The fire might call other desert prowlers, but Keilin was beyond caring. He would welcome the opportunity to kill anyone or anything now. When the flames finally died he turned his back on the place, picked up his pack and walked off into the night. He was going nowhere in particular, just away from here. Pure chance took his feet upvalley, heading toward the higher mountains that he'd been aiming towards some eighteen months before. Unable to focus on any course of action but that of killing the Morkth, anger and bitterness gnawed at him. He'd tried focusing his hatred on the pendant stone, to no effect. Only fear or sexual stimulus appeared to make the thing respond. Neither were things he could muster right now.
Eventually he stopped and slept. But not before he had had two startling thoughts: Firstly, he had not heard the high-pitched whine which had always given him warning before. It always appeared that others did not hear the sound. Had he changed in some way? Secondly, he wondered now whether the Morkth were hunting him . . . or the pendant stone. He decided it could be the latter, and smiled grimly to himself. It would make good bait.
For three days he trailed upward into the mountains. Here, where it was colder and the air was crisp, there was even a small trickle of water down on the valley floor. Around it there grew a profusion of plants, but the slopes were still almost barren. He hoped he'd chosen the right valley. Marou had described the route to him, but they'd never come this far from the desert the old man had loved.
Pantherlike, he stalked on upward along the valley lip, keeping just below the skyline. You could see best from here without being too visible yourself. A movement in the valley snagged his eye. It was a party of men.
In eighteen months, other than Marou, the apothecary and his customer, Keilin had only seen one other human, a distant and equally cautious fossicker. The fools in the valley were neither careful nor nervous. Keilin stood motionless awhile. Then he began to follow the hunters. That night, while the fellows slept beside an unhidden fire, Keilin sneaked up and looted half their kill and three of their best pelts. It was a dual exercise, the first half of which was undertaken almost as a public service: it would teach the hunters care. Had this been Marou's territory the old man would have cut every second throat. Secondly, and more importantly, it was also to prove to himself that he could now do what eighteen months before he had been unable to.
When the bellows of outrage and counteraccusations had died away from the camp in the valley below, a revenge party sallied out questing for any signs of the raider. From his nest under the slabs on the ridgeline, Keilin watched without much alarm. When they could find no signs of him, fear began to grow in them. Within the hour they had packed up and were tailing off upvalley. The desert rat followed.
Three days later he was extremely glad he had. They had led him through the pass he'd been seeking. On either side towered white-capped mountains, many thousands of feet higher still. To have crossed those would have been far more difficult. Marou's directions had been vague . . . and had also failed to tell him a great deal.
The western side of the mountains was the wet side. Here mist and rain were as commonplace as the searing heat of the east. The pine forests and heather slopes were a new and alien landscape to Keilin. Much of his hard-garnered desert lore meant nothing here. There weren't even any decent scorpions under the rocks. Just wet white wiggly things. A man couldn't live on trash like that.
Now he sat in the shadow of the pine trees and looked down on the straggling houses below. Part of him longed for the people, the lights and the voices. Part of him curled inwards, away from it, clinging to the security of loneliness. Eventually he steeled himself. He would go down and enquire where the Morkth lands were. After all, he had to start somewhere.
To a child of Port Tinarana the air of Steyir village would have been clear and sweet. To the desert-primed Keilin it was fetid to the point of making him gag. He walked down the dirt track between the ragged-thatched shanties. Fowls scratched in the street, and a mottled pig rooted in a pile of scraps between the houses. The air was full of boiling cabbage and elementary sanitation. According to Marou, at the end of the street was the Margery Tavern, where a few turquoise buyers always hung out. Keilin had decided they would be the best possible sources of information. He and Marou had uncovered a small pipe, with rather inferior nodules a month or so back. The best pieces had gone into the belt Keilin wore, made from the skin of the first snake he and Marou had eaten together, but Keilin still had a few bits of turquoise to trade with. He'd been nowhere near Marou's hoard. Still, what he had should give him some small money, easier and safer to spend than the gold pieces in his ankle pouch, and it would give him an excuse to talk.