“A deer,” began Fors, knowing that it was not.
Arskane gave a short bark of humor-lacking laughter. “Does a deer creep upon its belly and spy around corners, brother? No, I think that our friends from the city have found us out at last. And I do not like being caught in this place—no, I do not like that at all!”
Fors left the maps regretfully. How Jarl would have delighted in them. But to attempt to move them would be to destroy them and they would have to remain—as they had through the countless years. He picked up his quiver and checked the remaining arrows. Only ten left. And when they were gone he would have only short sword and hunting knife—
Arskane must have picked that thought right out of his companion’s mind for now he was nodding. “Come.” He went back to the flight of stairs which led them in a spiral up and up until they stood in a place that had once been completely walled with glass. “See there—and what do you make of that?”
The southerner stabbed a finger southeast. Fors picked out a queer scar in the vegetation there, a wide wedge -of land where nothing grew. Under the sun the soil had a strange metallic gleam. He had seen the raw rocks of mountain gorges and the cleared land where the Old Ones had once had concrete surfaces, but this was differ-ent. In a land where trees and grass had reclaimed their own nothing green encroached upon the wedge.
“Desert—” was all he could suggest doubtfully. But there should be no deserts in this section of the country.
“That it is not! Remember, I am desert born and that is no natural wasteland such as I have ever known. It is something the like of which I have not stumbled upon in all my journeying!”
“Hush!” Fors’ head snapped around. He was sure of that sound, the distant scrape of metal against metal. His eyes ran along the lines of the silent machines. And there was a flicker of movement halfway down the second line!
He screened his eyes against the sun, crowding up to the frame of the vanished glass. Under the shadow of the spreading wing of a plane squatted a gray-black blot. And it was sniffing the ground!
His whisper hardly rose above the rasp of Arskane’s quick breathing. “Only one—”