The Darkness Before the Dawn

Chapter Twelve

The audience roared as if they had all shared in the final blow. In the last few minutes of the battle Jedra had nearly forgotten the whole city full of people surrounding him, but now he looked up at the stands, where everyone stomped and cheered and waved their hats. When he pulled his sword free from Kayan's chest and they saw the blood covering the end of the blade they went wilder still. Even Kitarak and Lothar/Yoncalla were on their feet, and Jedra heard Kitarak's voice in his mind saying, Well done. Now take her body and meet us outside the city. Along with the tohr-kreen's voice came an image of a secluded spot between two hills not far to the east.

"I grieve with you," the elf warrior said. "But you did what you had to, like a true warrior. Come with me to the desert and live with the Jura-Dai."

Jedra shook his head. All is not what it seems, he mind-sent. He sent the image that Kitarak had given him and said, Meet us there tonight.

Sahalik gave nothing away. "As you wish," he said, nodding.

Jedra pushed past him and the other gladiators who crowded around to see the body, but one of the psionicists who guarded the gladiators, a stocky, gray-haired, no-nonsense sort of woman, stopped him before he reached the tunnel to the other side of the ziggurat.

"She's dead," Jedra told her.

"I'll determine that," she replied. She touched her hand to Kayan's forehead, then to the bloody wound in her chest. She frowned, perhaps sensing that something wasn't quite right, but at last when she could find no sign of life she said, "Yes, you seem to have done the job. Where are you taking the body?"

"Out into the desert," Jedra replied. "To give her a decent burial."

"Scavengers will get her within a day no matter how deep you dig," the woman said. "You'd be better off letting us bury her here."

She said it kindly, but an image formed in Jedra's mind of a mass grave, a pit full of decaying bodies, most of them slaves who had died on the ziggurat. He shuddered at the thought of Kayan lying among them, even if Kitarak couldn't revive her body.

"No," he said. "She's mine, and I'll take care of her." He pushed past the woman, following the torch-lit corridor beneath the ziggurat until he emerged out the other side, then he marched straight on through the nearly deserted city and out the caravan gate. The guards there gave him no trouble over leaving the city with a dead body in his arms; in fact, when they saw who he was and whom he carried, one of them laughed and held out his hand to the other, saying, "Hah, I win. Pay up."

The rendezvous spot was at least three miles out of town. Jedra found it easily enough, but he ached in every muscle by the time he got there. He'd tried levitating Kayan's body, but the drain on his energy was worse that way than if he simply carried her, so he'd finally bowed to necessity and slung her unceremoniously over his shoulder, holding her legs against his chest and letting her head and arms dangle over his back.

She hadn't begun to stiffen yet. Jedra didn't know if that was normal or if Kayan had done something to prevent it before she had... vacated her body, but when he laid her on the ground he was glad that she didn't stay folded up in the position in which he'd carried her. He arranged her on her back with her arms folded over her chest, then sat down on a rock beside her to wait for Kitarak and Yoncalla and Sahalik to arrive.

The crystal at his neck felt warm against his skin. He wanted to enter it himself and see how Kayan was doing, but he knew that would be dangerous. The crystal itself might be dangerous, but while he was inside with her he couldn't guard their bodies, either, and they could both wind up dead in the real world. That might prove to be merely an inconvenience if Kitarak could do the same trick for them both that he evidently had done for Yoncalla, but Jedra was still not convinced.

It felt strange, sitting beside his lover's body while the sun slowly tracked its way down the western sky, not knowing whether to grieve at her death or rejoice at her narrow escape. He settled for simply waiting; he would have plenty of time later to do whatever seemed appropriate.

Kitarak and Yoncalla arrived just before dark. Jedra heard them coming before he saw them. The former immortal was evidently less than pleased with his new body; he cursed a steady streak of unfamiliar epithets as they worked their way through the uneven terrain, and Kitarak occasionally said things like, "It was the best body I could get you at the time." and "Be glad I didn't put you into a kank."

The tohr-kreen rounded the flank of the hill. "Ah, there you are," he said. "And Kayan as well, in both her separate states. Good." He walked up to Jedra and extended a lower hand. "It is good to see you again. Many belated thanks for your rescue, and my apology for taking so long to return the favor."

"Just so long as you can revive her," Jedra said, squeezing the tohr-kreen's chitinous claw.

"If she made it into the crystal as I directed her to, then I can."

Yoncalla came stumping up on his short legs, panting for breath, and said, "Don't sound so smug about it, bug-face. You're good, but you didn't exactly solve all my problems." He looked Jedra up and down and said, "You could, though. That's a decent body you've got. I'll take it."

"You will do no such thing," Kitarak said. To Jedra he said, "Don't worry. I taught him our language and how to mindspeak, but I didn't teach him how to transfer himself from body to body."

"He's afraid I'll get loose and take over all of Athas again," Yoncalla said. He shook his head sorrowfully and added, "Not that I'd want this sorry excuse for a world. You certainly weren't exaggerating when you described it to me, were you boy?"

"Um, no," Jedra said, uncomfortable with speaking to the immortal in a body he'd seen killed two weeks earlier. To Kitarak he said, "I would have thought he'd know how to make the transfer already."

Kitarak shook his head. "The people of his time knew how to store the mind in specially made crystals, but it was tinkercraft, not psionics, that allowed them to do it, and they never mastered the reverse process. You need psionics to merge the mind with the body again."

"You mean there's actually something we can do better now than the ancients could?" Jedra asked incredulously.

"Don't be deceived by appearances," Kitarak said. "Progress never stops entirely, even in the midst of degeneration. We may not be as civilized as the ancients, but our medical abilities are far better than anything available before."

Yoncalla snorted. "That depends on your point of view. Your precious psionic medicine made me a dwarf." To Jedra he said, "What do you want for it?"

"What?" Jedra asked.

"Your body. If I can't take it, then I'll buy it from you. How much do you want?"

Jedra blushed, as if the immortal had suggested something indecent, as indeed he might have. The concept was too new for Jedra to know for sure, but the very idea seemed revolting. "It's not for sale," he said. "I'm not for sale."

"Sure you are," Yoncalla said. "Everybody has a price."

Jedra couldn't imagine enough wealth to make him trade his own body for a dwarf's. But some people might. And others-maybe even Yoncalla-would no doubt murder for a new body. What kind of nightmare were they about to loose on this already-grim world? Jedra said to Kitarak, "I'm just beginning to realize how dangerous this thing we've discovered is. Maybe we should bury these crystals back in the rubble where we found them." And Yoncalla with them, he added psionically, so the immortal couldn't hear him.

"Before we revive Kayan?" Kitarak asked. When Jedra spluttered for an answer, he said, "Your moral objection rests on shaky ground, doesn't it?"

It did at that. Could Jedra deny everyone else the opportunity to escape death after he had used the knowledge to rescue his love? Not and remain the kind of person he wanted to be. But neither could he let Kayan spend the rest of eternity imprisoned in a crystal, knowing he could save her.

"Of course we should revive Kayan," Jedra said. "She's counting on us. But nobody else knows this ability exists. Maybe we should keep it that way."

Yoncalla laughed. "Impossible, boy. I tried to suppress life-defiling magic, and look at how much success I had." He waved his arms to encompass the barren hillside.

Kitarak turned his head so a faceted eye faced Yoncalla. "Your people were responsible for this?"

"Uh... indirectly," Yoncalla said nervously.

"You will tell me about it. I and many others are still trying to repair the damage you did."

"I didn't do anything," Yoncalla protested. "I tried to stop it. It was-"

"Wait a minute," Jedra said. "Let's revive Kayan first. Then we can save the world."

"You are right," Kitarak said. "First things first." He bent down over Kayan and placed all four hands on her body. A soft blue glow spread from them into her, and her slack muscles began to tighten again. The ugly red wound over her heart closed, and the color came back to her skin. "Good," Kitarak said. "She prepared for this. She stopped her body's life processes before you did, so your sword wound merely caused local damage. The rest of her is still fine." He continued running his hands back and forth over her, coaxing her body into life again. Finally she shuddered once all over, and her chest began to rise and fall with regular breaths.

Jedra nodded. He felt a certain reluctance after what had happened to him before in the crystals, but his desire to see Kayan again-and to rescue her if she was in danger-was far stronger. "It may take me a while to find her," he said, "but if we don't come out soon, you'd better come after us. We may be in trouble."

Yoncalla said, "You fear another mad immortal?"

Jedra looked at him. Even in a dwarf body, the immortal looked smug. The wild look in his eyes made him appear a little crazy yet, too.

"You learn to fear everything in this world," Jedra said. He fingered the crystal around his neck. "Even the other worlds within it."

Yoncalla laughed. "The storage crystals follow the rules of their creators," he said. "This one may be completely different from the ones you have visited before."

"That's encouraging," Jedra said. He lay down on the ground so his body wouldn't topple over when he lost conscious control of it, and he concentrated on the crystal. He tried to mindlink with it, pushing at the barrier between himself and Kayan until it eventually gave way.

He found himself in a brightly lit forest. Not as bright as Yoncalla's world, but the sunlight streaming through the wide leaves was brighter than the reddish glow that fell on Athas. It made yellow streaks in the mist that rose from the damp ground, ground on which a thick carpet of deep green moss grew. Jedra took a couple steps and felt it compress beneath his feet, giving him a springy, almost jaunty gait that made him smile even though he still held himself alert for trouble.

He heard water flowing nearby. Water, and a voice raised in song. Kayan's voice. Jedra walked toward her beneath the trees, bouncing with each step, until he came to the edge of the stream. He stood atop a short cliff above a wide pool; it was maybe ten feet straight down to the water. And in that pool, glowing in the unfiltered sunlight, floated Kayan. The water was perfectly clear; Jedra could see the surface only by the waves Kayan made as she swept her arms out in front of her and scissored her legs lazily, pulling herself slowly through it. Her armor and underclothing lay in a pile on a flat rock a few feet upstream from Jedra.

"Hello!" he called to her, surprised that he could speak with such a sight before him.

She flinched, sending a big ripple out in a ring around her. Then she looked up and said, "You came for me."

"I did."

"Come on the rest of the way," she said, grinning mischievously.

"Into the water?" Jedra looked for a path down to the edge of the pool, but he saw none. The pool itself looked far deeper than he was tall; Kayan seemed to be floating just fine in it, but he had no assurance that he would fare as well. "I'll come to the edge for you," he said. "How do I get down there?"

"Jump," she said. "It's all or nothing in this world."

"Oh? You've explored it?"

"I did better than that. I made it."

"You made it? How?"

She leaned back in the water and pushed herself along with her hands. Swirls of light and shadow played across her body as she moved. "It was empty when I got here," she said. "Dark, with nothing to stand on. So I wished for a sun, and ground, and when I got that I wished for the rest. Do you like it?"

Jedra pulled his eyes away from her long enough to take in the stream flowing over the rocks at the head of the pool, the trees with their long branches full of wide, parasol leaves, and now that he looked for them, the birds flitting from branch to branch. "like it?" he asked. "It's beautiful. I can't believe I'm wearing this whole thing around my neck."

He looked back at Kayan, who had turned over and now pushed herself along on her stomach with gentle kicks of her legs. "Me, either," she said.

Jedra felt uncomfortable watching her suspended in the clear water, with so much seeming emptiness below. "Aren't you afraid of falling to the bottom?" he asked her.

She laughed. "The water holds me up. I don't know if this is something I made up too, or if I could do this out in the real world, but either way it's fun. Come on, try it." She stopped pushing herself through the water and beckoned to him with both hands.

Just in time for Kayan to splash another face-full of water on him.

"Hey!" he yelled, windmilling his arms in an attempt to stay afloat. The water was cool against his bare skin.

"Hey, yourself," she said, giggling and splashing him again.

She was doing it on purpose. Well, two could play that game. Jedra could hardly see through his wet eyes, but he slapped the water in her direction and was rewarded with a scream of surprise. She splashed him again, but he protected his eyes with his arm this time. She was close; when he saw a white leg shimmer beneath the water he held his breath while he ducked under and caught it, then tugged her under with him.

They both bobbed to the surface again, but this time Jedra reached up and took her in his arms, drawing her close to him. They eyed one another from inches away, both grinning now, and Jedra said, "Kiss me or I'll pull you under again."

"If you don't kick your legs, you'll-yeow!" They bobbed back beneath the surface before she could finish, but Jedra got the idea. He let her go and began to scissor his legs and move his arms back and forth the way he'd seen her do, and this time when they bobbed back to the surface, their heads stayed above water.

Kayan leaned forward and kissed him anyway. "I love you," she murmured.

"And I love you," Jedra said.

She closed her eyes. "I think that's the first time you've ever said that to me."

"I've said it hundreds of times," he told her. "Just not with words."

"I suppose you have," she said. She grinned again and moved closer, brushing her body against his. "You want to say it again?"

Later, after the cool water had drained all the heat from their bodies and they had climbed up the bank to soak up sunlight on the flat rock where Kayan's clothing lay, Jedra said, "Kitarak is probably getting worried about us. I hate to leave, but if we don't go out soon, he'll come in after us."

Kayan laughed. "I'd love to toss him in the water, too, but I suppose that can wait for later. Let's go see what he's done to my poor body."

Jedra winced. "I'm the one who did the damage. He's the one who fixed it."

Kayan squeezed Jedra's hand. "You did the only thing you could to save both of us. Don't torture yourself about it. Just don't make a habit of it, either, all right?"

Jedra smiled weakly. "All right."

"So then, let's go."

"How do we get out of here?"

"Hmm. I hadn't thought of that. This is my world; I suppose we could do it just about any way we want. How about... hmm." She stood up and walked across the springy moss to the base of a tree, grasped the stub of a broken-off branch that stuck out at waist level, and pulled on it. An oval door swung outward, revealing a dark interior sprinkled with stars. Kayan held out her hand. "This way."

Jedra got up and walked over to her. When he took her hand, she stepped through the doorway in the tree, and when he took the single step to follow her he felt a moment of disorientation and found himself lying on the ground on the hillside again. He sat up and looked over at Kayan, now little more than a shadow in the deepening night.

Kayan? he asked.

Here.

He was glad he was sitting on the ground; the relief that flooded through him would have sent him there anyway. He took Kayan's shoulders in his hands and pulled her up, holding her to him in a fierce hug. Their armor got in the way-it had never been removed in the real world- but he didn't care. He was holding the real Kayan, whole once again.

Kitarak stood beside them, his faceted eyes reflecting starlight. "Well," he said when their hug showed no sign of ending soon, "are you all right?" Kayan leaned back away from Jedra and patted herself on the sides and chest. "Everything feels like it's in the right place," she said.

"You can always go back into your crystal if you'd rather," Kitarak told him.

"No," Yoncalla said quickly, lifting his head. "Not that. This body isn't mine, and this world isn't paradise, but at least it's real."

"You should try the world Kayan made," Jedra said, reaching up to the crystal at his neck. "It's beautiful."

Kayan shrugged. "Actually, it's a lot like yours. I made the water a little warmer so I could get into it and pull myself around with my hands, but otherwise I just copied a stream and a pool like I'd already seen in your world."

"Swimming," the immortal said.

"What?"

"You were swimming. I do it all the time. Or did. I don't suppose there's enough water to fill a bathtub in this world anymore."

"Bathtub?" Jedra asked.

Kayan laughed. "We still have them in the palace."

Yoncalla didn't smile. "When I ruled here, even the peasants had bathtubs. And water flowed in mighty rivers over the surface of the land."

Kitarak said, "Many of us have dedicated our lives to bringing those days back to Athas. You would be a powerful addition to our team, since you know firsthand what we are trying to re-create."

"Not in a dwarf's body, I won't," Yoncalla said.

Kitarak rasped his arms against his thorax in agitation. "I will try to find you something better," he said, "but I will not become a necromancer for your benefit."

"There are plenty of bodies left over from every gladiator game," Yoncalla said, "like that big elf who fought so well. Why didn't you get me a body like his?"

A sudden chill ran down Jedra's spine. "What big elf?" he asked. "Not Sahalik?"

"Was that his name?" Yoncalla said. "I wasn't paying much attention until after I saw how good he was. If he hadn't slipped in a pool of blood, he would probably have won."

Jedra looked to Kitarak. "Was it Sahalik?"

Kitarak nodded his insectile head. "I'm sorry. He fought gloriously, but as Yoncalla said, he slipped, and..."

"And he's dead? Just like that?"

"That is the way of the world," Kitarak said. "At least for now. Perhaps in time, if we succeed in bringing back the riches we once had, we can use these crystals to conquer death for everyone, but unfortunately we were too late for Sahalik."

Jedra sank back to the ground. Sahalik couldn't be dead. He was too mean to die. Mean and cocky and self-confident-and lately, at least to Jedra, compassionate as well. And he was next in line to be chief.

"What about the Jura-Dai?" Jedra asked. "What will become of them?"

Kitarak shook his head. "Life in the desert is unpredictable. They may survive to become a great tribe once again, or they may not, but their story is their own. Our future lies down a different path."

"Does it?" Kayan asked. "And what path is that?"

Kitarak swiveled his head toward her. "Am I making an unwarranted assumption? I had thought that you would join us in our attempt to transform Athas into paradise again. With a little more training, you could be among our most powerful allies yet."

"Could we, now?" Kayan asked teasingly. To Jedra, she mindsent, What do you think? Is that what you want to do?

He could sense her eagerness. She was taunting Kitarak just for the fun of it, but she wanted what he offered. Even though she could retreat to her own private paradise whenever she wished, she wanted to bring it about in the real world instead. And so, Jedra realized, did he. He wanted more than just a pretty world; he wanted to upset the system of sorcerer-kings and templars and nobles and the abuse of power that led to slaves and lovers fighting in the gladiatorial arena for others' entertainment. He wanted to build a whole new society where nobody lacked food or shelter, and where everyone had a chance to succeed at whatever they wanted to do.

Sure I want to, he replied. More than anything else. Except spend the rest of my life with you, of course. That could be a long time, if we use these crystals of yours,

I'm sure. He drew her toward him and kissed her. He knew their lives would not be perfect from here on out. Kayan had once told him that there were no happily-ever-afters in this world, and he had seen enough to understand the wisdom in the elves' credo, "Hope for the best but expect the worst, that way all your surprises will be pleasant." But for just an instant as they kissed, there in the desert with their mentor once again at their sides and their future dedicated to a worthy cause, all the cares of the world vanished in an eternal moment of glory.