11. Moon and Stone, Crossing the Southern Drylands

They had been flying all night, taking advantage of a strong south wind, and Moon was relieved when Stone circled down to the valley. It wasn't an ideal place to stop and rest, but at least it was there.

The terrain was mostly barren sandy ground with sparse grass, punctuated by low rises and some scrub brush and one lone tree. Moon came in low, tasting the air and catching the scents of dryland flowers and sand.

Stone dropped to the ground not far from the tree. Instead of shifting, he threw himself down and proceeded to make a dust wallow. Moon landed nearby, and furled his wings, surveying the valley while Stone cleaned his scales. There was no open water source nearby, not much grazing, and the tree had a forbiddingly spiky canopy, which meant few if any grasseaters and few if any predators, except those traveling through to somewhere else.

Finally Stone finished, shook the dust off, and shifted to his groundling form. Moon took his own dust bath, then shifted and managed not to groan out loud. His back was sore, an ache that spread out down his arms and legs, though they had been riding the wind most of the time. If they were on the wrong track, it was all a waste of time, a waste of effort.

"Do you think we're going the right way?" he asked Stone, mostly just to make conversation.

"I did three days ago," Stone admitted, stretched out in the sandy wallow.

"Do you think we should have waited for the others?"

"No."

It was a moot point, anyway. If they were on the wrong path, and the others were on the right one, they couldn't find them, either. Stone said, "Come over here and lie down. Otherwise we'll never catch anything."

Moon realized he had been standing there a while, absently scratching the back of his neck and staring at nothing. He sighed and went over to lie down in the sand wallow with Stone.

The sand was warm on his abused muscles and he dozed off, listening to the wind in the grass. After a time, Stone elbowed him. "We've got something."

Moon slit his eyes just enough to spot the shape arrowing down at them out of the cloudless blue sky. "Is it one of those birds again? The last one tasted like dead leaves."

"You'll eat what I catch and like it." Then Stone growled in irritation.  "It's a damn flower-head again."

Moon snarled tiredly. "I thought we flew out of their range."

Stone hissed. "It's probably lost."

The creature stooping on them was roughly the size of an Arbora, with a head shaped like a rounded, multi-petaled flower, a little like an aster. It had the brains of an aster, too.  As it neared them, Stone twitched out of the wallow and shifted. Moon didn't bother.

Flapping wildly, the flower-head tried to stop mid-air, managed not to slam into Stone but lost control and hit the ground. It skidded about fifty paces through the sand and grass and landed near Moon. Moon sat up and told it, "Piss off."

It scrambled back and cowered, which was even more annoying. But you couldn't eat something that talked, no matter how stupid it was, and there was no point in killing it otherwise. Stone shifted to his groundling form and ambled back to the sand wallow.

The flower-head said, in bad Altanic, "What are you?"

Moon growled, "None of your business."

It backed away a few steps, and hesitated. Moon hissed, preparing to shift and snarl, but it said, "Do you know which way the big river is?"

Stupid as rocks, Moon thought, and said, "It's north, that way." He pointed.

The flower-head turned, ran a few steps flapping, and awkwardly launched itself again. Stone sprawled in the wallow and sighed. "I told you it was lost."

Moon didn't dignify that with a response and stretched out in the sand again.

The flower-head had caused enough commotion that it took a while to lure anything else down. Both Moon and Stone were able to get a short nap in before a large bird finally took the bait and dove on them.

***

Moon sat on his heels in the grass and tossed the last cracked bone away. This method of hunting while resting sometimes didn't work, but when it did, it saved them a lot of time.

Stone had finished eating and was rolling in the dust wallow again, getting ready to leave. Moon got the waterskin out of his pack for a drink, thinking that their next stop would have to be at a water source. Putting the stopper back in, he was facing the only tree. Then he went still. At some point, the tree had moved.

The branches above the ball of thorns pointed toward Moon and Stone and the sand wallow now. From this angle Moon saw something gleam at the end of each one. That hadn't been there before either, but perhaps the reflective surface had been concealed inside the bud-like structures that surrounded them, like eyelids. Exactly like eyelids.  "Stone."

His tone must have been an alert because Stone was suddenly at his side. "Huh," Stone commented.

They had seen tree-creatures before, but Moon always found them a little disconcerting. Their branches were almost like tentacles and he expected them to burst up out of the ground and attack him, even though so far it hadn't happened yet. There was always a first time.

There were no bones or other remnants of hunting around the tree, or even in the rest of the valley, and there was no predator musk.  Moon started to back away.  "Let's go."

"Wait," Stone said. He cupped his hands and shouted to the tree in Altanic, "Did you see a flying boat pass overhead, maybe one, maybe two days ago?"

Moon hissed. "Do you have to try to talk to everything?"

"Shut up," Stone told him. He tried again in Kedaic, then in a couple of other trade languages.

They waited. Moon scuffed his claws in the sand. They should leave, and he was getting ready to say so. Then the branches swept violently around.

Moon scrambled back a few paces and Stone braced to shift. Then Moon realized the branches had all moved to point south.

Moon took a sharp breath. "We're going the right way."