Free White Devil Mountain by Hideyuki Kikuchi

snow again but were immediately swallowed up by the howling blizzard.

The Ill-Fated Search
    chapter 4

    I

    P erhaps you could say the good omens continued. It was just shortly after daybreak that sunlight and blue sky began spreading behind the blizzard. About the same time, Lourié woke up. His color had returned, and his mind was sharp. He gave them a smile that suggested his body was in good shape as well.
    “Sure you’re not in any pain?” Vera asked, to which he answered in the affirmative, nodding exuberantly. After some reflection Vera called Dust over and said, “Our friend here is going to bring you down off the mountain.”
    “I don’t want to go,” the boy replied, pursing his lips tightly and shaking his head.
    “Well, to be honest, you’re just slowing us down.”
    “I know that. That’s why I started up alone in the first place.”
    “Going it alone is all well and good, but if anything were to happen to you, we’d have to go rescue you. You’re not alone anymore.”
    “Please, just go on ahead. That way, if something happens to me, you won’t know about it. All you have to do is keep moving straight ahead, and not turn around.”
    “You know we couldn’t do that.” Vera let out a sigh. Her patience was wearing thin. Yet the boy had an earnestness to his manner that tempered her anger. “When we found you, you said you’d come looking for your father who was lost up here, didn’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is that really all there is to it?”
    “Yes—why do you ask?” Lourié had lowered his gaze for a moment, but now he looked at the doctor again.
    “There are other people in the village who’ve had family go missing on the mountain. There are parents who’ve lost children. But you don’t see them out searching at this time of year.”
    “You’re right.”
    “Yet you try to make the climb with a blizzard raging—well, at any rate, we’re with you there. But you said you’d search for your father alone. I believe you’re serious. And that’s what worries me. So, did your father really just disappear?”
    “That’s right.”
    Vera looked the boy in the eye. He immediately averted his gaze. The doctor knew what that meant in an instant, but not the details. Pressing the matter any further would only make the boy more recalcitrant.
    “I guess we have no choice then.” Vera heaved a sigh. “At the moment, it’s possible to safely go down the mountain.”
    She turned toward the door and started to walk away. Her course took her behind Lourié. The doctor’s right hand came to rest on the base of his slender neck, where she pressed the anesthetic gun she’d hid in her sleeve. Quickly catching the boy as he slumped forward, she had Dust lay him on his back.
    “Get him down quickly,” she told the man, filling him in on the decision she’d made the day before.
    The giant nodded. Even so, he hesitated. “I’m supposed to be guarding you, Doc.”
    “If the boy were to do something stupid, it’d put me in danger as well. Getting him back to the village is the very best protection you can offer me.”
    The giant said nothing at that.
    “Please. Leave while the others are still sleeping.”
    “Roger that.”
    “And once you’ve done that, you’re not to come back here. Am I understood?”
    Silence once more from the giant.
    “Please. I don’t want you to end up like your daughter. Your wife cursed me to her dying breath.”
    Again, nothing from Dust.
    “What’s more, if anything were to befall you, it would pain me for all my days. And I’d hate those in the village office who picked you as my protector.”
    The doctor spat out her confession like a gout of blood, but it didn’t bring so much as a twitch from the stony face of the giant. All it wore was a cold blankness that surpassed even hatred.
    What had happened between the doctor and her protector?
    “I’ll be back,” Dust said flatly. He understood what the doctor was saying but didn’t agree with it;