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

This time Jedra got it right. When the candle was burning normally, Kitarak said, "All right, now we amplify the candle's heat and melt the glass."

"Why don't we just wiggle the glass particles until they get hot enough?" Jedra asked.

"Try it," Kitarak said.

Jedra did. He imagined one of the glass shards as another bunch of tiny sand particles, imagined them moving faster and faster and faster....

The glass began to glow a dull red color, but no matter how hard Jedra tried to move the particles faster, that was as hot as he could make it. He was getting plenty hot, though; sweat ran down his forehead and dripped off the end of his nose.

"That's enough," Kitarak said.

"Don't wear yourself out."

Jedra took a deep breath and relaxed. "Why couldn't I melt it?" he asked.

"Because that way isn't very efficient," Kitarak replied. He set the candle closer to the tray. "Amplifying, on the other hand"-he waved both hands on his right side for emphasis-"takes what is already there and simply makes more of the same. Much more efficient. Now concentrate on the candle and imagine its heat flowing into the glass. Then once you get that, imagine more and more heat coming from it until the glass melts."

Another few minutes and the glass shards slumped into a puddle on the bottom of the tray. "Good," Kitarak said. "Now we simply form it into the right shape and let it cool." The molten glass bulged upward, inflating into a hemisphere, then crinkling into nooks and fissures to resemble the surface of a rock.

Jedra heard a thump from beyond the central room. It turned out to be Kayan closing the door; he heard her walk across the room to look in at him and Kitarak at the workbench. "Learning more tricks, I see," she said.

"Yes," said Kitarak. "Come, you may try it, too."

"No thanks," she said. "I've had enough disappointment for one day."

She turned to leave, but Kitarak spoke sharply. "No. You came here to learn, so you will learn. Come try this." The shell of glass hovered above the tray, then drifted toward Jedra. "Here," Kitarak said to him. "Take this- not with your hands!-and go put it in place."

Jedra levitated the fragile skylight carefully, conscious of Kayan's smoldering anger at his ability to do so, but unwilling to disobey Kitarak. He backed out of the workshop with the glass and took it outside, where he carefully climbed atop the house and cleared the hole until the new skylight fit snugly in place. The whole time he was working on the repair, he could feel Kayan's presence below him, her mind seething with resentment.

If anger could melt glass, he thought, she would have no trouble with this lesson.

* * *

Kayan didn't speak to him until that afternoon. Jedra had cleaned out the rest of the storeroom while Kitarak showed her how to melt glass, and he had floated a cushion from the main room into it for a bed. Since he was momentarily free to relax, he decided to try the bed for a short nap, the way he used to spend hot afternoons at home, but he had just lain down when Kayan stepped into the room.

He sat back up. "How did it go?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I evidently don't have any tele-kinetic ability at all."

"Oh."

She didn't come in and sit down, didn't react at all, so he stood up and held her in his arms. "I'm sorry."

She laid her head against his shoulder. "Me too."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "I can do it, and you'll always have me."

"Jedra, that's not the problem. I don't like knowing there's something I can't do." She pulled away from him, then crossed her arms over her chest.

"I'm sorry," he said again, not knowing what else to do.

She sighed. "I'll get over it," she said, then she turned away and went into the library.

But she didn't get over it. Not that day, nor any thereafter. Each passing day only produced another frustration for her as Kitarak tried one method after another to teach her what he knew of psionics. Some things she could pick up instantly, especially those powers that dealt with healing or metabolism in some way, and she was a quick study in the telepathic arts as well, but anything to do with telekinesis remained beyond her ability. It didn't matter to her that Jedra couldn't heal so much as a minor scratch, or that neither of them could teleport or even dream-travel the way Kitarak had done; no, all that mattered to Kayan was that Jedra could move things with his mind and she couldn't.

Kitarak held their training sessions in the central room, the "great room" as he called it. The three of them spent most of their time there, sitting on cushions while they learned how to manipulate light and sound, how to read minds and blank their thoughts from other mind-readers, and how to enhance their other senses. At least once a day he also took them outside into the dry canyon bottom and showed them how to fight with their minds and how to defend themselves from attacks both mental and physical.

After so much time together, they tended to seek out privacy during their few hours of free time. Kayan took to spending most of hers in the library, reading old books and ignoring Kitarak and Jedra whenever she could. At night she slept on the same bed with Jedra, but she might as well have been on the other side of the house for all the affection she showed. Jedra found himself wishing they were back in the desert again; at least it got cold enough there to require snuggling to stay warm.