Anya looked up from a balcony over a 280th-floor conference room. Before her, the uppermost and steepest tier of the tower rose again, buttressed on each side by a single pair of elevators. At its peak, the hexagonal column contracted down to a twelve-sided mezzanine that formed the base of the spire called the Mace. "I used up some cable," Anya said. "I think I can still get to the top." Bond worffed. "Can you fly, Mama?"
"The pack is damaged," Yor said. "It's going to be tricky to go up, but I can get down." They both pointedly looked away from a form that had caved in a skylight before coming to rest on another balcony.
"What about them?" Anya said. They looked to the three men lined up in the doorway: The forbidding Donovan Desmond, the nervous Premier Lazar Linkola, the gracious Prince Ferdinand, and the exotrooper called the Flea. Rudolph Blackbell was inside, tied up back to back with Sharon.
"We really haven't been in any danger," Linkola said. "It was the Prince that the Queen seemed most concerned with."
"Take the elevator down," Anya said. "Our side should be in control."
"I am not leaving without my son," Desmond said.
"I'm going for the top," the Flea said.
"Then come with me," said Prince Ferdinand. "She will not bar my way."
"All right," Anya said. She took aim with her line thrower. She paused. "Wait." She pointed to Blackbell. "He has secret stuff up here!"
Anya rode Bond up the cable, with Mama hanging from the bottom. Bond's cargo rack held a carrying module for an exoskeleton. "Rising hope!" Anya called out.
On a balcony on the upper mezzanine, Colonel Welrod looked through the scope of an anti-tank rifle. "Sorry, ladies," he said as he took aim. Another hand firmly pulled his gun to one side. He looked up at the Prince of the Ill Wind, who stood bare-chested in wind chill that was 5 degrees below zero and dropping. Red eyes gazed from behind the mask of an ogre. The Prince shook his head in total silence. The colonel very briefly considered acting unilaterally, until he looked at his weapon.
The barrel was visibly bent.
Bond was halfway up when the projected image of the Queen began to appear on various faces of the building. A long, thin edge of the mace was filled by a sliver of the right side of her face. "Well, I see we have two more exotroopers on the way up," she said. "If I'm not mistaken, one of them is Anya, savior of the world. I look forward to your arrival. While I'm waiting, I have a story for all of you."
"Uh-oh," Anya said. "Every time a bad guy starts telling a story that's long and rambling, it builds up to something bad."
"My family came from the lands to the south," Nightfall said. More complete images showed Willow seated beside her, with young Loidy in her lap. The boy watched as she redid the braid her mother wore on her right shoulder, interweaving fine plaits with crystals and metal beads. "For a long time, I hid it, because my father warned me of what other peoples thought of us. But my mother would tell me stories of the old country, when he couldn't hear. She told me about the bora winds. She said she would see gathering clouds, and then the storm would come. She said her grandmother called it the breath of Father Frost. That was the dark bora, and like Father Frost, it was stern but kind. When daylight came, there would be snow. Then when Spring came, the snow would water the fields and crops."
In an elevator, Prince Ferdinand looked to the north at a bank of swirling cloud. "She's trying to scare them," he said. "I was concerned myself. But the clouds are clearing."
"No," said the Flea. He was without his exoskeleton but had put on a suit of body armor that included a visored helmet. The tilt of his mask showed his fear as clearly as his face could have. "It's parting…"
"…And then there was the clear bora, `dry' is what it really means, and it is so much worse," Nightfall said. "It is the ill wind, the name I gave to my Prince, the lying and treacherous wind. On clear, moonless nights, when children would beg to open their windows to look at the stars, it would come without warning. Without mercy. It brought no snow, only cold and wailing like the damned. The grandmothers said it was the cries of the very kodzlaks, the pitiful and pitiless souls who find no rest in heaven or in Hell. If you did not hide, it would freeze you to the bone. It would drain all warmth and life. Grandmother said that it could rip away your very soul and carry you away to wander forever with the lost ones!" Inside the spire, alarms sounded as the elevator came to an emergency stop.
"Mama!" Anya cried out. The cable swung back and forth and up and down like a whip in the rising wind. "We-ee aren't gon-na-na make it!"
"I love you, Anya!" Yor said. Then she let go.
"The Ill Wind is like all the promises of lovers and nations and gods," Nightfall snarled. As she spoke, the Flea did his best to support Prince Ferdinand as the whole spire swayed. "It comes with the beauty of the stars, and it brings the cold of the merciless void. It comes from nowhere, it gives nothing, it returns to nothing and leaves nothing, and yet it takes all! It finds the open doors of a warm heart, and turns life and light to ice and ash!"
"B-Bond!" Anya said. "The c-cable's gonna b-break!"
"BOOORRRFFF!" Bond wailed as they were launched into space.
Yor ejected what was left of her flight pack before the wind could wrench it away. In its place, she extended a flying-squirrel membrane from her suit. It arrested her fall, but she was as a leaf in a storm. Inevitably, she was drawn into the spiraling downdrafts that circled the tower. As she sailed past the mezzanine beneath the Mace, she aimed for a balcony. She bounced off the ice-encrusted rail, but an arm caught her. She stared up into the eyes of the Prince of the Ill Wind.
And Bond rose upward on wings, barely controlled. Anya called out, "Rising- AAAHHH!" He finally stood on his tail in full stall, high above the spire. He tumbled and then dropped, straight for the balcony of the café.
And they hit.