“Are you searching the Station?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve doubled the guards at the gates, too.”
With a visible effort, Siegfried untwined his fingers and dropped them to his sides. “Was she trained or just lucky?”
“We’re not sure. She took out both guards while the servant was still putting the tray down so he didn’t see what happened. By the time he’d got back to the door, she was coming back in. He tried to resist and got his arm broken and a poke in the stomach that put him down. The guards are still out so we can’t ask them what she did.”
“And you’re not sure? You have no imagination. Pass the word to approach her with caution.”
“Well, we did. She took a knife and a sword—she’s armed now.”
Siegfried rolled his eyes. “She was armed before. She was probably armed without the staff. I still want her alive…if possible. If she’s a martial artist, she’d make a wonderful assassin. Perhaps I could use her to take out her father and sister.”
Sylvan shuddered.
Siegfried turned back to the bench where the Helm sat connected to the battery cells. “I have a mission for Bartholomew. Get him.”
The Cotswolders drew the line four kilometers south of Brandon-on-the-Falls at a place where the Tiber Valley narrowed, fortified by a snow-and-wood blockade that stretched from cliff face to cliff face. The Eight Hundred could have forced their way through, but only at a cost Leland wasn’t willing to pay. They were already down to seven hundred fifty-three, and Leland carried every one of the forty-seven deaths, as if their stone grave markers rested on his shoulders.
What are you doing, Father? Are you still alive? Healthy? Or are you torn and bleeding and hanging on to life by a thread?
DON’T DO THAT TO YOURSELF. YOU DON’T KNOW SO DON’T MAKE THINGS UP.
Leland paced back and forth, behind the lines, unable to stay still. His communications with Koss were temporarily cut off by snow in the heights, blocking heliograph transmissions, so he couldn’t even advise him of his current halt.
They’d discussed slipping back and up into the mountains, bypassing the blockade, but their clothing was barely adequate for the weather in the valley. Going into the heights would be risky without better gear.
At the very bottom of the valley, where the Tiber was frozen over, the snow was meters deep. Leland’s path across this section was now a trench, shoulder deep. In early morning, he led Gahnfeld to the spot.
“Yes, Guide?” Gahnfeld asked, puzzled.
“We’re over the river. Dig that way”—he pointed down at an angle toward the enemy barricade—”until you reach the ice. Then follow it upstream. Dig quietly.”
Gahnfeld grinned suddenly. “I understand.”
Marilyn waited, lying on her back, in the best hide-and-seek place in the Station, the chest beneath the window seat in the library revealed to her by Leland so very long ago.
They’d already searched the library three times. Each time she’d expected the panel above to be lifted and men, armed and ready, to seize her. Each time, though, they’d gone on without finding her. She’d sneaked into the toilet in the hall once. The rest of the time she tried to ignore her stomach’s rumbling. She’d only snatched a bite of breakfast when she left the bound men in her room and fled down a flight of stairs and over one wing to the library.
She planned to wait until the wee hours of the morning before moving again.
“Excuse me, do you work here?” That’s what she’d said, the first time she saw Leland. He’d stared at her, frozen, and she remembered wondering if she was wearing her breakfast on her chin.
Finally, though, he’d blinked and stirred, a statue returning to life. “I suppose you could say that. I work everywhere else.”
Lying in the dark she replayed that first meeting in her head, a totally unexpected, wonderful encounter that still brought a smile to her lips. Then the dinner and his sudden inexplicable hostility, and their later arguments when she’d returned from Cotswold.
Well, he was certainly right about Cotswold.
Thoughts of Sylvan entered her head and she clamped her teeth together until her jaw muscles stood out like rocks. She forced herself to relax, counting her breaths, and turned her mind back toward escape.
She’d become familiar with a few parts of the Station when she’d last stayed here, but there were whole sections she’d never entered. She needed a plan of the Station and a map of the surrounding area. Where would she get them?
In Noram City, I’d go to the library.
Silently, lying in the darkness, she began to laugh.
They were well under the barricade now. Gahnfeld was having the men tunnel around the clock, changing units every half hour.
The tunnel was just wide enough for two men to walk abreast, one entering with an empty shield, one exiting with a shield piled with snow. The temperature in the tunnel was almost balmy, and the walls and ceiling were continuously melting and refreezing, forming an icy shell that was stronger than the snow.
A single candle burned near the ever-moving end, but otherwise the men shuffled forward in darkness, moving quickly, almost holding their breaths until it came their turn to scoop out the next shield of snow and hurry back out into the fresh air.
“As long as they keep moving,” Gahnfeld said, “they should move enough fresh air in…I hope.”
After sunset he and Leland took a quick inspection. Gahnfeld emerged, taking deep breaths. “It’s foul.”
Leland nodded. “Too much CO2—the candle is dimming. Send some spears in. I want shafts to the surface every five meters on this side of the barricade.”
“Right away.”
Leland returned to his headquarters, a makeshift hut with snow walls, a pine-bough roof, and a constant haze of smoke waiting to exit a vent hole. The door was a hanging blanket, to keep the heat in, and his bed salvaged pine needles well away from the fire. He took a deep breath before entering, then sat quickly, on the bed, to duck under the smoke haze.
The warmth was welcome. He’d grown chilled watching the work. He thought about taking a turn at the tunneling. The work would keep him warm, but he’d been up most of the night before and was exhausted.
He pulled a blanket up to his chin and tried to push everything away—the responsibility, the worries, the worst-case nightmares, but the harder he pushed, the harder they came at him.
NOT LIKE THAT.
He sighed. How then?
LET THEM COME, BUT LET THEM GO, TOO. YOU’RE GIVING THEM THEIR STAYING POWER. OBSERVE BUT STAY DETACHED. GET OFF THE LINE. WOULD YOU STAND STILL BEFORE A STRIKE? SLEEP WILL COME.
And so it did, eventually.
Gahnfeld woke him. The fire had died to embers and it was still dark outside. “An attack?” Leland asked.
Gahnfeld laughed. “No. A refugee from the Station, one you should talk to. He came around the barricade, down the mountainside.”
Leland followed Gahnfeld out into the cold, pulling the poncho hood up to keep his ears warm. A crowd of men stood around one of the closest warming fires, their attention on someone seated. As Gahnfeld and Leland approached, the group opened up and Leland saw who it was.
“Bartholomew.” Leland’s grin was so wide it hurt his face. “You’ve lost weight.” Bartholomew stood, smiling, and threw his arms around Leland and pounded him on the back. He pushed Leland at arm’s length, looking him up and down. “Thank the Founders you’re all right.
“I’ve a message from your father.”
Marilyn came to the opinion, reinforced by her experiences in Siegfried’s capital, that Cotswolders were not readers. After the library searches she heard only infrequent traffic on the stairway at the far end of the hall. The library itself was quiet and still. She took to leaving the lid of her hiding place open and ready, but strayed from its confines to explore the library shelves.
She found what she was looking for in the “new” books, books printed or handwritten on paper since the Founding. The
treasure was contained in an ongoing record of architectural changes to Laal Station.
…the invalid Athelia having died two years before, Lemuel de Laal ordered her rooms converted to a study. The elevator shaft was left in place against future need and the opening covered with shelves and cabinets in the study and on all the floors below with paneling to keep the unwary from falling.
A current floor plan of the Station didn’t show the elevator, but it did show the study up by Dulan’s rooms and there was a small two-meter by two-meter gap that had to be the shaft. The other floors weren’t to the same scale so it took some juggling to figure out where the shaft would be on other levels, but by working back from the stairwells she worked it out.
Dulan’s study was in this wing but two floors up. The shaft, if it used to open on this floor, should be six meters down the hallway outside the library. Three floors down from this one (and her stomach rumbled at the thought), it should open near the kitchen.
She took a quick, timid foray out into the hallway and located a section of wood paneling midway down a stretch of stone wall. A woven hanging covered most of it, and when she pushed the cloth aside and tapped gently on the wood, it sounded hollow.
She took her stolen knife and went to work.
Bartholomew led the way, and Leland and a bodyguard of four followed, fighting their way up snow- and ice-covered slopes, into the heights.
It was snowing, which was a blessing and a curse. A blessing, for it hid their passage effectively from those in the valley below. A curse, because, even with the extra clothing scavenged from the dead, the blown snow abraded their exposed skin like a rasp and coated their clothes, making it heavy with ice. For Leland, the clothing had started out heavy. The naked dead.
THEY HAVE NO EARTHLY NEEDS.
And whose fault is that?
DO YOU THINK THEY CAME JUST BECAUSE YOU GAVE THE ORDER? THESE ARE THEIR HOMES, THEIR FAMILIES. THEY WOULD’VE COME ON THEIR OWN.
This didn’t comfort Leland. His internal marching song was an inventory. The extra socks on his hands came from Peter Merkle of the Seventh, second son from a family in Fort Lucinda, who took an arrow in the head twenty kilometers inside Laal. The extra poncho came from Coronet Desmond Mann, father of two girls waiting in the village of Oasis, near Fort Chavez, who was trampled by Cotswold cavalry. The extra pants came from Vince Carey, only child of a family from Brandon-on-the-Falls, gutted by a spear and two days dying. The scarf wrapped over his lower face came from a Cotswolder soldier, cut down in one of the Eight Hundred’s camouflaged ambushes. His full name and origin were gone with him, but his sword belt had “Zeb” burned into it.
They came back down into the shoulders of the valley again, when it spread and had room for shoulders. This also put them in the trees and gave them some shelter from the bitter wind, but the snow lay in deep drifts and they had to take turns breaking a path in waist-high or deeper snow.
Peter, socks step Desmond, poncho step Vince, pants step Zeb, scarf step. Siegfried has a lot to answer for. And you, too, Father. How could you let him surprise you like this?
They avoided unnecessary talk. “Siegfried’s moved the majority of his men into the passes so his occupation troops are spread very thin, but he moves them constantly,” Bartholomew told them. “But they’re not very good in the snow.”
Leland took a stint as pathbreaker, wading into the snowdrifts and tramping them down. Peter’s socks and Desmond’s poncho, Vince’s pants and Zeb’s scarf. Damn you, Siegfried, damn you, Father. Too much fuss and too much bother.
“If you don’t get your father out soon, he won’t last much longer. However, he is more concerned about getting the Glass Helm out of Siegfried’s reach. I think we can do both.”
“But why Leland?” Gahnfeld had asked.
“His father won’t trust the Helm to anyone else,” Bartholomew had answered. “He was very specific.”
“Why do you think they won’t have found your escape route and be waiting?”
“Because I left a rope hanging off the west wall, but I didn’t get out of the Station that way.”
“Why not more men?”
“We’d be seen. The steward would die and Siegfried would get the Helm.”
Gahnfeld hadn’t liked it, but it was Leland’s decision. “Continue as we planned,” Leland told him. “Link up with Captain Koss and follow his direction. We’ll join you as we are able.”
“Yes, Warden.”
Leland had left laughing.
Outside of Brandon-on-the-Falls the small group took to the hills again, working their way from steep forest to brush and scrub and then, finally, rock and ice, barely crossable. They went roped together now.
It never stopped snowing and Leland never stopped his litany. Peter’s socks and Desmond’s poncho, Vince’s pants and Zeb’s scarf. Damn you, Siegfried, damn you, Father. Too much fuss and too much bother.
THIS IS GETTING MONOTONOUS.
You don’t have to walk.
Leland felt his knees buckle and he stumbled forward, steadying himself against the rock face.
WHO DO YOU THINK HAS BEEN KEEPING YOU UPRIGHT WHILE YOU TALK ABOUT DEAD MEN’S CLOTHES? DO IT BY YOURSELF FOR A WHILE.
Leland found himself too busy concentrating on his footing to continue the litany.
The slope had gradually steepened into a cliff whose limits vanished into the falling snow above and below. It was clear that one could fall but unclear how far. The imagination stretched the drop to infinity.
They heard the falls long before they saw them, thundering out of the east face of the station. It grew out of the mist, resolving slowly, wreathed in a fog of ice crystals. Above, the bulk of Laal Station loomed large and dark, its lines blurred by the snow. They couldn’t see the guards on the walls far above, and, they hoped, the guards couldn’t see them.
“This better work,” Leland said in Bartholomew’s ear. “It’s not like it’s been tested.”
Bartholomew shrugged. “True. Coming down I had a rope, but…” He suddenly clapped Leland on the back. “Well, you had to climb to get the Glass Helm the first time, too.”
Leland shuddered, and not from the cold.
When it wasn’t winter, the water pouring out of the Station was a tremendous gout, a torrent whose vibration could be felt throughout the Station. When he was very young, his first night spent outside the Station, he’d been unable to sleep, missing something. When he returned, he felt it then, aware and unaware at the same time.
The rock below the falls was water smoothed and hollowed out, a face steeper than vertical.
With the frost and snows higher in the mountains, the water volume diminished to a quarter of its late-spring levels. As it grew colder and colder, the ice began to coat the rocks around the falls, layer upon layer.
The sound of the ice axe was barely audible to Leland over the torrent, and he had little fear it could be heard above. It was slow going—the ice was very hard and slick. Twice he fell when vigorous axe blows shook him from slick hand- or footholds, but the other five were tending his rope and pulled him up again, dangling helplessly above the ice and water below.
As he progressed, he moved both up and sideways, vectors converging on the mouth of the fall itself. During the first of many rest breaks, the others offered to spell him, but tentatively, their eyes wide.
“I’m the lightest. When I drop, you guys can hold me. And, as Bartholomew has pointed out, I’ve some experience with this.”
As he worked, a mist of ice crystals swirled around him, stinging his face and layering his clothing with ice. With each rest break, he changed his outer poncho, and Bartholomew would pound the ice off the spare one.
Several times he wished for Bartholomew’s escape rope, but Bartholomew had brought it with him, needing it to get down the rest of the mountain.
The last three meters before the mouth were the worst, the spray the wettest, soaking his clothes and threatening hypothermia. With each stroke of the axe he
resorted to his litany, a syllable per blow. Pete…er’s…socks…and…Des…mond’s…pon…cho…
VIN…CE’S PANTS…AND…ZEB’S…SCARF.
Damn…you Sieg fried. DAMN YOU FA THER.
Too… MUCH fuss AND…too MUCH bo THER.
He could barely lift the ice axe and he was perched there, more than half frozen, staring dumbly to his left to pick out another hand- or foothold when it finally penetrated his head that he was inside the edge of the mouth and, finally, out of the worst of the mist. Also, the rock there wasn’t coated with ice and the air coming out of the tunnel was almost warm or, at least, above freezing.
It took him several attempts to move his left foot over, to step down onto damp stone, then swing around, to crouch tiredly at the edge of the rushing water on a tiny ledge that looked like a soccer field after the footholds in the ice.
His eyes adjusted slowly and he spent the time rubbing his face, trying to restore the circulation to his bare skin. His fingers ached in the cold and he felt arthritic in all his joints.
GET A MOVE ON, CHILD.
He groaned and moved forward, splashing down into the very edge of the stream, in ankle-deep water. He moved quickly, before the water soaked through to his skin, and, hunched over, scrambled up the stream, deeper into the mountain. After a moment the ledge appeared and he climbed onto it, teeth clattering. He looped the rope around the ice axe without untying it from his own waist, then wedged the axe between the wall and a slight irregularity in the ledge. He sat down, his feet braced against a crack, and tugged the rope four times.
It took twenty minutes for all of them to join him and, for a while, all they could do was sit there on the ledge, shoulder to shoulder, and rest. Leland took off his wet socks and replaced them with the ones from his hands. Peter’s socks. Then he rubbed them until restored circulation made them throb.
Bartholomew led the way then. Leland had been down here before, though it was forbidden, of course. Still, when the winter snows were falling, his brothers and he had ranged the entire station, forbidden or no. But Bartholomew had passed this way only two days before and he knew the disposition of the guards, so it was he who lit the candle and led the way.