And a short distance further along Hardan felt her fingers slip from their grip on his belt. She lay silent and limp on the rocky floor, her soft skin harsh and dry as the Dryland hills, and her cracked lips moaning.
He lifted her and staggered onward. His years in the Drylands had toughened his flesh and lungs to withstand the arid violence of the grasslands for several hours, but even yet he must sleep in or near water at night. He suffered mightily, his lungs on fire and his throat a dust-rasping channel. Like a man in a grotesque nightmare of torture he felt his wooden limbs move uncertainly far below him.
Only when the stars were above him and he felt the welcome fluidity of water about his parched ankles did he halt and lower the girl. The water was chill but his thirsty body sucked at it greedily.
III
The huge ringed sun of Osar was yet hugging the rim of the ragged Malsalm's peaks to the east when he awoke, shivering despite the thick dampness of his vurth-stuffed covering. Behind him, wedged against the rocky shelf and protected by a down-curving slab of rock, huddled Ylda.
He slipped off his thick shell and heaped it on the girl's sleeping body for additional warmth and stepped out, naked as go the men of the Upper Seas in their moist-walled cities and lush meadows. As yet the sun was not too warm for his sleek-furred flesh.
They had come up from the cliff to a narrow long plateau atop it. A shallow rocky lake was at their feet and a stream came down from a snow-capped peak in the southern distance to feed its chill moistness. Abruptly he remembered the cave and the yellow-haired Dryland giants who trailed them.
A long crevice rifted the floor of the miniature tableland not far from the lake's brim. Perhaps in the rainy season the overflow of the lake found escape there, but now it was dry, a crude staircase dipping down into the gloomy abyss that was the cave they had traversed. Hardan sensed the immensity of the void beneath, the whole cliff must be a honeycomb of caverns and subterranean passages.
The sound of horny bare feet and the rubbing of metal on the leather of harness warned him that the Drylanders had overcome their aversion of the darkness enough to trail them. He caught a glimpse of a moving blob of blackness that could only be them a hundred feet and more below.