Chương 58: Getting through

Drones will carry almost anything to almost anywhere within a day. A person living on a coastal settlement can have deep forest timber at their door before the next morning. This convenience has made people forget that some materials resist the transaction entirely. They can be moved. What makes them valuable cannot. You cannot drone-deliver a century of cold." - From a PfP materials procurement report, internal circulation only The storm arrived exactly when the clouds had promised it would.

Kara saw the wind shift first, the snow on the flat shelf of rock where Waggy had stood that afternoon beginning to move in a new direction, thin surface crystals skating sideways across the harder pack beneath. He was already standing when Ren looked up from the camp.

"We need to move. Now," Kara announced. They moved fast. Packs on in under a minute, mining tools and umbrellas secured across their backs. Kohaku lifted immediately, angling low and tight against the rock face rather than gaining altitude. Waggy was already moving ahead of them along the base of the outcropping. The wind hit properly thirty seconds later. It did not build.

It just arrived - a wall of it, carrying snow horizontally across the face of the mountain with a force that drove Kara's chin down and put him into a lean just to stay upright. The temperature fell in the same moment, a drop so sudden he could feel it against every exposed surface at once - face, hands, the strip of neck between collar and hood.

Kara was fighting for each step, planting his boot and waiting for the gust to ease before shifting his weight, his free hand against the rock face for reference points his eyes could no longer give him. Beside him, Ren had his arm up across his face, moving by feel. Waggy was ahead and pulling away. His body stayed low, making adjustments instinctively, before Kara could even register the need for it.

The mountain was throwing everything it had at the traverse and Waggy was moving through it the way water moves through rock, finding the path that had always been there, as if some part of him had always known it. He angled suddenly away from the rock face, moving perpendicular to their path into a section Kara could not see clearly. He paused. Then he reappeared at the edge of a shallow recess where the outcropping jutted further from the main rock face, and looked back - making sure they were following.

Getting to him took longer than it should have. The distance between them and the recess had acquired a resistance built from cold and noise and the disorientation of not being able to see past your own arm. Kara reached the recess wall and pressed himself against it - the rock taking the force of the storm and returning only a low vibration, the recess air thick and still against his face. He looked out at what the mountain was doing.

The cedar grove just a short distance away had ceased to exist from their line of sight. In its place was a moving white wall, the snow driven almost flat across the mountain face with a continuous compression against the rock, felt more in the chest than the ears. Each gust arrived in irregular intervals, and each one was harder than the one before as if testing the mountain's limit. Ren pressed himself against the back wall beside Kara, both hands flat against the rock.

Kohaku was tucked between him and the stone, wings folded tight, her warmth against his side the only soft thing in the recess. Waggy sat at the edge and watched the storm with some interest.

"We reacted ahead of time," Ren said, loudly enough to carry over the wind.

"We saw it coming. We moved immediately."

"And yet we almost got caught up in it," Kara finished. They looked at each other. The recess was perhaps six feet deep. Another five minutes on the mountain without it would have been a different conversation, in the unlikely event there had been a conversation at all. Waggy turned his head briefly toward them, as if confirming they had understood the relevant point, then returned to watching the storm. They did not sleep much.

The wind worked at the recess in intervals, each quiet spell just long enough to suggest it was finished before the next gust arrived to correct that assumption. Kara sat with his back against the rock and felt the mountain through it - the vibration of the gusts, the settling between them, the slow percussion of the storm working its way through the night. Waggy pressed warm against his side, his breathing even, his eyes occasionally catching the faint light that came off the snow outside.

Ren slept in short stretches, practised at taking rest wherever it turned up. Kohaku remained tucked against Ren's side throughout, amber eyes open, her full attention on the mountain outside - present and prepared. By the time the sky began to grey, the wind had dropped to something manageable.

Kara stepped out of the recess and stood in the cold morning air, and Waggy walked past him and shook himself once and moved immediately toward the cedar grove as if the night had been a minor administrative matter, now concluded. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. The storm had left the grove transformed.

Fresh snow covered the ground to knee height in places, drifted against the northern side of each trunk in smooth curves, and the lower branches held white loads that dropped without warning when disturbed, collapsing softly onto whoever was working below. The footing around the roots was unreliable - surfaces that looked compressed giving way suddenly, hollows beneath the snow catching a boot at the wrong angle. The complication came early.

The storm had driven ice into a crack running along the base of the first tree, and what looked like sound wood on the exterior concealed interior damage that only revealed itself when the trunk was nearly through. Kara worked around it, finding the angle that preserved the usable length, and the tree came down cleaner than expected, the crack staying below the cut line. By mid-morning, both shafts were down, trimmed, and lying in the snow.

Ren crouched at one end of his shaft, running both hands along the grain the way Isamu had shown them. Kara did the same. The wood felt right - the density consistent from end to end, the grain tight throughout, no deviation. Ren reached for his carry cord. Kara reached for his carry cord. They both stopped. The silence lasted perhaps three seconds.

"We should have done this on the way down," Ren said.

"We really should have," Kara agreed. They stood with their carry cords in their hands and looked at the two cedar shafts and then at the terrain above them, which continued upward for another two days at progressively steeper angles.

"Good training," Ren offered.

"Excellent training," Kara confirmed. They kept their faces straight and did not look at each other. Waggy looked at the cedar shafts. He looked at Kara. He looked at the shafts again, then at Kara again, having reached a conclusion about human intelligence and found it disappointing. Then he walked to the far edge of the grove and sat there silently for a minute. Kohaku joined him. They lashed the shafts to their packs along with the mining tools and started climbing. The weight changed everything about the day.

The shafts threw his balance wrong in a way that required constant small corrections on uneven ground, and the corrections accumulated over hours into tiredness. Kara's dexterity was carrying him where his strength should have been, each adjustment coming on time but requiring more effort. He sent Master a silent and deeply insincere thank you for making him dedicate a point to strength during his last tier up. Ren, moving ahead of him with the cedar shaft across his back, was not having the same problem.

His adjustments came on time and needed less effort, his footing certain on the same ground that was costing Kara twice the effort. Kara noted this with the flat resignation of a man watching a point he would rather not have had proved get proved anyway. The terrain above the cedar grove opened into a long ascending traverse along the eastern face, sheltered from the northern wind by a spine of rock running parallel to their path.

The snow here was older and harder, the surface reliable, and they made reasonable time despite the shafts. The mountain showed itself differently at this elevation - less forest, more of the underlying rock visible through the snow in long striations that followed the angle of the slope. They stopped at midday on a flat section between two large boulders and trained for an hour, the cedar shafts propped against the rock.

The training was slower than the day before, and more deliberate - holding positions longer revealed the geometry problems more clearly than speed had. Kohaku threaded between the canopies without a single misjudgement. Waggy found the gaps faster than the previous day, and twice moved through a line so cleanly that Kara needed no adjustment at all. They moved on after taking a small break. The animals appeared in the afternoon.

A pair of serow crossed the slope above them at distance - stocky, sure-footed, their dark coats distinct against the white. They looked at the two humans below and found nothing there worth changing pace for. Later, three marten appeared - low and quick, dark against the snow - and vanished into a crevice as Kara and Ren approached and did not reappear. The mountain was occupied, clearly, even at this altitude. Waggy tracked everything. His head moved constantly on the ascent, cataloguing.

Kohaku did the same from above, her slow circles occasionally tightening when something on the slope below drew her attention before she widened out again. Neither reacted with alarm to anything they saw, which Kara had learned to treat as reliable information. Waggy stopped first. He was perhaps five paces ahead of Kara on the traverse when he went still, his head turning to the left and holding there. This was different from the brief head-turns he used to catalogue background movement. Kara stopped.

Ren, two paces behind, stopped when Kara did. Waggy's gaze was fixed on the upper slope to their left, at an angle that put whatever he was watching somewhere above and well ahead of their current position. Kara followed the line of it and saw nothing - white slope, rock outcroppings, the broken line of the ridge above. Then he saw them. On a broad shelf of exposed rock where the snow was thinner, six shapes moved slowly across the stone.

Their quills caught the last angle of afternoon light and threw it back in brief pale flashes. At this distance they were small enough that Kara might have taken them for boulders if they had been still. He pulled up the interface and ran the grades. Five at G2 and G3, spread across the lower range. He moved to the sixth and the interface returned a reading that sat differently from the others. G5. He read it twice, then sent the readings across to Ren.

Ren received them, looked at the shelf, and looked back at the cedar shafts lashed to their packs. His expression did the quiet arithmetic. Six Yamaarashi. One two full tiers above anything they had handled in the valley. Cedar shafts on their backs shifting their balance and narrowing their options. Two days into a five-day mission with the iron deposits still ahead.

"We should come back for them," Ren said.

"Yes, we can't risk injuries right now. Let's get the iron deposits. We know where they are. We can handle them on the way down," Kara agreed. They stood a moment longer, watching the group move across the distant shelf. The Tier 5 was larger than the others - clear even at this distance once you knew to look for it. Then they turned and kept climbing, careful to stay out of sight.