Wizard

38 Bravura

It was no longer a matter of admitting Chris had been right. Robin knew that, had known it for quite a long time. She had had no business going off on her own in a place like this.

She tried once again to move her arm. This time she got some results: one finger twitched slightly, and she felt a rough texture beneath it. She swallowed carefully. One of her seemingly endless fears now was drowning in her own saliva. It could happen. Even worse things could happen. She might find, when she got her body back, that it was broken. In that case she would lie here in the dark forever, and while the bulk of that time would pass in peaceful nirvana, the first few weeks promised to be ugly.

How odd to realize that less than a year ago she had been nineteen, and fearless. It did not seem like such a great age, yet it was ancient for someone who could stumble tomorrow and fall a thousand meters to her death.

There was no reason death had to wait until tomorrow. While she lay helpless, the Night Bird could creep up on her and... do whatever it did to helpless witches.

Her breath caught in her throat, and she once more strained to turn her head just the few centimeters that would enable her to see if, as she suspected, the Night Bird was actually crouching on the ledge a few meters above her head. Once again she failed to see it, but a drop of sweat ran from her brow to sting her eye.

You were supposed to whistle, she remembered. Then: that's ridiculous. You're nineteen years old, maybe twenty already. You haven't been afraid of the Night Bird since you were six. Nevertheless, if she could have puckered, she would have warbled like a canary.

She was half convinced that the faraway sounds she had been hearing since shortly after she left Chris and Valiha were echoes of her own footsteps, the faint whispers of glowbirds shifting on their perches, the distant sounds of falling water. But being half convinced leaves a lot of room for the imagination, and the picture of the Night Bird had leaped from her childhood memories to shriek and gibber just out of her sight.

She did not believe it was the Night Bird; even in her present state she knew no such animal had ever existed, either here or on Earth. It was a story little girls told each other and nothing more. But the thing about the Night Bird was that no one ever saw it. It swooped down on wings of shadow and always attacked from behind; it could change its size and shape to conform to whatever dark place was available, hiding with equal ease in a gloomy cubicle, under a bunk, or even in a dusty corner. Whatever was trailing her-if there was anything-seemed to belong to that dreamworld.

She saw nothing. From time to time she thought she heard the sound of claws snapping together, the rattle of a ghastly beak.

Robin knew there were more living things in the cavern than the glowbirds, the cucumbers, shrimp, and lettuce, and the various plant species. There were tiny glass lizards with from two to several hundred legs. They liked heat and had grown more abundant as she moved east, so that her first morning chore was to rid her sleeping bag of the ones that had crept in. There were things like starfish and snails with shells as varied as snowflakes. Once she had seen a glowbird in flight snatched away by some unseen flier, and another time she had found something that might have been part of the ubiquitous body of Gaea denuded of her rocky covering, or could as well have been a creature beside which a blue whale would have seemed no more than a minnow. All she knew for sure was that it was warm and fleshy and, luckily, somnolent.

If all these things lived in a cavern that was, at first glance, endless kilometers of rocky sterility, why not the Night Bird?

Once more she tried to look over her shoulder, this time succeeding in lifting her chin a little. Soon she was able to twitch her feet. But long after she could move her legs and arms, she remained perfectly still, her feet almost a meter lower than her head, to be sure she was completely in control before she dared try to move from the slope where she had fallen.

When she did move, it was with infinite caution. She edged backward on her heels and elbows until she felt the ground leveling out, then turned to hug the warm rock. Gravity was a wonderful thing when it was pressing you down against a stable surface, not so nice when it tried to pluck you from an uncertain perch. She had seldom thought about gravity before, as either friend or foe.

When her trembling stopped, she crept to the edge of the ravine where she had lain helpless for so many hours. One of her glowbirds had been crushed beneath her when she fell. The other was flickering, near death, but it cast enough light for her to look down and see the bottom, no more than a meter and a half from where her feet had been.

When she came to Gaea, she would have laughed at such a distance. She did not laugh now. After all, it did not take a hundred meters to kill; it did not even take ten. One or two would do, if she hit right.

She took stock of first her body, then her equipment. There was a sharp pain in her side, but after careful probing she decided no ribs were broken. There was blood dried under her nose; she had smacked it when her legs gave way, just before starting her terrifying, feet-first slide into the unknown. Aside from that and some scrapes and a torn fingernail, she was all right. An inventory of the equipment she had kept after several episodes of weeding revealed nothing missing. Her glowbird cage was crushed, but she no longer had any animals to keep in it, and she could make a new one from reeds and vines at her next camp.

She had lost track of how many times she had brushed disaster, was to some degree unsure of just what counted as a brush. Even if she eliminated all the times she had felt her hands slipping on the rope, the momentary losses of footing, the falling rocks that hit only a few meters away, the quicksand that turned out to be only waist-deep, the flash flood that came from nowhere and thundered through a gully she had been about to cross ... even if she counted only the times she had actually felt the grasp of death as a cold, malefic presence, as though its clammy hand had brushed her and left its spoor of fear on her soul, it was too many times. She was lucky to be alive, and she knew it. There had been a time when danger exhilarated her. That time was no more.

Each day brought its new fear. There were so many by now that she was no longer even ashamed of them; she was too beaten down, too crushed by the collapse of the person she had thought herself to be. If anyone ever emerged from this cavern, she knew it would not be Robin the Nine-fingered but some subdued stranger.

It had not been easy to be Robin, but she was a person to respect. No one had ever pushed her around. Once again she wondered why she kept on. It would be more honorable, she felt, to live her life here where no one could see her. To emerge into the light would be to expose her shame.

But sometime later, urged on by a force she did not understand and would have resisted if she had known how, she got up and resumed her long walk east.

It had seemed so simple when she explained it to Chris and Valiha. She would make her way through the cavern, heading always toward the east, until she reached Thea. Of course, that was assuming the direction they were calling east really was east, but if it wasn't, there was little she could do about it.

But it soon became apparent she would have to make more leaps of faith than that first, basic one. She had to assume that the cavern, which was one or two kilometers across at the west end and reached into the unguessable east, would keep going in that direction. And there was no reason to assume that. By the pinpoint lights of the glowbirds she was able to tell the general trend of the passage for two or three kilometers in each direction. It seemed to average out as a straight line, but there were so many twists and curves she could not be sure.

There was another possibility. It was impossible to tell if the cavern was rising or descending. They had started at a level she knew to be five kilometers beneath the surface because Cirocco had said so. She also knew Gaea's outer skin was thirty kilometers thick. There was room to miss Thea's chamber by quite a margin.

Two simple instruments could have banished her disorientation. To go up in Gaea was to become lighter, while descending would have made her weigh fractionally more. A sensitive spring scale could have measured those differences. Her own senses were inadequate. The gyroscopic Gaean clock could have been used as a compass because when its axis was oriented north and south, it no longer turned. By aligning the clock until it stopped and then turning it ninety degrees, she could learn east and west by whether the clock ran backward or forward. But neither Gaby nor Cirocco had ever needed a spring scale in her travels, so they had not packed one. And the clock had stayed with Hornpipe.

She wasted a great deal of time trying to fix her position and direction using simple equipment, and ended up being completely baffled. In particular, it should have been possible to determine east and west by the behavior of falling objects. She tried setting up long plumb lines and dropping things, with inconclusive results. So in the end she blundered on, lost in the dark. She had been doing it for at least three kilorevs, possibly more. She followed the north wall. It had seemed a good idea until she came to the end of a passage, no more than twenty sleeps into her trip. She had followed the south wall back until it began to bend and kept bending through 180 degrees, and she realized she had entered a side passage without knowing it. There was nothing to do but go back across the passage until she reached the marks she had made to guide Chris and Valiha, cross out one and chisel in a new one, directing them to the other passage. Until it, too, ended abruptly three sleeps later.

From that time it had been a nightmare of long treks and heartbreaking backtracks, of gaining slowly as she eliminated false trails one after the other by fighting her way to the ends of them. It was grueling, dangerous work. Her overriding fear was that there was, in fact, no way out, that after all the tears and frustration and the growing realization that she had no real idea where she was going, she would one day see Chris and Valiha's camp in the distance and know it had all been for nothing.

The possibility began to grow that Chris and Valiha would one day catch up with her. She would not have minded that at all. In fact, she often wondered why she did not sit down and wait for them to arrive. It would be nice to have some company. She longed to see the two of them... or it could very well be three by now. She wondered what the baby Titanide would be like.

The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. Three of them working together would do better than Robin working alone. It would be safer, there was no getting around that. Chris would bear some of the danger of leading the way, so her risk would automatically be halved.

And every time she thought that, she pressed ahead with more determination than ever. If she could no longer be fearless, she could at least be dogged. If she must face the fact that she was fearful, she would also face the fear and overcome it.

She entered an arched corridor much like the one she and Chris had fled through. There was nothing unusual about that fact; she had explored a hundred just like it. But she had come to expect so little of her journey that it was more than a surprise when she saw what lay at the end of it. For a moment she was too stunned to move. There was an unpleasant smell in the air. Robin looked vaguely to the left and right, then down, where a thin sheet of clear liquid lapped at her toes. The tips of her boots were smoking.

She jumped back and hastily kicked them off. She might have waded right into it. She could have fallen on her face. It might have gotten into her lungs... .

"Stop it!" she said, aloud, shocked to hear the sound of her own voice. It would never do to stand here and worry about the things that might have happened. She had to deal with what still could happen.

"Thea!" she called. But what if it was Tethys she faced, or Phoebe? She doubted she could tell the difference even up close, and from where she stood, several hundred meters down a dark corridor with the conical regional brain only a speck of light, there was no hope at all. It might be best to go back, to think it out better, maybe approach the problem later.....Thea, I need to speak to you!"

She listened intently, keeping her eyes on the level of acid covering the floor a few meters from her. If it began to rise even the tiniest little bit, she would teach the glowbirds a thing or two about flying.

But the voice of Crius had been faint-hardly a sound to reach down acid-filled tunnels-and though Tethys had sounded louder, it was probably because she had been so frightened, hanging on every word. There was no reason to think Thea could speak any louder than the others.

Robin shouted again, listened, heard nothing. She had not counted on this. She had expected trouble in a million variations but had never thought she might be unable to make Thea aware of her presence.

"Thea, I am Robin of the Coven, a friend of Cirocco Jones, the Wizard of Gaea, Empress of the Titanides, and..." She tried to recall the titles Gaby had rattled off in a bitter moment back at the Melody Shop, but had no luck.

"I'm a friend of the Wizard," she finished, hoping the assertion would be enough. "If you can hear me, you should know I come on the Wizard's business. I need to speak to you."

She listened again, with no better result.

"If you're talking to me, I can't hear you," she shouted. "It is very important to the Wizard that I be able to speak to you. If you could lower the level of the acid so I could get closer, it would be much easier for us to talk." She was about to add that she could not harm Thea, but something in Cirocco's attitude when addressing Crius made her change her mind. She had no idea if it was a dangerous thing for her to assume any of the airs Cirocco had put on. It might be the worst thing she could do. Yet it was equally possible that Thea understood nothing but strength and would slaughter her the moment she showed weakness.

That thought almost made her laugh, frightened as she was. What did she have but weakness? It was possible she would lose control of herself while in Thea's presence and lie helpless while the huge being decided what to do with her.

Never mind all that, she thought. She would get nowhere but back to the far end of the corridor, back to the darkness of bitter defeat, if she kept thinking like that. She must do what she had to do and ignore the trembling in her hands.

"It is necessary that I speak to you," she went on firmly. "For that to happen, you must lower the level of acid. I tell you that the Wizard will be displeased, and through her, Gaea, if you do not do as I say. As you love and respect Gaea, let me approach. As you fear Gaea, let me approach!"

It sounded so hollow, it rang so falsely in her ears. Surely Thea would hear it as plainly as she did, the fear lurking behind her words, ready to betray her.

Yet the level of acid was receding. She approached it cautiously and saw that where there had been a few centimeters of liquid there was now just a slippery, fuming film.

She sat down quickly and opened her pack. Into her boots she stuffed rags from a shirt ruined many hectorevs ago. Her toes were cramped when she put them back on. She tied the rest of the shirt and a corner of her blanket around the outsides of her boots. Then she stepped forward onto the wet floor. She examined the blanket after taking a few steps. It looked as if the acid was not strong enough in that concentration to eat away the material quickly. She would have to chance it.

Thea was being cautious, too. The acid withdrew with painful slowness while Robin danced with impatience. The corridor sloped downward. Soon the walls were dripping acid. Drops began to fall from the ceiling. She drew her blanket over her head and walked on.

At last she came to stand on a ledge identical to the ones she had seen in the lairs of Crius and Tethys.

"Speak," came the voice, and she had never been closer to turning and running than at that moment because the voice was the same, the same as Tethys's. She had to remind herself that Crius had sounded like that, too: flat, emotionless, without human inflection, like a voice constructed on an oscilloscope screen.

"Do not move," the voice continued, "on peril of your life. I can act much faster than you suspect, so do not rely on past experience. I am within my rights to slay you because this is my holy chamber, given to me by Gaea herself, inviolate to all but the Wizard. It is only my long friendship with the Wizard and my love for Gaea that have brought you this far alive. Speak, and tell me why you should continue to live."

She's not one to mince words, Robin thought. As to the words themselves... if they had come from a human she would have thought the speaker insane. And perhaps Thea was insane, but it hardly mattered. "Insanity" was a word the connotations of which were not broad enough to cover an alien intelligence.

"If you mean to turn and run," Thea went on, apparently getting suspicious, "you should know that I am aware of what occurred when you visited Tethys. You should know that she was unprepared, whereas I have known of your approach for many kilorevs. I do not need to flood my chamber; beneath the surface of the moat is an organ capable of propelling a jet of acid powerful enough to cut you in half. So speak, or die."

It occurred to Robin that Thea's threats were a hopeful sign, in the same way that her willingness to speak at all was unexpectedly meek for a second-string God.

"I have spoken," she said, as firmly as she was able. "If you were listening, you know the importance of my mission. Since you apparently were not, I will repeat it. I come on an errand of great importance to Cirocco Jones, the Wizard of Gaea. I bear information she must hear. If I do not reach her to give it to her, she will be greatly displeased."

As soon as she said it, she wished she could bite her tongue out. This was Thea, an ally of Gaea, and the information she was bringing to Cirocco was that Gaea had murdered Gaby. That would not have mattered but for the possibility that Tethys, who must have been involved, had bragged to Thea. Since Thea seemed to know a lot of what had happened in Tethys's chamber, it was clear there was some communication.

"What is the information?"

"That is between me and the Wizard. If Gaea wishes you to know it, she will tell you."

There was a silence that could not have been more than a few seconds. It was enough time for Robin to age twenty years. But when the jet of acid did not come, she could have shouted for joy. She had her! If she could say a thing like that to Thea and still live, it had to be because Thea's respect for Cirocco was a pretty powerful thing.

Now if she could only keep it up for a few more minutes.

She began to move slowly, not wishing to startle Thea. She had gone three steps toward the stairs she could see on the south side of the chamber when Thea spoke again.

"I said you should not move. We have things still to speak of."

"I don't know what they could be. Will you impede one who carries a message to the Wizard?"

"The question may not be relevant. If I destroyed you-as is my right; indeed, my obligation under the laws of Gaea-there would be nobody to tell tales. The Wizard need never know you passed this way."

"It is not your obligation," Robin said, once more muttering prayers under her breath. "I myself have visited Crius. I have been to his inner chambers and lived to talk about it. It requires only the Wizard's permission. This I know, and you must know it, too."

"My chambers have always been inviolate," Thea said. "This is how it must be. No creature but the Wizard has ever been where you stand."

"And I say to you that I have seen Crius. There is no one more loyal to Gaea than Crius."

"I bow to none in my loyalty to Gaea," Thea said virtuously.

"Then you can do no less than Crius did and let me leave unharmed."

Possibly this was a difficult moral dilemma for Thea; for whatever reason, there was another long pause. Robin was bathed in sweat, and her nose burned from the acid fumes.

"If you are so loyal to Gaea," Robin prompted, "why have you been speaking to Tethys?" Once again she wondered if she had said the right thing. But she was possessed by a maniacal urge to play the charade out to its end, come what may. It would not do now to grovel or plead. She sensed that what chance she had lay in putting on a strong front.

Thea was no fool. She realized she had committed an indiscretion in revealing what she knew of Robin's experience in Tethys. She did not attempt to deny it but instead replied in much the same vein Crius had when confronted by Cirocco.

"One cannot help listening. It is how I am built. Tethys is a traitor. He persists in whispering heresy. All is promptly reported to Gaea, of course. From time to time it is of some use."

Robin concluded that Tethys either did not know what Gaby had told them or had not told Thea. With all the talk of Gaea's eyes and ears, Robin had not been sure just how far Tethys's own senses might reach. She suspected that the threshold to his chambers, five kilometers above him, was too far for direct spying on his part. But Thea did not know, for it was certain that if she did, she would have passed it on to Gaea, who would not be eager for Cirocco to learn the circumstances of Gaby's death. And in that case Robin would already be dead.

"You still have not answered my question," Thea said. "What is to prevent me from killing you now and destroying your body?"

"I'm surprised to hear you speak so disloyally," Robin said.

"I said nothing disloyal."

"Yet the Wizard is an agent of Gaea, and you propose deceiving her. We can leave that question for a moment and consider only the practical side. The Wizard, if she lives, knows-" She coughed, trying to make it look like the effects of the fumes. Robin, she said to herself, you have a very large mouth.

"You do not even know if she lives?" Thea asked, and Robin thought she detected a menacingly sweet overtone to the question.

"I did not," she said hastily. "But of course now it is obvious that she does. We would not be talking if she did not, would we?"

"I concede the point. She lives." Red sparks chased themselves over Thea's conical surface. Robin would have been alarmed if she had not seen a similar display when Crius was chastised. Thea was having a painful memory.

"As I was saying, then, the Wizard knows I went down the stairs with my friends. They are still alive and quite likely to remain so. Sooner or later the Wizard will come and find them and..." There were more sparks, and Robin wondered what she had said. She thought she might be treading on dangerous ground, then realized it was odd that Cirocco had not been down to look for them. Of course, she could be lying drunk on the front porch of the Melody Shop, but the implications of that in Robin's current situation did not bear thinking about. And apparently Thea was still sufficiently cowed by the threat of a search by Cirocco to keep on listening.

"The Wizard will come looking," she resumed. "When she finds them, they will tell her I came this way. You will object that I might have become lost in the maze to the west, but do you think the Wizard will be satisfied until she finds my body? And not only that, but a body dead by natural causes, not burned with acid?"

Thea was silent again, and Robin knew she had said all she could. Having posed that last question, she was no longer sure it was such a good one. Would Cirocco come looking for her? Why had she not done so already? Surely she would not abandon Gaby. She wasn't that far gone, was she? Thea did not think so.

"Go then," she said. "Leave quickly, before I change my mind. Carry your message to the Wizard, and may you never have a day's luck with it for the impudent desecration of my chambers. Go. Go swiftly."

Robin thought of mentioning that she would never have come here if there was any other way out, but enough was enough. The acid was rising already, and she began to fear Thea might still engineer a plausible accident. She hurried to the stairs and took them five at a time.

She did not slow down when she was out of sight. She did not intend to slow down at all, ever, but eventually exhaustion overtook her and she stumbled, fell to her knees, and lay gasping, sprawled across three steps.

She had escaped, but there was no elation this time. Instead, there was the impulse she by now knew all too well: the overpowering urge to cry.

But this time the tears did not come. She shouldered her pack and began to climb.

The entrance to the Thean staircase was clogged with snow. At first Robin did not know what it was and approached it cautiously. Books had told her snow was soft and fluffy, but this was not. It was hard-packed and drifted.

She stopped to put on her sweater. It was nearly pitch-black now that the wild glowbirds were gone. Her last glowbird in the rebuilt cage was nearly dead. There had been no chance to catch another in her hurried ascent of the stairs.

The first order of business was to get out in the open. If it was not overcast, she ought to be able to see the Twilight Sea and thus establish which way was west. Beyond that she was unsure. She tried to recall the map she had studied so long ago. Did the central Thea cable touch ground to the north or south of Ophion? She could not be sure, and it was important. Gaby had said the best way to cross Thea was on the frozen river. Once oriented, she would strike out to the south, and if she seemed to be rising, she would turn around because she did know the cable was very close to the river.

Before she was even out of the strand forest, she had to stop and put on all her clothes. She had never imagined such cold. She wondered uneasily if it had been a mistake to discard the bulky parka Chris had insisted she take. It had made sense at the time; the thing had taken up nearly half the space in her backpack, had made her unbalanced and awkward, and she had been sure the two sweaters, the light jacket, and the rest of her clothes would be enough for anything. But he had told her to keep the parka. He had been quite emphatic about it. At least she had her boots. They had been handy in the roughest stretches of climbing, though she had torn out the fur padding that had made her feet sweat. Like everything she owned, they had seen a lot of wear but were well-made and still intact. She rubbed snow over the acid-marked toes, hoping the corrosion would go no further once the stuff was diluted with water.

She was about to start again when she remembered one piece of equipment carried uselessly for so long that would finally come in handy. She dug in her pack and came up with a little mercury thermometer, held it close to the guttering glowbird, and squinted. She could not believe what she saw. But after she had shaken it, the thing still read negative twenty degrees. She breathed on it and saw the slender silver column rise, then slowly fall again. Now she had something else to fear. She could freeze to death if she didn't keep moving.

So get off your butt, she told herself, and eventually obeyed. It would have been nice to be more rested, she thought, but sleeping on the Thean stairs had been out of the question. Now she considered it, standing knee-deep in snow. She could go down a short way until it warmed up, sleep, and start out fresh.

In the end she did not and thought she was being cautious. There was no telling if she was safe from Thea on the stairs.

She looked again at the dying glowbird and knew she had better hurry. If she didn't get out from under the cable soon, the darkness would be complete.

She made it out, learning a few things about snow and ice on the way. Ice was a lot more treacherous than rock, even when it looked solid. As for snow ... she found enough of the properly fluffy variety to last a lifetime. In places it drifted higher than her head. Several times she had to find her way around huge piles of it.

But she saw gray light about the time the glowbird was becoming useless. She tossed the cage away and headed for it.

It was a strange sensation to see so far again. The weather was clear in Thea. The air was crisp and biting with an intermittent wind gusting up to five or ten kilometers per hour. It sucked the heat from her skin where it touched. She could see Twilight to her left, so that was west, meaning she had to circle the cable before she could go south.

Unless she was remembering wrong. It would be wise to consider it again before starting around the cable on a trip she would have to retrace if Ophion were north of the cable. She had had enough backtracking, and this time she had to consider her toes, which were already getting cold. She remembered that Thea was dominated by a rugged mountain range that reached from the north to the south highlands. Ophion, which kept to a nearly central course through the region, divided into a north and south fork somewhere near the middle of Thea. The central cable attached near the point where the streams reunited. For most of its length the south branch flowed beneath one of the two glacial sheets that covered most of Thea and would be nearly impossible to find. But the north branch was free of permanent ice. At times, during some part of Gaea's thirty-year climatic cycle, it thawed, and a narrow valley in central Thea experienced a brief, bleak springtime. Now was not one of those times. Still, even frozen, it should not be too hard to find. It would be relatively level and would be at the bottom of a wide valley.

The more she thought about it, the more she felt her first recollection had been wrong. The ground before her sloped gently down. It was too dark to tell if the river was ahead, but she now thought it was. And what the hell? The chances were even, and this way she would not have to begin by circling the cable. She started off to the north.

The wind picked up before she had gone half a kilometer. Soon snow was whipping from the tops of high drifts, stinging her cheeks. Once more she stopped to rearrange her clothing, this time wrapping her blanket around herself and fashioning a hood which she could hold tight at her neck and thus protect everything but her eyes from the wind.

While she sat, something approached her. She never did get a clear look at it through the blowing snow, but it was white, about the size of a polar bear, and had massive arms and a mouthful of teeth. It sat watching her, and she watched it until it decided to move in for a closer look. Possibly it wanted to say hello, but she didn't wait to find out. It absorbed her first bullet with no change of expression but paused to look down at a spreading red stain on its fur. When it kept coming, she emptied the magazine, and it folded up like clean white linen and did not move again. She fought the shaking in her hands as she reloaded the gun with her last clip, cursing under her breath and blowing on her fingers to make them bend. The creature had still not moved when she was through, but she did not try to approach it. She made a wide detour and resumed her downhill slog.

In a way it was good that she had not thought of what to do once she reached the river. If she had, she might still be huddled under the cable. Better to set one's goal a few steps at a time, she thought, as she stood on the wide, flat, windy plain that must be the frozen Ophion. She looked east, then west. Each direction looked equally impossible. She was in the dead center of Thea, with more than 200 kilometers to go in either direction before she reached daylight. To the east was Metis, which looked warm and inviting but was not, according to Cirocco. Metis was an enemy of Gaea, though not so dangerous as Tethys. West, of course, was Tethys, and the desert. Somehow it did not look so bad from here. She thought of the baking heat of the sands, then of the wraiths beneath those sands, and turned east. There had really been no choice, but pretending there was had given her a few minutes to stand still and not think about her feet.

The terrible thing was that she was burning up as she froze to death. She could not feel her toes while sweat ran down her back and arms. The exertion was keeping her warm-in fact, overheated-but the wind was killing her. There was nothing to do for either condition; she kept walking.

When she stumbled several hours later and then jerked her head up with the realization she had almost fallen asleep, she forced herself to take stock. She had enough experience by now with the drugged, careless rapture so common among people who tried to live in Gaea without a clock that she knew she was far gone under its spell. She had no idea how long she had been awake, but it was probably something like two or three days. She had already been tired when she reached the corridor that led to Thea, and she had been exerting herself continually since that time. It was possible to fall asleep standing up, she knew, because she had done it several times in her traverse of the cavern. She had to find a place to sleep, and fast.

Nothing looked promising. Trying to get her brain to work, she suddenly recalled something about burrowing in the snow. It didn't make sense, but then sleeping out in the wind sounded even crazier.

At the edge of the frozen river was a place where snow had drifted eight meters high. She went to the downwind side and began to hack at the snowbank. It was hard and crusty on the surface, but the digging quickly became easier. She scooped out the snow with both arms, working feverishly to hollow out something big enough to take her body. When she had it, she crawled in, fitfully tried to pack snow around the entrance, then curled up as tightly as she could and was instantly asleep.

She had thought "chattering teeth" was a figure of speech, and not a very good one, like knees knocking when one is afraid. Then she realized her knees were knocking, too. Her whole body was quivering, and she could not stop it. She began to cough, and a lot of wet matter came up before she was through. She was soaking wet and burning with fever. She knew she was going to die.

That thought was enough to bring her scrambling out of her cubby to stand unsteadily on the riverbank. She coughed again, could not stop until she threw up the bitter contents of a nearly empty stomach. She was surprised to find herself on her knees.

She was even more surprised to find herself walking over the ice. Looking back, she could not find the spot where she had stopped. She must have been moving for some time, and she had no recollection of it.

Things began to fade in and out as she walked. Her vision would narrow as if she were looking through a long pipe; then the edges would redden, and she would have to pick herself up from where she had fallen. Her outline looked comical as she stood there swaying, regarding the human cookie-cutter shape she had made. Snow angels, they were called, and she had no idea how she knew that.

Sometimes people walked beside her. She had a long conversation with Gaby and did not remember she was dead until long after. She fired a shot at what could have been another snow monster or just a gust of snow-laden wind. The gun was deliciously warm for a few minutes after that, and she thought of firing it again until she realized it was pointed at her stomach. When she tried to put it back in her pocket, some of her skin came away, stuck to the metal handle. Part of the tail of one of her snake tattoos went with it. Even worse, the lashes of one eye froze together, and she wasn't seeing all that well out of the open one.

The flashing light, when she saw it, was a bother at first. It irritated her because she could not explain it. She wanted no part of paranormal phenomena like the ghost of Gaby or hallucinations of Chris and Valiha, and she was sure this light was something like that. If she went there, she'd probably find Hautbois all saddled up and ready to gallop away with her.

On second thought, why not? If she were going to die, she might as well do it with a friend. So what if the Titanide was dead? She was not prejudiced. They would have a good laugh, and Hautbois would have to admit that there really was a life after death, that she and her whole race had been wrong about that. She laughed at the thought and struck out over the low rise where the light had been.

She was considerably sobered when she reached it, aware of how dangerously close to complete delirium she was getting. She had to keep her wits about her. The light was real, and though she had no idea what it might be, if it wasn't her salvation, then she had none.

Her vision was getting worse. If she had not run into the metal leg, she might well have blundered past it and into oblivion. But the thing rang when her head hit it, and she staggered up one more time, dazed, and peered up into the darkness. A red light was flashing up there, once every ten or fifteen seconds. She could dimly make out a building set on four stilts tied together with metal girders like a fire lookout tower. The tower was about ten meters high. There was a ladder with wooden rungs that went all the way to the top.

Something caught her eye beside the ladder. It was a small sign set just below eye level. She brushed snow away and read it:

PLAUGET CONSTRUCTION COMPANY REFUGE NUMBER ELEVEN

"WELCOME, TRAVELERS!"

-Gaby Plauget, Prop.

Robin blinked at it, read it through several times to see if it would fade away as Gaby's ghost had. It didn't. She licked her lips and fumbled around, trying to get a grip on the wooden rungs. Her hands would not work. Still, it was thoughtful of Gaby to have made the ladder from wood, she thought, recalling the terrible cold of the metal gun butt.

So she hooked her arms over the rungs and dragged herself up that way. She had to look down to see if her feet were on the steps; she could not feel them. Three steps and rest, then five and rest again, then three, then two. Then not even one. She could not raise herself any higher. She looked down and saw that she was almost halfway up, so she must have blacked out and lost count. She looked up and it might as well have been Mount Everest.

So close.

The door opened above her. A face peered down over a narrow ledge. She hoped it was Cirocco because she could believe that; the Wizard had business in Thea-good, sound, logical business. If it were anyone else, she would know it was a mirage, a phantom.

"Robin? Is that you?"

She smelled coffee and something cooking on the stove. That was too good to be true, and no, it was not Cirocco. It was so ridiculous there was no point in even bothering to look back because the face she finally recognized belonged to Trini, her lover a million years ago back in Titantown. At that instant she knew it was all a dream, probably the tower as well as Trini.

She let go and landed on her back in a deep snowdrift.