A wagon master approached, throwing on his clothes. “What’s all this?”
“She led me on!” cried the man, groveling away from Damson. “She’s a witch!”
He collapsed again and writhed at the girl’s feet, frothing at the mouth.
“Stop that!” Jame grabbed Damson to shake her . . .
. . . and found herself abruptly in the soulscape, grappling with something dark and dire. Ivory armor slid over her limbs, shielding her. She lashed out.
. . . and Damson sprawled at her feet in the sand with a split lip.
“I said if you ever struck me, I would strike you back,” Jame said, shaken. “I couldn’t help it.”
Damson spat blood. “Neither could I.”
“They’re both witches!” cried the driver, beginning to wax hysterical.
“Now what?” demanded the wagon master, distracted, as another man ran up to clutch his arm.
“It’s Nevin,” the newcomer panted. “Seized from his tent . . . through the floor . . .”
The master turned pale. “Gods help us. We’ve landed in a nest of snatchers. Everybody, get up! We have to move camp. Now.”
“A nest of what?” said Dar blankly. “Oh . . .”
Something green and scaly had emerged from the sand. It fumbled at his boot, gripped it with ten-inch claws, and pulled. Dar sank in up to his thigh.
“Help!”
Some of his friends grabbed him while others dug frantically. Finding his foot and the thing clutching it was no problem, but the sinewy arm, or neck, or whatever it was seemed to go down forever. Mint hacked through it. Dark blood spurted out of the hole, drenching Dar.
“Argh!” he said, trying to wipe the sticky goop off his face. “It burns!”
“Strike the tents!” the wagon master was shouting. “Move, move, move!”
One of the moas gave a squawk suddenly cut off, leaving only a puff of feathers afloat and the half-seen afterimage of a claw as broad across the palm as a man’s torso.
Everywhere tents were falling and people scrambling to load their wagons. The wind was stronger now and the visibility diminished except where lit with cracks of lightning. Blue light ran hissing over the wagon frames and up the oxen’s horns, crowning them like violet candle flames.
“’Ware the return stroke!” someone shouted.
As if his voice had called it forth, lightning seared down, striking dead the unfortunate oxen where they stood.
Jame was helping bundle Ean’s rolled tent into his sledge when they heard a child scream. Where was Byrne? She and Ean scrambled up the nearest dune. From its crest they saw an enormous, scaly claw on a neck or arm shimmering with blue-violet fire, thrust up through the sand. The boy dangled from its fingertips, curled up like a kitten in its mother’s jaws. Beneath, in a depression, smaller claws groped up like nestlings about to be fed by their parent.
A stocky figure stood at the base of the soaring arm and chopped at it with a sword as if with an axe.
The thing convulsed and dropped its captive. Jame took a running leap, caught the boy just above the groping claws, and rolled with him to safety.
Lightning clove the air, followed by a thunderous clap like the end of the world. The snatcher’s stump of an arm (or neck) flailed, fountaining black blood in a stench of burnt flesh, then whipped back into the sand, followed by its offspring.
“Whee!” said Byrne, somewhat breathlessly as his father snatched him up.
Jame confronted the swordsman. “Gorbel, what are you doing here?”
“What?”
They were both shouting, still partially deafened by the blast.
“I said . . .”
“I heard you.”
The Caineron Lordan leaned on his reeking blade, his face scrunched up against the sweat running down it. “Had to come, didn’t I?” he said, raising his voice to a near bellow against the ringing in his ears and the howl of the wind. “Father insisted that I discover the mystery of the Wastes, so I bribed a trader to take me along incognito. The idiot insisted on a team of hyenas, which promptly ate him. So here I am, in the desert, on foot.”
“You’re more than welcome to ride on my sledge,” said Ean, hugging his son.
“Appreciate that,” said Gorbel, gruffly. “Assuming that this lady doesn’t denounce me. Krothen’s wagon masters have no fondness for the Caineron.”
“I’m not sure I do either,” said Jame, “but you’re you. What quarrel do we have?”
“None that I know of, unless you count the last time at Tentir when I tried to kill you.”
“Oh, we’ve already gotten past that.”
“Then, sir, I accept your offer. Now let’s get out of this demon-infested wilderness.”
The caravan hastily trekked several more miles as the storm grew. The wind, whipping over dunes, covered and uncovered the bones of ancient, scattered dwellings so that sometimes they seemed to walk down dimly seen streets of the dead and sometimes through fields of petrified grain that snapped off under the lambas’ feet. There were sand-clogged wells and things that bent over them until the sand came again to cover all. Sometimes vast shapes wheeled overhead only to disintegrate in the lightning strokes.
At last the wagon masters declared the ground safe. Once again all pitched camp, this time on the hard desert floor between dunes, and collapsed exhausted in their hastily erected tents.
Meanwhile, the storm built.
“And you didn’t denounce him?” demanded Timmon.
It was the next morning, and the sandstorm roared over them, blotting out the sun, turning everything a lurid yellow. No one would travel today.
“At least Ean has a fighter on his team now. You should have seen Gorbel handle that sand monster.”
“Oh, he’s good at killing things, no question about that. Some day, though, you’ll have to face the fact that he’s blood-kin to your brother’s worst enemy.”
“And you aren’t?”
“Of course not. When has Grandfather Adric ever said ‘no’ to Torisen?”
“Repeatedly, starting when he didn’t let Tori attend the randon college. Your grandfather wanted a puppet for Highlord. He’s still coping with the fact that Torisen Black Lord doesn’t dance to anyone’s tune.”
Timmon opened his mouth, then closed it. They were perilously close to bringing up his father Pereden, who had definitely been Torisen’s enemy, and had made the entire Southern Host suffer for that enmity. Jame respected Timmon for coming to accept that, but she didn’t care to rub his nose in it.
“I thought you liked Gorbel,” she said.
Timmon ruffled his golden hair, perplexed. “I suppose I do, despite his rotten house. There’s something dependable about him. Decent, even, to the extent that his father leaves him alone, and even then . . .”
Quill stuck his head into the tent. “You have company, Ten.”
He opened the flap and bowed in a woman closely muffled in a cloak off of which sand cascaded. Jame and Timmon both rose.
“I bring an invitation from the seekers’ tent,” said the visitor with a marked accent which Jame had last heard from the lips of a dying girl. “If the Knorth Lordan would deign to join my mistresses for a dish of tea . . .”
Jame inclined her head. “I would be honored.”
In Kens she added to Timmon, “Stay if you like, or go. I don’t know how long this will take, nor what it’s about.”
The cloaked woman led her though the camp, both of them leaning sideways into the wind. Jame had donned a cape of her own, but sand as fine as flour still found its way into her clothes, eyes, and mouth where it ground unpleasantly between her teeth. Jorin trotted at her side. He at least could keep his eyes closed. The seekers’ tent was four times the size of her own with internal compartments that baffled most of the wind, but still bulged and swayed at its onslaught. The blond, portly woman and her thin, elderly companion waited for her in the innermost chamber, sitting on rich carpets, steaming dishes set out before them. “Tea” was clearly a flexible term.