The morning brought no horizon.
Tomas pushed open the canvas flap of Waystation Three at dawn. Then, the world had ceased to possess depth, distance, or form. Sky and snow had fused into a single, blinding bowl of churning white fog through which dry, granular snow drove horizontally at forty knots.
There was no up. There was no down. There was only the scream of the wind and the white void that made the eyes water and the brain reel with immediate, nauseating dizziness.
“Don’t look into the drift!” Kael roared, his hand gripping Tomas’s shoulder with the force of an iron vise. “Keep your eyes on the snow beneath your toes! If you try to find the mountain face in a whiteout, your inner ear will tip you off balance and you’ll step straight off the cliff!”
Tomas lowered his head. Through the narrow slits of his ash mountain goggles, the universe was reduced to an oval patch of wind-sculpted snow three paces across.
The heat had dropped to twenty-eight below zero. At this intensity of cold, the wind stripped heat from the body with hungry speed. Any exposed skin—even a sliver between scarf and goggle rim—began to freeze within two minutes. That turned white and painless before dying.
