Part 26 (1/2)

A cramp hit me as we traversed one such section: a fairly broad lip of rock beneath a jutting boulder made of some striated element more impervious to the weathering effect of the wind. I fell to my knees, clutching at my calf.

The pain was agonizing, as if a ligament had snapped or a muscle had torn. I was familiar with the sensation - I used to play rugby for Blackheath - but it as no more welcome for that. Fortunately Ace was also familiar with cramp, and forced me to lie flat whilst she ma.s.saged my calf until the muscle relaxed.

'Are you sure that we're headed in the right direction?' I asked as her fingers probed my leg.

'No. I haven't seen anywhere for them to have diverted, though, so it looks like we're headed for the top.'

The wind picked up as we climbed higher. It attacked us first from one direction and then from another, circling around to find our weakest spots, sometimes insinuating its cold, hard fingers into our clothes and sapping the strength from our limbs, sometimes buffeting us hard and making us lose our precious fingerholds. There was no mercy here: the elements were pitting their strength against two pygmies who had dared profane this sacred place. Perversely these natural attacks gave me some small measure of comfort, for compared to them the evil of men such as Maupertuis and his mysterious master were as nothing. If we could defeat the mountain, I felt that we could defeat anything.

That epiphany proved to be the turning point of the climb. Perhaps the cold had finally got to me and numbed my marrow but I felt warmer and more confident after that. Even when the rock vanished, to be replaced with a sheer wall of black ice, I did not quail. Ace and I took turns with her miraculous weapon, which she had set to produce a thin knife of sunlight, cutting steps into the ice. I took my cue from her: each step that she cut was precisely the right size, no deeper than it should be, and s.p.a.ced apart from its neighbours by a comfortable distance. My own initial attempts were farcical but I soon learned how to wield the device, and I found that I could match her delicacy of touch.

At one stage, when Ace was above me, cutting away, and I was clinging to the steps that I had recently cut but which had refrozen within seconds, I looked past her. The mountain could only have been a few hundred yards in diameter at that point, and I was shocked to discover that the sky was only a few body-lengths away. At that range the ice was pitted, rough and grey. Gaps existed between the ice and the mountain: black voids, like wounds in reality. The river of liquid atmosphere, just a trickle at this elevation, emerged from one of them. The view was half-hidden by tendrils of mist which curled around us. Looking down, first a few inches, then a few feet, and then further, I found that I could no longer make out the ground.

We were suspended between heaven and h.e.l.l, coc.o.o.ned in the mist.

'Jesus, I didn't realize we were so close.'

Ace's voice surprised me out of my reverie. I climbed past her and took the lightgun.

'A few more minutes should see us to the top,' I grunted, and set to work cutting a set of steps and then a rough platform for us to stand on, side by side.

Reverently, I reached up and touched the sky. It was as hard as the mountain had been, and as cold. I craned my neck and looked out, upside down, along its surface. My mind played funny tricks with perspective, for a moment I couldn't tell which direction was up and which was down, what was surface and what was sky. Some primitive part of my brain kept screaming that I was going to fall, but only for a moment.

And then a distorted face thrust itself out of a patch of mist at me, and I did scream.

Ace laughed.

'It's only one of the skaters,' she said.

Catching my breath, I looked closer. The face, which looked so much like a gross caricature of a well-fed, gout-ridden d.i.c.kensian gentleman, or a rector straight out of Trollope, gazed with an expression of bovine stupidity straight from a spherical, semi-transparent body some ten feet in diameter.

Three stubby limbs rose from the top of the body, each terminating in what looked for all the world like a skate, made of some bony substance. A pouch of skin drooped below the creature. I wondered for a moment what its function was, but I was enlightened when the creature grew bored with me and unfurled the pouch to form a sail with which it caught the breeze and skated away across the surface of the ice.

'Your face,' Ace said, and laughed again.

'They taste of chocolate, you say?'

'Yeah. They have these big macho dominance fights, sometimes, and they use those skate-things as weapons. The loser gets his balloon punctured and falls all the way down to the surface. I got hungry one night, and one just dropped out of the sky, virtually into my lap. ”That's 'andy, 'Arty,” I said, and bunged it on the fire. After that I made myself a bow and arrow. No time to eat now, though. We've got a job to do.'

'Where do we go now?'

She looked around.

'Where else is there? Onward and upward.'

'Upward where?'

She indicated the gap where the ice did not quite meet the rock.

'Up there. To the real surface. To the outside.'

'Are you mad? There's no reason to think that they've been taken up there!

The chances are that we missed the signs of a camp or a cave further down the mountain, and we've been climbing blindly ever since!'

Ace nodded to a larger fissure some thirty or so feet away.

'Look at that. The edges aren't natural. They've been clawed away. That's where they were taken.'

'But..' I was searching round for excuses now. I did not want to climb any further. Every muscle in my body ached with the acc.u.mulated toxins of fatigue. '. . . But the air is too thin. How will we manage to breathe? How did they manage? You must be mistaken.'

'That's a bit of a poser,' Ace admitted, frowning. 'You're right of course. If the atmosphere's this thin here, it'll be non-existent if we climb much further. They probably had suits of some kind. We'll have to improvize.'

I didn't like the sound of that.

'Improvize?'

'What's the matter, never seen Blue Peter?'

'No.'

'Lucky man. Now think: how do we ensure a supply of air for ourselves?'

'We've managed with the handkerchiefs so far,' I offered.

'True, but the path might move away from the mountain side, like in a tunnel through the ice or something. We can't rely on still being able to use the stream to refresh them.'

'So we need a larger supply,' I mused.

'Good thinking, Sherlock.'

I frowned at her and she blushed, embarra.s.sed.

'What about the animals?' I asked, as an idea suddenly struck me.

'The animals? You mean, cut a couple of them open, get rid of the gas inside and replace it with air?' She grinned. 'Ace!'

Luring the creatures over was, paradoxically, the easiest part. They were not wary of humans in the way that animals on Earth might have been. We had a few teething troubles in the butchery department: Ace used her lightgun on the first one, and it exploded with a surprised expression upon its face, singeing my eyebrows. The gas inside appeared to be inflammable, as well as lighter than air. The next one was almost as bad. I held it whilst Ace made a slight incision in its tough but flexible skin with my pocket knife. It burst in my arms, splattering me with a gelid blue substance. If I hadn't been so cold and so tired, the farcical elements of our actions would have set me laughing. As it was, both of us were getting increasingly angry. By the time we had captured a third creature, we had evolved a strategy. I pinched a section of its skin, and Ace cut off the protruding section. I could then gradually let the gas out using my fingers as a crude valve. It died struggling, and in confusion. The gas made me slightly light-headed, but I welcomed the feeling as it cus.h.i.+oned my tiredness somewhat. It also made me feel slightly better about what we were doing. I did not enjoy killing them, especially in such an undignified manner, but we were desperate.

Once we had two deflated skins, we set about cutting away the limbs and protruding members and refilling the remaining bladders. We carefully held the rents beneath the surface of the stream until some liquid got in. Whilst I held them closed again, Ace filled two oddly shaped canteens with liquid as well, and hooked one onto my belt.

'Additional supplies,' she said, then climbed inside one of the skins. I did likewise with the other. We knotted the rents from the inside. As we had hoped, the warmth from our bodies vaporized the liquid and inflated the skin.

Urgency had lent skill to our endeavours: the scheme had worked, and we were left standing within two tough, translucent, taut spheres that used to be living creatures but now functioned as crude reservoirs of breathable air.

Ace waved at me. I waved back, and followed her as she carefully climbed up towards the dark opening. The skin of the life-preserving integument deformed beneath our fingers and feet, enabling us to climb, but was tough enough to resist tearing against the rock.