barreling past the empty city, moving quietly on polished rails and its almost frictionless, rollamite processed wheels. David fought an urge to pull the silver cord of the train whistle. He wished to make as unspectacular a departure as possible.
Eventually, he was torn between two desires. He wanted to watch the landscape flash by, wanted to see the dawn from his command chair. Yet he felt like some time with a cartridge. At last, he went back and brought an adventure novel up front to plug in his ear. The sound and the visions came-the sound deep in his ear, the visions behind his eyeballs. Whenever he could no longer contain himself, he stopped the sound and the pictures and watched the Bluebolt gobble rails toward California and the Haven
It was forty-nine minutes before dawn of that day.
Soon, the Hunter would rise.
And dress in the hides of a hunter.
And make his prayers and set forth to do vengeance
Chapter Six
Hulann's overmind had to wait only a few moments for his organic brain to come to life. When he was fully alert once again, he was immediately conscious of the cold. For a naoli to feel such a sharp sensation of temperature, the situation had to be drastic.
As it was.
He had been flung free of the shuttlecraft, slid along the snowy mountainside, scraping even his tough naoli hide raw in places. He came to a rest in a deep drift sloping into a row of seven, thick-boled pines. He was looking out of a depression in the drift now, up the well his body had made by falling in. His body heat had melted the crystals, and the severe cold had re-frozen them. He was coated in ice that kept melting the re-freezing. The bitterness was worst on the torn patches where he would have bled if the blood had not been frozen solid.
Even a naoli could not survive for long in a situation such as this. He pushed up, stumbled erect, and wearily slapped and kicked his way free of the drift. He stood in the early morning air, half an hour before dawn, scanning the darkness for a sign of Leo or the shuttle.
He could see neither.
Indeed, much of what he could see was blurred by the great clouds of ghostly vapor spouting from his four nostrils, especially from the lower, secondary set which, when operative, did the greatest amount of respiratory work. He was annoyed at this, yet he could not close the secondary nostrils without operating on a semi-dormant level. And he presently needed to move as fast and wisely as possible.
He looked up the side of the mountain, but he could not see the top. A combination of darkness and shifting snow kept his range of vision down to thirty feet. How far down the slope had they come, then? At what point had he been thrown free of the shuttlecraft? Had the car gone to the bottom of the mountain, or had it too come to a stop only part way down? Was Leo alive-or dead? Or dying?
He felt a rising panic at the last few questions. If Leo were dead or dying, then what purpose was there? If Leo were dead or beyond Hulann's help, then this entire flight, and the crime which had given it genesis, was without meaning. He might just as well turn himself in. The point was lost. The symbol had evaporated.
'Leo!' He called loudly, but his words were torn away by the wind, lost in the howling of the natural elements.
He turned and huddled against the wind, cupped his hands on either side of his mouth, shouted again. His hands withered the sound, only served to make the wind's final dissipation easier. Besides, if Leo were dead or unconscious, shouting would do no good whatsoever.
He stood, legs spread, drifted snow up to his knobbed knees, and looked around at the wilderness, confused and frightened. In all his nearly three hundred years, he had never found himself in remotely as dire a situation. The most dangerous moments of his life had been no more horrifying than those with the mutant rat in the cellar only days earlier. This was something else again. He was in a strange landscape, trapped without transportation other than his own feet during a furious spell of weather unlike anything he had ever encountered on the naoli home worlds. Somewhere, there was a boy, perhaps wounded seriously, whom he had to reach. And even if they did get out of this, onto the road again, there was nowhere to go. They had no friends.
The wind blew about him, whipped the snow hard against his scales, leaving it packed on him in some places. As he stood, huge green eyes picking up what little illumination there was, he seemed more of a statue, sculpted by a madman, than anything truly alive and functioning. An alien in an alien world, it seemed almost as if he generated the wind with his very presence, caused the snow to fall by merely standing and watching the darkness.
At last, he moved tentatively to his right, which somehow seemed the proper direction-though there were no signs by which he could intelligently judge. He knew that the car would surely have left a trail as it careened down the mountainside, and he hoped to cross over this eventually, then turn and follow it until he discovered the shuttle or whatever remained of it after its jolting descent.
The wind pounded him as he moved directly into it, buffeted like padded hammers. He could only progress when bent, making himself into a battering ram to crash through the eternal succession of the wind's doors. White breath gusted around him, swirled into the darkness.
He pushed to the last of this clump of pines, brushing a low, snow-laden limb out of his way. The vibrations of his rude passage swept upward through the tiers of the pine, causing a heavy deluge of snow that almost drove him to his knees.
A hundred yards later, he began to worry about his choice of direction. As yet, he had come across no signs of the shuttlecraft, only the smooth blown skin of the storm. Surely he could not have been thrown this far! He decided to make another twenty agonizing steps before turning back to explore the other direction. On the seventeenth step, he came to the edge of the ravine.
He almost stepped into the gulf. As he put a foot down, he realized the front of it curled over a break in the terrain. Cautiously, he pulled it back and went to his knees, peered into the fuzzy mask of the storm. As he concentrated, he began to make out the lines of a cut in the mountainside. He could not see the other side of it, but it was easily a few hundreds yards long, since he could not make out a point of origin or termination on either side.
It was also deep. It ended in a tumble of broken, jagged rocks that peeped up here and there, through their white blanket. If the shuttle had gone into that, then Leo was dead. There was no sense in descending to look for him.
Hulann stood and retraced his steps. During the last hundred feet or so, the wind had obscured his tracks, and he was forced to rely on what little he had noticed about the landscape on his way out. Still, using pines for markers, he got lost twice, spent several minutes stumbling drunkenly both times. He found the drift where he had awakened, for his fall had disturbed it too badly for the wind to heal it in minutes. Here, he hunkered for a moment against the trunk of a pine, trying to recover his breath, energy, and a little of the body heat he had lost.
He picked at the layer of ice that crusted him everywhere but at his joints, then stopped, deciding that the ice would offer his flesh some protection from the wind. He did not want to think about the warmth the ice itself sucked from his system.
After only three minutes of rest, he stood, stretched, and set out over the unexplored region to his left. At first, the wind was an asset, at his back now. It seemed to buoy him along, to make his treading lighter. Soon, the illusion disappeared. The wind became a great fist shoving, slamming against his rear. It sent him stumbling sideways, threw him to the earth and bulleted over him. He kept his long head tucked as much between his shoulders as he could, but the icy blasts against the back of his skull could not be ignored.
But he found the track of the shuttlecraft ripped through the virgin mantle of the winter storm. The snow had begun to fill it in, and the drifting wind had made fast work, narrowing it considerably from what it must have been in the first moments after the car passed. Hulann looked up the trail toward the top of the mountain, wondering if Leo had been thrown free, farther back. He tried to recall the long, falling moments after they had crashed through the rails, but it was all a blur even to his usually observant overmind. He would have to hope that the boy had remained in the craft. Stepping into the trail, he started down to find whatever there was to find.
