City of Sorcery (35 page)

“The monastery bells have just rung the Night Office. Wake Cholayna; there is bread and dried fruit from supper, which we will eat on the trail.” Jaelle was pulling on long wool leggings under her breeches. Magda got into her clothes swiftly, bending to whisper to Cholayna. The Terran woman was sleeping heavily, and it occurred to Magda that if they had wanted to leave her behind, they could have stolen away and left her here sleeping, to be wakened only when the kitchen women came in with the unnecessary breakfast.

No. She is our sister, too. We have to be honest with her
, Magda thought, but sighed, wishing Cholayna had agreed to remain here in comparative safety or return to Thendara with Vanessa. She almost wished she were heading south herself, to Armida and family of the Tower and to her child, even to Thendara and her sisters of the Guild-house. She pulled on an extra layer of warm sweater, wordlessly handed Camilla another.

“I’m all right, Margali, don’t fuss so!”

She stared Camilla down, and the older woman, grumbling, pulled it over her head. Camilla was so thin, she would be glad of the warmth when they got into the pass.

Cholayna was shivering in the chill of the big room; they had allowed the fire to burn down. Wasting fuel and warmth were a major crime in the Hellers. The breakfast they had ordered would be eaten by somebody, and would be none the worse for being consumed by someone other than the travelers who had paid for it, but keeping a blazing fire all night was a waste the mountain-bred Magda and Camilla could not condone, even though it meant they must sleep under all their blankets. A thin skin of ice had formed over the pitcher of water at the table where they had eaten their supper, and frost rimed the single high, narrow window of the room.

Jaelle muttered in an undertone, “My brother told me once that the novices in the monastery sleep naked in the snow, wearing only their cowls, and run barefoot. I wish I had their training.”

“I suppose it is one of your psychic powers,” Vanessa said.

“Valentine says not; only use and habit, and convincing the mind to do its task of warming the body.”

Cholayna raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I am not convinced. Hypothermia has killed and continues to kill many people. How can they overcome that?”

“Val would have no reason to lie to me; he says that one of the tests for the higher degrees among the monks is to bathe in a mountain stream from the glacier on Nevarsin Summit, and then to dry, with his body heat, the cowl he wears. He has seen it done.”

“A conjuring trick to impress the novices with their power?”

“What reason would they have for that?”

“Nevertheless,” Vanessa said, “I heard it too when I went into Mapping and Exploring. It has been told before this, in the old days on Terra; before the Empire. Some of the men who lived on the high plateaus, at four thousand meters or more, had lung capacity greater than those who lived at sea level, and their bodies were so adapted that they became ill in the lowlands. I do not doubt that the Nevarsin brethren can learn to do these things. The human animal is amazingly adaptable. Many people would consider your native planet, Cholayna, too hot for human habitation. I visited there once and thought I would die with the heat. Man is not intended to live where the ambient temperature of the air is normally higher than blood heat.”

“Maybe not,” said Cholayna, forcing on her narrow boot over three layers of thick socks, “but I would rather be there than here.” She pulled her heavy wind-breaker over her jacket. “Ready?”

Carrying their personal packs over their shoulders, they stole through the quiet halls, and down a long corridor, away from the living quarters, into the stables. The heavy doors creaked, but there was no other sound, except for Cholayna, who went into a sudden spasm of coughing.

“Quiet,” Jaelle snarled, half-aloud, and Cholayna tried to muffle the sound in her sleeve, without much success, her whole body shaking with effort.

Their horses and chervines, and their loads, reduced considerably from what they had been when they left Thendara, were stacked in a corner of the same stable.

Jaelle whistled softly with relief. “I suspect Arlinda understood what I meant when I talked with her. Last night, these were stowed away in another set of cupboards in a different stable.”

Saddling up her horse, Magda found herself next to Vanessa. She asked in an undertone, “What do you think? Is Cholayna fit for travel?”

“Who can tell? But I checked her as best I could; her lips are a healthy color and her lungs seem to be clear; that ghastly cough is just throat irritation from the dry air and wind at these heights. All we can do is to hope for the best.”

They hoisted loads on to the backs of chervines, and in whispers settled their order of march. Jaelle, who knew the city well, was leading; Camilla, who knew it almost as well, bringing up the rear. Magda delayed at the end to help Camilla shove the heavy stable door together and brace it; but they could not bolt it from the inside, and finally Camilla whispered, “Wait, Margali, I will be with you in a moment.” She slipped back inside; Magda heard the heavy bolt slide. She waited in the street so long that she had begun to wonder if Camilla had been captured by one of Acquilara’s spies in the house.
We should have left the door alone
, she thought, but just as she was about to try and follow Camilla inside, the tall
emmasca
reappeared from a window. She slid down, turned briefly to blow a kiss, then hurried down the street after Jaelle.

Magda ran after her. “Camilla, what - “

“My gambling friend. Let’s not waste any more time; I heard the monastery bell. Let’s go.” But she snickered as she hurried after Jaelle.

“I wonder what they’ll think when they find us gone and the stable still locked from the inside?”

There was no way to silence the hooves of the horses and chervines on the cobbled streets, but leading them was quieter than riding. Still they struck hard, the metal shoes of the horses drawing flinty sparks in the cold. It was icy and clear; stars blinked above the darkened city, and high above, the only faint lights were from the dimmed windows of Saint Valentine’s monastery. Bells rang loud in the predawn stillness.

As they climbed the rocky streets, the stars paled above them, and the sky began to flush with the dawn. Magda could see her own breath, the breath of her companions and of the animals, as little white clouds before her. Her hands were already cold inside her warm gloves, and her feet chilly in her boots, and she thought, regretfully, of that breakfast Jaelle had ordered and never intended them to eat.

Upward and upward, the streets growing steeper and steeper; but Magda had been on the road so long now that she was hardly short of breath at the top of the steepest hills, and even Cholayna was striding along at the quick pace Jaelle set.

The northern gate was at the very top of the city, and the road beyond led over the very summit of Nevarsin Pass. At the gates were two men,
cristoforos
by their somber clothing, though not monks, who opened the wide gates to let them through.

“You are abroad early, my sisters,” one of them said as he stepped back to let their animals pass through.

“We follow two of our sisters who came this way the morning before last,” said Camilla in the exceptionally pure
casta
of a mountain-bred woman. “Did you perhaps let them out this very gate two mornings ago, as early as this, my brother?”

The
cristoforo
guard blew on his bare knuckles to warm them. His breath too was a cloud and he spoke through it, scowling disapprovingly at the
emmasca
.

“Aye, it was I. One of them - a tall woman, darkhaired, a soldier like you,
mestra
, with a
rryl
slung over her shoulder - was she your sister?”

“My Guild-sister; have you news of her, brother, in the name of him who bears the burdens of the world?”

He scowled again, his disapproval of
emmasca
and Renunciate contradicting the inborn freemasonry among soldiers,
cristoforo
or no. And there was no halfway polite way to refuse a request in the very name of the
cristoforo
saint.

“Aye. She had another woman with her, so small I thought for a moment she was travelin’ with her daughter like a proper woman. A little thing, wrapped up so I couldn’t see much of her but the big blue eyes.”

Lexie. So they were still together and Lexie safe and well as recently as two days ago. Magda heard Cholayna’s soft sigh of relief. They might even overtake them somewhere in the pass.

“She asked me - the tall one, your sister - if it was a bad year for banshees. I had to tell her, yes, a terrible one; we heard one howling right outside this gate a tenday ago in the last storm. Go carefully, sisters, try to get over the high part before the sun’s down again,” he warned them. “And saints ride with you. Aye, you’ll need them if you take this road by night.” He stepped back to let them through, closed the heavy city gate behind them.

Ahead the road led upward, stony and steep, ankle-deep in snow, with heavy drifts to right and to left. Jaelle mounted and signaled to the others to do likewise, and they climbed into their saddles. From the heights far above, like a warning, they heard the shrill distant cry of a banshee.

“Never mind,” said Jaelle, “the sun will be up long before we reach the pass, and they’re nocturnal. Let’s go.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Three days later, Magda sat on a packsaddle looking at a dried-meat bar in her hand. She was almost too weary to think about eating it; the effort necessary to chew and swallow seemed more than she could imagine.

The harsh winds of Nevarsin summit had blown away such extraneous fears as the thought of sorceresses or psychic attack; none of them had had a moment to think about anything but the raw mechanics of survival. Narrow ledges, a snowstorm which blew away their last remaining tent and left them to huddle in a hastily scooped hole in the snow, fierce winds which stripped away the last pretense of courage or fortitude, and always in the night the terrible paralyzing cries of the lurking banshee.

Camilla put a cup of tea into her hand. How could Camilla, at her age, remain so strong and undamaged? Her eyes looked red and wind-burned, and the tip of her nose had a raw patch of frostbite, but the few hours of sleep they had managed in the snow had revived her. She sat down on another packload, and slurped her own tea, into which she had crumbled the dried meat and bread, but she didn’t say anything. At this altitude there was no breath for extraneous words.

“Is Cholayna all right this morning?”

“Seems to be. But if we don’t get down to a lower height, I wouldn’t like to guess what might happen. She was coughing all night long.” But not even Cholayna’s coughing could have kept Magda awake last night, after the nightmare of the descent from the pass after dark, by moonlight on the surface of the snow:
kyorebni
looming suddenly from the dizzy gaps of space almost at their feet, wheeling and screaming and then disappearing again: washed-out patches of trail where even the chervines balked and had to be coaxed to step across, and the horses had to be dragged or manhandled, fighting backward, their eyes rolling with terror at the smell of banshee in the crags.

Jaelle had brought them all across, undamaged, without losing a horse or a pack animal or even a load; unhurt. Magda looked at the familiar slight form of her freemate, slumped across a packload, a handful of raisins halfway to her mouth. Her red curls were uncombed and matted under her fur-trimmed hood, her gray eyes sore and wind-burned like Camilla’s and her own. Magda wondered at the strength of will and courage in that small body. There had been moments in the pass when Magda herself, a strong young woman in superb physical condition, had wanted to lie down like one of the ponies, without breath or courage for another step; heart pounding, head splitting, face and body numbed with frost. She could only imagine what it had been like for Cholayna, but the older woman had struggled along bravely beside her, uttering not a single word of complaint. It was Jaelle, Magda realized, who had kept them all going.

Magda followed Camilla’s example and crumbled the meat bar into her boiling tea. The taste was very peculiar, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was astonishing how, at this altitude, she could actually feel the hot food and fluid heating her all the way down, restoring a feeling of warmth to her exhausted and chilled limbs. When she finished the mess she dug into the ration sacks and got out another bar, this one of ground-up nuts and fruits stuck together with honey, and gnawed at it. Cholayna was resolutely spooning up a similar mixture dissolved in her tea.