Elvenbane

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.