Someone emerged from the smoky hell of the front door. His hands were high in the air, and he yelled something back to the attackers.
There was a guttural laugh, and a rifle barked. The man fell, palms slapping to his forehead.
Eviane closed her eyes. Her empty stomach curled into a knot. Charlene’s whispered laughter rang in her ear: “You’re overacting. It’s embarrassing. What are we supposed to do?”
She had no answer. Dreamboat’s voice saved her. “Well, we know that they’re not the good guys.”
“We don’t have any weapons,” Hippogryph said. “We could get into a lot of trouble.”
“We have flares,” the Guardsman called. “Two boxes of them, and my rifle. Listen, with three flare guns we can convince them that they’re surrounded. Goners. I say we give it a shot.”
Hebert objected. “Flare guns? All right, they aren’t that well armed-”
Impatiently Eviane snapped, “Lead on!”
After a few whispered instructions, the group spread out. Eviane was all elbows and knees as she crawled along the ridge, the curving sickle of snow that sheltered them from the war below. Just ahead of her, Dreamboat raised his flare pistol. Bowles slashed his hand in the air, and With a chorus of dull phuts, white streamers cut through the air. Suddenly a half-dozen smoking, parachuting flares were drifting from the sky like burning blossoms.
The men on the ground looked up.
“Ooooobleobleoble-” Charlene screamed out, her cry swiftly echoed by everyone else in the group. Eviane joined them delightedly-who could resist an opportunity to scream baby talk with a bunch of supposedly grown adult-type people? It was ridiculous, and silly, and somehow cleansing.
The men in the valley looked around in confusion, but the sound was coming from everywhere and nowhere. The Guardsman aimed his rifle carefully, and squeezed the trigger. One of the enemy went down clutching his chest. The remaining three sprang to their feet, and spread their arms. For a moment Eviane thought that they were asking for mercy.
Then the clouds parted.
No, they hadn’t parted. The sky was slate-gray, threatening snow, but a northward wedge of cloud was brighter, widening, and Sky and land were flowing. Off to the north, the vast dim expanse of snow flowed to left and right, as if a folded blanket was being pulled straight. It was hard to see, because what was summoned into being was only new snowscape, no different from the old except that it glowed beneath a brighter sky.
The four gunmen hastened north, two carrying their wounded member. They didn’t look back, not even when the Guardsman stopped gaping and fired after them. He fired three careful shots. Snow puffed wide of the gunmen.
“Damn,” the Guardsman said.
A distant ridge of snow humped ahead of them. The four stopped, and one gestured wide-armed, his face lifting as the white mass lifted
… and then the snowscape flowed, the path closed, the light dimmed. Eviane huffed as her legs gave out and dropped her in the snow.
They were gone. There remained only a bare field of snow, and four corpses to mark the place where, a moment before, a dreadful battle had raged.
Chapter Seven
Eviane stumbled down the bank of snow, caught her balance for an exhilarating moment, then tumbled again. She wiped ice from her hair and snorted it from her nose as she came back to her feet.
The other refugees plowed furrows in the snow as they plunged down. Some rolled like pill bugs, whooping. Max and the National Guardsman. both kept their balance all the way down. At the last instant Max lost his battle with momentum and plowed face-first to the bottom.
Charlene walked down fully upright, slowly, like an aged elvish queen, with Hippogryph alongside her as a dwarfish attendant.
Eviane’s amusement vanished almost as quickly as it bubbled up. What was happening here? They had left the violence of the cities behind… and now this!
Something deep within her was untouched by the cold and the fear. Some voice whispered that it was all a dream, only a recurrent nightmare. Eviane shook her head violently. Such thoughts were dangerous.
She approached the burning lodge, cautiously avoiding the bodies of the dead.
Eviane had seen corpses before. A few more meant little. One of the dead men was heartbreakingly young. His eyes stared sightless, freezing in the terrible cold. His arms were outstretched as if begging for mercy, or trying to provide some small measure of protection for his people inside.
Charlene crunched through the snow behind her, whispered close in her ear. “Be careful?”
“Why?” Eviane asked, surprised with how damned reasonable her voice sounded. “We can handle it or we can’t. If we can’t, we’re probably dead anyway. Let’s go.”
Charlene looked at her with what could only have been amazement.. but Charlene hailed from an earlier, more benign world. Here the ice ruled, and only the strong would survive. Somehow Eviane would keep her friend alive until the tall girl had a chance to adapt to reality.
The National Guardsman jogged up beside them. Eviane scanned him appraisingly. He looked young and hard, jaw square and tight-curled hair cropped short. Good. An asset. There were bad times ahead.
Max Sands… she could trust Max. Despite the run, he wasn’t really breathing hard. Hippogryph was no weakling either. But Bowles was bent over, hands on knees, panting. Stith-Wood was massaging her knee. Orson and Kevin were still back on the slope. Johnny Welsh hadn’t told a joke in an hour.
Kevin of the pipestem legs: his padded clothing hung on him like a deflated balloon. He was puffing a little, but his smile was intact. The rest could survive a day or two of starvation, though they’d whine, but for Kevin they’d better find food. He’d build muscle-meat on this trip or die trying.
Smoke belched out of the front door as it creaked open. Fingers scrabbled on the inside, pulling weakly.
A man emerged. His broad Eskimo face was all planes and angles, the face of a man who has known starvation or terrible illness. His hands were lines and knobs. Only the eyes were alive. They were piercing, frozen blue, like chips of flaming ice.
He gasped for breath, and stretched the door wider so that a young woman could squeeze her way out. The girl fell to her knees in the snow, threw her arms around the young man’s corpse. “Wood Owl,” she sobbed hysterically. “Oh, you fool. Oh, my dear.”
She was rounded, solid beneath her furs. So: it wasn’t starvation which had stolen the fat from the old man’s face. Years of illness might do that.
As the old man stumbled from the doorframe, the roof gave a sigh and collapsed.
His voice was as timeless as the howling wind. “We must find shelter. Come with me to the prayer lodge. Ahk-lut dares not violate that sacred place.”
Eviane nodded as if she understood, and helped the girl to her feet.
The air grew even colder as they marched. The wind drove the snow until it was almost a solid curtain. The refugees stumbled on blindly, following the old man. He bent into the storm, pushing on step after painful step. Who could tell what the old man was following? Instinct or memory or the distant outline of white knife-edged mountains momentarily visible through the terrible gale. Except for those brief moments, they were in an endless, impenetrable shell of white, until Eviane could see only the stunned shadow of Johnny Welsh struggling ahead of her. One moment’s lapse of attention, a single misplaced footstep, and she would be lost.
After a time the storm’s fury diminished, and she could distinguish the alien landscape around her. There were no trees, although the snow was clotted in irregular lumps that might have been trees shrouded and drowned in white. There was no sign of life save for the line of silent travelers. Now that the wind was dying, she heard their gasping.