Trelig liked the plan. “Okay, so it’s me and some Agitar males. But what protects me from the cold? I shut down below freezing, you know. Can’t help it.”
The general got up and walked out of the tent, then came back in with a large carton. She opened the carton and pulled out a strange, silvery costume with a huge dark globe.
“You didn’t know we have had five Makiem Entries in the past century, then?” she said, satisfied. “And we don’t need the mechanical stuff, either. Air you’ve got.”
He grinned again. Things were going his way now, as they had always done. The Obie computer, New Pompeii, the Well World itself—all were within his grasp.
The general excused herself, and he sat there a minute or two, alone, looking at the map. Then he sighed, got up, and slow-hopped to a curtained-off passage between this tent and his portable living quarters. He pulled it aside. There was a flash of movement, and an object landed on the bed in the far corner.
She could hop quickly, she could, he thought admiringly.
It had been a marriage of convenience, of course. All Makiem marriages were marriages of convenience in a race that had no sex except one week a year, underwater, when they had nothing but. The convenience of the scoundrels that ran Makiem, the inconvenience of himself, naturally. She was the good minister’s daughter, and, if anything, she was slicker and nastier than her father.
What a team we’d make,he sighed once again, if only we could be on the same side!
“You needn’t pretend, my dear. You know everything and I know it, so what’s the difference? You can’t go this time.”
“I go where you go,” she responded. “It is law and custom. And you cannot stop me!”
He chuckled. “But it’s cold up there, baby! What good would you be as a sleeping beauty?”
She reached over, opened a wicker basket, and removed something. It was a slightly different design, but unmistakably a spacesuit.
He gaped. “How long have you had that thing?” he asked.
“Since Makiem,” she replied smugly.
Camp 43, Gedemondas
The trails weren’t bad. Gedemondans, it was known, were large creatures, and limited but steady use by the horselike Dillians had made them even more comfortable, on the whole around two meters wide.
It was a strange party that set off from the chilly shack into the snow cover: Tael, the Dillian guide, was in the lead, then the two Lata, occasionally walking but more often riding on Tael’s back, then Renard leading the winged pegasus, Doma, with the strange figure of Mavra Chang tied between wings and neck. The air was becoming cold; there was little conversation between them, nor was much possible without yelling, for blowing wind howled through the rocky clefts as if it, too, were a strange and living creature of this strangest of worlds.
It was only on the occasional breaks, done mostly for Renard’s benefit, that they could say anything. The plain was far behind; the twists and turns that the switchbacked trail forced upon them had all but the confident Tael totally lost, and the bright snow reflecting the glare of the sun, even when cut with sun goggles, made distance impossible to judge. They were tiny figures moving in a sea of white.
The trail itself seemed often lost in the snow, yet Tael went on as if it were a paved and marked highway, never hesitating in the slightest—and the footing was always there.
After they had been climbing for what seemed like a full day, they rounded one more mountain curve and, suddenly, the plain was spread out below them once more.
“Wait!” Mavra called to them. “Look! They’ve arrived!”
They stopped, and saw immediately what she meant. Tiny puffs of orange seemed everywhere in the air, and large numbers of creatures could be seen erecting tents and digging into the rock that was the start of the mountains. The cabin was invisible, but they all knew that, if it was there at all, it was being converted into a fort.
“Look at them!” Tael breathed. This was her first taste of armies and war. “There must be thousands of them!”
“The Yaxa,” Vistaru said flatly. “They will be coming up only a day or so behind us. This is not good.”
Tael laughed confidently. “Let them try and find the trail!” she boasted. “Without a guide they haven’t a prayer!”
Mavra turned and looked out at the sky. There were thin, wispy clouds and an occasional big, fat cumulus puff, but it was basically crystal clear.
“They’ll follow our own tracks,” she told them. “There’s no snow, nothing to cover them. They might mistake them for animal tracks, or Dillians alone, but where a four-footed animal or Dillian can go, so can they.”
The centaur frowned. A good snow guide, Mavra thought, but naive as hell. Dillia must be a very peaceful place.
“We could lay a false trail,” Tael suggested. “Run tracks off a cliff. It’s not that hard. The powder here could be brushed for a few hundred meters.”
Mavra considered it. “All right, do it,” she told them. “But it won’t do much. Slow them up, get a couple, that’s all. Better than nothing, though.”
They rigged the deception fairly simply. The Dillian girl picked a point, walked out to where there seemed to be continuous snow, then stopped. Renard removed his small snowshoes and followed gingerly behind in her tracks, then guided her feet as she backed up into her old tracks.
Mavra surveyed the results. “A little too deep,” she said critically. “An experienced tracker would catch on, but I think it’ll work. Does that snow fall off there and I just can’t see it, or what?”
Tael laughed. “This is the edge of what we call Makorn Glacier. A river of slowly moving ice with a snow-cover on top. There is a crevasse there at least three hundred meters down and a good ten meters wide. I could almost feel the edge of it.”
The small Lata then went back after they went around another bend with Tael’s fur hat and used it to fill in the tracks. Not an expert job, but they weren’t trying to fool experts.
They went on, into the hex and up at the same time. More frequent rest periods were called for. The air was becoming thin.
During one of these stops, Mavra said, “Still no sign of the Gedemondans. Hell, if they’re big bastards there must be awfully few of them to be this invisible.”
Tael shrugged. “Who knows how many there are? Sometimes there seem to be a hundred sneaking around the mountain tops; sometimes you will go completely through the hex without seeing one. That is not the trouble here, though.”
“Huh?” they all said at once.
She nodded. “We’re being watched. I can feel it. I’m not sure where they are, but there is certainly more than one. I could barely hear some intermittent deep breathing.”
They looked around, suddenly nervous. No one could see anything.
“Where?” Renard pressed.
Tael shook her head. “I don’t know. Mountain sounds are deceptive. Close, though. They have networks of trails they, ah, discourage us from using.”
“They’d have to,” Mavra said dryly. She strained but could hear nothing but the howling wind.
She was freezing to death, too, despite being covered by an amazingly resourceful patchwork set of clothes. Her face and particularly her ears were killing her; still, it was no worse on her than on the others, and they didn’t complain.