The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,30
of thorns at any moment.
Despite his fears, they made another mile without mishap, and when they had put a couple of large dunes between them and the hapless b’rohg, they stopped to rest again. Kayan finished healing Jedra’s left foot, then they shared another of their honeycakes and washed it down with a drink of water. They had ten cakes left out of the twelve Galar had given them, but they were going through water fast; Jedra figured they only had enough for another day and a half at this rate. They needed refreshment now, though, to help recoup the strength they had lost to the sand cactus.
“We need to figure out a good way to make sure we don’t step on one of those things again,” Jedra said. He toyed idly with the spear as he spoke, drawing lines in the sand with the point.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kayan said with a grin. “As long as you walk in front, I don’t mind healing you.”
“Right.” He knew she was joking, but something about her attitude still irked him. Then he remembered some advice an old veteran of the streets had once given him, and he laughed. “You were pretty quick to take the lead when the b’rohg attacked,” he told Kayan.
“Yeah, well, the ground cactus seemed the lesser danger at the moment.”
“Someone I knew once told me, ‘When you go hunting wild inix, you should always take a companion with you. That way you never have to outrun an enraged inix; you only have to outrun your companion.’”
Now it was her turn to miss the joke. “Jedra, I wasn’t trying to leave you to the b’rohg! I was running for my life, and I thought you were right behind me.”
“I was kidding,” he told her.
“Oh.”
She still didn’t laugh, so Jedra dropped it. He toyed with the spear some more, thinking that he could wave it in front of him to detect sand cactus, save that their progress would be excruciatingly slow if they had to sweep every inch of trail ahead of them. He wondered how the elves did it. He hadn’t marched at the head of the column, so he’d never seen what the scouts did for protection. Spotting a pile of bones that hadn’t been disturbed would be a fair indication that you were in cactus territory, but that wouldn’t protect you from a young plant that hadn’t fed yet. Maybe heavier sandals would provide more protection, or there might be a way to spot the needles if you knew what to look for.
He didn’t have either the sandals or the knowledge. What he had was a spear, a knapsack, and his robe.
Hmm. His robe was already ripped to shreds; he’d hardly miss another chunk off the bottom of it. If he tied that to the spear…
“What are you doing?” Kayan asked when he ripped off a foot-wide, two-foot-long strip of his robe.
“Watch,” he told her. He tugged it through the holes at the butt end of the spear, leaving two loose ends that flopped down on either side, then he tied two of the corners together so the bottom hem ran in a continuous line from side to side. Standing up, he put the spear over his shoulder so the heavy stone point would counterbalance the rest of it, and he took a couple of steps with the rag just scraping the ground in front of him. “There,” he said. “A crude but functional sand cactus detector.” “Wow,” Kayan said. “That just might work.” “Of course it’ll work,” Jedra said, his pride wounded by the thought that she might not think so. He jounced the pole on his shoulder a time or two and said, “Are you rested enough? I want to try it.”
Grinning at his boyish enthusiasm, she stood up and put on her pack again. “All right. Lead on.”
It took him a few minutes to get the hang of it. At first the end of the spear would dip down and dig into the ground every few steps, or it would lift up too high and the cloth wouldn’t drag the surface, but he soon settled into a smoother stride that kept the spear butt aimed down at the right angle. He couldn’t take his eyes off the ground for long, though, so Kayan had to navigate from behind, calling out, “A little to the right,” or “Watch out for that rock.”
Eagerness to test his new invention kept him going for another mile or