Glory Season

Plunging into the canyon, Maia had to feel her way at first, her fingers tracing a thick layer of living topsoil that soon gave way to hard laminations of clay. Maia found herself descending a series of hellish rents in the ground, as if the skin of Stratos lay raked open by gigantic claws.

Her pupils adapted, splitting slitwise to let in a maximum of light. Succeeding beds of clay and limestone alternately shone or glittered or simply drank whatever moonbeams reached this deep into the canyon. It all depended, Maia supposed, on what mix of tiny sea creatures had fallen to the ocean bottom during whatever long-ago sedimentary ages laid these beds. Soon even the sinuous bands gave way to hard native rock, twisted and tortured by continental movements that had taken place before protohumans walked on faraway Earth. Interchanging patterns of light and dark stone reminded her of those towering "castle" pillars she had seen in the distance from the railway — rocky remnants of once proud mountains that used to stand here, but had since been all but ground away by rainstorms and rivers and time.

Time was one thing Maia didn't figure she had a wealth of. Did Tizbe intend to wait till morning to spring a trap on her? Or would the young Beller come during the night to the room Maia had been given, accompanied by a dozen well-muscled Jopland fems? After overhearing those sinister words in the farmyard, Maia had chosen not to stay and find out.

Escaping Jopland Hold was easy enough. Stepping quietly to avoid alerting the dogs, she had crept down to the nearby stream that ran beside the orchard, and then sloshed a kilometer or so through icy water with her shoes tied together, hanging from her neck, until the mansion was well out of sight. Next she had to spend several minutes rubbing sensation back into her half-frozen feet before lacing up again. Shivering, Maia then spent an hour trampling a path across successive wheat fields until at last finding the road.

So far, so good. Thinking through her predicament was much harder. After weeks of depressed numbness, the abrupt effect of all this adrenaline was both dizzying and exhilarating. She couldn't help comparing her situation to those adventure reels Lamatia let summerlings watch during the high seasons, when the mothers were too busy to be bothered. Or illicit books Leie used to borrow off young vars from more lenient holds. In such tales, the heroine, usually a beautiful, winter-born sixer from an up-and-coming clan, found herself thrown against the dread schemes of some decadent house whose wealth and power was maintained by subversion rather than honest competition. Usually there was a token man, or a shipload of decent, clear-eyed sailors, in danger of being gulled by the evil hive. The ending was always the same. After being saved by the heroine's insight and courage, the men promised to visit the small virtuous clan each winter for as long as the heroine's mothers and sisters wanted them.

Virtue prevailing over venality. It seemed exciting and romantic on page or screen. But in real life, Maia had no mothers or sisters to turn to. She was a lone summerling fiver without a friend in the world. Clearly, Tizbe and her Jopland clients could do whatever they pleased to her.

That's if they catch me, Maia thought, biting her lip to stop a quiver. Clenching her fists also helped. Defiance was a heady anodyne against fear.

Uh oh.

Coming to a dead stop, she swallowed hard. The trail had been meandering along a lip halfway down the canyon wall, but on turning a corner she found it suddenly plunging straight for a precipice. A rickety suspension bridge lay ahead, half of it in shadows and half reflecting painful moonlight to her dark-adapted eyes.

I must've taken a wrong turn. Calma could never have taken her wagon across that!

Tracing its spidery outline, Maia saw that the bridge hung over a gulch strewn with heaping mounds of ash and slag, trailing from a row of towering beehive structures on the opposite ridge. Here and there, Maia glimpsed red flickers from coal fires that were banked for the night, but never allowed to go out.

Iron foundries, she recognized with some relief. So this was Lerner Hold after all. Calma must have taken a slower freight route across the canyon floor. This was the more direct way.

Setting foot on the creaky, swaying bridge would have been frightening even by daylight. But what choice had she? I was never very good at this, she thought, remembering camping trips with other summerlings on the steppe near Port Sanger. She and Leie had loved the expeditions, putting up cheerfully with biting bugs and bitter cold. But neither of them had much love for crossing streams on teetering logs or skittish stones.