The five men who were going to the Congress post spent the late afternoon and part of the night preparing.  Anen carefully divided the food and fuel.  "There's fifteen days full rations for each of us.  We'll take six days' food and twelve days' fuel rations." Anen sat back on his heels and looked at the piles to stay and go.  "That leaves 22 days' food rations and 16 days' fuel here, plenty of margin for error, bad weather, more attacks by Moaekod and Masxad." He glanced significantly at the Churkins and then at the beamed trooper.  The Churkins looked grim and nodded.  The trooper had no chance at all if rescue didn't come within two or three days.  Anen talked directly to the wounded.  "Someone will find you here long before the supplies run out.  God willing, it'll be Moaekod or Bubov that does the finding."

Each man going with Anen packed his own food, fuel, and tent.  Stanis also packed the extra tents and the trash sacks for the phony campsite.  Then all of them lay down for a few hours' sleep.  Anen lay down like the others, but he couldn't sleep.  He knew how to make his muscles relax, but he'd never found a successful technique for making his mind relax as well.  His mind struggled with the choices he'd made.  The trail to the edge of Tzinn was a high risk, but nobody in his troop was likely to survive a rush for the Buruq entrance shelters.  In Thawtime, there might be Desert Runners in the pass, before the Congressional patrols drove them back to complete their sentences.  Desert Runners were always dangerous----Tzinn itself was always dangerous.  That's why House Zizranski sent its convicts there.  Even if Anen were the only people on the ground in the pass, they could be seen from fliers and attacked from above.  With zappers, Anen shuddered, remembering.

He rose at dawn, physically rested and mentally on edge.  Each time he'd made what he thought was the right decision for his House, the decision had somehow betrayed him.  He had to succeed this time.  He'd get no more chances.  If Moaekod captured him, he was dead.

He stepped outside the shelter.  Ice-fog hung again over the plain and clung in crystals to trees, bushes and rocks.  On any other morning, Anen would've enjoyed the beauty of the sparkling twigs and pine needles.  This morning, the frozen fog only meant that by midday any brush marks he and his men accidentally left in the snow would be buried by the crystals falling from the trees.  He threw off his reluctance to begin the trek and he re-entered the shelter.  "Roll out of bed, men," he ordered. "It's time to get on the trail."

Preparation required just a few minutes, then the men were at the door, munching on trail bread and gulping the last of a mug of opov.  Yen Churkin saluted the men who were leaving.

"Karzhov , Lord Anen, Kod, Zik, Ota.  The Lord be with you."

"And with your spirit," they answered.

"Pray for us," Anen added as he went out the door, repeating silently to himself, we're not going to die, none of us are going to die.  He said the words over and over again to himself like a mantra---we're going to cross the ridge and work east to the lower Tzinn pass, we're not going to die, we're not going to die.

Anen stepped carefully outside into a bitter cold morning.  "Watch your step!" he snapped.  But not ten paces from the shelter, Kod slipped and fell.  Zik started toward him to help but had to windmill for balance instead.  Stanis grabbed a tree trunk just in time to keep from falling.

"We're not going to be able to walk at all!" Zik snarled.

Stanis loosened his grip on the tree and turned to Anen.  "I have an advantage here, brother.  My people go outside in winter.  We can be all the way down the hill in just one hour if we slide down."

"Slide?" The three troopers looked at the big man with no understanding at all of sliding on purpose.

"Slide," Anen repeated with satisfaction, remembering the children of Raaros.

"That means to sit on a board or piece of stiff something and ride on the ice, like a boat over water."  Stanis paused.  "You don't use boats, either.  I'll have to show you, then." Stanis walked gingerly back to the shelter and went inside.  In a little while he returned and handed each man a plasti-board rectangle.  "The backing boards for the others' packs," Stanis explained. "Watch."

Stanis sat on the rectangle, pulled his feet up onto it, and pulled the front edge up into a curve.  He hitched along on the snow until the plasti-board began to slide.  Stanis zipped past the Puredorv, down the hill, spun into a turn, and fell on his side.  The Puredorv gasped.

Stanis stood up, laughing and brushing off snow.  "I haven't done that since I was a boy.  Before you try it, cut handholds back from the front edge.  This is going to be a longer slide than I've ever had before.  You'll need the holes."  Stanis laughed again, flung his arms wide and stuck out his tongue to catch snowflakes.  Then he picked up his sled and came back up the hill.  Coming up, he could jab his toe through to the soft snow under the crust and walk with confidence.

"There are a few things you have to know about steering," he began while he was still a distance away.  "You can learn the direction you want to t urn or pull up the opposite front edge and lean, or fall over and stop, which is the best idea if you're about to meet a tree.  You can't get hurt if you're careful."  Stanis stopped beside Anen, not even panting from the climb.  "We can reach the campsite long before dark this way. Lord Anen, may I set the order of going?"

Anen nodded.

Stanis's mouth twisted as he thought.  "The first man breaks trail, and the last man gets the fastest ride.  I'll go first, because I'm heavier and know more about sliding.  Lord Anen, you follow because that's the safest position for you, having only one arm." He looked at the others.  "Men, we'll make only left turns, sine that's the only direction Lord Anen can turn without hurt.  You three troopers pick your own order.  If one of you races horses or fliers, though, that one should be last."

Ota moved up the slope, behind the others.

Stanis nodded approval at him. "All of you, keep to the one track if you can.  The fog falling will likely erase it by noon, but if it doesn't, one track will keep Moaekod guessing.  He doesn't know about sliding either." Anen sat on his sled.  "Sit, dig your heels through the crust, and cut your holes where they're comfortable." He watched until the holes had been cut.  Then: "Let's go!"

Stanis shoved off with one hand, Anen and the other men followed.  Speed caught Anen's breath.  Snow crystals blurred into a glistening white sheet as he zipped past.  His stomach felt gone, as if he had left it on the shelter doorstep.  Stanis's track bent around a pile of boulders and Anen skimmed after him without trouble, but his heart pounded heavily and he had to swallow a big lump in his throat.  The path led straight between rows of pines and Anen felt the first glow of exhilaration.  "Sentinels!  What the Puredorv have been missing!"

Joy possessed him.  He was so filled with it he saw the bend in the track too late and tossed himself sideways just in time to miss a massive crackwood tree.  He heard a squealing sound behind him, a crunching sound and a thump, then another thump.  Sitting up once more once the ice crust had been broken was difficult with just arm, and when Anen finally succeeded, the three troopers were again sitting on their sleds, heels dug in, brushing snow from their faces, hoods, shoulders and legs.

"Are you all right, milord?" Ota asked.

"Da." Anen laughed ruefully.  "I apologize for not paying attention."

The troopers shrugged and lined their sleds in the track on the downhill side of the stirred snow.

Stanis had a good eye and had selected an almost straight course cutting slightly across the slope.  At one place he'd made a left-side fall-stop. At one place he had made a left-side fall-stop, then corrected the track toward the right.  Anen saw the blurred mark where Stanis had fallen sideways far enough ahead of time to make the same fallstop himself.  Near the bottom of the hill, Anen's sled zipped past Stanis's vacant one.  Anen stuck out his footbrakes.  Stanis had stopped in the open center of a grove of pinkpines and was bending over the unrolled tent, fitting the gas cylinder to the setup connection.  Anen left his sled and sat on a snow-covered rock, resting his left forearm on his thighs.  The whole arm ached and trembled from the strain of steering.  Kod, then Zik, then Ota slid to a halt in the clearing.  Without needing orders, they set up a thermo and a two-pot and started cooking midday.  The tent went whump and erected itself.  Stanis stepped back and examined it.

"It's a four-man, but if we trample the snow a lot, searchers will never figure out how many were here."

Anen heard clicks and slithering noises behind him and turned quickly.  Kod had loosened his pack clips and was sliding the pack off.  "Leave it on, Kod," Anen ordered.  "Loosen it up if you wish but leave it on.  Visibility's still good enough for fliers.  We might be spotted and have to dive for cover."

Kod winced as he slid the straps back over his shoulders.  He trudged back to the thermo and stripped off his mittens, letting them dangle from their safety clips while he warmed his hands.  "Keeping a tight hold so long sure numbs the hands," he said to nobody in particular.

Anen forced his shoulders back, then forward to get rid of a crick in his neck.  He stood up slowly and tried to brush the snow off his rear.   His tired left arm obeyed him poorly.  All the muscles creaked, and they hurt when tightened.  The troopers crouched around the thermo and served themselves stew and hot opov.

Zik wrinkled his nose.  "This stew is contaminated with kebedamon."

"It's food," Ota snapped.  He scooped a spoonful up, blew on it, ate it.

A gust of wind rushed under the pine branches and blew snow against the two-pot.  The pot hissed and sizzled.  Nobody spoke until the food and drink were gone and the utensils were wiped out with snow and put away.

Kod licked his lips.  "That was good. Pity there's not more of it."

"Later, when we're out of Moaekod's reach," Anen admonished.

Anen leaned back against his packframe and shut his eyes.  He felt weaker than he'd ever tell anybody, and very tired.  The trek to the patrol hut would take two days and the foothill beyond this one was not hard to cross, but, right now, the trip seemed more than he had the strength to accomplish.  Snowflakes made tiny, cold prints on his face, more and more of them, until Anen had to wipe them off.  He sat up. Snow was falling hard again, the wet, heavy snow of thawtime.  Visibility for fliers would be zero.  Anen looked around their camp.  Stanis had left wastepaper where wastepaper would be left and had dropped the food wrappers and containers outside the tent door and around the thermo.  He'd also stacked the plasti-boards in the snow beside the tent.  It was time to muddle their trail and move on, so they could set up a real camp for the night before the weather turned much worse.

Anen looked at his companions.  They, too, were leaned back against their packframes, napping.  For Stanis, the standard Puredorv-size frame was far too small, so when he leaned against it, his head flopped back onto the top of his pack.  The position hadn't stopped him from sleeping.  He snored quietly.  Anen started to rise.  He heard an engine's buzz.

"TAKE COVER!" Anen shouted.

His companions jerked awake and sprang for the low-hanging pine branches.  The flier, invisible in falling snow, came over.  A purple tracer lanced into the middle of the clearing, striking the thermo. Flames flew outward.

"Heatseeker!  Up the hill!" Anen cried to his men.  "Split up!  Meet over the top of the ridge!"  He didn't wait to see if everybody obeyed but burst from his hiding place among the pines and scrambled up the hill, using his left arm as a kind of third leg.  He saw a trooper climbing near him, but falling snow concealed the other men.  He knew the others were coming because he heard snow-muffled scuffing and crunching noises and once in a while an "oof" when someone slipped or fell.  He paused for a fraction of a second at the crest of the ridge to look back.  Snow hid the flames of the thermo, but not the ominous orange glow.  He wasn't the only one watching.

"Svarog!  The whole grove's burning," Stanis shouted from Anen's right.

"Fire must have overpowered the piddling little body heat that we put out.  We're safe!"  Zik shouted, jubilant.

"Don't be stupid!" Ota snapped from somewhere to Zik's left.

"Kod?" Anen called into the snow silence that followed Ota's retort.

"I am here, lord."

By calling, answering, listening; calling, answering, listening; they found each other.  Zik, who'd been a little slower leaving the pine grove, had a singed hood and jacket.

"Whew,' he said, wiping away snow-water that was dripping off his icy eyebrows.  "The flier can't find us with all that heat around.  Do we stop here?"

A blot above the fire's glow moved slowly towards the ridge.  Zik stared at the blot and at the bright, white light on its bottom.  "They can't find us with a searchlight."

"Right, Zik, but up here on the ridge our body heat will be like a beacon to them.  They'll need the light to find us afterward."  Anen raised his voice to be sure everyone heard.  "That could be a Bubov flier, or one of ours, but I won't bet on it:  Our people don't need to hunt us at dark in a snowstorm.  Scatter, now, at least two hundred paces from one another.  It'll be a cold, cold night, but at least we'll likely live till morning.

The other men moved away.  Anen waited until he could no longer hear the shuff, shuff of leg-plowed snow before he scrambled up the side of the ridge and a little way down the other side to a jumble of boulders.  He curled up in a cranny and leaned against his pack.  Several times he heard the hiss of a heat-bolt blindly zapping the crest of the ridge above him, but the flier itself never crossed the ridgetop.    "They know we're here," he whispered as his eyelids grew heavier and heavier.  "They know we're here."

Dim morning light showed Anen that he was in a rocky, deep, and very narrow ravine between two ranges of hills.  The ravine was bare of snow wherever its steep, leaning walls protected it from the wind.  The men gathered, ate a fast-breaking biscuit, drank snow-water, slid to the bottom of the ravine, and followed the direction Stanis said was almost directly east.  Snow covered the protective ravine floor only thinly, snow that glistened in weak sunlight.  By th e time the men stopped for midday, the sun had come fully out, and the air was thick with dripping and trickling sounds.  They set a thermo on a flat rock and heated a protein-rich mush.  While they waited for the mush to boil, the men joked and talked.

Stanis took off his boots and held his feet toward the thermo's heat.  "My toes get numb walking in snow so long.  My fingers are cold, too.  I bet ice melts at a lower temperature here than it does on Raaros."  His aggrieved tone earned him smiles from the Puredorv.

"It's Thawtime," Kod reminded him.

"So you say," Stanis retorted morosely. 

The first warning of danger was a tracer bouncing off a cluster of boulders above them.

"Svarog!" Stanis grabbed his boots and ducked behind the cluster of flat rocks the thermo sat among.

"Scatter!" Anen ordered.  "Get those green packs off and lie down on them, then don't move.  Stanis, damn it, you're hiding behind the biggest heat source down here!"

Stanis whacked the thermo away into a snowdrift and scuttled the opposite way.  The thermo sizzled, turning the snow around it to steam, then it went out.  Stanis whipped off his pack and sprawled over it.  The flier descended.  Anen heard clearly the buzz of its engine coming closer and closer until the narrow ravine hummed with the noise.  A heat-bolt zapped the rock the thermo had been on.  Anen wanted to get up and run from the death the flier carried in its wings.  His memory screamed the pain of burning.  Run! Run!  The flier came nearer.  If it's a flitter, they'll come right down the ravine and burn us by hand.  Anen's legs twitched with the urge to run.  The flier's heat-beam sizzled across nearby rocks.  Anen's mouth felt dry, and his muscles knotted, aching with the wild need to get away from the burning.  Then the flier was directly overhead.  Anen's breath came hard, he shut his eyes to close out the flier, knowing if he watched it his terror would be too great for him to control.  The engine sounded like it was a fighter's.  It flew down the ravine, then turned and came back, the sound of it coming closer and closer again.  Anen took an iron grip on his fear and forced himself to look up.  he was a commander and had to know what he and his men were facing.  He told himself that again and again as the flier's engine's thrummed closer.  It was a fighter and too wide to come lower.  Anen's whole body trembled from the effort of will be needed to stay motionless so near the deadly beam.  The craft passed.  Anen heard a sizzle as the fighter rounded a bend in the ravine, then the sound of its engines faded.

"Can we get up now?" Zik's voice was plaintive.  "I'm getting cold."

"You're cold...."

"Shut up, Karzhov," Ota snapped, "and get down!  We're not safe yet!"

Irregularities in the ravine hid the speakers from Anen's sight.  In the quiet following Ota's order, the ravine itself seemed quieter than before the attack.  Water ran gurgling over rocks, dripped from the twisted trees that clung to the steep south wall, trickled through places hidden under snow.  In such quiet, the returning buzz of the fighter seemed more ominous, more dangerous than it had before.  Anen felt himself shaking and cursed himself for a coward.   The flier passed over his hiding place, fired several bolts behind it, and disappeared far down the ravine.  Anen heard a rushing sound as thaw-softened snow somewhere, disturbed by the flier's vibration or loosened by the heat of a bolt, slid down the ravine side.  Anen lay without moving a long time after the last throb of the flier's engines had died in the distance.   He hoped his men interpreted the wait as prudence; he knew it was also caused by bone-melting terror.

"Let's try it," he called out at last, keeping his voice steady by sheer act of will.  "Get up but be ready to duck again."

"Must've been a fighter," Zik said.  "Too wide to come down.

So, someone else had been afraid to look.  That made Anen feel a little bit better.  "It was a fighter," he said.  He looked down the ravine to where he'd last seen Stanis.  "Stanis?  Stanis?" His voice sharpened with concern.  "Are you all right?"

Stanis crawled out from under and overhang.  "That was too close."  He took off one mitten and stuck his fingers into his mouth to warm them up.

"Pilots couldn't aim," Zik added smugly.

"Don't talk till you know what you are talking about," Ota snapped, coming around a bend in the ravine wall to join the rest of the men.  He held up a slightly burned pack.  "Kod----isn't, anymore.  Said something about this being too uncomfortable to lie on.  He threw it to one side when he lay down."

Zik looked at the pack wide-eyed. "Did he run away?"

"Don't be more a fool than you must be, Zik." Ota dropped the back to the snow. "All that's left of Kod are the soles of his boots and his pack.  Sentinels, Zik! A fighter's bolt will burn a flitter out of the sky!"

Zik swallowed noisily and began to look greenish around the mouth and nose.  "Are we---are we going to bury him, Lord Anen?"

"There's nothing left to bury, according to Ota," Anen replied, feeling a little sick himself.  "We'll take what we can use from his pack and get out of this ravine." Anen turned to Stanis.  "You warmed up enough?"

Stanis shook his head.

Anen's mind raced.  There had to be something to keep Stanis from freezing.  "Carry the thermo for awhile," he said abruptly, hiding his worry with the curt tone, "it can't be totally cooled off yet.  We're changing routes, men, going over this ridge and the next one instead of staying on this side of the mountains.  We're too easily seen on this side.  Moaekod knows we're here now.  We'd be ducking bolts until none of us were left.  We can reach the patrol hut by crossing Mt. Muhov and walking along the edge of Ghorr.

"Go into the mountains in Thawtime, lord?  And Ghorr?  What about the Watchers and the Runners?"

Ota's voice was clam and respectful, but Anen knew the man's doubts had to be pressing for him to even think about questioning his lord.  The man was a good soldier and deserved a respectful answer.  Anen shut a mental door on what he knew was "right" behavior for a lord facing such questioning and answered honestly.  "I'd rather take my chances with all of those than try to stay alive for three days as a zapper target.  Those who don't want to try the edge of Ghorr can stay on this side and try to get back."

Zik broke in.  "But we'll die over there, lord."

"I've been burned, Zik.  I'd rather die of cold or hunger or a Runner's spear.  But we won't.  There are four of us, and I've been on Mt. Muhov before, hunting with my sire."

"What if a flier comes before we...."

"Stop your whining, Zik!  Matters are bad enough as it is.  I won't put up with whining."

Zik's mouth shut with an audible snap.  Anen pulled on his pack, with Stanis's help, and started down the ravine at a fast pace, not looking back to see who, if anyone, was following.  He reached a place where the ravine met a gentle hill, a place where a man with one hand to use could climb out.

As he came closer and closer to the crest of the hill, Anen crouched lower and lower.  the men behind him followed his example.  By the time Anen reached the crest, he was crawling.  He stopped and looked back.  All his men had followed him toward Ghorr.  Beyond them, Anen could see over two ranges of hills to the plain, where strings of men were struggling up the hill to where the fire had been.   Sunlight flashed from the barrels of long-range zappers.  "Look."  He pointed.

The others looked.  Their mouths tightened.  They all turned and slid down the barren slope on the far side of the ridge to the foot of the next hill, then climbed to the top of that.  Bare trees spread empty branches above soggy snow.  Above the bare trees, pines drooped under cloaks and hoods of ice.  Anen stopped among the pines for a breather, his forehead gleaming with sweat.  "Warm now, Stanis?"

Stanis grinned. "Da, lord.  Is it time to eat?"

"Da, but only a fast-breaking biscuit, a piece of choc, maybe some dried turnips.  Suck snow if you're thirsty, because we're not lighting the thermos again until we reach the mountain, where we'll be out of sight."

"How long, lord?" Again, Ota was questioning.  Again Ota's voice was respectful.

Anen wondered if he had made a mistake with Ota.  Would it make him less willing to take orders if he could ask questions?  In Federation forces it wouldn't, but the men of Federation planets had long been used to independent thought.  Did Ota see Anen's willingness to listen as weakness? But it was already too late to go back to a traditional way of dealing with questions.  Anen met Ota's eyes.  There was no contempt in them.  "With luck, we'll be on the side of Mt. Muhov tonight."

Ota nodded, reassured, slid off his pack, and began digging out the food Anen had listed.

The men ate standing, then scrambled down the sharper slope on the other side of the pine-topped hill and slid out onto the black ice of a wide river.  Anen stopped, balancing himself agianst the slipperiness, and cursing the overconfidence that had sent him out into the foothills without dalers.  He had thought them unnecessary; after all, they would never be out of sight of the plain and Castle Buruq.  It was too late for regrets.  They did have Stanis with them.

He turned to his friend.  "Mt. Muhov is north, northeast of this river, Stanis.  Which way should we go?"

Stanis pointed, then started walking and the men followed.  They climbed through old, broken pines and tall underbrush to the top of the next ridge, a narrow, rocky spine scoured bare by wind.  A fierce wind funneled down a gorge that might've been the river's old bed.

Stanis stopped with a gasp.  "We're too wet for this wind, Anen.  My clothes are soggy with snowmelt and so're everyone else's."  The wind whirled around Stanis, making his teeth chatter so much he quit talking.

Anen took Stanis's arm and led him off the windswept rocks.  "My sire took his sons hunting Maocats in Ghorr once.  We came down from this gorge.  There's a flat place not far from here.  We'll set up tents there and dry out, Stanis.  No matter how cold we are, we can't set up a heat-beacon like a tent camp on a hilltop."

"It'd be suicide," muttered Zik.

Anen plunged down to a game trail that cut into the side of the rocky ridge and curved its way gently towards the gorge floor.  Across the gorge from the trail, tons of sliding rock from a rotting cliff lay in a jumble of boulders and debris that half-filled the space between the ridge and the cliff.  "Careful, it's a bad drop," Anen warned, keeping close to the ridge side of the game trail himself.

The trail eventually flattened out between the ridge wall and the snow-covered side of a mountain.  A narrow neck of rock that had probably once been under a waterfall connected the mountain and the ridge the men had left.  Anen looked at Stanis.  He had both hands inside the opened front of his survival suit.

Anen stopped.  "Set up a thermo, Ota.  Zik, we're putting up two tents."  Anen took of his sling and struggled to get out of his pack.

"Anen, I can do that for you." Stanis pulled his hands out of suit.

"There's heat," Anen snapped, pointing to the thermo.  "Get your hands warm."

Anen watched, carefully keeping the worry out of his face until Stanis hunched over the thermo and held out his hands to the heat.  Anen put the sling back on and attempted to connect the gas cylinder to the first tent with one hand.  Ota took the cylinder away without a word, inflated the tent, and set up another thermo inside.  "Better get in there, Kharzov," he said.

"He's right, Stanis," Anen added.  "Go in and get out of your wet clothes.  We'll all come in to eat in a few minutes."

Stanis hesitated just a moment before limping into the tent.