palla said. She stood far below on the bell terrace, the counting cord wrapped twice around her wrist.

Rasden stepped into open air.

For three long breaths there was only the plunge, robe snapping, mountain turning around him. He struck the terrace in a low crouch. Stone burst outward in a ring. Before the debris landed, he was running uphill. He crossed the cloister stairs, circled the bellhouse, caught the great bronze bell one-handed beneath its rim, and lifted it clear of its timber cradle.

The clapper gave one soft, astonished note.

Rasden set the bell down as gently as a cup. The mend remained open inside him, following fall into sprint into lift as one unbroken effort.

Palla held up the new knot. “Nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I could untie one.”

He began jogging circles around her. If he came fully to rest, the working would settle around what he had already achieved. He wanted the thousandth fall to complete the same great sentence, from the high shelf to whatever dawn gave them.

Palla walked backward to stay in front of him. “At sunrise, the south face.”

“Too easy.”

“In the dark?”

“Better.”

“Fine. Blindfolded.”

“Now you’re trying.”

Rasden completed ten more circles. The bell stood quiet in its cradle, and Palla had begun proposing increasingly foolish blindfolds, when a sound much larger than bronze rolled across the mountains. Rasden turned.

Two ridges away, the western wall of Suncleft Gorge split along a water-dark seam. Spring melt had worked deep into the stone; now a shelf the size of a village square peeled loose under its own weight. It fell in a pale, grinding sheet. The western anchorage of the Pilgrim Span vanished with it.

The bridge was crowded. For one suspended instant Rasden saw the caravan against the sky: bright packs, walking staffs, adults reaching for children. Then the far end dropped. The span folded into the gorge.

Palla shouted his name, but Rasden was already gone.

The road to Suncleft was two steep miles. He crossed it before the first crash finished echoing. Trees hammered past. A mule on the approach threw up its head at the thunder of his feet, and then he was at the eastern anchorage as the last main rope tore through its stone guide.

Rasden caught it.

The rope burned through both palms and hauled him to the lip. Forty yards of timber deck swung down with a caravan tangled across it. He saw the cliff rushing up to meet them and planted one foot.

The stone beneath it shattered. His knee bent, his shoulder opened with a hot internal rip, and the mend flooded every break. Rasden pulled. The bridge stopped a man’s height from smashing into the eastern wall.

For a heartbeat it hung from his hands and the one surviving main rope. Then he dragged the whole span upward until its lower decking struck a broad sloping ledge. Timber shrieked. The ledge held. Rasden threw the rope he had caught around its scarred stone horn and pulled until the fibers locked. Between the two eastern ropes and the ledge, the ruined span held.

Palla arrived on a lathered horse, flung herself from the saddle, and skidded to the rim. “Forty-seven!” she gasped.

“People?”

“No, turnips. Yes, people. I think. The bridge moved.”

The ruined span hung almost vertically against the cliff. Pilgrims clung to planks, side netting, and one another. Rasden could have hauled all of it higher, but arms and ankles were threaded through torn ropes. His mend healed only him. One hard jerk would save the bridge and kill the people on it.

He ran down the cliff.

“Blue coat under the second crossbeam!” Palla called. “Can’t use her leg.”

Rasden found the woman wedged beneath a rail, broke the rail with two fingers, and lifted her against his chest. A boy had both arms around her waist. Rasden took him too and climbed.

He did not climb as other people climbed. His fingers struck cracks and released. His feet touched stone just long enough to drive him upward. He reached the rim, placed both pilgrims in waiting hands, and turned without letting his heels become still.

“Two,” Palla said.

“You said forty-seven.”

“Then stop chatting.”

Down again.

On the second trip he carried three. On the third, four, two under one arm and two gripping the rope across his back. Each descent lowered him through drifting dust and the creak of failing timber. Each ascent carried more lives against the pull of the gorge. The open mend raced around his ribs, through his shoulders, behind his knees. It repaired what the effort tore, and what he completed became the strength for the next trip.

“Nine!” Palla called.

Rasden ran down.

“Red shawl, left side!”

He crossed the hanging deck.

“Other left. Mine. Sorry!”

He changed direction so sharply a plank spun away beneath him. “Your left is terrible.”

“My left can see!”

The red shawl proved to be tied around a pack. The pilgrim hung three yards lower in a gray cloak, too frightened to call. Rasden gathered him up and was back at the rim before Palla finished swearing at the shawl.

“Ten!”

Trip followed trip. Dust thickened, and the ledge beneath the bridge shed chips into the gorge. Rasden’s counting narrowed to grips, bodies, turns: a pair of sisters who would not release each other’s hands, a man with a bleeding temple, a baby shoved at him by three different arms. None of them could borrow his healing, so he made his speed gentle, a burst through empty space and a smooth turn when he carried someone, never a stop.

“Thirty-one!”

Palla ran the rim above him, dropping to her belly to see under each fold of the ruined span. Her early calls had carried jokes. Now they came clipped and raw.

“Two beneath you. One lower. Lower!”

Rasden tore open the side net and found them.

Seven more came up through dust and swinging rope.

“Forty!”

He brought up an old man and two young pilgrims bound together by a loop of handrope. His breath still arrived as easily as it had on the first descent. Palla’s did not. She was on hands and knees at the edge, hair white with stone dust.

“Quit dancing,” she said as Rasden jogged a tight circle to keep the mend open.

“Nine hundred and ninety-nine is still listening.”

“Show-off. Go.”

He went.

The lower net held only packs twisting in the dust. Rasden swept beneath it once, saw no reaching hands, and ran back as the surviving anchorage cracked.

Palla counted the people behind her. Her lips moved twice. “Forty-three.”

“Four missing.”

She looked over the edge. Her face changed.

Beneath the lowest intact planks hung the bridge cradle, the deep woven basket used to carry small children across the span. Four pale faces looked through its netting. The cradle had twisted under the deck where Rasden could not see it from below.

Palla pointed. “There. Rasden, there!”

The eastern anchorage shelf tore out of the mountain. Rope, timber, and cradle dropped together.

Rasden reached the edge. The thousandth fall had been meant for dawn, with a blindfold and Palla’s worst possible counting. Instead there were four children falling into Suncleft Gorge and Palla beside him with the cord clenched in both fists.

“Count this one,” he said.

“Just go!”

He went.

The cradle had a head start. Gravity was fast. Rasden had become faster.

He struck a falling plank with both feet and drove it upward, himself downward. A second crossbeam spun below; he caught it with one hand, swung past, and kicked away. He used the collapsing bridge as a stair built out of instants. Rope snapped by his cheek. The gorge wind tore the breath from his mouth. He passed the broken deck, passed the long end of the main cable, and saw the cradle above him.

Rasden hit the cliff below it running downward.

Three steps matched the cradle’s plunge. On the fourth he turned, got both shoulders beneath the bridge’s central beam, and caught its full falling weight.

The impact drove him twenty feet down the wall.

He let it. His legs folded a little at a time, bleeding speed from the cradle instead of stopping it all at once. Rock exploded under each foot. The four children bounced in the net but did not strike the beam. Behind them, forty yards of wet rope and timber bucked like a living thing.

Rasden’s spine bowed. Something tore from hip to ribs. The open mend blazed through him, restoring not the man who had begun at Midsky, not the man who had lifted the grain wagon, but the man who was still holding a bridge.

He stopped falling. Then he climbed.

Strength turned the full weight upward. Speed found grips before shattered stone could leave them. Stamina, after two miles and trip upon trip along the cliff, kept his heart driving with the same delighted force. The working joined all three because he gave it no pause in which to divide them.

Rasden ran up the face of Suncleft Gorge with the broken Pilgrim Span across his shoulders.

Palla’s voice reached him from above, cracked beyond any joke. “Come on. Come on!”

He climbed through the dust. The rim drew near. Hands reached down and snatched the cradle’s net, but Rasden did not surrender its weight until all four children rolled onto solid ground. Then he heaved the bridge beam over the edge and landed beside it on both feet.

The thousandth fall ended at the top.

For a moment Suncleft Gorge was silent except for settling stones and Palla trying to breathe.

Then forty-seven survivors began shouting.

Some cried Rasden’s name because they had heard Palla screaming it down the cliff. Others simply cheered. The boy from the first trip wrapped both arms around Rasden’s leg. One of the children from the cradle looked at the wreckage, looked at Rasden, and demanded, “Again!”

Palla sat down hard and laughed until she coughed.

Rasden took the closing breath. The mend settled through him, warm as sunrise, around a body that had caught a bridge and carried it upward. Nothing diminished. Nothing rolled back.

Palla rose with the counting cord. Her hands shook as she worked a new knot into its end.

“That’s ugly,” Rasden said.

“It’s a thousand. It gets to be ugly.” She pulled it tight and looped the cord around his wrist. “Also, I called the red shawl correctly.”

“You called a pack.”

“There was a person near it.”

“On the other side.”

Palla lifted her chin toward the forty-seven people alive behind him. “Forty-seven. Right enough.”

Rasden looked at her. Dust striped her face. Her eyes were bright, and there was no fear in them now, only the enormous answer he had wanted from her and never known how to ask for.

Palla glanced away first. “You wanted a proper thousandth.”

“Was that proper?”

“No. It was ridiculous.” Her grin returned, ragged at the edges. “It’ll do.”

Beyond the broken span, mountains rose in blue ranks farther than Rasden had ever traveled. Sunlight caught snow on the highest peak.

Palla saw him looking. Of course she did.

“That one,” she said, pointing at the farthest white summit. “Before sunset.”

“What do I win?”

“Fall one thousand and one.”

Rasden bent forward. Behind him the survivors shouted his name. Palla shouted louder, because she was still ahead on volume.

He ran, and Suncleft Gorge gave his first stride back as thunder.