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bed in the far corner.
She could hop quickly, she could, he thought admiringly.
It had been a marriage of convenience, of course. All Makiem marriages were marriages of
convenience in a race that had no sex except one week a year, underwater, when they had nothing
but. The convenience of the scoundrels that ran Makiem, the inconvenience of himself, naturally.
She was the good minister's daughter, and, if anything, she was slicker and nastier than her
father.
What a team we'd make, he sighed once again, // only we could be on the same side!
"You needn't pretend, my dear. You know everything and I know it, so what's the difference?
You can't go this time."
"I go where you go," she responded. "It is law and custom. And you cannot stop me!"
He chuckled. "But it's cold up there, baby! What good would you be as a sleeping beauty?"
She reached over, opened a wicker basket, and removed something. It was a slightly different
design, but unmistakably a spacesuit.
He gaped. "How long have you had that thing?" he asked.
"Since Makiem," she replied smugly.
CAMP 43, GEDEMONDAS
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The trails weren't bad. Gedemondans, it was known, were large creatures, and limited but
steady use by the horselike Dillians had made them even more comfortable, on the whole around two
meters wide.
It was a strange party that set off from the chilly shack into the snow cover: Tael, the
Dillian guide, was in the lead, then the two Lata, occasionally walking but more often riding on
Tael's back, then Renard leading the winged pegasus, Doma, with the strange figure of Mavra Chang
tied between wings and neck. The air was becoming cold; there was little conversation between
them, nor was much possible without yelling, for blowing wind howled through the rocky clefts as
if it, too, were a strange and living creature of this strangest of worlds.
It was only on the occasional breaks, done mostly for Renard's benefit, that they could say
anything. The plain was far behind; the twists and turns that the switchbacked trail forced upon
them had all but the confident Tael totally lost, and the bright snow reflecting the glare of the
sun, even when cut with sun goggles, made distance impossible to judge. They were tiny figures
moving in a sea of white.
The trail itself seemed often lost in the snow, yet Tael went on as if it were a paved and
marked highway, never hesitating in the slightest-and the footing was always there.
After they had been climbing for what seemed like a full day, they rounded one more mountain
curve and, suddenly, the plain was spread out below them once more.
"Wait!" Mavra called to them. "Look! They've arrived!"
They stopped, and saw immediately what she meant. Tiny puffs of orange seemed
everywhere in the air, and large numbers of creatures could be seen erecting tents and digging
into the rock that was the start of the mountains. The cabin was invisible, but they all knew
that, if it was there at all, it was being converted into a fort.
"Look at them!" Tael breathed. This was her first taste of armies and war. "There must be
thousands of them!"
"The Yaxa," Vistaru said flatly. "They will be coming up only a day or so behind us. This is
not good."
Tael laughed confidently. "Let them try and find the trail!" she boasted. "Without a guide
they haven't a prayer!"
Mavra turned and looked out at the sky. There were thin, wispy clouds and an occasional big,
fat cumulus puff, but it was basically crystal clear.
"They'll follow our own tracks," she told them. "There's no snow, nothing to cover them. They
might mistake them for animal tracks, or Dillians alone, but where a four-footed animal or
Dillian can go, so can they."
The centaur frowned. A good snow guide, Mavra thought, but naive as hell. Dillia must be a
very peaceful place.
"We could lay a false trail," Tael suggested. "Run tracks off a cliff. It's not that hard. The
powder here could be brushed for a few hundred meters."
Mavra considered it. "All right, do it," she told them. "But it won't do much. Slow them up,
get a couple, that's all. Better than nothing, though."
They rigged the deception fairly simply. The Dillian girl picked a point, walked out to where
there seemed to be continuous snow, then stopped. Renard removed his small snowshoes and followed
gingerly behind in her tracks, then guided her feet as she backed up into her old tracks.
Mavra surveyed the results. "A little too deep," she said critically. "An experienced tracker
would catch on, but I think it'll work. Does that snow fall off there and I just can't see it, or
what?"
Tael laughed. "This is the edge of what we call Makorn Glacier. A river of slowly moving ice
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with a snow-cover on top. There is a crevasse there at least three hundred meters down and a good
ten meters wide. I could almost feel the edge of it."
The small Lata then went back after they went around another bend with Tael's fur hat and used
it to fill in the tracks. Not an expert job, but they weren't trying to fool experts.
They went on, into the hex and up at the same time. More frequent rest periods were called
for. The air was becoming thin.
During one of these stops, Mavra said, "Still no sign of the Gedemondans. Hell, if they're big
bastards there must be awfully few of them to be this invisible."
Tael shrugged. "Who knows how many there are? Sometimes there seem to be a hundred sneaking
around the mountain tops; sometimes you will go completely through the hex without seeing one.
That is not the trouble here, though."
"Huh?" they all said at once.
She nodded. "We're being watched. I can feel it. I'm not sure where they are, but there is
certainly more than one. I could barely hear some intermittent deep breathing."
They looked around, suddenly nervous. No one could see anything.
"Where?" Renard pressed.
Tael shook her head. "I don't know. Mountain sounds are deceptive. Close, though. They have
networks of trails they, ah, discourage us from using."
"They'd have to," Mavra said dryly. She strained but could hear nothing but the howling wind.
The working part of her ears was still the same as ever, good but not fantastic; all the bigger
ears had done was to give her a little better localization and add a slightly hollow sound to
everything, which the wind magnified.
She was freezing to death, too, despite being covered by an amazingly resourceful patchwork
set of clothes. Her face and particularly her ears were killing her; still, it was no worse on
her than on the others, and they didn't complain.
"Let's keep going," Hosuru said after a moment's listening. "If they're shadowing us, they'll
either make a move or they won't. Just keep listening and looking."
"Don't strain too hard," Tael warned. "If they don't want to be seen, they won't be. All
bright white like the snow, they could be ten meters away and out in the open and you'd never
know it."
They pressed on.
They reached Camp 43 before sundown, but Tael insisted that this would be their stop for the
night. "We couldn't possibly make the next camp before nightfall, and you don't want to be out
here after dark."
"I hope those Yaxa or whatever feel the same way," Renard worried.
"I hope they don't," Mavra responded. "That'll kill a lot more of them a lot quicker. Vistaru?
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