Night caught her an hour short of her destination—and the blizzard, although abated somewhat in its fierceness, still howled at her back. She paused as the light faded, debating the wisdom of fighting on through the darkness. Although she couldn’t see more than a few yards in any direction, Chilaili knew precisely where she was and precisely how much farther she had to go to reach the valley of the ice bridge. This innate knowledge was something Chilaili had long suspected the Tersae shared with their ancestral stock. It was literally impossible for Chilaili to lose her way, even in the white-out conditions of this storm. Awareness of the invisible lines of force which ran through the earth beneath her taloned feet told her it would take only ten steps to reach a steep-walled little gorge she knew of.
That gorge would offer at least some shelter for the bitterly cold hours ahead. She could climb down, build a fire under the overhanging cliff walls. Chilaili turned toward the path she knew lay no more than ten steps away . . .
And literally could not make her foot move in that direction. Startled, Chilaili realized she had just received a warning, one she didn’t understand. She tried to listen to the energies loose in the night, to understand what those energies were trying to communicate to her. As both a master katori and a successful huntress, she had listened to the voices of wind and trees and water and soil too many times in the past, avoiding disaster that might otherwise have overtaken her, to ignore the message now.
She was not meant to take shelter, yet. She was meant to go on, to reach the human nest as quickly as possible. Why, she didn’t know, but knew it would be revealed, in time.
Swearing under her breath at the seeming folly of it, she set out once more toward the valley of the ice bridge, using her stick to probe ahead for every step of the way as the light vanished. Night plunged her into a darkly howling world of uncertain footing and rising fear. She slowed down, by necessity, but fought on, determined to keep going. Chilaili stumbled more frequently as well, sprawling sometimes across buried tangles of brush. The hour stretched out, agonizingly, until it felt like she’d been struggling through darkness for half her life.
When the wind’s scream rose sharply, Chilaili halted, listening, stretching out her hands to test the wind’s strength. Judging from the sound and the force of the wind, the trees had to be thinning out directly ahead. That, plus the invisible grid inside her head, told her she had come to the edge of the humans’ valley. There was only one safe way down—the rock ramp the humans had fashioned. In total darkness, she would be unable to see it. She had glimpsed it only once and wasn’t at all sure of its twists and turns as it dropped two hundred feet to the valley floor. Chilaili hesitated . . .
And as she paused, a deeper sound lifted the fur on the nape of her neck. A savage, snarling roar growled toward her through the darkness, coming from the open ground to Chilaili’s right, across the valley in the direction of the smoking mountains. Terror took hold as she recognized that sound. Twist-wind! Chilaili threw herself prone, wrapped arms and legs around the base of a solid tree, prayed to every ancestress, every spirit of rock and tree and wind she had ever prayed to, and hung on. The monstrous roar drew rapidly nearer. The wind whipped savagely through the forest, changing directions in wild gusts. Her ears popped as the air pressure dropped. The killer wind siphon drew so close, she could feel it plucking at the underbrush around her—
Then it dove over the lip of the gorge and roared its way down the long, narrow valley toward the human nest. Chilaili lay shaking and sick, too terrified to move, helpless as she listened to the monster rush toward her one human friend in all the world. The friend she had risked so much to help. Why? she demanded fiercely of the night. Why let me come so close, only to destroy her with a twist-wind? Chilaili shivered at the base of her tree, listening as the killer wind’s roar receded in the distance. She heard a muted change in its sound as it skipped up out of the valley and collided with the mountain beyond, then she could hear it no more. Either the twist-wind had died on the slopes of the glacier or it had skipped back into the storm clouds.
Deeply shaken, Chilaili sat up.
Gradually, it came to her that the warning to struggle forward might have come so she would be on hand when the twist-wind struck the humans’ valley. Not to make her a witness to their deaths, but to render aid to any survivors. The thought sent her stumbling forward, crawling through the last of the trees, hugging the ground on her belly as she slithered forward, probing with her stick over the lip of the steep-walled gorge. The wind had scoured away all snow along the rim at least, so she didn’t have to struggle through drifts. Her stick located the stone ramp with a solid thunk.
She started down, flat on her belly as the wind plucked at her.
It took her nearly a quarter of an hour to reach the bottom, probing ahead with her stick as the stone ramp turned back on itself time and again. Once down, she stumbled toward the most sheltered side of the gorge, where the cliff walls gave her enough protection from the wind to stand up. She set out again, probing once more with her walking stick, and soon encountered massive debris from the twist-wind. Trees were down everywhere, making her path through the damage treacherous. She crawled blindly over downed tree trunks, stumbled and tripped through tangled branches, scraped her legs against splintered stumps. Trembling with exhaustion, she fought her way forward, then stumbled onto something very hard and very flat and exceedingly smooth.
She halted, frowning; then she had it.
The landing pad, Bessany Weyman had called it, for their flying machines.
She was close, then, very close. Chilaili traced the edge with her stick, turned in the direction she hoped would aim her toward the hard-walled huts, and tapped ahead to try and avoid walking into anything that might be lying in her path. She stayed on the landing pad for a long way, then came to the edge and traced it with her stick again, probing for debris that might lurk ahead. Chilaili stepped off and inched her way forward—
And heard voices.
Thin, human voices, crying for help, screaming in terrible pain.
Chilaili’s heart leaped into her throat, pounding raggedly. Someone had survived. Several someones, from the sound of it. She hurried forward, stumbled across chunks of debris, what felt like pieces of the hard-walled huts themselves, scattered like leaves by the killer wind. Then she caught a gleam of light, white light, strange and startling against the snow-blown darkness. She rushed toward it, realized it was coming from a partially intact piece of the human nest. Then she heard a voice she knew, the only human voice she knew, sobbing for help from somewhere directly in front of her.
Chilaili tossed her walking stick aside and started digging through the rubble.
Chapter Nine
My new commander and I share mixed feelings about our arrival at Thule. Alessandra DiMario is understandably stressed, although anxious to come to grips with her personal demon and overcome it. I am uncertain about my spliced and patched systems. Due to the urgent nature of my refitting, I have never been field-tested, a situation which perhaps alarms me more than it does my commander, who is doing her best to put her faith in me.
Our transit time has been brief, by interstellar military standards, less than a day at hyper-L, although I suspect Thule’s beleaguered colonists would say those twenty-three point two standard Terran hours were not brief. It is a curious phenomenon, much commented upon by biological life-forms, that the passage of time seems to be variable in relation to the events against which it is measured. I calculate the passage of time exactly and have never experienced this phenomenon for myself; but even a refurbished Mark XXIII Bolo can understand how bleak and long the hours must seem to people who are waiting almost hopelessly for rescue.
For the sake of Rustenberg’s colonists, I am glad our transit time has been so short.
From orbit, Thule’s daylight hemisphere—glimpsed briefly, as Rustenberg currently lies in the night side of the planet—shows the blinding flash of sun-struck snow fields across most of the northern and southern hemispheres. Thule is beautiful in its way, with rainbow dazzles off glaciers and vast tracts of virgin snow. Deep sapphire oceans have generated bands of moisture-laden clouds which spill over Thule’s northern land masses, dropping snow in locally severe blizzard conditions.