The whirr of the skiffs faded. Only the groan of the cooling wreckage echoed between the dunes.

Any experienced sandmaster could tell the tale of the desperate last moments of the Bluestar. The churned red sand a horizon back told of the gravgrab's sudden burst as the officers spotted the oncoming pirates and threw her into an accelerated turn, leaving shipprints in the dunes as the engine pulsed at maximum in a vain attempt to flee. Smoldering wood just behind the first divot in the desert marked where a broadside of rockets struck painted woodwork. From there the Bluestar had rolled over twice, tearing away superstructure and guide-pylons as she plunged to the ground, where her nose finally dug in at the start of the trench which would serve as her open grave before coming to rest a thousand strides later. The sandmaster would point out neat incisions in the hull, where the pirate's Q-torches had opened her like a doctor hurrying to salvage vital organs from a freshly deceased cadaver. Reactor, gravgrab, and central control were torn from the wreckage: gold teeth pried from a corpse.

Passengers and crew had perished in the crash, or were shot by the pirates as they salvaged Bluestar's heart, legs, and brain. Their bodies would be left to desert's undertakers: sun, wind, and sand. In this part of the Parch the wind and sand might cover the bodies before the sun finished desiccating the deceased, leaving enough nourishment for tunneling whitebeetles or a burrister queen to start a new generation.

The sandmaster might also remark on the footprints moving from the wreck to the nearest high dune, and shake his head while opining that a quick death at the hands of the pirates would be preferable to a lingering end in the unforgiving wastes of Mars.

The human was the first to return to the wreck. After peeking above the edge of the wave-shaped mountain of sand to make sure the pirates had truly gone, he trotted to the broad face of the main hull where it met the riven desert. He wanted a chance at whatever supplies lay behind, and even more importantly, the hull's hard, flat surface.

He cradled his limp left arm and gritted his teeth at the pain in his aching shoulder as he jogged across the sand. When he reached the hull he tested the joint as he placed his naked shoulder against the flat metal. He twisted his body, biting off a cry as the bone slid back into its socket; electric wires of pain coursed down his arm. He searched the wreckage, painful tears blurring his vision as he recognized friends among the slain.

"Hooman, holp with thisph," another survivor, a hopper, called. The hopper had jumped into a fissure in the wreck and was trying to open a jammed door by placing one oversized leg against the frame and pulling with his arms.

"The name's Ayen. Ayen dun Huss. This isn't Oldyears, nomad, I don't take orders."

"Hooman Ayen, please holp. I think watoh inshide."

Dun Huss picked up a reinforcing rod of and climbed up beside the hopper. He wedged the pinched-off end in the doorframe, and pulled. The portal gave way with a crack.

"By the soon and starsh, that did it. I am Uaji, of the Parching Washt. I will share what I find, hooman Ayon."

By the time they emptied the storage compartment, the other survivors had emerged from their hiding places in the wreckage and gathered in the shade of the hull. Ayen looked at them, some rooting amongst the debris, others just standing and staring at the ruin of the great ship, which only an hour ago had been floating gently above the dunes under white canvas wings. Besides Ayen there was one other human, clothed like Dun Huss in a leather vest, sandals, and loose canvas trousers. Their uniforms showed them to be a pair of the Bluestar's sailsetters. The older sailsetter sat in the shade of the hull, wheezing and coughing blood-streaked spetum into a white cloth and cursing between hacks in short, loud bursts. Near him two kukkluks panted out prayers as they worked on all fours, pawing up a shower of dirt onto the dead. The hopper Uaji shook his head in disgust at the sentimental pole-dwellers as they sweated to accomplish what the desert would in a day and a night. A pair of loinclothed Canalmen searched the bodies of the deceased for valuables, hooting over each find and slapping each other on lucky tatoos. He didn't like the look of the crooked-legged canalmen, and took a short punch-dagger from a sheath on one of the dead officers. The rest were red-skinned hominids, travelers on the ancient trade routes of the extinct Arkanian Empire. Dun Huss counted an even dozen survivors, including himself and the Hopper.

"Assistance! Assistance, up here, please," a soprano voice called, in an all-too familiar accent.

Make that an unlucky thirteen, Dun Huss said to himself as he looked up at the top of the ship. It was her. A slight, dark-haired figure stood uncertainly at the top peak of the wreckage.

"I can't see a way to climb down," she called down at the survivors.

"Fly down, witch," one of the Canalmen called.

"Yes, fly down, witch," added the other, thinking the jibe so clever it bore repeating.

Ayen would have been content to let the Arkanian passenger find her own way out of the predicament, but the chortling canalmen moved him to action.

"Uaji, use your knife and help me cut off some of that canvas, could you? Four or five sheets will be enough. Here, you others, offer a hand for the needful."

He arranged them around the canvas. "Lean back. Tighter, that's good. She's a featherweight, we'll hold her easy enough" he said, placing the taut canvas under the Arkanian. He looked upward, judging the trajectory one more time. "Jump! We'll catch you!"

"I would put my trust in a roundear?" she shouted down.

Dun Huss flushed from the tips of his bristly red hair to his thick neck. "You will if you want to get down. There's eight marsers holding this. We'll see it through, damn you."

She said something too quietly for Dun Huss to hear, and stepped off the precipice. Her tattered black dress flapped in the air as she plunged, landing in the canvas butt-first with a thump. Dun Huss stepped toward her, offering a hand to help her up.

The Arkanian jumped to her feet, pink eyes wide under her thick black mane. Pale arms and legs showed her to be of noble blood; the ravaged dress and crescent-shaped gold earrings in her pointed ears marked her as of a still-wealthy house. She pulled ornamental daggers from their jeweled sheaths on thigh and forearm.

"Touch me and die, human," she hissed.

"You haven't mixed much," Dun Huss said, eyeing the points as they waved in front of his chest like serpents looking to strike. "Whatever your grandmothers told you, humans don't wake up thirsty for Arkanian blood after dreams of rape. That was generations ago."

"Genocide makes for long memories," she said, lowering her weapons, but not sheathing them.

"My people did not find their way here across the void in sledges. They were brought by you Arkanians. In chains."

"Foolsh!" Uaji snorted, his gum-flaps wobbling. "Soon piratsh come back, or othersh home in on metal. Ish no time for argue."

Dun Huss looked into the hopper's wrinkled face, heavy flaps of moisture-catching skin dropping over eyes, nostrils, and mouth. Short golden fur covered the bow-legged biped. "Keep out of this, hopper. The wench had the Sandmaster beat me for brushing against her while I passed her on a gangway. By rights I should have carved my initials in her scrawny ass, not saved it."

"That was you?" she asked, stepping back from him. "And yet you still helped me? Not what I'd expect from a human."

"If all you know of us is what you read in your cursed books, I'm not surprised."

An hour later the survivors gathered, having put what they could salvage into makeshift packs. The hopper's high-pointed ears were shifting this way and that across the horizon, listening for the whine of a pirate skiff's gravgrabs. The others discussed their options.

"Us for north," one of the kukklucks said, standing in the traces of a laden sled they had improvised. "Gods see us to water."

"Reconsider," one of the hominids said. "North is farther than to the Greenbelts. Unless you strike an uncharted canal, you'll never make it."

"We miss Holymelt, if go south. Gods test faith with choice," the other kukkluck said.

"Enough," Dun Huss spat, his head and torso now swathed in linen taken from a body. A brace of water-containers hung from a fur-wrapped pole placed across his wide shoulders. "Let them try, if that's what they wish. They'll want to travel at night anyway, they don't mind the cold. I'm leaving now, keep up if you can."

Uaji lifted his tail, and in four bounds the hopper passed Dun Huss to top the nearest dune.

"Agrees," one of the canalmen said. Dun Huss didn't care to have them on his side, but there was little he could do about it.

"Agrees," added the second, who seemed to repeat whatever his blood-brother said.

"Human, what about the other," the Arkanian said, jerking her chin toward the sailsetter, who now wiped bloody spittle trickling out of his mouth. The loud swearing had become a steady, disgruntled mumble.

"He'll be dead by morning. Feel free to carry him till then. You'll wish it were water after he dies."

"We could make a stretcher," one of the hominids said, pulling at the black tuft of hair at his chin, shaped to make his face even more triangular. "If your ladyship wills it, of course."

"I'm in no position to will anything, any more than that human is to give us orders . . . it's j--just a human after all."

Dun Huss ignored her, and began to walk in the direction of the hopper. The hopper knew the Parch better than any of them. Ayen only knew it would be a long, long march to the Greenbelt in the south.

They began to die on the third night. A hominid never woke up to another bitter dawn of the Parch. A thin coating of ice covered his staring eyeballs.

Dun Huss could not believe the Arkanian still lived. Each night she picked a pocket of sand and sat in an upright fetal position, hugging a religious icon to her chest with her knees. Ayen watched her from his blanket roll of fur, wishing he had a plump blonde Atlantean or one of the doe-eyed brunettes of Leung to keep him warm through the frigid desert night. Yet there was a delicate beauty to her angular face and long-lashed eyes, he admitted to himself. Grudgingly.

Mornings and afternoons he walked beside Uaji, setting the best pace he could, his yolk of water growing ever lighter.

Another hominid refused to get up at their morning rest-halt, and ignored all arguments from his fellow survivors. Ayen made no move to get him to his feet, but he did prevent the Canalmen from robbing the exhausted passenger of his clothing and food. The Canalmen grumbled and kicked up rocks with their hooves; Ayen put his hand on the punch-dagger handle until they got into line.

"Yoo die lasht, hooman Ayen," Uaji said, in his matter-of-fact manner. "You strongesht. Two daysh ago, I think Arkanian die firsht. I wrong."

Dun Huss heard a light step behind him, and turning his head saw the Arkanian coming to the front of the file, skipping lightly around the red rocks. He ignored her.

"Hopper, human, just a moment, please," she said, falling in between them. "You're going the wrong way."

"Pfffft," the hopper snorted, his heavy hanging top lips wobbling in derision. "See high cloodsh to sooth? Water many more daysh that direction."

"Not according to this," she said, drawing her oval icon from between her breasts. "Have you ever seen a lifehold?"

Dun Huss shrugged at the unfamiliar word, but looked at the artifact more closely. He touched it, and the soft surface yielded.

"If you can't work it just say so," the Arkanian said, pulling it away. "It can, well it can do a lot of things, but it says there's water five horizons southwest. It must be by those mountains. We could reach that easily."

"No life in thosh mountainsh," Uaji said. "No wato. Dooshtlands."

"Not according to this. It's a chance, isn't it? Two people have died, how many more before we reach the Greenbelt?"

"All boot I, poorhapsh," Uaji said.

"Are you using that thing right?" Dun Huss asked. "Seems a strange device for some high-born to have on her."

"The name is Relensta, human. Relensta Nei-Nala. As to my being a high-born, well . . .whoever I am, I do know how to work a lifehold and there is water in those mountains."

"There better be," Dun Huss said. He shifted the weight on his shoulders, turned in the direction of the distant mountains, and began to walk in his accustomed sand-eating stride. He did not see the smile on the Arkanian's face, or the fear in the hopper's eyes as they followed.

"The bearded bastards drink too much," the older, and more tattooed, canalman remarked the next day as they waited out the worst heat of the afternoon. He glared at the little cluster of hominids.

"Bearded bastards!" his friend agreed, truncating the statement for effect.

"I poord the watoh," Uaji demurred. "All same-same."

"We've got enough to make it to those mountains," the Arkanian said, keeping her voice easygoing. "There is more there. Food too, perhaps."

"Mind your mouth, witch," the elder canalman said. "There's already too many mouths to feed. We might fill yours with--"

"Quiet!" Dun Huss rasped. "You'd be less thirsty if you kept your airholes shut. We agreed to share what we carried."

"Hey, human," the canalman continued. "I've seen you looking at the witch. That'd be something worth sharing. With that buttercream she rubs in her skin, she'd be soft and wet as a Cartasen dewgirl. Whaddya say?"

Dun Huss's eyes narrowed. "No water for them at the next break, Uaji."

"Muscle and a uniform don't mean you'll always be in charge. Might be time for a change of command, eh Grega?" the younger one said, for once not echoing his kinsman.

"One or both of you can try anytime," Dun Huss said, his voice low. "But if you do, you'd better make damn sure of me. It'll be life or death, if it comes to fighting."

"Don't mind him," the elder canalman said. "He's always talking like he wears the bigger harness. I'll keep him in line."

Despite the assurance, as they got to their feet at the start another long hike towards the setting sun, Dun Huss smelled a tension in the air. It poured from the younger canalman like sweat as he returned from relieving himself behind a cracked boulder.

The canalman's long arm flew up as he passed Dun Huss, basketlike hand gripping a pointed rock. The sharp end just missed his temple. Dun Huss caught part of the glancing blow at his hairline as he ducked under the swing. He shoved the canalman's back in the direction of the attack, adding his strength to the blow's momentum. The canalman went face first into the pebbly dirt.

Dun Huss pounced on the prone form. He grabbed the canalman's hoofed foot and brought his teeth down at the sensitive rear of the subjoint, the smaller of the two ankle- like protrusions that joined foot proper and lower leg. Cartilage crackled as his teeth pressed together. He pulled away, ripping open tendon and vein to the tortured screams of the canalman. The wounded foe kicked him in the shoulder. Ayen's blood was up and he hardly felt the blow, though the twin edges of the split hoof opened cuts along his tricep.

The man got to his feet, drawing punch-dagger and turning to face the other. The elder canalman squatted, shaking his head.

"My teammate is a mudhead, human. Under these circumstances, I'd never attack you. I didn't get these year-rings on my arms by taking stupid risks.

"Help me, kinsman," the wounded one groaned, grabbing his leg. Blood flowed between his fingers.

"We're leaving," Dun Huss said to the frozen tableau of gaping survivors. "Without him. Are you coming, Grega?"

"Mudhead or no, he's my kin. I must stay with him," Grega said regretfully.

"Crippled and smelling of blood?" Dun Huss asked. "The burristers will be on him by sunfall. I've counted three nests since morning."

The elder canalman went over to his teammate. He unwrapped the cloth wound around his head, and knelt beside the injured figure. "You must be bandaged at once, cousin."

The younger lifted his wounded leg, and a knife flashed up from Grega's cloth, catching the cripple in the armpit. The dying canalman's eyes widened in suprise.

"Shhhh. Better this way, cousin," Grega said, lowering his kinsman gently to the desert. When his dying breath wafted to the empty sky the elder stood, licking blood from his knife and fist. "It was better this way."

"We moosht leave," Uaji said, bouncing on his resilient legs in anxiety.

"You need that bleeding stopped too," the Arkanian said, taking a thumb-sized tube from her small hip-pack and approaching Dun Huss. All the others moved away from the corpse, as if fearing the deadly hum of a burrister's wings already.

"Is there a blade in that as well?" he asked.

"Just an antiseptic sealant," she replied. She ran it across the cut, and Ayen winced at a tingling pain, replaced in an instant by a pleasant numbness. He looked down at his arm. The cut had partially closed: a gooey red welt stood where blood had once flowed.

"Great Aris, you're no highborn, you're a--" he began.

"Hush," she breathed. "Yes and yes. Keep it to yourself."

Dun Huss looked down at the waifish albino. He had never seen a technosage before, at least knowingly. They who had upon a time raised Mars to its heights, only to leave it a wasteland in the genowars, were killed out of hand when discovered. She trotted off to join the others.

Uaji hopped over. "Hooman Ayen, theesh no good. This part of Washt, my folk keep oot."

"Why?"

The hopper's ears drooped. "Not know reason."

"You said yourself we're probably dead anyway. It's our only chance. But if you want to go south, I won't stop you. Take a share of the supplies and go."

The hopper looked south, pulling back the flaps of skin from his eyes as he looked at the wispy far-away clouds. "Hooman shamesh me. Where yoo dare, I dare, good?"

"Good," Dun Huss agreed.

"Assistance, assistance, p-p-please," a voice whispered in his ear.

Dun Huss came out of his chilled stupor. Stars glittered in the blue-black sky. The Arkanian knelt beside him, shivering. His breath rose like smoke.

"What's the matter?"

"Lifehold . . . power . . . empty," she whispered, teeth chattering.

Dun Huss raised the heavy pelt of the kanymyd skin. Relensta tucked herself inside the warm nest of fur, instinctively pressing against Ayen.

"Why not join your kind?" he asked, indicating the heap of hominids nearby, tucked together under blankets like racked cutlery.

"Kind of embarrassing," she said, shivering, her back pressed against his chest. "I'm in estrous. They'd smell it in a second."

"Why not the hopper, then?" Dun Huss looked at the tightly curled lump of Uaji nearby, feet, arms and tail all pressed against the hopper's face as he slept.

"He smells like the south end of a northbound kukkluck. And I don't like that canalman, if that's your next question."

"That does leave me, then," he said, wrapping his arms around her diminutive frame. She did not object, rather she relaxed into the warmth. He felt her nipples harden against his forearm.

"Mit-rah, you're attractive. In a rough manner," she said. "Damn time of the season." She reached down, felt his hip-point, then moved her hand around to the front of his trousers. "Makes me crazy for . . . ahhh. So not all the stories about you humans are false."

Dun Huss turned her face to him. "You don't know the half of it," he said, and kissed her.

Dawn struck the mountains, bronzing the rocky heights. They were beneath a cluster of bluffs staring out at the empty flats with hundreds of shadowed eyes formed by wind-pockets in the stone. Cracks and pops of rock changing temperature sounded from the cliffs.

"No watoh, no food, no hopesh," Uaji said, sniffing the air coming down from the mountains. "Toorn sooth now?"

"Is that locator working?" Dun Huss asked Relensta.

"Dead. But we've come the right distance in the right direction. It only gave out a day ago. It showed us nearly there."

"There's water here somewhere," Dun Huss said to the group. "Where there's water, chances are there's food. But it's only a chance. We might waste days wandering these hills. If anyone wants to go south with the hopper, speak up."

The exhausted hominids shook their heads dully. Grega, suffering agonies of thirst that only another canalman would understand, just looked to the mountains. He knew what Relensta's answer would be. "Good. Let's keep to the foothills for now. Water runs downhill, after all."

They moved in shorter spurts, with more frequent rests, over the rougher ground. Dun Huss found himself being generous with the water, they all seemed to need it in this last throw of the dice. The maddening thing was that they crossed ancient watercourse after ancient watercourse, rounded stones filling the bottom. Once this land had been green and thriving, before the Plagues of Mars.

They came to a precipice. A deep valley gaped below, and a quarter-horizon away another cliff stood paralleling the first. The valley extended out into the desert to the north.

"A dry canal, by Aris," Dun Huss said. "It's got to be, eh Grega?"

"A canal for certain."

"It went into the mountains for a reason. Let's follow it," the Relensta suggested.

They turned and followed the edge of the canal into the mountains, moving with renewed hope. When they camped that night they ate and drank their meager rations in better spirits than any time since the crash.

The next day the canal grew deeper and narrower as it moved into the heights. Dun Huss could hardly imagine the engineering that went into its construction, though stories had been passed down for a thousand years of the myriads of humans who had been brought from ice-bound Earth to help in the task.

The ground grew rougher. The boulders had disappeared but they had to traverse a series of low ridges. As they climbed one, Relensta cried out and dropped to her knees. She brushed dirt from a flat surface.

"A gravehill," she said, blowing dust from the carved inscription. "Iriem Hei-Preen. Fifty six years old, when she died in the third cycle of the eighteenth archpent. That's over a thousand years ago."

"She was an Arkanian, and lived there, I think," Grega said, pointing from the crest of the hill. Uaji reached the summit in two powerful leaps; Dun Huss resisted the impulse to grab the hopper by his thinning tail and be hauled up the slope.

When he stood beside the other two, as the rest awkwardly scrambled up the loose dirt of the hill, he could see that Grega was right. The architecture of the Arkanian Empire at its height could not be mistaken for the baroque patchwork of the canal city-states, or the grim walled enclosures of the barbarian citadels. Viewed from above, the city resembled a wagon wheel, what had been broad, avenue-flanked parkland ran along each spoke with a spiderweb of subsidiary streets connecting the main arteries. All was decay, dust and ruin. The intervening centuries had dried the parks and covered the buildings in layers of sand and debris, though the solidly-build structures still refused to collapse. Only one construct was still maintained, at the midpoint of the circular city. A hexagon-shaped building stood at the hub, roofed over with something that sparkled in the distance like blue crystal.

"Hooman Ayen, a legend hash come to life," Uaji said. "You look on Nexoosh."

"What's that?"

"Nexus," Relensta said. "A rumor and a wish. The city of the Keepers. The last great repository of Arkanian culture. Library, museum, and college."

"And something else. I see green, by Aris," Dun Huss said. "Look, before the blue-topped structure."

"Yes, by Mit-rah," Grega said, looking at the trees in the shade of the great building, flanking wide ramps. "Let's waste no time."

Dun Huss gave the others a few minutes to catch their breath, staring in wonder at the ruins. "Uaji, can you find us a way down."

"Aye. Go thirty hopsh ahead, and step off the cliff. A great savingsh in time and effort. The resoolt will be the same, if yoo go within the walls of that accoorshed plash."

"Stay here and rot, then," Grega said. "We don't have a fat tail to keep us going. I don't care if the six daemons of the Void each stand in front of a door there, I'm going down."

"Yoo shit too mooch watoh, canalman," the hopper said, as Grega slid down the hill towards the cliff. His ears drooped. "Hooman Ayen, come with me. Yoo strong. Yoo will make Greenbelt. Pleash."

"What do you think, Relensta?" Dun Huss said.

"I wouldn't miss this for all the ice of Kandar," she said, eager eyes fixed on the glittering blue dome. She linked hands with the hominids, and they began to descend the treacherous slope.

"Sorry, Uaji. Come or go as you wish."

"Ish bad look travel alone. I come. We keep each other company in Void."

Distance had played tricks on their eyes, the city was even more colossal than it looked from the cliff. They their way through a ruined gate under a wall wide enough for three gravgrab chariots to run abreast, before entering an avenue under pillars which seemed to climb to the clouds.

"Aris!" Dun Huss swore, looking at the great icons carved into the towering mass. "If that fell, there would be an earthquake they could feel in Cartas."

"Who's Aris?" Relensta asked, giving up trying to calculate the height of the column by the shadow stretching a thousand strides north. She didn't have the equipment to figure the sun's angle precisely enough.

"Our old god. There were many, but we forgot most of them long ago. Gods of song, dance, laughter. Only Aris remains. Aris the Oathkeeper. He's who we ask to help us see things through."

"That's important to you humans? Don't think I'm being sarcastic, I'm just curious."

"The other gods we prayed to were supposed to give us things. Money. Health. Happiness. In our long bondage they forgot us, so we forgot them. Aris, though, keeps his word. Those who keep their word win in the end. But more than that, he rewards following through on a dream. Make a plan. See it through. Then reap what was sewn. Whether it's a crop of grain or vengeance, if you give yourself to it fully, you'll get what you desire. Sometimes the way is a little roundabout, though. Aris has an ironic sense of humor."

They walked up the dusty avenue along a dead park. A few petrified stumps of trees stuck above the sand.

"How do you mean?" Relensta asked.

"When you had me beaten, I swore to Aris that if I ever got my hands on you, you'd scream as loudly as I did."

Her pale skin flushed. "Well, you did make me cry out. I'm sorry about the beating. It was . . .it was a role, not me. I grew up in a technosage enclave. But we aren't what most people think. We don't experiment on people. It's turned into a religion, I suppose, and it's taken some odd turns. Females aren't supposed to learn certain things. I stole books and manuals from my father, though. He had no son so perhaps he pretended not to notice. But our council found me out and I had to run for my life with a bag full of artifacts. I found work in a royal house, under the crest of Nei-Nala. They were old and haughty, they didn't want hominids seeing to their children. One of the other servants found some of my tools, I swore her to silence but she would tell sooner or later. I stole some clothes and valuables from the house and ran again. I was trying to escape to the pole on the Bluestar. The Arkanians probably want me hung as a thief and my people wish me beheaded as a heretic. My only chance is with the barbarians."

"Barbarians? We don't behead people for reading a book. I wonder if you are using the word correctly."

A corner of her mouth turned up. "You have a point. You and the hopper, for instance. The Arkanians would have started throwing stones if they had seen the lifehold. No privately owned Arkanian technology. Even a lightbar has to be registered with the authorities and declared safe. What a system. Of course there's a history behind it, but times have changed. They're keeping Mars poor and desolate with their laws."

"They keep your toys out of our hands, that's for sure," Dun Huss said. "The only Arkanian artifacts among my people I've seen have been junk."

"And where are your people?"

"Dead and scattered. Sand Devils."

"Sand Devils? Your're a long way from home, Dun Huss. I thought they were just around the south pole."

"And you're right. I've been selling my back ever since. Soldiering mostly."

"But all the time keeping oaths to Aris?"

"All but one." Dun Huss said, his jaw tightening.

Relensta wanted to ask more, but a cry from ahead interrupted.

"Water ho! I hear water," Grega cried.

They were almost in the shadow of the great blue-domed building. It's roof seemed to be some kind of giant gem, cut into billions of facets. To either side of them the ruins were overgrown with desert plants and thick, water-hoarding trees. Insects buzzed, breaking the silence of the ruins. The party stood before a great open street ringing the building, its carved cobblestones swept clean of desert sand.

"That was grown," Relensta said, as awe-struck as the others despite her knowledge of how it was done. "I've heard tales of great crystal farms. They must have put one on the roof of that whatever-it-is."

Green trees and gardens, well-tended and orderly, stood beneath the walls of the blue-domed monument, and on shelves cut into the sides of the building as well. White stairs and ramps lead up to tall doors, graceful friezes waited like door-wardens at either side of the portals.

"Where are these Keepers?" Dun Huss asked.

"Who cares. A pool!" Grega shouted. He rushed across the grass and Dun Huss tensed. Whether he expected the canalman to be turned to stone or swallowed by the green carpet he could not say.

The canalman splashed into the water and disappeared. Relensta took a deep breath before he burst from the surface again, exultant.

"It's even cool," Grega shouted to the others. "Come, it's not poisioned."

Dun Huss beat the other's to the water's edge, scooping handful after handful into his mouth. He shook his head.

"Not too much at once. It'll just come back up," he warned.

Even Uaji came to the pool, sniffed and then began to suck great gulps of water in. But his ears twitched the whole time, rotating in all directions.

"Mit-rah, that's good," Relensta said, rinsing her long black hair.

"Fill the containers, and let's go," Uaji said, coming up from his long drink. "Hurry."

"Hurry?" Grega said. "The sun's gotten to you. We need a few days rest, with plenty to eat and drink. I smell jurlberries and who knows what else grows here. We walked into this city paupers, but I bet if we explore these buildings we'll leave rich as kings."

"Do you know anything about these Keepers?" Dun Huss said.

The technosage shrugged. "No. They're supposed to be living Arkanians, speaking and looking just as they did thousands of years ago. None of them seem to be about though."

They explored further, finding fruit trees and berried plants arranged more for color than for production. But they were still sweet, even if they were there for looks. Dun Huss touched the side of the building.

"So smooth," he said. "If the tales are true, they were through-and-through bastards. But they made mighty things."

Night fell on the water-and-berrylogged survivors. There was some sadness for the two hominids who died during the journey, and even the overjoyed canalman turned solemn as they talked over what they had been through.

"Poor old mudhead," he said. "So young, so proud."

The stars came out, and the blue dome of the building shone faintly, not from reflected light, but from some inner gleam, reflected and dispersed through the crystal until the entire surface glowed.

"So they're inside that," one of the Hominids said. "I wonder if we should . . ."

The whine of a gravgrab cut him off. A figure cut across the lawn toward their pool, riding on a one man skiff shaped like a pulpit. He was clothed in some kind of shiny green armor, and carried a scythe in one hand and some sort of spear in the other.

Dun Huss reached for his punch-dagger with one hand and pulled Relensta to her feet with the other.

Uaji, who had been nervous and miserable all day, sprang into the cobblestoned expanse surrounding the building, crying a strangled shriek of terror. The Keeper on the pulpit whirred after him. Uaji jumped for his life in a race to the overgrown ruins. Something whirred above and a long, straight bolt of lighting flashed down at him. There was no thunder at its touch, just a hiss as it hit the stones, followed by the crack of superheated rock shattering. Vaporized stone puffed skyward like a ghostly mushroom. Uaji leaped sideways, some instinct making him bound randomly back and forth in his race. The finger-thick beams struck all around, finally catching him across the back as he leapt for cover. The hopper screamed as he tumbled behind a fallen wall.

The thing on the pulpit spun, and moved for the rest of the group.

"Inside, inside!" Relensta said, moving to the stairs.

"No, they don't go past the cobblestones. To the ruins!" Grega shouted.

Dun Huss stood frozen, taking it all in through fear-widened eyes. The canalman galloped across the cobblestones with the hominids running behind. A flash of light cut through a hominid. It fell to the cobblestones, cut in two. The front end clawed its way a few more paces across the stones as the back-end pantomimed running, spinning as it shed blood onto the decorative collage.

The pulpit-rider interposed itself between Grega and the edge of the ruins. The galloping canalman threw himself at the Keeper. The rider pivoted his machine and brought the scythe down on the canalman's neck. The blade never touched skin, but something hummed between scythe-tip and handle, neatly beheading the figure. Grega's body tumbled to the ground, still twenty paces from the ruins. The remaining hominids turned and fled toward Dun Huss and Relensta as another of their number was cut down by a beam of light from above.

Relensta ran up a set of stairs to one of the great doors. Dun Huss followed, dagger held ready. On the other side of the stairs he saw another Keeper, quietly trimming branches with his scythe, oblivious to the screaming in the plaza. Relensta pressed on one of the great doors, but it did not open. Dun Huss threw all his muscle mass against the push-panel. The metal wall stood oblivious to his efforts.

The last hominid reached the stairs, only to be speared by the pulpit-riding Keeper. The spear made its way through the hominid's body, appearing near his navel in a whirr of tiny blades. Black blood splattered across the stairs, flung from the spinning blades.

The flier, a square shaped box with two gravgrab orbs projecting from all four sides, dropped down and scooped up part of the bisected hominid with a shovel.

"Open, open," Relensta cried, tears running down her cheeks.

The pulpit Keeper pulled his spear from the dying hominid, and began to drift up toward Relensta and Dun Huss. "If you've got a key in your bag of tricks, now's a good time to find it." Dun Huss flung the punch-dagger into the Keeper's chest, it bounced off his armored breastplate with a clang.

"Mit-rah!" Relensta cried. "Se-sa-may!"

The doors swung noiselessly open, and the pair plunged through the gap, falling over each other. Dun Huss pushed the door closed, but the pulpit rider seemed to forget their presence, and turned away from the door in silence.

"It's a coliseum," Relensta said, picking herself up and reading signs inscribed in the walls and stairs. "I forgot to speak in ancient Arkanian. That's all we had to do to get in."

"Where do the Keepers live? I'd like to stay away."

"The don't live. Not really. I think I know what this is. Hurry," she said, sprinting down the polished floor of the hall. She ran lightly down a set of stairs, and Dun Huss followed.

The lower corridor was not as well lit, and Dun Huss heard a faint mechanical hum from pipes running along the wall and ceiling.

"That's it," she said, looking at a green sign, yellow hieroglyphs against it illegible to the human.

"I hope so," Dun Huss said. "Look, something's coming."

A half circle rounded the curve ahead, its flat side hugging the floor as it whirred along on some kind of spinning disc, raised a light and shone it on them. It had a dark shiny surface, reminding Dun Huss of a giant fighting-beetle. Another, thinner Keeper appeared from the hallway where they had come, hanging from the ceiling on a spider-leg hook.

"Keep them busy!" Relensta said, going into the dark little room. It reminded Dun Huss of an old Arkanian prayer-alcove he had seen in an ancient fortress in his travels. There was a kneeling-bench before an altar of black and white prayer-stones.

"How?" Dun Huss said, as the door was kicked shut in his face.

"Improvise," he thought he heard her say from inside. He wasn't sure what the word meant, so he decided it stood for "run."

He dashed toward the less-threatening spider-like thing as it moved along on its ceiling attachment, giving its arms a wide berth. The great beettle-shape behind turned in pursuit. The hanging spider dumped a foamy substance on the ground as it shot some sort of liquid at him. The spray stuck his face and something burned his eyes. Tears welled up, but he was blinded by the acid. He felt his feet slip on the floor and fell forward. The oily trap on the floor coated him, he tried to rise to his knees but slipped and fell again.

Something grabbed his ankle in an iron grip. He felt bones crush in its grasp. Dun Huss screamed as he was pulled aloft. Through blurred vision he saw the beetle behind him, lifting him in a long, thin arm projecting above its back. A gaping mouth opened, and the ankle-crushing hand at the end of the arm released him to fall into the beetle's foul-smelling gullet.

The door slammed home above him, and a deep grinding nose sounded from either side. The space around him began to close to his right and left. He put his back against one of the closing walls, his feet against the other, and resisted until the veins stood out on his uninjured leg. The walls remorselessly closed, pushing his knees up to his chest until he waited, teeth gritted in agony at the pain in his ankle, for his spine to snap.

The grinding stopped, and the walls began to part.

"Aris!" Dun Huss cried.

"No, Relensta," a voice said from Outside. "It's over, we're safe."

"The Keepers aren't living, they're machines," Relensta explained, as the gravgrab skiff moved out of the service garage and into the red dawn of Mars. "In the last years of the Collapse, the Arkanians reprogrammed even simple maintenance robots to defend their cities. Somebody screwed up with the ones protecting Nexus's Civic Center. Any non-plant was classified as a threat. I was able to do a temporary shutdown for a few hours, but the self-diagnostics will restart them soon. I don't know enough to reprogram them. That's why we had to leave in such a hurry."

Dun Huss nodded sagely, but she might as well have said that she did a star-dance with a magic feather to save them, for all he understood. He knew his ankle hand been bandaged in some sort of plaster and they were on a transport, with enough food and water to get them out of the Parch. That was enough. The coliseum was already returning to life. Already a spidery robot was moving across the crystal dome, polishing and vacuuming up desert dust. It bristled at them as they turned overhead, waving arms and squirting crystal-polish threateningly.

"What did the basement-thing squirt me with? My eyes still hurt. Will I be alright?"

She laughed. "Just some soap and floor-wax, I think. No permanent harm. You do smell much nicer, though. And speaking of smelly . . ."

She dropped the skiff to the surface. Uaji peeked up at them from beneath a cracked overhang. The hopper limped out into the dawn, a dark scar running down its leg.

"Looking for a lift south, my friend?" Dun Huss called.

"By the soon and starsh, I am, Hooman Ayen. What magicsh bring yoo oot alive again? With transhport, no lessh."

"A strange magic indeed," Relensta said, as Ayen Dun Huss helped the wounded hopper onto the back of the skiff. "It was an incantation inscribed above a glowing orange switch. The magic words might be translated as 'in the event of servborg emergency, break and push.'"

The skiff turned south and accelerated, its gravgrab echoing between the dunes.