Read Ardor on Aros for Free Online Page B

was on the opposite side of the cluster of rocks, and I could see only its tenuous upper portions. It reached the rocks long before I did; the rocks where I was supposed to find Jadiriyah.
    It was as if I were listening to an invisible radio—with earplugs. The sound was in my head, not in the air. I saw flickering images, too, and they were only in my head. I kept moving wearily, tuned in to the weird drama. In stress, she was broadcasting desperately.
    I heard a thought, but it was garbled—it isn’t Kro Kodres! The thought was deliberately damped; these riders are not friends! I slide in between the biggest boulders, which are about three feet apart. I draw my sword. My heart is like thunder in my chest; my breasts heave and I am suddenly wet with perspiration. I fill my left hand with dagger-hilt.
    They pound up and stop ten or so paces away in a great cloud of swirling xanthic dust, and we all wait for it to dissipate. I see them.
    (I saw them through her mind: she recognized them. I didn’t. They weren’t horses, and their riders weren’t Kro Kodres’ people. They were enough to bring on the jimjams.)
    The horse-sized beasts were a dark grayish blue, like some earthly cats. Their heads resembled foxes far more than cats or horses, with long thin snouts and entirely too many teeth. They had no manes. Their ears were floppy and their tails stubby, though equipped with the usual whisk broom ends big animals need to swat flies. [Yes, there are. God was just as overgenerous with flies on Ardor as he was on Earth. An obvious error in the Grand Design.] The beasties’ feet were huge, splayed for desert travel, and yellow, for no good reason other than decor. Foot fetishists, maybe. Oh, one other thing about those feet: there were six of them. Something for a fetishist to get his teeth into!
    The riders were blue-gray, rather than gray-blue like their mounts. Hairless, as I learned, although when I first saw them, through her eyes, they wore long white robes with cowls, like Arab burnūses. Their noses were huge and broad, resembling a gorilla’s more than anything, with long-slitted nostrils. The mouths: gashes, hardly any lip at all. The teeth: human enough, a little animalish. Yellow eyes, with hazel irises and tiny pupils. They were set very deep. Not as differ as the green men and other creatures we’ve all read about , but different enough, I assure you. They were not quite human; they were very alien; they were staring at her with those deepset, teeny-tiny black pupils. She was a lonesome, scared female.
    Besides, they were eight feet tall, give or take a few centimeters.
    They were boots beneath those loose-sleeved robes—boots obviously made from the beasts they rode (slooks, of course). A shortish bow was slung on the back of each rider, with arrows on his saddle. Each wore a sword girded on with a thick sash. The robes were white; the sash of one was orange, the other’s an eye-rending chartreuse.
    “Put down your steel, Kang-she,” the thought came, murkily, relayed. “We have bows and need to come no closer.”
    I shake my head. They look at each other, white cowls twisting ghostily in the twilight. Twilight is bloody red, on bloody Aros. One of them unlimbers his bow. The other argues, with a lot of gesticulating.
    “I am Jadiriyah of Brynda,” I say, “and decsire only to be allowed to go in peach, unless you offer aid. I have nothing of value, not even a mount.”
    You’re right: She should’ve told them Daddy and Hubby and forty thousand knights of the Table Round were just over yonder. She probably would have, too, if she’d thought of it! These were Vardors, the not-quite-human nomads who’d attacked Kro Kodres. They’d rather raid and fight and slay and rape than eat or sleep. They’d hardly offer aid to each other, much less her; she was a she of the Kang race, and the races were natural enemies, theirs and Kro Kodres’. As to giving her a ride—sure they would! Straight to hell, or