Then she heard it. Faint initially, like a first cousin to the wind itself. It strengthened slowly, a soft ripping sound approaching from the north, from the direction they were headed. It intensified until it became an audible buzzing, still muted but rising ominously in the distance. Peering hard in the direction of the ascending susurration, Luminara thought she could make out the first hints of a low, dark cloud.

The suubatars began to stir uneasily, throwing back their sharp-ridged skulls and pawing at the ground with middle and forefeet. She struggled to control her mount. At the same time, Kyakhta's eyes bulged with realization.

"Kyren!" he exclaimed fearfully.

"Quickly, my friends!" Bulgan was suddenly standing upright in his saddle, looking frantically in all directions. "We have to find shelter!"

"Shelter?" Obi-Wan held his seat, but began searching their immediate surroundings nonetheless. "Out here?"

"From what?" Barriss wanted to know. By now she, too, saw and heard the onrushing blur. "What's a kyren?"

Without suspending his search, Bulgan edged his steed closer to her own. "A flying creature that travels the plains of Ansion, migrating from region to region as it follows the seasons." He gestured downward. "When the grasses in one area mature and the heads of each stalk are ripe with seed, the kyren resumes its flight, eating until it is sated. Then it settles down to rest, and to breed. When the young are fledged, they take flight anew in search of further nourishment."

She blinked in the direction of the diffuse shadow on the horizon. "That can't be all one creature coming toward us."

"It's not," Bulgan disclosed apprehensively. "There are many more than one."

"I don't see why it matters." Anakin had moved forward to join the conversation. "What have we to fear from a flock of seed eaters? They are just seed eaters, aren't they?" he thought to add.

A strange expression came over the guide's face; strange even for a pop-eyed, long-maned, single-nostriled Ansionian. "Seed is their preferred food, yes. But once they have taken flight, they are unable, or unwilling, or simply disinterested in changing course. Nor will they fly higher to pass over anything unexpected in their path." He swallowed hard. "Rocks they will smash themselves into. Trees they will cut down. Living things like hootles, or suubatars, or cicien, they will eat their way through. Unless those creatures can somehow find a place to hide, or manage to get out of the way."

"Hootles or suubatars?" Barriss asked softly. "Or-people?" Somehow she wasn't surprised when Bulgan nodded solemnly.

Anakin's hand strayed to his belt. "We have lightsabers, and other weapons. Can't we stand and defend ourselves from these things? How big are they, anyway?"

Raising his long-fingered hands, Bulgan placed them on ei ther side of his head. "This is the average of their wingspan."

"That's all?" Anakin frowned. "Then I don't see why you and Kyakhta are so concerned."

"How many of them are there?" Barriss asked. "In the average flock?"

Lowering his hands, the guide looked back at her. "No one knows. No one has ever been able to stay in one place long enough to count an average flock." He gestured toward the now rapidly darkening northern horizon. "I think this flock may be a little larger than average."

"Take a guess." The fingers of Anakin's right hand continued to hover in the vicinity of his lightsaber. "How many of these things are we likely to be facing?"

Turning in his saddle, Bulgan considered the horizon anew. "Not a conspicuously great number. But enough to pose a seri ous danger if we don't find cover quickly. No more than one or two hundred million, I would say."

Anakin's hand moved away from his lightsaber. " 'Hundred million'? 'One or two'?" The only shelter in sight was a trio of wolgiyn trees standing forlorn and isolated off to their right. They did not cast much of a shadow.

"This way!" Pointing forward and to his left, Kyakhta urged his mount in that same direction. The two Jedi Knights followed, with the Padawans bringing up the rear.

Barriss tried her best to conceal her unease. Instead of fleeing, they were riding straight into the oncoming adumbration. On a collision course, kyren flock and speeding travelers drew rapidly toward one another. Though she had never seen a kyren in her life, she trusted that Kyakhta had seen something more substantial than a mirage, and more solid than faint hope.

Chapter 10

Several minutes of hard riding later, it was still impossible to make out individual kyren, but their collective screeching had come to dominate all other sounds on the prairie. Usually frightened of nothing, a pack of shanhs went racing past in the opposite direction. The fearsome carnivores were absolutely terrified. Terrified of something that cracked grass seed for breakfast, Lu-minara reflected. A small, lightweight, winged herbivore she could hold in the palm of one hand. The sight of the fleeing shanhs was anything but reassuring. As she had been instructed, she urged her suubatar faster, not wanting to fall behind. There were some instruments of nature even a Master of the Force could not stand against. One kyren, without question. A dozen, surely. A few hundred, perhaps. A few thousand? Questionable.

A hundred million of anything was too vast a number for even several Jedi to stand against. Even if the adversaries in question were nothing more than small, soft-bodied, seed- eating fliers.

By the time she finally saw where Kyakhta was leading them, the collective cries of the millions upon millions of kyren were a steady stabbing in her ears. They blocked out the sun, creating their own eclipse, and their stench threatened to overwhelm her inundated sense of smell and send her reeling. Grimly, she clung to the reins of her mount and kept her feet jammed resolutely into the forward-facing stirrups. With one hand she pulled a bit of robe across her face to shut out a little of the dust and smell.

"There, that way!" Peering into the gathering darkness, she barely managed to hear Kyakhta's cry, and see where he was leading them.

Looming out of the gloom just ahead and towering above the grass, a crazy conglomeration of tilted pillars and columns took shape. Ranging in hue from a light tan to dark umber, more than anything else they resembled alien tombstones set in the middle of the open plain. The analogy was not encouraging. Roughly triangular in shape, each rose to a sharp point. Not all were perfectly vertical. Some thrust upward from the ground at marked angles, and several lay broken and shattered, having fallen over on their sides.

She later learned they were the mounds of the jijites, tiny creatures that lived in the soil and fed off the wide- ranging root systems of the numerous grasses. Constructed of tiny, even minuscule pebbles, they were bound together by a natural mortar extruded by specially designated jijite workers. Each pillar served to vent hot air from the living tunnels below the surface, cooling the jijites' immediate environment. They were also lookout towers from which farsighted jijites could keep watch on the surrounding plains-and on other, marauding members of their own kind. They were not insects, but a kind of collective small reptilian life-form.