“Not too bad!” Kiem shouted. “Keep to the left-hand side and don’t worry about the last bit!”
He was right, worrying wouldn’t help. Jainan was at least very good at doing what had to be done. He let himself down carefully over the side and felt for the first foothold.
It was not easy. Jainan had never climbed seriously and wasn’t accustomed to testing footholds to see if they would hold his weight. His back and shoulder twinged in a way that told him he was starting to build up stim debt. The cold air tasted like metal in his mouth as he took his foot off one hold and slid his boot across the rock face, feeling for another foothold he couldn’t see. He had never been so grateful that he had kept up his quarterstaff training. Even as it was, his arms were shaking by the time he reached the part that had defeated Kiem.
He looked down. If Kiem couldn’t make it, Jainan doubted that he could. The ground below offered no good landing place; Kiem had been lucky not to twist an ankle. And in any case, Kiem himself was standing in the way. Jainan clung tighter to the ridge through his gloves and tried to make himself think.
“Jump!” Kiem called. He was holding his arms up. “Just let go!”
“I…” Jainan said. The word got lost in the cracks of the rock in front of him. “What?”
“I’ll catch you!” Kiem’s voice was going hoarse from shouting up advice. “It’ll be fine!”
It was not going to be fine. Jainan made himself pry his fingers off the handholds anyway. He let go.
He didn’t fall, just as Kiem hadn’t fallen—it was more of a slide, painfully scraping across the rock face and gathering speed. He only had time for a moment’s panic before he crashed down on top of Kiem. Kiem staggered, but his arms encircled Jainan, and his footing on the boulders held. Jainan had enough of his wits about him to jam his elbow into Kiem’s back so he stayed balanced over Kiem’s shoulder and they didn’t both fall.
There was nowhere immediate for Jainan to get down. It was not easy for a grown man to carry another one; Kiem took a couple of wobbly steps across the boulders while Jainan held on and tried not to move. His face was buried in Kiem’s shoulder. Kiem’s hair pressed against his forehead, the smell and feel of it distracting in a way they really shouldn’t be. Kiem was holding him close—for balance, for balance—and Jainan could feel the press of his body even through all their layers.
Kiem came to a halt on flat ground as the boulders petered out. It took Jainan a moment to react, then he realized Kiem was trying to put him down and he was still holding on. He rolled off Kiem’s shoulder and half fell, landing on his feet. Kiem stepped back very quickly.
Jainan caught his breath. Kiem looked more shaken from the climb than Jainan had realized, and his hand appeared to be trembling as he lowered his arm. Was that the effect of the stim tabs Kiem had taken, or had Jainan’s thoughts shown on his face?
Kiem rubbed his neck where Jainan’s hand had rested. Jainan gathered his defenses and swallowed the whole incident down, burying it where it wouldn’t affect either of them. “I’m not sure climbing is a sport I’m going to take up any time soon,” Jainan said lightly. “It’s getting dark. How much farther do we go today?”
“Right,” Kiem said, shaking his head a little and coming back to the logistics. The mountains had long twilights even by the standards of Iskat’s long evenings, but now the deep blue above their heads was turning into dusk, and clouds were creeping up from the farthest peaks. “We should camp. Maybe not here though—the snow’s pretty deep.” As he turned to scan the shadowed valley, his eyes skated past Jainan awkwardly. “We could probably reach that overhang in half an hour.” He shouldered the backpack again. Jainan fell in beside him, not too close.
The boulders at the base of the mountain gave way to rock and earth in patches visible under the thin layer of snow. This part of the small valley was more sheltered than the higher reaches, though the snow lay in smothering drifts on the other side. They didn’t talk.
The snow was still deep enough to crunch beneath their feet. Jainan’s breath crystallized in front of him in white clouds in the still air, which hung and then dissipated. He found himself sinking into a rhythm of walking, eventually warming up enough that he unfastened his coat and let it flap open. Every now and then, a breath of wind chilled his face.
The stillness was the stillness of a shrine. None of the palace politics seemed important: even Internal Security and the Resolution felt toothless out here. Apart from the brush of their footsteps and their laboring breath, absolute silence reigned. The cold against Jainan’s face was clean and purifying; he felt detached, but in a strange way, as if he could see his tiny, insignificant form moving at the center of the huge spaces around them. Something in the space and silence was trickling into his bones, gradually filling them up with an itchiness like shoots of grass unfolding. It came with an aching feeling, and for some reason, the ache felt like loss.
There is something wrong with you, he told himself, because there was no loss, and now he was sounding quite insane. But it was like an echo of someone else’s voice.
“Here?” Kiem said, startling Jainan out of his reverie. Jainan turned, slow to react, and realized Kiem had stopped a few paces back to inspect a patch of earth sheltered by a cliff face.
Jainan gestured assent. “Give me the tent.”
Kiem unshouldered the backpack and tossed over a dense, knobbly pack with a handle at the top. When Jainan pulled the cord, the pack exploded into a pincushion of plastic tubes that pistoned out like spikes, and a waterfall of fabric that chased them and covered the surface of the structure until he was holding a rigid pod. It was noticeably small for two people. Jainan decided not to think about that. “Is there a heater?”
“Yes, but only three canisters,” Kiem said. “I thought we should save them. There’s food if you want it.” As Jainan finished securing the tent and came around the front of it, he saw Kiem had laid out several foil packs on the snow by the sleeping bags. “Finest gourmet choices: you can have brown sludge, brown sludge, or grayish sludge. The gray one says it’s strawberry, but I’m not sure I believe it.”
Jainan picked up a piece of the brown rations. It was more like a hard cake than sludge, and it crumbled like a cookie; a square broke off in his hand. He tried a mouthful and then broke off a square of the gray one on the working hypothesis that it couldn’t be worse. It wasn’t, quite. He sat next to Kiem in front of the tent, his outdoor clothes rustling as he settled down. The valley they had just trekked down folded out in front of them.
Kiem stared at the red-tinged snow where the sunset light came through a break in the fiery crags, absently eating square after square of the horrible rations. “Jainan,” he said. “What happens if both the treaty representatives die in a crash just before Unification Day? Does the Resolution appoint new ones?”
“I don’t know,” Jainan said. If he thought about it clinically, as a diplomatic puzzle rather than a sector-wide disaster, he could just about treat it logically. “Under normal conditions, maybe. Given the Auditor already suspects Taam was murdered, it seems likely he would take this as a further sign that Iskat and Thea are not stable enough to sign a Resolution treaty.”