THERE WAS ONLY one place in the Lair large enough to hold a Lair meeting: the huge cavern from which all the rest branched. It was full now, nearly a hundred of the Kin crowding the floor or perched on rock outcroppings or formations around the walls and rising from the floor itself. The convoluted cavern blazed with multicolored radiance, some from the magic lights kindled by the adept of the Kin, the rest reflecting in prismatic brilliance through the thousands of crystals mounted in the upper walls and ceiling.
The cavern throbbed with the cacophony of voices; the Kin that did not have an opinion on this subject were few indeed. The echoes doubled and trebled the voices, making it that much harder to hear. Alara held her peace and her temper, and let the others finish shouting themselves out. Right now there was no reasoning with the most fanatic and frightened of the Kin. Most of them had had no idea up until this moment that Shana was anything other than an exotic pet. The girl’s abilities, especially the magnitude of those abilities, had come as a tremendous shock.
Of the rest, those who had known what Shana was were divided and vocal. Lori, for one, had been screaming at the top of her lungs since the Lair meeting began; Alara had hopes that she was beginning to wear even on the tempers of her supporters.
Surely by now she must be getting hoarse, at least.
Alara spared a pitying thought for poor Shana, confined in a dead-end cavelet at the end of the main cavern, with a stone too large for her to lift blocking the entrance. They had left her alone and in the dark, and only Alara and Keoke’s presence had kept Lori from tearing her apart on the spot. Keoke had taken advantage of his position as most senior dragon present to order the confinement, pointing out that the boulder they used to stop up the entrance to the cavelet was too large for even Father Dragon to move.
That left the others thinking it was too large for Shana to lift, especially given the size of the rocks the halfblood had used on Rovy. Alara wasn’t so sure. The entire altercation with Rovylern bespoke control to her, not unthinking violence.
Alara considered the relatively light injuries the bully had taken. Rovy had one broken rib, a gash over his eye, and a concussion. Shana could have hit him in the head with any of those larger rocks, and he would have been dead. Not even a dragon could survive a blow to the skull with something that size, especially not if Shana had placed it just right. She could have taken his eye out with that rock that gashed him. The broken rib wasn’t even on the side she hit—it was on the side he had fallen on. He had probably broken it when he fell. Fire and Rain, if she had been really cruel, she could have just as easily broken his wings with those rocks, and he would have been flightless for months.
“That rabid animal broke my child’s rib ,” Lori shrilled for at least the hundredth time. Her voice echoed off the cavern ceiling, making those nearest her wince. Alara noted with hope that even Lori’s supporters were beginning to look bored. “He’s going to be abed for a week, at least! I’m telling you, it’s gone mad, and if you don’t kill it, I will!”
Her voice was finally getting hoarse, the din had died down considerably, and Alara decided that now was the best time to speak. She had chosen a position atop one of the rock formations, but had been reclining on it, with the result that she was relatively inconspicuous. As she raised her head and mantled her wings, heads swiveled in her direction.
“Your precious child—who is not a child by the definition of the Kin—was assaulting Shana’s foster brother, who is still a child by that same definition,” she said coldly and clearly, trumpeting her own accusation out over the general hubbub. Silence descended immediately; even Lori was caught off-guard, and stared with her mouth open in surprise. “Keman will not be flying for several weeks, thanks to Rovylern, and he walks only with pain. I suggest you consider that , Kin! Rovylern instigated the trouble—Shana only came to her foster brother’s rescue.”
“But—” Lori cried weakly.
Alara spoke right over her, trying to make her words sound calm and reasoned. “Keman weighs a third less than Rovy. Shana weighs—perhaps!—a hundredth of what Rovylern does. Do those odds sound, fair to you?”
“But—but that thing has magic!” Lori squawked. “It used magic on Rovy! It could have killed him! Even you don’t know what it can do! It’s a halfblood, and no one knows what they can do, and you can’t claim otherwise!”
Alara nodded. “Yes, she does have the halfblood powers of magic. No, I do not know what she can do with them. But I think, given the situation, she showed admirable restraint.”
Lori subsided sullenly and the cavern held a silence so profound it hurt the ears. Keoke spoke into the silence, breaking it gently. “The problem is, Alara, we don’t know whether it was restraint, or accident. We have only the halfblood’s word that her weapons were aimed, and did not hit random targets. That simply isn’t good enough.”
Orola followed his speech, clearing her throat. All eyes went to her, she took advantage of the attention by standing up and towering over the rest. “Lori, your son got exactly what he deserved,” the Elder said firmly. “I’ll have you know that I was winging in to thrash him myself. I may yet, if he shows no sign of learning his lesson. I heard most of what he said, and he should by rights be punished for it. No dragon calls another ‘Master.’ We left all that behind us, and I will not tolerate anyone bringing it back again.”
Elated by this unexpected support from the most senior dragon in the Lair, Alara’s hopes for getting Shana out of this predicament lifted.
But those hopes were dashed by Orola’s next words.
“But Keoke is right, Alara,” she continued, turning her soft gold eyes on her. “I know you’re fond of the halfblood, and I know Keman considers it his foster sister, but it isn’t one of the Kin and we both know it. The real problem is that what we do not know if whether it really did aim its power as it claims. If it’s telling the truth, well and good; it showed restraint that was utterly admirable. But if not—the next time it’s angered, it could kill. We can’t take that chance, Alara. We simply cannot.”
No—no, this wasn’t right , it wasn’t fair—
“Kill it!” Lori snarled. “It’s a rabid beast!” She flexed her claws against the stone with a scraping sound everyone in the cavern heard clearly.
Anoa interrupted before Alara could reply to that. “Killing is out of the question,” she said flatly, as the other two seniors nodded agreement. “No matter what you, Lori—and some of the rest—may think, the child is not a beast. I’ve taken the form of the elven lords and their human slaves and walked about in their world, as has Alara, often enough to know. Lori, you and those backing you have not and will not. You either haven’t the skill or the inclination—and no one who has not been there has any basis for making a judgment.”
The dragons who did take other forms nodded vigorously. Lori glowered; the rest looked elsewhere.
Anoa waited, then continued, her voice soft and rational. “I speak from experience. The humans are as intelligent—or as stupid—as the best and the worst of the Kin. They are not animals. The elves are formidable, more than you imagine, and the reason for the unwritten Law against revealing our existence to them is that they could destroy us if they chose. Yet history tells us that the Halfbloods came very near to destroying them .” Anoa paused, allowing her statements to have their full impact. “No, Lori, that potential for destruction is not found among animals. But you are right in this: That very potential is terribly dangerous, and I think the child has gone past our ability to control her.”
Heads nodding all around the meeting put an end to Alara’s hopes of gaining support for her position. They were going to throw Shana out, into a world she knew nothing about, into the hands of those who would kill the child if they discovered what Shana was. What could she do? What could she possibly do?
Keoke stood as Anoa lay back down. “Alara, I think that you are going to have to rid us of that danger, by ridding us of the child.” Alara surged to her feet, her spinal crest a-bristle, but Keoke stared her down. She settled herself again, but unwillingly, her wings mantling. “I do not mean that you should kill her, but she simply cannot stay here, or even in the vicinity of the Lair. You’re going to have to allow us to turn her out into the world. If she is half as remarkable as you claim she is, she’ll be fine.”
But she isn’t ready! Alara wanted to exclaim. I haven’t told her anything about that world! She doesn’t even know that there are any real two-leggers alive except herself!
But she said none of this. There was more at stake than just Shana’s fate—if she protested, she would lose face with many of the Kin. And that would cost her dearly in respect as a shaman. And in the end, it would gain Shana nothing. The Kin were determined to exile the child—no matter what she said or did in the girl’s defense.
She held in her anger, but it was harder to rein in her despair…
“Father Dragon said when you brought her to us that she had great hamenleai” Keoke continued, his tail lashing restlessly, so that those nearest him moved out of range. “You rightly reminded us of that not long ago. We will give her a chance to prove that. I think we should take her out to the desert, near the caravan trails, and leave her there. I know the Law, but I don’t feel that anything she tells the humans will matter. When she is found by humans, if she is, they will take anything she says about the Kin as the ravings of a creature with sun-sickness. She has the ability to find water. If she is more than simply a bright animal, she will be able to save herself, and her potential for making changes occur will be well exercised among the humans.”
“And if she is the ‘animal’ that Lori claims she is,” Anoa interjected dryly, “she won’t save herself, and there is no harm done.”
“Shouldn’t I do this?” Alara asked desperately, looking frantically for a single chance to give Shana the information she needed before she was abandoned to her fate, whatever that might be. And her death, Alara thought bleakly, if they recognized her for what she was…
“No!” Lori shouted, before someone buffeted her with a wing to shut her up.
Keoke shook his head, and light rippled down his neck in liquid waves. “Lori’s right in this much, Alara,” he told the shaman. “You’ve spent more than enough time with this halfblood as it is. An inordinate amount of time, really, considering all your duties. You have functions and responsibilities, and there are those among us who think you might have wasted some of the time you could have spent on fulfilling those duties in tending this fosterling of yours. No, we’ll take care of the child. You deal with your own son and daughter, and your office.”
Alara bowed her head in submission; she wanted to scream in angry protest that to be a shaman was to be contrary—but she knew, now, that there was a fine line between being contrary and being enough of an annoyance to be looked on as a danger.
That put an end to the meeting, for all practical purposes. There was a certain amount more of discussion—mostly involving Lori, who was not pleased with the outcome, nor with the censure her son had incurred. But in the end, she left, defeated and unsatisfied.
Alara returned to her lair and Keman, with a heavy heart. She had not even been permitted to bid Shana good-bye.
She stood in the sunlight outside the entrance to her home and watched Keoke taking off, something small clutched in his right foreclaw. That something was her fosterling, bearing nothing with her except the tunic she wore.
Alara could hardly bear to watch—and yet she could not look away. Forbidden even to speak mind-to-mind with the halfblood, she bid Shana a silent, sorrowful farewell, her eyes burning and her stomach knotted with sorrow and loss.
My little one— my poor, innocent little one—She stared after them, long after Keoke had vanished into the blue glare of the cloudless sky, wishing with all her heart that there was something she could have done to prevent all this. Then she descended into the cool depths of the caverns, wondering how she was going to break the news to Keman.
Shana spent most of her captivity crying, both from anger and from fear. Anger at the injustice of it all—and fear of what they might do to her.
The cave they’d left her in was cold and unfinished; they hadn’t even made a light to leave with her. They hadn’t let Alara near her, and no one would tell her where Keman was or even how he fared.
It was all so unfair! Rovy outweighed her and Keman together—he was a known bully and troublemaker, and there wasn’t a single one of the young dragons (except, perhaps, Myre) who didn’t rejoice in the fact that someone had at long last given him a trouncing.
And Rovy had transgressed far more than Keman had five years ago—he’d been inflicting damage on the younger dragon that could easily have been permanent. Yet she was being confined as if she had done something vile!
But that was not the worst aspect of this miscarriage of justice; she’d heard Lori’s shrill calls for her death—Lori had been against her from the beginning, and there were plenty of the Kin who agreed with her. Shana didn’t think Foster Mother would let them kill her—
But the idea was enough to frighten her into tears long after her anger had faded away.
She couldn’t make out anything of what was being said, out there in the big cavern. The voices echoed too much. She heard her name from time to time, and Rovy’s, and Keman’s, but that was all.
Finally the noise died down, and she heard only murmuring; she waited for someone to come and tell her what was going to be done with her. It seemed to take forever as she crouched on the cold, bare stone in near-darkness, with only a bit of light leaking around the rock they had used to cover the entrance to her prison.
She hugged her arms to her chest and shivered, and not just from the chill.
Finally she heard the clicking of talons on the floor, and the mumbling of two voices. There was a grating noise of rock on rock. The huge boulder rolled slowly to one side, as progressively more light poured in through the widening opening, and she saw the dark, spidery shape of a taloned claw pulling at the side*of the boulder.
She felt she should meet them standing. She got to her feet, slowly and awkwardly, feeling every bruise and scrape she had acquired in her scramble over the ridge, her muscles aching and stiff from the cold. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and blinked in the yellow glow from the light-ball hovering over Keoke’s head. Orola was with him, but left as soon as the boulder cleared the doorway.
Keoke watched her warily for a moment, as if waiting for her to hurl rocks at his head. In fact, his unguarded thoughts made it quite clear to her that this was precisely what he was waiting for.
:I wish I knew what she was thinking,: she “heard” him say, as he stared at her. She saw herself through his eyes; not the tiny, dirt-smudged, helpless creature she felt herself to be, but something alien and unreadable, and no less deadly than a dragon for all of its small size. :The scorpion is small .: she heard, :and the fanged spider. Both of them can kill. She could hurt even me, if she chose to. She could hurl a stone at my head as easily as she did at the boy’s.:
I kind of wish I could… She was utterly exhausted by her exercise of her powers against Rovy. If she hadn’t been so frightened and so apprehensive in her little prison, she probably would have fallen asleep.
“I hope you don’t expect me to say I’m sorry,” she said sullenly, “because I’m not. I’d do it again. Rovy’s a toad, and I think you all were horrid to let him get away with bullying us for so long.”
To her surprise, Keoke chuckled sadly. “No, I don’t expect you to apologize, child, and if I were in your place, I venture to say I would feel the same.”
She rubbed her hands along her arms, trying to warm herself, but stayed where she was. Keoke’s thoughts were guarded now, and she couldn’t read them without alerting him to the fact that she was doing so. Since she couldn’t see what he was thinking, she didn’t know what he had planned, and she didn’t intend to move until she did know.
“So why did you put me under a rock, like a mouse you were saving for dinner?” she asked, making no attempt to hide her anger. “If I didn’t do anything wrong, why are you punishing me?”
Keoke sighed, and relaxed his crest. ‘‘Child, you represent something new and strange—you’ve done something we can’t. Everything alive fears what is strange, Shana, even the Kin. We love change, but only if it is under our control—and, frankly, only if it doesn’t materially affect us . Perhaps it is foolish to fear a young child most of us could crush with a single claw, but we do.” He lowered his head and looked a little to one side of her, as if be was ashamed. “I’m sorry, Shana, but what you did to Rovy would not have been wrong if you were of the Kin. He deserved it, and you have told us you could have hurt him worse than you actually did. But—”
“But I’m not of the Kin,” she replied flatly. Somehow she had known it would all come down to this.
“Exactly. And some of the Kin even think you are some kind of animal that has turned on its masters, like a one-horn.” He blinked, and she sensed that he was embarrassed. “We managed to convince the rest that you weren’t, but you can’t stay here anymore, Shana. I’m sorry. I’m going to have to take you far away from the Lair, far enough that you won’t be able to make your way back, and set you on your own.”
The words fell on her like the stones she had launched at Rovy, and left her just as stunned. She could only stare at Keoke numbly, unable to move, or even speak, her mind going in tiny, panicked circles like a mouse caught in a jar.
Take me away? Where? What will I do? What’s going to happen to me?
She was so sunk in shock that she never noticed that Keoke was moving. She had no idea what he was going to do, until his great foreclaw closed around her waist and he lifted her up and out of her prison.
And then, of course, it was too late for anything, even for tears.
Keoke dropped her—literally—somewhere in a desert. He didn’t even land long enough to put her down; he just hovered, his wings throwing up huge clouds of sand, opened his claw, and let her fall. It wasn’t a long drop—little more than her own height—but it was unexpected.
She went limp as she landed, and tumbled, rolling over her shoulder to keep from hurting herself as she .hit. She lay in the hot sand for a moment, collecting her scattered wits. By the time she had picked herself up, Keoke was a tiny speck against the hard blue turquoise bowl of the sky.
She brushed sand off herself, looked about at the desolation she had been left in, and was tempted to give in to a fit of hysteria. But tears and screaming wouldn’t change anything—
So instead she clamped control down on herself and took stock of her surroundings.
He could have picked a worse place to leave me, she thought glumly.
There had been plenty of worse places on the way; they had flown over a flat salt plain that stretched on for leagues, followed by a featureless expanse of sand and small stones worn smooth by the constant wind, then a stretch of sand where nothing grew but cactus, and not too much of that.
Here, at least, sajus dotted the landscape, and there were some projecting rocks with a cluster of brush around them; enough to give her shelter from the sun for the rest of the day. She was wilderness-wise enough to know that she could not possibly endure the full glare of the sun for long, and that she would have to travel by night—
If she could find somewhere to go…
She choked down the tears that threatened to break out of her control, and calmed herself. That clump of brush and rock was too inviting; undoubtedly there were other creatures in there using it for shelter. Some of those would share it with her without contesting it; others would not.
And the only way to find out who was “home” was to “look.”
First things first; she had to have some shade, before she fell over with heatstroke. Already the sun felt like a claw pressing her into the earth, and she regretted every tear she had shed in the caves as lost water. She went to her hands and knees and crawled carefully into the bare bit of shade provided by the closest sajus-bush. Scanty though that shade was, there was a vast difference in temperature between the shadowed sand beneath its branches and the open ground a few footsteps away.
Shana lay on her stomach, stretched out with bits of the sajus-twigs tangled in her hair, and rested her chin on her folded hands in front of her. There was just enough shade beneath the sajus for her to fit all of herself beneath it. She used the methods to calm herself that Alara had taught her, taking slow, deep breaths, forcing herself to relax. The discipline Alara had made a part of her worked as effectively as ever, despite her strain, her fears, and all the myriad of problems facing her. In a moment more she was able to drop into a light trance and begin searching the area around her for life.
A kestrel in a hollowed-out place in the stone was the first sign of life. That was good; his presence meant no mice, and not a lot of big bugs. A runner-bird rested at the foot of the stone—that was even better! No snakes were ever around runner-birds, unless they were in his stomach…
She searched further, sending her mind deeper, looking for even tinier forms of life. She found them, and identified where they were, exactly, marking them in a little mental map to remember when she came out of trance.
There were plenty of scorpions, though the only spiders were ordinary hunting spiders that would leave her alone. Lots of lizards, mostly small ones the size of her longest finger. A nest of ants, and those were to be avoided at all cost. No wasps, though, which probably explained the healthy population of hunting spiders, since desert wasps preyed on spiders, laying their eggs inside them before walling the paralyzed body into a nest-cavity.
And that comprised the entire population of this arid little bit of vegetation. There was nothing living here that needed to drink water, no mammals at all, and the two birds received all the moisture they needed from their prey. That meant there was no water Shana could dig to.
No water—she fought a surge of fear, but it broke her out of her trance. She opened her eyes on the same view of sand and barren branches, and licked dry lips. She knew she would be all right for now—knew intellectually, that is. Convincing the unreasoning part of her was another question altogether.
First things first, she told herself. She needed shelter and rest, and soon.
Now that she knew where every creature down to the ant colony was, she could avoid a potentially fatal mistake—like putting her hand right down on top of a scorpion. She resumed her hands-and-knees crawl under the branches of the sajus, working her way into the cluster of rocks at the middle, and projecting calm at the runner-bird as hard as she could manage while still moving. The closer she could get to that bird, the better off she would be. Not only would its presence ensure that there would be no snakes, but it would probably keep scorpions away too. She’d never seen one actually eat a scorpion, but she had seen them kill the venomous insects.
As she neared the base of the rock she saw the bird, resting quietly, its bright black eyes watching her as she crawled nearer. It had chosen to bed down right against the bottom of the boulders in the deepest shadow, and its mottled gray-and-brown feathers blended right in with the sand and the stone. It blinked at her and tilted its head to one side to get a better look at her, but didn’t seem in the least alarmed at her approach.
She wriggled her way in past the last of the branches and to within an arm’s length of the bird, hardly able to believe her luck. The bird continued to stare, but its crest was down, and its posture relaxed. She curled up next to it, putting her back up against the rock—the rough stone was cool, or at least, cooler than the earth beneath the sajus had been. The bird tilted its head the other way, and she reached out to it, greatly daring, and began to scratch the crest feathers gently. This was the closest she had ever been to a runner-bird; the long, sharp beak was at least as long as her hand, and quite dangerous-looking—but if she could make friends with it, she wouldn’t need to fear falling asleep beside it.
The bird leaned into her hand, closing its eyes in pleasure. She continued to scratch until it pulled away; she took her hand back, and it gave her another of those bright-eyed, measuring looks. It fluffed its feathers a little, and raised its crest for a moment, then settled back down with every appearance of content.
She lay down beside it, and pillowed her head on her arms, closing her tired, burning eyes for a moment.
Or at least, she only intended to close them for a moment.
But sometime between resolving to close them, and deciding to open them again, she fell asleep.
When Shana woke, the runner-bird was gone, and she came very close to crying. That bird was the nearest thing she had to a friend here in this empty wilderness of sand and stone.
Night had fallen while she slept; a desert night, full of sound and scent. Insects chirred, sand hissed as the breezes moved it. And off in the distance, a pack of loupers howled—not a hunting howl, but a pack-howl, undertaken just for the sake of community.
Shana wished they were closer; she had grown to like the loupers Keman kept, and they would have been company, however simpleminded. If she could find and be accepted by a louper-pack, she wouldn’t need to worry about finding food or water.
Keman—she hadn’t even gotten to say good-bye to him, or to Alara. Her last memory of him was of seeing him limping away in the custody of some of the adults, his shoulder and wing-muscles marked by bleeding punctures. She remembered him looking back over his shoulder and trying to say something, but being hurried away. Her throat closed, and once again, tears threatened.
But now crying was something worse than merely futile—crying meant loss of precious moisture. She fought the tears back and carefully wiped the two that did escape onto her finger and licked it dry. The salty liquid only made her thirstier.
She looked up through the branches of the sajus at the brilliance of the stars, and made a guess as to the time. Probably not too long after sunset; she hadn’t lost much traveling time to sleep.
She set her back against the rock, and entered her trance again—necessary, since it was likely that everything she had pinpointed except the ant nest had moved since she’d fallen asleep. Scorpions were just as much a danger after dark as in daylight. More, actually; they tended to be nocturnal.
But most of them had converged on the remains of a kill the runner-bird must have made; a half-eaten snake on the other side of the rock. They were busy nipping off tiny bits with their pincers, and quarreling over choice positions on the carcass.
That was an unlooked-for blessing—and Shana wondered for a moment if the runner-bird had dropped the thing there deliberately, to lure the poisonous insects away from her.
Then she decided that it had probably been an accident; although it was hard to tell the actual size of the dead snake from the tiny minds of the scorpions, it appeared to be a real monster. Very likely the runner-bird had found it couldn’t eat it all, and had left the remains where they wouldn’t lure scavengers too near its chosen resting place.
But no matter what the cause, the result was that Shana could crawl out of the brush to the open ground in relative safety, and she was deeply grateful for that result.
But once out of her temporary shelter and on her feet again, she looked around with a growing sense of despair. North, south, east or west, the landscape was the same. Silver sand under the brilliant moonlight, dotted with dark clumps of sajus or rocks. There was no hint of anything different on the breeze; just the ever-present spice of the sajus. Any direction was as good as another. There really didn’t seem to be much point in moving—except to find water. Now her mouth was dry as well as her lips, and she tried to work up enough saliva to wet her tongue. She had to find water soon. She couldn’t last longer than a couple of days without it.
She closed her eyes to the blazing stars, and invoked her water-sense, but the best she could get was a hint of something eastward, faint and far away.
Well, that was better than nothing.
She turned her back on the little clump of brush, and set off across the sand, with no more goal than that. The moonlight gave her enough light to find her way without stumbling too much, and as long as she kept to the open, she thought she’d be all right. Before long, she knew she was lost—or at least, she’d never be able to find that particular clump of rock and brush again. The loupers howled again, but farther away, and there was no way to distinguish where she was from where she had been except that the faint “feeling” of water was a little stronger than before.
Was she walking in circles? With no landmarks to show her way it was certainly possible.
But if she worried about that, she might as well give up.
She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, staying to the open ground to avoid snakes and scorpions, and trying to concentrate on that promise of water. She succeeded better than she had anticipated, for after a time, she was simply a kind of walking machine, repeating the steps over and over, her mind gone into a kind of numb haze where coherent thoughts simply weren’t possible. Her world had narrowed to the need to keep moving, and that far-off hint of water.
Once or twice, she woke up, and finding that nothing much had changed, she sank back into her trance of apathy. But just before dawn, she sensed something in the air that made her stop and scan with all her senses for trouble.
It didn’t take her long to find it.
Trouble was a darkness on the eastern horizon that blotted out the false dawn; a hissing roar, and the dead calm of the air around her. The darkness grew with the speed of magic, towering higher and higher, obscuring more of the sky with every breath.
Sandstorm!
She had no chance to avoid it, and only enough warning to enable her to take shelter in the lee of a rock. She dug a hole at the base of it as quickly as she could, then, as the roar of the storm neared, pulled the branches of a bush around her and cupped a space between her body and the rock to give her clean air to breathe.
Then the storm was upon her, and the universe narrowed to the tiny dark space between her and the stone. The voice of the storm shrieked, howled, and bellowed, and after the first few moments, the noise was so overwhelming it was meaningless. Wind and sand scoured the back of her tunic and her arms and legs, and she tried desperately to tuck as much of her bare skin under shelter as possible, feeling the sting that was certain to mount to pain in no time unless she protected herself.
Then there was nothing but dark, and noise, and the fight for breath.
She was certain she was going to die.
For a time, until the klee-klee-klee of a kestrel overhead convinced her that the sandstorm had passed, Shana was certain that either she had gone deaf, or the storm had indeed killed her. She sat up slowly, sand pouring from her shoulders, her abraded skin stinging, and blinked at the blinding white morning sun.
There was no sign of the sandstorm that had done its best to kill her, except for the pile of sand half burying her, and the fact that the tiny leaves had been entirely stripped from the sajus-brush she had used to protect herself.
The air was already warming, and the tiny kestrel shot past and pounced on something just on the other side of the boulder, mounting back to the sky with a mouse clutched in its talons, crying a klee-klee-klee of triumph.
Shana’s dry mouth and tongue were nothing less than torture.
She pulled herself up out of her shelter, fighting her way clear of the mound of sand piled to her waist around the boulder, and finally stood free of it, one hand on the boulder to keep herself steady.
Sun or not, she had to find water—water, or someplace to wait out the heat of the day, or both. If she couldn’t find water soon…
She shook her head to drive away the thought, took a deep breath, and set out towards the east on rubbery legs that felt like they were going to give way under her at any moment. Her mind was simply not working; every thought emerged only after a long fight through a fog of weariness. It wasn’t until she had staggered forward for half the morning that she thought to look for water.
And as soon as she did—her entire body shook with the nearness of it, as if she were inside a cavern and a dragon gave a full-throated bellow, so that everything in the cave shook with the reverberating echoes.
East. Due east. Into the sun—
Her legs moved on their own; first a clumsy shuffle, then a stiff walk—then, unable to help herself, an awkward, stumbling run. She ran, even though she was blinded by the glare of the sun, even though she fell over rocks and had to pull herself to her feet a dozen times and more. She ran until she finally tripped and fell over something that wasn’t a rock, something that stood knee-high and sent her falling flat on her face, with all the breath knocked out of her.
She lay there for a moment, panting, while her head cleared and the stars stopped dancing in front of her eyes, until she could again draw a full breath.
When she did, she pushed herself up off the hard-packed sand, to find herself in the middle of a ruin.
She had fallen over the remains of a low stone wall; there were what appeared to be the remains of buildings all around her. And in front of her, cool and serene beneath the equally blue sky, was the impossible.
Water; an entire pool of it.
She didn’t even try to get to her feet; she scrambled towards it on hands and knees, and flung herself down onto the stone rim confining it. She scooped up the cool, pure stuff by the handful, gulping it down, then splashing it over her face and neck, laughing and babbling hysterically to herself.
Finally her thirst was assuaged and her hysterical energy ran out. She rolled herself away from the edge of the pool and slowly sat up.
And found herself staring at a body. A two-legger body.
What was left of one, anyway.
There wasn’t much; the desert air and the sand had mummified what there was that the insects and birds hadn’t gotten. A few shreds of silk; the bleached remains of the bones.
“I guess you didn’t get here soon enough, did you?” Shana said aloud, staring curiously at the oddly rounded skull, the talonless fingers. “I wonder how long you’ve been here? It could be a hundred years, or only ten. I wish you could tell me. Well, I’m sorry for you, but right now I’d better take care of me. I wonder if you had anything with you?”
She began to search through the sand beside the pool for anything the unknown might have brought with him. At this point, even a hollow gourd would be more than what she had. She combed the sand with her fingers, and before too long, encountered something hard and oddly shaped.
She pulled it out of the sand, and gasped at the sight of it; she held in her hand a kind of band of flexible gold mesh, studded with cut jewels that flashed in the sun with thousands of points of multicolored light. She’d never seen anything so beautiful in her life, and as soon as she saw it, she knew she had to have it.
She was puzzled for a moment about how to carry it, and finally hit on the idea of coiling it into a roll, making a little bundle of it with one of the scraps of silk still fluttering around the poor two-legger’s skeleton, and tying the bundle around her neck, dropping it securely inside her tunic.
Once it was safely there, she felt immensely better, although she couldn’t have said why. Maybe since it had come from a two-legger it could focus her magic like Keman’s jewels focused his. Maybe it would even let her shape-shift. She still might be Kin, who could tell? Maybe all she needed were the right gems…
She blinked, beginning to feel a little light-headed from the sun beating down on her.
I’d better find someplace to sleep out the day, she realized finally. I’m going to fall over if I don’t .
There was a sand-and-wind-worn hollow beneath the wall of one of the ruins, a place where the sun wasn’t touching even though it was directly overhead. Shana tried to go into trance to check for snakes or scorpions, but was so tired and so dizzy she finally gave up.
Instead she poked around inside with one of the leg-bones of the skeleton, and when she stirred up no more than a single flat desert toad, rolled herself into the shade and shelter, and promptly went to sleep.