Elvenbane (24 page)

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.

KEMAN BRISTLED WITH resentment and stared at Keoke until the Elder dropped his eyes. Keoke’s crest was already flat, and Keman didn’t intend to give in to him one tiny bit, no matter how hopeless his cause. If he could make Keoke and his mother feel horribly guilty, he would. “Rovy tried to hurt me real bad, and you know it,” the youngster said angrily, his voice full of undisguised contempt. “He’s been hurting everybody younger or smaller than him and you know
that
, too. And you let him. Then, when Shana gave him what was coming to him, you punish
her
and let him get away without even getting yelled at! Is that fair?”

“Lashana was not of the Kin, Keman,” the Elder said, looking steadfastly over Keman’s shoulder. Keman figured it was to avoid looking into his eyes.

I hope you feel rotten
, he thought angrily at the elder dragon.
I hope you feel awful. I hope you have nightmares about Shana for the rest of your life
.

“But I
am
, and she was just defending me!” he insisted. “If she’d been one of my loupers and she’d
bitten
Rovy when he was hurting me, would you have punished her?”

“It’s different,” Keoke said lamely. “You’re too young to understand, Keman, but it’s different—”

“Why?” Keman interrupted. “Because she’s a two-legger? Why should it be different? Mother raised her like one of us, with the same code of honor, and
she
lived up to it and Rovy didn’t! It’s not fair, and you know it!”

“Keman!” his mother said sharply, with enough force that he turned away from Keoke to look at her. “You’re still young, and Keoke is an Elder. This situation is very complicated. There is more at stake here than just Shana’s welfare.”

That was what she said aloud, but she added, mind-to-mind,
:If you keep up this insolence, I’m going to have to do something neither of us will appreciate. I can’t explain it all to you now. Someday you’ll understand
.:

Keman ducked his head between his aching shoulder blades, his spinal crest flat in submission, but muttered rebelliously, “It’s not fair. You
know
it’s not fair. And nothing you can say is going to make it fair.”

The adults exchanged a glance that he had no trouble reading. Exasperation, shared guilt, impatience, “well-you-know-children-he’ll-learn-better.” He slunk away, back to his cavelet, his stomach churning with anger.

Right now all he wanted was Rovy’s throat in his claws. Rovy was ultimately the one responsible for this, him and his stupid mother. It wasn’t fair. They should never have done that to Shana. She didn’t know anything about the two-leggers; Mother had never told her. All she knew was the language and the writing. And now they’d thrown her out there and she was going to get hurt. Keman was positive of that.

He wanted to claw something, bite something, scream his rage from the top of the mountains. He’d already staged one temper-tantrum when he had asked where Shana was and his mother had had to tell him what had happened to her. That had gotten him nowhere. He’d thought he could get some justice if he forced one of the Elders to
see
what had been done to him. So he’d insisted on seeing Keoke as soon as he could stand without hurting too much, and this was all the result he’d gotten out of
that
interview.

He’d intended to show Keoke how wrong he’d been, how Shana had been the hero, and Rovy the villain. Then when Keoke capitulated he would demand that the Elder go find Shana and bring her back. He never got any farther than insisting on how unfair it all had been. Keoke refused to admit that his decision had been in error, on the grounds that Shana was not of the Kin. “Unfair” simply didn’t apply to
her
, nor did honor or the Law, and that was the end of it.

He wasn’t going to get anywhere with his mother, either, that much was certain. She backed Keoke; he didn’t know why, but it was plain she had no intention of helping him or Shana.

So if anyone was going to save Shana, it was going to have to be him, all alone.

Do what you think is right
, had been Father Dragon’s first advice to him about Shana. Well, he
knew
what was right. If she was going to get thrown off in the desert somewhere, it was only right that he share her exile. After all, she was there because of him.

Except that right now he couldn’t fly… which was going to make some serious problems with mobility.

He could fix that problem, he thought angrily, hugging his own little secret to himself. And Mother didn’t know he could. She thought he was going to be lying around in bed for at least a week.

He eased himself down into his bed, seething with defiance.
I’ll show her. I’ll show them all
.

He arranged his aching limbs carefully, and put himself into the shape-shifting meditation. A common place enough state of mind; he practiced it several times each day. Except that this time he wasn’t going to
shift
anything, he was going
to fix
it.

Of all the forms he knew, he was most familiar with his own body, naturally enough. He had to be; he had to
know
what he was shifting out of in order to know what to change. Like all dragons proficient in shape-shifting, he knew exactly how each muscle should look, work, and feel. So in order to heal the damage Rovy had done to him, it was only a matter of taking the damaged muscles and shifting them until they were whole again.

Only…

He had figured this out when he realized that the most proficient dragons never stayed injured for very long. He’d had no idea the actual practice would hurt so much. After all, shape-changing didn’t hurt at all.

Within heartbeats his shoulder muscles burned as if he’d poured molten rock on them; his wing muscles twitched wildly and sent stabs of lightninglike pain down his back each time they did. He quit immediately, and tried to figure out what he was doing wrong.

Nothing, he realized finally. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was just making real changes to things, making himself heal faster. And everything hurt because all the nerves were alive, and hurting the way they would if he was healing, only faster.

He started again, hoping it would be better.

It wasn’t.

At least a dozen times he was ready to give up, and let nature heal his injuries in its own time—but each time he did, he saw Shana, bravely standing up to Rovy and telling him off, while the bully ducked and screamed as her rocks hit him.

Shame overcame him; she was somewhere out in the desert, with no shelter, and no water, and no friends to help her. This was nothing. And if he didn’t get himself in flying condition soon, she might die.

He went right back to his healing.

Suddenly, after what seemed like days, the pain stopped.

His eyes flew open, and he flexed his arms and wings wonderingly. They worked perfectly; no pain, and not even a trace of stiffness. He couldn’t see his own back, but the skin wasn’t pulling as if it had been scarred. He had succeeded in healing himself—and no one in the entire Lair knew that he was whole and flightworthy again.

And they weren’t going to find out until it was too late.

He climbed out of his bed and stole into the cavern itself, waiting, watching and listening. When he heard and saw nothing, he searched the lair, quietly stealing along the pathways of the cavern with his belly scraping the stone, hiding in shadows whenever he thought he detected a sound that wasn’t the steady drip of water. But though he checked every possible corner of the lair, there was no sign of Alara. All he found was Myre, curled up in her bed, sleeping so soundly that an avalanche wouldn’t have made her stir.

Good. Everything was clear.

He slipped to the back entrance, pausing only to free all of his pets, even the one-horns.

He wasn’t exactly sorry to see
them
go; lately only Shana could get near them. They seemed even to like her—as much as one-horns ever liked anyone. Keman they charged whenever he neared the paddock, bashing their stupid heads against the stone of the enclosure. And they never learned not to.

The two-horns were harder to free; gentle as they were, he’d enjoyed their quiet company and the antics of their young. Poor old Hoppy had long since suckled her last kid, but her descendants followed their fierce cousins happily enough out to the free pastures beyond the Lair.

The loupers were equally pleased to head into the hills; they’d never gotten used to confinement, and Keman had been contemplating freeing them for some time. Maybe it was all for the best that he was forced into it now.

The only animal Keman didn’t free immediately was the otter. Instead, he lured the playful beast to him, and caught it in a net when it came within reach. It
meeped
reproachfully at him from the net, after struggling unsuccessfully to free itself. He wished he could tell it that he was taking it to the river on his way out on Shana’s trail, but he had no way to reach its mind. He could only hope it would do well once it found it was free again.

Then he launched himself heavily into the air, net and all, heading outward from the Lair, the otter dangling from his foreclaws as he took to the night sky.

At least he’d gotten that much out of Keoke, he told himself, as he settled down at the place—he hoped—the Elder had released his foster sister, sometime just before dawn. Five rocks, one of them tall, with a kestrel nesting in a hollow near the top, and sajus all around. Keoke had given him that much detail in the hopes it would make him feel better about Shana—the Elder had assumed that the presence of that much sajus and the nesting kestrel meant that there was water Shana could find
and
get at relatively close to the surface.

It was just too bad that for Shana that wasn’t true. Sajus had deep roots that could reach down ten, even twenty dragon-lengths to get at water, and kestrels got all the water they needed from their prey. All the cluster of bushes meant was that there was water there. Somewhere. Not near enough to the surface to help Shana, and it was too early in the fall for dew to be collecting on the rock at dawn.

He couldn’t look for her on the wing; she might be hiding, sleeping, or even unconscious under a bush somewhere. She might change direction at any time. And this was close to the caravan routes; he
dared
not be seen.

He needed a shape. A good tracker with a keen nose, and something that would be safe out here.

Keman sat for a moment and thought about the shapes he was familiar with. His best bet was a louper—they could smell footprints on the wind. But they were also small, and tended to travel in packs for protection. It was still hard for him to shift into anything as small as a louper, and he needed something that could protect itself.

A one-horn, he decided reluctantly. He knew they were good trackers; they’d follow something for weeks before they’d give up chasing it. He would just have to modify it, so he wasn’t stuck with its bad temper, its instincts, and its brainless head. That was going to take time—

But nothing messed with a one-horn. Not even another one-horn. They could eat just about anything, even sajus. And they were almost as good as kestrels about getting water from what they ate.

There was another advantage: If Shana saw him, she wouldn’t be afraid of him. He wasn’t anywhere near as good as she was at mind-to-mind speech;
she
would be able to talk to him, but he would not be able to tell her that he was in animal form until she was close enough to touch. But she had come as close to taming the one-horns as had anyone he’d ever heard of, and she might see a one-horn as transportation and protection.

Now he was glad he’d stopped after releasing the otter, to kill and eat two unfortunate antelope. He was already tired when he began the long flight, and shifting both shape and size was going to take a lot of energy.

He locked his joints so that he wouldn’t fall over, closed his eyes, and began the patterns of his meditation.

Once he was deeply inside those patterns, he slowly shifted most of his bulk Out, leaving just enough mass to make a really
big
one-horn.

Then he set the form he wanted to mimic in his mind, and began copying it from the skin out.

He felt his muscles flowing reluctantly, taking the shape that he set them; felt bones lengthening and assuming a new configuration. Felt his spinal crest soften, his tail shrink and sprout hair—and finally felt the pearly horn sprout from the middle of his forehead, stabbing at the sky aggressively.

He cracked one eye to look down at himself, and saw a smooth-haired, silky green leg.

That wouldn’t do at all. He concentrated a little more, and watched the leg darken to black. And the heat of the sun hit him hard enough to flatten him, if he hadn’t had his legs locked.

Possibly not the best color choice in a desert.

He reversed the process, and watched the skin and hair bleach to a pure, unblemished white.

Already he felt
much
cooler. Satisfied, he opened his eyes completely, and lifted his nose to sniff the faint breeze.

There was no doubt of it; Shana
had
been here. He remembered her scent from taking three-horn form; the odd mix of dragon-musk (from her tunic) and two-legger scent was unmistakable. Even if there
had
been another two-legger somewhere around here—however unlikely that was—they wouldn’t have had the scent of dragon on them as well.

Keman put his nose close to the ground and circled around the rock formation. He picked up Shana’s trail immediately; found where she had wriggled into the cluster of brush to spend the heat of the day, and where she had come out. There were still tracks she had made, reduced to vague depressions in the sand, but forming a clear line off to the east now that he knew what they were.

He shook his head and mane, put nose to the ground, and followed.

He was doing just fine when the sandstorm hit, just about midmorning.

Fortunately his one-horn instincts, however buried, were still keen enough to warn him in plenty of time to take cover. He was Following Shana’s trail with the total, concentrated single-mindedness that tracking in the desert required, when a sudden chill made him toss his head and look up, his eyes widening.