Elvenbane (25 page)

A dark brown cloud that rose in a wall from earth to the sky reached for the sun ahead of him and grew taller even as he watched. In next to no time, it had blotted out the sun completely, and his keen ears picked up a roaring sound in the distance.

Sandstorm
! He’d never lived through one, he’d never even seen one except from far away and above.

There was only one thing to do—take shelter, and quickly; it was too late to try to avoid it.

He remembered a cluster of boulders along his backtrail, a semicircle of rock that should protect him from the worst of the wind and punishing, wind-borne sand. And there was something else that he could do to weather this that no real one-horn could manage; he could alter his shape to take the storm. He couldn’t change into a rock yet, only living things, but he
could
change his nose to create membranes he could breathe through; toughen his skin, even put scales back on it.

But first, he had to reach a relatively safe haven.

He whirled on his hind legs, leapt into motion, and galloped at full speed back towards the remembered boulders, his wide, cleft hoof-claws churning up the sand in his wake, his mane and tail flying, his ears laid back. He cast a glance over his shoulder; behind him the wall of brown had grown taller. The storm was gaining on him.

His legs pumped harder. He altered his hooves as he ran, until they were flat, twin-toed, splayed pads that hit the sand and gave him purchase without sinking into it. He looked back again. The storm seemed no closer, but the roaring of the wind was definitely louder.

Wings would do him no good at all at this point, and the delay might even kill him if he stopped long enough to sprout them. He
could
pop back into his draconic form, but that, too, would cost him time. And he didn’t think he could fly any faster than he was running; draconic form was not particularly fast except in a dive.

There were other reasons; things he’d been warned about. If he flew he could get caught in an updraft—and get torn to bits. And the sand would wear his wing-membranes away to nothing in no time.

He looked ahead, desperate to see something besides brush that would do nothing to protect him.

The rocks! He spotted them, only a few dragon-lengths away. He put on a burst of speed he didn’t know he had in reserve, scrambled around to the entrance and dove into their shelter, lying down with his head between his knees.

Faster than he had ever thought was possible, he altered the one-horn form; changing the soft skin for his own scales, growing a special membrane over his nostrils and ears to keep the sand from clogging them, weaving his mane into a canopy of tough, scaled skin and spreading it over his head, shrinking the horn so that it was just holding the membrane away from his face. He put his head into a cranny between two boulders, and did his best to seal that skin down against the rock. He had only enough time left to wonder if all he had ,done would protect him. Then the storm hit.

He’d only heard about the force of a sandstorm before this. Despite the relative shelter of the rocks, he quickly decided that it was a good thing he’d exchanged hair for scales. The sand abraded his hide with a force he felt even through the copy of his own draconic skin.

He should recommend sandstorms for the Kin who were going crazy with itching when they shed, he thought wryly. One morning, and it would all be over with.

He also decided that it was a very good thing he had not taken a full draconic form; the little skin frill that was protecting his face was taking a bad enough beating; his wing-membranes would, indeed, have been shredded in next to no time.

He thought suddenly of Shana; thought of her being caught in this thing, with no protection other than her wits and a short, dragon-hide tunic. He could all-too-easily imagine the wind and sand abrading her delicate skin away.

The thought made him want to leap to his feet and charge into the tempest looking for her, and only his own good sense kept him from doing so.

He had to keep telling himself over and over that if he ran out of his shelter, he wouldn’t be able to help her, and he might well get himself hurt or even killed. She was somewhere ahead of him; if the sandstorm had caught her, it had done so already, for it had come out of the east where she had been heading. She had either survived it intact, survived it hurt, or not survived at all. And no matter what the outcome, it had already happened.

None of that was any comfort as he waited out the fury of the storm.

The storm passed as quickly as it had descended, and Keman was up and out of his shelter while sand still blew around his circle of rocks.

He looked around and felt his heart plummet in despair, the storm had scoured away every trace of Shana’s trail, and when he sniffed the breeze, he scented nothing but the sharp tang of bruised sajus, dust, and the ever-present odor of heated sand.
Fire and Rain
—
how am I ever going to find her
now?
I’m never going to be able to pick up her trail
! His spirits sank, and he wanted to lie right down and weep.

He couldn’t give up. He couldn’t. He was all she had. He forced himself to change back to pure one-horn form. He sniffed the air, trying to catch a hint of Shana’s scent and having no luck whatsoever.

All right
, he told himself, as his throat closed and his stomach knotted, I
have to think this out
. He knew she was going east. If she was still alive, that was probably where she was still heading. What he had to do was quarter the possible trail, with this as his starting point. He could do it, he could find her, he just had to work a little harder.

The midday sun glared down pitilessly on him and on the empty desert, now quite featureless except for the clumps of brush. Even the birds were gone. Never had landscape seemed quite so empty of life.

He gritted his teeth with determination, resolving not to give in to despair, and trudged forward under the white heat of the sun.

Using peculiar rocks and his own innate sense of direction he zigzagged across the desert, nose in the air, testing every breath for a hint of Shana’s scent. Even when he felt dizzy from the heat, when the white sand wavered and rippled in his vision, he kept going. By midafternoon another problem began to torture him: hunger. He’d used up a great deal of energy in shape-shifting, and the strain had taken its toll. But there was nothing except sajus, and dry sajus at that. He snatched mouthfuls of it as he passed, but it did little to ease his hunger and nothing to ease his thirst.

By sunset he was half-mad with hunger and thirst combined. That was when he encountered one other large living creature: a real one-horn, a young one.

By then, he was so ravenous with hunger he was ready to pounce on anything that looked appetizing. The one-horn looked more than appetizing—it aroused an instinct in him that no amount of reason could overcome.

Kill!

The one-horn seemed to sense his mood, and broke into a run as it sighted him.

That was enough for him. He reverted back into draconic form and launched himself high into the sky, gaining altitude, then descending on the hapless one-horn in the kind of deadly dive dragons and accipiter hawks had in common. And like the accipiters, when the one-horn took shelter in a clump of brush, Keman went right in after it, hunger making him blind to everything but his quarry, even to the possibility of damage to his wings. He screamed with rage as it paused and turned at bay, his sight red-hazed, his hunger all-encompassing.

It turned, squealed, and struck back at him with its horn; a single, blow, light and glancing, but it was enough to madden Keman past all reason. He screamed, lunged, and seized the beast with talons and teeth, breaking its neck with a single jerk of his head, then tearing out its throat for good measure.

He ripped the limp body of the one-horn limb from limb in his rage, bolting great chunks of bleeding flesh, devouring the creature down to the bare bones in the few moments it took the sun to set. He’d never felt this way before, this unreasoning anger, this blood-lust; it took him with a wild intoxication that had his heart pumping, his wings mantling, and his spinal crest bristling long after the one-horn was a pile of gnawed bones. He couldn’t even think in coherent thoughts; he was all feeling, and that feeling was all anger.

A louper howled in the far distance. He raised his head from what was left of the beast, mantling his wings at the rising moon. It took him a moment to realize that the moon was no enemy, and not out to steal his kill. Only then did he finally come to his senses and remember what had brought him out here in the first place.

For one moment longer, Shana no longer seemed important. What was important was the wild wind under the moon, the taste of fresh blood in his mouth, the freedom to go and do whatever he pleased…

Then he shook his head, his mood changing as quickly as the desert sky at sunset, appalled at himself.
What’s wrong with me? What am I thinking of? Have I gone mad
?

He coughed, and shook his head again. He felt very strange, light-headed, dizzy, as if he’d been someone or something else for a moment. He’d never suspected he could feel emotions like that—

Like some throwback. Like Rovy?

No, he didn’t think so. He simply had gone rather feral, and only for a moment. Hunger had driven him, not a bad streak. Not like Rovy; Rovy was vicious, cruel.

He took a very deep breath to steady himself.
I’m all right. I was just
—
hungry
. Now he knew better than to leave feeding too long.
I’ll never do that again. Never, never, never. I swear it
. He collected himself, his thoughts, stepped away from the pile of gnawed bones and refused to look back at them. He had to get back to the trail. Shana was alone out there, somewhere, maybe hurt, and he had to find her.

He moved off a little, composed and centered himself, and reached for the power to shift. He made the transformation back to one-horn, finding it much easier the second time, and returned to his search.

Night was easier to take; his night-vision was good, and he was no longer tormented by heat, thirst, and hunger. Several times he thought he found the trail, only to lose the scent again, but the fact that he caught a scent at all gave him hope.

At just about dawn he scented water—and Shana.

And nearly a hundred other creatures, two-leggers and animals combined, somewhere over the crest of the hill he was climbing.

Fire and Rain! What
—

He thought quickly. He knew he must be near caravan trails, which meant two-leggers.

He couldn’t be seen.

But had they found Shana? Or were they just nearby?

He topped the rise, moving silently and cautiously, and found he was looking down on a ruin surrounding a stone-rimmed pool of perfectly clear, blue water. Approaching from the opposite direction was a caravan of two-leggers; merchants, from the look of the laden beasts. And from the dust-covered condition of men and beasts both, they had been caught in the same sandstorm that had delayed him. Somehow, by luck or knowledge, they had found the oasis—but only the worst of luck could have brought them here at this moment in time.

He took to cover, turning his coat a mottled sandy-brown—just as he saw a distant figure that could only be Shana crawl out of one of the ruins and await the approach of the strangers.

Something woke Shana out of a sound, exhausted sleep. She blinked, hearing unfamiliar noises, a babble of voices and the calls of strange beasts.

She felt ill, weak with hunger, and put her hand to her head as she sat up, to stop its spinning. It had been so long since she had last eaten—was she dreaming this, or was it real?

The noise continued; neared. She closed her eyes until her head steadied, then crawled forward a little and looked cautiously out of her little shelter. But when she peered out from beneath the overhanging shelf of wind-worn rock, the first thing she saw was a great copper-colored dragon on the wing, shining in the rising sun.

She panicked immediately. There was only one thing she could think of. Had they decided to follow her? Had Lori decided to risk the censure of the Kin for disobeying the Elders, and kill her?

Fear threaded her spine, and she stared at the dragon with the same fascination as a mouse staring at a hawk. His great wings rippled and snapped in the rising wind. In fact, his whole body rippled as he hovered above the sand—

She came out of her fearful trance.
That
—
doesn’t look
or
sound right
—

She blinked again, and rubbed her eyes—and only then did the “dragon” resolve itself into nothing more than an image wrought in some coppery substance on a piece of sky-blue cloth fastened to a stick and flapping in the wind.

Her fear dissolved, leaving her weak-kneed and disoriented. She started to sink back into her hiding place, no longer caring what the noise was all about. But the painted dragon seemed to call to her in a peculiar fashion that she didn’t understand.

She crawled out from beneath the shelter of her rocks to stare at it in dazed fascination. The stick was attached somehow to a contraption that was in turn strapped onto the back of an animal Shana had never seen before; it had long, gangly legs, flat feet like huge water-worn stones, a lumpy body, and a long neck surmounted by the ugliest head Shana had ever seen. The whole of it was covered in warty gray skin, exactly like a flat-toad. Where did these things come from? And why would anyone put a picture of a dragon on a piece of cloth? Unless—it was another Lair of the Kin. Foster Mother had told her that some of the other Lairs had different customs.

There were more of the beasts behind the first, and half of them were being ridden by—

By
—She shook her head, trying to make her mind work.
They can’t be two-leggers
. She was the only two-legger around, anywhere. They must be dragons in two-legger form. But why?

Shana blinked and rubbed her temples; she tried to see the dragon-shadows, but she was so dazed that she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. She tried again; and this time she thought she saw a flicker of shadow, a strange, fuzzy halo around each of them that
could
have been dragon-shaped.