At thirty feet, the voynix began to fade back into the forest.
Daeman picked up his pace, almost running now. Voynix on all sides were moving away.
Afraid that he might stumble and smash the egg—he had the sickening mental image of the egg splitting and a small Setebos brain scuttling out on its dozens of baby-hands and stalks, then the thing leaping for his face—he still forced himself to run toward the retreating voynix.
The voynix dropped to all fours and loped away—hundreds of them fleeing out in all directions like frightened grazers freeing predators on some prehistoric plain—and Daeman ran until he could run no more.
He dropped to his knees, hugging the rucksack to his chest, feeling the Setebos egg stirring and shifting, feeling energy flowing from him toward the evil thing until he pushed it away from himself, setting it on the ground like the toxic thing it was.
Greogi landed the sonie. “My God,” said the bald pilot. “My God.”
Daeman nodded. “Take me back to the base of Starved Rock. I’ll wait there with the egg while you ferry down those who can walk the mile or so to the faxnode pavilion. I’ll lead that procession. You can load the weak and wounded and follow us by air.”
“What …” began Edide and fell silent. She shook her head.
“Yeah,” said Daeman. “I remembered the bodies of the voynix frozen in the blue ice at Paris Crater. They had all been frozen in the act of running away from Setebos.”
He sat on the edge of the sonie, the rucksack on his lap, as they floated back to Starved Rock a comfortable six feet above the ground. There were no voynix in the trees or meadows.
“Where are we going to fax to?” asked Boman.
“I don’t know,” said Daeman. He felt very tired. “I’ll figure that out as we walk there down the road from Ardis.”
48
“You’ll need a thermskin,” said Prospero.
“Why?” Harman’s voice was distracted. He was staring out the glass doors at the beautiful triple-dome and marble arches of the Taj Moira. The cablecar house had clicked into place in the southeast eiffelbahn tower—one of four set at the corners of the giant square of cantilevered marble that held this magnificent building above the summit of Chomolungma. Harman had estimated the eiffelbahn tower to be about one thousand feet tall and the apex of the onion-domed white building was half again taller.
“The altitude here is eight thousand eight hundred forty-eight meters,” said the magus. “More vacuum than air. The temperature out there in the sunlight is thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. That gentle breeze is blowing at fifty knots. There’s a blue thermskin in the wardrobe next to the bed. Go up and put it on. You’ll need your outer clothes and boots. Call down when you have your osmosis mask in place—I need to lower the pressure in the car here before we open the mezzanine door.”
They took the elevator down from the thousand-foot-level platform. Harman looked at the tower struts, arches, and girders as they passed them on the way down and had to smile. The secret of the whiteness of this tower was as prosaic as white paint over the same dark iron and steel as the other eiffelbahn structures. He could feel the elevator and the entire tower shaking to the howling winds and realized that the paint must be scoured away in months or weeks here rather than years; he tried to imagine the kind of painting crew that would be always at work up here, then gave it up as a silly effort.
He was obeying the magus now because it got him out of the prison of the cablecar. Somehow here in this insane temple or palace or tomb or whatever it was on this insanely tall mountain, he would find a way back to Ada. If Ariel could fax without faxnode pavilions, so could he. Somehow.
Harman followed Prospero from the elevator at the base of the tower across the wide expanse of red sandstone and white marble leading to the front door of the domed building. The wind threatened to blow him off his feet but for some reason there was no ice on the exposed sandstone and marble.
“Don’t maguses feel the cold or need air?” he shouted at the old man in the trailing blue robe.
“Not in the least,” said the magus. The jet-stream-strong wind was blowing his robe to one side and sending his fringe of long, gray hair trailing sideways from his mostly bald skull. “One of the perquisites of old age,” he cried over the wind howl.
Harman veered to his right, arms extended for balance against the wind, and walked toward the low marble railing—not more than two feet high—that ran around the huge square of sandstone and marble like a low bench around a skating rink.
“Where are you going?” called Prospero. “Be careful there!”
Harman reached the edge and looked over.
Later, studying maps, Harman realized that he must have been looking north from this mountain called Chomolungma or Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng or Qomolangma Feng or HoTepma Chini-ka-Rauza or Everest, depending upon the age and origin of the map, and that when he stood at the railing he was staring out for hundreds of miles—and six miles straight down—into lands that had once been called Khan’s Ninth Kingdom or Tibet or China.
It was the down part that struck Harman viscerally.
The Taj Moira was essentially a sandstone-marble city block stuck on the summit of the Goddess Mother of the World like a tray embedded on a sharp stone, like a piece of paper slammed down onto a spike. As an engineering feet, the buckycarbon cantilevering was impressive to the point of impossibility—a god-child’s form of showing off.
Harman stood by the two-foot-high, ten-inch-wide marble “railing” and stared straight down for more than twenty-nine thousand feet with the full force of the jet stream at his back, trying to shove him off into the endless empty air. Later, maps would tell him that he had been looking at other mountains with names and the east and west Rongbuk Glaciers with the brown plains of China far beyond toward the curve of the earth, but none of that mattered now. Shoved by the strong arms of the howling wind, windmilling his arms to keep his balance, Harman was looking six miles straight down—from an overhang!
He dropped to his hands and knees and began crawling back toward the temple-tomb and the waiting magus. Thirty feet in front of the huge doorway, a small, sharp boulder—no more than five feet tall—rose from the marble squares, ending in a thirty-inch pyramid of ice. With Prospero watching—arms crossed and a small smile on his face—Harman wrapped his arms around the decorative boulder and used its imperfections to pull himself back to his feet. He continued to lean on the boulder, arms wrapped around it, his chin resting on the icy point, afraid that if he looked back over his shoulder at the distant low wall and vertiginous drop, the urge to run toward that wall and leap would be overpowering. He closed his eyes.
“Are you going to stay there all day?” asked the magus.
“I might,” said Harman, eyes still closed. After another minute, he shouted over the rising wind, “What is this rock anyway? Some sort of symbol? A monument?”
“It’s the summit of Chomolungma,” said Prospero. The magus turned and walked into the open, elegantly arched entrance of the structure he’d called Rongbok Pumori Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng Dudh Kosi Lhotse-Nuptse Khumbu aga Ghat-Mandir Khan Ho Tep Rauza. Harman saw that a semipermeable membrane was guarding that entrance—it had rippled as the magus passed through, another sign that Harman wasn’t dealing with just a hologram this time.
Several minutes later, still hugging his boulder-summit, the eyepieces and osmosis mask of his thermskin hood almost completely frosted over because of the pelting snow squalls that struck his body like icy missiles, Harman considered the fact that it was probably warm inside that building, warm beyond that semipermeable forcefield.