She looked back through the Gun’s sights.
The rider standing in the saddle-outlined against the start of the sunset, body made thin and stick-like by the wash of pastel light behind-seemed to look down into the desert.
She thought she saw him shake his head, but the quivering image made it hard to be certain.
“That is, perhaps, your cousin,” Feril said quietly. “I might be able to contact him, if you like.”
She looked up at the android, then over to the rider crushed under his dead mount.
“No,” she said, putting the Gun down. “Don’t do that.” The group of riders at the pass in the distant mountains were barely visible dots, a tiny, dark flaw against the pale sunset light. “Just a moment,” she said.
The monowheel dipped millimetrically and made the tiniest of whining noises as she got down from it and walked to where the dead man’s arm stuck out across the dust from beneath the tawny pelt of the dead bandamyion. The rider’s gun lay nearby.
She lifted the rider’s cold, grey hand up; the sleeve of his tunic fell further back. She inspected the mark on his wrist.
“What do you see, Feril?” she asked.
“I see a patch of slightly abraded, calloused skin which I would guess extends to a two-centimetre wide ring round the dead man’s wrist,” Fenril said. “There are two immediately adjacent outer rings which look as though they formed the limits of a wider band of callusing in the past.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I see, too.”
She let the dead man’s hand fall back to the dust and picked up the light laser-carbine that had fallen from his hand.
She walked round the bandamyion, looking for anything else, and saw the Keep-uniformed body of a guard lying half-in and half-out of a shallow trench downhill. She turned him over; he’d been shot with a small-beam laser.
She tried to fire the guard’s gun but it only clicked.
She looked into the distance. “Mind Bomb,” she whispered.
She returned to the other side of the dead animal and looked up at the darkening blue vault above, then at the android sitting patiently to the rear of the perfectly still vehicle’s cockpit, the tilted monowheel itself curving out behind Feril’s slender body like a rounded fin.
“Do you know roughly where we are?” she asked.
“Only to within about one or two hundred kilometres,” Feril said apologetically.
“That’ll do,” she said. “Think this glorified monocycle could take me to Udeste?” She dusted off her hands as she walked back to the vehicle.
“Udeste?” Feril’s head moved back a fraction.
“Yes,” she said. “I was thinking of heading into the sunset and turning right when I saw the ocean, but maybe you can find a more direct route, if this thing has the range.”
“Well,” Feril said. “I suppose I could, and I suppose this could, technically. But aren’t there forces between here and there who might attempt to stop us?”
“There are indeed,” she said, swinging back up into the cockpit. She patted the Lazy Gun. “Though if we can get the lock off this, they won’t be able to stop us.”
“I am not sure that will be easy,” Feril said. “What if we cannot release the weapon?”
She looked into the machine’s sunglass-eyes, seeing herself reflected twice. She watched her tiny, distorted images shrug.
“If they get us they get the Gun too, and everybody gets to go with a bang.” She pushed the Lazy Gun forward into the footwell and sat in the seat, hauling on the harness. “To tell the truth, Feril,” she said, “I really don’t care any more.” She glanced up at the android. “You don’t have to come, though; just point me in the right direction. I’ll let you off wherever. You can say you were abducted; you’ll get home.”
Feril was silent for a second, then said, “No, I’ll accompany you, if you don’t mind. Given that you are prepared to risk your life, it would be lacking in grace of me not to gamble the loss of a week’s memories.”
She shrugged again, then looked towards the sunset, to the pass in the mountains.
The riders had gone. Before she looked away a single, large aircraft powered into the skies beyond and headed north-west, angling across the sunset and dispatching another distantly diving arrowhead shape above as though it was an afterthought.
The monowheel vehicle turned and rolled away down the far side of the ridge, picking up speed as it descended towards a dry valley, then accelerated smoothly away in a trail of chill, falling dust.
24 Fall Into The Sea
The evening light deepened as the monowheel spun quickly down a succession of shallow clinker valleys devoid of snow, vegetation or significant.obstructions towards a range of mountains, then came out into a broad gulf between jagged peaks whose summits still held a snow-pink trace of sunset. They found a wide shelf of till sand and gravel that traced a barren contour on that great valley and drove along it; after a few kilometres its surface bore a dusting of snow that thickened gradually as they drove. The tree line was fifty metres lower down.
“Is this a road?” she said, puzzled, as they headed into and out of a long narrow side-valley she’d have thought it easier to bridge at the mouth.
“I believe it is what is called a parallel road,” Feril said. “Caused by the waters of a temporary lake, probably formed when a glacier block-”
Feril went silent, then said, “Electromagnetic pulse.”
“What?”
The mountain-tops on the other side of the broad valley were suddenly blazing white.
She stopped the monowheel.
They turned and looked behind them, but the snow-caped shoulders of the mountain at their back cut out much of the sky.
“I believe the Keep has been destroyed by a thermonuclear device,” Feril said.
She watched for a moment as high, feathery clouds above the mountains slowly faded yellow-white, then started the monowheel again and powered on along the sand and gravel road.
The ground-shock arrived a little later. The monowheel absorbed the pulse without a murmur but they saw the snow-smothered ground nearby shake and ripple.
Sharrow and Feril looked up the white mountain slopes on their right, to see them covered with hazy white clouds, gradually spreading and enlarging.
“Oh, shit.”
“I believe those are avalanches.”
“So do I. Hang on.”
They raced along the white shelf of the ancient beach to the shelter of an outcrop of rock. The avalanches were a smoothly building roar of noise that terminated in a blast of icy air and a sudden dimming of the late-evening light; the sky above the summit of the outcrop disappeared. A tearing dim greyness flowed all around the sheltering rock-face and a whistling noise came through the throaty bellow of the avalanche. They were suddenly surrounded by their own heavy, swirling snowfall.
A noise like thunder sounded downslope as the tsunami of snow and ice hit the forest.
When the roaring stopped and the last few flakes had fallen around them, they brushed themselves down and went slowly on through a dim white haze across the ice-rubbled mounds of settling snow. She found the cockpit heater control and turned it up.
Feril leant over the side of the vehicle and peered underneath as they traversed one of the house-high pillows of snow.
“Impressive,” she heard the android say. She glanced round. “The wheel beneath has ballooned to this width,” Feril said, spreading its hands over half a metre apart, “and appears to grow spikes where it contacts the surface.” The section of angled wheel protruding behind Feril was thin as a knife.
“Yes,” she said, turning to the front again. “Well, don’t lean back.”
The parallel road had all but disappeared under the icy debris and scattered falls of rock. Downhill, through a haze of settling snow, much of the forest had disappeared under the white flows, the shattered trunks of the trees sticking jumbled from the snow like broken bones.