“I’m sure she is,” Erwal said evenly. The pain of her own lost child — stillborn soon after Teal’s first mysterious voyage away from the village — was too long ago to mean anything now, and the dismal fact that she and Damen had proven unable to bear another child had come to seem trivial compared to the huge, greater tragedy sweeping down over their little community.

“How is the baby? Will you allow me?…” Erwal opened Sura’s blanket just a few inches, tenting the flaps so that the snow was kept from the child, and ran her fingers over the hot bundle. Sura looked on, a vacant smile hovering about her mouth. The child’s breathing was rapid, ragged; the tiny hands were as if carved from ice. “Sura, you must take the child indoors. Keep her covered. I am afraid her limbs are frozen—”

“She needs air,” Sura said, her voice high. “It’s so musty in the teepee.”

Erwal stared into Sura’s eyes. Her skin was smooth but her eyes were ringed with dark shadows. Sura was little more than a child herself. “Sura,” Erwal said urgently, “you aren’t thinking clearly. The child is too cold.”

The shallow smile evaporated. Sura brushed Erwal’s hands away resentfully, and began to paw at the baby. “She’ll be all right.” She cupped one tiny hand in her own and began to rub vigorously.

“Sura, take care, I beg you.”

“She just needs to get warm—”

There was a soft crackle, as if a thin crust of ice had broken.

It was a sound that Erwal knew she would remember to her dying day.

Sura’s head jerked down; her jaw seemed to be swinging loose, the muscles in her cheeks slack. Erwal, watching in horror, felt as if she would faint; it was as if she saw the whole tableau, Sura, the child and the snow, from a great distance.

Sura opened the hands which had cupped the child’s. Detached fingers lay like tiny jewels on Sura’s callused flesh. The child whimpered, stirred against its mother. Sura jerked her hands back, so that the frozen pieces of flesh fell to the snow. She pulled her blanket tight around her and ran, oblivious to the drifting snow.

Erwal bent and scooped up the tiny fingers, the fragments of palm and wrist.

When she returned to the teepee, Damen had woken. Wrapped in a blanket, he held a pot of water over the fire with wooden tongs, and he scowled at the draught Erwal made. The smoke from the fire, disturbed, swirled around the teepee walls in search of the vent at the apex.

Erwal, wrapped in her furs, felt like something inhuman, a gigantic animal intruding into this place of warmth. She pushed away the furs, hauled off her frozen leggings and huddled near the fire; Damen wrapped a heavy arm around her until the shivering stopped. When the water boiled Damen poured it over fragments of mummy-tree bark. Erwal sucked at the thin, steaming tea.

Then she opened her hand.

Damen picked up one tiny finger. His face gray, he studied the tiny nail, the knuckle’s bloodless termination. Then he took the rest of the fragments from Erwal and dropped them into the fire. “Whose child?”

“Borst and Sura; I met her at the tree stand with her slops. I have to go to her, Damen.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“…No. It’s best if I go alone, I think. You keep the teepee warm.” She drank her tea, deeply reluctant to don her furs once more. “Damen, we can’t go on like this. Every year is worse than the last. I suspect the trees are starting to die, and even the mummy-cows aren’t immortal.”

“I know, love. But what can we do? We have to survive until the Sun recovers, and then—”

“But what if it doesn’t recover? It’s been failing since your grandmother’s day. Allel told us so herself. And now — Damen, it’s only early autumn, but the blizzard out there is blind; if we’re not careful the teepees could be snowed over before the winter’s out.” She shivered, imagining tiny pockets of warmth lost in the snow, the humans within suffocating, cooling, calling to each other.

“The Sun will recover,” Damen said wearily.

She said urgently, “But we don’t have to wait here to die. Teal said—”

“No.” He shook his massive head, his gray beard scraping over his chest.

“But he told us there was a way out of here,” she insisted. “The Eight Rooms. He found them, saw them. Your grandmother believed him.”

“Allel was a foolish old woman.”

“And Teal returned there. He said he’d leave a trail for the rest of us. Maybe if—”

He wrapped both arms around her. “Erwal, my brother was crazy. He hurt you, fought with me… He lost his life for nothing But now it’s over. He’s gone, and—”

“What if he survived?”

“Erwal…”

She sighed, pulled herself away from him, and began to haul her leggings over her still-cold feet.

Damen sat in silence, staring at the fire.

As she pushed through the snow Erwal heard odd snatches of song. The melodies, soft, harmonized and sad, were fragmented by the wind, and at first she thought she was dreaming. Then Sura’s teepee loomed out of the snow. Before it she made out a series of low mounds about as tall as she was. Occasionally a trunk would lift out of a mound, the two very human hands at its bifurcated tip twisting together, and slowly the songs grew clearer.

At last Erwal recognized the ancient chants of the mummy-cows.

Five cows, almost the village’s full complement, were grouped in a tight circle about a sixth; the latter lay at the center of the circle, and Erwal saw that some viscous fluid had leaked from its bulk into the snow. She pushed back her hood. “Sand? Are you here?”

One of the mummy-cows lifted her head; under a cap of snow a squat, cylindrical skull rotated on a neck joint and plate-sized eyes fixed on Erwal. “…I amm-m hhere, Err-waal…”

Erwal fixed her fingers in the shaggy fur covering Sand’s muzzle. Since Erwal’s childhood, Sand had been her favorite. “What’s wrong? Why are you gathered here?”

Sand moaned and scuffed with delicate fingers at the snow before her. “It iss-s Cale. We are… s-singing for her…”

“Singing? But why?…”

Sand closed her eyes.

Erwal turned to inspect the body at the center of the group. Cale was silent, utterly motionless, and when Erwal pushed her fingers through the fur she felt only a diminishing warmth.

How could this have happened? The mummy-cows rarely reproduced these days — there was too little fodder for them to generate the growth required — but they were virtually immortal. She walked around the fallen cow to the patch of moisture she had noticed earlier. She bent and touched the stuff. It was blood. Crouching, she probed upwards at the mummy-cow’s belly, exploring the soaked and matted fur. There was a tear in the flesh, a gash at least two feet long that was sharp and clean; performed by a stone knife.

She took deep breaths of the chill air; then she forced herself to reach forward, lift aside the flap of cut flesh, push her hands into the glistening stuff inside the cow.

She found a still, cold form. Snakelike entrails had coiled around the body in a hopeless attempt to keep it warm. Exploring by touch, Erwal found the tiny buds, hard as gristle, which had begun to grow to replace the child’s lost hands.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Erwal withdrew her arms, rubbed snow over them to clean them, tucked them once more into her clothes. Sura stood beside her, her arms loose at her side. “…Yes, Sura. I’m sorry.”

“It worked for your husband, didn’t it? Teal, I mean. That mummy-cow he took to the Eight Rooms kept him alive by opening herself up… I suppose you despise me because I have killed a cow.” Sura sounded resigned, no longer caring. “Will you punish me?”

Erwal stood. “No, Sura. I understand.”

“You do?”

“You were trying to save your child. What more can any of us do? What else is there? Come on.” She took Sura’s unresisting arm. “Let’s go to your teepee.”