With the sun, they were up and moving. The days came and went, long eternities of heat and thirst, through which they plodded in the shifting sands. They were tiny motes of life against a backdrop of level, desolate loneliness.
They crossed ancient beds of rock, where once, in forgotten eons, a sea had rolled. Here Kael had to lift and carry Flaith, for her thin sandals were gone, and her white feet were red with blood where the stones had cut them.
They went on and on. They stopped at an oasis, here and there, to quench their thirst in the cool waters of a subterranean spring. They ate of the dried figs and bits of hard black bread that Lunol carried in his girdle.
Toward dusk of their sixth day on the desert, Lunol cried out. They focussed eyes salt-encrusted with dried sweat where his finger pointed.
"There! See yonder, and know Lunol did not lie!"
There was livid fear in the eyes of the old peddler as he gestured at the glistening black pile of the tower lifting upward from the sand. It was almost as if he expected to see something dark and fearsome slip from the basalt blocks and come hunting him.
"It's been there for thousands of years," he whimpered. "Even when the balangs roamed these sands, the tower was there."
Flaith came close to Kael. "I'm frightened! There's something wrong with it."
Kael snorted and walked forward through the sand, ploughing his way where the wind had piled thick granules. Flaith ran a few steps after him, her hand seeking his arm. Behind them, could hear the peddler moaning.
"I tell you," he chattered, "I've seen it come out of the tower on clear nights when there wasn't a wind stirring across the sand. It just moved around, all white and shining, making the sand lift and whirl, like a storm down off the Barakian hills. It was cold. Terribly cold! The sand was frozen solid where it had been."
The McCanahan stared at the tower. It was tall, formed of black basalt, a thick column of rock that was windowless and seemingly doorless. At the base of the column was a long, low building that stretched on either side of the tower for forty feet. Two red pylons, carved and polished, stood like pointing fingers at its ends.
The old peddler was wringing his hands. "It wasn't human, that thing. It could kill as easy as a harlot winks! Once I saw a hare run past it. It stretched out a thin wire of that cold white stuff and touched the rabbit, and the rabbit died. I'm afraid!"