“I’m not awake,” he said. “Shit! I’m not awake!”
Pie took the pot of herders’ brew from the fire, and
poured a cup.
“You didn’t dream it,” the mystif said. It handed the cup over to Gentle. “You went to the glacier, and you almost didn’t make it back.”
Gentle took the cup in raw fingers. “I must have been out of my mind,” he said. “I remember thinking: I’m dreaming this, then taking off my coat and my clothes . . . why the hell did I do that?”
He could still recall struggling through the snow and reaching the glacier. He remembered pain, and splintering ice, but the rest had receded so far he couldn’t grasp it. Pie read his perplexed look.
“Don’t try and remember now,” the mystif said. “It’ll come back when the moment’s right. Push too hard and you’ll break your heart. You should sleep for a while.”
“I don’t fancy sleeping,” he said. “It’s a little too much
like dying.”
“I’ll be here,” Pie told him. “Your body needs rest. Let it do what it needs to do.”
The mystif had been wanning Gentle’s shirt in front of the fire, and now helped him put it on, a delicate business. Gentle’s joints were already stiffening. He pulled on his trousers without Pie’s help, however, up over limbs that were a mass of bruises and abrasions.
“Whatever I did out there I certainly made a mess of myself,” he remarked.
“You heal quickly,” Pie said. This was true, though Gentle couldn’t remember sharing that information with the mystif. “Lie down. I’ll wake you when it’s light.”
Gentle put his head on the small heap of hides Pie had made as a pillow and let the mystif pull his coat up over him.
“Dream of sleeping,” Pie said, laying a hand on Gentle’s face. “And wake whole.”
When Pie shook him awake, what seemed mere minutes later, the sky visible between the rock faces was still dark, but it was the gloom of snow-bearing cloud rather than the purple black of a Jokalaylaurian night. He sat up feeling wretched, aching in every bone.
“I’d kill for coffee,” he said, resisting the urge to torture his joints by stretching. “And warm pain au chocolat”
“If they don’t have it in Yzordderrex, we’ll invent it,” Pie said.
“Did you brew up?”
“There’s nothing left to burn.”
“And what’s the weather like?”
“Don’t ask.”
“That bad?”
“We should get a move on. The thicker the snow gets, the more difficult it’ll be to find the pass.”
They roused the doeki, which made plain its disgruntle-ment at having to breakfast on words of encouragement rather than hay, and, with the meat Pie had prepared the day before loaded, left the shelter of the rock and headed out into the snow. There had been a short debate before they left as to whether they should ride or not, Pie insisting that Gentle should do so, given his present delicacy, but he’d argued that they might need the doeki’s strength to carry them both if they got into worse difficulties, and they should preserve such energies as it still possessed for such an emergency. But he soon began to stumble in snow that was waist high in places, his body, though somewhat healed by sleep, not equal to the demands upon it.
“We’ll go more quickly if you ride,” Pie told him.
He needed little persuasion and mounted the doeki, his fatigue such that he could barely sit upright with the wind so strong, and instead slumped against the beast’s neck. He only occasionally raised himself from that posture, and when he did the scene had scarcely changed.
“Shouldn’t we be in the pass by now?” he murmured to Pie at one point, and the look on the mystif s face was answer enough. They were lost. Gentle pushed himself into an upright position and, squinting against the gale, looked for some sign of shelter, however small. The world was white in every direction but for them, and even they were being steadily erased as ice clogged the fur of their coats and the snow they were trudging through deepened. Until now, however arduous the journey had become, he hadn’t countenanced the possibility of failure. He’d been his own best convert to the gospel of their indestructibility. But now such confidence seemed self-deception. The white world would strip all color from them, to get to the purity of their bones.