The Darkness Before the Dawn

Chapter Four

Jedra looked down at the insectile beast. It was the biggest thri-kreen he'd ever seen, easily ten feet long from the end of its abdomen to the top of its head, with its upper four appendages adapted for grasping and its lower legs long and double-jointed for running or leaping. Its neck was nearly two feet long. Only its head seemed small, and that only in comparison to the rest of its body. It was oblong, with jet-black compound eyes sticking out bulbously on either side and powerful mandibles in front.

Something about its shape didn't seem quite right, though. Jedra hadn't paid much attention to thri-kreen when he'd lived in the city-it was best just to give them plenty of room-but this one seemed subtly different. A bigger cranial bulge behind the eyes, maybe, and a narrower face, if that glistening expanse of hard exoskeleton could be called a face.

Strapped to the creature's back was a pack proportioned to the thri-kreen's large size. Jedra could have fit inside the bag, and there would have been room for Kayan on the wooden frame that extended below it. They would have had to empty it first, though; the pack bulged with unknown contents, and the frame was festooned with hardware. Cooking pots, the two multi-bladed heads of a gythka-without the usual long pole between them-some kind of curved throwing weapon with spikes sticking out of it, and more things that Jedra didn't recognize had all been tied to it. Jedra doubted if he could even lift the pack, much less carry it anywhere. Thri-kreen must be strong.

And rich. Most of the stuff was made of metal.

The creature became aware of their presence. It shuddered, trying to lift the arm that Kayan still touched, but it couldn't. The mandibles opened, clicked shut, then they opened again and a faint, croaking voice said, "Water."

"Sorry," Kayan said, backing away. "We don't even have enough for ourselves."

"Water," the creature croaked again. It tried again to move, this time managing to raise its head a few inches. Its multifaceted eyes seemed to fix on Kayan, then on Jedra. "I know... where is... water," it said. "You give me... yours... then I get more... for all of us."

Jedra was still in shock over the complete wreckage of his expectations. He had come here expecting to find help, but now he found himself being asked for it instead. His beautiful city, with open fountains and food enough for weeks, had turned out to be the delirious ravings of a dying thri-kreen. He had doomed himself and Kayan to the same fate.

Unless the thri-kreen was telling the truth. Could it know where to find water in this ancient city? "Tell us where it is," Jedra said, "and we'll go get it."

The thri-kreen laid its head back on the ground. "Never reach it," it said. "Water is... underground. Must work... mechanism."

"I can use a pump," Jedra said. The thri-kreen shuddered the whole length of its body. "Not this one," it said. "Must know... principle. Suction head... not enough... need more differential... priming valve... air squeezer..." The words trailed off and it lay still.

She shook her head. "It's delirious."

"No." The thri-kreen lifted its head again, and even managed to prop itself up with an arm. "I am... rational. I can reach... more water... if you help me." Kayan stepped back out of the creature's hearing, pulling Jedra along by his sleeve. "It's desperate," she whispered to him. "It'll say anything to get our water."

Jedra looked back at the enormous mantis, its black eyes reflecting no readable emotion as it watched them decide its fate. "Yes," he whispered to Kayan, "but that doesn't mean he's lying, does it?"

"What, you believe it knows where there's a well? Why didn't it use it before?"

Jedra noticed she was saying "it" rather than "he" in reference to the thri-kreen. Was she trying to keep from thinking of it-of him-as a fellow intelligent being? Jedra couldn't do that. He didn't want to do that. He said, "Maybe he collapsed before he could get there."

"Hah. It seems pretty unlikely that it'd get this close and then give up. I think it's lying."

The setting sun cast long shadows among the broken stones littering the courtyard. Jedra wondered how they would find their way back out of this maze with only one moon and the stars to guide them. And where would they go if they did?

"So you want to just leave him to die?" he asked.

She sighed. "What else can we do? I wasn't lying; we don't have enough water for ourselves."

Jedra nodded. "Then why are we whispering? To spare his feelings?"

Kayan clenched her fists. "I-" I don't care about- You 're a healer. You could no more watch him die than you could kill him yourself with this spear. Jedra hefted the b'rohg's weapon for emphasis. You 're trying to talk yourself into it, but it's not working.

Don't go putting words in my mouth, Kayan said. I could let it die in an instant if I had, to. I'm just trying to decide if I have to.

Jedra pulled off his pack and took his waterskin from it. There was only a swallow left, hardly enough to gurgle when he shook the skin. Kayan's waterskin held no more than his, he knew. I don't think it's really going to make much difference, he said. You said it yourself; we don't have enough water to do us any good anyway. But a thri-kreen doesn't need much water to survive. What toe have left could revive him, and he could help us find more. He talks like he knows this place; who knows, maybe there really is a well.

Maybe. And maybe it just wants us to revive it so it can use us for food They eat elves, remember? I'll bet it wouldn't turn down half-elf, or even human in its present state. I don't sense any danger from him, Jedra said. Not even when I try to imagine him healthy again. He tried to think about it logically, though. Thri-kreen were carnivores, true enough. Is there any way to

tell psionically if he's telling the truth? he asked.

She nodded. Yes, if you know how to do it. Unfortunately, that's not one of my skills.

Oh.

Just one more reason why we need a master to train us. With our combined power we should be able to find out what he had for breakfast three years ago, but we don't know how.

Jedra sloshed his waterskin. Then we'll have to do it without psionics.

Kayan stared past his shoulder at the insectile creature. It stirred feebly, then quieted again. Finally she shook her head. I don't know how I let you talk me into these things, but all right, let's try it. We certainly don't have much to lose.

When the thri-kreen saw them returning with their waterskins, it croaked, "Your generosity... will be returned... a thousandfold."

"I'll settle for full packs and a guide out of the desert," Jedra said as he held the waterskin up to the thing's mandibles. It took him a moment to figure out how to pour the water without spilling any, but there was no hurry. He dribbled a few drops at a time into the creature's hard mouth and let them run down the back of its throat.

When his waterskin was empty he took Kayan's and poured its contents into the thri-kreen's thirsty mouth as well, then handed the empty skin back to her. She held it up to catch the last drops on her tongue, then put it away in her pack.

They didn't have to wait long for the water to take effect. The thri-kreen lay back for a couple of minutes while the pulsations in its abdomen grew stronger, then slowly, deliberately, it put its four hands down on the ground and pushed itself erect. Its backpack teetered precariously, but the creature used its upper two arms to steady the load while it came to its feet.

He held the spear ready. Not quite pointed toward it-he didn't want the creature to think he was challenging it-but he made sure he could bring the stone point to bear quickly if he had to.

Get ready to link, he sent to Kayan, then aloud he said, "You should know that we can stop you psionically as easily as we revived you, if that becomes necessary."

The thri-kreen opened and closed its mandibles with a clicking sound. "Commendable," it said. Its voice was much richer now, deeper and with more volume. "One should always be prepared. However, I am not thri-kreen, as you have mistakenly assumed. I am tohr-kreen. Related, but more... civilized. We do not harm other intelligent creatures."

I've heard of them, Kayan mindsent. They're like priests or something. Loners. They don't come into cities much, and they're not nearly as aggressive as regular thri-kreen.

"Good," Jedra said aloud. He lowered the spear a few inches. "Do you have a name?"

"Kitarak," the tohr-kreen said. The name was more clicks than anything, but it fit a human tongue well enough.

"I'm Jedra," Jedra said, "and this is Kayan."

"Charmed," Kitarak said. "Or not, as the case may be. You are psionicists, rather than mages."

Jedra wasn't sure if that was supposed to be a joke. "Uh, right," he said. "So if you're civilized, you'll stick to your bargain. We gave you the last of our water; it's time you showed us this well of yours."

The tohr-kreen clacked his mandibles again. "Ah yes, the well," he said. "A deep subject. Come." He turned to the right and began walking through the rubble with a quick, darting stride.

For someone who had only minutes before been dying of dehydration, Kitarak could move fast. It was all Jedra and Kayan could do to keep up. Occasionally they lost sight of him behind a large boulder or the remnant of a building, but fortunately his enormous pack squeaked with every step he took, so they could home in on the noise even when they couldn't see him. At last the noise stopped, however, and they came cautiously around a corner to see him lowering his pack to the ground and bending over a pile of stones at the base of a relatively well-preserved building. It still had two walls, at any rate, and part of a third.

The other buildings around them were in even better shape. They were much larger, too; some of them rose five or six stories. Jedra looked around at their placement, and realized they were standing in the same spot where the courtyard fountain had been in their psionic vision.

The tohr-kreen began removing the piled-up stones. With his four arms, that didn't take long; by the time Jedra and Kayan had arrived and removed their own packs, he had exposed a piece of machinery of some sort, Jedra recognized a pump handle and spout, but that was about the only thing he recognized. Three more levers stuck out of a flat plate on the ground, and a set of toothed gears connected a two-handed crank to a vertical shaft that also went into the ground beside the levers.

Finding machinery amid such ruins was surprise enough, but Jedra was even more astonished when he realized that everything but the pump handle was made of metal. If he could carry even one of those levers or gears back to Urik, he could name his price from any weaponsmith in town.

"How did this manage to survive the scavengers?" he asked.

Kitarak twisted his long neck so first one eye, then the other, looked toward Jedra. With their multiple facets, it was impossible to tell just what he was looking at. "It is worth more as a pump," he said. "Those of us who know how to use it are careful to hide it from those who don't." He worked the pump handle up and down a few times, bringing forth a squeak of rusty metal but no water, then he pulled one of the levers beside it toward himself and bent over to spin the crank with his lower set of arms. The gears squeaked, too, but the shaft turned, and deep underground something vibrated.

"The water is too deep to pump directly," Kitarak said while he worked the crank. "Atmospheric pressure will only raise water thirty-five feet at this elevation. So we must pressurize the containment vessel to provide more lift."

"Right," Jedra said. He hadn't understood a word of what Kitarak had said. He looked over to Kayan, but she merely shrugged her shoulders as well.

Kitarak went on without pause. "Unfortunately the cistern leaks after ail these many centuries, so I must pump fast to keep it pressurized. In another century or two, I fear someone will have to descend into the tank itself to replace the seals."

"In another century?" Jedra asked incredulously. "You seriously think this thing will last that long?"

"Why not?" Kitarak replied. "It has lasted until now. I and other travelers have had to repair the handles, and once a valve stuck on the lifting piston, but other than that-"

Kitarak bent down farther and switched from his lower arms to his upper ones on the crank. "It is tinkercraft," he said. "An ancient discipline, lost to time for all but we few scholars who struggle to keep it alive."

Kayan had been watching silently the whole time. Now she spoke up. "I've heard of it. It's the opposite of magic. Or of psionics for that matter. Using mechanisms to replace sentient beings. Some say it helped bring on the destruction of Athas."

Kitarak stopped cranking for a second. The below-ground vibration stopped as well, and now they could hear a faint hissing from around the base of the levers. Then Kitarak resumed cranking. "Not so," he said. "Not so to all your points, except possibly the first. Magic is a lazy attempt to duplicate tinkercraft without the hardware. What magicians don't understand is that every action has an opposite and equal reaction. Every act of creation is an act of destruction. Each spell they employ uses life-force, which is then gone forever. It is magic that destroyed Athas. Not tinkercraft."

Kayan looked like she might have argued the point, but just then the pipe began to gurgle. "Ah, we have built up enough head!" Kitarak said happily. "Now we can help it along a bit." Switching to his lower arms on the crank again, he used his upper ones to work the conventional pump handle. "Get your waterskins ready," he said. "When it comes, it will be a deluge."

Jedra and Kayan quickly dropped their packs and dug out their waterskins. They were none too quick; Jedra had just gotten his unstoppered when a fount of rusty water gushed from the spout, then a heavy stream of clear, cold water splashed onto the rocks. He and Kayan thrust their waterskins beneath the stream side by side, holding them there until they filled completely. Water!

They splashed it over themselves and drank thirstily from their cupped hands.

Kitarak pulled back on another of the levers and stopped pumping. The flow dwindled to a stop while he rummaged in his pack for his own waterskin-water-skins, it turned out. He had five of them, each twice the size of Jedra or Kayan's. "If you don't mind..." he said, holding the skins out to the two of them, then he turned back to the pump and the crank. He threw the lever forward again, and water flowed once more.

Jedra and Kayan filled Kitarak's waterskins as well, then drank their fill and splashed each other with the remainder. At last, soaking wet and exuberant at their success, they began splashing Kitarak as well.

"Hold!" he cried out. "What are you doing? Did I ask for a shower?"

"Yes," Kayan said, giggling. "I'm sure I heard you. Right, Jedra?"

"Of course," he said, scooping a double handful of water and throwing it over the tohr-kreen's iridescent back.

"Stop that!" Kitarak said. He stopped cranking and pumping, but the water continued to flow, and Jedra and Kayan continued to splash him and each other.

"What wasteful creatures!" Kitarak said, backing away. "I suppose you will wish to bathe next."

Jedra laughed. "No thanks. We did that a couple of nights ago."

The water finally quit running out of the spout, so Jedra and Kayan backed away and sat side by side on a rock, laughing and wringing the water from their robes. "I can't believe it," Kayan said. "We actually found water here. Who would have thought?"

Kitarak's entire body quivered, spraying water droplets everywhere. "Did I not promise you?" he asked.

"Well, sure," Kayan said, wiping the spray from her face. "It just didn't seem very likely, that's all, especially when we found you collapsed there."

"Understandable," Kitarak said. "But as you have seen, appearances can be deceiving." He stepped over to his pack, which leaned up against one of the surviving walls of the pump house, and untied a many-bladed gythka head from the bundle of tools below the bag. Normally a long pole separated the two wicked blades, but this one had only a stub of a shaft, leaving barely room to grasp it. Not for long, though. Kitarak held it overhead, then spun it quickly, and with a hiss of sliding metal the shaft seemed to magically extend itself until it was nearly eight feet long.

Jedra backed uneasily toward the b'rohg's spear, which now seemed pitifully inadequate against the expanding gythka, but Kitarak paid no attention to him. The tohr-kreen bent down to his pack again and untied the curved, spiky throwing weapon, then stood and said, "Guard the pump. I will go hunt for food." Before Jedra or Kayan could reply, he leaped straight over the wall- nearly fifteen feet-and came down with a clatter on the other side. They heard him kick off again, then all was silent.

"What do you think?" Jedra asked. "Do you trust him?"

Kayan laughed. "Do we have a choice?" "We could make a break for it while he's gone."

Jedra had no answer for her. Tyr was the closest city they knew of, and it was at least five days away. They had water enough now-barely-but no food.

Kitarak had said he would hunt for some. He'd kept his promise about the water; maybe he would do the same with food.

As they waited for him to return, they heard occasional animal squeals that suggested he was doing just that. Jedra tried following him psionically, but he couldn't see clearly on his own what the tohr-kreen was doing, and he didn't think it was important enough to link up with Kayan to try it. When the sun dropped below the horizon and Kitarak still hadn't returned, they flapped their robes to dry them before the night grew chilly, then settled into the protected corner of the pump house to take turns sleeping and standing guard.

Kitarak returned at dawn, bearing a rope from which dangled a slender, six-legged leathery kip at least a foot and a half long, a scaly z'tal lizard nearly that large, and a round, furry jankx as big as Jedra's head.

"Breakfast," Kitarak said nonchalantly, as if he had merely brought them an erdlu egg. He put Jedra and Kayan to work cleaning his kills while he set up another piece of tinkercraft from his pack. This was a metal grate surrounded by thin, curved mirrors that reflected sunlight from all sides onto it. He set the contraption in a shaft of light that slanted down into the well house from between two buildings across the way. The morning sun wasn't particularly hot yet, but when Kitarak placed a strip of jankx meat on the grate, it immediately began to sizzle.

"Solar collector," he explained proudly when he noticed Jedra eyeing the device. "Doubles as a telescope, though it's very hard to collimate. I have a better one at home."

"Ah," Jedra said, nodding as if he understood. Then he suddenly remembered his lightning glass and dug it out of his pack. "like this?" he asked, holding his treasure out to Kitarak.

He had picked up the curved piece of glass from the sand after a templar had called down a lightning bolt to kill a slave who had stumbled while bearing the templar's sedan chair. The glass made tiny upside-down images of things when he looked through it, and if he held it just right it would make a tiny spot of sunlight that burned anything he touched with it.

Kitarak took it from Jedra's hand and looked it over casually. "Ah, yes, a flake off the top of a fulgurite," he said. "Remarkably free of inclusions, too. Useful for starting fires, I suppose, but not optical quality, I'm afraid." He handed it back to Jedra and adjusted his stove.

Jedra tried to hide his disappointment as he put the glass away. Dornal the mage had sold him into slavery to obtain that piece of 'fulgurite.' Certainly it held more value than Kitarak thought.

Breakfast soon took his mind off anything but food. They ate the whole jankx, and most of the kip as well. Kitarak adjusted the mirrors and cooked the z'tal more slowly while they ate, drying the thin strips of lizard meat rather than roasting them. When it was done he split it three ways and returned the cooker and his weapons to his pack. Then the three of them piled the boulders up around the wellhead again.

When the site had been returned to its former abandoned-looking state, Kitarak pulled on his pack and said, "We have water and food; now we hunt for treasure."

"Treasure?" asked Kayan. "What sort of treasure could you find here?"

"Tinkercraft, of course," Kitarak said. He led off into the ruins, his pack once again squeaking with every step. He moved at a much more leisurely pace this time, poking around among the ruins whenever he found any hint that something might have survived the ravages of time. He stayed pretty much to the center of the city where the buildings were better preserved, and ventured inside any that still stood.

Jedra and Kayan followed along for lack of a better plan, but they soon grew bored with his explanations of how counterweighted door-opening mechanisms worked or how the rectangular holes in the interior walls meant the buildings had been centrally heated. When he entered one particularly well-preserved building-this one three stories high and still capped with most of an angled roof-Jedra and Kayan told him they would wait in the shade just inside the door. Kitarak didn't seem to mind; he wandered off into the gloomy interior, poking his head into every room and shuffling through the debris on the floor as if he were looking for a misplaced pair of sandals.

It was a big building. The room they were in was at least fifty feet across, and that was just the first of many. Jedra and Kayan sat on a stone bench beside the door and listened to Kitarak proceed farther and farther, until his footsteps could no longer be heard and the squeaking of his pack blended with the sigh of air moving through the doorways and windows of the immense structure.

He's certainly a strange one, isn't he? Jedra mindsent, even though he was certain Kitarak was out of earshot.

I don't see how it could have, Jedra said. Expanding gythka handles and stoves that cook with the heat of the sun are interesting devices, but they could hardly cause the destruction of the world.

I just know what I've been taught.

By mages, Jedra pointed out. The templars were the people who wrote the histories, but most of the templars were magic-users. Defiler mages at that, some of them anyway. Of course they aren't going to say magic caused it.

I suppose you're an expert on the subject, Kayan said, her eyes wide and angry.

Of course not, Jedra said, but Kitarak had a good point. We can see defiler magic taking life from the world every time it's used. It makes sense that a large enough spell, or enough small ones, could have turned the world into the desert we live in today.

And so could a big enough cookstove, couldn't it? Kayan stalked back outside the building.

Jedra winced at his stupidity. He'd just attacked the basis of her former life; no wonder she'd gotten mad. Why was it every time he tried to talk with her they wound up arguing instead? He wondered if he ought to go after her and try to patch things up, but he was afraid he'd just make an even bigger mess of it. Better to give her a little time to calm down.

He leaned back against the cool stone wall and closed his eyes, but a familiar sensation made him open them again almost immediately. Someone else was in the building with him.

Not Kayan, nor Kitarak either. When he concentrated he could sense them both, but this was a much fainter awareness, even fainter than Kitarak's had been when he had been dying of dehydration. Jedra hadn't noticed it until now because Kayan's presence had masked it.

It came from the far wall, or beyond it. He picked up his spear from where he had leaned it beside the door and walked toward the source of the sensation, stepping over the shattered remains of furnishings millennia old, until he came to the wall. Yes, beyond there. He backed up until he reached the long, dark hallway and stepped carefully down it, spear held ready. The presence was in the second room.

"Come out slowly," he said aloud. "I know you're in there."

The awareness didn't change, which was not surprising, weak as it was. Whoever was in there must be nearly dead. Jedra stepped to the door and peered inside. The room had no window, but enough light filtered in through cracks in the outer wall for him to see a smaller room than the one in front, only twenty feet or so long and maybe fifteen deep, with a wide stone workbench set against the wall all the way around. The stone had been cut perfectly flat and polished smooth, and at regular three-foot intervals atop the bench stood intricate rectangular frameworks of metal and crystal, now rusted and sagging under their own weight.

The awareness came from the near right corner, the one opposite the cracks in the walls. Jedra waited until his eyes adjusted to the dimness, then peered under the bench, expecting to see someone crouched there, but the space was empty. The bench itself held another of the metal frameworks, but nothing else.

There was definitely a presence of some sort in that corner, though. Jedra stepped closer and reached out to touch one of the crystals in the framework. It was about the size of his thumb and milky white in color, one of eight identical crystals mounted at the corners of an open cube. They had been mounted there, at any rate; three of the top four had fallen off after their supports had rusted through, and now lay on the stone slab.

The presence definitely came from the crystals-four of them, anyway-two in the framework and two on the table. The other four, as well as all the others in the room, were just crystals, like ones Jedra had seen worn countless times for ornamentation or used as magical talismans.

Jedra wondered what had been done to them to make them register to his psionic sense as though they were alive. Had some ancient magician stored life energy in them to power one of his spells? Jedra could hardly imagine a dead crystal holding much life energy, but maybe something happened when they were linked together, the way he and Kayan drew upon more power when they mindlinked than they could produce separately.

Or maybe the crystals were psionic. Jedra concentrated on one of them, but he didn't sense any contact. The mysterious life-force continued undisturbed.

The squeak of Kitarak's backpack and the scritch of clawed feet on stone came down the hallway.

"Kitarak," Jedra said when the tohr-kreen drew near, "I've found something in here."

The tohr-kreen stuck his bulbous head in the doorway. "Oh, those," he said when Jedra held up one of the crystals. "Yes, I saw them. Crystals. Hah. Magical foolery. They're nothing. Come see what I've found." He waved something metallic in one claw, then headed on out of the building into the light.

Kitarak was showing off his discovery to Kayan. It was a short tube with a piece of glass at one end, mounted on what looked like a wedge taken out of a small wheel. A tarnished mirror about the size of a coin stuck out of the top of the wedge, and another one was mounted on one side, right in front of the tube.

"It's a jernan," Kitarak said. "Part far-seer and part angulator. Used for determining northness."

"Determining what?" Kayan asked.

"Northness. One's position north or south on the surface of the planet."

"The what?"

"The planet. Athas. Our world."

"Oh."

"Athas is round," Kitarak said impatiently, sensing that his explanation was going astray somehow. His voice grew more abrupt, filled with clicks and buzzing. "You can tell where you are on the surface by measuring how high the sun is in the sky. That's called your northness. The ancients had a way of measuring eastness as well, which is the position around the globe in the direction it spins, but that depended upon accurate timekeepers, and we no longer-"

"Athas is round?" Kayan asked.

"Of course it-" Kitarak stopped. "Never mind." He held the piece of tinkercraft up to his compound eyes, then lowered it again. It had obviously been designed for humanoid eyes. "Never mind," he said again.

Their exploration took on a slower pace after that. Kitarak found a few more incomprehensible ancient artifacts, but they were all in bad repair. Jedra didn't even know what to look for, and after he discovered a nest of stinging insects in one pile of debris he no longer bothered to search.

By midday, he and Kayan had sought refuge from the heat inside one of the few buildings that still had a roof, while Kitarak went into another across a wide, relatively rubble-free street. The building they sheltered in had once been magnificent. Rows of columns ran down either side of a central aisle toward a raised dais at the end opposite the door. Pedestals between the columns had once held statues, now shattered into marble fragments on the floor. There were no benches or even large blocks to sit on, so Jedra and Kayan sat on the floor with their backs to a column, glad of the cool stone and the shade, but not only because of the heat. All those stone blocks outside reflected a lot of sunlight, and it was hard on the eyes.

They didn't speak to one another for a few minutes. Kayan leaned back against the column and closed her eyes, so Jedra dug into his pack and took out the crystals he had found earlier. Two of them still radiated their mysterious essence, but the third was just a dead stone. As far as he could tell it was just a regular crystal, like the ones people wore for luck.

He could use some luck. He put the other two crystals back, then removed one of the leather tie-downs from the side of his pack and wrapped it tightly around the dead stone, tying it snug so the crystal couldn't fall out. He hung it around his neck, adjusting the leather cord so the crystal rested in the hollow between his collarbones. He didn't feel any luckier now, but who could tell?

He leaned back against the column, his shoulder brushing Kayan's. The soft rustle of his clothing echoed quietly in the ancient building, but when he sat still he could hear the quiet murmurings of air moving through the open windows and doors, or the creak of stones shifting as they heated up under the relentless sun. It was eerie. Jedra imagined those sounds to be the ghosts of the former inhabitants, peering at him from just out of sight.

The longer he listened, the more nervous he became. Anything was preferable to this. He finally worked up his courage and said, "Are you still mad at me?"

Kayan opened her eyes. "I was never mad at you," she said automatically. She looked up at Jedra, then shrugged. "Well, all right, maybe a little. But not for long. I just don't like it when somebody comes up with a wild theory and then assumes that it's just as valid as all the knowledge that's been taught for centuries."

"Oh." Jedra thought that over for a minute or two. When the silence threatened to overwhelm him again, he said, "I'm not arguing, but isn't that where new knowledge comes from? People making up theories?"

She frowned. "Actually, I'm not sure if there can be any new knowledge. The ancients knew just about everything. We've forgotten a lot of it, but I think that's mostly for the good, considering what they did

"You really think that?" Jedra asked incredulously. "You think we're better off ignorant?"

"Maybe." She shrugged. "Ignorant of some things, anyway."

He tried to compose his thoughts. He didn't want to annoy her again, but this was a side of Kayan he had never suspected. She'd been so eager to find a mentor who could teach them more about psionics, he'd just assumed she would be eager to learn anything. "What about us?" he asked. "Our ignorance is dangerous. We've killed people because we don't know what we're doing when we merge our minds. Are you saying we shouldn't try to figure out how to control it?"

"We don't need to. Other people already know how. They can teach us."

"But what if they didn't?" Jedra insisted. "What if this were something brand new? Shouldn't we try to learn how to control it on our own?"

Kayan shifted her position on the unyielding floor.

"That's a nonsense question," she said. "Other people do know how to control it."

"I'm just saying 'what if?'."

"And I'm saying it's a pointless question. We need to find a psionics master, not speculate on what we'd do if there weren't any."

"I guess." Jedra picked up a bone-white fragment of a statue-a nose, it looked like, though the tip of it was missing-and turned it over in his hand. "Where do you suppose we ought to start looking?"

"Tyr is still the closest city," Kayan said.

Jedra nodded. "Tyr. Everything in my life seems to be pushing me to go there. I'm not sure I want to give in to it." "Why not?"

"I have a bad feeling about it."

She laughed. "You were headed there as a slave. That might color a person's attitude a bit."

Jedra laughed with her. "It might at that." His laughter dwindled away quickly, though, and he said, "I still have a bad feeling about it."

"We don't have to stay there," Kayan said. "We've got money; we could buy passage on a caravan to Altaruk or Gulg or Nibenay or somewhere."

"And hope the Jura-Dai don't decide to attack it," Jedra said. He tossed the nose across the central aisle, where it bounced off a column and shattered into even smaller fragments on the floor.

The rattling sound continued long after the pieces had come to rest, and it took a moment for Jedra to realize that he wasn't hearing ghosts. Kitarak was returning. The tohr-kreen ducked down to make it through the doorway, then took off his pack and rested it against the column beside the one Jedra and Kayan were using.

"Have any more luck?" Kayan asked him.

"None, regrettably," Kitarak said. He took one of his waterskins from his pack and drank a few sips-the first water they had seen him drink since they'd given him their own. When he was done he put the skin away and said, "I think this city is nearly mined out. It is too close to the hinterlands."

"Is that where you're from?" Jedra asked.

Kitarak's lower arms jerked suddenly and scraped against his thorax, producing a scritching sound. "I couldn't say."

Touchy subject? It didn't matter. They weren't going to the hinterlands anyway. Jedra said, "Kayan and I were just talking about our plans. Thanks to you we've got food and water enough to make it to Tyr, if we start this evening."

"Tyr?" Kitarak turned his head first left, then right. "What do you expect to find in Tyr?"

"A psionics master, we hope," Jedra said. "Or failing that, at least passage to another city where we might find one."

"Psionics?" Kitarak looked away. "You mentioned that before. Said you could stop me with it if I attacked you. Could you?"

"Yes," both Kayan and Jedra said in unison.

Kitarak clicked his mandibles. Laughter? "Prove it," he said.

"What?" Jedra reached out for his spear, but Kitarak stepped forward and pinned it to the floor with one of his clawed feet.

"Prove to me that you have this power."

"Why?" asked Kayan. She looked unblinkingly at Kitarak, and Jedra realized she was getting ready to use her healing power on him somehow. Or maybe she would do to him what she'd done to Sahalik.

"I wish to see it." "No, you don't," she said. "Trust me."

"Who said anything about traveling together?" asked Jedra.

Kitarak rasped his lower arms against his thorax again. The vibration it produced was unpleasant, ear-piercing. "You said you were going to Tyr. So am I. Unless you plan to take a less direct route than I, we will be traveling together."

What now? Jedra mindsent to Kayan.

I don't know. I'm not sure I want him traveling with us.

Me either, Jedra said. On the other hand, he knows the countryside, and I still don't get any feeling of hostility from him, even now. He'd probably be good to have along, if we can just convince him we're not lying about our power.

Kayan said, Hah. Convincing him won't be a problem; keeping him alive while we do it will be the trick.

Maybe not, Jedra said. He's not like Sahalik; we might not have to be quite so direct with him.

What do you have in mind?

He smiled. Well, we're in a ruined city already. What's one more ruin?

Aloud, he said, "All right. You want a demonstration, we'll give you a demonstration. Come on outside." He stood up, leaving the spear and his pack where they lay. He offered Kayan a hand up, and the two of them walked out into the street.

Kitarak left his pack inside as well. He stood beside them in the street, cocking his bulbous-eyed head this way and that, while Kayan and Jedra blinked to regain their vision in the sudden light.

Link up, Jedra sent. He took Kayan's hand in his own, remembering that physical contact had strengthened the link before.

The rush was like a wind blowing through them, spreading well-being through every cell of their bodies. They felt their minds merging again, felt themselves become a new being. With Kitarak so close by, they tried not to imagine themselves with any kind of physical body, lest their psionic wings or claws do him inadvertent damage before they could get clear. Instead, they concentrated on the city before them, bringing every stone and every shadow into sharp focus. This time, now that they had seen it with their own eyes, they saw it as it was now, rather than in its former glory.

It was still impressive. The tallest remaining tower, nearly six stories high, stood only four or five buildings away, halfway down the next block on the same street on which they stood. Jedra and Kayan turned toward it, stretching out with their power, letting it flow through them, upward and outward. They raised their hands to help direct it, palms out, arms slightly bent. They could almost feel the stone walls against their hands. A little more concentration, and they could feel the stone. They felt every crack, every joint, every rectangular window for the entire six stories on the side that faced them.

Then they pushed.

The building groaned. The massive wall resisted. Jedra and Kayan pushed harder, and slowly, inexorably, the wall tipped away from them. It didn't go over in one big slab; instead it buckled in the middle, and the top half, suddenly relieved of its support, broke into its constituent blocks and rained down like a sudden hailstorm.

The ground shook, and thunder rolled down the street. The lower half of the collapsing wall smashed through interior partitions as if they weren't even there, gutting the building, then twisting to the right as it toppled inward and knocking out the back wall as well. The whole building shuddered, and more stones fell. Then the third wall, the far one, crumbled away from the others and crashed down on the building behind it.

The fourth wall stood for a moment, a massive, six-story monolith with the ragged ends of floors sticking out from the side, then it tipped inward and did what the others failed to do: fell in one piece all the way to the ground.

Dust billowed up, obscuring the entire far end of the street. Jedra and Kayan struggled to keep their balance when the quake hit, and the renewed body awareness brought them out of their link.

They hadn't been merged long enough for the letdown to be as severe as before. They were able to stand and watch the dust cloud rise above the other buildings while they waited for the noise to die down enough to allow speech. It didn't die right away, though, and finally they realized why: The shaking had weakened the next building closer to them, and it was going down, too. This one was only three stories high-it was the one in which Jedra had found the crystals-but it fell with nearly as much impact as the first.

Kitarak didn't know they had only caused the first collapse directly; He turned toward them and shouted, "Stop it!"

Run! Kayan mindsent as she whirled around and did just that, dodging boulders and leaping through the rubble while the ground shook and more stones fell from the buildings all around them.

Kitarak was already in motion, but rather than sprinting down the street after her he ducked into the building they had just been inside. Jedra and Kayan's packs flew out the doorway, then Kitarak reappeared, dragging his own pack behind him.

Jedra grabbed both his and Kayan's packs and ran off after her. A section of cornice fell off the front of the building beside them and shattered, sending fragments everywhere. He felt a sting in the side of his right leg, but he kept running.

Kitarak passed him within twenty feet, leaping high on his powerful back legs even with his pack weighing him down. He ran all the way to the end of the block, through the intersection, and paused in the rubble beyond where the building on the right side of the street had already collapsed. Kayan stopped next to him, and so did Jedra a moment later. They turned around to watch the last of the buildings-including the one they had been resting in only a few minutes earlier-thunder to the ground.

Jedra was horrified at the destruction they had unleashed. True, the city was abandoned and nearly ruined anyway, but to see building after building destroyed because of something he did made him want to scream in frustration. He hadn't planned it this way. He couldn't let Kitarak know that, however. When the rumbling finally stopped, they stood together in stunned silence for a moment before Jedra said, "Was that enough of a demonstration for you?"

The tohr-kreen clicked his mandibles again and again, as if having trouble speaking. Finally, his voice still full of clicks and buzzes, he said, "You didn't have to do that! Throwing a single boulder across the street would have been enough!"

Kayan, picking up Jedra's cue, said, "We wanted to make sure there was no doubt."

Kitarak looked from them to the dust cloud-now drifting eastward on the breeze-and said, " 'Be careful what you ask for; you might get it.' I did ask, didn't I?"

"You did," Jedra still felt guilty, but if Kitarak wanted to take responsibility for their mistake, let him. Maybe it would keep him from demanding any more demonstrations. "So are you ready to leave for Tyr now?"

Kitarak turned his compound eyes toward Jedra. This time there was no doubt what emotion his expressionless face was hiding. "Whether or not I am ready," he said, "we must leave in any case."

"Why?" asked Jedra.

"Because you have destroyed the well."