Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 58

wake up, little one, little hawk, wake up…" In his great weariness he
spoke to her as he had used to speak to Parth, at daybreak, a long time ago.
She obeyed him at last, struggling to her feet with his help, getting the
line into her frozen gloves, and step by step following him across the
shore, up the low bluffs, and on through the tireless, relentless, driving
snow.
They kept along the rivercourse, going south, as she had told him they
would do when they had planned their run. He had no real hope they could
find anything in this spinning whiteness, as featur eless as the night storm
had been. But before long they came to a creek tributary to the river they
had crossed, and turned up it, rough going for the land was broken. They
struggled on. It seemed to Falk that by far the best thing to do would be to
lie down and fall asleep, and he was only unable to do this because there
was someone who was counting on him, someone a long way off, a long
time ago, who had sent him on a journey; he could not lie down, for he
was accountable to someone…
There was a croaking whisper in his ear, Estrel's voice. Ahead of them
a clump of high cottonwood boles loomed like starving wraiths in the
snow, and Estrel was tugging at his arm. They began to stumble up and
down the north side of the snow-choked creek just beyond the
cottonwoods, searching for something. "A stone," she kept saying, "a
stone," and though he did not know why they needed a stone, he searched
and scrabbled in the snow with her. They were both crawling on hands and
knees when at last she came on the landmark she was after, a
snowmounded block of stone a couple of feet high.
With her frozen gloves she pushed away the dry drifts from the east
side of the block. Incurious, listless with fatigue, Falk helped her. Their
scraping bared a metal rectangle, level with the curiously level ground.
Estrel tried to open it. A hidden, handle clicked, but the edges of the
rectangle were frozen shut. Falk spent his last strength straining to lift the
thing, till finally he came to his wits and unsealed the frozen metal with
the heatbeam in the handle of his gun. Then they lifted up the door and
looked down a neat steep set of stairs, weirdly geometric amidst this
howling wilderness, to a shut door
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