The Darkness Before the Dawn
Page 10
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 luck
ier 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?"