The door opened onto a narrow ledge on a steep mountainside. To her left a spindly tree was just visible through whirling snow, maybe a hundred paces away. To her right the ledge disappeared into white. The manufactory should be on the other side of the mountain, though in this weather she could not be sure of anything. On the other hand, she dared not go back inside. She mentally tossed a coin. Left looked marginally more attractive than right. She went left and began to trudge up the ledge.
Beyond the tree she came onto an exposed slope where the wind was like needles of black ice. Tiaan looked down and could see nothing. Up was the same. Gritty snow blew horizontally. Forward and back, she now lost the path within a dozen paces. It could have been any hour of the day. Which way should she go? She had no idea. Her steps grew reluctant.
A wild gust thumped her against the cliff. It might just as easily have carried her over the edge. The weather was deteriorating rapidly. She moved on and knew that she was failing. If I keep going, Tiaan thought, I'm going to die.
She headed back. Better the risk of the lyrinx than certain death by freezing. It might hold to its word. Might be a creature of honour. The cold and wind was indifferent. It would kill her and scream defiance over her body.
Head down, Tiaan plodded into the wind. Snow clotted in her eyes, making it impossible to see. It seemed much further, going back. Surely she'd walked a thousand paces and still there was no sign of the place. Plod, plod, one foot after another. Trudge, trudge, ice crystals growing on her eyebrows, her ears going numb. Every step took an effort of will.
At last she saw the tree. The door could be no more than a hundred steps away. She counted each step to make sure. The weather had closed in, but even so, by the time she had reached ninety Tiaan expected to see the door. It should be a black hole in the grey mountainside. She went down a slope. One hundred, one hundred and one… Had she left the door open, or closed? If it was closed she would never find it. Ajar, Tiaan thought, but it was difficult to remember. Her brain felt like a frozen sponge.
One hundred and twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-two. She must have gone past it. She scanned the rock face but everything was crusted with ice. Could it have been two hundred paces? Tiaan could no longer remember. Maybe it had been. She kept going, but when she reached three hundred, she knew she had gone way too far.
Turning back, she soon found herself descending a precipitous slope she definitely had not climbed before. Again she turned but the path was icy and she'd only gone a few steps before her feet went from under her. She went flying through the air and buried herself in a drift.
Struggling out, Tiaan plunged neck-deep into another snow-filled hollow. She feebly scratched her way onto a ledge and foundered. An overhang blocked the way up. The snow was now falling as heavily as she had ever known it. It was a mighty blizzard and she would be lucky to survive.
Exhausted, Tiaan put her head down on the pack for a minute. The hedron dug into her cheek. She picked it out. It had a faint warmth. Holding it in her hands, she laid her head on the pack and closed her eyes.
T WENTY -F IVE
In the days Tiaan had spent in the mine, a deep, subpolar low had formed four hundred leagues south in the Kara Agel (the Frozen Sea) which lay between the boomerang-shaped Island of Noom and the steppes of N'roxi. It roared north across the Kara Ghashad (the Burning Sea), funnelled through the gap between the Smennbone Range and the Inchit Hills, passed directly across Ha-Drow on the Kaer Slass or Black Sea, burying the city of Drow under two spans of snow, then, still gathering strength, screamed across the inland sea of Tallallamel heading north. After dumping more snow on Lake Kalissi, a meteor crater with a curious spire island in the middle, it hurled itself against the ramparts of the Great Mountains in Tarralladell.
The mountains pushed the storm east where it found a gap in the chain, climbed the pass and began to empty its load on the branching ranges. Somewhere south of Tiksi the storm collided with a warm front moving up the coast from distant Crandor. The wildest blizzard of the century was about to strike the eastern mountains.
The wind had risen steadily all day. Now it screamed around the side of the mountain, scouring loose snow up into clouds. Tiaan began to feel really frightened. Unless a miracle happened she was going to die here.
Tiaan was trained to survive in the mountains, but this place was going to get colder and colder until it froze her solid. A snow cave was her only chance but it was too late to look for a suitable place. The best she could do was try to close off the space under the overhang.
She dug her knife into the snow plastered on the rock face. The blade went all the way in. Carving the compacted snow into blocks, she stacked them to make a curving wall on the outer part of the ledge. It was hard work, but useful, for the face turned out to be concave. Though not quite a cave, it offered shelter above and on either side.
By the time Tiaan's knife-point skated across rock, she had closed in two-thirds of her ledge. The visibility was falling; two steps from her shelter she could no longer see it. She stamped down the drift next to her wall, hacked it into blocks and continued raising the wall. Finally it met the ledge above, sealing her in. The space, about four strides long but only two across, looked like a white sepulchre.
It was getting dark. She warmed her hands in her armpits, for the crystal had gone as cold as the rest of her world and was hardly glowing at all. If only there was a way to draw power into it to warm herself. She tried to sense out the field but found nothing. Perhaps she was too far from the node, though that seemed unlikely.
Tiaan ate another ration pack, this one an unidentifiable melange of dried fruit, nuts and suet. It lay in her stomach like a brick. After rubbing her feet in a useless attempt to warm them, she wrapped the fur-lined coat around her and leaned back against the wall, trying to rest without going to sleep. She found herself dozing a couple of times, jerked awake then slipped into a restless sleep.
Outside, the storm was approaching its climax. Snow fell as it could not have fallen since the last Ice Age, at half a span an hour. Across the range it reached halfway up the great gate of the manufactory, but here, piled against the flank of the mountain, it was much deeper. By midnight it was four spans deep and falling as fast as ever.
In her snow cave Tiaan dreamed only of cold. She could feel it seeping into the core of her. There was nothing but cold anywhere in the world. Nothing…
Help!
At first she did not know where it came from. It might even have been her own subconscious. The cry slid like an icicle along her congealing synapses.
Help!
A long dreaming, a slow cooling, a slowing down of every process in her body. Imperceptibly it crept towards the point from which there was no recovery.
HELP!
Tiaan shuddered in her sleep, slipping into a dream in which a single point of light moved slowly across a field of darkness. It left behind a few glowing specks. The point started another line, making a few more specks. Another line.
It was not until the hundredth line that her dazed dream-consciousness began to see an image in the specks. A series of horizontal lines, some verticals and two diagonals radiating up from one of the verticals. They made the sparest image that could possibly be made, though Tiaan's sluggish mind could see nothing in it but geometry.
Suddenly he was there. It was the young man on the balcony, his arms thrown up in entreaty.
'I'm here,' Tiaan croaked. Her mouth felt frozen shut.