Water Witch by Willis Connie & Felice Cynthia

Author:Willis, Connie & Felice, Cynthia [Willis, Connie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575120280
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2013-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Tycoon’s ponies moved surprisingly fast. If they had gone straight to the karst, they would have been in its tangled contours in a matter of minutes. From the gates of the compound, Deza could see the low morning fog from the sea covering it. Instead, the Tycoon took a circuitous route that swung several miles north, through a native village, and north again before turning to the bluffs that rimmed the karst. It was much narrower here and rougher, and Deza could see no reason for his choice of route, but she was grateful for the delay.

She wasn’t sure why the Tycoon was bringing her here, and not knowing made her feel helpless. She did not underestimate his determination to get what he wanted—she was through with underestimating him—but her new awareness of his ruthlessness was not going to help her now. She examined their loaded saddles for some clue to the reason for their journey. Her own pony was carrying food for just a day and a couple of metal helmets, the kind miners used when they excavated rubble-filled sinkholes, looking for fossilized mbuzi bones. The Tycoon’s was slung with coils of rope. She could not see what was in his saddlebags, but the helmets made her guess they were stocked with carbide lanterns or magnesium pocket flares, though why he would want to descend into one of the treacherous sinkholes of the karst was more than Deza could fathom. Her father might conceivably have told him Deza’s water sense could distinguish water-filled orbs, but even he would have been hard-pressed to justify her finding an underground treasure trove of mbuzi bones, and anyway, she was quite sure her father never would have suggested the karst. He always had avoided the karst, even though it meant travelling into places with far less cover and far more danger of discovery. Only once, because of some soldiers pursuing, had her father relented to so much as skirting along the bluffs that rimmed a karst area. That time they had gone no more than half a mile before he had stopped, taken a long look at Deza who was by then feeling peculiar, felt her forehead, and then headed straight out into the arms of the soldiers. She had not felt ill, and the pressure on her cheekbones had been no worse than usual when she was surrounded by that much water, but she had felt oddly detached even when they were captured. Deza still was not completely certain how her father had managed to obtain their release; it took her days to recover her sense of reality.

She had tried to contact her father before they got out of reach of the compound this morning, but couldn’t. She had no idea what “out of reach” meant. Telepathy, if it was telepathy, should not be bound by distances, yet she had been unable to raise her father when he was no farther away than the mbuzi pens. When the Tycoon stopped

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.