Thereafter, they did not encounter another settlement or see another human being for some long days.
Sixty kilometers from Hoskins' Watch the gray sky lowered like a canvas flat all during the dull afternoon and, with none of the warning of rain, salted the earth with a fine, dry snow. The tiny flakes sifted through the pines, eddied at the espers' feet, slowly built up as darkness came on.
They made camp in the lee of a granite cliff, sheltered by pines on two other sides, with a beautiful downhill view of the snowscape being created before their eyes. They had taken to marching by day and sleeping by night, for they now felt safe from pursuit, ever since they had gone unrecognized in Hoskins' Watch.
By morning more than eight inches of snow had fallen, and the sky still sifted the white stuff.
Tedesco stomped through the fluffy carpet as if it were not there, oblivious of the huge white clouds he kicked up in his wake.
Chaney and Kiera frolicked in the snow together, running ahead of the others, sometimes loping on all fours, more often progressing in the more sedate, two-footed manner when they realized they were being watched. They were in their element now, and their spirits were higher than they had been at any other point in the journey.
Jask and Melopina were the laggards, having neither the strength to plow through the snowfall as Tedesco did, nor the grace and agility to dance across it as the wolf-people did. No crust had been built up, and the depth was not sufficient to permit the use of the snowshoes. The others held their pace in order not to pull too far ahead of the most humanoid couple in their group.
On the fifteenth day out of Hoskins' Watch, when they were in need of fresh meat, Chaney and Kiera unburdened themselves of their packs and set out to find and kill a deer. Within an hour they had cut one from its herd and driven it back toward the day's camp. When it was near enough to make butchering and storage convenient, they went for it, running fast, leaping, claws catching, teeth snipping first at its legs then, in moments when it stumbled, at its neck.
Kiera scrambled onto its back, bit deep near its jugular.
The deer squealed, turned, leaped confusedly.
Chaney was on it.
The deer reared up again.
It snapped its shoulders. Shook its head. Flung him away.
Be careful! — Melopina.
The wolf-people, on all fours, circled their quarry.
The deer stood with its head bowed, dripping blood on the snow.
Kiera feinted toward it.
The deer was instantly alert, skittering sideways.
She snarled at it. She moved closer, putting her head down, her paws widespread, hissed menacingly at the wounded animal.
The deer watched her carefully.
Forgotten, Chaney came in fast.
The deer squealed when the wolf hamstrung its left hind leg.
Snow flew.
Crippled, the deer tried to stagger past Kiera, hobbling on three legs, done for and knowing it. Its breath was frost.
Kiera leaped, high.
She got its neck.
The deer went down. It kicked. It stilled. The hunt was over.
The two wolf-people wiped their bloodied muzzles in the snow, rose from their feet onto their hind legs and walked down to join the other three espers.
Jask had expected them to take longer to rise out of the primitive state he had just seen them in. When they were in front of him, however, he saw that they were the same Chaney and Kiera, more civilized than not, more prone to kindness than violence.
I wouldn't think you 'd need to rob graves to eat, Jask said to Chaney. With your hunting prowess, your table should always be full.
Chaney shrugged. I prefer to buy my meat when I crave it. My kind was equipped to hunt and kill, and our abilities kept our strain alive through the centuries of violence following the Last War and through the many years of barrenness after that. But these days the need to bring down our own game comes seldom. I enjoy a hunt, but only rarely. Besides, I'm halfway to being a vegetarian.
I thought you disliked moralists?
I do. My predilection for becoming a vegetarian is strictly a matter of taste, not morals.
Ten days later, far up in the snow belt, they ate the last of the deer meat and wondered if the few packages of jerky, which Tedesco had picked up in Hoskins' Watch, would keep them until they had reached the Glacier of Light. They had not seen any animal life for more than three days.
The snow was now as much as ten feet deep, crusted enough for them to make use of their snowshoes.
The wind wailed at night, mournful as a beast that had lost its mate, somehow reminding them of the invisible companion they had picked up at the black glass craters and gotten rid of in the middle of the Hadaspuri Sea. All of that, of course, seemed to have happened in another lifetime, centuries ago.
During the day the sun glared on the diamond surface of the snow fields, giving the illusion that they walked upon a magnificent mirror or across the top of a serene ocean.
As they walked, the snow melted on the pelts of Tedesco, Kiera and Chaney. At night, as they lay sleeping, the water froze in pellets. When they woke again, they were bedecked in transparent pearls.
At last, a day before their last packages of jerky would have run out, they topped a white rise near sunset and looked out across the basin of land, which at its far end was stoppered by the mammoth anterior wall of the Glacier of Light.
30
They stood at the base of the glacier. Glowing worms of pastel light, twisting through the ice, shed little illumination on them. Less, even, than the stars that had been revealed in a cloudless sky.
The Black Presence isn't here — Melopina.
How do you know? — Jask.
Reach for it with your esp.
He tried. Well?
Did you find anything at all? — Melopina.
Reluctantly he admitted, No.
Perhaps we're not using our esp properly — Kiera.
How else could it be used? — Melopina.
I sense something in there — Tedesco.
Chaney: Me, too.
What? — the other three.
A machine, I think, Tedesco 'pathed.
The Black Presence would have machines, Kiera 'pathed.
And could the Presence, itself, be a machine? — Jask.
The old books don't say so — Tedesco.
You've previously admitted that the old books omit many things — Jask.
But omit something so basic? — I doubt that.
Melopina: I think I am receiving something besides a machine.
Oh?
A very minimal psychic radiation.
The wind battered the side of the glacier.
The worms of light lay still, dead but glowing.
There, yes — Kiera.
A man — Chaney.
No, it's a woman — Tedesco.
Both — Jask.
More than two — Melopina.
One by one, they sat down on the hard-packed snow and ice.
Hundreds of people — Kiera.
But none of them quite alive? Melopina 'pathed. Then again, how could they be alive in the center of a glacier?
They should be helped, Jask said. But how?
We can't melt a glacier, Chaney 'pathed.
They don't want help — Melopina.
They like it in there? — Chaney.
They went there of their own accord — Melopina.