‘I’ve heard about them,’ Narasan said, ‘but I’ve never actually seen one.’
Rabbit ran his fingers over his lodestone. ‘I think I’d better put her in a cloth pouch,’ he mused. ‘She’s all sort of smooth and round, and just tying a rope around her might not work too well, and I definitely don’t want to lose her. I’ll make a sort of pouch out of cloth and put her in that. Then I’ll tie the rope to the pouch.’
‘Won’t the pouch sort of block off whatever makes her jump at iron?’ Sorgan asked.
Rabbit shook his head. ‘She always jumps at iron, Cap’n - or iron jumps at her. She’ll even reach out through leather to grab iron. She just loves iron for some reason. I’ll put her in a cloth pouch, lower her down to that shining yellow sand and drag her back and forth a couple times. If that sand out there is really iron, the outside of the pouch will be covered with it when I haul her back in. If nothing sticks to the pouch, the sand isn’t iron. It might not be gold, but it definitely won’t be iron.’
‘I think I’ve seen a good place for us to try that,’ Longbow told his little friend. ‘It’s over on the other side of that west ridge. The rock face that goes down to the Wasteland isn’t very high there, so we won’t have to carry so much rope.’
‘Let’s go, then,’ Rabbit said. ‘I think that if we come up with the right answer, we’ve just won another war.’
‘Whoever’s doing this for us is very clever,’ Torl said when he joined Rabbit and Longbow as they climbed up the ridge to the west of the basin. ‘I’d say that this desert of imitation gold was what he had in mind right from the very start.’
‘She,’ Longbow corrected. ‘It was a woman’s voice that kept ordering me to get out of the way.’
‘Do you suppose it might have been Lady Zelana’s sister?’ Rabbit asked, shifting the coil of rope he was carrying over his shoulder.
Longbow shook his head. ‘I’m sure I’d have recognized her voice,’ he said. ‘The voice I heard wasn’t Aracia’s. It was a familiar voice, but I can’t seem to remember where I’ve heard it before.’
‘Well, whoever it is seems to have even more power than the people who hired us do,’ Torl declared. ‘She’s probably the greatest swindler in the whole world.’
‘Swindler?’ Rabbit protested.
‘Waving fake gold at people isn’t exactly honest, Rabbit,’ Torl said with a sudden grin, ‘but it doesn’t bother me one little bit. She just hired five armies to fight our war for us, and she paid them with imitation gold.’
‘We will have to hold back the creatures of the Wasteland until our new friends finish building that ramp,’ Longbow reminded him.
‘That’s true, I suppose, but cousin Sorgan’s men are coming up that shepherd’s pass to lend us a hand. We don’t really have to kill off all of the bug-people now. All we have to do is hold them back until our new friends get here. Then we can step aside and cheer while the churchies and the bugs destroy each other.’ He looked around at the rocky ridge. ‘How much farther is this place we’re looking for, Longbow?’
‘Just on the other side of that large tree,’ Longbow replied, pointing on ahead.
‘Are you sure we’ve got enough rope?’ Rabbit asked. ‘The Cap’n won’t be too happy if we can’t get an answer for him until sometime tomorrow.’
‘It’s only about fifty feet high there, little friend,’ Longbow replied.
‘If it’s that shallow, why aren’t the bug-men coming up there instead of out on that slope?’ Torl asked.
‘It’s too narrow,’ Longbow explained. ‘The Vlagh needs places that are fairly wide when it starts moving its servants.’
They passed the towering tree and went down into a narrow stream-bed that had cut its way down through the surrounding rocks.
Torl looked out across the Wasteland. ‘It looks to me like your “sea of gold” ran dry a ways out there, Longbow,’ he said. ‘It goes back to being red near the far side of this ridge, and after a mile or so the red fades out and everything goes back to being plain old brown sand.’
‘It’s just bait, Torl,’ Longbow explained. ‘Our unknown friend’s trying to lure the fish we want to catch here, not all over the Wasteland out there.’
Torl looked a bit sheepish. ‘I guess I didn’t think of that,’ he admitted. ‘All that imitation gold out there seems to be turning my head off for some reason.’
‘Your mind should clear up as soon as we get the proof that the yellow sand cluttering the Wasteland is nothing but a fraud,’ Longbow suggested.
‘You wouldn’t think that water - which isn’t really very hard -could cut through solid rock like this, would you?’ Rabbit suggested. ‘Particularly since it only runs down through these gullies for a few weeks out of every year.’
‘That sort of depends on how much time the water has to get the job done,’ Longbow explained.
‘Just how long would you say it took the water to cut out this little gulch?’
‘Not too long - fifty thousand years, maybe.’
‘That’s your idea of a short time, Longbow?’
Longbow smiled. ‘Water’s very patient, my little friend,’ he replied. ‘All it really wants to do is go downhill.’
They moved cautiously down the now-dry streambed and stopped a few feet back from the abrupt break.
‘There’s a lot of the new sand right at the bottom of this cliff, Rabbit,’ Torl said, carefully leaning out over the edge.
‘How far down would you say it is?’
‘Fifty - maybe sixty - feet is about all.’
‘That had me just a bit worried,’ Rabbit admitted. ‘We’d have all looked a little foolish if this rope was about three feet too short.’ He sat down and took a piece of loosely-woven cloth out from under his belt and gathered it up around his lodestone. Then he passed his knife over the makeshift bag.
The pouch jumped up and attached itself to the knife.
‘It looks like we’re in business,’ Rabbit said, carefully tying the cloth into a tight sack. Then he tied the end of the rope coil he’d brought along to the pouch and carefully began to lower the bag to the sand below. When it reached the sand, he raised it and then lowered it several times to make certain that it would capture even more grains of the glittering sand. Then he carefully pulled the rope back up, took hold of the cloth sack and held it up for Longbow and Torl to see. The little pouch was almost completely covered with glittering yellow flakes.