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his tone was merely informative. "It is built of a type of stone called shepra, which is highly prized. It is quarried in the mountains near here, along with other precious stones."
    His gesture indicated the mountains I'd seen on the horizon. I almost let out a snicker, because if that was what he called "near," I wondered what he would consider to be distant—halfway around the planet? I also wondered how many slaves it had taken to haul the shepra across the desert and then build the palace. A vision of Hebrew slaves building the pyramids of Egypt—same weather conditions, too—popped into my head.
    Wazak seemed to be reading my thoughts, for he added, "And it was not built by slaves, and not strictly for the Queen. It was built as a monument to our people."
    He seemed to be quite proud of that fact, though he didn't come right out and say it. As I gazed at the structure, I concluded that while it might have been intended as a tribute to the Darconian people, it was also a monument to beauty. Perhaps living in a barren desert had made them appreciate beauty all the more, making it as highly prized as the shepra—or the water.
    And music!—what could possibly be more beautiful than that? Now I understood why I was there: to bring more beauty to an otherwise harsh and desolate world. And I would do it, too, because if they weren't all tone deaf, these people were going to love Mozart.
    And Brahms. And Beethoven. Maybe even Bach. I just hoped the kid could play.

Chapter 3
    MY OTHER HOPE WAS THAT THEY UNDERSTOOD JUST HOW
    much water a member of my species would require to survive in such a climate. I seriously doubted that they bathed in water as we did on Earth, and I'd have been willing to bet that they didn't drink two or three liters of fluid a day, either. Their scaly skin probably didn't perspire; it was more likely they were similar to other reptiles and stayed out of the sun to avoid getting overheated. Aside from the fact that there wasn't much else around to use, this was surely the reason they favored stone as a building material—good insulation.
    The heat was unrelenting, and even the breeze created by the movement of the hovercars didn't help very much. My mouth was dry, and I could already feel the skin on my face beginning to tighten up and burn. Being pale even by human standards, I doubted that I would last a day out in the desert, even with adequate water.
    I knew I could survive with a lowered water content in my body, but it would take some time for me to adapt. I ought to have tried to drink less on the journey here, but this was one of the finer points about life on Darconia that I hadn't anticipated. I'd read that there were deserts, but I hadn't known I'd be living right in the middle of one of them! Maybe that was why the job had been posted on Earth; we were too far away to know many of the details. Now that I was here, I was wishing I'd paid a little more attention to the fine print—and I might have, if there'd been any.
    When we stopped at an entrance to the palace, Wazak actually helped me out of the hovercar. I suppose his irritation with all my questions was overborne by the need to observe at least some of the niceties, and as before, his two sidekicks carried my luggage.
    Once underneath the portico, the temperature seemed to drop about ten degrees, and I heaved a sigh of relief.
    I couldn't even tell that I'd been sweating—the air was so dry that it evaporated immediately—until I brushed a hand across my arm, and it felt slightly gritty with salt.
    "You will require some refreshment," Wazak said stiffly. "This way."
    I found myself following him again, and as his buddies disappeared with my stuff, I wondered if they would go through it and confiscate all of my clothes. This was a palace, after all, and perhaps there was a rule I didn't know about: "Thou shalt not wear more clothing than the Queen," or something of that nature. I also wondered if shoes were permitted. I had worn