The surface was so soft that he didn’t even feel his boots strike it. He passed from a world of moonslight to a world of darkness in an instant. He ground to a halt, not because his boots had struck earth at last; his fall simply seemed to have compacted a little island in the snow.
Deor took a cautious breath. There was little air to breathe: the snow had collapsed around him and he was quite thoroughly buried, perhaps to a depth that was twice his height, perhaps more—certainly not less.
But now he knew what he was doing. He started making a way for himself with his hands and feet, compressing snow, making a kind of slope to crawl out of the hole. It took time, but he wasn’t worried. It was no worse than travelling over the glaciers of Mundjokull, though perhaps a little colder. A lot colder. No matter: he knew what to do and he did it. On the way up he came across his axe. It made him heavier, but he was glad to see it.
He broke back to the surface at last, after many a recollapse of the snow around him. The wind-carved crust of snow was very tenuous, but it could hold him if he stretched out his weight carefully.
He saw three other snowholes with floundering figures in them: his comrades.
Beyond them all, encircled by glittering clouds of ice-bugs, the Viviana fell from the night-blue sky. Horseman, rising in the west, lit her with fierce light; beyond her in the eastern sky, Trumpeter seemed to watch somberly. Her front section completely empty of balloons, the rear section in flames, she dropped prow first toward the snowy fields and crashed, the remains of her wooden framework and gondola screaming on impact before silence fell, even the fires silent, quenched by the bitter, moonblue snow.
Deor watched it all through a haze of tears. He had hated the journey on the Viviana more than any other he had ever taken. But she was the work of their hands and minds, fearfully and cunningly made with great labor, and she had died protecting them. He wiped the tears away and snarled at himself for a fool. But he did not look away until the fires were gone and the ice insects had flown off again.
Deor crawled across the surface crust to where Morlock and Ambrosia were arising from their own impact craters, crooked shadows in the moonslit snow.
“What now, Ambrosii?” he called.
“The wreck of the Viviana,” said the shadow with Morlock’s voice.
Of course. Their packs, if they could recover them.
“And maybe we can salvage some of her for snowshoes,” he said, thinking aloud.
“A good thought,” Morlock said.
Deor looked at the ruins of the Viviana, half sunk in snowdrifts.
“She was a brave ship,” he said, and—Canyon keep it!—his voice broke in mid-sentence.
The shadow that was Ambrosia turned to look at him. “Yes,” she said. “I should have known better than to name her after a woman so mortal and so crazy. But maybe that’s why she was so brave.”
“Could be,” said Deor with Morlockian gruffness, and crawled off to help Kelat out of his snow pit.
CHAPTER SIX
The Narrow Road
to the Deep North
Their packs survived more or less intact. Morlock and Ambrosia had placed fire-quell magic on them, as they did out of habit with most things they wore, and the only losses were from the crash. In Morlock’s, for instance, the impact had shattered a jar of some horrible mushroom liquor he had received as a gift from the Blackthorn masters of making.
“Eh,” said Morlock. “I could have used a drink.”
“You drink too much, harven,” Deor said.
Morlock shrugged and turned away to harvest fabric and wood for snowshoes.
They each made their own snowshoes, even Kelat, who proved to be quite good at it.
“If you couldn’t make snowshoes and walk away,” he explained to Deor, “you were trapped all winter long with the other Uthars.”
“But it can’t snow so very much on the north shore of the Sea of Stones, where Uthartown is,” Deor objected.
“Uthartown is wherever the Uthars are. It must have had fifteen different locations that I can remember.”
“Sixteen since you were born,” Ambrosia interjected.
Deor’s eyes crossed at this and Morlock smiled to himself. Deor understood travel, and tolerated it fairly well, but the idea of a home that was not always in the same place: that was unthinkable to many a dwarf.
Morlock cut cloth from the shell of the Viviana and made it into face masks for each of them.
Ambrosia and Deor took theirs without comment, but Kelat objected. “I don’t like things on my face—I don’t care how cold it gets.”
“Your face cares,” Morlock retorted. “We are nearing the edge of the world, where men may not dwell.”
“Even Deor and I don’t like it much,” Ambrosia said. Kelat laughed, and did not put on his mask. The others did, though.
The track of the sunstream was easy to read on the moonslit face of the snowy plain, and they shuffled across the empty white fields to reach it.
The snow crust there was deeper and more stable. They pitched camp for the night.
“We should have brought firewood from the Viviana,” Kelat said.
“No fires on this trip,” Morlock said.
“What keeps us from freezing at night?”
“You will, Prince Uthar,” Ambrosia said. “You’re a furnace, burning fuel night and day. Did you know it? All we need do is contain the heat that you, and I, and the others here generate as a matter of course. Morlock or I can shepherd that heat, keeping it within a shelter, as we kept it in the balloons of the Viviana.”
Kelat looked relieved at this, but Deor gave a sidelong glance and said, “I don’t like it, harvenen. Long watches in the visionary realm are a burden you have already born to your harm. Kelat and I will go fetch some firewood.”
Ambrosia said flatly, “No. We can’t carry firewood enough to last us to the edge of the world, and we’re unlikely to find any on the road, unless you think you can make a bonfire out of ice-trees. This is the only way, Deortheorn,” she added in a gentler tone.
“There’s another way,” Deor said stubbornly. “Share your burden. Teach us how to do it.”
Morlock met Ambrosia’s eye. She nodded briskly. “The Sight is a treacherous gift for a ruler,” she said. “But harven Deor has a point.”
“I always have a point,” Deor admitted, “though I usually manage to stab myself with it.”
They set up their occlusion and ran a census on their food. It wasn’t much to reach the end of the world with, much less to walk all the way back.
Deor said to Kelat, whose face fell approximately one face-length when he saw how small the rations would be, “Well, look on the bright side. We may not have to walk back.”
“Because we’ll be dead, you mean?” Kelat said calmly. “That might be just as well. Starvation’s an ugly death.”
Morlock was impressed with the youth’s steadiness. He did childish things, like refuse to wear a face mask in the coldest air in the world. But he was not a child.
“If it comes to that,” Morlock said, “there are ways to survive without food.”
Deor stared at him. “Oh?”
“Yes. We might absorb the tal of the local beasts and plants directly. It would keep life in our bodies, anyway.”
“What’s the downside? I can tell by your face there’s a downside.”
“It may change our bodies.”
“Ach. Well, troubles never come singly.”
“And a stitch in time saves nine.”
“A stitch or nine is exactly what you’ll need when I’m done with you, harven,” Deor said mildly.
They each ate something and then Ambrosia and Kelat wrapped themselves in their sleeping cloaks and lay back to back. Deor stayed awake for a while and Morlock took him through the first lessons of the Sight. It did not go as badly as it might have, and Morlock was strangely moved to think that his harven-kin and oldest friend might become a dwarvish seer—a rare thing in the world, if not absolutely unheard of.