Trey moved on, out of the cave and up into the crying sky. He felt an immediate sense of freedom as space grew around him, and as he spun and swooped way above the ground he pushed out his perception, comforted to find that there were no minds nearby. Not human, at least. Skull ravens sat chattering in trees farther up the slope, silenced by his touch. A herd of mountain goats munched wet grass. Nestled against a collapse of boulders far up the hillside, a tumbler quivered and shook in the rain, and Trey steered clear of its multiple captured minds. They were all screaming, and he had no desire to find out why.

He swept back toward Pavisse, passing through small valleys and over low hills, dipping into thickets of trees, finding a few dwellings where families huddled before the fire, hiding from the rain and dark. Some of these minds he touched on briefly, but he found nothing there to interest him. There was little to interest even themselves; they were sad, empty places, bereft of hope, concentrating instead on simple existence. None of them seemed to look farther forward than the next morning, when sheebok would need milking, fields hoeing and planting, ditches clearing, fences repairing . . .

He found the freedom exhilarating, and again he wondered just how far he could project himself like this. Underground there had been miles of solid rock to temper his explorations . . . but he also wondered whether his horizons had been too limited. He had never been tempted to move aboveground to see what it was like, even though perhaps the ability had always been there. As a miner he had often considered journeying topside at some point in his life. But as a fledge taker, he had never been tempted to take full advantage of the opportunities it offered him, other than guilty forays past Sonda’s bedroom window. His boundaries had been too insular, he knew that now. It had taken the disaster of the Nax to open his mind.

And then something appeared in the distance, something more powerful and less human. Trey dropped down near the ground, pulling in his exploratory senses and hiding himself as effectively as a raindrop in the storm. It would take some time for the thing to reach him, so he tasted the rain, felt it hitting the ground and splashing back up, loaded with dust. It was a summer storm, warm and welcome, but it carried taints of autumn, smells of dead leaves and bare trees. Things were changing, and even the rain swore to that.