by Ryan Hughes
The elves themselves registered in the vision as long, slender, silvery funnels reaching upward toward him. Jedra knew from previous experience in the slave caravan that if he flew down any of those funnels he would find himself mindlinked with the person at the base of it, or at least making preliminary contact. When he and Kayan had done this while mentally joined the funnels had been great wide things, and when they flew down one they found themselves seeing through the eyes and hearing through the ears of whomever they encountered, but Jedra couldn't do that alone. Many times he couldn't even recognize who he'd contacted, in which case he couldn't make his presence known, but if it was someone he knew then he could usually at least send them a message.
He stopped rising when the elf camp was a mere speck in the desert. Sahalik had gone east, so Jedra turned toward the golden apple the rising sun had become and began to move across the crumpled gray cloth of the dunes. He saw two more funnels a few miles out-Galar and Ralok, no doubt-but he didn't see any more beyond that. Sahalik had been moving pretty fast, though; he could have gone a long way in an entire night.
The air blew Jedra's robe into billowing folds behind him. The fringe at the edge of the mat flapped in the wind, too, but the mat itself only undulated a little. Jedra slowly began to relax, but he never let go his grip on the edge. He didn't think falling off in a psionic vision would be fatal, but he didn't know for sure, and it was a long way down....
After he had traveled for ten or fifteen minutes straight east, he began to wonder if he had missed his quarry. At the speed he was flying, he must have covered a full day's march and then some; if Sahalik were out here, he should have found him by now. Of course Sahalik might not have continued straight east. He had been in a panic, after all; he might have started running in circles for all Jedra knew. So he turned to the south and flew along in that direction for a few minutes, then turned west for just a mile or two, then back north again. He swept back and forth through the dreamscape, crisscrossing the desert in search of any hint of a silvery funnel, but he found nothing.
At last, exhausted from the effort, he turned back toward the elf camp, thinking that he might be able to rouse Kayan and the two of them might be able to search more thoroughly. The sun was considerably higher now, but he banked around and put it behind him, then swept back across the desert, keeping his eye out for the rock outcrop that would be the tents. But after he'd flown a few minutes and still not found it he began to wonder if he had overshot. Or possibly he had gone too far north or south; he'd zigzagged back and forth so much he really didn't know where he was anymore. Well this is silly, he thought. All I have to do is open my eyes and I'll be back in the tent. He tried it, but he found that he had to close his eyes first to even make the attempt, and when he opened them he was right back in the vision. If he swung his arms below the mat he didn't encounter tent floor, either, just more air.
Sure enough, now that he was looking for that instead of the rock outcrop, he could see it clearly to the south. He directed his mat toward it, faster now because he could feel himself growing tired from the extended psionic voyage, but when he drew closer he realized he I had made a mistake. This funnel didn't issue from the ground; it came from a source high in the sky. Jedra veered to the side and circled around it. It looked like a tangle of thorny vines, a dense knot of sharp points that said clear as words: Do not touch. Jedra wondered what it looked like in the real world. Was it a creature of some sort, or maybe another psionicist or wizard flying between cities on kings' business? Maybe those thorns were the psionic representation of magical wards.
The silvery vortex twisted around toward him. Jedra wasn't sure if he wanted to make contact, but whoever it was might have spotted Sahalik. Whether or not that person would deign to speak with Jedra was anybody's guess, but Jedra didn't suppose it would hurt to try.
He flew into the maw of the vortex. The mat bucked, and Jedra hung on tight, but then he felt the familiar sliding sensation as he fell into contact with the other mind, and-
Wham.
Intense rage, directed straight at Jedra's unprotected mind. Rage and some kind of force as well; it felt as if his head were suddenly full of pressure, as if it were going to explode at any second. Pain and terror accomplished what his imagination had not: he tumbled off his mat to land heavily on his side-right on top of Kayan.
That in turn did what his earlier shaking could not. Kayan cried out in panic and struggled to sit up, shoving Jedra aside and striking out with her hands at the same time as she directed some sort of psionic attack at him. Jedra ducked her blow, but he couldn't duck the wave of unreasonable panic that passed through him, a brief surge of terror as if he'd just realized he was about to die. The sensation momentarily paralyzed him, and Kayan's shove sent him tumbling off her to the floor of the tent.
"What do you think you're doing?" she demanded.
Shaking his head to clear it-he wasn't going to die after all, it seemed-Jedra sat up and said, "I was looking for Sahalik."
"By climbing all over me?" she asked sarcastically.
"No, no, I fell on you when the-whatever it was attacked me."
"The whatever it was?" Kayan rubbed her eyes and looked around the interior of the tent.
"Not here," Jedra protested. "I was in a psionic vision, searching for Sahalik. I couldn't find him, but I saw what I thought might be another psionicist, so I thought I'd ask if he'd seen him, but when I tried to make contact he attacked me."
"Not surprising, if you approached him like you did me," Kayan said. She glowered at him a moment longer, then she saw the cake waiting for her at the head of her mat and her expression softened a bit. She picked up the cake and took a bite of it. Around a mouthful of crumbs she said, "So why were you looking for Sahalik? You want a rematch?"
Jedra was getting a little upset at her caustic attitude, but he told himself she had just been awakened suddenly and had jumped to a false conclusion, so he would give her a few minutes to come around. "He's still missing," he told her, "and the elves are worried about him. They've delayed the morning march until they can find him."
She laughed. "Hah, good luck to 'em. He's probably halfway to the Ringing Mountains by now."
"What do you mean? What did you do to him?"
Kayan ate another bite of cake. She watched Jedra as she ate, as if sizing him up to see how much she wanted to tell him. When she swallowed, she simply said, "I used an old templar trick we sometimes used on prisoners and such to make 'em cooperative."
"What kind of trick?" Jedra asked, but Kayan only smiled coyly and took another bite of cake.
"What's this?" Jedra asked. "Are you going to start hiding things from me now?"
She looked away at the stitchery on the tent wall beside her. "Is it hiding things to protect you from yourself?" She looked back at him, her expression serious. "Jedra, every time I teach you something, you use it to get into trouble. We need somebody with some experience at this to help us before we start playing with dangerous abilities."
"You think so?" Kayan flipped her hair back behind her ears with a haughty shake of her head. "Try living in a woman's body for a dozen years, and then maybe I'll listen to your advice. In my experience, men don't take no for an answer unless you make it very clear you mean it."
"You certainly made it clear enough to Sahalik. The trouble is, now the whole tribe is afraid of us."
"Is that necessarily a bad-?"
A cry from just outside the tent interrupted her. It was in elvish, a single word that sounded like "Chimbu!" Neither Jedra nor Kayan knew what it meant, but other voices picked up the cry and soon the whole camp was shouting it.
"Maybe Sahalik has come back," Jedra said. He was about to get up to go see, but before he had risen more than a few inches off his sleeping mat something made a swooshing sound that drowned out even the elves' cries of alarm, and a thick rope edged with spines slashed through the tent. If Jedra had been standing it would have taken off his head, but as it was the rope
merely ripped away the top of the tent at the four-foot level. The remaining walls slumped to the ground like clothing taken off and dropped at day's end.
The sudden sunlight made Jedra squint, but a moment later the sun disappeared behind a triangular silhouette. Was that the top of the tent blowing away? No, the tent was over to the side, a small rag still dangling from the spikes at the end of the thick rope that issued from the base of the triangle. A quick twitch of the rope from side to side shook the tent free, and Jedra suddenly realized the rope was a tail, and the dark triangle was some kind of flying creature.
A loud boom rolled over the desert: the whip-crack of the thing's tail. Jedra revised his estimate of its size. The creature was enormous. It must have been a hundred feet across.
The elves were screaming in terror. Archers fired arrows at the thing, but the arrows seemed to slow just before they hit it, then fall back to the ground.
Over the cry of the elves, Kayan shouted, "That wasn't a psionicist you found while you were out looking for Sahalik, that was a cloud ray!"
Jedra felt a sinking feeling in his gut. "What's a cloud ray?" he asked, but he already knew the important thing: it was trouble.
Kayan confirmed it. "They're carnivorous, and they use psionic levitation to fly around looking for food. They normally leave people on the ground alone, but they hate other psionics users. When they encounter one, they almost always try to kill him."
Jedra looked at the creature again. It was mostly wing, with a thick ridge down the center between its bulging head and its whip tail. It was hard to tell with the glare of the sun directly behind it, but it looked like the underside was mostly white, blending into a light brownish green near the edges. Muscles rippled when it flapped its leathery wings. It couldn't have flown by just flapping alone-it was far too large and shaped wrong for that- but evidently that was how it maneuvered. It banked silently around, exposing the sun again. Jedra's eyes watered, and he sneezed.
"It hates psionicists? Then how do we fight it?" he asked, looking away.
"Not with longbows, that's for sure," Kayan said. The elves were figuring that out, too. Their arrows were doing more damage to the tribe when they fell back to the ground than to the cloud ray. The chief-standing among the warriors on a dune top-shouted something, and they tried firing over the top of the ray and letting their arrows fall on its upper surface, but the mysterious barrier slowed them from above, too.
The other elves began scattering out into the desert, either trying to get better angles to pierce the ray's invisible armor or just trying to get away before it came around and attacked the camp again. That would be soon; despite its size, the thing was fast. And deadly. Its spiky tail could cut a person in two without even slowing down.
"We've got to link up," Jedra said. "If we don't do something, it could kill the whole tribe."
He looked back up at the aerial monster, now turned to expose a mouth wide enough to swallow a dozen people at once. Four jet-black eyes, two on either side of the mouth, seemed to lock on to his own. The cloud ray flapped its wide, leathery wings again and began to descend, obviously not content with a single attack. "I think you're right," Kayan said.
The being they had become vibrated with energy. They felt it coursing through them in ever-strengthening pulses, bathing their psyches with sensual waves of delicious power. They were exultant, they were invincible, they were life itself, born to conquer the forces of death and destruction.
They rose upward from the desert floor, becoming a swift, powerful bird of prey. Overhead, the cloud ray was a lumbering balloon of flesh, wallowing through the air by comparison with their darting flight.
It holds the arrows off with an inertial barrier, the Kayan part of their combined being thought. If we can remove its shield, the elves can kill it.
With that thought, their perception of the cloud ray altered. Now they could see a green shroud enveloping its balloonlike form, nearly invisible when viewed straight on, but easily discernible around the edges. Kayan and Jedra climbed toward the creature, talons extended to rip the shroud apart, but when they reached it they found it sticky and resilient rather than easily shredded.
The cloud ray reacted instantly to their contact. Screeching in anger, it expanded its entire body, doubling in size almost instantaneously and slamming into them. They tumbled backward, flapping madly to stay aloft, and when they righted themselves and banked around they could see that the green shroud was even stronger than before.
The cloud ray swooped toward the ground, renewing its attack on the source of the psionic power that had approached it.
Don't let it get close enough to use that tail again! Jedra thought. If the ray made another pass, it could level the entire camp, him and Kayan included.
In the psionic vision the elven camp was a maelstrom of activity, the tiny vortices of intelligent minds darting about and tiny lightning bolts that had to be arrows rising up toward the cloud ray and bouncing off. Jedra and Kayan flew ahead of the ray, ignoring the lightning bolts, which passed right through their bird-of-prey body. They wouldn't feel any physical object unless it hit their real bodies in the tent; only psionic forces had any reality in the vision.
Everything they saw there was a manifestation of their minds. When the cloud ray expanded, it had been resisting their mental contact and strengthening its inertial barrier. Now as Jedra and Kayan tried to stop its descent by projecting a physical force against it with their minds, their own body in the vision grew larger with each wing-beat until they were as big, then even bigger than, the ray. With powerful strokes of their wings they blew it back into die sky, but the ray responded with a blast of wind that drove it back toward the ground.
Quick, push it down instead of up, they thought, and they swooped up and over its back, digging their talons into the sticky inertial barrier and flapping hard to shove it downward. The ray plummeted toward the elven camp, screeching with rage as it tried to reverse the winds, but it didn't have time. Jedra and Kayan managed to steer it away from the camp itself and toward a gap in the roiling vortices below, then they put everything they had into one last colossal wingbeat, driving it full speed into the sand.
They got more force than they expected. The cloud ray streaked toward the ground, and Jedra and Kayan barely managed to let go and veer aside before it hit.
The impact shook even the dreamscape. Thunder rolled across the desert, blasting Kayan and Jedra out of their link only to be tumbled across the floor of the tent by the real earthquake.
Slowly, their minds disoriented and their bodies aching with sudden fatigue, they staggered to their feet and looked around them. Not a single tent had remained upright. Pieces of canvas lay strewn across the sand for hundreds of yards; evidently the wind the cloud ray had produced had had a real counterpart. Elves lay strewn everywhere as well, most of them rising shakily to their feet now that the battle was over. The kank pen had been trampled and the kanks had fled, except for the ones that had been injured either by flying debris or by their fellows.
However, the worst scene of destruction by far was the site of the cloud ray's impact. It had hit with enough force to dig a crater, scattering gouts of sand and chunks of its body all around. Jedra was awestricken by the magnitude of what he and Kayan had done, but then he saw something that sickened him instead: one of the elves hadn't been able to dodge the flying debris. Only his lead and shoulders stuck out from the huge oblong mass of bone and flesh that pinned him down. It was the cloud ray's head, Jedra realized.
The elf wasn't dead. He screamed in pain and tried to wriggle free, but he was trapped. The other elves ran toward him and began digging frantically in the sand, trying to pull him out, but the immense weight of the head just sank it deeper with every handful they scooped away. The elves switched their digging to the downhill side of the head, trying to roll it off their companion, but it was so huge Jedra didn't see how they could budge it.
Kayan took a step toward the digging elves. "Mayb
e we can help now. Push the... thing aside, or..."
"No." Jedra grabbed her by the shoulder. "If we link up again, there's no telling what might happen."
"Then let's help dig. We can't just stand here and watch him die," she said, and she began picking her way through the wreckage of the tents toward the pinned elf.
Jedra followed her, but the elves stopped them when they drew near. "Get back," one warrior snarled, drawing his sword. "You've done enough damage. Harat is dying, thanks to you."
"I'm a healer," Kayan said. "I can keep him alive while you dig."
The warrior considered a moment, then stood aside, but he didn't sheathe his sword. "See that you do," he said, "or you will die with him."
Kayan sized him up with a look that seemed to say, "Not likely," but she didn't push it. Instead she bent down to the pinned elf. He was no longer screaming, but his face was still contorted in a grimace of pain, and his breathing was fast and shallow. His skin was pale, too, for an elf.
"I'm going to make you sleep," Kayan told him. "Try not to fight it. When you wake up, you'll be out of here, and all your injuries will be healed."
The elf shook his head. "I can't... feel my legs. Not even you can heal that."
"Don't be so sure," Kayan said, placing her hands on his head. The elf closed his eyes and his breathing slowed. When he was completely unconscious, Kayan turned to the elf warrior who still stood over her with his sword drawn and said, "You'd be more use to him digging. He's bleeding inside, and I can't stop that until we get him out of here."
The warrior growled something in elvish, but he sheathed his sword and walked around to join in the digging.
Jedra did the same. He had to stifle an involuntary laugh when he first saw how the elves were digging-they had bent down and were throwing sand backward between their legs like a pack of rasclinn burrowing for roots-but when he tried it himself he realized that was the best way to move a lot of sand in a hurry.