It looked like she would get to see the great city in the south after all.

A moment after she had fulfilled the necessary ceremonial obsequiences, exhaustion overtook her. She collapsed into the arms of Grauel and Barlog.

Marika wakened after the fading of the light. She found herself perched precariously upon the flying cross. In one hasty glance she saw that she shared the strange craft with the other survivors of Akard. Grauel and Barlog were as near her as they could get-as they always were. Bagnel was next nearest. He rewarded her with a cheerful snarl as her gaze passed over him. Communicator Braydic seemed to be in shock.

The wind seemed almost still as the cross ran with it. To the left and below, the ruins of Bagnel's home, Critza, appeared. "No bodies anymore," Marika observed.

In a hard, low voice, Bagnel said, "The nomads feed upon their dead. The grauken rules the Ponath." The grauken, the monster lying so close beneath the surface of every meth. The archetypal terror of self with which every meth was intimately familiar.

The Maksche senior eyed Bagnel, then Marika from her standing place upon the axis of the cross. She pointed skyward. "It will get worse before it gets better. The grauken may rule the entire world. It comes on us with the age of ice."

Marika looked skyward, trying to forget the dust cloud that was absorbing her sun's power and cooling her world. She tried to concentrate on the wonder of the moment, to take joy in being alive, to forget the horror of the past, of losing first the pack with which she had lived her first ten years, then the silth packfast where she had lived and trained the past four. She tried to banish the terror lurking in her future.

Jiana! Doomstalker! Twice!