Nightmare journey

fast.
    The deer squealed when the wolf hamstrung its left hind leg.
    Snow flew.
    Crippled, the deer tried to stagger past Kiera, hobbling on three legs, done for and knowing it. Its breath was frost.
    Kiera leaped, high.
    She got its neck.
    The deer went down. It kicked. It stilled. The hunt was over.
    The two wolf-people wiped their bloodied muzzles in the snow, rose from their feet onto their hind legs and walked down to join the other three espers.
    Jask had expected them to take longer to rise out of the primitive state he had just seen them in. When they were in front of him, however, he saw that they were the same Chaney and Kiera, more civilized than not, more prone to kindness than violence.
    I wouldn't think you 'd need to rob graves to eat, Jask said to Chaney. With your hunting prowess, your table should always be full.
    Chaney shrugged. I prefer to buy my meat when I crave it. My kind was equipped to hunt and kill, and our abilities kept our strain alive through the centuries of violence following the Last War and through the many years of barrenness after that. But these days the need to bring down our own game comes seldom. I enjoy a hunt, but only rarely. Besides, I'm halfway to being a vegetarian.
    I thought you disliked moralists?
    I do. My predilection for becoming a vegetarian is strictly a matter of taste, not morals.
    Ten days later, far up in the snow belt, they ate the last of the deer meat and wondered if the few packages of jerky, which Tedesco had picked up in Hoskins' Watch, would keep them until they had reached the Glacier of Light. They had not seen any animal life for more than three days.
    The snow was now as much as ten feet deep, crusted enough for them to make use of their snowshoes.
    The wind wailed at night, mournful as a beast that had lost its mate, somehow reminding them of the invisible companion they had picked up at the black glass craters and gotten rid of in the middle of the Hadaspuri Sea. All of that, of course, seemed to have happened in another lifetime, centuries ago.
    During the day the sun glared on the diamond surface of the snow fields, giving the illusion that they walked upon a magnificent mirror or across the top of a serene ocean.
    As they walked, the snow melted on the pelts of Tedesco, Kiera and Chaney. At night, as they lay sleeping, the water froze in pellets. When they woke again, they were bedecked in transparent pearls.
    At last, a day before their last packages of jerky would have run out, they topped a white rise near sunset and looked out across the basin of land, which at its far end was stoppered by the mammoth anterior wall of the Glacier of Light.
    30
    THEY stood at the base of the glacier. Glowing worms of pastel light, twisting through the ice, shed little illumination on them. Less, even, than the stars that had been revealed in a cloudless sky.
    The Black Presence isn't here-Melopina.
    How do you know?-Jask.
    Reach for it with your esp.
    He tried. Well?
    Did you find anything at all?-Melopina.
    Reluctantly he admitted, No.
    Perhaps we're not using our esp properly-Kiera.
    How else could it be used?-Melopina.
    I sense something in there-Tedesco.
    Chaney: Me, too.
    What?- the other three.
    A machine, I think, Tedesco 'pathed.
    The Black Presence would have machines, Kiera 'pathed.
    And could the Presence, itself, be a machine?-Jask.
    The old books don't say so-Tedesco.
    You've previously admitted that the old books omit many things-Jask.
    But omit something so basic?-I doubt that.
    Melopina: I think I am receiving something besides a machine.
    Oh?
    A very minimal psychic radiation.
    The wind battered the side of the glacier.
    The worms of light lay still, dead but glowing.
    There, yes-Kiera.
    A man-Chaney.
    No, it's a woman-Tedesco.
    Both-Jask.
    More than two-Melopina.
    One by one, they sat down on the hard-packed snow and ice.
    Hundreds of people-Kiera.
    But none of them quite alive? Melopina 'pathed. Then again, how could they be alive in the center of a glacier?
    They should be helped, Jask said. But how?
    We can't melt a glacier, Chaney 'pathed.
    They don't want help-Melopina.
    They like it in there?-Chaney.
    They went there of their own accord-Melopina.
    I'm getting the same impression-Tedesco.
    But-
    They have been frozen on purpose, Tedesco 'pathed. The machines tend them, have tended them for thousands of years.
    To what end? Chaney asked.
    Preservation until… Melopina strained, searching the numbed minds of the glacier's