Aenir by Garth Nix, Steve Rawlings Read Free Book Online Page B

memories of better times, when his family was all together and the worst thing Tal had to worry about was going back to a new term at the Lectorium.
    Tal spat out the last mouthful of cakefruit. He didn't want to remember any more. It was too dispiriting to think about his family and their troubles. He had to focus on the immediate objective.
    "I have to find the Codex," he said aloud.
    Above him, Adras nodded his head, but did not stop soaking up water vapor. The desert had been hard on the Storm Shepherd. He had shrunk to three quarters his normal size in the dry air. Now he was intent on taking in as much water as possible, to last him till the cooler night.
    "It's better that Milla left," Tal added. He was looking at Adras, but he was really talking to himself. "It makes everything more… I don't know… straightforward. I mean, she didn't want to find the Codex, really. She just wanted to know about Aenir to tell that weird old woman."
    Adras stopped taking in water vapor long enough to burp. Then he started sucking again, his powerful breath twisting the water into vapor and up into his mouth.
    "Beautiful," said Tal. "You're a big help." Despite the heat, now at its most intense, Tal didn't want to wait. Every minute spent in the oasis was time lost. Anything could be happening while he sat around eating cakefruit. To Gref, or to his mother.
    Anything.
    "Come on," he said. But he had only gone a few stretches from the shade of the trees when the heat from the sand burnt through the soles of his shoes, sending him hopping and swearing back to the pool.
    "Too hot to travel," said Adras, yawning. "We should wait till it cools off."
    "I guess so," said Tal reluctantly. He inspected his boots. He hadn't noticed before, but the morning's trek through the strange desert had burned several holes through the hide. They were Icecarl boots, built for ice, not burning sands. "We'll have to make up the time tonight."
    Adras nodded.
    Tal put his back against one of the trees, looked up to make sure that no cakefruit was likely to fall on him, and closed his eyes. He wouldn't sleep, he vowed. He'd just think everything through. Finding the Codex was the first step, but there was a lot more to think about.
    "How do I find the Codex?" he mumbled to himself. Did he just keep on walking east till he fell over it?
    Tal knew it wouldn't be as easy as that. He would rest now and save his strength. Then he would walk all night. He'd make up the lost time. He had to.
    But the sun was very hot, even in the shade of the cakefruit trees, and Tal's thoughts drifted off into dreams.
    He slept, even when the breeze came up and cake-fruit dropped with soft plopping noises all around him.
    He slept on, even as something slithered down the trunk of the cakefruit tree above him. Something long and scaly, though very flat and thin. It had thousands of tiny hooked legs. They rippled under it, each hook digging out minute flecks of bark as it made its circular way down and around the trunk.
    It had two heads at the end of its ribbonlike body. They were of unequal sizes. The smaller head had a bulbous cluster of eight multifaceted eyes, and two jointed tendrils that quested ahead. The other head was twice as big. It was all mouth, currently shut.
    The thing seemed in no hurry. It moved steadily down, until it was right above Tal's sleeping head. The tendrils from its small head brushed his hair, and the eyes glittered as it measured up the Chosen boy.
    Then its mouth began to open. At first it didn't seem possible that it could open wide enough to do Tal any harm. But the lower section of the thing's head continued to open wider and wider, the mouth spreading back well past the second head, into the creature's body.
    It didn't have any teeth, but an ugly green spit began to drip from the back of its throat.
    The thing shifted a little to line Tal up better, and then slowly began to lower its jaws down over his head, as the green drool spread across his