Food, warmth, medical attention, all could be waiting. A spur which kept Arbush moving, arms and legs working as if parts of a machine, his mind lost in an enticing dream.
"Steam baths," he whispered. "Hot showers. Oils applied by lovely girls. Meats, hot, with crisp skins and filled with succulent juices. Mulled wine, spiced so as to tingle the tongue; fires, ovens, heat to take the chill from flesh and bone. Once I was on a hot world, Sere; a place of jungle and desert, the sun like a furnace in the sky. I hated it then, but I would give half of what remains of my life to be there now."
His voice broke, took on the thin, keening of a song; a dirge which held the wail of distraught women, the cry of a bereft child.
It ended when they saw the city.
"Earl!" Arbush turned, snapped from his delirium; his mottled face was haggard, defeated. "How the hell are we going to reach it?"
* * * * *
It lay in the cup of a valley, a gem held in an upturned palm; towers, spires and rounded domes, the flat expanse of walls, the spread of terraces covered with transparent material which glowed in the sun.
A paradise in the wilderness, enchanted, enticing- unobtainable.
Crouched on the rim Dumarest studied it, fighting the blurring of his eyes; the wavering of planes and lines which, at times, gave the impression of looking through water.
It could almost have been a mirage.
Almost, but no mirage he had ever seen had rested in the cup of a valley; and the flyers he had seen had been real enough. No mirage had fired the missile which had almost killed him. And those flyers must have come from this city.
He studied it, ignoring Arbush's babble; the low mutter of his voice as, once again, he yielded to the fogs which misted his brain. Around the place lay a broad circle of flat ground now covered with a dust of snow; more snow heaped in high dunes at the half-mile expanse of smooth terrain. Once reached, it would be easy to cross. Reaching it was something else. The valley was deep; the rim on which he crouched a quarter mile above the heaped snow at its foot. A smooth, sheer drop, as if something had cut away the rock and ice in a mathematical pattern. A bowl, wider at the rim than at the foot, the surface roughly concave; the curve flattening as it descended. To either side it was the same.
Blinking he withdrew from the edge, gripped the minstrel's shoulder, shook him, sent the flat of his gloved hand across the mottled cheek.
"We're here," he snapped. "We've arrived. All we have to do is to climb down a slope."
"All?" Arbush sucked in his breath, his eyes bloodshot, but clear. "I was dreaming, Earl. I thought I had wings. We need wings. How else are we to get down?"
"The same way as we did before. Pitons and ropes. We'll take it in short, easy stages."
Stages which had to be short, but which would never be easy. Before it had been hard, now it would be almost impossible.
Dumarest fumbled at his pack, his pouches. Four pitons, two axes, rope and a hammer. Arbush had the same, aside from the pitons of which he had six.
Ten pitons, eighty feet at a time, but the drops would be too long and still they would not have reached the bottom. He looked at the axes, the rings at their ends. They would help, but it still wasn't enough. Back at the rim he searched the lower expanse. The wall, appearing smooth, was not. A thin fissure ran in a diagonal, from a point a hundred feet down to another twice as far. And they had the lasers, one charged, the other almost exhausted.
"We'll start from here. Two pitons buried deep. Feed the rope through one and bind it on the other, so it will take the strain as you let me down. When it reaches the middle, lash it tight. I'll make a hold and signal. When I do, feed through the rest of the rope, knock free the extra piton and follow me down as you did before." "Earl-"
"There's a fissure down there in which we can rest." Dumarest picked up one of the hammers. "Let's get at it." It was too hard, his body too weak. Before he had struck a half-dozen blows, he knew it was impossible. Dropping the hammer he drew the near-depleted laser, aimed it, sent the beam to melt a hole into which he rammed the piton. Three blows and it was secure. The other quickly followed.
Quickly, because there was no time to dwell on the difficulty of the task. No time to allow the final surge of energy to subside.
Two stages and they reached the fissure to lie gasping, to crawl down its length; to face again the impossible task of crawling like flies down a wall of ice.
Dumarest threw aside the exhausted laser, used the other, finished the job with blows of the hammer; each stroke sent waves of nausea through his mind, filling his vision with darts of color.
On the third stage down, he knew they would never make it.
He hung on the end of the rope, Arbush above lashed to a piton; a bulky figure like a grotesque spider caught in a frayed web. His voice was thin, strained, "Earl!"
Dumarest moved, looking upwards, the turn of his head taking an age, the effort to shift mountains.
"Earl! God, man, the rope!"
It was stretching, overstrained; the cold making metal and plastic brittle, wires yielding within their sheaths. Old material, bought cheap, made to last long beyond its time. Breaking even as he watched.
Looking down he saw the mounded drift of snow, the outcurve of the wall. Falling he would hit it, be thrown from it, to plummet well away from its foot. Away from the snow, the only thing which could break his fall.
"Earl!"
He jerked, dropped, hovered for a moment and then dropped again, strands breaking, others stretching to break in turn; the entire rope giving with a suddenness which sent him falling.
Falling to the wall, the ground, the frozen hardness which would pulp his flesh and shatter his bones.
Chapter Nine
There were small sounds, clickings; and for a moment he thought he was back in the Styast, strapped to the control chair, reliving a segment of the past. Then he felt deft touches, the pull of gentle suction, something eased from around his temples.
"All right," said a voice. "You can open your eyes now."
Dumarest looked at a fog of nacreous brightness, a mist in which objects took shape and substance; solidifying into a ceiling, lights, oddly shaped machines, the face of a man.
"I am Dras. What is your name?" He smiled at the response. "Good. As Camolsaer predicted, you have recovered with total awareness of personal identity." "Camolsaer?"
"You can sit up now." Dras ignored the question. "That's right. If you feel a little nausea it will pass. Now just relax, while I make a few extra tests."
He was sitting on a long, wide couch covered with a dull green material, placed close to a machine which sprouted suction-tipped wires. A diagnostic machine which must have been monitoring his condition. As the man bustled around him, instruments making soft impacts on his skin, Dumarest examined his body.
He was nude, wasted, muscles clearly ridged against the bone. The thin lines of old scars showed on his torso, together with others more recently made.
"You were in a bad way when the Monitors brought you in," said the man as he checked his findings. "Extensive frostbite, several ribs broken, your lungs terribly lacerated. There was also a high degree of debilitation, together with large areas of bruising and multiple points of internal hemorrhage." He added, casually, "You were also in a state of terminal shock."
"My companion?"
"Is well. His injuries were not as extensive as yours. He was released a month ago."
A month? Dumarest looked again at his body. A long passage traveling Low would have produced a similar result; body-fat used to maintain life, tissue wasted, muscles beginning to shrink.
He said, "How long have I been here?" "