“I want to see what they have done to our water; we have to know. I will take two hunters.”

“One of my young manduktos will go with you as well. Wrap yourselves in the cloth, legs and feet covered as well.”

“I know.” Herilak’s voice was grim. “Another child, dead. The thorns fly up from the sand when disturbed, very hard to see. We have had to pen and guard the mastodons. They will eat anything green. How will this all end?”

“It can end in only one way,” Sanone said, his voice bleak and empty. He turned and left.

Herilak led his small band past the guards and over the barrier that sealed the valley. It was hot in the muffling wrappings of cloth, but the protection was needed. The murgu kept their distance, always retreating when attacked, but the dart-throwers grew everywhere now.

They walked cautiously up the valley floor along the dry riverbed, the mud already caked into a hard crust. There was movement ahead and Herilak pointed his death-stick, but there was nothing more to be seen, just a clatter of retreating claws. A few more turns in the valley and they reached the barrier.

From wall to wall it stretched, a tangled mass of vines and intertwined growth, vivid with flowers; a vertical jungle. A little water trickled through this living dam to make a small pool at its base.

“We can cut it down, burn it,” Sarotil said. Herilak shook his head slowly, his face dark with anger, hatred—despair.

“Cut it, it will grow again. It won’t burn. Poison thorns await us if we go close. Come, I want to see where all the water is going.”

As they climbed up out of the dry riverbed there was a quick whistle of darts from above that bristled into their cloth coverings. Herilak fired back, climbed quickly. But there were no murgu there. The mandukto pointed to a shrub still swaying with the release of its burden; long roots from it ran back down the slope.

“We sprang the trap ourselves, when we stepped on the roots. They are growing these plants around us all of the time, more and more of them.”

There was nothing that could be said. They skirted the bush—and the others like it—walked up along the high bank until the living dam was below them. A small lake had been formed behind it which had burst the banks further upstream. The river now found a new course out into the desert and away from the valley.

It was a good thing that they still had the spring of pure water.

Once they were back behind the relative safety of the barrier they carefully plucked out the poisonous darts before stripping off the stifling layers of cloth. Herilak found Sanone waiting in their usual meeting place, and he reported what they had found.