“Then it will not hurt me?” said Ryana, still dubious.
“The kank would never think of hurting you,” Sorak said. “It thinks you are a brood queen. It would be contrary to all the years of kank evolution for this food producer to do anything but care for you.”
“What do you mean, care for me?”
“Provide you with food,” said Sorak, indicating the blister like, membranous globes covering the food producer’s abdomen. “You can ride to Nibenay and drink your fill of kank honey.” He brought his fingertips to his forehead and bowed his head in salute. “It is the very least that I could do for such a valiant thrax killer.”
Ryana smiled. But she still looked at the kank a little dubiously. “Brood queens do not ride upon food producers,” she said. “Will this one allow me to mount it?”
“Lowly food producers do not question their queens; they merely serve them,” Sorak said. “Aside from which, as we walked over here, Screech effected a psionic link with this kank. It would have been dangerous to attempt it with all of them, especially with the soldiers in an agitated state, but controlling this one will pose no difficulty now. It will be as tame as one raised by a herdsman, but it will have a closer bond with us.”
He went over to the kank and slapped it several times on its chitinous thorax. The creature lowered itself to the ground, and Sorak held his hand out to Ryana. She glanced uncertainly at the creature’s mandibles, smaller than a soldier’s but no less intimidating in appearance, then put her foot onto one of the ridges of the kank’s armor, stepped up, and swung her leg over the creature’s thorax. Sorak climbed up behind her. The kank’s rounded carapace made a firm, smooth, and slightly slippery perch, but by relaxing and settling her weight between the rounded ridges on the creature’s back, Ryana found the ride comfortable enough. And it certainly beat walking. The kank rose up on its legs, turned, and began to move forward, heading directly to the east on a diagonal course away from its old herd.
Its six-legged gait was remarkably smooth, with only a slight rolling action, and Ryana had no difficulty getting accustomed to it. This was traveling across the desert in style, and riding on the kank had the added advantage of reducing some of the dangers they might have faced. They were now well out of reach of snakes they might have stepped on without noticing them, and sink worms would no longer be a hazard. It would be a rare sink worm that would be large enough to swallow a kank whole, and they did not eat kanks, in any case. The giant, armored ants of the desert were not digestible by sink worms. The kank’s sensitivity to ground vibrations also effectively eliminated any potential danger from dune trappers or other creatures that lurked just beneath the surface of the loose sand, though this area of the tablelands was mostly hard-packed scrub desert. Still, the kank would sense approaching danger long before they would have been aware of it themselves.
As they continued their gradual descent along the gently rolling terrain, subtle changes began to occur in the environment around them. The scrubby desert growth gradually became more sparse, and wider patches of sun-baked ground were visible. The isolated stands of pagafa trees became more sparse, as well, and grew lower and more twisted than those they had seen before. The terrain grew flatter and the vistas stretching out before them possessed an openness that made Ryana feel very isolated and exposed. They were now well into the tablelands, and the Ringing Mountains, rising in the distance behind them, seemed very far away.
Ryana felt a disquieting sense of apprehension as they rode along. For miles, as far as she could see, there was absolutely no landmark. With the city of Tyr far behind them in the valley, there was no sign of civilization anywhere.
That, in itself, did not disturb Ryana quite so much as the vast openness of the terrain. Growing up as she did in the Ringing Mountains, she had never been surrounded by civilization. However, there was the convent, and that was home, and the tall, dense, ancient forests of the mountains had an embracing closeness. Here, in the tablelands, she suddenly felt as if she were adrift on some vast, dried sea. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for the rather nerve-wracking experience of seeing so far . . . and seeing nothing everywhere she looked.
All around her, the tablelands stretched out into infinity, a panoramic vista broken only by a vague, barely perceptible, uneven line of grayness in the distance to the east. She was looking at all she could see of the Barrier Mountains, which lay on the far side of the tablelands and beyond which lay their destination, Nibenay. All that way, she thought with a distinct sense of unease. We still have to go all that way....
But the desert was not empty. Far from it. When she wearied of looking out into the vast flat plain ahead of them, she began to pay attention to the terrain immediately around them, looking closer at the desert at her feet. It was harsh, inhospitable country, but it teemed with life, life that she only began to notice when she focused her attention on it.
That anything at all could grow here seemed a miracle, but the years had evolved plant life that was capable of thriving in the desert. It was not yet summer, but the short and violent rainy season was approaching, and in anticipation of it, the desert wildflowers had already begun to bloom so that they would be able to deposit their seeds during the brief time when there would be some moisture on the surface. The blooms were, for the most part, very small and not visible for any appreciable distance, but from close up, they imparted tiny yet spectacular splashes of color to the desert. The sparse and trailing claw vine bloomed bright, cerulean blue, and the wild desert moonflowers developed globe-shaped, yellow blossoms that almost seemed to glow. The scrubby false agafari bush, which grew no taller than about knee height, blossomed with small sprays of wispy, feathery pink flowers that looked as fine as ice crystals, and some varieties bloomed bright crimson. The nomad brush, a small shrub that grew no more than two feet high, sent out long, trailing, hirsute vines that gathered moisture from the morning air and grew along the surface until they found purchase in loose soil. They would then take root, and new plants would form while the parent plant died back. In this time of approaching spring, the nomad brush would bloom with the bright orange, brush-shaped thistle that gave it its name.
From the distance, the desert appeared flat and featureless, a vast, empty, and desolate place. Yet up close, it possessed a striking beauty. The hardy, sparse vegetation that grew here, storing moisture for long periods of time in its wide-branching roots and succulent flesh, supported a wide variety of small insects and desert rodents, which in turn supported reptiles and larger mammals and airborne predators like razorwings, which rode upon the desert thermals. It was a place vastly different from the forests of the Ringing Mountains where Ryana had grown up, but for all that it looked like another world, it was just as full of life.
For a long time as they rode, Sorak remained silent. Since he was sitting behind her on the kank’s back, Ryana initially thought he was absorbed in conversation with his inner tribe. When he had remained silent for a long time, she turned around to glance at him and saw him quietly looking around at their surroundings. His facial expression was alert, not vaguely distant, as it was when he was engaged in internal conversation with his other personalities. However, he still looked preoccupied.
“I was merely thinking,” he said when he saw her glance around to look at him.
“About what?”
“It feels very strange to be here. I was born here, somewhere in the desert, and this is where I almost died.”
“You are thinking about your parents?” He nodded in a distracted manner. “I was wondering who they were, if they are still even alive, and what became of them. I was wondering if I was cast out into the desert because my tribe would not accept me, or because my mother would not accept me. If the former, then did my mother share my fate? And if the latter, then was ridding herself of me the only way that she could maintain her status in the tribe? Thoughts such as that, and others, dwell upon me heavily today. It must be the desert. It has a strange effect on one.”