He startled her so much when he shook her that she changed three shades of color before she realized it was him. Quickly, though, he outlined the changed situation.
“Joe, I’m not going to make it,” she told him. “You know we aren’t great walkers, and I haven’t fed in two days.”
“If you stay here, you’ll die. Same reason.”
“I know. Joe—we’ve been through a lot together. We’ve been as close as we could as comrades. I’m only alive and here in this world now due to your kindness long ago on a lonely road in West Texas. I’ve tried as much as possible to pay you back. Now I need something from you. Now. Right here. They won’t be coming back in tonight; I know their routine and what they already got.”
“Marge! Here? Now? I—”
She was changing, becoming a vision of an idealized Tiana, mixed with Mia, and now with every vision of every woman he’d ever loved or wanted to love. She was Venus, and Diana, and Lust herself.
“It is finally time, Joe,” the vision whispered to him, those big eyes holding him. “Make love to me, Joe. Make love to me now.”
Joe feigned an upset stomach at the end of the meal and excused himself, saying it was definitely not the food or the cooking, but rather an old ailment coming back.
Marge and Macore waited for him behind the security shack. He stared at the little thief, all dressed in thick furs, gloves, hat, and boots, although only the boots, being his originally, fit right.
“How’d you get out?” he asked the thief.
“I told you I could walk any time I wanted. That place couldn’t hold a baby.”
“Who told you about the advanced schedule?”
Macore looked positively rhapsodic. “Mary Ann! She came to me, Joe, as if in a vision, saying she loved me!”
Joe looked at Marge and gave a slight pig grunt. She smiled and shrugged sheepishly, but she sure wasn’t weak anymore.
In point of fact, Joe felt damned good himself; wide awake, alert, excited, adrenaline flowing, the darker thoughts and-fears that had been so close to the surface with him receding into the background. The Kauri were not true parasites; what they took from you was in the main stuff you wanted taken. Still, there was the present worry.
“I hope Mia’s okay,” he said. “We ought to get going.”
“Here she comes,” Marge noted. “You know, you’re right. She makes me feel cold to look at her and I’m not wearing anything more than she is.”
“Conditioning,” he told her. “We feel what we expect. Ah! Mia! Any problems?”
“A little, Master. The dog harness was a problem. I have my own knife as well. My lord Macore, the best I could find for you was a butcher knife.”
“It’ll do,” he replied. He stared at her in the semidarkness. “You know, I could almost swear you look familiar. I must say I don’t like the way they shave their slaves up here, though, although you look quite pleasant, my dear.”
“You remember her from Earth and the boat, Macore,” Marge told him. “Don’t worry about it. And the poor girl can’t help the way she looks. Mia, you’re gonna have to carry a real load out there and not drop with it. You think you can do it?”
“It is necessary, and so I must, my lady. I will not fail you all.”
“Grab all the gear and let’s get away from here and well out on the ice fast,” Joe ordered. “Sooner or later somebody is going to come looking for one of us and not find us. When they see Macore’s gone, too, they’ll put two and two together.”
“You think they’ll come after us?” Marge asked him. “I mean, you sort of showed them how it’s done.”
“I doubt it, but even if they do, they won’t be able to close on us, if we’re well away,” Joe replied. “And if they come in after us on their own ice blocks, they’re not going to think about all the things we did, and it’ll eat them alive.”
“One or two of ’em will come,” Macore predicted. “They won’t want to raise the alarm or report us missing, because it’ll go against them that they let us escape. They’ll want to bring us back, dead or alive.”
“Can’t they catch us with the dogs, Master?” Mia asked, concerned.
Macore chuckled. “Dogs won’t go near that place. Dogs got more sense.”
“Let’s go. We’ll organize this stuff on the edge before we go into the Devastation,” Joe told them. “Marge, since you’re way too small and light to carry much of anything, stay behind and check on pursuit. We’ll wait for you before we go in. Might as well make use of those fairy wings and all that excess energy while we can.”
She grinned. “Will do, boss. Now, in the words of my great grandpappy, ‘Git!’ ”
They got.
The moon had risen just at dusk, and was slowly rising in the sky. It was still almost full, of course; not enough for wereing, but enough to give them some light across the dangerous ice pack.
“I kinda wished it would be a bit darker,” Macore remarked. “I know we’re damned hard to spot out here under these conditions, but I feel like a backlit target.”
“Where do we go, Master?” Mia asked.
“Right where all those colors—” Suddenly he realized that, of all of them, she was the only one who couldn’t see the place. “Do you see anything at all over there, where I’m pointing?”
“The ice seems to look a bit different, Master, a bit more moonlit as if it is glowing slightly.”
“Good girl! That’s enough. For now, just follow me.”
They walked for quite some time, their boots crunching eerily in the dead silence of the cold. Joe turned back to Mia. “How are your feet feeling?”
“Sometimes it feels like hard, rocky ground, sometimes like walking on sand, Master,” she responded. “But I do not feel this cold.”
“Good. Not much farther to go.”
“Are you sure this is the narrowest point, from here?” Macore asked him.
“There’s not much to use for landmarks, but it’s close. Four point two miles northwest of the town, if their map is right. The area’s ragged, but basically oval in shape and pinched just above its middle. In the pinch, it’s supposedly forty-two miles. It broadens to about sixty-five, so I hope we’re right. The palace would be a mile north and about a quarter-mile in from the pinch on the other side.”
“If we miss, we’re gonna have everything from zombies to invader spells up the ass,” Macore noted. “We better hit this one dead on.”
Since the pinched oval of the Devastation was angled from the shore, he had been forced to guess on the pinch without being really able to see much of it, but he felt sure he was correct.
“Here,” he told them, putting down the pack for a moment. “This is as good a guess as any. Better start cutting our ice blocks now. Mia, we’ll cut your ice load large and heavy and then trim it down to something you can handle. You don’t need to walk on this stuff, but we’ll need what you carry to sit on.”
“Yes, girl, but even you must remember that, if you have to relieve yourself, it must go in the sack here,” the thief put in, already starting to cut his own blocks. “It’ll be as warm as ours. Once it’s cold, and that won’t take long, then we can dump it. We won’t have to carry our crap, at least.”
The great sword Irving cut through the ice as if it were butter, and soon Joe was trimming a block into two smaller, lighter, slabs with flat faces.
“We might well not need these,” the thief admitted, tying his own blocks on, “but we can’t chance it unless we have to. If we lose the blocks, or they splinter, or prove too cumbersome, then we’ll have to experiment. By that time the soles of our boots will be at ice temperature, anyway.”