The Darkness Before the Dawn (Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas 2)

The richly appointed tent made Jedra nervous. He got up and went back outside, and this time he stopped the first elf he saw-one of the old women who couldn't get out of his way in time-and asked why the tribe wasn't moving out at dawn.

She peered at him through eyes gone white in patches, but Jedra got the impression she was looking deeper than the surface level anyway. Finally she sniffed and said, "We're waitin' on Sahalik. He's not back yet."

"Oh," Jedra said. He felt a mixture of relief and anxiety. He didn't necessarily want to see the big elf again, but on the other hand, if anything had happened to him, Kayan would be responsible. "How about Galar?" he asked. "Has he returned?"

The woman started to laugh, but it turned into a dry, hacking cough. When she got it under control she said, "Come and gone again, hours ago. The night creatures chased him and Ralok back to camp before they tracked Sahalik more than a mile, but they went back out as soon as it was safe."

"Oh," Jedra said again. No, this wasn't good at all. "Thank you," he told the woman, then he went straight back into the tent.

Kayan was still asleep. "Wake up," he said, shaking her softly by the shoulder. "Kayan, wake up." When she didn't stir, he shook her a bit harder, but she didn't respond.

Kayan, he mindsent. Mmmm? Kayan, wake up. We have to find Sahalik. Mmmm-mmmm. Come on, this is important! He shook her again, but she didn't awaken. He felt the mindlink break,

and when he tried again he couldn't make contact. Evidently Kayan had blocked him out. He didn't e

ven know if she had understood him, or if she was just too much in need of sleep to be roused.

Well, maybe he could do something by himself. He didn't have nearly the control that Kayan had, but he could still make mental contact with people. Much as he hated the idea, maybe he could track down Sahalik and persuade him to return. Or failing that, he might at least be able to find out if the elf was all right.

Jedra tried to orient himself inside the tent. The fire pit was beyond the wall to his right, and Sahalik's tent was behind him and a bit to the right as well. Sahalik had run away from the fire and over another tent, which would mean he had gone more or less directly to Jedra's left. To the east. Jedra sat cross-legged on his sleeping mat facing that direction and closed his eyes so he could concentrate.

The first time he had gone on a psionic voyage, it had felt like he was dreaming. He had found himself face down in a crystal-clear pool of water, a pool so impossibly large he had actually floated in it. Far away at the bottom of the pool had been the desert floor, over which he had drifted like a cloud in a breeze. He tried to recapture that image now, tried to become a cloud, or a bird like the second time he'd gone voyaging with Kayan. Now that he was concentrating on it of course it was harder to do, but the camp was quiet and the tent peaceful enough; eventually he felt his consciousness drift free of his body and begin to rise.

The camp receded below him, the dozen or more sand-colored tents of varying sizes looking more like an outcrop of rock than anything. Puzzled, Jedra swooped down and realized that the camp was a rock outcrop, at least in his psionic vision. The insectlike kanks in their pens beyond the tents had become dung beetles, then metamorphosed into ants as he rose into the sky. Great.

He couldn't count on any correspondence with reality, then. Except for one thing: himself. He was still a half-elf in a light blue robe, seated in midair on a rectangular sleeping mat. He gripped the edges so he wouldn't fall off and directed the mat upward.

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.