A narrow canyon which has been running parallel to the tube now crosses their path. Diverting along it won't work, since it doesn't seem to be getting any shallower, bending the tube will make it harder to convert to an equartier path later, and too much time would be lost to the longer route. The journey will pause for a few hours.

All the active catfolk leave the tube and surround the area in front to keep it warm enough for werewolves to come out and build a bridge. Someone has got to have bridge building experience, right?

Sure. Some harpies would speed it up a lot.

"Okay. By how much? And what else are we missing..."

Well, not that much time, if they build the bridge out of stone that's already enervated. But if harpies gather loose boulders and pile them up to make the bulk of the bridge, the rest of the werewolves can spend that time stocking up on tube parts, and you know how the catfolk doing assembly are getting faster with practice and outpacing the supply of parts?

He did not know any of that, actually.

"Even if there are harpies in Kef it will take too long for them to get here to be worth it. But send for them anyway, so we don't have this problem again. And, in general, we need to prioritize making the path suitable for equartiers. If we had done that already, we might have been able to get harpies here fast enough to save time. I don't know what we'll need, for the next surprise, because no one has even tried to answer my question about what else we're missing, but we'll need to be able to get it fast."

"And I want updates from each team, every ten hours."

So, anything fun happening in Kef? Dancing? Swimming in the lovely warm aqueduct? By the way, Fuzzer wants harpies. Hey Quiet Pavel, how about we put soap on our feet and go sliding down the empty mine corridors? No, I don't know why he wants the harpies. Actually we should put the soap on our bellies, so we can run and then flop down and slide. I don't want to go back and ask him why; I'd have to redo all the soap.

"All that I'm saying is that it looks like a system similar to an alphabet, not that each letter necessarily represents a sound. I'm not even sure that the row of letters is a sequence in time."

Apparently Calsa's wife is a werewolf. Still weird, but Chime isn't offended anymore. Really, she shouldn't have been offended at all. Maybe lots of households cross a bit internally and just never tell anyone.

She wouldn't know; she hasn't been part of a household since childhood.

There's wind here, and it's been getting steadily stronger. Why is there wind here but not in Kef? Are the Cliffs of Sorrow, way back near Argolake, enough of an obstacle to thrust a calm area windward all the way out to Kef, but not any farther? Seems like a stretch. The wind must be coming from something ahead of them.

Has the wind been eroding the ground?

Yeah, there are signs of erosion. Is that good or bad?

Bad, because it means the wind is a permanent feature of the landscape, not just caused by the alien ship somehow. And do you know what else is a permanent feature of the landscape? I don't know either, but it's ahead of us.

The bridge is finished and they continue darkward.

"So you don't do any farming? That's so weird to me. In Lei, everyone farms. Even I schlepp stuff around; there's not nearly enough vampire work for a whole shift."

"I used to light fields in Argolake, or the lake itself, but not since coming to Kef. We do have farms in Kef, it's just that they wouldn't be enough to live on by themselves."

"Isn't that true of this whole part of Sota, dark of the Cliffs of Sorrow? What if Nitatlel didn't send food...I mean, I guess then you'd stop the Argo aqueduct, so it'd be bad for them too, so they wouldn't. But it just seems so fragile."

"All life is fragile."

"In Lei you really pack the people in, don't you? That seems more fragile."

"Oh, no, I mean, yes, the shrines keep very careful track of how many people there are and how to support them all, but no, it's not scary the same way. Each 'county' goes all the way from bright to dark, so no one is dependent on a treaty to stay fed, certainly not a treaty between different countries. And Lei is huge. If something bad happened to a county, there'd be space for everyone to go somewhere else.

I get the impression people don't travel much here?"

"Wha? In Lei people are forbidden to travel!"

"Nnno. People travel within their county all the time, and across counties there are cargo sledders and theater troupes and" flip fingertips out "rare species and exchange programs... You need a reason, but if you have a reason you can do it. Not like here where every don and magistrate makes up their own rules."

"I see what you mean..."

"And, like, your son is a mouseling? That would never happen in Lei."

"Hey, so, I'm a weird cat, okay? And Merta is a weird wolf. We rescued Siki from bandits who thought Kef would be an easy target, and then what, you want to take him away from a happy family just so he can be with mouselings in Argolake?"