If Chilaili's winter nest had lain any farther from the valley where Bessany Weyman's nestmates had built their home—even as far as Icewing Clan's migratory summer nests—she would never have made it. As it was, a journey which should have taken her an easy day's walk, at most, instead took nearly twenty hours of bitter struggle with the wind and the stinging snow at her back. She kept to deep forest as much as possible, for the trees helped break the worst of the screaming wind and prevented the snow from piling quite so deeply. It was at least possible to walk through the heavy stretches of forest. When she came to open stretches that had to be crossed, Chilaili got down on her belly and crawled, presenting as little of herself as possible to the maddened fingers of the wind.
Even so, one particularly strong gust picked her up and flung her nearly fifteen yards before she slithered to a bruised and scratchy halt. She landed in a deep drift piled up against a tangle of underbrush where the forest closed in, again. She lay shaking for long minutes, getting back her strength and her courage, then crawled deeper into the trees before she dared standing up again. After that, Chilaili swung out of her way to avoid stretches of open ground, aware with every fiber of her battered being just how lucky she was to have survived that screaming gust of wind.
It was utterly imperative that she reach Bessany Weyman's nest before darkness fell again. Chilaili's winter coat was thick and her subcutaneous layer of fat provided extra insulation, enough to allow her to thrive in the deepest cold of winter, but the wind was so fierce, it effectively dropped the temperature to the lowest ranges she could tolerate. She would not survive a night exposed to this wind and the deeper cold of darkness.
Drifts were already twice her height in places, forcing her to swing wide of easier paths time and again. The constant shrieking of the wind deafened her so greatly, she didn't even hear the snap and crash of trees brought down in the storm. She was beyond hoping none of them crushed her. She had to focus every ounce of her strength on putting one foot in front of the other, probing with a long stick for sudden drop-offs buried beneath the snow. As the long day wore exhaustingly on, Chilaili's strength faded, frightening her. She struggled on, unable to do anything else.
Night caught her an hour short of her destination—and the blizzard, although abated somewhat in its fierceness, still howled at her back. She paused as the light faded, debating the wisdom of fighting on through the darkness. Although she couldn't see more than a few yards in any direction, Chilaili knew precisely where she was and precisely how much farther she had to go to reach the valley of the ice bridge. This innate knowledge was something Chilaili had long suspected the Tersae shared with their ancestral stock. It was literally impossible for Chilaili to lose her way, even in the white-out conditions of this storm. Awareness of the invisible lines of force which ran through the earth beneath her taloned feet told her it would take only ten steps to reach a steep-walled little gorge she knew of.
That gorge would offer at least some shelter for the bitterly cold hours ahead. She could climb down, build a fire under the overhanging cliff walls. Chilaili turned toward the path she knew lay no more than ten steps away . . .
And literally could not make her foot move in that direction. Startled, Chilaili realized she had just received a warning, one she didn't understand. She tried to listen to the energies loose in the night, to understand what those energies were trying to communicate to her. As both a master katori and a successful huntress, she had listened to the voices of wind and trees and water and soil too many times in the past, avoiding disaster that might otherwise have overtaken her, to ignore the message now.
She was not meant to take shelter, yet. She was meant to go on, to reach the human nest as quickly as possible. Why, she didn't know, but knew it would be revealed, in time.
Swearing under her breath at the seeming folly of it, she set out once more toward the valley of the ice bridge, using her stick to probe ahead for every step of the way as the light vanished. Night plunged her into a darkly howling world of uncertain footing and rising fear. She slowed down, by necessity, but fought on, determined to keep going. Chilaili stumbled more frequently as well, sprawling sometimes across buried tangles of brush. The hour stretched out, agonizingly, until it felt like she'd been struggling through darkness for half her life.
When the wind's scream rose sharply, Chilaili halted, listening, stretching out her hands to test the wind's strength. Judging from the sound and the force of the wind, the trees had to be thinning out directly ahead. That, plus the invisible grid inside her head, told her she had come to the edge of the humans' valley. There was only one safe way down—the rock ramp the humans had fashioned. In total darkness, she would be unable to see it. She had glimpsed it only once and wasn't at all sure of its twists and turns as it dropped two hundred feet to the valley floor. Chilaili hesitated . . .
And as she paused, a deeper sound lifted the fur on the nape of her neck. A savage, snarling roar growled toward her through the darkness, coming from the open ground to Chilaili's right, across the valley in the direction of the smoking mountains. Terror took hold as she recognized that sound. Twist-wind! Chilaili threw herself prone, wrapped arms and legs around the base of a solid tree, prayed to every ancestress, every spirit of rock and tree and wind she had ever prayed to, and hung on. The monstrous roar drew rapidly nearer. The wind whipped savagely through the forest, changing directions in wild gusts. Her ears popped as the air pressure dropped. The killer wind siphon drew so close, she could feel it plucking at the underbrush around her—
Then it dove over the lip of the gorge and roared its way down the long, narrow valley toward the human nest. Chilaili lay shaking and sick, too terrified to move, helpless as she listened to the monster rush toward her one human friend in all the world. The friend she had risked so much to help. Why? she demanded fiercely of the night. Why let me come so close, only to destroy her with a twist-wind? Chilaili shivered at the base of her tree, listening as the killer wind's roar receded in the distance. She heard a muted change in its sound as it skipped up out of the valley and collided with the mountain beyond, then she could hear it no more. Either the twist-wind had died on the slopes of the glacier or it had skipped back into the storm clouds.
Deeply shaken, Chilaili sat up.
Gradually, it came to her that the warning to struggle forward might have come so she would be on hand when the twist-wind struck the humans' valley. Not to make her a witness to their deaths, but to render aid to any survivors. The thought sent her stumbling forward, crawling through the last of the trees, hugging the ground on her belly as she slithered forward, probing with her stick over the lip of the steep-walled gorge. The wind had scoured away all snow along the rim at least, so she didn't have to struggle through drifts. Her stick located the stone ramp with a solid thunk.
She started down, flat on her belly as the wind plucked at her.
It took her nearly a quarter of an hour to reach the bottom, probing ahead with her stick as the stone ramp turned back on itself time and again. Once down, she stumbled toward the most sheltered side of the gorge, where the cliff walls gave her enough protection from the wind to stand up. She set out again, probing once more with her walking stick, and soon encountered massive debris from the twist-wind. Trees were down everywhere, making her path through the damage treacherous. She crawled blindly over downed tree trunks, stumbled and tripped through tangled branches, scraped her legs against splintered stumps. Trembling with exhaustion, she fought her way forward, then stumbled onto something very hard and very flat and exceedingly smooth.
She halted, frowning; then she had it.
The landing pad, Bessany Weyman had called it, for their flying machines.
She was close, then, very close. Chilaili traced the edge with her stick, turned in the direction she hoped would aim her toward the hard-walled huts, and tapped ahead to try and avoid walking into anything that might be lying in her path. She stayed on the landing pad for a long way, then came to the edge and traced it with her stick again, probing for debris that might lurk ahead. Chilaili stepped off and inched her way forward—
And heard voices.
Thin, human voices, crying for help, screaming in terrible pain.
Chilaili's heart leaped into her throat, pounding raggedly. Someone had survived. Several someones, from the sound of it. She hurried forward, stumbled across chunks of debris, what felt like pieces of the hard-walled huts themselves, scattered like leaves by the killer wind. Then she caught a gleam of light, white light, strange and startling against the snow-blown darkness. She rushed toward it, realized it was coming from a partially intact piece of the human nest. Then she heard a voice she knew, the only human voice she knew, sobbing for help from somewhere directly in front of her.
Chilaili tossed her walking stick aside and started digging through the rubble.