you?"

Besan grinned back at her. There was a quaver in her voice that her brave words did not dispel. She has what it takes, he thought as they inched along precariously high above the denars.

The great salmon-hued sun of Saaar was almost touching the distant loom of hills to the west as they slid down a natural ladder of lianas to a rocky ledge. For two hours and more they had been moving through the trees' sketchy by-ways, expecting at any moment to be hurled into the maelstrom of maddened saurians boiling underfoot.

Now they were safe atop a sheer cliff lifting forty feet above the branch-roofed bed of an unnamed stream.... A stream that now flowed with hissing reptilian monsters.

"Tomorrow we cross the Cratur Hills," Besan told the girl sagging wearily now against his shoulder, "and then reach Rhilg."

Nard Rost shook his head. "I wish we had weapons," he said. "We're safe from animals, yes, but the wild men...."

Besan nodded, lips tightening. For the thousandth time he deplored his lack of the natural defense glands of the Garros. His supply of artificial scent, nestling under his right armpit, was low. Unlike his two companions he must depend on his fleetness of foot and his cunning to escape should he become separated from them.

"We should find a cave nearby," Relsa Dav said hesitantly. "I can't take another step, I'm afraid."

Nard Rost's lips smiled encouragement. "A few moments of rest and you'll be fit again. Besan and I will look around."

Besan squeezed her arm. "Be with you in a minute."

The ridge climbed steeply for a score of feet above the ledge. It leveled off then into a narrow uneven ribbon of rocky brush-spotted earth and fell away again into a jumbled region of twisting ravines, canyons, and wooded ridges. The wind that had been blowing from the south had died and they could see three distant threads of smoke lifting gracefully into the reddening twilight sky.

"Savages." Besan's scalp tightened. The logical path for them to take back toward the dead volcanic cone housing Rhilg lay in that direction.

"Look here, Besan," Nard Rost's voice was muffled.

The instructor was not to be seen. Besan, after a quick look 

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