“Goliath,” she called wearily, hoping the animal would hear her through the still howling wind. She had visions of herself and Reza, frozen to death, twirling on a rope behind the animal until it, too, finally died of exposure. “Kazh! Stop!”
The rope went slack.
Esah-Zhurah wanted to lay there in the snow and rest for a long while, but she knew that to do so would have brought Death calling. Reza lay next to her, his body still. She had to act quickly. She gained her feet, staggering like a drunkard, and was met by Goliath’s steamy muzzle. Petting the beast with dead hands, she worked her way to the saddle and grappled with the lashings that held the shelter, slashing the frozen bindings free with her talons. It fell into the snow. The small brown roll, about the diameter and length of her thigh, immediately began to grow, quickly assuming a hemispherical shape that was nearly as big around as Goliath was long. A tube extruded itself from one end as the whole thing changed color from a leathery brown to a heat absorbing black. As an afterthought, Esah-Zhurah pulled the saddle from Goliath’s back, leaving him free to seek his own shelter.
She pulled Reza into the tube, the shelter’s sphincter-like entrance dilating open to accept them as if they were crawling back into the womb, then closing behind them. Groping wearily in the darkness of the vestibule with her numbed fingers, Esah-Zhurah cut away Reza’s frozen armor, the ice shattering as she peeled it away like the hardened chrysalis of some exotic species of insect. She tore at his clothes, quickly throwing everything to one side in a frozen heap. Then she dragged him into the main part of the shelter and turned him on his stomach. Doing what he had once shown her, she straddled his back and began forcing the water from his lungs with her hands, pushing down with all her weight on his back.
Beneath her, she could hear the sickening gurgle of water as it gushed from his mouth onto the floor of the shelter. Push, release, push, release, until the water fell to a trickle, then stopped. Then she hurriedly turned him over. She bent down, putting her ear to Reza’s naked breast, listening for a heartbeat through the pounding of her own that reverberated in her ears. For eight beats of her heart, there was nothing. Then, she heard a faint lub… dub through his flesh.
The sound energized her with the power of hope. She bent over him, praying that she could remember the things he had taught her when she was learning to swim. “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” he had called it in his native tongue. She had laughed at him at the time, finding the thought of doing such a thing to another Kreelan – let alone a human – repugnant.
But the humor of that day was now replaced by desperation as she took his head in her hands. With one hand cupping his head and the other clamping his nose, she put her numbed mouth over his and began to force air into his waterlogged lungs. She took another breath, then blew again. Her body shook from sheer exhaustion and cold, and her heart beat so fast that she knew it must soon burst. But she refused to give up.
Suddenly, he began coughing. He spouted water everywhere as his lungs received a signal from his dazed brain that they were to begin functioning again, and they sought to clear out the last of the offending fluid. Esah-Zhurah shuddered, praying her thanks to the Empress.
After a few minutes, his breathing became ragged but steady. Undoing her own armor and shedding her clothing, she held him close, wrapping her quaking arms around him. Beneath them, the shelter absorbed the icy pool of water from Reza’s lungs. It left behind only a soft, dry bed that already had begun to warm them, reflecting their flickering body heat inward.
Cradling his frigid body to give it what little warmth her own had to offer, she spiraled into a dark, dreamless abyss.
Tesh-Dar stood at the great window in her quarters, watching as the muted light of day faded into the cold clutches of deep winter’s night. She did not need a thermometer to tell her that the temperature was plummeting, and that any organism directly exposed to the night’s ministrations would not long survive.
“All of the tresh are accounted for, save Esah-Zhurah and the animal,” her First reported quietly. The task they had been given had been a simple but vital one, carried out by generations of tresh for eons as a service to the priestesses of the kazhas. The journey to the city and back, even in deep snow, should have taken only three-fourths of the day’s light. But dusk was now upon them, and the young pair still had not returned. “Perhaps,” she went on in the silence left by Tesh-Dar, “the human did something…”
The priestess waved her hand impatiently, dismissing the First’s veiled accusation. “Had he wished to do something in that vein,” she said, “surely he would have done so before this day. No,” she said, turning away from the window, “it is not that. Perhaps they remained in the city through good judgment. I do not know.”
“If there is nothing else, my priestess, I shall retire for the night,” the First said, saluting before she turned to leave. “If the weather allows, I will send out search parties tomorrow to find them.”
“No,” Tesh-Dar told her. “If they are alive, they must find their own way. If they have perished, there is no need to risk the lives of others to find frozen corpses. Many lives has the winter claimed in this way, and I will not willingly add to its toll.”
“Then it is in Her hands,” the other woman observed. “Sleep well, my priestess,” she said, softly closing the door behind her.
Turning again to the window, a grimace kissed Tesh-Dar’s lips at the First’s parting words, for no sleep would she find this night.
Closing her eyes and straining to hear and see with senses far beyond what her body boasted, Tesh-Dar began to wander through the endless cold of the night, searching for her missing children.
Reza was not sure if he was awake or simply in some kind of strange dream. The world was cloaked in velvety darkness, and his skin tingled in a strange, yet familiar way. After a moment, he realized it was the sensation left by the healing gel as it worked its strange miracles. He lay against something warm and smooth, his face pressed against a firm pillow. His nose relayed a gentle smell he recognized as the alien musk to which he had become so accustomed, the smell of Kreelan skin. Esah-Zhurah’s skin.
“Esah… Zhurah?” he rasped, his tongue a flaccid lump of flesh in his parched mouth.
“Yes,” came her voice from somewhere in the darkness, accompanied by the cool touch of her hand on his forehead, gently brushing his hair back. “I am here, Reza.” When she had awakened from the nightmare that had finally come to pass, she had found Reza lying next to her, shivering and burning up with fever. The shelter had done as best it could to save the frostbitten flesh, automatically coating Reza’s skin with healing gel, but there was nothing it could do for whatever raged within his body. Esah-Zhurah had despaired for his survival as she did what little she could to keep his temperature down, comforting him in the few lucid moments the fever had allowed.
“Are you… all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” she told him, her heart swelling at his concern for her. He tried to move, but Esah-Zhurah held him back. “Be still, my tresh,” she commanded softly, her hands holding him firmly in place against her side, his head cradled between her breasts. She put her hand against his forehead again, reassuring herself that it was only warm, and not hot. “Your body is yet weak.”
“Where is Goliath?” he asked.
She smiled. Reza was forever concerned with his animal friend. “Goliath lies buried next to us in the snow, keeping warm in the way of his kind. He, too, is well; complaining of hunger, but alive.”