Cloud came closer to him, hungry and <wanting the berries> Cloud could smell.
And suddenly he realized Cloud wasn’t stuck on the <snowy branches> image any longer. Whatever Cloud had been saving them from—was gone from the ambient.
So Cloud got the berries. All he had. They weren’t much for Cloud’s big body, but Cloud got them, and Cloud’s rider had only one last one. Cloud was due that much.
Cloud would find more berries tomorrow, and they’d take the chance they had and go down the mountain, please God. He’d been stupid. He’d run off from his parents and come up on the mountain where a stupid kid hadn’t any experience or any business being. God punished people like that. But maybe they had one more chance to get out of this.
Cloud snorted, mad. Cloud didn’t understand God. But if that was God that was out there in the dark, Cloud took exception to his thinking about God: Cloud came between him and the wind and licked vigorously at his face, making it wet in the cold air. He tried to shove Cloud off, but Cloud wouldn’t leave him, Cloud pressed in so he had to tuck up tighter in his nook or have his face scrubbed raw.
He was warm, though. He shivered, and whenever he thought— as he had to—that what he’d felt was real, and Watt had run through the woods, and Watt had fallen off the edge of some cliff—he disturbed Cloud, who didn’t want him to, and who thought about where they were and about <snow,> until he gave up trying to think of anything else.
<Snow sifting down on them.> He thought it was Cloud’s imaging. But he opened his eyes and felt it on his face when he looked up. It whitened the evergreen that made their blanket. It stuck to Cloud’s back.
The terror didn’t come back. Maybe the rogue was asleep.
Maybe it had found what it was hunting. But he hadn’t felt it satisfied. It had just—flown away, not finished with what it was doing.
<Harper firing—on a man and a horse, firing until the gun was empty.>
—until the man was dead.
He squeezed his eyes tight, not wanting to think about that. So he thought, like Cloud, about <snow and branches > and bore down on that thought very hard.
Chapter XVII
THE AIR AT DAYBREAK WAS QUIET, LADEN WITH MIST THAT MADE the woolen blanket damp. Guil folded it up, wet though it was. He had two blankets. He’d felt the moisture in the air last night and not taken the other out of the pack. If the sun came out today he’d wear the one cloaklike a while and let the wind work on it; but it could only get wetter, as the morning promised to be, with a veil over the road.
Today, he expected a harder trek, and maybe one more night on the climb; he hoped to God not, mistrusting the clammy mist that meant a lot of moisture in the air. It was a treacherous kind of weather. All it took was a front coming over the mountains, and they were in heavy snow—or a freezing mist. Aby had indicated in vagrant images of her high-country treks that the high end, beyond the shelter, was far steeper—more than a twenty-five percent grade in places.
Ravines.
Bridges.
Loose fill where the roadbed was sure to have washed out at the edges. The number of trucks in the old days that had lost their brakes and taken the straight route down was legendary.
With frozen sheen marking the edges of leaves this morning, it wasn’t a road to like at all—but that was the situation they had, and they walked, both of them, for an hour or more, with only hazy rock at one side to tell them where the road was bending, hazy gray at their right to tell them where empty space was, and the grade of the road and their own burning lungs and weary legs to advise them how high and fast they were climbing. At least once the sun was lighting the mist, the frost on the rocks slowly turned liquid.
By midmorning a mild breeze began, and as dry cold scoured away the mist, the world below appeared in pastel miniature, a memorable view down the series of switchbacks and slides.
There were fewer rock falls: a falling rock wouldn’t stay on this steep, he swore. Earth-slip had skewed a whole section of phone poles, the line not yet broken, but the poles wanted resetting. He vowed to tell Cassivey next spring in person and in no uncertain terms that if they wanted these lines to stay up, whoever was supposed to be responsible for them, they’d better hire riders—and get a road repair truck up here next summer, or not even a line-rider with a wire-cutter and a roll of tape was going to be able to get up here in another year. Damned stupid economy—to wait until they had to blast a new roadbed out.
It only got worse. In one place, erosion had cut away half the road. It made him give anxious thought to the ground under their feet, which was shored up by timbers the slide had compromised. Badly.
In another turn he met the first of the high bridges: the road was climbing by a rugged set of switchbacks and going further and further back into a fold of the mountain, and where the roadbuilders hadn’t found a way to blast away enough mountain to make a roadway past the slip-zone they had evidently just bridged the gap and hoped.
But with the fresh scars of slides going under the bridge, he got down off Burn’s back, climbed down at least far enough on the rocks so he could take a look at the underpinnings; and it did look to be sound.
He climbed up then and walked across the boards ahead of Burn—as Burn trod the weathered boards imaging <boards shattering> and switching his tail furiously. <Sharp rocks,> Burn insisted, <far, far, far down in the gully.>
It wasn’t that far down. But, give or take the missing tie-downs that made no few of the warped boards rattle and rock—and thunder like hell under wheeled traffic, Guil could well imagine—it forecast nothing good ahead.
The next such bridge they reached was worse—two boards were actually missing in a span above a higher drop. Hope, Guil thought, that the villages had done better with the bridges up near the crest.
Another short span. Burn had to cross over more missing boards, easy stride for a horse—but Burn was, by now, not happy with bridges in general.
Then they caught sight of the big one Aby’s images had foretold they could expect, over a gorge by no means so large as Kroman, but impressive, the longest bridge yet—and as Guil looked up from below, it showed sky through its structure.
Guil gazed up at it in dismay, and Burn outright balked on the gravel road, catching the image from his mind and dizzily lifting and turning his head to have his one-sided horsewise view of it. Burn immediately ducked his head down and laid his ears back, shaking his neck.
Nothing to do but have a look, Guil thought, and nudged Burn with his heels, twice, to get him moving up that steep gravel incline.
The bridge looked no better when they came up on a level with it, a long span over a rift in the mountain flank, a cable and timber structure far more ambitious than any they’d met.
It wasn’t wholly suspension, thank God. The rails as well as the roadbed were missing pieces, and four and five of the crosslaid planks were gone at a stretch. He counted four, five such gaps in the bridge deck, so far as he could see from this side, gaps exposing the underpinnings. The boards had probably, Guil thought, sailed right off in the storms, considering the cold gusts that battered and buffeted them, sweeping unrestricted along the dry, slide-choked gorge on the one side and dizzily out into open sky and the whole of the plains and the distant haze-hidden Sea on the other.
He jammed his hat on tight and slipped the cord under his chin before he walked out on the span to look it over, and the look he got sent his heart plummeting. The gaps were big enough to drop a horse through, and the winds that swept across that span could rock a man on his feet.
Burn didn’t like that idea. <Guil coming back,> Burn urged him anxiously.