The Pure Cold Light by Gregory Frost Page A

announced excitedly. “I did that. I know where to get them. May be they’re too big, but I kind of had to guess.” He gestured into the corner past where she had been lying.
    She climbed the rest of the way to her feet, expecting dizziness, nausea—some kind of nasty reaction. When none followed, she walked back beside him and started rummaging. Glimet continued staring at her body.
    She found a shirt and pants. As predicted, both were too large. The bulky shirt didn’t matter—it would be warm. For the trousers, she took the rope he’d tied her arms with and looped it around her waist. Glimet had to tie it for her. He was as clumsy as she would have been. He hadn’t found shoes but there was a pair of ragged wool socks that she let him put on her, too. She watched the excitement in his expression while she finished her brief smoke and wondered if he’d ever fucked anything alive in his life.
    He brought her out of her reverie suddenly by announcing, “I know who it is.”
    Amerind looked up from crushing out her cigarette. “What?”
    “I know who the topsiders wanted.”
    “Who?”
    “Horrible Woman. It’s gotta be.”
    “Who’s Horrible Woman?”
    “She’s the one I got to go see now, to get your medicine. Nobody’ll have gone down to her camp. Hardly anyone knows about it. She only appeared a week or so ago maybe. Nobody else much goes down there in the all-dark. But I like it, see. The Other Place comes through real good there. I’ve traveled all through it.”
    “Wait now,” she ordered. “If you’re going, then so am I.”
    “But you’re hurt, sweetie. And it’s a long way.”
    “Sure. So the sooner I get helped the better. If I’m with you then I won’t have to wait till you come back to get my first dose.”
    The truth was, she didn’t think he would be alive much longer, and she wanted to learn everything she could about the Pit while he could still teach her.
    He scrunched up his remaining features while mulling over her argument, finally giving in. “Okay,” he said, “but we got to have some barter, though.” He groped around and came up with a small canvas sack from beneath the blankets, then turned to his small pantry. “Here. Can of peas and one of potatoes.”
    “That’s all? Two cans of food?”
    He nodded sagely. “Doesn’t take much down here, and food’s worth a lot. She’s plenty hard up from what I seen. Her people got funny stock to trade—things nobody else has. Like the medicine. They live way way down in the deepest tunnels, like maybe under the river, so probably they found an old place in the west city that was closed up and forgotten. It happens sometimes—I got most of my cans of food from one of those, a little teeny store that had got overlooked. Got a lot more squirreled away.”
    “Really?”  
    “Hauled them myself. I was more ‘here’ back then.”
    She smiled tenderly. “You’ll have to show me where you keep them.”
    He gave her a troubled look and made no commitment in reply. She knew better than to pursue the issue.
    They set off at a slow pace, Glimet trudging along and Shikker, aching, being careful not to step on anything sharp.

    ***

    Horrible Woman had twice emerged into the upper tunnels. Like a go-between from a subterranean realm, a troglodytic guardian of some unfathomed Symzonia deep inside the planet, she appeared and then vanished again.
    The two who claimed to have bargained with her, an orbiter named Chemosh and a schizo called Tecato, said she had a cache of rare supplies that they argued could only have been stolen from the Overcity—drugs and unusual tools, flashlights and things. All Glimet knew for certain was that Horrible Woman had traded her supplies to Chemosh and Tecato for cans of food.
    By their description, she was so grotesque that, upon her first appearance, she had put the passively drugged Market Street encampments to flight. At least twenty people corroborated the sighting, although descriptions