the coming of the hurtling moon, by the light of which their progress was that much faster.
Later, with the moon down again, they took it a little easier and fell into the natural, jingling, fast-striding pace of accustomed Travellers. They held back from talking, saved their breath for the work. Now and then they must climb where ridges and spurs broke the timber-line, but mainly they followed level contours. Plainly The Dweller had been right; their guide was completely familiar with these heights; either that or he was a creature of unerring instinct. They forged steadily east.
Another rest, another meal...
A string of long, flat, shallow saddles between elevated peaks like wave crests, where their striding ate up mile after mile unending, until finally and far too soon the easy going was eaten up entirely ...
A region of sliding scree which the trees had gathered into a treacherous, teetering barricade. Only tread unwary, trip the wrong pebble, and the whole thing -trees, scree, men and all - would go avalanching down on to Starside. To prove it, there were plenty of breaks where the green belt had been swept away right down to the raw rock ...
Another sleep period ...
When they sat down, the grey one sat apart; when they lay flat, he stretched himself out. Coming awake, he'd be up first, waiting for them. They tossed him scraps of dried meat, which he 'wolfed', naturally. His job didn't allow for hunting.
Then, an odd thing: Twenty-five hours or almost two-thirds of the way into the trek, the wolf bitch which Lardis had seen with the changeling overtook them. He recognized her from her pure white, extraordinarily bushy eyebrows. She carried something in her dripping mouth, which she put down on approaching their guide. Then the two wolves went through a careful recognition ritual, following which she sat down with the other a while. Peder Szekarly tossed meat, which she gratefully accepted.
But Lardis was more interested in the item she'd carried in her mouth: a grenade, from The Dweller's armoury in the garden. Lardis knew what it was well enough; there'd been several left over from the battle four years ago; devastating devices, he'd wanted nothing to do with them. Aye, for there are weapons and there are weapons. A shotgun is controllable until the moment you pull the trigger, but one of these ...?
Only arm it ... and from then on, no way to change your mind. The rest was out of your hands - indeed it must be out of your hands, and as quickly as possible! What The Dweller's bitch would want with such a thing was a mystery, but as far as Lardis was concerned she was welcome to it. And in a little while she gathered it up in her mouth again, and set off east as before. Then- Six more hours of trekking, followed by a break (all too brief) before the next incident: a small, unequal dispute. But long before that the beacon of the sphere Gate was already making itself visible from time to time in the east. At first, as the distance between gradually narrowed down, it was the merest firefly glimmer; later it became a weird glow-worm radiation - light without heat - in the shadows of the barrier range where eastern foothills met boulder plains to merge into Starside's blue-tinged moonscape.
As for the dispute: This came where Lardis wanted to leave the pine-clad margin and climb diagonally towards the saddles between the high peaks: his escape route into Sunside, in the event a bolthole should become necessary. Their wolf guide thought differently, however; he had been told to stick to the timber-line and head for the ball of glaring white light close to the great pass, and he didn't intend straying from his duty. So that when the grey brother simply refused to change his tack ... that was the end of the unspoken argument. But in any case (Lardis consoled himself), the way up had looked pretty rough going just there. And so the four men followed on behind their lupine guide as before, except that now they were constantly on the lookout for easy climbing.
They found it an hour later, just as a parting of the ways became absolutely necessary. For if indeed the Wamphyri were still abroad and active in the vicinity of the Gate, then from this point forward it would be madness to remain too far Starside of the peaks.