Leaving the protection of the payload shell was an ordeal. They gasped and shivered in the thin, cold air. The sun was just peeping around a shadow square.
The Ghouls blinked in the growing daylight and crawled into the payload shell to sleep.
Harpster had brought them down at the higher of two orange-splashed cliffs, alongside another floating plate and three baskets attached to collapsed balloons.
The village was stirring. Downslope and to the sides, furred shapes moved out from snow-roofed houses to forage in the tilted lands beyond.
Even to a nomad like Tegger, this wasn’t a large village. Then again, it was nearly invisible. The roofs were rectangles of snow on a snowfield; you picked them out by their shadows.
Five locals were trudging uphill to meet the visitors from below. A raptor-beaked bird circled about them. The Red Herders watched them come, but they couldn’t see anything inside their furs. They carried water bags and more furs.
The water was heated. It tasted wonderful. Warvia and Tegger struggled into furs in frantic haste, pulling them closed until only their noses showed. That and their gasping seemed to amuse the Spill Mountain People.
“Na, na, it’s lovely day!” Saron sang in a nearly impenetrable accent. “You walk in blizzard. Teach you respect mountain!”
They walked around the wood and iron cruiser, paying no attention to the floating plate it rode on.
The five Spill Mountain People looked like barrels sheathed in layers of white– and-gray-striped fur. Saron’s fur was different: striped white and greenish-brown, with a hood that had been some ferocious creature’s head. Her rank must be distinctive, Tegger thought, and decided that Saron was a woman. She was the smallest of the five. Her voice gave no clue and her furs hid all details.
Saron was studying the bronze spinnerweb and its stone backing. She asked, “Is this the eye?”
Warvia said, “Yes. Saron, we don’t know what to do next.”
“We were told Night People would come. Where are they?”
“Sleeping. It isn’t night yet.”
Saron laughed. “My mother told me it was only a way of speaking. They come out at night?”
The Reds nodded.
The bird hovered above them, riding the wind, then suddenly dropped far downslope. It struck talons first, and rose with something struggling in its beak.
Deb asked, “What must the eye see?”
Tegger and Warvia had no idea. This must have been obvious, and Deb answered herself. “The mirror and the passage. Take the eye with us. Does it talk?”
“No.”
“How do you know it sees?”
“Ask Harpster and Grieving Tube.”
Warvia said, “I’m going to cover them. They could freeze to death up here.”
“Good,” Jennawil said, and they carried furs into the payload shell.
Harreed and Barraye were at work dismounting the bronze web and its backing. Tegger had decided they were men. Though they peered out of their hoods in frank astonishment at the Red Herders, they were silent. It seemed the women did all the talking.
Tegger tried to help them. As he scuttled sideways carrying one edge of the stone-backed web, he found himself gasping, suffocating. Deb and Jennawil moved in to help. Tegger got out of their way, fighting for breath.
“You’re feeble,” Saron decided.
Tegger tried to quiet his gasping. “We can walk.”
“Your lungs don’t find enough air. You will be stronger tomorrow. Today you must rest.”
The four picked up the web and began to climb, angling downhill, toward the snow-roofed houses. Saron walked ahead to point out footholds to Warvia and Tegger, ready to steady them if they slipped.
The bird dropped onto the leather pad that crossed Deb’s shoulders. Deb staggered and swore at it in some alien language, and it rose again.
Spill Mountain People seemed incredibly surefooted.
Tegger and Warvia walked with their arms around each other, trying to stay upright. They’d been in motion too long. The mountain seemed to sway beneath them. The wind searched out every tiniest gap in their furs. Tegger peeped out of his hood through slitted eyes, blinking away tears.
He had some of his breath back. He asked Deb, “That was your own tongue, yes? How did you learn the trade speech?”
Deb’s vowels and consonants were distorted. He had to catch the sense above the shrilling of the wind. “Night People say, tell you everything. But you, you tell the flatland vishnishtee nothing. Keep our secrets. Yes?”
Tegger didn’t know the word, but Warvia caught it. She told him, “Vashnesht,” enunciating it properly, and told the others, “Yes.”
Vashnesht: protectors. Keep secrets from the protectors from below the spill mountains. “Yes,” said Tegger.
Deb said, “Teela came from below, from the flats. A strange person, all knobs, could not resh. You understand, reshtra? Could not. Nothing there. She let us look.
“She taught us to speak. We knew the speech of the mirrors, but we spoke it wrong. Teela taught us, then told us teach the people who ride the balloons.
“Then she went through the passage. Came back seventy falans later, no change in her. We thought she was a vishnishtee, but now we knew.”
They were passing houses now: rectilinear houses made of wood that must have been imported from the forest below. They’d picked up an entourage of curious children: eyes peeking out from fur hoods, and chattering that came in puffs of fog. Warvia was trying to answer them.
Tegger asked, “May we speak to this Teela?”
“Teela went below again, since forty falans or more,” Deb said.
“More,” Saron said flatly.
Jennawil asked, “What do you know of reshtra?”
Tegger looked at Warvia. Warvia temporized. “How can you know of rishathra? Do you have other visitors from below?”
The locals laughed, even the men. Deb said, “Not from below, but from sideways! Folk visit from nearby mountains—”
“But they’re all Spill Mountain People, aren’t they?”
“Wairbeea, the people of the mountains are not all one kind. We are High Point. Saron—”
Here, a door. Tegger eased Warvia in ahead of him. The bird settled on Deb’s shoulder as she entered.
This narrow space was not the house proper, only a tiny anteroom supported by wooden beams and lines with hooks for furs. Doors at the far end opened opposite each other.
Now the furs started to come off. The two species stared at one another, fiercely curious.
High Point People were broad through the torso, broad across the face, with wide mouths and deep-set eyes. Their hair and—on the men—beards were curly and dark. Beneath their furs was cloth enclosing their torsos to the elbows and knees, and below the cuffs, a good deal of curly hair.
Deb was a strong woman in middle age. The bird, Skreepu, belonged to Deb. So did the identical-looking young men, Harreed and Barraye: they were her sons. Jennawil was a young woman mated to Barraye.
And Saron was a woman, deep of voice, old and deeply wrinkled. Something about her jaw, her hands: Warvia asked, “Are you of High Point?”
“No, from Two Peaks. A balloon carried us to High Point, far past Short One, where we wanted to visit. The wind blows wrong here. We could not return. The rest flew on, exploring, but I found my man Makray persuasive. He cannot have more children, I have had mine, why not?”
While Deb removed her fur and hung it, Skreepu clung to the leather patch. When Saron led the rest into the main house, the great bird lifted and followed them.
The ceiling was high. Furniture was minimal. There was a high perch for the bird, two low tables, no chairs. This was half of the visitors’ house, divided from the other half by the long anteroom. Tegger wondered if he would meet whatever visitors were living on the other side.
The men propped the bronze web against the wall. Then the High Pointers settled cross-legged in a circle that left space for their visitors.