It was altitude causing that. He’d felt it a little down at the cabin with the senior riders, and Guil had warned him it could get debilitating—which he couldn’t afford right now. Mouth was dry. They hadn’t eaten all day. He didn’t think he could swallow the thawed food he carried; eating snow relieved the dryness but chilled the bones, so he just took a little mouthful, after which he shut his eyes—partly to ease the headache and partly just to warm them from the wind.

But even with his eyes shut, he saw them all <sitting in snow> from Cloud’s senses, a moving sort of vision as Cloud came trudging back. <Tired horse, ice lumps in his tail, banging against his hocks.>

He had so much rather have nursed his headache and caught his breath undisturbed, but he couldn’t let that annoyance go on. He bestirred himself to check over Cloud’s feet for ice-cuts: the threefold hooves had a soft spot high up between the juncture of the three bones, just behind the middle and largest toe. If a horse didn’t feel a buildup of ice freezing on the scant hairs of the inside, developed an ice lump and went on walking on it, so he’d had from experienced senior riders, the horse could go lame. He had to take off his glove and put a knee on the snow, and take armfuls of wet, chilled horse-foot into his embrace, one after the other, probing a bare finger into the crevice, finding no blood.

So he put his glove back on and broke the ice lumps out of Cloud’s tail—three big sharp ones—by bashing them against his knee with his gloved fist and the hilt of his boot-knife. The way the weather was going they’d form again off the melt that Cloud’s own body heat made, and dealing with Cloud was getting him damp, when that was what he was most trying to avoid.

Cloud paid him when he was done with a warm rough tongue across the cheek and a whuff of hot nighthorse breath in his face where his scarf had slipped. <Cloud and Danny walking free, uphill,> swam across his vision like a view of heaven. <Boys sitting under thick snow. Thicker and thicker snow.> Cloud wanted him to get up and leave the boys. Cloud thought of <village. Ham cooking.>

Cloud loved ham with all his omnivorous heart. It was so vivid he could taste it.

But so was Cloud’s own case of altitude-generated dry mouth, and when Danny took his glove off to fish for a morsel in the packet he had against his ribs, Cloud couldn’t more than lick it into his mouth and work his jaws about trying to find a <taste> that eluded him.

No words between Danny and his clients, nothing but breathing, a try at massaging the legs, a thump of gloved hands at one’s boot-toes to be sure the feet still picked up sensation. They stayed down so long as Cloud rested, hunkered down in a knot sheltering Randy in Cloud’s wind-shadow, warming the kid and slowly warming up the backs and fronts of their legs.

Couldn’t do anything about the cold knees except the extra cloth they’d wrapped around—Tara had told them that trick: lots of air space and extra woolen padding. But Randy’s wraps kept coming loose and gathering around his calves. Danny tugged his up again, tugged at Randy’s left one and Carlo fixed the right.

Then Cloud decided it was time to walk and they lost their windbreak.

“Kid can’t do it anymore. ” Carlo’s voice was all but gone as they got up. “I need help, Danny. ”

“You and me,” Danny said. Talking over the wind hurt his throat, and if neither of them had understood during that moment of physical closeness that his distance estimate was off, he didn’t want to tell them yet the trouble they were in. Randy was light-boned and chilling faster than they were in the gale-force wind. Carlo, sixteen, Danny reckoned as stronger than hewas at a travel-hardened year older—and maybe with the two of them really putting effort into it they could make the cabin up there not too long after dark.

So Carlo took the left-hand pole of the travois and Danny took the right one. The spot where they’d rested had had only a slight incline, which tended to be true at turns, for very sensible reasons for the truckers.

But the next stretch was a hellish steep that began on the inside curve for a downhill-bound truck, the kind of place where the builders had tended to do their worst: this turned out to be the worst grade yet, up to yet another wandering road and into the teeth of an icy damp wind.

(“The mountain can surprise you. ” Tara Chang had even said it in words, plain as she could make it. “Don’t commit to that road unless you’re sure you’ve got several days running of clear weather. Ring around the greater moon means stay put. If you don’t see cloud in the east—” (“She means a weather system past us,” Guil Stuart had interjected at that point. And Tara had said: “The troughs from the west and over the mountains run about four days apart. ” And Guil: “But sometimes they lie, too. ”) “If you don’t see clouds in the east,” Tara had said without looking at Guil, “and not too far east— don’t budge from that shelter. ”)

Well, he’d seen no ring around the moon when they’d left the first-stage shelter. He’d seen clouds just past them in the east.

This morning when they’d left—hell’s bells, he hadn’t been able to seethe moon, in a sleet-storm that his other source of advice, Carlo and Randy, who had spent their lives on the mountain, said could be the leading edge of a real blizzard coming down.

He’d listened most to Tara telling him how to move when the choice was move—and not enough, he realized now, to both Guil and Tara telling him he should wait for a clear, established trough between major storms— thatwas what Guil had meant, not any stupid counting. He’d known all his life that there tended to be a four-day gap between storms that reached Shamesey.

But down there you saw them coming. He’d not imagined that up here you didn’t seethe weather. They were almost onthe continental divide—and the consequence of being on the east of the mountain ridge meant the weather came up hidden by the mountain until it broke right over your head.

The direct consequence was that a storm which hadn’t even been a cloud-line on the horizon yesterday morning at first-stage had set in hard during the night of their stay at midway. They’d seen it first boiling above the distant peaks of the central massif when, coming up from that first-stage shelter at dusk last night, they’d rounded that last curve. The midway shelter had been there in front of them and, a fact with which he reproached himself now, he’d never thoughtto turn around and go back right then, when, yes, they were tired, and they’d walked all day; and, yes, there was a horse down below they didn’t want to deal with—but it might have been better than this.

Last night the wind had howled about the midway cabin, literally shaking the walls of a structure poised on the edge of nothing at all. Their fire had refused to stay lit against the draft coming down the chimney. His information from Tara as well as Carlo and Randy said the road above midway and below was subject to deep, impassable drifting once winter set in. After the small stack of wood ran out in that barren, treeless steep the snow might block them from leaving, and they could freeze to death in a cabin that even with the intermittent fire last night had been colder than hell’s attic.

Even knowing thathe’d not seriously thought of turning them around and leading them back to first-stage—because he’d been unwilling to face that damned stray horse.

He’d had too much sympathy for it—since it was itself a refugee from the Tarmin disaster, lost, bereaved, more desperate than they were. Riders had died down on the lower reaches of the mountain, and horses had survived—meaning hurt horses, horses missing riders—and the one haunting the vicinity of the first-stage cabin when they’d arrived hadn’t been too sane to start with, if it was the horse he most feared—a good chance it was that horse, considering where it was hanging out, where a rider had died who was, no question, crazy.