Fall of Angels (The Saga of Recluce #6)(95)

"You drank that quickly," said Ryba. "You would too, if you'd dived into a snowbank and gotten stuck there."

"You wouldn't have had that problem," pointed out Ryba, "if you'd started trying to learn earlier."

Nylan took another sip of the tea. Ayrlyn had already told him as much, far earlier, and he supposed he deserved the reminder, but skiing was a pain, however necessary it might prove.

Ryba raised her eyebrows.

"How were the bows in the cold?" he asked, hoping to change the subject.

"The bows are really good in the cold," Istril said from the foot of the first table.

Nylan nodded. While he hadn't thought about that, both the composite and the endurasteel had been designed to handle the chill of space and the heat of high-temperature reentry, which would make them ideal for the chill of the winter on the Roof of the World.

"Gerlich's already snapped one of his great wooden bows in the cold," Istril added in a lower voice, after looking around and not seeing the hunter. "I'll bet the new bows would be really good in cold-weather warfare."

"Is anyone else crazy enough to be out in this weather?" asked Nylan.

"Well . . . they're good for hunting, too. Even Fierral thinks so, and she's pretty hard on everything."

"Is there that much out in the woods?"

"More than you'd suspect, from the tracks, and that's good for us. You saw the deer. That's a couple of meals, at least, even for twenty of us. There's also a snow cat, almost all white, with big spread paws and claws. I don't know how good the meat is, but I'd bet the fur is warm."

Nylan nodded. After his brief excursion, a warm coat sounded better than wool or a ship jacket, a lot better.





L



NYLAN FASTENED THE ship jacket and pulled on the crudely lined boots that he wore everywhere, even inside the tower. His fingers crossed his stubbly chin, but the chill was so great, even with the heat from the bathhouse stove, that he had not shaved, but only washed his face and hands, before hurrying back up to the tower's top level to dress for the cold day ahead.

The heat from the furnace removed the biting chill of the wind that howled outside the tower's walls, but Nylan's breath turned into a frosty cloud when he stepped away from the heated center of the tower and up to the sole top-level armaglass window to check the sealing. He half rubbed, half scraped away the frost to look outside, but cold air rolled off the glass, and frost re-formed almost as fast as he removed it. Through the little area he could keep clear, he could only see white-white and more white.

For more than two days, the white barrage had continued, and Nylan wasn't certain how much of the snow was new and how much just snow picked up by the roaring wind and flung-and reflung-against the walls.

Most of the exterior tower walls had a spotty coating of ice on the inside stone, except in the kitchen and the furnace room. Kyseen and Kadran had plenty of guards-especially the newer ones-ready to saw and split wood in return for a place around the stove. The number of people willing to work on partitions and stools, or other wooden necessities, in the workroom off the furnace had never been higher. Could it be the warmth? Nylan grinned at the thought, even as he readied himself to head down to join them.

Ryba was below somewhere; she hadn't said where she was going, but, with the storm still going, she was somewhere in the tower.

A figure huddled by the furnace duct on the fifth level. Nylan paused on the steps. "Relyn?"

"Ser?" The red-haired man stood with his cloak wrapped around him. "A man can never get warm here. It's too cold to do anything except be miserable, and just warm enough so that you never quite freeze." He jerked his head toward the single shuttered window. "I can't even leave. Twenty steps in that, and they'd find me frozen in a block of ice come spring."

Nylan sat on a step, and Relyn sat on the other edge.

"Why are you up here?" asked the engineer.

"It's the only place where I can be alone. Sometimes . . ." Relyn shook his head.

"I'm surprised that you haven't gotten close to one of the guards."

"It is ... hard ... to think about, as you put it, getting close to someone who could kill you with one blow."

"Why?" asked Nylan. "Anyone you sleep with anywhere could kill you."

"You always bring up disturbing points, Mage. At home, when I had a home, should anyone have killed me, they would have been tortured and then killed."

"If anyone killed you here, she'd be punished. What's the difference?"

"It is different," pointed out Relyn.

"I suppose so. Here you have to trust someone else, under a ... ruler . . . you don't know. I think that means you've never really trusted anyone." Nylan stood up.

"Mage . .. were you in Carpa, I would challenge you."

"For what? Is the truth so terrible? Most people with power always say they trust people, and what they mean is that they only trust them so long as they control them. True trust occurs only when you have no control."

"I'd rather have control."

"We all would . . . but even that's an illusion a lot of the time." Nylan recalled Ryba's struggle with her visions. "Even for rulers. If a ruler taxes his people too heavily, some will revolt, and he must kill them."