The leaves fell, dried out in less than a day, and made a rust-colored blanket underneath the tree. These dried leaves made excellent nesting material for desert rodents, which dug burrows beneath the many forms of cacti that grew out in the tablelands. Some of the cacti were very small, no larger than a human fist, covered with a fine growth of silvery pincushion that once or twice a year—after a rain—exploded into brightly colored blooms that lasted no more than a day. Some were large and barrel-shaped, as tall as a full-grown man and twice as thick around.
The rodents liked to nest among the thick roots at the pagafa’s base, and eventually, their burrowing killed the plant, though only after many years. Slowly, the huge tree lost its support and fell from its own weight, and then dried out, its carcass becoming a temporary home for kips and scarab beetles, who dined upon its drying, pulpy meat. The large, thick spines of the cactus were then harvested by desert antloids, whose worker drones formed long lines across the desert as they carried back the thick spines to their warrens to help support the many tunnels that they excavated in the hard-baked desert ground.
Occasionally, antloid warrens came under attack from desert drakes, one of the large reptiles that made its home in the Athasian desert. Part lizard and part snake, the drake’s thick hide, so highly prized for armor in the cities, rendered it impervious to the mandibles of antloids. Its long, talonlike claws allowed it to dig up the warrens, and its thick, twin-pronged, muscular tongue gave it the ability to capture antloids and drag them out to where it could crush their exoskeletons.
The antloids would come swarming out to fight it, and sometimes, if the colony was large enough, they overwhelmed the drake by the sheer weight of their numbers, piling up their huge bodies on top of it. If the drake prevailed over the antloids, the survivors scattered and abandoned the dug up warren. It then provided a home for hurrums, brightly colored beetles prized in cities for the melodious humming sounds they made, or renks, large desert slugs that dined on the wastes left behind in the antloid warren.
If the antloids managed to defeat the drake, however, they ate its carcass, sharing it with other life forms: jankx, furred and squeaking mammals that lived in townlike burrows on the tablelands; or z’tals, tall, bipedal lizards that lived in small herds out in the desert and laid eggs inside the excavated antloid warren after they had disposed of the carcass of the drake.
The loosened earth left behind after the drake destroyed the antloid warren allowed the seeds of brambleweeds to root, and they grew up around the eggs left behind by the z’tal, their spiny tentacles poking up out of the ground and protecting the eggs from predatory snakes and rodents. All life in the desert was closely interdependent, a mutated yet balanced ecology that had grown up in the devastation left behind by the defilers.
Ryana wondered what the desert had been like before, in the days when Athas was still green. She tried to imagine the barren, scrubby, rolling plain before her when it was covered with tall grasses that rippled in the wind, blooming with wildflowers, and resonating with the song of birds. It was the dream of every druid and of all villichi, of all preservers every-where, that someday Athas would once again grow green. Chances were that Ryana would never live to see that day, but even so, she was glad that she had left the mountains to truly see the desert—not the vast and empty wasteland it appeared to be, seen from the heights of the Ringing Mountains, but the strangely beautiful and vibrant place it really was.
She knew some of that beauty could be deadly. If the ten-foot antloids attacked, which was especially likely in the season their queen produced young, their fearsome mandibles would make short work of her. The rare and gorgeous burnflowers that grew out in the desert could be as lethal as they were beautiful. Though easily avoided in the light of day because their patches could be seen for miles, they could kill during the early morning if an unwary traveler happened to be near them when the bulb-shaped flowers opened. The shiny, silvery-colored blooms, some as large as two to three feet in diameter, would open toward the sun and track its progress across the sky throughout the day, absorbing its life-giving rays and reflecting them back as deadly beams of energy. It was the plant’s protective mechanism, but the sight of those beautiful blooms opening would be the last sight anyone would ever see.
If the burnflowers killed, it was merely an accident of their adaptation to survive in such a hostile climate, but a blossomkiller did so by design. The blossomkiller was carnivorous, and its survival in the desert depended on its ability to trap its prey. It did so with a wide network of rootlike surface vines that, unlike its taproot, radiated out from the body of the plant to a distance of as much as fifty feet. It took but the merest touch on one of these vines to send an impulse to the pistils of the colorful flowers, which would then shoot out a spray of sharp, needlelike quills. These quills were covered with a poison that produced paralysis. Once the hapless victim, whether animal, humanoid or human, was frozen into immobility, the tendrils of the blossomkiller would reach out and wrap themselves around their prey. A small desert rodent or mammal would be digested within a matter of hours. For a human, the process could take days. It was a horrible and agonizing death.
Nor were lethal plants and insects the only dangers in the desert. There was a wide variety of deadly reptiles, from poisonous snakes no longer than a human finger to the deadly drakes, some species of which could grow as long as thirty feet and wider than the trunk of a well-watered agafari tree. Death could come from above, in the form of floaters, creatures with light, translucent bodies composed of a jelly like protoplasm with stinging tendril tentacles that trailed down below them. The merest brush of one such tentacle could produce a large and painful welt that would take weeks to heal, while solid contact could be fatal. And death could also come from underfoot, in the form of dune trappers, sand cacti, or sink worms.
Dune trappers were lifeforms that were neither plant nor animal, but something in between. They lived almost entirely beneath the desert surface in pits they excavated as they grew. The mouth of the dune trapper gradually grew and spread out on the surface, filled with what appeared to be a pool of cool, clear water. Plants would grow up around the mouth of the strange creature, sustained by the moisture it produced, giving the deceptive appearance of a small, welcoming oasis. But to approach that pool in an attempt to drink from it was almost certain death. The mouth of the dune trapper, triggered by a footstep on the soft membrane that lay just beneath the sand, would suck the unsuspecting victim down into the pit the creature occupied, there to be digested by the fluid that had first appeared to be a pool of water.
Sand cacti were no less deadly. Like the dune trapper, the main body of the plant grew beneath the surface of the desert, especially where the soil was sandy. Only the tips of its numerous spines protruded just above the surface, over a wide area, poking up no more than an inch or two, so that they were difficult to spot. Stepping on a spine would trigger a response within the plant that would cause it to shoot that spine up into the victim’s foot, where its barbed hook would find firm purchase, and the plant would start to drain the blood out of its prey. Once “hooked,” the victim’s only chance was to tear loose from the spine, or cut it free, but this could not be accomplished without also tearing loose a lot of flesh, and if any of the spine remained embedded in the victim, it had to be cut out or else infection would set in.