said. “How far are we from the tourist trails? I haven’t seen any red paint in hours.”
Tilde pulled away her goggles to wipe them, gave him a flash smile with no warmth. “No tourists up here. Most good climbers stay away, too. But I know my way.”
“Snow goddess,” Mitch said.
“What do you expect?” she said, taking it as a compliment. “I’ve climbed here since I was a girl.”
“You’re still a girl,” Mitch said. “Twenty-five, twenty-six?”
She had never revealed her age to Mitch. Now she appraised him as if he were a gemstone she might reconsider purchasing. “I am thirty-two. Franco is forty but he’s faster than you.”
“To hell with Franco,” Mitch said without anger.
Tilde curled her lip in amusement. “We are all weird today,” she said, turning away. “Even Franco feels it. But another Iceman . . . what would that be worth?”
The very thought shortened Mitch’s breath, and he did not need that now. His excitement curled back on itself, mixing with his exhaustion. “I don’t know,” he said.
They had opened their mercenary little hearts to him back in Salzburg. They were ambitious but not stupid; Tilde was absolutely certain that their find was not just another climber’s body. She should know. At fourteen, she had helped carry out two bodies spit loose from the tongues of glaciers. One had been over a hundred years old.
Mitch wondered what would happen if they had found a true Iceman. Tilde, he was sure, would in the long run not know how to handle fame and success. Franco was stolid enough to make do, but Tilde was in her own way fragile. Like a diamond, she could cut steel, but strike her from the wrong angle and she would come to pieces.
Franco might survive fame, but would he survive Tilde? Mitch, despite everything, liked Franco.
“It’s another three kilometers,” Tilde told him. “Let’s go.”
Together, she and Franco showed him how to climb the frozen waterfall. “This flows only during midsummer,” Franco said. “It is ice for a month now. Understand how it freezes. It is strong down here.” He struck the pale gray ice of the pipe organ’s massive base with his ax. The ice tinked, spun off a few chips. “But it is verglas, lots of bubbles, higher up—mushy. Big chunks fall if you hit it wrong. Hurt somebody. Tilde could cut some steps there, not you. You climb between Tilde and me.”
Tilde would go first, an honest acknowledgment by Franco that she was the better climber. Franco slung the ropes and Mitch showed them he remembered the loops and knots from climbing in the Cascades, in Washington state. Tilde made a face and retied the loop Alpine style around his waist and shoulders. “You can front most of the way. Remember, I will chisel steps if you need them,” Tilde said. “I don’t want you sending ice down on Franco.”
She took the lead.
Halfway up the pillar, digging in with the front points of his crampons, Mitch passed a threshold and his exhaustion seemed to leak away in spurts through his feet, leaving him nauseated for a moment. Then his body felt clean, as if flushed with fresh water, and his breath came easy. He followed Tilde, chunking his crampons into the ice and leaning in very close, grabbing at whatever holds were available. He used his ax sparingly. The air was actually warmer near the ice.
It took them fifteen minutes to climb past the midpoint, onto the cream-colored ice. The sun came from behind low gray clouds and lit up the frozen waterfall at a sharp angle, pinning him on a wall of translucent gold.
He waited for Tilde to tell them she was over the top and secure. Franco gave his laconic reply. Mitch wedged his way between two columns. The ice was indeed unpredictable here. He dug in with side points, sending a cloud of chips down on Franco. Franco cursed, but not once did Mitch break free and simply hang, and that was a blessing.
He fronted and crawled up the bumpy, rounded lip of the waterfall. His gloves slipped alarmingly on runnels of ice. He flailed with his boots, caught a ridge of rock with his right boot, dug in, found purchase on more rock, waited for a moment to catch his breath, and humped up beside Tilde like a walrus.
Dusty gray boulders on each side defined the bed of the frozen creek. He looked up the narrow rocky valley, half in shadow, where a small glacier had once