When the place lay black and smouldering, Kortha lifted his head and looked with his green eyes across the desert to Yassa.
A rolling something on the red sands caught his alert gaze. He smiled gently. A tumblie. Probably Xax, who liked him. He watched it roll straight and fast over the desert, toward him.
Nature had made a perfect gyroscope in a tumblie: a round ball of sharp, glistening spikes with a core of jelly that stayed level no matter how fast the powerful spikes rotated. Two long feelers, like skeletal arms, lay hidden in the spikes, but could stretch beyond them to clutch food seeking to escape. In the heart of the jelly was a strong brain.
Xax stopped, looking between his hard spikes at the blackened ruins.
"You leave the desert, Kortha?"
"I go to Yassa."
He felt the alarm of the tumblie, and sighed as Xax shrilled, "You go to death! Only the tumblies have ever entered Yassa and—lived. There is a part of Yassa that even a tumblie cannot penetrate. The white tower. The temple of dead, forgotten Zut."
Kortha hefted his big hammer and eyed its gleaming length.
"Kortha has never gone to Yassa," he whispered grimly.