It was another two and a quarter hours before they reached the edge of the forest. Ozzie and Orion both peered through the flap, eager to see the land beyond. They were high up, something Ozzie hadn’t appreciated before. The crystal tree forest sprawled across the plateau of some broad massif. Where it ended, the ground swept down toward a vast plain dominated by hundreds of low volcanic craters. Sara had been right about its size, the ultra-cold air was perfectly clear, yet from his vantage point half a mile above the plain, Ozzie couldn’t see the other side, it was hidden within a hazy crimson horizon. The crater rims themselves were almost flat, but between them the frozen land had ripped open, producing thousands of rocky fangs like small Matterhorns. Crystal trees grew on their lower slopes, although the pinnacles were rugged naked rock with a few streaks of snow and ice caught in crevices, reflecting a dusky scarlet in the pervasive sunlight.
The craters were all filled with ice particles, Sara told them, fine sandlike granules that produced a perfectly level surface, giving no clue how deep they actually were. Most of them had vapor rising from the center in small plumes that drifted almost straight upward, slowly getting wider and thinner as they climbed until, thousands of feet above the plain, they merged into smears of tenuous cirrus that meandered about like spacious contrails. When Ozzie switched to infrared he could see the craters glowing with a weak intensity, no more than a few degrees higher than the surrounding land, but a temperature difference sufficient to cause evaporation. He wondered how much warmer the craters were at the bottom.
Halfway down the slope leading to the plain, he could see the Silfen threading their way past small clumps of crystal trees, lantern lights bobbing about merrily. There was no sign of the riders. One by one, the big sleds crested the top of the slope, and began their precarious descent after the hunters.
It was a rough journey down, with the rucked surface rocking the sleds about. Every so often, the Korrok-hi drivers had to use the ybnan to slow their speed rather than pull them along. Ozzie had a lot of difficulty looking out and checking on Tochee; everyone inside the covered sled was hanging on grimly to the broad bone cage. In the end he just stayed put—there wasn’t much he could do if the tow rope broke anyway. Several pieces of equipment had worked loose to roll around, pans and bone struts jangling as they banged painfully into shins and arms and chests. The brazier was swinging in an alarmingly wide arc on its short chain.
They couldn’t have taken more than forty minutes to reach the plain, although time stretched out to hours inside the cramped stinking cabin. Ozzie had never before appreciated how important it was to be able to see out of a moving vehicle. His imagination filled the whole route down with knife-blade boulders waiting to split them open, and the slope was bound to end with a hundred-yard vertical cliff.
Bill let out a low trumpet of satisfaction to signal the descent was over. Inside the sled, everyone flashed nervous grins around, not willing to admit just how scared they’d been. After that, progress was appreciably easier. Sara was confident they could close some of the distance that had accumulated between them and the Silfen. Orion kept his friendship pendant clasped tightly in his fist, watching its sparkling blue light intently.
The covered sleds maintained a single file, following the fresh tracks in the crunchy grains of snow. They were heading directly away from the massif, rattling along at a good pace. By midday they were skirting along the shoreline ridge of the first crater, with a string of savage rock peaks on the other side. After that there were gullies crowned by curving waves of compacted snow, looking as if the slightest tremble would send them avalanching into the gulf below. Ravines with frozen sheet ice along the floor, where the ybnan had trouble getting a grip with their hooves. Spinneys and forests of crystal trees and bulbous bushes: often when he looked out, Ozzie would see great swaths of them smashed and shattered, leaving jagged stumps surrounded by a pile of ice-encrusted branches. There were narrow, steep saddle valleys to surmount, where their speed was reduced to a painful crawl on the ascent, only to degenerate into a mad slither downward, more abrupt and frightening than the trip down from the massif. Long curves around craters, where the vapor drifted out sideways like a mist, swiftly covering ybnan and sleds alike in a crusty hoarfrost.
When the sun was an hour and a half from the horizon, the massif was invisible behind them, blocked from view by towering spires of sharp black rock. Shadows were lengthening and darkening across the rust-tinted ground. The ybnan teams on all the sleds were beginning to tire, even on the flat their speed was noticeably less than earlier.
