"How far do you think we've come?" I groaned, stretching out in the shade of a prickly bush with small purple flowers. This was the first sign of vegetation we'd encountered, but I was too exhausted to display any active interest.

"I've no idea," Harkat said. "How long have we … been travelling?"

"Two weeks I think."

After the first hot day, we'd tried travelling by night, but the path was rocky and treacherous underfoot not to mention hard on my bare feet! After stumbling many times, ripping our clothes and cutting ourselves, we elected to brave the blistering sun. I wrapped my jumper around my head to ward off the worst of the rays the sun didn't affect Harkat's grey skin, though he sweated a lot but while that prevented sunstroke, it didn't do much against sunburn. My upper body had been roasted all over, even through the material of my shirt. For a few days I'd been sore and irritable, but I'd recovered quickly thanks to my healing abilities as a half-vampire and the red had turned to a dark, protective brown. The soles of my feet had also hardened I barely noticed the absence of shoes now.

"With all the climbing and back tracking we've … had to do, we can't be making more than … a couple of miles an hour," Harkat said. "Allowing for fourteen or fifteen hours of sunlight … per day, we probably cover twenty-five or thirty miles. Over two weeks that's …" He frowned as he calculated. "Maybe four hundred in total."

I nodded feebly. "Thank the gods we're not human we wouldn't have lasted a week at this pace, in these conditions."

Harkat sat up and tilted his head left, then right the Little Person's ears were stitched under the skin of his scalp, so he had to cock his head at a sharp angle to listen intently. Hearing nothing, he focused his green eyes on the land around us. After a brief study of the area, he turned towards me. "Has the smell altered?" he asked. He didn't have a nose, so he relied on mine.