Fall of Angels (The Saga of Recluce #6)(100)

LIII



AS HE WATCHED Saryn shift her weight on the ungainly skis, Nylan wanted to shake his head, but he had little enough time for that. Just following the former pilot's tracks was proving hard enough even after his determined efforts over the past eight-days. To navigate and shoot a bow on skis remained an effort, but he wasn't plunging headfirst into the snow or leaning backward until his skis slid out from under him and left his shoulders and rump buried in the white powder.

With a passing cloud, a shadow fell across the trail, and Nylan's eyes squinted to adjust to the change in the midday light, but the relative relief of the cloud passed, and the glare returned.

The snow around and across the Roof of the World was more than seven cubits deep, and twice that in drifts. That was deep enough that Nylan could fall into one of those pits and never make his way out, not without turning into a knot and cutting the thongs. There was no way to untie them hanging upside down in a mass of powdered ice or the equivalent. His fingers twitched around his poles as he thought about the knife at his waist.

He blinked as a clot of snow thrown up from Saryn's skis and carried by a gust of wind splattered above his left eye.

Saryn held up a hand, and Nylan coasted to a stop right behind her, proud that he neither hit her nor fell into the deep snow beside the semitrail that the guards had created through the lower forest.

As he caught his breath on the level stretch before a steep descent through the trees, trying not to breathe too deeply, Nylan put off thinking about the climb back up the ridge that would follow the trip.

"I think there are some deer, and maybe a snow leopard, downhill and to the right. The wind's coming uphill here, and I might be able to get close enough," whispered Saryn.

"If I'm not stamping along?"

She nodded.

"Go on. We're always on the verge of running out of meat."

"Can you just wait here?" asked Saryn, her voice still low. "With your bow ready?"

"I'll wait with a bow handy. How much good it will do I'm not sure." Nylan tried to keep his own voice down.

As the wind whispered through the evergreens, clumps of snow splattered around them, leaving pockmarks scattered on the once-smooth white surface, depressions that the wind seemed to begin to fill immediately with feathery white powder that scudded along the snow.

The engineer glanced back uphill. Already, sections of the packed trail they had followed had begun to disappear beneath the drifting snow. Another shadow darkened the Roof of the World, and he looked up at the white cloud that scudded across the sun.

"You'll do fine. Just don't let our supper get away." Saryn raised her left hand and then slipped down the steeper section of the partly packed snow trail ahead. In moments, she was out of sight in the trees, gone as silently as if she had never been there.

Nylan shrugged and unlimbered the composite bow, wishing that he had practiced more with the weapon. The shadow of the cloud passed, and for a long time, nothing moved in the expanse of white beneath the overhanging firs, nothing except snow scudded between trunks by the light wind that rose and fell, rose and fell.

A gray-winged form plunged from nowhere into a swirl of powdered snow, and a quick geyser of white erupted, then died away as the gray-hawk flapped away, a small white-coated rodent in its claws.

As the hawk vanished, Nylan inched forward on the skis, mainly to shift his weight and keep his hips and knees from cramping in the cold. He looked back in the general direction of the tower, but could see nothing but snow, tree trunks, and the white-covered green of the fir branches.

A rhythmic swishing, almost a series of whispering thuds, rose, just barely, over the hissing of the wind.

Nylan squinted, looking downhill, when the snow cat bounded across the hillside toward the trail where he stood, moving so quickly that what had seemed a small figure swelled into a vision of knife claws and glinting teeth even as Nylan released his first arrow and reached for the second, triggering reflex step-up. The second arrow flew as the leopard reached the snow beside the flat section at the crest of the trail.

Both Nylan and the snow cat seemed to be moving in slow motion, but the engineer forced his body to respond. The third arrow left the bowstring as the cat stretched toward Nylan.

Bow still in hand, he managed to dive into the snow at the side of the trail as the snow cat lunged at him. A line of fire slashed down his shoulder as he half twisted away from the mass of fur and claws. His skis linked together, and he toppled like a tree blasted by a microburst into the deep snow, a heavy weight on his back.

That weight did not move, and, in time, Nylan levered it away from him and, through a combination of rolling, twisting, and gasping, finally struggled into the light.

His knees ached. One leg burned, and the other threatened to cramp. Half sitting, half lying in the snow, he managed to reach one of the poles he had abandoned to use the bow, and with it, to retrieve the bow itself. He laid it on the edge of the harder snowpack of the trail. Then he looked at his boots and the mass of snow and ice around the thongs.

With a groan and more rolling he finally managed to totter erect.

The claws had sliced through the heavy leather shoulder of the hunting jacket he had borrowed from Ayrlyn, but blunted the impact enough that the wound was little more than a thin line skin-deep.

He looked at the snow-covered leopard, then downhill, but the forest was silent. After prodding the cat with one of his poles, he took a deep breath, regretting it instantly as the chill bit into his lungs, and then edged his skis toward the dead leopard.