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nightshadows that were too thick for him. “Eat,” he managed. “Eat b’fa. Sessi.”
    â€œAnd you’re going to forget all this, old Yoech. It’s only a dream, a dream that fades like mist in sunlight, only a dream.”
    â€œDuhreeem.”
    â€œForget.”
    â€œFaagaa.”
    â€œSleep now, old Yoech. Sleep calm and wake rested. Sleeeep.…”
    A snore.
    She looked down at him with wry affection. Tough old buzzard. Didn’t I think it’d hurt more than help, I’d try conditioning you to stop drinking. By Djabo’s ivory overbite, I am tempted. Better not. You’re getting along all right the way you are and sure wouldn’t thank me for interfering. She got to her feet and strolled to the other end of the warehouse where she had her nest. She climbed wall beams and swung onto the slab, stretched out on a scavenged blanket and began making mental lists of what she’d need to go take a look at Tol Chorok. Fantasy maybe, but what the hell, what else did she have to do.

PRESENT TIME. DO OR DIE IN TOL CHOROK.
    No rain. The clouds hung lower and lower but didn’t let go.
    The trick with the hijjiks and the creek didn’t puzzle the saayungkas much. Not long after noon, when what shadow she had was puddled about her feet, she heard the howling behind her; the pack was closing fast.
    She’d run out of hope and almost out of will but kept moving, drowning in that euphoric confusion that comes before collapse. Weaving, stumbling, sweat blinding her, she got down the last slope and moved onto the stony floor of a dessicated valley. No grass, no water, only dead rock with a thin layer of dust, dust that lifted at the lightest touch and hung about her. Looming over the valley (she kept seeing it through dust and sweat, losing it again as if it were a mirage teasing her) was a mountain peak, a peak that was leaner, more jagged, higher than the others, its point twisted sideways like a crumpled horn.
    When she stumbled over the remnant of a wall and crashed onto hands and knees, she stayed down, dazed. Wall? She shook her head, trying to clear out some of the fatigue-trash clogging it, lifted it and saw the crumpled horn of Chol Dachay. Wall? She pushed up and back until she was sitting on her heels, rubbed at her eyes, stared at the lacerated palms of her hands, wiped them on her tunic.
    Howling. Close. She looked over her shoulder and saw low dark beasts running at her. Minutes away. In a last desperate effort which she knew meant nothing but a little more time gained before the inevitable capture, she drove her body up and into a ragged run toward the center of that dry ghost of a city, toward a cluster of taller ruins where she could hole up and make them hurt before they got her.
    Dust rose and circled about her. She thought it was her feet kicking it up, but it wheeled too high, whipped too vigorously about her. She thought it was the wind. But she couldn’t feel any wind. The air was thin, dry, still.
    She staggered through street-traces, her mind floating away from the beasts closing on her as she left the direct line to the center and began weaving a complex pattern through the ruins, body moving now at the hest of something else, the dust thickening and swirling closer, leaving a circle of clean air about her. Muffled by that enveloping dust she could hear snuffling and foot thuds of the saayungkas, the rattle of their harness; she thought she could feel the heat of their breath on her back; she caught glimpses of the dark forms circling her. For some reason they didn’t seem able to get at her, couldn’t break through the bubble. She couldn’t make sense of any of this, she didn’t want to try.
    Pattern, Yoech said, there is a pattern. Her feet traced it until she reached a sketch of a doorway, two posts and a lintel, the lintel carved, the carving sand-scrubbed into anonymity. Gate. Subliminal humming. Other sounds muted,