“At the pole we switch to this road”—he pointed—“and start south for County Tsarang. That’s another seventy-five hops.”
The prince grimaced. “Altogether, that’s thirty-five jumps further than the Island Road. How long will it take?”
“By the treaty, they need supply us with only one pilot, so I doubt if we’ll do better than six jumps an hour … say twenty hours in all.”
“Very well. We’ll return to the yacht and prepare to leave.
At the same time, I want you”—Pelio was speaking to the consul now—“to do everything in your power to encourage prompt Snowman cooperation: we need that clearance for the North Road and we need a pilot who knows the way.”
The elderly official bobbed his head. “As you will, Your Highness.”
It took nearly three hours for the Snowmen to produce a qualified pilot. During most of that time, Ajão and the others huddled near their boat’s tiny stoves and tried to keep warm. The skies were still clear and both moons were up now, at opposite ends of the sky—one full and the other a narrow crescent. To the southeast—beyond the shelves of frozen ocean—the stars disappeared a few degrees above the horizon. Along the edge of the lake, Snowmen chipped industriously at the smoky ice that formed even in the doped water. Only an occasional boat jumped into or out of the lake. At least fifty boats, more than half of them of the heavy Snowman design, were tied up at the wharves—all waiting for the Island Road to clear.
Toward noon, twilight brightened the southern sky as the sun made a valiant effort to pop above the horizon. But they were above the arctic circle here at Grechper, and the effort was in vain.
At one point, their navigator sent a message ball down the Island Road to the first transit lake that he senged to be ice-covered. Minutes later a reply smashed into the water near the yacht. The badly crushed wood ball was hauled aboard, and cut apart. The message within reported that the storm was furious and worsening.
And all that morning there on the frigid deck, Pelio and Leg-Wot exchanged scarcely a word. The only time Ajão saw one look at the other was once when he caught Leg-Wot glaring at Pelio’s back. Neither of them even asked him about his recovery. It was as if they were different people now; what happened while he was sleeping? He tried to get Yoninne into a private conversation, but she refused to be maneuvered.
Finally their new pilot—escorted by the two Snowmen who had originally brought the bad news about the storm—came stomping up the gangplank. Once aboard, the stalling—if that was what it had been—ended. The yacht’s chief navigator took the fellow on a short tour of the hull, carefully pointing out the dimensions and weaknesses of its structure. Five minutes later they were renging steadily northward. The boat slid sideways in the water as it came out of each jump. Twilight faded quickly from the south. The moons looked down from a star-filled sky.
Ajão saw no more boats with the sun-over-fields seal of the Summerkingdom. The traffic along this road belonged to the Snowfolk: their boats, almost perfectly spheroidal, were unmistakable. The buildings around the shores were smaller now, and there were rarely towns beyond them. They looked to be little more than huts built from thick ice blocks. This far north, ground temperatures never rose above zero, even in the middle of summer; ice and snow were as good construction materials as any. Besides, the bedrock hereabouts was probably buried under several hundred meters of ice. League after league, the land remained a sterile, frigid desert. He realized now that even the Snowfolk couldn’t maintain their way of life above the fiftieth parallel. No doubt the only people living by these lakes were the snow-chippers needed to keep the road open.
At one point the wind died—perhaps they were in the lee of some mountain range hidden by the night. While their Snowman pilot took a rest, the crew inspected the boat’s hull, and tried to chip away some of the greenish ice that covered the lower window slats. In the relative silence, the deck stoves crackled and spat. With the wind down, those stoves had a chance to heat the deck, and the men huddled near them. Ajão wondered that this sudden warmth didn’t bring Samadhom out of whatever cubbyhole Pelio had found for him in the boat’s hold.
Ajão looked through the ice-stained windows at a boat across the lake. Something new and curious was going on there: the craft slowly turned upside down, like a whale doing a lazy bellyroll. It started to roll back, then abruptly was teleported from the lake. Now why in heaven’s name had the Snowmen rolled their boat before they jumped? He walked across the frosted deck to where Pelio stood warming himself. The prince didn’t look up as Bjault asked about what he had seen in the water. For a moment he thought Pelio wasn’t going to reply. Finally, the Azhiri shrugged. “I thought you and Ionina knew all the answers, Adgao,” he said softly. “I’m an ignorant lout it suits you to use just now, remember?”
The light dawned on Bjault. He glanced across the deck at Yoninne, but that worthy stared grimly at the shoreline, determined to ignore them. Well, Bjault sighed to himself, I suppose neither of us were meant to be intriguers. He was almost relieved that the boy understood the situation. Aloud, he said, “There are many things we don’t know, Your Highness. Perhaps that’s why we … tricked you. If you were lost hundreds of leagues from home and surrounded by strangers who might be hostile, wouldn’t you act a little bit, uh, sneaky—even toward the people you thought were friendly?” The prince’s gaze fell back to the fire shining through the isinglass grating of the stove. “I suppose. From you I could accept this, but I thought Io—” He broke off, started on an entirely new course. “The boat you saw roll over was preparing to jump to some road in the southern hemisphere.”
It was an ironic fact that in some situations the Azhiri could jump thousands of kilometers easier than hundreds: for if your destination lay due south as far below the equator as you were above it, then you could teleport there without suffering even the smallest jolt. So the Snowkingdom could occupy opposite ends of the world, yet—in a sense—still be a single, connected domain.
But that didn’t really answer Bjault’s question. “I mean, why do they turn the boat upside down?”
Pelio shrugged again. “The people at the South Pole are standing on their heads compared to us and no one can reng a boat unless it’s first turned so the keel will point down at the destination. That’s true even for the jumps we’ve been making, though you probably haven’t noticed the trim changes, they were so slight.”
This sounded like nonsense, till Ajão saw that it could follow from conservation of energy: if no adjustments were necessary, you might make a perpetual-motion machine by teleporting a pendulum back and forth between the North and South poles. An interesting and curious fact—but now he could think of nothing more to ask. And it seemed that Pelio had nothing more to say. Despite all the men on the deck, the boy was completely, miserably alone. Ajão sighed and returned to his seat.
Their arrival at the North Pole was unexpected and abrupt. Suddenly they were floating in a new lake, several times larger than previous ones. The traffic was heavy here—as if this lake were the juncture of many routes. Ice-block warehouses stood all around the water, many connected by hallways whose roofs barely poked above the dustlike snow that blew across the water from the plain beyond. If those dumpy buildings were the palace they’d been hearing about, then this was quite an anticlimax.