Meta picked up a war ax and stood by the entrance to make sure that Jason was not disturbed when he opened the lockbox. He took out the meal packs and unsealed them, then pointed tO the radio.
“Report to Kerk at midnight. Let him know everything that is happening. You should be safe enough here, but if it looks like there will be any difficulty, tell him to pull you out.”
“No. We will stay here until you return.” She plunged her spoon into the food and ate hungrily. Crlf took the other pack and Jason stood guard at the entrance during the meal.
“Put the empty cans into the lockbox until we find a safer spot to bury them. I wish there was more I could do.”
“Don’t worry about us. We know how to take care of ourselves,” Meta told him firmly.
“Yes,” Grif agreed, unsmiling. “This planet is very soft after Pyrrus. Only the food is bad.”
Jason looked at them both, battered yet undefeated. He opened his mouth, then closed it because there was really nothing that he could say. He packed a leathern bag with the supplies he might need for the trip, extra clothing, and a microminiaturized transceiver that slipped into the hollow handle of his war ax. This and a short sword were his only weapons. He had tried using the laminated horn bows, but he was so improficient that he was better off not having one of the things around. Slinging a shield from his left arm, he waved good-bye and left.
When Jason rode up on his lnorope, he saw that a small force of less than 50 men had assembled for the expedition. They carried no extra equipment or supplies and it was obvious that it would not be a prolonged trip. Only after Jason had intercepted a number of cold glances did he realize that he was the only outsider there. All the others were either high-ranking officers and close associates of Temuchin or members of his own tribe.
“I can keep secrets, too,” Jason told Ahankk, who rode close, scowling, but he received only a fine selection of grating curses in return. As soon as the warlord appeared, they rode off in a double column, following his lead.
It was hard riding and Jason was thankful for the weeks he had spent in the saddle. At first they started toward the foothills to the east, but as soon as they were hidden from sight of the camp and sure that they were not observed by stragglers, they turned and moved south at a ground-eating pace. The mountains rose up on all sides of them as they rode from valley to valley, climbing steadily. Jason, breathing through his fur neckpiece, could not believe that throat-hurting air could be so cold, yet it did not seem to bother anyone else.
They grabbed a quick, unheated meal at sunset, then kept on going. Jason could see the sense in this; he had almost frozen to the ground during their brief halt. They were in single file now. The trail was so narrow that Jason, like many of the others, dismounted to lead his morope, in an attempt to warm himself above the congealing point by the exertion. The cold light of the star-filled sky lit their way.
Coming to a junction of two valleys, Jason looked to his right, at the gray sea spreading out in the distance beyond the nearly vertical cliffs. Sea?! He stopped so suddenly that his Inorope trod on his heels and he had to jump aside to avoid being trampled.
No, it couldn’t be the sea. They were in the middle of the continent. And too high up. Realization came late, he was looking at a sea rightly enough, the top of a sea of clouds. Jason watched until a turn in the trail took them from sight. The trail was dipping downward now as he knew it must. He halted his inorope so that he could climb back into the saddle. Somewhere up ahead was the edge of the world.
Here the domain of the nomads ended at the continent, spanning cliff, a solid wall of rock reaching up from the plains below. Here also, was where the weather ended. The warm southern winds blowing north struck the cliff, were forced upward and condensed as clouds, to then bring their burden of water back to the land below as rain. Jason wondered if they ever saw the sun at all this close to the escarpment. A glistening dusting of snow in the hollows showed that severe storms pushed even over the top of this natural barrier.
As the trail dropped it passed through a narrow pass and, once inside, Jason saw a stone hut under an overhang of rock, where guards stood and stoically watched them pass. Whatever their destination was, it must be close. A short while later they halted and word was passed back to Jason to wait on Temuchin. He shuffled to the head of the procession as fast as his numbed muscles would permit.
Temuchin was chewing steadily on a resistant piece of dried meat, and Jason had to wait until he had washed this morsel down with some of the half-frozen achadh. The sky was lightening in the east and, by the traditional nomad test, it was almost dawn, the moment when a black goat’s hair could be told from a white.
“Bring my inorope,” Temuchin commanded as he strode away. Jason grabbed the reins of the tired, snapping beast and dragged it after the warlord. Three officers followed after him. The trail took two more sharp turnings and opened out onto a broad ledge, the farther side of which was the sheer edge of the cliff. Temuchin walked over and stared down at white-massed clouds not far below. But it was the rusty chunk of machinery that fascinated Jason.
The most impressive part was the massive A frame that was seated deep into the living rock at the cliff’s edge, projecting outward and overhanging the abyss below. This had been hand-forged, all eight meters of its length, and what a prodigious labor that must have been. It was stabilized with cross-brace rods and rested against a ridge of rock at the lip of the drop that raised it to a 45-degree angle. The entire frame was pitted and scratched with rust, although some attempt had been made to keep it greased. A length of flexible black material led over a pulley wheel at the point of the A and back through a hole in a buttress of rock behind. Aroused now by curiosity, Jason went around the rock to admire the device behind it.
In its own way, this engine, though smaller, was more spectacular than the supporting frame on the cliff. The black ropelike material came through the hole and wound around a drum. This drum, on an arm-thick shaft, was held to the back of the vertical rock face by four sturdy legs. It could obviously take an immense strain as there was nothing to uproot: all of the pressure would be carried directly to the rock face, seating the legs even more firmly. A meter-wide gear wheel, fitted to the end of the drum, meshed with a smaller pinion gear that could be turned by a long crank handle. This was appareiitly made of wood, but Jason did not pay much attention to the fact. A number of pawls and ratchets made sure that nothing could slip.
It could not take a mechanical genius to understand what the device was for. Jason turned to Temuchin, forcefully controlling the tendency for one eyebrow to lift, and said: “Is this the mechanism by which we are supposed. to descend to the lowlands?”
The warlord seemed about as impressed by the machine as Jason was himself.
“It is. It does not appear to be the sort of thing one would usually risk one’s life with, but we have no choice. The tribe which built and operated it, a branch of the stoat clan, have sworn that they used it often to raid the lowlands. They told many tales, and had wood and gunpowder to prove it. The survivors are here and they will operate the thing. They will be killed if there is any trouble. We will go first.”
“That won’t help us very much if something goes wrong.”
“Man is born to die. Life consjsts only of a daily putting off of the inevitable.”
Jason had no answer to this one. He looked up as, with pained cries, a group of men and squat women were driven down the hill toward the winch.
“Stand back and let them do their work,” Temuchin ordered, and the soldiers instantly withdrew. “Watch them closely and if there is treachery or mistakes, kill them at once.”
Thus encouraged, the stoat clansmen turned to their jobs. They appeared to know what they were doing. Some turned the handle while others adjusted the clanking pawis. One man even pulled himself out on the frame, far over the cliff’s edge, to grease the pulley wheel on its end.
“I will go first,” Temuchin said, slinging a heavy leather harness around his body under his arms, “I hope that rope thing is long enough,” Jason said, and instantly regretted it when Temuchin turned to glare at him.
“You will come next, after you have sent down my morope. See that it is blindfolded so it does not panic. Then you, then another Inorope, in that order. The inoropes will be brought to the cliff only one at a time so they do not see what is happening to the others.” He turned to the officers. “You have heard my orders.”
Chanting in unison, the stoats turned the handle to wind the rope onto the drum, the pawls slowly clanking over. The pressure came on the harness but the rope stretched and thinned before Temuchin was lifted from the ground. Then his toes swung clear and he grabbed the rope as he swung out over the abyss, oscillating slowly up and down. When the bobbing had damped the operators reversed the motion and he slowly dropped from sight. Jason went to the lip and saw the warlord’s figure get smaller and finally vanish into the woolly clouds below. A piece of rock broke loose under the pressure of Jason’s toe and he stepped backward quickly.
Every hundred meters, more or less, the men slowed and worked cautiously as a blob appeared where two sections of the elastic rope were joined together. They turned the handle carefully until the knot had cleared the
