Silence from within.
“I want to find Jory,” said Nela. “I want to talk to Jory. Come with me to find Jory, Bertran.”
She folded her wings and stumbled off along the river, inexplicably headed in the right direction. After a moment Bertran followed her, humping his body along behind her, finding this gallumphing progress weird but efficient.
Perhaps when they found Jory, he would decide whether it was worth it to go on living.
Behind them both, the sand lay level and still in the sunlight, no ripple betraying what still lay beneath.
For a time, it seemed to Zasper and Danivon that they would reach the wall before the things behind them caught up with them. For a time they thought they would get there without being observed by any of the people of Beanfields, either. There was open woodland much of the way, with good cover and solid footing, and they were making very good progress. Though they observed persons working in fields inland, though they could not avoid coming out into the open occasionally, as when fording streams, no one seemed to know they were there, no one got in their way, and they became almost convinced as the day wore on that they would come to the wall without trouble.
Then they reached a region where the trees had been cleared, a strip of bare, high land, where they could both see and be seen, and noticed behind them the telltale glitter of something coming very fast along the riverside.
“That’s bigger than it ought to be,” said Zasper soberly. “The things back there near the cavern were very small.”
Danivon moved rapidly into cover. “So maybe this is a bunch of them stuck together,” he said, telling more truth than he knew. What was coming behind was, indeed, a lot of them stuck together that were capable of coming apart again with fatal intent.
“What do you think guides it,” panted Zasper. “Heat detector?”
“Possibly. Or just sound. You’re breathing like a gaver in rut.”
“Courtesy, boy,” muttered Zasper. “Either case dictates evasive action.”
Danivon didn’t bother to reply. The standard formula applied. Get quiet. Get cool. Cool meant water. The river was a considerable distance to their right, through some badly cut up country, so they headed downhill at their best speed, praying there would be a stream at the bottom. Running water, if deep enough, would mask the heat of their bodies. Running water, if swift enough, would hide the sound of their breathing as well.
What they found was a murky pool, and not much of that.
“I hate mud puddles,” Zasper groaned to himself, busy cutting a large reed into a breathing tube. “Would you like to bet there will be at least a dozen chaffers in there?”
“No bet,” snarled Danivon, busy with a tube of his own.
They trampled about in the pool, muddying it still further, then slid into it with all their belongings, their heads among the reeds, each with a single finger wearing a detection tip extended to the surface of the water.
They detected the thing arriving. After a time they detected it departing. They waited, and it came back again.
“Tracker?” signaled Danivon with a finger on Zasper’s hand.
“Wait,” signaled Zasper in return. The thing went away for a second time. Again the thing came back.
“Tracker?” signaled Danivon again. “Smeller.”
“You go left, I’ll go right,” signaled Zasper, scarcely finishing before Danivon erupted from the pool beside him. Their weapons fired almost as one; the thing came apart into its constituent parts, some of which were very lively and quite deadly.
Sometime later, Danivon finished bandaging his leg, and Zasper the long cut along his ribs, which he had managed to stop bleeding but which nothing could stop hurting. He felt he had been sliced by a giant venomous insect.
“They’re getting nasty. There was a new kind of poison on those blades,” said Zasper, then more plaintively, “we’re filthy!”
“All to the good,” said Danivon, burrowing in his leg packs for something he had trouble finding. “Here. Native growth scent pads.”
Zasper rubbed the things over his hands, then strapped them over his boots. The device had tracked them by smell. If a breeze came up to dissipate the aroma of their passing—though they mostly smelled of mud at the moment—the scent pads would mask their footsteps and anything they touched with their hands. “The next one will be worse,” he commented. “You know that.”
Danivon merely grunted.
If there was another one, it did not follow them from the muddy pool. They saw things on their back trail, but nothing came close. Time went by; they began almost to relax, and it was with a good deal of shocked surprise that they came out of a narrow defile into a wider patch of woodland to be suddenly seized up by a company of Mother-dear’s sister guards.
As Danivon remarked later, even surprised as they were, they could have disposed of the sister guards if only they had had license to do so. Unfortunately, there was no complaint and disposition against the women of Beanfields.
Zasper, who had never been in Beanfields, tried to explain who they were and was knocked on the head.
“Boys do not speak until spoken to,” said the sister-in-charge. “You will have an opportunity soon enough to tell your story to Mother-dear herself. It was she who told us to watch for your coming.”
All their weapons were removed, except the ones the sisters did not find. All their belongings were taken away as well. They were escorted up a hill onto a rocky ridge above the nearest community and there locked into a small stone building and left alone.
“Who knew we were coming this way,” asked Danivon.
“Fringe. The twins. And the thing following us.”
“That’s what I thought too. So who told Mother-dear?”
“I doubt it was Fringe.”
Two cots stood along the walls of their jail, and Danivon fell onto one of them with a weary groan. He had not run so fast so far for the better part of a year,
