"That settles it," Jedra said. "We're going."

Kayan narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "I still don't like it. What's that city doing there, anyway? I've never heard of it before. And what's a thri-kreen doing roasting an erdlu in the middle of it? Where'd the erdlu come from? For that matter, where'd the thri-kreen come from? And where's everybody else? Something's not right here."

Jedra dismantled their tent and put on his robe again. "I don't care," he said. "It's better than trying for Tyr." He slung his pack over his shoulders and picked up the spear. "You coming?"

She blinked in surprise. "Jedra, what's gotten into you?"

He shrugged. "I guess I'm just trying to be decisive."

"What? You're rushing off into the unknown because I called you indecisive yesterday?"

"No." He tried to explain, but it was hard to put words around his reasons. "This just feels right. I know this is where we should go."

"It feels right. Oh, great." All the same, she apparently realized he was done arguing about it. She stood up and slowly drew on her pack. "If you're wrong..." She let the rest of the sentence hang.

Jedra finished it for her. "If I'm wrong, we're dead. But I'm not wrong; I can feel it. This is the right thing to do."

"I certainly hope so. All right, then, let's go."

The next day and a half passed much like the first, save that the terrain grew steadily rockier the farther they went. Once they had committed themselves to reaching the mystery city to the northeast there was no more argument about it, but Kayan obviously still doubted and resented the decision. There were no more goodnight Kisses; indeed, the rocks held the sun's heat well into the flight so they split the watch again and didn't even sleep together.

Jedra's danger sense never even twinged the whole time, either while they were walking or while they rested. This rocky wasteland was truly empty.

On the evening of the next day-their third since leaving the elves-they crested a shallow rise to find their goal laid out before them. It was indeed a city, and a vast one, too, but unfortunately Kayan's guess had been right: It was now a complete ruin. Stone buildings had collapsed into piles of rubble, and time had flattened the piles until the city was little more than a regular array of rocky hills. A few of the hardier structures- mostly toward the center of town-had fared better, some standing a few stories high, but most of the outlying buildings were mere fragments of their former selves.

Kayan refrained from saying "I told you so." Jedra was glad of that; ridicule on top of the intense letdown he felt would have probably driven him over the edge. Their waterskins held only a swallow of water for each of them; if they didn't find more soon, they would die.

"What about the thri-kreen?" Kayan asked. "Maybe he's real, at least."

Jedra cast about with his watcher sense, and sure enough he felt a faint tingling of a presence toward the center of the city. "Something's alive in there," he said.

"Can't you tell if it's the thri-kreen?"

He shook his head. "Just something alive."

"It could just as easily be something dangerous as something we want to meet," Kayan pointed out.

"It doesn't feel dangerous," Jedra said, concentrating. He felt a sense of urgency more than anything. "In fact, it feels like it's in trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"I don't know. I don't sense any threat to us, though."

Kayan looked at the piles of rubble they would have to navigate to reach whatever Jedra sensed, then with a sigh she said, "That's probably the only thing here in this slag heap; we might as well go see what it is."

It took them another hour of scrambling over boulders just to reach the city's center. They stayed to the middle of what had once been streets, finding that the debris wasn't as thick there, but the closer they got to the large buildings the deeper the rubble became simply because there had been more of it stacked up to begin with.

It was hardly a street at all, now. The top half of what must have been a ten-story rectangular tower had fallen into it, scattering its massive stone blocks the way the wind scatters sand. Jedra picked his way among them, some of them nearly as tall as he was, searching for the source of the life he sensed. Now that they were close it seemed to be weaker.

At last he thought to climb up on top of a particularly large stone and look around from there, and from that vantage he finally spotted a dusky yellow, chitinous leg sticking out from behind another block. "Over there," he said, pointing with the spear. He jumped down, and he and Kayan advanced cautiously. He didn't think they needed to fear this thri-kreen, but it never hurt to be ready for trouble.

When they rounded the edge of the stone and saw the entire creature, they knew they had no reason to worry. Not about it attacking them, at any rate. The mantis warrior lay on its side, its six limbs sprawled out and its head resting flat on the ground. The only sign of life was a faint pulsing in its bulbous abdomen.

There were no obvious wounds. "What's wrong with it?" Jedra asked Kayan.

She leaned down and gingerly touched one of its clawed hands, then closed her eyes. "Dehydration," she said after a moment. "Wonderful. Thri-kreen can live for weeks without food or water. If this one is dying of thirst, there can't be any water around for a hundred miles."

Chapter Four

Jedra looked down at the insectile beast. It was the biggest thri-kreen he'd ever seen, easily ten feet long from the end of its abdomen to the top of its head, with its upper four appendages adapted for grasping and its lower legs long and double-jointed for running or leaping. Its neck was nearly two feet long. Only its head seemed small, and that only in comparison to the rest of its body. It was oblong, with jet-black compound eyes sticking out bulbously on either side and powerful mandibles in front.

Something about its shape didn't seem quite right, though. Jedra hadn't paid much attention to thri-kreen when he'd lived in the city-it was best just to give them plenty of room-but this one seemed subtly different. A bigger cranial bulge behind the eyes, maybe, and a narrower face, if that glistening expanse of hard exoskeleton could be called a face.

Strapped to the creature's back was a pack proportioned to the thri-kreen's large size. Jedra could have fit inside the bag, and there would have been room for Kayan on the wooden frame that extended below it. They would have had to empty it first, though; the pack bulged with unknown contents, and the frame was festooned with hardware. Cooking pots, the two multi-bladed heads of a gythka-without the usual long pole between them-some kind of curved throwing weapon with spikes sticking out of it, and more things that Jedra didn't recognize had all been tied to it. Jedra doubted if he could even lift the pack, much less carry it anywhere. Thri-kreen must be strong.

And rich. Most of the stuff was made of metal.

The creature became aware of their presence. It shuddered, trying to lift the arm that Kayan still touched, but it couldn't. The mandibles opened, clicked shut, then they opened again and a faint, croaking voice said, "Water."

"Sorry," Kayan said, backing away. "We don't even have enough for ourselves."

"Water," the creature croaked again. It tried again to move, this time managing to raise its head a few inches. Its multifaceted eyes seemed to fix on Kayan, then on Jedra. "I know... where is... water," it said. "You give me... yours... then I get more... for all of us."

Jedra was still in shock over the complete wreckage of his expectations. He had come here expecting to find help, but now he found himself being asked for it instead. His beautiful city, with open fountains and food enough for weeks, had turned out to be the delirious ravings of a dying thri-kreen. He had doomed himself and Kayan to the same fate.