Free Star of Cursrah by Clayton Emery Page A

collapsed.
    Scuffing her hands and knees on rock, Amber rolled and cried with pain.
    “Hak! You clumsy fool…”
    “L-look—h-here!” panted Hakiim.
    She looked, then laughed for sheer delight. All around lay solid gray-yellow rock, an oasis of stone, a sanctuary. Grateful, Amber breathed steadily and felt her heart slow its pounding. She chuckled giddily. It felt wonderful just to lie still and watch the sky spin above her.
    “Unbelievable!” called a voice.
    Amber snapped her head up, frightened of another attack when she felt so weak. Rolling to one elbow, she saw Reiver already on his feet. His survival had always depended on outrunning his enemies, after all. From a bowshot away, where bedrock stopped, he called, “The thunderherders churn sand all around us. They’re still trying to get us!”
    “Let ‘em churn,” Amber grunted and lay back.
    Hakiim nodded and wheezed, “I hope they chew their teeth to nubs.”
    They didn’t lay there long, though, for once their breathing steadied, thirst wracked them. They were parched enough to drink a lake dry and sucked their water bottles dangerously low, licking their sandy lips again and again.
    “Hoy!” Reiver called from afar. “I found another hole … a square one.”
    “Square?”
    Amber and Hakiim glanced at one another. Tired but intrigued, the two trudged after the distant scarecrow figure that was the skinny thief, taking care to tread only on rooted stone, like children playing a game of Dare Base. This was a serious game, though, for furrows showed close at hand where thunderherders circled like sharks.
    Reaching Reiver, the friends looked where he pointed. A hundred feet distant lay another shelf of bedrock. Notched into its lip was indeed a square hole. Judging from twin furrows passing by, the thunderherders’ burrowing had collapsed the sand covering it.
    “Looks like a cellar hole,” said Hakiim.
    “A house? Out here?”
    Slowly, Amber turned a circle then grunted in surprise. That last downward slope actually curved around three-quarters of the horizon, dipping at the south.
    “This is a valley,” she said, “miles across.”
    “There’s nothing but sand and stone,” objected Hakiim.
    “Nothing that shows,” countered Reiver.
    Unbidden, all three looked at the square-cut hole. It had obviously been hand-cut, sometime in the past.
    “Are the borers gone?” whispered Amber, then suddenly shrieked, “Reiver!”
    Impetuous as ever, the young thief dashed across a hundred feet of sand for the next rock. His bare feet flew over sand crisscrossed with creases, but nothing nipped at his heels. On rock again, near the hole, Reiver spread his arms and crowed in triumph.
    “He’ll get us killed,” Hakiim said.
    “Now that he’s alerted the herders, yes,” Amber agreed, “but we need to get over there too.”
    Gritting her teeth, clutching her capture staff with white knuckles, Amber scampered over the sand with Hakiim bumbling behind. Panting and raspy, but giddy to have survived, the three friends crept toward the square hole notched into the rock shelf. From above, they saw a rectangular ditch in the sand pointed to the notch, which slowly descended into the shelf under their feet. The gap was nine feet wide.
    “A tunnel?” asked Reiver.
    “Leading where?” rasped Hakiim.
    The thief spit sand off his lips, then grinned and said, “Let’s find out.”

4
    The 383rd Anniversary of the Great Arrival
     
    “Ho, Tafir, shoo—oh, too late!”
    “I bagged one,” Gheqet called as his brown mare pushed through shoulder high grass, the yellow-green stalks hissing along its flanks. “Now if I can just find it…”
    Amenstar still held a long bird arrow nocked to a riding bow. She’d been too slow to loose when the covey of grouse flushed and beat the air in all directions. She yawned, for they’d ridden much of the cool night and the sun now climbed toward its zenith. Tucking bow and arrow into the case behind the saddle, Star