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“Anyone know what’s happening?” I asked.
Fiona, who stood beside me, shook her head vigorously, her long brown hair swirling around her shoulders and brushing the tattooed lengths of her arms.
“Not a clue,” she muttered in English, her Irish accent coming through much more obviously than it did when she spoke the language of the Sea Sands.
Please let it be good news, I thought silently as the shuttle group came to a stop at the fire. My eyes searched their faces frantically, skimming over Chapman, Gahn Fallo, Gahn Taliok, Grim, Valeria, Tok, and three of the warriors from the original Death Plains mission.
But Oxriel was missing...
And so, I realized with a hard lurch in my guts, was Priya.
CHAPTER TWO
Errok
“What in the cursedpeaks isthat?”
I stood, frowning into the fire-spattered darkness of foreign peaks. Togo and I had crossed the swallowing sands of what I now knew to be called the Death Plains. We’d stopped to rest and eat in the mountain range that separated the Death Plains from the Sea Sands. Though, in my opinion, these peaks were pathetic excuses for mountains. They paled, both in colour and grandeur, compared to the great clawing peaks of the Deep Sky.
But it was not the puny fangs of rock around me that had caught my attention. But rather movement among them.
Togo, my braxilk, who up until that moment had been resting beside our fire, now rose up onto his many legs, tossing his head uneasily.
We had built our fire against a small, stony sheltered area. Its light licked up the stone - normally white and grey under the sun, now shades of black, silver, and orange in the night. The firelight flickered, brightening our area and deepening the shadows that surrounded us.
Whatever was moving was getting closer. I could see the shifting of greyish limbs in the darkness where the firelight did not reach.
“Whatever it is, it is no match for a Deep Sky Gahn and his mount,” I said with easy confidence. I slipped my bow off of my chest, up over my head, and nocked an arrow, aiming it at the shifting mass in the distance. Tension rammed through my body, my arm bulging.
I let the arrow fly.
A shockingly quick tendril snapped out of the darkness, catching the arrow and snapping it.
Suddenly, more tendrils of flesh spilled from the shadowy area of the valley, coming straight for us.
Hmm... Maybe not.
