"Probably, yes." Rudi patted his pocket. "I'm using relief maps from the other side for navigation, it's close enough to mostly work, and the Wergat's pretty hard to miss. The only thing I will say is, if the weather starts closing in I need to get down on the ground fast. The Hjalmar palace is about an hour, hour and ten minutes away from here, as the trike flies-it'll cut into my ability to do a sweep around to the north. Are you sure you want that?"
Riordan rubbed the side of his nose thoughtfully. "I think... if you don't see signs of soldiers southeast of here within thirty miles, then I definitely want to know what's going on down along the Wergat. If you see those soldiers, call me up and we'll discuss it." He nodded to himself. Then he pointed at Rudi's survival kit. "Why the gun? Can you shoot from a moving aircraft?"
"It's not for when the trike's flying: but if anything goes wrong while I'm forty miles out, over open forest..."
Riordan nodded. "Good luck." "Thank you, sir. I'll try not to need it."
In the end, what saved them was Huw's nose hair.
It was, Huw sometimes reflected, one of those fine ironies of life that despite being unable to grow a proper heard, he suffered inordinately from the fine hairs that clogged his nostrils. Nostril hair was neither sexy nor obviously problematic to people who didn't have to put up with it: it was just...
In the flashlight-lit wreckage of a building inside a shattered dome, standing before a wall with a tightly sealed doorway in it, his kid brother raised a fire ax and swung it down hard towards the left side of the door.
As the ax-struck the door, Huw, who was standing a good two meters behind and to the left of him, sneezed. The sneeze had been building up for some time, aggravated by the cold, damp air in this new world and the low priority Huw had attached to his manicure in the face of the mission of exploration. Nevertheless, the eruption took Huw by surprise, forcing him to screw his eyes shut and hunch his shoulders, turning his face towards the floor. The noise startled Yul, who began to turn to his right, towards Huw. The movement took him out of the direct line of the door. And it also surprised Elena, who was standing off to the right near the entrance to the building with her vicious little machine pistol at the ready. She ducked, and this took her out of the direct line of sight on the portal.
Which was why they survived.
As the ax blade bit into the edge of the door, there was a brilliant flash of violet-tinted light. Huw registered it as as flicker of red behind his closed eyelids and might have
ignored it-but the rising noise that followed it was impossible to write off.
"Ouch! What's that-" Yul began.
Huw, opening his eyes and straightening up, grabbed his brother's arm, and yanked. "Run!"
The hissing sound from the edge of the door grew louder; the center of the door bowed inward slightly, as if under the pressure of a giant fist from their side. Yul barely spared it a glance before he dropped the axe and took to his heels. Huw was a stride behind him. Two seconds brought them to the twilit entrance to the room. "Hit the ground!" yelled Huw, catching one glimpse of Elena's uncomprehending face as he threw himself forward and rolled sideways, away from the open doorway.
Behind them, the creaking door-far thinner than Huw had realized-creaked once more, and gave way. All hell broke loose.
The hissing and whistling gave way to a deep roaring, and the breeze in Huw's face began to strengthen. Huw glanced over his shoulder once, straining to look over the length of his body towards the inner chamber. A strange mist curdled out of the air, obscuring whatever process was at work there. The wind was still strengthening. "Take cover!" he called out. "There's hard vacuum on the other side of that-thing-watch out for flying debris!"
