The heat was getting unbearable. He was going to have to do something, or he and Kayan would cook.

  Feeling helpless and stupid, but not knowing what else to try, he stripped off his robe and waved it at the cactus. It still made no motion, even when he got right next to it. Finally he tossed one end of the robe out and let the thorns at the end of one arm catch it, then he tugged downward. The cactus flexed a little, but that was it.

  That was as good as he could do. He walked around to the other side, trailing the robe and spreading it out to make the biggest possible shadow. Stretched out like that it was nearly square, and now he noticed that the hems were extra thick to allow the thorns to hold it fast without tearing. He was willing to bet the elves had designed the garments that way for just this purpose.

  Ha. He was learning. He just hoped he could learn fast enough to keep himself and Kayan alive.

  He helped her move over to the patch of shade, then sat down beside her to wait out the hottest part of the day. But when he leaned back against his knapsack, she said, “We should sleep in alternate shifts.”

  “Good point,” he said, sitting up again. “You go ahead, and I’ll take the first watch.” He didn’t know what he would be able to do if anything approached, since the elves hadn’t given them any weapons, but he refrained from mentioning that to Kayan. Let her sleep without worry if she could; she needed the rest..

  She curled up on the ground, her robe still protecting her light skin from the bright reflections off the sand, and within minutes her breathing slowed and her muscles relaxed. Jedra yawned, then forced himself to look away and concentrate on something else.

  The desert was quiet, but not silent. When he listened hard, he could hear the faint clicks of rocks expanding in the heat, the cluttering of tiny bugs, and the occasional rustle of a not-so-tiny bug or lizard scurrying from one piece of shade to another. Breezes flapped the loose ends of his robe, and every few minutes a fly would circle around until he chased it off.

  The smells were more subtle, masked as they were beneath the ever-present aroma of sun-baked sand and his own sweat, but when he concentrated Jedra could pick out the faint spiciness of the cactus providing their shade, and even the dry, strawlike scent wafting off the few patches of wispy grass that grew on the dunes.

  Another smell took longer to identify, but he finally realized it was the remains of the perfume the elven women had added to their bathwater. He bent down and inhaled close to Kayan’s hair. Mmm, yes.

  He let her sleep through the hottest part of the day, waking her only when the sun had moved far enough that she was no longer in the shade. They moved over a few feet and traded places; he slept while she kept watch. She woke him when the sun was still an hour from the horizon. “We should probably get moving,” she said. “This is about when the elves started their evening march.”

  Jedra sat up and rubbed his eyes. He still felt tired, but even a couple hours of sleep had helped tremendously. He could probably put another five or six miles behind him before he tired again. He took a swig from his waterskin and passed it to Kayan, and they shared the first of the honeycakes Galar had packed for them. He’d given them a dozen; they could each eat two a day.

  When they’d eaten the last crumbs and washed them down with a sip of water, Jedra said “Let me take down my robe and we can go,” but that proved more difficult than he’d expected. The cactus thorns had tiny barbs pointing toward their bases, and the breeze had flapped the fabric enough that it was stuck to hundreds of them. Jedra and Kayan both tried to work his robe free, but the thorns wouldn’t let go without a great deal of wiggling and spreading of the weave. Most of them were out of reach anyway, so Jedra finally wound up simply tugging the robe down. It came free with a loud rip, leaving dozens of tatters of cloth behind in the cactus.

  Jedra held up the robe to inspect the damage and was annoyed to find that the worst tears were in the back, where they would let tomorrow’s sun through to his already-tender skin.

  “So much for that wonderful idea,” he said. He picked up his pack and slung it over his shoulders, noticing how its rough fabric chafed his back.

  Kayan put on her pack as well. “We needed the shade,” she said. “You did what you had to do. Tomorrow we’ll figure out something different.”

  “I hope so.” He turned toward the sinking sun and began to walk.

  He set a pace much slower than the elves had, but one that he hoped would ultimately be just as productive. If he and Kayan could keep from exhausting themselves, they would make better time than if they had to stop and rest all the time.

  His strategy paid off for the first couple of hours. Luck was with them, too; when the sun sank below the horizon in front of them, Guthay, one of Athas’s two moons, rose behind them and continued to provide light. After the day’s brilliance, its golden glow was a welcome change. It was a little more difficult to see where they were going under its softer illumination, but there didn’t seem to be much to worry about. The plant life was thinning out the farther west they went, and they saw little else but an occasional pile of bones where some poor animal had evidently starved and scavengers had picked the carcass clean.

  They walked side by side and kept their eyes on the sky almost as much as the ground, trying to navigate by the stars. That turned out to be a bad idea; Jedra had become mesmerized by the brilliant stars when he suddenly felt a sting in the arch of his left foot.

  “Ow!” he yelled and jumped backward, but he nearly fell over when his foot refused to lift.

  “What the-?” He tugged on his foot, but each tug sent a lance of pain up his leg.

  “What is it?” Kayan asked.

  “Something’s got me!” he shouted, pulling harder.

  It felt as if something were trying to pull his bones out through the sole of his foot. It wasn’t pulling on his sandal; whatever it was had penetrated the leather sole and stuck deep in his foot. He managed to lift it a few inches off the ground, but it simply wouldn’t come any farther, and now he could see a thin cord or a root or something leading into the sand.

  In full-scale panic now, he yanked backward with all his might and finally pulled free of whatever had snared him. It looked like a cactus spine with a thumbnail-sized hunk of his leather sandal and some of his skin still attached. He staggered backward, his left foot on fire-and stepped on another spine with his right foot.

  “Ye-ow!” he screeched, and he wrenched free of it with one mighty jerk.

  “Jedra!” Kayan took a step toward him.

  “Don’t move!” He bent down and brushed the hem of his robe cautiously over the sand, and sure enough, it hung up on another thorn sticking up between them. He swung the cloth around in as wide an arc as it would reach and encountered three more of the strange spines a foot or so apart.

  “It grows underground,” Kayan said, her voice full of wonder.

  Jedra could hardly stand on his feet. Pain and anger made him snap at her, “Of course it grows underground. Everything is hostile in this damned desert, even the land itself, and the sooner we realize that the longer we’ll live.”

  A little taken aback, she said, “Jedra, I know that. But neither of us could have known about this.”

  “We should have suspected it,” he said, twisting around without moving his feet. “I wonder how far back it goes? As far apart as the thorns are, we could have been walking right through them for the last ten paces or so.”

  “True,” she said. She bent down and swept the hem of her robe over her tracks. When she didn’t encounter a thorn, she took a step back the way they had come and swept the robe out again, and this time it snagged on a spine just an inch or two from a footprint. She gingerly stepped over it and moved on.

  Wincing at the pain in his feet, Jedra did the same until they stopped encountering thorns. The patch of them was only six or eight feet across, it turned out, but there was nothing visible to indicate that it was there, save for the thin needles that were the same color as the sand.

  Jedra immediately sat down and slipped off his sandals. Both feet had big red patches surrounding the puncture wounds, which bled steadily even when he squeezed. Under the moonlight his blood made dark rivulets across his skin, and where it dripped on the sand it made black circles.

  “Here, let me see that,” Kayan said. She bent close and took his right foot, turning it so the moonlight shone on the sole. “Does it still hurt, or is it just bleeding?” she asked, pressing on either side of the puncture.

  “Ow!” he yowled. “Yes, it still hurts.”

  “Shush. Something might hear you.” She held the foot in both hands and concentrated on it, and presently the pain began to ease, but the bleeding continued unabated. “That’s strange,” Kayan said. “There’s something interfering with your blood’s ability to clot. The cactus must have injected it with something. I wonder why it would do that?”

  “Spite,” Jedra said.

  Kayan laughed. “It’s a plant.”

  “So?”

  She shook her head and bent back to her work. She had to work at it for a couple of minutes, but eventually the bleeding stopped and the pain lessened until it was more like a bee sting than a gaping wound. Jedra watched, fascinated, as the hole the thorn had ripped on its way out closed up, healing at hundreds of times the normal rate.

  “That’s good,” he said at last. “Stop! You’ll wear yourself out again.”

  “I hope not,” she said. “I still have your other foot to do.” She let his right one go and scooted around to do his left.

  Jedra watched her stop the bleeding again, but this time he felt a wave of uneasiness pass over him. He looked away, but the sensation continued to grow. It wasn’t nausea; this was more like alarm. Something was wrong. He couldn’t imagine what it could be, though. The pain was going away just like in the other foot.

  Even so, he couldn’t shake the sensation of impending disaster. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with his foot. It felt a little like the feeling he sometimes got when someone was watching him, but out here in the desert? There wasn’t anything for miles around.

  Or was there? Jedra scanned the sandy horizon beyond Kayan, then twisted around to check behind him.

  “Hold still,” Kayan said.

  There. Just around the edge of a wind-hollowed dune about thirty feet away, Jedra sensed a presence. “Something’s out there,” he said.

  Kayan looked up. “What? Where?”

  “Over-” But Jedra didn’t need to point. The moment its cover was blown, a b’rohg leaped out from behind the dune and charged toward them, screaming a ululating war cry that sent shivers up their backs.

  Jedra had seen b’rohgs before in the arena. They were four-armed humanoid giants, mutations or throwbacks to an earlier age. Not particularly bright, but vicious fighters. This one was about twice as tall as Jedra, heavily muscled, and fast. It carried a crude stone-tipped spear in its upper right hand, poised for throwing.

  “Run!” Kayan screamed. She leaped up, pulling Jedra to his feet, and took off directly away from the b’rohg. Jedra followed her as soon as he got his balance, but he realized instantly that they would never outrun the creature. At least he wouldn’t. Kayan hadn’t had time to finish; his left foot still flared in agony with each step. They didn’t have time to mindlink and fight the b’rohg psionically, either. And without weapons, they were as good as dead.

  Wait. They did have one weapon. Jedra veered to the left, praying that the b’rohg would follow him rather than Kayan. Just to make sure, he stumbled, went down to his knees, then got up and ran on. He glanced over his left shoulder; sure enough, the b’rohg was going for the easy mark. Now Jedra had to time it just right…

  The b’rohg was even faster than he expected. Jedra had to put on a burst of speed to keep the creature aimed in the right direction, and even so it looked like he might not make it. He turned harder to the left, running directly across the b’rohg’s path. If this didn’t work, the b’rohg wouldn’t even have to use its spear; it could just grab Jedra in its massive arms when they collided.

  The distance between them closed to twenty feet, then ten. Jedra was about to turn and face the b’rohg in a last desperate stand when the creature shrieked in pain and whirled around as if something had grabbed it by the leg.

  Something had. Jedra had led it right over the sand cactus.

  The b’rohg tottered on one foot, flailing its arms for balance. Jedra knew it was strong enough to pull free once it regained its footing, and maybe even strong enough to keep chasing him. He couldn’t lose his momentary advantage, so he did the one thing he could think of: He concentrated his psionic power and imagined pushing the creature over.

  It hadn’t done much good when he’d fought Sahalik, but now maybe it would be enough. Jedra shoved with all his might, and the b’rohg flailed its arms even more, then finally it shrieked in terror and fell over into the patch of cactus needles.

  At least four more penetrated its skin, holding it fast to the ground, and as the giant humanoid screamed and thrashed around it impaled itself again and again until it could barely move.

  Then the cactus began sucking it dry.

  Kayan came back to stand beside Jedra, and they watched in horrified fascination as the b’rohg’s burnt-orange skin turned pale and its flesh slowly shrank around its bones.

  “It’s carnivorous,” Kayan whispered incredulously. “That’s why your blood wouldn’t clot. The cactus drinks blood, so it secretes something to keep it fluid.”

  The b’rohg shuddered once more, then lay still. The spear fell from its grasp and thumped to the sand.

  Jedra shuddered, too. He was just as responsible for the creature’s horrible death as the cactus was. The fact that it had attacked him didn’t make him feel much better about it. He had used his psionic power to kill another intelligent being. Not a very intelligent one, to be sure, but smart enough to use a spear. The b’rohgs Jedra had seen in Urik had been able to understand a few spoken commands.

  Why had it attacked them? he wondered. Probably for their water, given that the b’rohg didn’t have a waterskin of its own. It didn’t have much of anything, just a scaly reptile skin of some sort wrapped around its waist, and the spear.

  Hmm. The spear.

  “We should try to get that,” Jedra said. Trying to ignore the desiccated corpse, he crab-walked toward the weapon, sweeping the sand in front of him with his robe as he went to detect any more thorns. When he reached the spear he grasped it by the haft just below the stone point and dragged it back out, careful to step in his same tracks.

  The spear was nearly ten feet long, and three inches thick. The haft wasn’t solid wood; it was a hollow tube honeycombed with holes. Jedra suspected it was the heartwood of one of the long, skinny kinds of cacti he’d seen farther back where vegetation had been more plentiful. Whatever it was, it was lightweight and strong. The heaviest part of it was the stone point that had been flaked to a sharp edge and bound to the haft with rawhide thongs. The whole thing had a weight and a balance to it that felt right. Though Jedra had no idea how to throw a spear, it felt good in his hand.

  “Maybe we should put some distance between us and this place,” Kayan said. “Something else might come to investigate the noise.”

  “Good idea,” Jedra said. He wanted to leave anyway. He made a wide detour around the sand cactus and its captive, limping a bit on his not-quite-healed left foot, and led the way toward the west. He winced with each footstep, not just because of the pain, or because of the small but noticeable hole in each sandal, but because he expected to encounter another invisible patch of thorns at any moment.

  Despite his fears, they made another mile without mishap, and when they had put a couple of large dunes between them and the hapless b’rohg, they stopped to rest again. Kayan finished healing Jedra’s left foot, then they shared another of their honeycakes and washed it down with a drink of water. They had ten cakes left out of the twelve Galar had given them, but they were going through water fast; Jedra figured they only had enough for another day and a half at this rate. They needed refreshment now, though, to help recoup the strength they had lost to the sand cactus.

  “We need to figure out a good way to make sure we don’t step on one of those things again,” Jedra said. He toyed idly with the spear as he spoke, drawing lines in the sand with the point.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Kayan said with a grin. “As long as you walk in front, I don’t mind healing you.”

  “Right.” He knew she was joking, but something about her attitude still irked him. Then he remembered some advice an old veteran of the streets had once given him, and he laughed. “You were pretty quick to take the lead when the b’rohg attacked,” he told Kayan.

  “Yeah, well, the ground cactus seemed the lesser danger at the moment.”

  “Someone I knew once told me, ‘When you go hunting wild inix, you should always take a companion with you. That way you never have to outrun an enraged inix; you only have to outrun your companion.’ “

  Now it was her turn to miss the joke. “Jedra, I wasn’t trying to leave you to the b’rohg! I was running for my life, and I thought you were right behind me.”

  “I was kidding,” he told her.

  “Oh.”

  She still didn’t laugh, so Jedra dropped it. He toyed with the spear some more, thinking that he could wave it in front of him to detect sand cactus, save that their progress would be excruciatingly slow if they had to sweep every inch of trail ahead of them. He wondered how the elves did it. He hadn’t marched at the head of the column, so he’d never seen what the scouts did for protection. Spotting a pile of bones that hadn’t been disturbed would be a fair indication that you were in cactus territory, but that wouldn’t protect you from a young plant that hadn’t fed yet. Maybe heavier sandals would provide more protection, or there might be a way to spot the needles if you knew what to look for.