Nightfall_at_Algemron

Gabriel tried to feel what the stone was trying to show him. "A little more to the west," he said.
"A canyon here, Gabe," Helm said, watching him from the center display.
"Right," Gabriel said. "Drop down a bit."
"Into it?"
"Yeah."
"How far?"
"I'll tell you."
Gabriel cupped the stone in his hands and tried to shut everything else out. Inside his mind he could just faintly see a kind of glow, like the glow from the stone, growing slowly stronger.
"Down more," Gabriel said as he watched that faint pearly light. It was hard to keep track of exactly what it was doing. The effect was like the light inside your own eyelids when you've been looking at the sun—very vague and diffuse.
"This is quite a deep canyon, Gabriel," Enda said. "I am not sure where we will find a place to land, except at the bottom."
"That might have to be it," Gabriel muttered. "Farther down."
Down the three ships dropped on their system drives, very gently, nearly hovering. Gabriel felt the glow growing stronger and then suddenly paling off again. "No," he said. "Stop and back up a little."
Enda coaxed the ship up again. Gabriel was more aware of this by the slight inroads he now had into her mind than by any feeling of the ship's movement. "Right here," he said.
"Gabe," said Helm's voice, "that's pretty nearly a sheer cliff face. A few little skinny ledges on it are about wide enough to take one of you. I might have trouble, and nowhere to land close by but a ledge about ten meters up. I wouldn't be sanguine about the ships' ability to stay there for long without the whole thing falling out from under them."
Gabriel opened his eyes and looked at the cliff face. It was striated beautifully in cream, brown, and red. It was very weathered, and with very few exceptions—mostly the little ledges Helm had mentioned—it was as vertical as anyone could hope. There was no sign of anything in the neighborhood even remotely glassy. There were, however, some deep cracks, wide enough for even Grawl to get through.
"The whole thing must be buried," Gabriel said. "Helm, tell me you have a grav belt or two in the Awful Room."
"I had one once, but I never used the damned thing. Sold it off. Now I wish I hadn't!" "Too late. I guess we'll have to climb. What about ledges underneath us?" "There's a couple," Helm said. He paused a moment then said, "Follow me."
About another twenty meters down were two separate parts of a big outcropping with room enough for the three ships. "I wouldn't go out late at night to take a leak," Helm said as he landed, and the others came down on either side of him.
Gabriel could see his point. Longshot was sitting right by the edge of the outcropping, and there was a thirty-meter drop directly beside her.
"Surely if you did that," Grawl said, "it would freeze in midair." "For a poet," Helm said, "you can sure be pragmatic sometimes." "What's the temperature now?" Gabriel asked.
"About three degrees C," replied Helm. "Heat getting trapped down here a little, seems like. It might stay warmer at nights, too."
"Or it might get colder," Angela said. "You'll want to keep an eye on that."
Gabriel looked out the front viewports at the canyon wall. The stone twinged and sizzled in his hand. "This is it," he said. "Let's get out there and look around."
It took perhaps half an hour for everyone else to get kitted out—cold weather gear, breathers, armor, weapons. They met at the edge of the outcropping and looked over the terrain.
It was a very confined, restricted kind of place. The canyon walls seemed almost to lean in over the viewer, a claustrophobic and unsettling effect. Beyond that, there was nothing overtly threatening about the place. Chilly wind whined down the canyon, making it seem more like negative ten C or so. Here and there a pebble tinkled downslope when someone put his foot down incautiously. There was no other sound.
Helm was looking down from the outcropping. "Actually," he said, "this isn't too bad. We climb down there then climb up the far side."
"One of us could always hover and drop the others on one of those little ledges," said Angela.
Helm snorted genially. "Not to run down your piloting, Ange, but you want to try that with that big barge of yours here? In this wind? You're braver than me. Then the one doing the flying gets to stay behind."
"No chance," Angela said hastily.
Gabriel looked up at the cliff on the far side. "It's a little less vertical than it looks," Gabriel said, "and it looks like there's plenty of handholds."
Helm grunted. "Good thing," he said. "Well, I have climbing gear and a couple of harnesses. We can go up two at a time."
"Where exactly are we going?" asked Grawl.
Gabriel was still gazing at the cliff face. "See that big crack there," he said, "where it looks like the strata shifted? That's big enough for us to squeeze through."
"Better hope there's something on the far side," Helm said.
"Oh, there's something there all right," Gabriel said. "If we can only get at it."
Helm went to fetch the climbing gear. These, too, Gabriel realized, had been packed away in the Awful Cabin, and once more he became determined to find time to go through that place from top to bottom and see what else Helm might have stuffed in there.
It took another twenty minutes or so to get the first two, Angela and Enda, into the harnesses. Enda was quickest. "I have used these before," she said as she was buckled into the harness.
Helm looked at her curiously. "Didn't know you went in for climbing."
"I do not," Enda replied, "but in the Wanderers' cities, there is so much to be serviced, and not all of it can be handled by machines."
Gabriel laughed inwardly at the image of Enda as a window washer, but he remembered that she had worked her way up through a lot of jobs to city manager. Maybe it's like hotel work. They say the best way to become a manager is to learn all the jobs from the bottom up.
"All right," Helm said. "You're on belay now. Down you go."
Down the two of them went, alternately clinging to handholds and footholds or spinning like spiders briefly when no holds were available. At the bottom, Enda slipped out of the harness and called up to Helm, "It will not be hard coming up. The cliff does not shelve significantly, and there is plenty of support for an upward climb."
"Right," Helm said. He and Grawl started pulling the harnesses up, and Grawl finished making fast to Lalique's skids the rope that would remain in place for access when they climbed back up again. Helm came over to check the knots, while Gabriel and Grawl harnessed themselves.
"Looking thoughtful," Gabriel said to Grawl as she gazed across the way at the cavern wall.
"I am making notes," Grawl said. "This will make a fine song some day."
"Assuming we find something."
"We have already found something," Grawl said, "or so you say." Gabriel nodded. "That's not it, though."
Grawl glanced at him, an odd expression. "Your meaning is dark to me."
He tried not to smile, mostly because he could feel the tension in her gut and recognized it. He had it, too. "You don't like heights either."
Grawl bared her fangs. then let the look relax into a smile. Gabriel would not have thought it was possible for a weren to look sheepish.
"I did not care to mention," she said. "It makes poor reading in the tales later."
"I wouldn't have mentioned it either," Gabriel said, "but if I throw up on the way down, I just wanted you to know that it's nothing personal."
"Spew," Grawl said, "is normally about as personal as it is possible to get. Nonetheless, warrior, I take your meaning."
Together they went on belay and made their way down. Gabriel was much relieved by knowing Helm and Delde Sota were up there keeping an eye on the ropes, but the tension remained, and he concentrated on controlling his stomach as he descended. It was no more than a minute or so before he was on the rocks and sand and gravel at the bottom of the canyon, shrugging out of the harness and feeling profound relief. Climbing would not be as bad as descending, but he still wished he could do without it entirely. The thought of standing on that narrow ledge across the way was making his stomach flipflop again.