These preparations consumed almost four hours, so we set out late according to Brajj’s timetable. The convoy down below seemed as though it had not moved an inch. Brajj estimated that it was two thousand feet below us. He said that if “everything goes to hell” we should just “pull the ripcord” and let ourselves slide down the ice to the valley floor where we could throw ourselves on the mercy of the military. They might arrest us but they probably wouldn’t let us die. It was a last resort, however, because if we tried it we stood a good chance of falling into a crevasse before we reached the bottom.

Brajj took the lead. He was armed with a length of tent-pole that he would use to probe the snow ahead of him for crevasses. At his hip he had his “sticker,” a long, heavy-bladed knife. He claimed that if one of us fell into a crevasse he would throw himself down and jam this into the ice, anchoring himself so as to arrest our fall. He had me go last and saw to it that I was armed with an L-shaped piece of metal scavenged from the frame of my pack, which I was to use in the same manner. He even had me practice throwing myself down face-first and jamming the short leg of the thing into the ice. Dag, then Laro, were roped up between us. The toboggan trailed behind me.

The first part of the trek was balky and frustrating as the snowshoes or the bindings that held them to the others’ feet seemed to give out every few steps. The whole expedition seemed to have failed before it had started. But then I noticed we’d been going for a whole hour without pause. I sipped from the tube that ran down to my water-pouch and munched slowly on an energy bar. I looked around me and actually enjoyed the view.

Allswell! The thought hit me like a snowball in the nose. I’d been out of the concent for a little more than two weeks, eating extramuros food the whole time. Lio and Arsibalt and the others had probably made it to Tredegarh in less than a week—too brief a time for them to be affected. But I had been out long enough that the ubiquitous chemical must have taken up residence in my brain—subtly altering the way I thought about everything.

What would my fraas and suurs have said about the decisions I had been making recently? Nothing too polite. Just look at where those decisions had gotten me! And yet, even in the midst of this terrible situation, I’d been strolling around with nothing on my mind except for how pretty the view was!

I tried to force myself into a sterner frame of mind—tried to envision some bad outcomes so that I could lay plans. Brajj’s “sticker” might serve as an anchor in a crisis—but he might just as well use it to cut himself free if one of us fell in. What should I do in that event?

But it was no use. Brajj had made himself the leader, and had made reasonable decisions to this point. There was no limit to the amount of time and energy I could put into spinning such alarming fantasies in my head. Better to attend to the here and now.

Or was that the Allswell talking?

For the first few hours we followed the tamped-down tracks left by the tractor, but then they veered downhill, following a cirque—a crescent-shaped vale cut by a tributary glacier—down toward the valley floor. This would take us straight to the military convoy, and so here we broke away from the trail and ventured across trackless snow for the first time. The first bit was slow going as we had to work our way up out of the cirque. By the time the slope began to level, I was ready to “pull the ripcord” in Brajj’s phrase. If I threw myself on the mercy of some military drummon operator, what was the worst that could happen? I hadn’t broken any laws. It was only my three companions who had to go to such ridiculous lengths to avoid the authorities’ notice. But for better or worse I was roped up to them and couldn’t cut myself free without endangering their lives and mine; I had to wait for them to pull the ripcord.

Then we crested a subsidiary ridge and came in view of the coastline. I was startled at how close it was. We had to shed some altitude but the horizontal distance didn’t look that great. We could easily pick out individual buildings in the port and count the military transport ships moored at its piers. Military aerocraft were lined up at the edge of a dirty landing-strip wedged in between the coast and the foot of the mountains. We watched one take off and bank to the south.

One or two civilian ships were also in the harbor, and this gave us all the idea that if we could only get down there in one piece—which looked like less than a day’s travel—we could buy passage on one of them and get out of here behind the next icebreaker. So we took a rest up there in preparation for what we all knew would be a long and arduous final push. I forced myself to eat two more energy bars. The things were starting to make me sick but perhaps that was just me worrying about the Allswell. I washed them down with water and refilled my snow pouches and my fuel bladder. Our supplies were holding up well. The sledge drivers had given us plenty—perhaps thinking that they might not be returning for a while. I was glad we had taken action—moved out instead of huddling in that tent not knowing if we’d live or die.

After an hour’s rest we repacked the toboggan and got underway again. We descended into a round-bottomed cleft: another cirque that cut across our path and seemed to curve toward the port. Brajj decided to follow this one down. The risk was that it would become too steep for us to negotiate and that we’d have to backtrack. On a few occasions during the next couple of hours I became very worried about this, but then we would come around a bend, or crest a little rise, and get a view of the next mile or so and see that there was nothing we couldn’t handle. On steeper bits the toboggan would try to run ahead of me, and then I would have my hands full for a while—the only remedy was to slew it round ahead of me and let it pull me downhill as I leaned back against its weight. At such times the others, who didn’t have to contend with such a burden, would outdistance me. The rope joining me to Laro would draw taut and remind me of his impatience. I felt like reeling him in and smacking him. But Brajj kept our pace from running out of control. Even in stretches that looked smooth and safe he plodded along at the same rate, pausing every couple of steps to probe the snow ahead of him with his tent pole.

I had long since learned to distinguish Brajj’s snowshoe prints from those of the others, and from time to time I would notice, to my indescribable annoyance, that they had diverged: Brajj had zigged for whatever reason, and Dag had zagged, and Laro followed in his kinsman’s steps, obligating me to do the same, and hence pass over ground that Brajj had not probed.

We had probably shed three-quarters of the altitude needed to reach the port. It would be relatively easy going from here. Laro and Dag were laborers—they had plenty of energy left and yearned to push on past the plodding Brajj to a place where they could get a hot meal and peel off the accursed suitsacks.

It was on one of those steep bits where the toboggan had swung around in front of me and I was straining back against two ropes at once that I noticed myself being pulled out of balance. The tension on the rope that connected me to Laro was rapidly increasing. I planted my left snowshoe and pulled back, but the last hours’ descent had turned my leg muscles into quivering flab. I collapsed to my knee, the rope at my waist pulling me forward. Just before I planted my face in the snow I collected a glimpse of Brajj standing up facing me, a hundred feet away, sticker in hand. Laro was sliding and tumbling down the slope, pulling me with him. Dag—who was roped between Brajj and Laro—was nowhere to be seen.

That remembered image was all I had to go on during the next little while, because I was face-down, being pulled along by Laro and by the toboggan. And—I realized—by Dag. He must have fallen into a crevasse! Why hadn’t Brajj stopped his fall? The rope—the frayed yellow thirty-foot poly rope that had connected Brajj to Dag—must have snapped. Either that or Brajj had cut it with a swipe of his sticker. I was the only person who could stop this, and save Laro, Dag, and myself: I had to plunge that L-shaped piece of metal into the ice. I should have had it out and ready to use—should have been watching ahead for signs of trouble. But in order to free both hands to wrangle the toboggan I’d stuck it in one of the equipment loops on the outside of my suitsack. Was it still there? I kicked wildly with one leg and managed to roll over on my back. My head was plowing up a bow-wave of snow that buried my face. I snorted it out of my nose and stifled the urge to inhale. I groped around until I felt something hard, and pulled it out—or so I guessed. Through those mittens it was hard to tell what was going on. I got the pick pointed away from my body, flailed the legs again, and managed to roll over on my stomach. My head came up out of the snow and I heard Laro screaming something—he must have gone over the brink of the crevasse. I put all of my weight on top of that L-shaped hunk of metal and drove it down. It caught—sort of—and became a pivot; my body spun around it as the rope at my waist, now drawn by the combined weights of Laro and Dag, torqued me downhill. The pick tugged at my hands, but not all that hard. It didn’t seem to be holding.