The north wind rattles the tower window, and the snowflakes dance.
XLIX
CARRYING THE SKIS and the fir poles with the leather straps at one end out through the south door to the tower, Nylan followed Ayrlyn and Saryn up the beaten path toward the stables for several hundred cubits. Where the ground dropped away from the path on the south side, there was a ramp packed through the waist-deep snow, rising gently from the path for perhaps fifty cubits before the ramp merged with the snow. Beyond that point, the snow, swirled in drifts, generally dropped away toward the east.
The cairns down in the south corner of the snow-covered meadow were white hummocks with drifts extending almost to the drop-off that overlooked the forest far below. A light wind blew across the snowfieid, lifting and swirling the top powdered snow under a bright sun that gave no warmth and a clear green-blue heaven that seemed to suck the heat out of the engineer, despite the two jackets and heavy woolen scarf he wore.
Nylan set the skis on the flat part of the packed snow ramp, following Ayrlyn’s example, and looked along the ramp that sloped gently upward through the walls of snow. A half-dozen dual ski tracks fanned out from the end of the ramp onto the snowfield.
“Who’s been out already?” Despite the scarf around his nose and mouth, Nylan’s breath formed white clouds in the air, and he could feel the ice forming on the wool of the scarf. As he watched, the ice crystals that had been Saryn’s breath fluttered to the powdery surface of the packed snow.
“Gerlich, the hunters,” answered Saryn, “and Fierral, Ryba, and the scouts.”
If Gerlich could master old-style skis, then Nylan could, he decided, as he bent down and fastened the leather thongs around his boots, boots lined with wool scraps and bulging somewhat at the tops. He had to take off the outer layer of his gloves because they were really leather mittens covering woolen gloves, and he couldn’t handle the leather thongs with the fingerless mittens. Neither mittens nor the gloves beneath fit terribly well, since he’d done the cutting and stitching himself.
“Ready?” asked Saryn.
Nylan straightened and pulled the leather mittens back over his gloves, then took a pole in each hand.
“If I can do this, you can,” said Saryn, slowly gliding up the ramp.
“Let’s hope so,” Nylan muttered, but he followed her example and, one pole in each hand, slowly slid the left wooden ski forward. Each ski felt like a building timber, but Ayrlyn had insisted that the skis needed to be wide and long because the snow on the Roof of the World was light and powdery.
As he tried to slide the right ski after the left one, he could feel himself lurching forward, and he leaned back to compensate. Then his left ski started sliding backward, and he jabbed a pole into the packed snow of the ramp, wobbling there before catching his balance.
“Start with slow movements,” suggested Saryn, “and keep your weight forward-not too forward-on the skis.”
“I’ve always tried not to be too forward,” Nylan retorted, ignoring the cold air that bit into his nose, throat, and lungs.
“Slow movements, one ski at a time,” ordered Ayrlyn.
Nylan inched the left ski forward, then the right, then the left until he had crept up the ramp to where the packed area ended. Squinting against the brightness of the sun, he looked out over the nearly flat and powdered snow that covered the meadows more than waist-deep.
“Just follow in my tracks,” Ayrlyn instructed.
Nylan edged after the redhead, though her hair and most of her face were well swathed in a gray woolen scarf.
Despite his best efforts, his skis skidded out of the tracks Ayrlyn had made, then sank to knee depth. As the snow piled up in front of his shins, he slowed to a stop. When he shifted his weight, the skis sank even farther until the snow reached his knees.
“Making the first trail is the hardest,” called Saryn from beside him, “especially if you’re moving slowly. Speed helps-until you fall, and then it’s a mess.”
Looking at the snow that covered his skis completely and most of his lower legs, Nylan decided it was already a mess. “Just put one ski in front of the other. Make it a sliding sort of walk.”
That Nylan could understand, and the process seemed to work, enough so that he actually had covered several hundred cubits, mostly staying in the trail Ayrlyn had cut through the snow.
“That’s it,” the singer called. “Just keep up that motion.” At that moment, Nylan reached too far forward with his right pole, lost his balance, flailed, and went down in a heap, his entire upper body plunging through the powdery white crystals until a gloved hand slammed against something hard.
He lay in the snow, his feet pinned together by the skis, breathing both chill air and snow crystals that had oozed around his scarf.
“Straighten your skis.”
“How?” he mumbled through the snow. Finally, he levered his upper body sideways, since his skis would not move, until his legs could separate slightly. Then he bent his knees and curled up into a ball as close to the skis as he could. That allowed him to rock himself over into a half-crouching, half-kneeling position. From there he struggled upright, his snow-covered face finally emerging into the glare, the snow almost chest-deep.
His skis felt mired, but he lifted each in turn, letting snow filter under each, climb-packing his way up until he stood on the skis-merely knee-deep in the powder that leached the heat out of his legs and feet.
“See… you can get out of it,” said Saryn.
“This time,” snorted Nylan, trying to brush the snow off himself, snow that clung to everything but the leather trousers and packed itself into every bodily crevice.
He started after Ayrlyn even more cautiously than before, then stopped as he saw a pair of figures sweeping from the ridge line above the tower.
Istril and Ryba skied slowly downward, a rope tied to a bundle they towed. As they neared, each leaving a graceful dual line of ski traces in the snow, Nylan could see the bundle consisted of a pale-coated winter deer.
He also marveled at their grace, doubting that he would ever match it. Part of him never wanted to try as the snow melted in cold rivulets down his neck, back, and legs. He forced a wave to the two skiers.
“There’s the engineer!” Istril returned his wave.
As he started to follow Ayrlyn’s tracks again, in a turn that would carry him back toward the packed trail the horses used, Nylan found himself again wobbling on the skis, conscious that the leather thongs provided no real support. He jabbed his poles back down to balance himself and let himself slide to a halt.
“Watch your balance,” said Saryn, nearly beside the engineer, making her own track, the powdery snow nearly to her knees.
“That’s easy to say. Doing it is a lot harder.”
Istril and Ryba had towed the deer carcass to the tower, unfastened their skis, and lugged their kill and skis inside long before Nylan struggled the few hundred cubits back to the tower.
“That’s enough for today,” he declared. Maybe forever, he thought, as he gathered skis and poles and trudged back across the causeway. He left a trail of snow and water down to the storeroom beside the furnace, and on the steps on his return trip back up to the great room for the midday meal.
Nylan slumped onto the bench before the hearth, aware that he was sitting in damp trousers. His upper cheeks were nearly flaming red, and his ears ached as they warmed. They hadn’t been out in the cold that long-except it appeared that the Roof of the World was even colder than a Sybran winter-and that was cold, indeed.
Although there was no fire in the hearth, the great room was warm by comparison to the frozen wasteland outside, and the bark-and-root tea helped. He poured a second mugful.
“You drank that quickly,” said Ryba. “You would too, if you’d dived into a snowbank and gotten stuck there.”
“You wouldn’t have had that problem,” pointed out Ryba, “if you’d started trying to learn earlier.”
Nylan took another sip
of the tea. Ayrlyn had already told him as much, far earlier, and he supposed he deserved the reminder, but skiing was a pain, however necessary it might prove.
Ryba raised her eyebrows.
“How were the bows in the cold?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.
“The bows are really good in the cold,” Istril said from the foot of the first table.
Nylan nodded. While he hadn’t thought about that, both the composite and the endurasteel had been designed to handle the chill of space and the heat of high-temperature reentry, which would make them ideal for the chill of the winter on the Roof of the World.
“Gerlich’s already snapped one of his great wooden bows in the cold,” Istril added in a lower voice, after looking around and not seeing the hunter. “I’ll bet the new bows would be really good in cold-weather warfare.”
“Is anyone else crazy enough to be out in this weather?” asked Nylan.
“Well… they’re good for hunting, too. Even Fierral thinks so, and she’s pretty hard on everything.”
“Is there that much out in the woods?”
“More than you’d suspect, from the tracks, and that’s good for us. You saw the deer. That’s a couple of meals, at least, even for twenty of us. There’s also a snow cat, almost all white, with big spread paws and claws. I don’t know how good the meat is, but I’d bet the fur is warm.”
Nylan nodded. After his brief excursion, a warm coat sounded better than wool or a ship jacket, a lot better.
L
NYLAN FASTENED THE ship jacket and pulled on the crudely lined boots that he wore everywhere, even inside the tower. His fingers crossed his stubbly chin, but the chill was so great, even with the heat from the bathhouse stove, that he had not shaved, but only washed his face and hands, before hurrying back up to the tower’s top level to dress for the cold day ahead.
The heat from the furnace removed the biting chill of the wind that howled outside the tower’s walls, but Nylan’s breath turned into a frosty cloud when he stepped away from the heated center of the tower and up to the sole top-level armaglass window to check the sealing. He half rubbed, half scraped away the frost to look outside, but cold air rolled off the glass, and frost re-formed almost as fast as he removed it. Through the little area he could keep clear, he could only see white-white and more white.
For more than two days, the white barrage had continued, and Nylan wasn’t certain how much of the snow was new and how much just snow picked up by the roaring wind and flung-and reflung-against the walls.
Most of the exterior tower walls had a spotty coating of ice on the inside stone, except in the kitchen and the furnace room. Kyseen and Kadran had plenty of guards-especially the newer ones-ready to saw and split wood in return for a place around the stove. The number of people willing to work on partitions and stools, or other wooden necessities, in the workroom off the furnace had never been higher. Could it be the warmth? Nylan grinned at the thought, even as he readied himself to head down to join them.
Ryba was below somewhere; she hadn’t said where she was going, but, with the storm still going, she was somewhere in the tower.
A figure huddled by the furnace duct on the fifth level. Nylan paused on the steps. “Relyn?”
“Ser?” The red-haired man stood with his cloak wrapped around him. “A man can never get warm here. It’s too cold to do anything except be miserable, and just warm enough so that you never quite freeze.” He jerked his head toward the single shuttered window. “I can’t even leave. Twenty steps in that, and they’d find me frozen in a block of ice come spring.”
Nylan sat on a step, and Relyn sat on the other edge.
“Why are you up here?” asked the engineer.
“It’s the only place where I can be alone. Sometimes…” Relyn shook his head.
“I’m surprised that you haven’t gotten close to one of the guards.”
“It is… hard… to think about, as you put it, getting close to someone who could kill you with one blow.”
“Why?” asked Nylan. “Anyone you sleep with anywhere could kill you.”
“You always bring up disturbing points, Mage. At home, when I had a home, should anyone have killed me, they would have been tortured and then killed.”
“If anyone killed you here, she’d be punished. What’s the difference?”
“It is different,” pointed out Relyn.
“I suppose so. Here you have to trust someone else, under a… ruler… you don’t know. I think that means you’ve never really trusted anyone.” Nylan stood up.
“Mage… were you in Carpa, I would challenge you.”
“For what? Is the truth so terrible? Most people with power always say they trust people, and what they mean is that they only trust them so long as they control them. True trust occurs only when you have no control.”
“I’d rather have control.”
“We all would… but even that’s an illusion a lot of the time.” Nylan recalled Ryba’s struggle with her visions. “Even for rulers. If a ruler taxes his people too heavily, some will revolt, and he must kill them.”
“As he should,” declared Relyn.
“But dead men pay no taxes, and now the ruler must tax the others more heavily to pay the soldiers because there are fewer men to tax. And he will need more soldiers because people will be even more unhappy. More soldiers require even more taxes, and that makes people even less happy. Do you see where that leads?”
“But…” Relyn looked up at Nylan.
“Control is not what it seems, young Relyn. If you kill a man, you make an enemy out of his family. How many enemies can a ruler afford? Do you see the marshal eating better food than her guards?”
“No.”
“Does she wear jewels or great trappings of wealth?”
“No.”
“Will her guards follow her anywhere?”
“I think they would.”
Nylan smiled. “Think it over.” He walked down the steps, wondering why he had bothered. What he had said would certainly have upset anyone in Relyn’s position, and the young noble was probably very upset. But what good had it done? His head throbbed slightly. Why? Because what he’d said wasn’t quite true? Ryba did have one thing the others didn’t-power. It might be power out of necessity, but it was power. Nylan shook his head. He couldn’t even present provoking thoughts that might be misleading without getting a headache, or so it seemed.
Nylan rubbed his forehead as he walked down the steps past the great room, empty.except for Ayrlyn, gently strumming the lutar-probably refining or working on another song. He paused for a moment, watching the redhead struggle with a chord or a phrase, but she did not look his way.
He turned toward the south door, where chill winds seeped through the cracks, and a fine layer of snow covered the stones behind the door, shifting with each gust that buffeted the tower.
Nylan resumed his descent, thinking about the cradle he was crafting. But Dyliess would need somewhere to sleep, and a cradle made sense.
LI
FROM THE INNER corner of the room wells the warmth of a well-banked fire, though Terek still wears a heavy white woolen vest over his robes. The white wizard’s face is red with strain, but Sillek ignores the wizard’s effort and studies the image in the glass on the table.
In the center of the swirling white mists is a dark tower, rising out of the snows. A beaten path runs uphill from the tower toward a canyon in the base of the higher western slopes. Thin spirals of smoke rise from the twin chimneys in the pyramidal roof of the black tower.
A pair of figures in black coats walk briskly uphill, their breath leaving a thick trail of white. The snow on each side of the path rises above the heads of either.
The flat of the snow before the tower is crossed with sets of flat tracks, ski tracks that spread in all directions, with some circling back to the short causeway before the tower. A second packed-snow trail leads to the ridge separating the tower from the forest below, and a pair o
f horses drag a tree trunk up the ridge. Beside them walks a figure bearing a pack.
“It looks normal,” observed Sillek.
“Have you seen enough, ser?” asks Terek.
“I think so.”
The wizard relaxes, and the mists collapse, leaving a blank glass. “It’s too normal, ser. That snow is over their heads, and there must be three cubits more packed underfoot. The air is so cold that their very breath falls like snow itself, and they walk to check their mounts-those are stables up in that canyon. Could your armsmen do that?”
“Not for long.” Sillek turns to the wizard. “What is your meaning, Ser Wizard?”
“They are evil angels, ser. They must be destroyed, or they will destroy us. No one else could walk the Roof of the World without freezing into ice.”
Sillek nods without agreeing. “Thank you, Ser Wizard. If you discover anything new, please let me know.”
“Will you destroy them, ser?”
“Ser Terek, as you pointed out, we can do nothing until the snows melt, and it becomes warm enough for normal men on the Roof of the World.”
“Yes, Lord Sillek.”
“Then we will see what we can do.” Sillek nods once more as he leaves the warm quarters of the wizard. His face is impassive as he walks the long corridor and climbs another flight of stairs.
The guard opens the door to his quarters, and he closes it, stepping quietly past the sitting room to the bedchamber where Zeldyan sits in a chair, knitting a small blanket.
She smiles and stands, setting aside her work. “You look glum, Sillek.”
The Lord of Lornth hugs his consort, feeling the beginning of a gentle rounding of her figure against him. “How are you doing?”
“Fine. I can feel him kick.” Zeldyan smiles as they separate.
“How can you? You’re not that far along.”
“I can. It’s gentle, but he does kick.”
“You always call the child ‘him.’ ”
“That’s because he is, and we’ll call him-”
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