Book Three of the Travelers Read Online Free PDF Page B

went quiet. She walked toward the lake. A thin wedge of moon illuminated it. The surface was still and black. Today it had looked beautiful. Now it looked terrifying, like some dark force that might suck her down and destroy her.
    Hesitantly she approached the lake. Loor knelt and looked down. She could see her face reflected in the dark water. Only her eyes were visible.
    Finally she leaned over and drank, drank until her belly was full. Then she stood and waded into the water.
    It was so frigid that she gasped. She had never been in water before, nothing deeper than a two-inch-deep bath. She had heard the Rokador actually had pools that they swam in. But water was too precious in Xhaxhu for such frivolous use.
    A band of fear closed around her chest. But she forced herself to walk out farther into the water. She could feel the pebbles shifting under her feet. Deeper and deeper she went, her heart pounding as the cold black water surrounded her. With each step she grew more frightened. She had not been frightened at all when she had been fighting for her life the other day. But this—this was terrifying.
    She was up to her neck in the water. A few more strides and she would sink beneath the water and drown.
    She took a deep breath. And waited.
    â€œThere is much time in the desert,” she said, speaking the words out loud. “There is much time in the desert. There is much time in the desert.”
    And then she felt something strange around her, something moving inside her robe.
    She smiled. Yes! It was working!
    Every Zafir robe was constructed with tiny bladders of a substance that absorbed water. Any water that came in contact with it would be filtered and sucked into the bladders, where it would remain until you opened them to drink.
    It was these ingeniously constructed robes that allowed the Zafir to move through the desert for days on end without dying of thirst.
    Loor walked slowly out of the water. The robe was amazingly heavy now that it was full of water. No wonder the Zafir walk so slowly, she thought. This is heavy as lead!
    Â 
    An hour later she was walking into the dark, silent dunes.
    S IX
    L oor was not the sort of person to doubt herself. But now that she was out in the desert, she realized how foolish she had been. Xhaxhu was to the east of the Elzehe’er Mountains. But simply plodding toward the rising sun was no way to get through hundreds of miles of shifting sand. There were no landmarks, no roads, no signs—nothing to indicate precisely where to go. Compared to the massive desert, the mighty city of Xhaxhu was just a speck on the map. She could easily miss it and wander right on into the deserts to the west of the city.
    Plus, the robe with its pockets full of water was heavy and hot. Even though she knew that it helped her conserve water and guarded her skin from the sun, it still felt constricting and awkward. She knew that her progress was much slower than it would have been without the robe.
    By noon on the first day, she was feeling light-headed from the heat. With the heavy robe around her, her body built up heat unmercifully.
    Loor was a strong girl. Years of grueling traininghad toughened her mind and body. But one of the things you learned through years of hard physical labor was that every body, no matter how hard it had been trained, had limits. When you crossed those limits, the machine broke down. The toll of three days in the desert had robbed her body of fluids and minerals that one evening of eating and drinking had not quite replenished.
    It wasn’t her body that seemed to be taking it the hardest, though. She knew she could push her body further. She had water and a little food that she’d brought with her. But her mind just didn’t feel sharp.
    She found herself fixating on things in the distance, imagining things on the horizon, staggering toward them without thinking. One time she realized she had gone for hours without thinking anything at all.