“Should we kick these shoes off?” Ambrosia, who was in the lead, called back.

Morlock had been thinking the same thing, but on impulse he shouted back, “No!” He waited a moment for his half-formed idea to emerge fully into being and then continued, “Slow start; slow stop.”

“Right!” Ambrosia called back after another moment. She leaped off the narrow road to the north and ran westward through the field of shuddering beasts.

“Deor! With her! Kelat, with me!” Morlock shouted. He leaped off the road, running eastward.

The cold—cruel enough on the snowy road carved by the sun’s death—bit deeper than ever in the snowy fields. Morlock was glad of his mask—wished for something better. He wondered if impulse wells could be adapted to turn impulses into heat. Hm. . . . If you put impulse collectors in the shoes. . . .

A hillbeast roared behind him. Once, in a very different land than this, Morlock had heard an elephant scream when it stepped on a poisoned stake. If a thousand elephants made of glass had stepped on four thousand poisoned stakes, it might have sounded something like the hillbeast’s rage.

“What are we doing?” Kelat wondered aloud, shuffling along beside him.

Morlock looked at Kelat, noticed something about his face, decided it wasn’t the time to mention it. “We’re sowing confusion,” he said, and jabbed a thumb over his lower shoulder.

Kelat spun about and gasped. He grabbed Morlock’s arm and Morlock halted, looking over his shoulder.

One of the hillbeasts pursuing them had blundered against a hillbeast that was just beginning to rouse itself. The hillbeast in motion staggered back and raised the long lip of its gigantic body, exposing the vast mouth between its spiny root-like legs. The mouth had no teeth, but it did display a long, snakelike, thorny tongue. It screamed its thousand-glass-elephants-in-agony scream and stabbed the offending hillbeast through its side with the long, indefinitely extensible tongue. Black matter spurted out of the wound, and the attacker rolled its tongue in and out of the wound, slurping up the clumpy black fluid, whatever it was. Now the offending hillbeast, offended, struggled to its rooty feet and stabbed its attacker with its own tongue.

The beasts about them were rising up also.

“Come,” said Morlock. “We’ll run until we have pursuers and double back—”

“I see!” shouted Kelat, evidently delighted, although his face didn’t change expression much.

They ran back and forth for much of the day, sowing chaos among the hillbeasts. Sometimes they caught sight of Ambrosia and Deor doing the same. But as the sun began eastering, Morlock led Kelat away northward through the fields, successfully avoiding the attention of the hillbeasts, who were mostly busy feeding on each other.

They saw Deor and Ambrosia running parallel to them on the far side of the road. As dusk rose, blue from the earth, into the sky, they met on the road and set up occlusions for shelter.

The others wanted to talk about the adventures of the day, but Morlock overrode them all, saying to Kelat, “Let’s have a look at your face.”

Startled, Kelat raised a gloved hand to his face. “What’s wrong with it? It doesn’t hurt.”

“Feel anything?” Morlock asked.

“Uh. . . . No.”

“It’s frostbite,” Ambrosia confirmed, looking at the hard, white skin that showed wherever his golden beard didn’t. “Oh, Uthar.”

“Sit down,” Morlock directed. “Take your gloves off and hold your hands over your face.”

Ambrosia sat next to him and closed her eyes. In moments she was in visionary rapture.

“It’s starting to feel better,” Kelat said.

Morlock didn’t doubt it. Ambrosia could herd the warmth from Kelat’s hands and his core to thaw his frozen flesh. But if the tissue was dead . . . dead was dead.

Morlock sat, shucked his pack, unpacked his food, ate his cursory meal in three bites, and then filled his belly with water, wishing it were wine.

“I’m going to be all right,” Kelat said tentatively. If it was a question, Morlock didn’t answer it. He put his food and waterbottle away and unfolded his sleeping cloak.

Ambrosia descended from vision. She opened her eyes, looked at Morlock, and shrugged.

Morlock tapped his nose, meaning, What about his nose?

Ambrosia shook her head. It was dead (or so Morlock guessed).

“We should take care of it now,” Morlock observed.

“You are sure of that,” she said.

He thought this remark over. Morlock was sure, and Ambrosia was likely sure as well. But Kelat would not be.

“What do you mean?” the young Vraid said. He was still obediently holding his hands over his face. If he had as obediently worn his face mask, he would not be facing mutilation now. On the other hand, if he were merely obedient, he wouldn’t be much use on a quest like this.

“Your face will be well enough, though it will have some bruising for a while,” Ambrosia said. “Your nose is in a more serious condition.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“We’ll know in a couple of days. You can lower your hands now.”

They talked even less than usual that night.

The next day, Kelat wore his face mask. Morlock and Deor talked over the idea of using impulse wells to heat clothing in winter. It was purely theoretical, since they had no impulse wells or the means to make them at hand, but it was a way to combat the perpetual gnawing chill, if only in imagination. It seemed to raise everyone’s spirits.

At the end of the next day they inspected Kelat’s face again. The bruising was horrific: blackish purple smeared across his face, darkest on the nose. The very end of his nose was a greenish gray: gangrene was beginning.

They showed it to him in a mirror and explained what it meant.

“Cut my nose off?” he said, obviously surprised at the thought of it. “Can’t you heal it? Surely you can heal it! I’ve seen the wonders you can do when you try.”

“The flesh is dead,” Ambrosia said with unwonted gentleness. “I’m sorry, Kelat. But dead is dead. It will have to come off.”

Kelat looked at each of them, as if he expected someone to disagree. He shouted, “No! No! I’d rather die.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Ambrosia said impatiently.

“You don’t know—”

“It’s you who don’t know, sir. That’s why you are in this uncomfortable position. But that’s all that it is—not a matter of life and death.”

“It is to me!”

“Kelat, my friend,” Morlock said. “There are things worth dying for. We all believe that, or we wouldn’t be here. But vanity isn’t one of them.”

“This isn’t vanity.”

“It is.”

Silence.

“Let me go away,” the young man said quietly. “Let me go away and die in the wilderness. You can keep my rations and have . . . have that much good from this mess.”

Ambrosia’s eyes filled with tears and she looked at Morlock.

“No,” he said pitilessly. “You have not yet been of much use on this quest, young Prince Uthar, but what use you could be you still can be. We didn’t bring you along to judge perfumes or the bouquets of fine vintages, you know.”

Kelat glared at him with hatred.

“But if you insist on leaving when the journey is at its most dangerous,” Morlock continued, “you must, of course, take your rations. If you find the courage to live, out among the snows, you’ll need them.”

“Shut up! Shut up!”

Silence again.

“I’ll kill you someday,” Kelat remarked in a conversational tone.

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders, and there was no more talk of Kelat wandering off in the night to die.

They lay Kelat on his back. Ambrosia fed him a painkilling drug she had in her pack, and they arranged shears, bandages, snow, and herbs near at hand.

But when she lifted up the shears, her eyes grew wet again and she whispered, “Oh, Morlock. Oh, his beautiful face.”

Morlock was not attached to the young man’s beautiful face and he didn’t like the way his sister’s hands were trembling. He took the shears from her. He put his left hand over Kelat’s eyes, to restrain him physically and to keep him from flinching, and swiftly snipped off the gangrenous nose. Deor deftly caught it, and Ambrosia and Morlock busied themselves with sewing up the edges of the wound and bandaging it before Kelat lost too much blood.