Half an hour later, Orion stumbled. Ozzie only knew because he heard a small grunt. When he looked around, the boy was facedown in the snow with the pony standing above him. Much as he would have liked to hurry back, Ozzie’s limbs responded slowly. It was like trying to move through liquid.
When he sat Orion up, the boy wasn’t even shivering. Ozzie pulled the scarf off his mouth to check for breathing. His lips were dark and cracked, with tiny flecks of blood frozen into place.
“Can you hear me?” Ozzie shouted.
Orion’s eyes fluttered weakly. He moaned softly.
“Shit,” Ozzie grunted. “Hang on, I’ll put the tent up. We’ll wait here until the weather picks up.”
There was no reply, although Orion raised one arm a few inches. Ozzie left him propped up against the pony and tried to get the tent pack off the lontrus. His outer gauntlets were too thick to unfasten the strap catches, so he took them off, trying not to wince as the arctic air bit straight through the woolen inner gloves. He started fumbling with the straps, then gave up and pulled the diamond-blade machete from its sheath, and cut the straps.
Three times he had to put his gauntlets back on and flap his arms to try to heat his hands back up before his fingers actually moved. What seemed like hours later the air-insulated section of the tent had reluctantly self-inflated and he’d got the support poles secured to the edges. He dropped a couple of heatbricks inside, then dragged the semiconscious boy in after them. With the flap sealed, the interior of the tent warmed rapidly from the radiance of the heatbricks. Ozzie had to strip several layers of clothing off himself and the boy before they began to feel the benefit. The chilblains in his fingers and toes were strong enough to make him wince as circulation returned. Orion started coughing; he looked as though he wanted to burst into tears.
“How can it be so cold?” the boy asked wretchedly.
“If you really want to know, I don’t think we’re on Silvergalde anymore.” Ozzie watched the boy anxiously to see what his response would be.
“Not for about three days, I figured,” Orion said. “But I still don’t see why anyone would visit a world with this kind of climate.”
“Oh. I’m not sure. I don’t think we’re in this planet’s polar regions, because of the trees. I may be wrong, but rule of thumb is that year-round ultra-cold environments don’t support living things as big as trees. So my guess would be either a world with a dying sun or one with a very long elliptical orbit and we arrived midwinter, worst luck.” He shook his hands, trying to ease the pain as feeling and movement returned. His ears still felt like lumps of ice.
“So what do we do now?”
“Like I said, wait to see if the morning brings any change, though I suspect it won’t. But we can’t go any farther now. We need to prepare. I’ll go out again in a while. I need to put the tent’s wind shell up, then I’ll get the rest of our packs in here. We also have to eat a good hot meal. And the first aid kit has some cream that’ll take care of your lips.”
“And yours,” Orion said.
Ozzie put his fingers up to his mouth, feeling the rough broken skin. “And mine,” he conceded. He was praying he wouldn’t have to deal with frostbite as well; fortunately his boots had kept his feet reasonably insulated, but he’d have to check Orion over properly later.
“What about the animals?” the boy asked.
“I can’t chop any branches off for a bonfire, I won’t have the strength. I’m going to spread some flame gel around the base of a tree and see if I can just set the whole damn thing alight. That might help them keep warm enough.”
He really didn’t want to go out again, which might have accounted for how long it took him to get ready. Eventually, he slipped back out into the sub-zero forest. Polly and the pony had slumped to the ground—a really bad sign. The lontrus was wheezing quietly, but otherwise seemed unaffected. While his fingers were still functioning, he pulled the remaining packs off its back and carried them over to the tent. Then he spent a frustrating twenty minutes erecting the wind shell over the inner lining as his hands got progressively stiffer. Finally it was done, and he took the pot of flame gel over to one of the nearby trees. He scraped the snow off a section of the trunk a foot above the ground, then stopped and peered closer. It wasn’t bark he’d exposed, more like a rough layer of dark purple crystal, almost like amethyst. His gloves were too thick to give him any clue to the surface texture when he rubbed his hand over, and in any case his skin was too numb. Despite that, he thought it was genuine crystal, he could see refracted light glinting from deep inside. For the life of him, he couldn’t think what type of chemical reaction had done this to the bark—some kind of ultra-cold catalyst conversion? Hoping the wood was still unchanged below the crystal, he held up the machete and took a swipe. Several crystals shattered from the impact, but the cut was barely a centimeter deep. Another, heavier swipe broke a big chunk of the amethyst crust away. The hole exposed more crystal inside, a column of what he took for near-pure quartz that made up the interior of the tree. Lush pink sunlight shone into it, revealing a vertical lattice of capillaries with what looked like dark viscous fluid moving through them extremely slowly.
“Son of a bitch,” Ozzie grunted. “A fucking jewelry tree.” When he looked up, the branches did seem to be more angular than a normal pine’s, their twigs multiplying out in fractal geometry patterns. All of them were smothered in a hard scabbing of snow, which had kept their true nature hidden.
The sense of wonder he would normally have enjoyed at the discovery of such a magnificent quirk of nature was canceled out by the realization that the weather wasn’t going to improve for tomorrow morning. Evolution hadn’t come up with this crystalline biota for warm climates; in fact, it was probably a form of reverse evolution; arctic-style plants expanding with the final ice age, then struggling for survival in a degenerating environment until their genes refined the ultimate winter-attuned chemistry. And how many millions of years of declining heat would it take to produce something this sophisticated? They’d missed this planet’s last springtime by geological eras.
He hurried back to the tent, too guilty to look at the horse and pony as he passed them. Orion had started cooking a meal on the heatbricks. Condensation was dripping off the inner lining.
“I can’t see a fire,” the boy said as Ozzie closed up the seal.
“This wood won’t light. Sorry.”
“I can feel my toes again.”
“Good. This insulation should keep enough heat in overnight. We’ll be fine in our sleeping bags.” He was doing a rough inventory. There were only eleven heatbricks left. Enough to keep them going for—realistically—three days. They could afford to walk forward for one more day, no more. If the path didn’t take them to a warmer world by tomorrow night, they’d have to turn back. No: Just see what’s around the next curve; no: I think it’s getting brighter. If things didn’t genuinely change, he couldn’t take the risk. There was no margin for error left anymore. And there would be nobody to return his memorycell to the Commonwealth for a re-life procedure. In fact, how long before anyone even notices I’ve gone missing?
Ozzie dug his sewing kit out of the pack. “Ah! This is going to be useful. I’ve an idea for some things we need tomorrow. How are you with sewing?”
“I’ve spoilt your chances, haven’t I?” Orion said. “You would have made it if it wasn’t for me.”
“Hey, man.” Ozzie tried to smile, but his lips cracked open. He dabbed at the drops of blood. “No way. We’re really doing it, we’re walking the deep paths. It’s your friendship gift that got us this far.”
Orion took the pendant out. They both stared at its dark lifeless surface.
“Try it again in the morning,” Ozzie said.
Polly and the pony were frozen solid when they emerged from the tent the next morning.
“They wouldn’t have felt anything,” Ozzie said when Orion stopped to look at them. His voice was muted by the thick fabric mask he’d carefully stitched together last evening. He was wearing every piece of clothing it was possible to wear, as was Orion. The boy looked as though his coat had inflated out to twice its normal size; even his gloves were covered in crude, bulging wraps of modified socks, like small balloons.
“They would have felt cold,” Orion said.
Ozzie couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses he was wearing, but he guessed the boy was feeling a great deal of remorse. With his more practical gauntlets, it was Ozzie who dismantled the tent and put the packs back on the lontrus. The cold was every bit as debilitating as the day before, but the little extra pieces of protective garments they’d put together helped to keep it from attacking their skin. The temperature was far too low for the snow to melt, which eliminated the chance of their feet getting wet—a lethal development.
The breeze had scattered the loose top layer of snow about, but there were still a few signs of the footprints they’d followed yesterday. Ozzie pushed at the lontrus’s rump, then finally gave the miserable beast a kick. It started moving, emitting a wounded wailing.
Optimism, which had been high as Ozzie climbed out of the tent to greet the day, drained away quickly. Though it never faltered, the lontrus moved slowly. Every step Ozzie made was an effort, moving the weight of clothes, pushing his feet through the cloying snow. Warmth left him gradually. There was no one place it was leaking out from, rather an all-over emission, slowly and relentlessly chilling him. Every time he tipped his head up to the high cerise clouds drifting across the rosy sky he could imagine currents of his body heat flowing upward to fill the insatiable icy void.
Some dreary time later, he noticed the crystal trees were shorter than before. Their perma-cloak of snow was also thinner, with the upper branches poking clear. Sunlight glinted and glimmered from their multiple facets, splitting into a prismatic spectrum entirely of red, from a gentle light rose to deep gloomy claret. There was less snow beneath their feet as well. Ozzie had long since lost sight of the Silfen footprints.
He was so intent on trying to see through the thinning crystal pillars he didn’t see Orion slowing. The boy grabbed at matted strands of the lontrus’s pelt, which made the animal whine in protest.
“Do you need a break?” Ozzie asked.
“No. It’s so cold, Ozzie. Really cold. I’m frightened.”
“I know. But try and keep going. Please? Stopping is only going to make things worse.”
“I’ll try.”
“You want to lean on me for a bit?”
“No.”
Ozzie tugged gently at the strands of pelt just behind the lontrus’s neck, reducing the animal’s speed. It didn’t resist the instruction. They ambled forward at a terribly slow pace. Ozzie started reevaluating their whole progress. He clearly hadn’t taken Orion’s state properly into account last night as he’d worked out how far they could travel. Obviously, they weren’t going to get more than a couple of kilometers farther at best today; and that was going to be exhausting for the boy. The sensible course would be to turn around immediately. At this rate, if they were lucky, they might just get back to where they’d pitched the tent last night.
“The forest’s finishing, look,” Orion said.
Ozzie focused, alarmed by how easily he’d fallen into a daydreaming state. The crystal trees were small and naked now; central boles of amethyst armor standing proud, with their main branches flung out at right angles. Away at the tips of the regular twig segments, the purple encrustation gave way to smooth opal wedges that flared out from each tip, flat side up to absorb the crisp frigid sunlight. They had thinned out enough for him to see past the last clusters to the vast plain beyond. From his position it looked like a circular depression walled in by low curving hills. In the thin clear air, the far side was almost as sharply drawn as the ground around him. Distance was difficult to judge with so few reference points, but he guessed at thirty to thirty-five kilometers across. Bright sparks of reflected sunlight twinkled with vivid intensity to halo each hill, indicating the crystal tree forest had spread over every slope. The depression’s floor was empty apart from its scattering of dusty snow.
For all the harsh beauty of the exotic landscape, Ozzie wanted to curse it. There was no hope here. They were going to struggle just to reach the end of the forest, a few hundred meters ahead where the crystal trees were nothing more than spindly dendrites of clear crystal strands sticking out of the iron-hard ground. Any notion of traversing that vast bleak and empty land to the other side was unthinkable.
Perhaps this is why so many who sought the deep paths were never heard of again. Our perception of the Silfen as gentle and kind is our own stupid, convenient illusion. We wanted to believe in elves. And how many human bodies lie out there under the snow because of that?