by Ryan Hughes
The last of the daylight had faded by the time their stew finished cooking; they ate by candlelight. After his second bowl, Jedra looked across the table at Kayan's shadowy form and said, "Do you forgive me?"
"For what?" she asked, her spoon half raised to her mouth.
"For everything."
"That's a lot to forgive someone for."
"I suppose." He took another bite. "On the other hand, think how virtuous it'll make you feel."
"Hmm. That's a point." She ate another few bites. "I know what you're thinking."
Jedra laughed. "Then tell me so we'll both know."
"You're thinking we should ask Kitarak to come back and finish teaching us what we need to know."
He hadn't been thinking that-he'd only wanted to reconcile with Kayan-but now that she mentioned it, that did sound like a good idea. "Do you think he'd come?" he asked. "It's only been a few days."
Kayan shrugged. "All we can do is ask him and see."
"All right." Jedra reached out his right hand and took her left. "Let's see if we can find him."
Their mental union felt like old times-the intense rush of pleasure, the complete blending of their personalities, the orders-of-magnitude increase in their power. They concentrated on the unique signature of Kitarak's mind and sent their message radiating out to find him wherever he had gone: We're ready for you to come home now.
With mindsending they couldn't tell where their target was, or even if he had heard them, but they kept their minds open for a response, which was only a few seconds in coming.
I'd love to, but I'm temporarily indisposed. I've been captured and forced into the gladiator games in Tyr. Along with his words came an image of the tohr-kreen standing outside the city's walls, so absorbed in measuring the northness with his tinkercraft jernan that he didn't notice the soldiers until they had completely surrounded him.
We'll come get you out, they told him.
That will be difficult, Kitarak said. They have four psionicists in conjunction at all times to keep me under control. In fact, I'm surprised they haven't detec-His voice cut off in midword.
Looks as if they just did. Jedra and Kayan imagined themselves hovering over the city, and within a heartbeat their center of consciousness was there, looking down into the immense gladiator arena at the base of the half-finished ziggurat.
From above, the city of Tyr looked like two colorful plates just barely overlapping. The smaller one held the sorcerer-king's palace and gardens, while the larger one held the ziggurat, the arena, the elven market and the merchant district, and every kind of dwelling from nobles' houses to the warrens to the slave pits. Streets provided the cracks, like crazing in the glaze of a much-used piece of pottery.
Fitting, Jedra and Kayan thought when they saw the likeness, for despite the enormous ziggurat still under construction in the middle of it, Tyr was an old city. They focused their attention on the slave pits-the deep excavation into which the king's captives were herded when they weren't fighting or working on the ziggurat- but they didn't see any sign of a tohr-kreen among the milling mass of unfortunate humans and demihumans. They checked the arena itself, but no games were being fought today and Kitarak wasn't among the dozen or so gladiators practicing in the dusty red field. He wasn't among the myriad slaves toiling on the ziggurat, either.
Considering Kitarak's talents, his captors would need a powerful suppression field. Jedra and Kayan scanned the city for one, blanking out as much of the other detail as they could until the city itself was a mere shadow, and when they did that their target became obvious. High on the hill on which the nobles had built their mansions rested a single intense sphere of blackness. That was good news. Kitarak would get better treatment from a noble than from the sorcerer-king or any of his templars. But even so, slavery was slavery; Jedra and Kayan weren't about to let him remain captive.
Assuming Kitarak was inside the suppression-field bubble.
Let's look at it in regular light, Jedra suggested, and the estates themselves grew more substantial. The one that housed the force bubble was built like a miniature version of the city itself. A twenty-foot-high wall ran all around a cluster of low stone buildings, all of which in turn encircled a two-story dwelling built of wood. Whoever had captured Kitarak was rich even for a noble, wood was the most expensive building material in Athas. The mansion was big enough to contain an open courtyard in the center, in which two tall trees provided shade and over which the inner rooms looked. Observation towers rose from the outside corners of both the mansion and the outer wall enclosing the grounds, and two guards armed with crossbows waited at constant alert atop each tower. Evidently the noble who owned all this was as paranoid as he was rich.
Ah, the price of success, Kayan said with amusement, but she and Jedra were anything but amused when they realized that they would have to get past those guards somehow. Not to mention the dozens of others who patrolled the compound on foot, and probably hundreds more inside the bunkhouses. The bubble of force that presumably held Kitarak had disappeared beneath the roof of one of the low buildings at the rear of the compound. That was probably the gladiators' quarters, judging by the bloodstained practice field in front of it. Jedra and Kayan lowered their viewpoint until they could see in through the barred windows, and sure enough there was Kitarak, bound in chains by all four arms and linked to an enormous bolt that ran completely through the back wall. Two other slaves-a human man and an elven woman-were also chained to the wall. The prisoners had enough chain to allow them to sit or lie down on their cots, but no more.
The four psionicists guarding them-two young women and two bored-looking old men, one of them elven-sat in comfortable chairs across the building's single room. That could explain how Jedra and Kayan had reached Kitarak and how he had managed to reply before they had stopped him. His guards had been too relaxed, saving their energy for when they needed it, but they were alert now.
Kitarak didn't see them looking in, for there was nothing there to see. Their bodies were still back at his house in the canyon. The psionicists might detect their presence if they looked, but they were worried about trouble from Kitarak, not from outside. Jedra and Kayan could take advantage of that. They slipped around to the back of the house to where the bolt in the wall stuck out through the stone. A large iron washer and a nut held it in place. Jedra and Kayan concentrated their telekinetic power on the nut, but it was rusted tight, and they couldn't muster enough force at such a long distance to budge it. Nor could they affect anything inside the building at all; the suppression field stopped their power as well as Kitarak's.
We'll have to get closer so our power will be stronger, Jedra said as they withdrew so as not to alert the psionicists to their presence.
They rose up until they could see the entire city again, memorizing the location of the noble's estate. If they came in through the city's main gate, the caravan gate, it would be high to their left.
They had seen what they came to see. Every moment they stayed linked was costing them energy, so with the speed of thought they returned to Kitarak's house, and without pausing this time, they broke their link. They sagged back onto their chairs, tired and suddenly depressed.
"What were we thinking?" Jedra asked, leaning back and holding his hand to his forehead. "We can't just march into Tyr and break Kitarak out of an armed estate. We're strong, but we're not invincible." "No," Kayan said, "but we are responsible."
She said, "I mean we're morally obligated to try. Kitarak left the safety of his own home because of us."
Jedra nodded. "That's true." He took a deep breath and straightened up. "But we won't do him any good if we don't have a plan."
"Then let's get busy and make one."
They finished the entire pot of stew while they plotted a three-pronged attack. First they would create a diversion, to draw the bulk of the soldiers away from the slave quarters. They would use Kayan's medical power to sicken anyone who remained so they couldn't fight, and then they wo
uld use telekinesis to knock down the slave quarters. The psionic guards would prevent the falling rubble from harming themselves or their charges, but while their power was being used for that, they would be vulnerable to mental attack. If Jedra and Kayan let Kitarak know who was responsible for the commotion, he would undoubtedly join in and help overpower the guards, and then the three of them could make their escape.
"What if they move him?" Jedra asked.
Kayan got up and took her bowl to the sink. "Then we modify the plan at the rime."
"What if the psionicists are stronger than we are?"
"Nothing is stronger than we are," she said, washing out the bowl with water from the jug. "They might have better control, but this doesn't require a lot of precision."
Jedra took his bowl and the stew pot over to the sink and held them upside down, then telekinetically pulled the debris from them and dropped it into the drain. He was uncomfortable with her degree of confidence, but he supposed she might be right at that. They had slammed a cloud ray to the ground and leveled an entire city by accident; they should be able to handle four distracted psionicists.
Even so, he shuddered when he thought about it. Kitarak's training hadn't affected one thing: Jedra still hated fighting, no matter how good the odds.
* * *
They left at first light the next morning. They had loaded their backpacks with supplies, but they were supplies for surviving in a city, not for crossing the desert. To do that they held on to each other tightly, joined minds again, and levitated up out of the canyon, then redirected the wind to blow them across the sky toward Tyr.
The view from the sky was exhilarating. Actually being there was somehow more exciting than leaving their bodies on the ground and peeking at things through psionic vision. They flew high enough to reach cool air, and from that altitude the canyonlands passed beneath them like a wrinkled blanket sliding off a bed. The deepest valleys held patches of greenery at the bottoms, and some were obviously inhabited.
Tyr slid up from below the horizon like a blotch on the land. First came the pall of dust and smoke hanging over it, then came the city itself, its hills and towers and the dominating ziggurat ringed all around by a great stone wall. Jedra and Kayan lowered themselves to the ground when they were still a few miles out so they wouldn't attract attention, and walked over a low ridge to join the caravan road linking it to the other cities of Athas. As they approached the road they encountered a steady stream of people, but instead of the usual comings and goings around a city, everyone was headed inward. They didn't stop at the main gate, either, but veered off to the right around the fields.
"What's all the excitement?" Jedra asked one of the other walkers. He was an old man in a threadbare gray cloak, leaning heavily on a wooden staff held in his right hand.
"Don't you know?" the man asked incredulously. He cackled in glee and said, "It's game day, boy!"
"Game day?" Jedra asked, but a sinking feeling in his stomach told him all he needed to know. "Gladiator games?"
"Of course gladiator games!" The man thumped his staff on the ground. "You don't think I'd come all the way into town just to see somebody run a footrace, do you? Blood and guts! Brains on the sand! Yessir, that's entertainment."
Jedra paled. It wasn't his idea of fun, but he tried to put on an eager expression all the same. This would provide the perfect opportunity to enter the city without being noticed.
He and Kayan fell in beside the old man, who hobbled along on his good leg and his prop for the next half mile or so, but as they drew closer to the city his pace began to speed up and his staff barely touched the ground. "Hee hee," he cackled. "I'm like a kank headed to the barn! It does my old bones good to watch a gladiator get whacked. Nothing like it to get the juices flowing."
Jedra didn't ask whose juices he meant. He didn't bother to correct the man, either, but he suspected that ayan had a lot more to do with the old codger's sudden spryness than any amount of bloodlust.
"You got gypped," the old man said when he returned with the melon, but Jedra suspected he was merely put out that Jedra hadn't bought one for him as well. He didn't particularly care who ate the thing; he had bought it for looks.
The guards at the stadium gate paid no special attention to the three of them as they passed into the city. When asked their business, the old man said, "We're here t'see the games," and Jedra held up the melon to back him up.
"Don't throw that," one guard said, laughing. "You'll kill someone with that hard thing." But he let them through the gate. Just inside, hordes of merchants had set up booths and were hawking wares of all sorts to the even larger horde of spectacle-goers. The old man harumphed and grumbled his way past the jewelry and clothing stands, complaining bitterly about the poor craftsmanship and high prices. He sloshed his own waterskin gleefully at the water vendors and paused at the fruit stands only to malign the quality of the produce, but when he reached the barbecue pits he stopped and inhaled the greasy smoke as if it were the sweetest perfume.
He looked to Jedra. "Buy me a slab of that, boy, and I'll show you and your girl the best seats in the stadium."
Jedra wasn't sure he wanted the best seats, but if Kitarak were forced to fight today, he supposed a good view would be essential to helping him. How they could do that he didn't know, but they would have to try. So he bought the old man a greasy slice off a barbecued mekillot haunch that looked big enough to feed the entire city for a week, and they proceeded into the stadium.
Pike-wielding ushers directed them up into the top section of seats. Jedra thought at first that they were getting preferential treatment until he realized that the upper section provided shade for the lower one, which was closer to the floor of the arena. That suited him fine, though. As long as he could see, he didn't care to be close enough to smell the action as well. The old man led them up into the crowd, stepping on toes and nudging people aside with his staff as he climbed, eventually choosing a section of stone bench halfway up the stands and two-thirds of the way down from the palace toward the ziggurat.
"What's so special about these seats?" Jedra asked.
The old man bit into the meat Jedra had bought him, chewed, and said around the mouthful, "I told you I'd show you the best seats. So there they are." He pointed to the rows of balconies overlooking the stadium from the eastern wall of the palace, on the side of the stadium opposite the ziggurat. Gaily dressed templars and those nobles who were currently in favor with the sorcerer-king lined the balconies, ignoring the crowds below while they dined and drank before the games began.
The old man cackled at his own joke. "These, on the other hand, are the best that were left, and that's the truth. We'll still see plenty from here." He took another bite, letting the grease and sauce drip off the end of his grizzled chin.
Cart you believe this guy? Kayan asked, resting her head against Jedra's shoulder.
I'd be afraid to, Jedra replied. He gave Kayan a hug. He could sense her unease in this crowd. The last time she had been in a city, she had been among the templars. Jedra was used to life among the rabble, but Tyr was a strange city and knowing why he and Kayan were here made him even more nervous.
The crowd grew around them until the stadium was nearly full. The noise of thousands of conversations blended into a continual roar, much like the roar of the city Jedra had discovered in the second crystal world. Occasional fights broke out among spectators who couldn't wait for the action to start below, but the ushers quickly quelled them. The threat of their pikes put a peaceful stop to most disagreements, but they had to yank one drunken brawler up to the top of the stands and toss him over the side to break up one fight. The crowd roared its approval, then roared even louder when they turned back around and saw the crier walking out into the middle of the arena.
The crier raised his hands, and a hush settled over the crowd. He spoke, welcoming everyone to the games and announcing the first combatants, but Jedra didn't recognize either name.
The other peo
ple in the crowd, however, did. They roared their approval when a swarthy, leather-clad man bearing a club and a short sword climbed up the steps from the pens below the ziggurat and paced out into the middle of the arena, and they roared again when a lithe blonde woman in a breechcloth and halter and carrying a longer sword and a whip stepped out after him. The two took up positions about twenty feet from each other, the man flexing his arms and brandishing his weapons for the audience while the woman just stood there, her whip trailing behind her, ready for action.
Jedra fought to keep himself from throwing up. He'd heard that some gladiator games started with executions, but he'd never imagined that they would throw an untrained woman in the arena against a trained gladiator and make them fight to the death.
At a shout from the crier they sprang into action, and the woman instantly made Jedra realize he'd misjudged her. She lashed out with her whip and cut a gash in the man's hairy chest with her very first blow. The crack echoed across the stands, and the crowd cheered. The man stepped forward as if he hadn't even been hit, his short sword held out vertically before him, but he danced back when the woman flicked the whip toward him again. He leaned in and back, in and back, while she popped at his arms and legs with the lash. A few people booed him for his caution, but the man bided his time, learning the woman's rhythm. Then, in the middle of another motion just like all the others, he sliced out with his sword instead of backing off, and a three-foot piece of whip flew end-over-end over his shoulder.
The woman tried to change her rhythm to match the shorter whip, but it took her a few tries, and by the time she got it right the man had leaped toward her and thrown his club directly at her stomach. She staggered back, stunned, and the man swept in and stabbed her cleanly below her left breast before she could even raise her own sword to guard herself. When he pulled his sword free, bright red blood flooded out over her white belly, running down her leg and dripping to the sand. She looked up at him with wide eyes, then she folded over like a closed book and toppled to the ground.