Okay, I'm up. I'm up.
I reached out and rubbed Max's snout. He sat back, looking pleased that he had been able to do something useful during this trek.
Nana up. Nana up.
He sniffed at me to make sure I was ok and then bounded away. I smiled as I saw him leaping with joy into the distance as he chased some live prey into the ground.
Max had been feeding himself with the plentiful wild life around the mouth of the tunnel and was actually eating better than we were.
I groaned and sat up.
It was late afternoon. The rain had lessened in severity.
I stretched my aching body and looked around. Simon and Tarzan were no longer playing their checkers game, opting instead to play 13 card poker.
They were chatting back and forth quite a bit, using sign language. Both were quite proficient so there was serious dialogue going between them, none of which the twins were privy to.
Not that the guys cared at all. They were standing by the tunnel's mouth, gazing out into the distance.
Connor and Corwin were looking less haggard and more themselves, but I could feel their anxiety, even though they did not give voice to their concerns.
I joined them at the tunnel's entrance, looking out into the grey drenched world.
One of them reached out and touched my back. I could feel a warm energy emanating from his palm, spreading into my body.
"Shouldn't you be saving that energy so you can work whatever magik that might be needed?" I moved away from Corwin.
He was not looking much better than any of us and needed to conserve his own energy.
"You were sleeping on the cold ground and your lips were turning blue." He looked away.
I wrapped my arms around my body. "I'm not that cold. Once we get moving, I'll warm up quickly."
I looked out into the horizon. The birds were not visible, but I could feel their little sparks of life dancing in the distance. There was no reason to delay the mission.
"You gonna call your minions now?" Simon edged closer to me, abandoning his poker game with Tarzan.
"They're not my minions. I'm asking them for a favor."
"Yeah, that's what all the really nice Overlords say," he responded with a dry voice. "You're all still Masters of a magikally-enhanced slave species. Isn't that what the term Overlord means?"
"None of the crows have been magikally-enhanced." I gave him a withering look as I cast my mind into the sky, calling out to the crows.
Truthfully, I hated to think of myself as an Overlord of any sentient living thing, but if I had to be honest with myself, there was no good way to justify the fact that these animals came to me every time I called them.
My only consolation was that at least, they would often seek me out for company or for help with something that only a person with a pair of opposable thumbs could do.
I raised my arms up high into the sky.
"Dajiadohguolai!"
Within a minute of my call, the stark black outlines of several flapping crows appeared from the haze of the blue-grey mist. They squawked and cried at me, anxious to tell me what they knew.
Banking around a tiny gust of wind, they landed on the extended arms of several nearby scarecrow-looking yucca palms.
I smiled and waved at them.
What can you see? Will you show me?
"How convenient to have crows so close by." Corwin looked impressed at their sudden appearance, as if at will.
I ignored Corwin for a moment and concentrated on the nonverbal images the crows were sending to me. It did not take long to get the gist of what they were trying to tell me.
"It's not convenience." I responded after a bit of delay. "They've been haunting this spot waiting for me to emerge ever since the bats told them we were coming."
"They told you that?" Corwin gave me an askance look.
"Yes. They will guide us to the boy. There is a good-sized settlement at the train depot not far from here. Although it's not the quickest way, it's easiest to follow the train tracks. The crows will lead us there."
"How far?" Corwin's eyes narrowed as he peered into the distance.
"Not sure," I pursed my lips. "We might reach there by nightfall."
"Then let's get going," he waved a hand to rally the rest of the group. "The sooner we find Tory, the sooner we find the missing primates."
And with that, we set off in the soggy crystal blue afternoon, walking along the desolate terrain.
All around us was the wilderness of the desert. We were following the only visible sign of civilization, the set of polished steel tracks running into the distant haze.
Around us, the wild scrub grass waved and bowed to the will of the wind. Glistening in patches here and there, the sun managed to peer through between the gaps in the dark clouds.
Amidst this wild rugged landscape, we were a motley gang of six. I didn't have a mirror on me, but I was fairly certain I was not particularly looking good at the moment.
I had been slumming it with the guys for several days now, and finger-combing bedraggled, hopelessly tangled hair was about the only beauty routine I had been able to manage.
The path was rocky and overgrown with briar patches and scrub brush. It was rough walking.
Tarzan followed behind, keeping his eyes mostly on me and saying nothing. Of everyone there, I felt most sorry for him.
In the world of mages, non-human primates were little more than slave labor no matter how well they were treated.
They were the coveted property of whoever owned them and their family structures were dependent upon their handler's ownership. Any transfers of ownership of any primate ultimately meant the separation of primate family units.
Tarzan had no legal rights of his own and yet, here he was, risking his life trying to help us with our own quests.
What was just as disconcerting was that if we were caught with him, we would also be in a world of trouble for aiding and abetting a primate that had killed his own Overlord.
I did not want to think about the ramifications of the whole situation I had somehow found myself in. All I could do was press on and do what was right—what needed to be done.
We followed the train tracks for what seemed like forever.
The drizzle abated at some points along our trek, but never for long and never for good. The skies were still heavy with a dark grey moisture that blocked out the sun's rays and kept us waterlogged even though the mages did their best to dry us out on the occasion with their magik.
The twins took turns scouting the skies on their hoverboards, checking for any localized dangers. Unfortunately, the clouds were so thick and so low that even if they flew up to the highest point possible on their hoverboards, they could not see into the distance past the cloud banks.
The dreary afternoon turned even bleaker as evening crept upon us. The relentless rail tracks gleamed into the distance, with no end in sight. Nevertheless, the crows overhead continued their insistent cawing that we were getting closer to the human establishment.
With their encouragement, I pushed the group onward until darkness began to stain the desolate landscape with fingers of blue-black night.
This far away from any light source, the night was so pitch black that had the guys not magiked a small blue flame to hover above our heads, I would not have been able to see my own hands in front of my eyes.
It was so dark that the heavens glittered above us in bright points of lights. I had never seen stars so bright. Moreover, I had never seen so many stars before! The pattern of stars splayed out before us in a dazzling array of blues and yellows and golds.
"Nana," Connor finally reached out and took hold of my arm. "It's too dark to see where we're going. It's safer if we camp out nearby and wait until morning."
"But the human settlement is not that far ahead." I protested. The crows had insisted that it was somewhere ahead, although they were notorious for ambiguous distance calculations due to their as-the-crow-flies mentality.
"And we will get there in the morning, when we can see the settlement and determine that it's not dangerous." He reasoned with patience. "Right now, if we wandered into their town, they would think we were dangerous and confront us with force."
"Furthermore," Corwin interjected, "if we all huddle together, one of us could keep a bubble shield over everyone and that should at least keep out night time predators. It would allow us to get some rest. You are looking as if you're ready to drop."
"I could take a turn at maintaining the bubble too." Simon spoke up.
The twins gave a grateful nod at him and cornered me until I acquiesced to their demands even though I did not want to spend the night out in the open desert.
We spent one more night out in the wilds, with the crows keeping watch from above for any untoward danger and Tarzan keeping an eye on the ground for any dangerous animals that might be lurking near.
I shared the last of my food with the guys and then we made our beds under a small clump of yucca palms.
Some time towards midnight, I fell asleep in the middle of someone's detailed discussion about the merits of illusory magik as opposed to shape-shifting. The technical aspects of this type of magik was far too deep (and boring) for me to follow without hitting that serious drowsiness threshold.
Although I tried to maintain a slight distance from the twins, they continued to keep an eye out for me. Invariably, once I fell asleep, they both edged closer to me in a protective embrace so that by morning, we were snuggled up together in a nice warm pile with me crushed between the twin mages.
Having never slept anywhere other than my own bed and with no one other than myself, I found this hobo style of transient living to be highly unusual and quite disturbing. But a rescue mission was far more important than creature comforts and I did not want to be the whiney girl in the group of stalwart males.
And so it was, on that early mid-summer Monday morning three full days after we left the Topaz Academy of Magikal Arts, we were peering over the hedge that ran alongside the periphery of the town's Main Street.