Lee walked on, shivering under the rising moon, sucking on her pebble, trying not to concentrate on her own troubles, but on the bigger issues that had brought her here. It was, however, surprisingly difficult to concentrate on Big Issues when you had an empty stomach, a raging thirst, blistered feet, and muscles that ached from a long day’s walking.
Still, Lee considered that she was doing better than she’d ever thought she might under such circumstances. It wasn’t that she was tougher than she thought. She kept getting the feeling that she had some kind of obscure help, from things themselves—stones that didn’t turn under her feet when they might have, a wind that didn’t blow as hard as it might: help from the world. If the world pleases, she remembered Dierrich having said, the other night. At the time she’d thought it just an odd turn of phrase.
But on second thought, perhaps it wasn’t so weird. Worlds did have different ways they behaved, physically; everyone knew that. And there did seem to be “behavioral” differences between them of the kind Gelert had mentioned when they were discussing it last. Could it be that the Alfen are more closely in touch with the reason their world has those kinds of differences?—possibly in touch with the world’s ‘personality,’ somehow?
She stopped one more time to see if perhaps she might be able to transit. The wind around her rose, and Lee shivered; but once again she leaned her will against the empty air, thinking of the place she and Gelert had passed on their way over the yoke that led to the back of the mountain, to Istelin’ru Semivh.
There had been a little cave in the next hill over—or maybe hill was the wrong name for it. It had been another of those big spires of stone that stuck up out of the landscape like a thorn, jagged and gray-white. The weathering had split and scored one side of it so that a narrow winding cave-crevice had opened in it on the side facing the mountain wall and stony spire where the Laurins’ House reared up, looking down over the valley. In other circumstances, it was the kind of place that Lee would have hiked up to with a bottle of wine and a picnic lunch, to contemplate life and the universe, the way she often went up to the top of Topanga for the view over Queen of Angels Park and the rest of LA. But right now, in memory, that cave just looked like a good place to hide. Lee laid her will against the air, against the world, thinking, open! Open!
Nothing. Lee stood there and sighed, and listened to the wind rushing around her, and started to shiver harder than ever. Then she realized it wasn’t just wind that she heard. Somewhere here, making a thin, faint white-noise sound just at the edge of hearing, was water.
Oh, God, Lee thought. Thank You! The sound was coming from ahead of her and over to her right. Slowly, trying not to hurry, she made her way in that direction. No point in finding water, then falling down and breaking a leg or something, Lee thought.
The actual time it took her to find the little brook that ran down from the higher ground to the south couldn’t have been more than five minutes…but it felt longer than the whole day’s walk. Lee got carefully down on her knees among the stones beside the quick-flowing water, and drank, and drank, and drank. The water was so cold it made her teeth hurt, but she didn’t mind; she drank it until she gasped. Lee splashed it on her face, started to drink again…
…and then gasped once more at the sound from right behind her.
Slowly she straightened up where she knelt, looked over her shoulder. There was a tall, still shape in ExAff uniform standing there behind her, holding a pulse-rifle of some kind. As she looked back across the stream, two more, an Alfen man and a woman, materialized in front of her—literally materialized, slipping out of the air as she hadn’t been able to do all day.
“It’s just not fair,” Lee said.
“What?” said the Alfen behind her, amused. “That we can placewalk, and you can’t? But our mistress didn’t want you doing that. So she moved to prevent it until you could be located.”
Slowly, Lee stood up and turned to face the one with the weapon. “And now I suppose we go back to Mhariseth, and I get shoved in a shuttle and sent home,” she said, furious that it should end this way, after all the day’s hopes and troubles.
The Alfen with the gun shook his head slowly. “For ephemerals found unescorted or without permission from the Laurin or the mrinLauvrin within the bounds of the Land,” he said, “the penalty is execution of the Ban.”
Lee swallowed. “You mean,” she said, hoping that the way she had begun to shake didn’t show too much, “execution, plain and simple. And you don’t even care what the UN, or anyone else, will think.”
“It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks,” the Alfen said. “You were caught trespassing, and so you’ll have suffered the penalty of our law. Unfortunate, but—” He shrugged. “Other sovereignties have penalties just as rigorous, in places. If you—”
Lee wasn’t going to sit still listening to further explanations. She scrambled to her feet and threw herself at the Alfen, and he pulled the weapon away from her, but Lee’s sights were set lower at the moment: she kicked him hard in the kneecap. He grunted with pain and went down hard on the other knee, but Lee’s grab for the gun didn’t work. Too quickly for her to see how it happened, one of the other Alfen had it, and then Lee was the one who got kicked, so that she went sprawling and gasping across the stones, nearly pitching face-forward into the brook. Shot while trying to escape? she thought. Not without giving you a little present first! —and came up with a fist-sized rock from the bed of the brook. She fired it at the second Alfen, and managed to hit him in the bicep, but her aim was poor: it wasn’t the bicep holding the gun. That weapon came up, aimed at her. Lee’s eyes went wide—
From behind him, the white shape came leaping out of the darkness, silent, fastened huge jaws on the neck of the Alfen, and pulled him backwards and down. The gun fired over Lee’s head as she ducked, and as the second Alfen went down, she threw herself at the gun, grabbed it, came down on the stones and rolled away. More gunfire from an energy weapon stitched the ground where she’d been. Gelert bounced away from his first victim, leaped over the brook, and hit the second Alfen chest-high. She went down flat under him, wrestled briefly with him—then rolled away, wheezing horribly, writhed against the stones for a few seconds before she went limp. Lee got to her feet as fast as she could, ready to fire the pulser at the first legitimate target—but not before she saw the first Alfen get to his hands and knees and topple sideways into a place where the stones were rippling like a curtain seen sideways. He vanished through them; they went solid again.
Lee stood there panting, not aware of much of anything for a few moments until Gelert’s head came to rest on her shoulder. She put an arm around it, hugged it tight. “That one dead, too?” she said.
“With not much regret, I have to say yes.”
“What kept you?”
“Well, gee, Lee, I’m glad to see you, too.”
She turned to hug him properly. “Of course I’m glad to see you, you idiot!” She hugged him hard. “Twice in twenty-four hours— Suz, Gel, this isn’t a habit I want to get into!”
“My pleasure to be of assistance. But meanwhile, it’s a good thing I had your recording of your little vanishing trick,” Gelert said, “or I still wouldn’t be here, and this little episode would’ve turned out differently. As it was, it took me all night after we got back to adapt the technique. Using Scent rather than Sight as the paradigm is a little tricky, but I found my way, finally.” He sat down, panting a little, looking around him with satisfaction. “It’s harder from Earth, Lee… but it can be done, if you believe it can, and if you have a clue to the technique, and are really, really motivated. And maybe it also helps if you have one of these. Here—” His jaws worked for a moment, and then into Lee’s hand he spat out the stone.
“Oh, thank God,” Lee said, drying it off against her sweater. “I was afraid maybe someone was going to search you at the gating complex and take it off you.”
“They searched me all right,” Gelert said. “But not terri
bly well. They didn’t like getting their hands in my mouth. Maybe they just didn’t want doggie drool all over them.” He grinned, exhibiting twenty-six other possible reasons, all sharp. “Of course, the stone was well past my mouth at that point.”
Lee looked at Gelert in shock. “Gel, that thing could have ripped you up inside!”
“That occurred to me. Fortunately, I have firsthand experience with the weird things my kids are constantly eating.” His expression was amused, and resigned. “Rocks that size and sometimes that sharp haven’t killed them yet: I thought I had at least a chance. Recovering the thing was a little distasteful, but I put it through the dishwasher afterward.” Gelert looked rueful. “You have no idea the grief Nuala gave me about that.”
Lee burst out laughing and pocketed the stone again, buttoning the pocket. “You’re better at this than I am,” she said.
“I wouldn’t know about that…”
“Might have something to do with your people coming from here, once upon a time.”
“Might be. The place smelled strangely familiar the whole time I was here—did I mention? Maybe not, we were busy. But, Lee, this kind of transit is relatively easy. Easier than I’d ever have thought, just going from there to here, though it takes a lot of preparation. The Alfen are going to have a lot of explaining to do as to why they haven’t shared this information with everyone else. It could open up the worlds in a way no one has imagined…”
“Control,” Lee said. All around her, she felt the world vibrate obscurely, thrumming like a plucked string. “But there’s no time for it right now. Gel, we’ve got to go. It’s starting.”
“What’s starting?”
“I don’t know. But the world thinks the Elf-King’s coming, and if I correctly assess Madam Dierrich’s mood, she’s going to go after him the moment he turns up. We have to be there.”
“Aien Mhariseth?” Gelert said. “We can’t just walk in there…”
“Remember where we were hiking, Gel? About an hour after we left. That funny cave—”
“Have you noticed something?” Gelert said.
“What?”
“It’s clouding over.”
Lee looked up. He was right. The sky was suddenly full of cloud: some of it was still silver with the moonlight from above, but much more was opaque to the light, darkening easily three- quarters of the sky. As she watched, she saw the light continue to fade, the night grow darker. “It’s not natural,” she said softly.
“We lost one guy,” Gelert said. “He went right back to warn Dierrich, I’ll bet.”
Lee looked up at the darkening sky as the last scraps of moonlight faded away. Something cold touched her face: she shivered. And something touched her there again, and again. It was starting to snow. “Gel, they had some kind of block in place that kept me from moving. But it doesn’t seem to affect you. Let’s get out of here before they widen the effect—”
“That pathway leading up to the cave…” Gelert said. He stood there for a moment, still, concentrating.
The air in front of him rippled. Lee didn’t wait: three quick steps brought her to it, through it—
She gasped with the sudden cold and wind. Behind her, Gelert came out of nothing, landed hock-deep in snow. Lee was up to her knees in it, and it was falling fast. She started to shiver again, harder, for the air temperature here was far more bitter than it had been in the place they’d just come from.
“This can’t all be meant for us,” Lee said. “There hasn’t been time—”
“Hard to tell,” Gelert said. “But we’ve got to deal with it anyway. Where’s that cave? I think I brought us out too far down.”
Lee looked around her, trying to remember the way the path had gone from this part of the climb. The problem was that it was difficult to tell which part of the climb this was. The snow was falling fine around them, but even the snow was hard to see in the heavy fog that also surrounded them. Whiteout—
Lee closed her eyes for a moment, summoned up her Sight, opened her eyes. Even through the fog and under the snow, she could still See the shapes of boulders that she recognized from the climb. “Up and to the left for about ten meters,” she said. “Then about a thirty degree angle to the right.”
They struggled through the swiftly deepening snow and up the path, or where Lee thought the path was—for the Sight kept failing her. Interference? Or is it just my own physical state? —for an exhausting day without food, without enough water, and with fear and cold added, would quickly reduce any practitioner’s effectiveness to a fraction of its normal level. There was nothing Lee could do, at last, but rely on memory to keep herself and Gelert on the path. Many times one or the other of them strayed off it, only to discover the fact by banging into boulders half-buried under the snow, their shapes disguised by the drifts the wind was piling up. Lee was terrified that they were going to make one mistake too many, somewhere along here, and go over the edge—for there were places where the path had been perfectly flat until suddenly it dropped off, to the right or sometimes the left, fifty or a hundred meters straight down. In this visibility, featureless grey-white as the inside of a light bulb, it could happen before either of them could react.
Lee thought of dil’Hemrev’s seemingly casual remark about the sunset on the mountains: I’d like to say that we arranged it for you, but we’re not all that adept. Lee pushed her wet, snowy hair out of her eyes, where the bitter wind was constantly whipping it. Meaning that some of them are? she thought. If some Alfen could manipulate the space of their world the way Lee had seen they could, then it might well follow that the same talent could be used to shift weather fronts, cause local changes in temperature, pressure—
If they could do it, Lee thought, could we do it? “Gel,” Lee said, “think about this snow going away—or stopping—”
“You think it’ll help?” he gasped from behind her.
Her heart seized. She was so used to thinking of Gelert as stronger, more robust than she was; but here it looked as if he was suffering far more from the cold than she was. “It might. Think of it at least not falling on us.”
She tried to do that herself as she kept moving, tried to think of them both as being surrounded by a bubble of clear air, no fog in it, no snow. Just a few meters’ worth of visibility, say ten meters, that would be plenty— She leaned her will against the world. It resisted her, or something did. Just a pause in this, Lee thought, briefly angry, a fighting chance, come on—
Maybe it was the anger that helped. The air abruptly cleared around them, as if they were in the reverse of a paperweight snowglobe, the whiteness briefly beating all around the outside of the globe but not coming in. Lee paused, still hugging herself against the wind, for whatever she’d managed had no effect against that. “Come on, Gel!” she said, and went up what little she could still make out of the trail, a stretch where the snow had been a little less deep because of the mountain wall right next to it. And just past there, the spire of grey stone sticking up out of the foot of the neighboring hill, the spire all white with snow on the south side, but still mostly bare on the north: and at the bottom of it, half full of drifted snow, the little cave— “There it is, come on!”
The two of them floundered toward it through the snow. Seconds later their protection gave way, as they reached the opening of the cave, and the snow slammed stinging into them from behind, as if in revenge for the temporary frustration. Lee used her arms and the Alfen pulse rifle to try to sweep the snow out of the opening, back toward the trail: a frustrating business, as the wind just blew it right back in at her. The cave was smaller than she remembered it, shallower, and wasn’t going to provide much protection against that wind, to judge by the snow already drifted in. But it was the best they were going to get. “Come on, we’ve got to get rid of some of this!” she said to Gelert. “If it drifts in on top of us, it’s insulation—”
Gelert didn’t answer her, just started digging. Within a couple of minutes there was enough room for them b
oth to crouch into the little space. Gelert collapsed to the floor and curled himself into as tight a ball as he could: Lee wrapped herself more or less around him, shivering, feeling the snow melting between them. “Not much help,” he said faintly. “Sorry.”
Outside, the wind rose to a scream, then a shriek, and the relentless snow began to pile in on top of them again. Lee got the pulse rifle around in front of her, out of the snow, and had little strength to do anything else. The shivering was shaking Lee’s whole body now, and the cold of the snow burned her, but there was no use in trying to shake it off; it simply flew up into her eyes again, blinding her, and continued piling up. Insulating it might be, but it was still wet, and the chill of it seeped into her, relentless.
“We’re going to die here,” Gelert said softly.
It was a thought that had occurred to Lee just before he said it; but she hadn’t been willing to make it real by letting it out. Too late now. “This is my fault,” Lee said. “I’m sorry.”
There was a long silence. Finally, Gelert cocked one eye up at her. “It’s all right,” he said. “Nuala knew.”
“Knew—”
“She wouldn’t let me be, last night. I had to tell her, finally—” A tremor of cold shook him. “Tell her how dangerous this was likely to be. She said she understood. She said I had to go.”
The tears came to Lee’s eyes. It was almost impossible to listen to this, under the circumstances, let alone respond to it. But at the same time, if they were going to be dead soon, she could at least deal with the difficult things.