The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [93]
He could feel the regular shivers that were beginning in the ice. Tremors, emanating from massive and still-growing sinkhole about Gotheray Castle, were beginning to shake the glacier loose.
Beckett’s frustration screamed at him from beneath the haze, ordering him to go faster. He ignored it. It swore at him to forget the curves of the switchback and cut straight down the side of the mountain. He ignored it.
A huge, shivering wave passed through the ice beneath his feet, rocking him as he walked, and for a moment everything vanished, and he was rolling in the black waves of a stormy sea, beneath a black sky. Saltwater filled his mouth and nose, cleansed the filth from his eyes and lungs tossed him up and down so that he lost all sense of direction…
Stay here! The voice in his head shouted, and he was back on the glacier. He began to focus on the ragged cold breaths that scraped his lungs, and the broken glass that was slicing the inside of his knees to ribbons. He tried to find a balance between the drug and the pain, using his agony to keep his mind from drifting off.
Time was distended. He had no idea how long he’d walked, if it was faster or slower than the time it had taken them to climb. All he could think of was the pain of his body and the warmth of the drug, and the weight of Valentine on his shoulders, crushing the breath out of him.
And then, there was the promontory where they’d left the coach. There was the wooden bridge that led from the glacier. There was another terrifying shudder in the ice, and thousands of tiny granules began to shower past his feet. Almost there! He told himself. Almost!
The bridge. He’d made it to the bridge. Halfway across. And then his legs gave out. Pushed to the brink of exhaustion and beyond, his legs simply stopped working. He collapsed beneath the weight of his friend, halfway to safety. The ringing in his ears began to fade, replaced now with a great, rumbling sound, the huge, earth-shivering thunder of an earthquake.
Too late, he thought to himself, even as his inner-sergeant bellowed and tried to bully him to his feet. It was no use. His will was strong, but there was simply no strength left in his body. He heard the thunder bearing down on him, and felt the cold creep in past the drugs. His arms and legs were numb, well beyond feeling. The cold was a terrible fist, slowly closing around his heart. Beckett snatched what ragged breaths he could; his lungs felt too tired to breathe. The thunder rolled closer and closer, and Beckett closed his eyes. Well, Valentine, he thought in the dark. Guess we didn’t make it, this time.
Beckett was so tired that the cold was beginning to miraculously transmute itself into warmth. Real warmth, not the fiction of the veneine. Real warmth, and the thunder had become the rolling waves of the sea, and Beckett let himself go to Cross the Water…
“Grab his feet, there, boy!” A rough voice spoke, and rough hands gripped Beckett’s arms. “Hurry, we haven’t got time to dawdle. That’s it!”
Hands, voices, all vanished into the sound of the sea. There was a cough, and Beckett imagined he heard Valentine. “Owww. Did . . . what happened?”
“No time for that, Mr. Valentine. Get on your feet if you want to live.” Was that Harry’s voice?
It didn’t matter. Sleep claimed him, and an enormous sea of ice and snow swept the wooden bridge away into the darkness.
Thirty-One: A Conclusion
The coroners returned to Trowth in the wake of the sharpsie riots. Beckett remained unconscious for the entire trip, pushed beyond the limits of human endurance by his heroic trip down the mountain. Valentine, who had regained just enough of his wits to climb onto the stone promontory from the bridge before it was swept away by the avalanche, remained addled for a little while, but soon was back to normal.
The city, on the other hand, had been completely transformed. Almost all of Old Bank had been destroyed; Raithower House was one of the few buildings untouched by the second