“They have to be close. It may be the only way to keep warm.”
“Anytime you think it’s getting a little chilly, Etienne, just consider the poor Mai.” She gestured toward the long team of vroqupii and Brul as she and Etienne marched alongside the hydrofoil. “I wonder how low the temperature has to fall before they become susceptible to frostbite?”
“To freezing, I’d expect, but you’d never know it to look at them now. Half of them are so cold they can’t shiver anymore. Too numb.”
Not one Brul had quit for several days now, however. For those who remained the climb had turned into a grim contest. None would give up so close to the goal for fear of being derided by those who stayed on.
As for the vroqupii, they could not voice any complaints, but they seemed to adjust to the colder weather much better than their masters. Their pace was slower now, more measured, but none had fallen by the wayside. Undoubtedly their short brightly colored fur afforded some protection against the changing climate. It also helped that when a particularly steep spot was reached, they were unhitched while one of the humans lifted the boat and its wheels to the next level on repellers. The Brul looked forward to such respites with relief.
Forty-eight hundred meters. Forty-nine.
“Tomorrow morning.” Etienne spoke as he crouched across from the portable heater they recharged every couple of days from the boat’s batteries. He longed for the comfort of their heated cabin. They slept outside at Homat’s insistence. If they did not, he warned them, they risked losing the respect of the Brul. “We’ll reach the top of the canyon tomorrow morning.”
He put down his self-heating cup of tea and slid beneath the thermosensitive blanket. The covering was warm but the ground beneath the sleeping pad very hard. A glance showed the temperature to be fifty-three.
Tomorrow, vindication, he mused. After that, two days of steady travel overland to Jakaie. There they would find friends, shelter, and fires large enough to warm even the Brul.
Lyra still sat in front of the heater, staring at her husband. “You never would know when to say no, would you, Etienne? A bad habit, one that’ll be the death of both of us one of these days.” She smiled. “You dragged me all this way when I’d just as soon have quit and turned back toward home.”
“Home?” His eyebrows lifted.
“Well, back toward Turput. I’ve come to think of that as kind of a home away from home.”
“In spite of the inhabitants’ unpleasant burial rituals?”
“I didn’t spend much time consorting with the dead. I get to do that on the boat every night.”
“Very funny.” But she was still smiling. Tyl sat nearby, leading his fellow Tsla in their nighttime chant. Etienne watched her as she listened to them without reaching for her recorder. Light from the porters’ fire lit her profile, burning away the years.
Ten years together. She’d been very beautiful a decade ago. Now she was hardened, toughened by fieldwork, by adversity, by too many hours spent away from the comforts of civilization—and still beautiful. All the poison in her spirit, all the acid in her voice could not change that.
She grew conscious of his stare and turned back to him. “I owe you an apology for wanting to turn back.”
“How about a kiss instead? I haven’t had a kiss in a long time. Apologies I can live without.”
She eyed him uncertainly for a moment, then walked around the heater to bend next to him, touching her lips to his. They were warm against the night.
Then she pulled away, sooner than he wished. Too brief, too considered, not spontaneous enough, he thought. But something, it was something. It had been a long time since they’d had even that.
He turned over beneath the blanket, feeling much warmed inside—and not by the heater—anxious for morning to come.
XII 
Screams, shouts of panic, and the hoarse trilling cries of the vroqupii woke him, the latter a sound he hadn’t heard since the start of the long climb up from the Skar. Gesticulating silhouettes rushed past his sleep-filled eyes like the shadows of ghosts. Only the heater was alive, a steady glow in the darkness.
Trying to force himself awake he sat up, hunting for the source of all the disturbance. Suddenly he found himself rising from the ground. Something had placed tight steel bands around his shoulders and the back of his neck. He screwed his head around so he could look overhead, thinking how strange it was to meet a denizen of hell five thousand meters away from the center of the planet.
Four long wings beat at the air, protruding from a thick, flattened body. Wind and a fetid, corrupt odor assailed his face. Not far from his eyes, altogether too near, was a mouth full of sharp hooks. A pair of saucer-sized bright blue eyes glared down at him. The pupils were huge and yellow.
The odor of carrion was overpowered by a sudden sharp smell of ozone. The monstrosity shivered. Lyra fired again and Etienne found himself falling. He landed heavily on his blanket and sleeping pad instead of the naked rock. With two holes burned through one wing, the creature had had enough. It lifted skyward, emitting a cry very like the sound the devil must make when gargling.
Etienne rolled over and clutched his right elbow, which had absorbed the brunt of his fall. It throbbed painfully. He was fully awake now.
Lyra jostled him as she slid on her knees next to him. Her eyes were still on the night sky. “Here,” she said, handing him his pistol. “Others are still around.” She gave him a hand up.
Guarding each other’s backs they stumbled through the confusion and screaming, Etienne handling the asynapt with his left hand. The most immediate danger came not from the nocturnal carnivores but from the bellowing, stampeding vroqupii.
Etienne fired and fired. Though there was no recoil, his fingers grew numb simply from gripping the pistol. Eventually the night was scoured clean, however, and he let the weapon fall to his side. The stars returned, except off to the north where the air was filled with vast dark shapes, rapidly receding.
The Redowls returned to their campsite, set the heater back on its base, and sat down. All around them panic was giving way to muttered curses and exclamations in excited Mai.
Homat joined them, almost invisible in his cold-weather gear.
“What were they?” Lyra asked him. Etienne massaged his elbow, still looking to the north where a last straggler fled after its companions on ten-meter-wide wings.
“Monsters.” Homat was shivering despite his bulky attire. “Very rarely do they come down to the river. They must be more common up here, where the land is better suited to monsters and Tsla!”
Other eyes joined the conference. If Tyl had overheard Homat’s last words, he chose not to comment. “Strepanong,” he declared, gesturing heavenward with his flexible proboscis. “Scavengers and killers.” He paused. “They took two of the Brul. They rarely bother us in the fields, and never in the towns. Never have I seen so many in one place at the same time. The presence of so much meat must have drawn them.”
“A bad omen, bad omen,” Homat was muttering. “Perhaps we should turn back, de-Etienne.”
A small invisible needle pricked his elbow and he winced. “Not after making it this far, Homat. I’m not turning back now.”
“The Brul may grumble once they restore calm among their animals,” Homat warned him. “They do not come this far to fight with monsters.”
“Tyl, repeat what you said about never having seen so many in one place before. The chances of this happening again before we reach Jakaie are insignificant, aren’t they? Tyl?”
The Tsla spoke mournfully. “I can guarantee nothing, Learned Etienne, though it would be most unlikely.”
“One strepanong is too many,” Homat argued.
“We drove them off,” Lyra reminded him, gesturing with her pistol. “We injured several of them, maybe fatally, threw a real scare into the entire flock. I don’t imagine they’ll come after us again. You tell the Brul that. And from now on Etienne and I will alternate standing guard at night so we’re not surprised anymore. If there is a next time they’ll feast on strepanong, not the other way around.”
“That is no consolation to the families of the two who were taken.” Homat shuddered at the thought.
“Their families will be compensated,” she promised. “Tell the Brul that if they turn back now because of a bunch of carrion eaters they’re no better than children, crying for their mothers. We’re only a couple of days, maybe less, from our goal, where there’ll be warm shelter and safety for all.”
Tyl assumed an uncharacteristically haughty air. “That much can be assured. Tsla hospitality refuses no one.”
“You can also tell them,” Lyra continued with a sudden burst of inspiration, “that if they insist on turning back now, we’ll have to find Tsla help to take us the rest of the way.”
Homat smiled at this slyness. Truly de-Lyra was becoming knowledgeable of Mai ways. “All your assurances would not convince them, but an insult to their reputations!—yes, I will tell them that. I do not think we will have any trouble.” He turned and disappeared in the direction of the vroqupii corral.
The Redowls were left alone. Lyra indicated her husband’s right arm. “What’s with your elbow?”
He forced a wry grin. “It thought it was a foot. I landed on it, but I don’t imagine it’s broken. Just feels like it. Couldn’t you have managed to shoot the damned thing before it got me off the ground?”
“Sorry,” she said dryly. “Be thankful we’re camped on a relatively wide section of trail. You might’ve been dumped over a precipice.”
