They came steeply down the western flanks of Zubuam for three days in cloudy weather, seldom able to see the barrier wall of Silong across the vast gulf of air where the wind chased coiling clouds and ghostly snow flurries that never came to earth. They followed the guides all one day through cloud and fog along an arete, a long spine of snow-covered rock with a steep drop to either side.

The weather cleared suddenly, clouds gone, sun blazing at the zenith. Sutty was disoriented, looking up for the barrier wall and not finding it. Odiedin came beside her. He said, smiling, "We’re on Silong."

They had crossed over. The enormous mass of rock and ice behind them in the east was Zubuam. An avalanche went curling and smoking down a slanting face of the rock far up on the mountain. A long time later they heard the deep roar of it, the Thunderer telling them what it had to tell.

Zubuam and Silong, they were two and one, too. Old maz mountains. Old lovers.

She looked up at Silong. The heights of the barrier wall loomed directly over them, hiding the summit peak. Sky was a brilliant, jagged-edged slash from north to south.

Odiedin was pointing to the south. She looked and saw only rock, ice, the glitter of thaw water. No towers, no banners.

They set off, trudging along. They were on a path, level and quite clear, marked here and there with piles of flat stones. Often Sutty saw the dry, neat pellets of minule dung beside the way.

In mid-afternoon she made out a pair of rock spires that stuck up from a projecting corner of the mountain ahead like tusks from the lower jaw of a skull. The path narrowed as they got closer to this corner, becoming a ledge along a sheer cliff. When they got to the corner, the two reddish tusks of rock stood before them like a gateway, the path leading between them.

Here they stopped. Tobadan brought out his drum and patted it, and the three maz spoke and chanted. The words were all in Rangma and so old or so formalised that Sutty could not follow their meaning. The two guides from the village and their own guides delved into their packs and brought out little bundles of twigs tied with red and blue thread. They gave them to the maz, who received them with the mountain-heart gesture, facing toward Silong. They set them afire and fixed them among rocks by the pathway to burn down. The smoke smelled like sage, a dry incense. It curled small and blue and lazy among the rocks and along the path. The wind whistled by, a river of turbulent air rushing through the great gap between the mountains, but here in this gateway Silong sheltered them and there was no wind at all.

They picked up their packs and fell into line again, passing between the saber-tooth rocks. The path now bent back inward toward the slope of the mountain, and Sutty saw that it led across a cirque, a level-floored half-moon bay in the mountainside. In the nearly vertical, curving inner wall, still a half kilo or so distant, were black spots or holes. There was some snow on the floor of the. cirque, trodden in an arabesque of paths leading to and from these black holes in the mountain.

Caves, scarred Adien, the ex-miner, who had died of the jaundice in the winter, whispered in her mind. Caves full of being.

The air seemed to thicken like syrup and to quiver, to shake. She was dizzy. Wind roared in her ears, deep and shrill, terrible.

But they were out of the wind, here in the sunlit air of the cirque. She turned back in confusion, then in terror looked upward for the rockslide clattering down upon her. Black shadows crossed the air, the roar and rattle were deafening. She cowered, covering her head with her arms.

Silence.

She looked up, stood up. The others were all standing, like her, statues in the bright sunlight, pools of black shadow at their feet.

Behind them, between the tusks, the gateway rocks, something hung or lay crumpled. It gleamed blindingly and was shadow-black, like a lander seen from the ship in space. A lander — a flyer — a helicopter. She saw the rotor vane jammed up against the outer rock spire. "O Ram," she said.

"Mother Silong," Shui whispered, her clenched hand at her heart.

Then they started back toward the gate, toward the thing, Akidan in the lead, running.

"Wait, Akidan!" Odiedin shouted, but the boy was already there at the thing, the wreck. He shouted something back. Odiedin broke into a run.

Sutty could not breathe. She had to stand a while and still her heart. The older of their guides from the foothill country, Long, a kind, shy man, stood beside her, also trembling, also trying to breathe evenly, easily. They had come down, but they were still at 18,000 pieng, she had heard Siez say, 6,000 meters, a thin air, a terribly thin air. She said the numbers in her head.

"You all right, yoz Long?"

"Yes. You all right, yoz Sutty?"

They went forward together.

She heard Kieri talking: "I saw it, I looked around — I couldn’t believe it — it was trying to fly between the pillars—"

"No, I saw it, it was out there, coming up alongside the pass, coming after us, and then it seemed like a flaw of wind hit it, and tipped it sideways, and just threw it down between the rocks!" That was Akidan.

"She took it in her hands," said Naba, the man from the deep village.

The three maz were at the wreck, in it.

Shui was kneeling near it, smashing something furiously, methodically, with a rock. The remains of a transmitter, Sutty saw. Stone Age revenge, her mind said coldly.

Her mind seemed to be very cold, detached from the rest of her, as if frostbitten.

She went closer and looked at the smashed helicopter. It had burst open in a strange way. The pilot was hanging in his seat straps, almost upside down. His face was mostly hidden by a blood-soaked woollen scarf. She saw his eyes, bits of jelly.

On the stony ground, between Odiedin and Siez, another man lay. His eyes were alive. He was staring up at her. After a while she recognised him.

Tobadan, the healer, was quickly, lightly running his hands over the man’s body and limbs, though surely he couldn’t tell much through the heavy clothing. He kept talking as if to keep the man awake. "Can you take off your helmet?" he asked. After a while the man tried to comply, fumbling with the fastening. Tobadan helped him. He continued gazing up at Sutty with a look of dull puzzlement. His face, always set and hard, was now slack.

"Is he hurt?"

"Yes," Tobadan said. "This knee. His back. Not broken, I think."

"You were lucky," Sutty’s cold mind said, speaking aloud.

The man stared, looked away, made a weak gesture, tried to sit up. Odiedin pressed down gently on his shoulders, saying, "Be quiet. Wait. Sutty, don’t let him get up. We need to get the other man out. People will be here soon."

Looking back into the cirque, toward the caves, she saw little figures hurrying to them across the snow.

She took Odiedin’s place, standing over the Monitor. He lay flat on the dirt with his arms crossed on his chest. He shuddered violently every now and then. She herself was shivering. Her teeth chattered. She wrapped her arms around her body.

"Your pilot is dead," she said.

He said nothing. He trembled.

Suddenly there were people around them. They worked with efficiency, strapping the man onto a makeshift stretcher and lifting it and setting off for the caves, all within a minute or two. Others carried the dead man. Some gathered around Odiedin and the young maz. There was a soft buzz of voices that did nothing but buzz in Sutty’s head, meaningless as the speech of flies.

She looked for Long, joined him, and walked with him across the cirque. It was farther than it had seemed to the mountain wall and the entrance to the caves. Overhead a pair of geyma soared in long, lazy spirals. The sun was already behind the top of the barrier wall. Silong’s vast shadow rose blue against Zubuam.