Fall of Angels (The Saga of Recluce #6)(109)

"Yes, ser. They won't like it, ser."

"Rimmur ... do they want to know and be dead, or not know and be alive?"

"Ser?"

"If no one knows where we're going, whether it's after Ildyrom or the black angels, then our enemies can't plan. If they can't plan, then fewer of our men get killed. So just get them ready. Tell them what I told you."

"Yes, ser." Rimmur stands and waits.

As Terek and Sillek head up the narrow steps to the upper levels of the tower, the white wizard clears his throat, finally saying, "You never did indicate . .. ser . .."

"That's right, Terek. I did not. I do not know what sort of screeing or magic the angels have. So my decision remains unspoken until we leave. That way, Ildyrom and the angels have to guess not only which one I intend to attack, but also when."

"As Rimmur said, ser, that makes preparation uncertain."

"Terek . . . before this is all over, we'll end up fighting them both. So prepare for both eventualities." Sillek steps out onto the upper landing and turns. "Your preparations won't be wasted."

"Yes, ser." Terek inclines his head.

"Good." Sillek turns and walks down the corridor to the quarters where Zeldyan waits.





LXI



THE NIGHT WIND whistled outside the tower windows, rattling the shutters on the partitioned - off side so much that small fragments of ice broke off and dropped to the floor inside the sixth level. From the third level below came the faint crying of an infant, Dephnay, but the crying died away, replaced by the faintest of nursing sounds, and gentle words.

On the slightly warmer side of the top level of the tower, protected by the thin door, the recently completed partitions and hangings, Ryba and Nylan lay in the darkness.

Nylan's legs ached from the skiing, the endless attempts to find and track the smaller rodents he knew were in the forests. His arms and shoulders ached from the drubbings he had taken in his last blade-sparring sessions with Saryn and Ryba in the half darkness of the fifth level of the tower. His lungs were heavy from the cold. His guts grumbled from the continual alternation of too much meat and too few carbohydrates with the periods of too little food at all. His upper cheeks burned from near-continual frostbite, and his fingers ached from holding a smoothing blade or a knife too long.

For all his exhaustion, he could not sleep, and his eyes fixed on the patchwork hangings that moved, ever so slightly, to the convection currents between the cold stone walls and the residual warmth of the chimney masonry that ran up the center of the tower.

Ryba lay on her back, nearly motionless, eyes closed, the woolen blanket concealing her swelling abdomen.

In the darkness through which he could see, Nylan studied her profile, chiseled against the darkness like that of a silver coin against black velvet, a profile almost of the Sybran girl-next-door, lacking the regalness that appeared whenever she was awake.

What had made her able to struggle against such odds, going from a steppe nomad child to being one of UFA's top combat commanders and to founding a nation or tradition that seemed almost fated to endure?

Would it endure? How long?

He stifled a sigh. Did it matter? Ryba was going to do what Ryba was going to do, or what her visions told her to do, and for the moment he had no real choices. Nor did any of them, he supposed, not if they wanted to survive. He tried to close his eyes, but they hurt more closed than open, with a gritty burning.

The shutter on the far side of the tower rattled again as the wind forced its way against the tower, and more icicles broke off and shattered across the plank floor. Even the armaglass window creaked and flexed against the storm, although Ayrlyn insisted that, while the storms would be more violent in the eight-days ahead, they represented the warming that was already under way.

Nylan hadn't seen any real warming outside, and the snow was still getting deeper, and the game scarcer, and the livestock thinner, and tempers more frayed.

He tried to close his eyes again, and this time, this time they stayed closed.





LXII



NYLAN LAY IN his snow-covered burrow, the long thong attached to the weighted net suspended over the concealed rabbit run.

Catching even rodents was a pain. First he'd had to put out the nets almost an eight-day before so that the damned frost rabbits would get used to the scent-or that the cold and wind would carry it away. But even when they triggered the net, somehow they never had stayed caught long enough for Nylan to get there.

So he'd been reduced to tending his net traps in person.

It had taken him all morning to get the one dead hare strapped to his pack, and it was well past mid-afternoon. Now, lying covered in the snow, watching the second rabbit run he had discovered, Nylan could sense the snow hare just below the entrance to the burrow. It had poked its head out several times, but not far enough or long enough for Nylan to drop the net.

So the engineer shivered and waited... and shivered and waited.

The sun had almost touched the western peaks before the hare finally hopped clear of the burrow.

Nylan jerked the thong and the weighted net fell.

The rabbit twisted, but the crude net held, and in the end, Nylan carried a small heap of thin flesh and matted fur up through the snow. Now he had two thin, dead snow hares- that was all.

He was cold, his trousers half-soaked. The sun was setting, and he had a climb just to get out of the forest, even before the ridge up to Westwind.