Duneflyer by Jay Aspen

Author:Jay Aspen [Aspen, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, science fantasy, adventure romance, epic fantasy, strong female lead
Publisher: Sandfire Publishing Ltd
Published: 2021-09-28T22:00:00+00:00

16

I FIND TALIN WAITING impatiently several hundred yards away from the feeding ground. He moves to mount, waving his hands impatiently.

“What kept you?”

I resist the urge to ask him what he imagined I have been doing after his last instruction to make it up as I go along.

“This.” I hold up the wrapped bag. “Get as far away from Strike as you can, because I think the birds find it as unpleasant as I do.”

We retreat as far as the reins allow and I unwrap one end of the black cylinder, taking care to hold the insulated end.

Talin reaches his hand to it, then withdraws hastily.

“Ugh. What is it?”

“No idea. But I think it’s the reason those carcasses haven’t already been cleaned up by passing lizards. Why did you think they had stayed there so long?”

“Malindir and Rianen checked the meat with a poison-scanner and it came up clear––so they thought the deterrent must be some toxic wavelength in the general area. We noticed it had about a sixty foot radius. We thought the disturbance that alerted us to that part of the desert in the first place was from whatever slaughtered those lizards, as well as the mass killing which seldom happens in nature. I could still feel the effect when we searched the area, but we couldn’t find a specific source. We hoped it would slowly dissipate over time.” He looks at me with an admiring grin. “You really do have a heightened sensitivity if you spotted it on your first search! Is this the only one you found?”

“I don’t know if there are any more of them. I didn’t look because I was in a hurry to get moving. Too worried about Claw getting over-stuffed. But suppose this is some kind of marker or beacon? It might lead us to more of them further along the faultline you mentioned before. Which would give us a direction to search instead of a huge area.”

Talin peers at the tube, his eyes screwed up against the glaring sunlight.

“No markings. How would we activate it?”

“I’m hopeless at tec. But it could be sealed to stop sand and dust getting in, same as a sand-spinner. Maybe it just does what it’s doing right now and it might react to another one, like a kind of echo.”

I slowly turn full circle while Talin tries to calm the fractious condors.

“Over there.” I point north. “I could feel a small surge in its radiation or whatever it is.”

Talin watches me re-wrap the thing as the dissonance subsides. “That blind-flap is two layers of black silk with a fine wire mesh sandwiched between the layers to hold it stiff, away from the birds’ eyes. It might work like a Faraday cage.”

“Like I said, tec is a total blank for me. But maybe adding your blind as well would make it more efficient?”

Thankfully, it does and the birds start to calm down.

This time I watch Talin take off and make a note of the brief lean forward that seems to be the flight command.

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