In the morning, it was little better. The temperature was far below zero and they were faced with a breath-takingly beautiful but hazardous sight as clouds closed in almost all views below them, even of the slight dips, valleys, and cirques, leaving only the points of the highest peaks popping up into a brilliant, almost blinding sun. Had flying not been prohibited by the lack of oxygen at that extreme altitude, it would still be impossible now. Once up, there would literally be no safe place to land.
The Gedemondan continued to lead the way on foot, the Agitar, bundled in heavy clothing, rode atop Brazil. The white creature seemed less bothered by the conditions and totally unaffected by altitude and cold, and navigated the tricky range with unerring precision.
Still, such precision was not at the expense of over-caution, for anything less would destroy you up here above the clouds, and it was even slower going than before. At midday, Mavra guessed they had made only a couple of kilometers; the black barrier to the north looked no closer and they had made barely the next set of peaks popping up out of the clouds, Brazil was even more pessimistic; he began to wonder if they could make it at all. There was nothing to eat up here, and he was feeling starved as it was. The trouble was, all directions looked the same to him—lousy. There might not, he reflected uneasily, be any way to abort the plan at this point.
Nearing dusk, they were all feeling down, defeated, and more than a little cheated by it all. They linked to talk, but there was very little to say, really. They all were sharing the same dark thoughts.
I’ve failed, each one seemed to say to itself or to the others; we’ve failed. We’ve managed to out-think, out-trick, or out-fight every force the Well World has thrown in our way, but now we are dying, victims not of army or plan but of geography.
Darkness fell, and they camped for another lonely, windy, cold night without food and, now, without much hope.
“We tried our best,” Brazil tried to console them, although he felt more in need of it than in the mood to give it. “We’ll continue to try as long as possible, until we just can’t any more.”
“I can see only one way out,” Mavra told them.
“Tomorrow, early, while we still have strength, we must try and fly down into the canyon.”
“How wide is an Avenue?” Prola asked apprehensively.
Brazil thought about it. “Thirty meters, more or less,” he replied. “The chasm is a bit wider, of course, but we don’t know how far we’d have to glide and what narrow spots we might have to dodge.”
“Fully extended,” Mavra noted, “my wingspan and yours is roughly eight or nine meters. It doesn’t give us very much maneuverability—and with those wicked updrafts and downdrafts, and those clouds…”
“It was your idea to fly,” he came back. “Don’t try talking me out of it at this stage. It’s the only thing we can do—and I want to do it so little it wouldn’t take very much to let me freeze and starve up here.”
“Near midday tomorrow, then,” she agreed ruefully, “when whatever sun gets down in there is available to us.”
They slept fitfully that night, not wanting to think about, let alone face, the day ahead. And when the first of them awoke and looked around, hope was dashed even further. The clouds had risen now; the whole world was a sea of swirling white in every direction.
They nibbled some snow and relaxed, unable to move until the sun or weather patterns burned some of the fog away.
“It’s like this a lot near Avenues,” Brazil told them. “You get the same reaction when two dissimilar hexes—seasonally, that is—meet at a border, and that’s a border out there, of course, a border with a thirty meter strip in between that’s subject to wind and weather patterns from both hexes.”
They were silent most of the morning, and the mists would not clear. Brazil finally motioned for the Gedemondan to come over and “plug in,” as he thought of it.
“Mavra—what have you been thinking about?” he asked gently, trying to get her mind off the situation.
She gave a wry chuckle. “Other places. Other people,” she replied. “I wonder how the battle went? I wonder who won? And whether it made a damn bit of difference? I wonder if they bit on that empty shell of a body you left them, or if they’re all lined up somewhere, fighting yet. It would be nice to know before I…”
“Die?” he completed. “Does that really scare you?”
“Yes, of course, ” she replied. “I’m not like you, Brazil. I don’t think anyone is. I’d like to see that new universe.”
He hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, that tells me something about you I was wondering about.” He didn’t elaborate, but it settled a nagging reservation he had had. He had wondered, up to this point, whether or not she might not have desired, been happy, in her Dillian existence. Of course, Asam’s treachery would have dispelled that, but only for the two of them. It wasn’t fair, though, to do to anyone what he intended for her if she could have been happy in some alternate existence.
It wasn’t fair anyway, he knew, but she wouldn’t believe that until she found it out for herself.
The Gedemondan broke the contact. “The fog is lifting,” he noted.
They looked around and saw it was true. The sun was visible now, about a quarter of the way up in the sky, and it was burning through the thin cloudiness that seemed impossible at this altitude.
“I think I see a peak over there!” Prola called excitedly. “And another, there! Yes! I think it’s clearing.”
The Gedemondan suddenly stiffened and looked around nervously. “I don’t think all is well,” he whispered. “I sense others near by. I—I allowed my own personal emotions to cloud my senses,” he explained apologetically. “Now I can read them. We are being watched!”
They tensed, and the Agitar drew his coppery swordlike tast, which could conduct thousands of volts of electricity from his body. They waited tensely to see who the hell could possibly have penetrated this fog and found them at such a height.
“Helloooo…!” boomed a voice from somewhere just to the left of them, a call that echoed back and forth between the peaks. “Hey! Nate! Where are you?” it called. “Come on—I won! I gotcha dead to rights. You can’t move. I took your challenge and I’ve won, Nate! I’ve won!”
Brazil gestured with his head to the Gedemondan, who placed a pad on his head allowing speech.
“Over here!” he called wearily. “How the hell did you ever find us?”
A huge figure glided out of the fog and approached them carefully. It carried in two of its six hands a small electronic device.
“This is a high-tech hex, Nate,” Serge Ortega told him. “Haven’t you ever heard of radar?”
Above the Borgo Pass
Ortega had a fairly large force around, and as they walked with him the size became more apparent. They were also well armed and well equipped with the best in weaponry and detection gear and obviously digging in.
“I must say that it’s damned hard to think of you as a pegasus,” the Ulik said jokingly. “And a passionate pink one at that! My, my!”
Brazil could only snort at this commentary, since the Gedemondan could only be an effective speech conduit when they were standing still. He and Mavra could only seethe and take it; all hope was now gone.
“The Borgo Pass,” Ortega told them. “It’s the narrowest point in the whole chasm, barely ten meters clearance on either side of the Avenue and with nice, natural fortifications on both sides. As you saw from the landscape above, anyone who wants to reach the equator has to come up the Avenue itself—and has to get past this spot.”
There was a lot of activity around the mostly obscured pass; they could see a portable crane lifting some gun emplacement down into the mist and cloud layer below, supervised by a number of small flying things.