03 The Gypsy Morph by Brooks Terry

Author:Brooks, Terry [Terry, Brooks,]
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-04-09T23:00:00+00:00

And she wonders about their companions, the ones from whom they separated, gone other ways, to other places.

THEY FIND NEW SHELTER as the dawn nears and go to ground for another day. They have nothing to eat or drink. The heat is unbearable, and their thirst acute. They sit waiting for the day to pass, miserable and despairing. The journey to reach the balloon will take another two days, and they are already weak and exhausted. It is questionable if they will be able to finish the trek.

At midday, Simralin goes out to look around. The sky is clear, the land empty of life. There is no sign of the winged hunters. She settles on a fresh course of action. This is country she knows. She decides to leave the others long enough to hunt for water. If she is lucky, she will come upon food, as well. The greatest danger lies in not being able to find her way back. But she is a skilled Tracker, and she is certain she will be able to do so.

Stay hidden through the day, she tells them. I will be back before dark with whatever I can find.

She sets out determined not to return without at least finding water for them to drink. She slogs through the heat alone, a solitary figure in an unchanging landscape. She scans land and sky frequently for signs of pursuit, but sees nothing. She has a compass to chart her passage, and she measures the distances between changes of course. It is an endless, tiresome process, but she is careful to keep track of everything, knowing that if she gets lost, she will never find her way back to them.

She finds the water she seeks around midafternoon in a deep ravine walled away by steep banks formed of bedrock that feels entirely out of place with the desert. But the water is good, and she fills the containers she carries after drinking her fill, and starts back the way she has come.

It takes her the rest of the day to make the return. It is dusk by the time she arrives back, the shadows deep and layered. She has hurried, but she needn't have. Her companions are dead. They lie scattered about the space in which they were hiding, torn apart by whatever found them. The tracks of something huge are visible in a patch of soft earth. Neither demon nor once-men made these tracks. This is something else entirely, a desert hunter come in search of food, in all probability a mutant beast born of the changes wrought by humans. Pieces of the Elves killed are missing; parts of them have been eaten.

Almost nothing of Chenowyn's body remains. It appears from the marks on the rocks that the larger part of it was dragged away.

She feels the heart go out of her then, and for a moment she considers just sitting down and waiting for the inevitable. She is going to die, and she knows it.

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