A shift in the sledge’s attitude brought me just awake enough to know I’d been sleeping.

In going over the pole, we’d followed a stocky isthmus. Two tectonic plates had collided in the far north and pushed up a range of mountains that would have been tricky to pass over if they hadn’t been buried under two miles of ice. During the last day or so the continent had broadened beneath us, but we had stayed to the right or (now that we were southbound) western side of it. Not all the way to the edge, for the western coast was a steep subduction-zone mountain range. There was very little level ground between it and the frozen sea, and most of that was covered in treacherous crevasse-riddled glaciers flowing down from the mountains. So instead the sledge train stayed some miles inland of the coastal range, tracking across a plateau with stable ice. That’s where the sledge port stood. Roads ran south from there across ice, tundra, and taiga to connect up with the transportation network that ramified all the way to the Sea of Seas. But the first outpost going that way was hundreds of miles distant. Smugglers such as the man driving my sledge could not prosper carrying their passengers such a long way. Instead they veered to the right, or west, bypassing the sledge port and taking one of three passes that slashed through the coastal range to connect with ports on the shore of the ocean. These were reachable from the south via icebreakers.

Cord, Sammann, and the Crades would simply get into the fetches and drive south from the sledge port. If the weather had been better and the short-range smugglers had been operating today, I could have paid one of them to whisk me around the sledge port and drop me off on the road a few miles south where I could simply have climbed aboard Yul’s fetch. Instead, my four companions would drive south without me for a couple of days into a more temperate zone, then swing west and cross the mountains to a harbor called Mahsht—the home port of the icebreaker fleet. In the meantime I would buy passage on an icebreaker or one of the convoy ships that followed in its wake. This would bring me down to Mahsht. Once we’d rendezvoused there, it would be only a few days’ drive to the Sea of Seas. So what I was doing now was Plan B—Plan A being the short-range whisk-around—and frankly we hadn’t discussed it in very much detail because we hadn’t expected it to come out this way. I had a nagging feeling that I’d made the decision hastily and probably forgotten some important details, but during the first couple of hours on this little sledge train I’d had plenty of time to think it through and satisfy myself that it would turn out fine.

Anyway, when I sensed the sledge changing its attitude beneath me I took it as a sign that we were beginning the ascent to one of the three passes that connected the inland plateau to the coast. According to Sammann, one of these was considerably better than the other two, but was closed by avalanches from time to time. The sledge drivers never knew, from one day to the next, which one they would end up taking. They made up their minds on the spur of the moment based on what they heard from other smugglers on the wireless. Since our driver was in a separate vehicle, sealed up in a heated cab, there was no way for me to overhear his wireless traffic and get any sense of what was going on.

A few hours later, however, the sledge’s velocity dwindled and it shambled to a halt. We passengers spent a minute or so learning how to move again. I checked my watch and was astonished to learn that we had been underway for sixteen hours. I must have slept eight or ten of them—no wonder I was stiff. Brajj hurled a tent-flap aside to flood our sledge with grey light, bright but directionless. The storm had broken, the air was free of snow, but clouds still screened the sky. We had paused on the flank of a mountain, but the surface beneath us was reasonably level—some sort of sledge track, I guessed, that traversed the slope through whatever pass our driver had decided to take.

Brajj showed no interest in getting out. I got to my feet and made as if I were going to climb over his outstretched legs, but he held up a hand to stay me. A moment later we heard a series of thuds from the sledge tractor followed by a peeling and cracking noise as its door was pushed open through a coating of ice. Feet descended steel stairs and crunched on snow. Brajj lowered his hand and drew in his legs: I was free to go. Only then did I remember Sammann’s warning not to let my feet touch the surface, lest I be abandoned. Brajj, who seemed to have done this before, knew it wasn’t prudent to venture out until the driver had exited the tractor.

We’d invested in snow goggles at Eighty-three. I pulled them down over my eyes and climbed off the sledge to find an unfamiliar man standing on the snow up next to the tractor, urinating on the uphill slope. I reasoned that there must be a bunk in the tractor and that two drivers must spell each other. Sure enough, the first driver now stuck his sleepy-looking face out the door, pulled on his goggles, and climbed out to join the other. They kept the door open, apparently so that they could listen to wireless traffic. This came through in rare bursts, weirdly modulated. I could understand enough to gather that it was sledge operators exchanging information about conditions in the passes, and who was where. But very little seemed to be getting through. When a transmission did erupt from the speaker, the two drivers stopped talking, turned toward the open door, and strained to follow it.

Laro and Dag climbed out and went to the other side—the downhill side—of the sledge. I heard exclamations from both of them. They began talking excitedly. The drivers looked annoyed since this made it difficult to follow the bursts of distorted speech on the wireless.

I went around to the other side. From here we had a fine view down a snow-covered slope, interrupted from place to place by spires of black stone, to a U-shaped valley. We were on its north side. To our right, it broadened and flattened as it debouched into the coastal strip. To our left it grew steeper as it ascended into white mountains. So we had made it over the summit of the coastal range and were descending toward one of the icebound ports.

But that wasn’t what had drawn exclamations from Laro and Dag. They were looking at a black snake, ten miles long, wreathed in steam, slithering up the valley toward the mountains: a convoy of heavy vehicles, jammed nose to tail. All the same color.

“Military,” announced Brajj, climbing out of the sledge. He shook his head in amazement. “You’d think a war was starting.”

“An exercise?” suggested Laro.

“Big one,” said Brajj in a skeptical tone. “Wrong equipment.” He spoke with such a combination of authority and derision that I guessed he must be retired military—or a deserter. He shook his head. “There’s a mountain division on point,” he said, and pointed to the head of the column, which, I now noticed, consisted of several score white vehicles running on treads. “After that it’s all flatlanders.” He chopped air, aiming for the first of the dark drummons, then swept his hand down-valley, encompassing the remainder of the column, trailing toward the frozen sea, which could be seen from here as a white, jumbled plateau crazed with blue fractures. A smear of yellow and brown marked the port we were trying to reach. A lane of black water had been gouged by an icebreaker but was already fading as the ice crowded in behind it.

I was not a praxic and not an Ita but I’d seen enough speelies as a kid, and heard enough from Sammann, to have a general idea of how the wireless worked. There was only so much bandwidth to go around. In most circumstances it was plentiful. This was true even in big cities. But military used lots of it, and sometimes jammed what it didn’t use. The sledge operators up here in these mountains were accustomed to having a nearly infinite amount of bandwidth at their disposal, and had grown dependent on it—they were always swapping reports on the weather and on trail conditions. But at some point during today’s journey our drivers must have noticed something new to them: transmissions got through rarely, and were of poor quality. Perhaps they had thought their equipment was malfunctioning until they had crested the pass and discovered this: hundreds, maybe thousands of military vehicles, commandeering every scrap of bandwidth.