"I did not," she said hastily. "But of course now it is obvious that she does. We would not be talking if she did not, would we?"
"I concede the point. She lives." Red sparks chased themselves over Thea's conical surface. Robin would have been alarmed if she had not seen a similar display when Crius was chastised. Thea was having a painful memory.
"As I was saying, then, the Wizard knows I went down the stairs with my friends. They are still alive and quite likely to remain so. Sooner or later the Wizard will come and find them and..." There were more sparks, and Robin wondered what she had said. She thought she might be treading on dangerous ground, then realized it was odd that Cirocco had not been down to look for them. Of course, she could be lying drunk on the front porch of the Melody Shop, but the implications of that in Robin's current situation did not bear thinking about. And apparently Thea was still sufficiently cowed by the threat of a search by Cirocco to keep on listening.
"The Wizard will come looking," she resumed. "When she finds them, they will tell her I came this way. You will object that I might have become lost in the maze to the west, but do you think the Wizard will be satisfied until she finds my body? And not only that, but a body dead by natural causes, not burned with acid?"
Thea was silent again, and Robin knew she had said all she could. Having posed that last question, she was no longer sure it was such a good one. Would Cirocco come looking for her? Why had she not done so already? Surely she would not abandon Gaby. She wasn't that far gone, was she? Thea did not think so.
"Go then," she said. "Leave quickly, before I change my mind. Carry your message to the Wizard, and may you never have a day's luck with it for the impudent desecration of my chambers. Go. Go swiftly."
Robin thought of mentioning that she would never have come here if there was any other way out, but enough was enough. The acid was rising already, and she began to fear Thea might still engineer a plausible accident. She hurried to the stairs and took them five at a time.
She did not slow down when she was out of sight. She did not intend to slow down at all, ever, but eventually exhaustion overtook her and she stumbled, fell to her knees, and lay gasping, sprawled across three steps.
She had escaped, but there was no elation this time. Instead, there was the impulse she by now knew all too welclass="underline" the overpowering urge to cry.
But this time the tears did not come. She shouldered her pack and began to climb.
The entrance to the Thean staircase was clogged with snow. At first Robin did not know what it was and approached it cautiously. Books had told her snow was soft and fluffy, but this was not. It was hard-packed and drifted.
She stopped to put on her sweater. It was nearly pitch-black now that the wild glowbirds were gone. Her last glowbird in the rebuilt cage was nearly dead. There had been no chance to catch another in her hurried ascent of the stairs.
The first order of business was to get out in the open. If it was not overcast, she ought to be able to see the Twilight Sea and thus establish which way was west. Beyond that she was unsure. She tried to recall the map she had studied so long ago. Did the central Thea cable touch ground to the north or south of Ophion? She could not be sure, and it was important. Gaby had said the best way to cross Thea was on the frozen river. Once oriented, she would strike out to the south, and if she seemed to be rising, she would turn around because she did know the cable was very close to the river.
Before she was even out of the strand forest, she had to stop and put on all her clothes. She had never imagined such cold. She wondered uneasily if it had been a mistake to discard the bulky parka Chris had insisted she take. It had made sense at the time; the thing had taken up nearly half the space in her backpack, had made her unbalanced and awkward, and she had been sure the two sweaters, the light jacket, and the rest of her clothes would be enough for anything. But he had told her to keep the parka. He had been quite emphatic about it. At least she had her boots. They had been handy in the roughest stretches of climbing, though she had torn out the fur padding that had made her feet sweat. Like everything she owned, they had seen a lot of wear but were well-made and still intact. She rubbed snow over the acid-marked toes, hoping the corrosion would go no further once the stuff was diluted with water.
She was about to start again when she remembered one piece of equipment carried uselessly for so long that would finally come in handy. She dug in her pack and came up with a little mercury thermometer, held it close to the guttering glowbird, and squinted. She could not believe what she saw. But after she had shaken it, the thing still read negative twenty degrees. She breathed on it and saw the slender silver column rise, then slowly fall again. Now she had something else to fear. She could freeze to death if she didn't keep moving.
So get off your butt, she told herself, and eventually obeyed. It would have been nice to be more rested, she thought, but sleeping on the Thean stairs had been out of the question. Now she considered it, standing knee-deep in snow. She could go down a short way until it warmed up, sleep, and start out fresh.
In the end she did not and thought she was being cautious. There was no telling if she was safe from Thea on the stairs.
She looked again at the dying glowbird and knew she had better hurry. If she didn't get out from under the cable soon, the darkness would be complete.
She made it out, learning a few things about snow and ice on the way. Ice was a lot more treacherous than rock, even when it looked solid. As for snow ... she found enough of the properly fluffy variety to last a lifetime. In places it drifted higher than her head. Several times she had to find her way around huge piles of it.
But she saw gray light about the time the glowbird was becoming useless. She tossed the cage away and headed for it.
It was a strange sensation to see so far again. The weather was clear in Thea. The air was crisp and biting with an intermittent wind gusting up to five or ten kilometers per hour. It sucked the heat from her skin where it touched. She could see Twilight to her left, so that was west, meaning she had to circle the cable before she could go south.
Unless she was remembering wrong. It would be wise to consider it again before starting around the cable on a trip she would have to retrace if Ophion were north of the cable. She had had enough backtracking, and this time she had to consider her toes, which were already getting cold. She remembered that Thea was dominated by a rugged mountain range that reached from the north to the south highlands. Ophion, which kept to a nearly central course through the region, divided into a north and south fork somewhere near the middle of Thea. The central cable attached near the point where the streams reunited. For most of its length the south branch flowed beneath one of the two glacial sheets that covered most of Thea and would be nearly impossible to find. But the north branch was free of permanent ice. At times, during some part of Gaea's thirty-year climatic cycle, it thawed, and a narrow valley in central Thea experienced a brief, bleak springtime. Now was not one of those times. Still, even frozen, it should not be too hard to find. It would be relatively level and would be at the bottom of a wide valley.
The more she thought about it, the more she felt her first recollection had been wrong. The ground before her sloped gently down. It was too dark to tell if the river was ahead, but she now thought it was. And what the hell? The chances were even, and this way she would not have to begin by circling the cable. She started off to the north.
The wind picked up before she had gone half a kilometer. Soon snow was whipping from the tops of high drifts, stinging her cheeks. Once more she stopped to rearrange her clothing, this time wrapping her blanket around herself and fashioning a hood which she could hold tight at her neck and thus protect everything but her eyes from the wind.