side. It was plain that he was too late.
Marou’s eyes, wide and staring, looked into some distant place. Beyond speaking, he weakly squeezed Keilin’s hand, and then . . . he was gone. For a long time the boy just sat there, until the silence was recaptured by the small sounds of the desert.
At last the boy stood up, gently taking the old hand and laying it back on the old man’s bony chest. He looked across at the Morkth body still impaled on the long black spear. “That’s what you are all going to be! I’m going to kill all of you. Do you hear me?” His voice rose to a scream. The transmitter line to Beta-Morkth HQ was still open. So, indeed, they did hear him. But they did not believe him. And it was not in the Morkth warrior’s genetic design to know fear anyway.
It was evening, and Keilin leaned on his spear, and watched as the fire consumed the last of Marou Skyann. He had dressed the old man in his best fringed leather shirt, with his broad snakeskin turquoise-studded belt. Marou’s black spear Keilin had wrenched from the Morkth corpse, and laid across the gnarled hands. Then he had placed the body out on a bier of dead mountain cedar, which had been carried here into the desert by the floods. It had been doused with the apothecary’s entire store of flammable oils.
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