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

What do you think I've been doing? he demanded, but he realized what she meant. He'd tried psionics and he'd struggled against the vines, but he hadn't actually tried to manipulate the crystal world on its own terms. He imagined it now, trying to visualize a way out. Instead of Kayan's hole in the ground, he imagined the wind whirling around him, enclosing him and carrying him off through the crystal sky.

Sure enough, the vines snapped like string, and the wind bore him aloft. Yoncalla made a desperate lunge for him, but Jedra's whirlwind surged upward and the would-be god's oversized hand swept by yards below.

"Don't leave me!" Yoncalla shouted. "If you stay, I'll worship you!"

Then the whirlwind reached the sky. Jedra felt the same disorientation as before, and he found himself in Kitarak's library again. Kayan was struggling to sit up beside him.

We're still linked, she said.

He nodded. They were both so tired they hardly felt it, but he knew what would happen when they

separated. Promise you won't hate me, he said. I'll try.

He reached out and took her in his arms. It felt like hugging a skeleton. Her face was all harsh angles and sagging skin, but he kissed her anyway. The mindlink momentarily strengthened, then weakened again when they drew apart.

Here goes, Kayan said.

Her presence faded from Jedra's mind, and all the troubles of the world came crashing down to replace it. Of two worlds. He thought of Yoncalla, suddenly abandoned again after millennia of isolation, and he felt bad for doing that to him. If he hadn't been so weak, he might have tried to go back.

And then there was what he had done to Kayan. He couldn't look at her. She got up and staggered into the kitchen, but even though his stomach screamed for food, he stayed in the library.

How long had he been gone this time? The candle had only burned down an inch or so-not even an hour then. An hour, and all he had eaten had been used up. No wonder Kayan had fallen unconscious before he did; she hadn't eaten before they entered the crystal, and they had been gone for nearly a

day.

He thought briefly of calling for Kitarak. He and Kayan obviously needed their mentor. But the tohr-kreen had been gone only a couple of days; he probably wouldn't return even if Jedra could contact him, which was unlikely. Kitarak probably wouldn't lower his shield for a week, just to make sure Jedra and Kayan truly solved their differences before they called him back.

Jedra went into the kitchen just long enough to take a drink and pick up another bag of nuts. Kayan's bulging eyes followed him as he went past her, but she said nothing. That was all right. He didn't know what to say to her, either.

* * *

Kayan slept in the library again, Jedra got up periodically to check on her, but her breathing remained steady and she didn't convulse the way he'd seen some starving people do. She'd evidently gotten food soon enough to prevent permanent damage. He left her to heal in her sleep.

When the morning sun finally began to filter through the skylights, Jedra wondered if they had been covered with sand. The light was deep red, almost like candlelight. But when he checked the skylights he saw that they were clean, and then he realized he was seeing normal sunlight. His eyes had adjusted to the brilliant sun inside the crystal, and now Athas's coppery red cinder seemed dull by comparison. He hoped he would grow used to it again, or he would be spending the rest of his life in dim twilight.

Hot, dim twilight. Even inside the stone house the temperature rose with the sun, but when Jedra went outside to relieve himself the intense heat felt like a physical force beating down on him. He had never realized just how oppressive it was until he'd sampled another world.

But that one was just the construction of a crazy person's mind. Such a thing probably couldn't exist... or could it? Legend told of a time when Athas's sun was brighter, and Kayan had said that the Sea of Silt was once an ocean. Who could say?

Jedra always went around to the back of the house to urinate, giving the tree that grew there a little more water, but today when he rounded the side of the rock pile he stopped short when he saw what had happened: The storm had toppled the tree. Its trunk had splintered about three feet off the ground, and the top had fallen with enough force to break two of its three big limbs. The remaining one rose into the sky like a tree itself, but its leaves had all been ripped loose, leaving only the skeletal branches.

Jedra walked up to it and snapped off a twig. Brittle. The fierce desert heat had already baked it dry. Jedra stood there and idly broke the twig into pieces while he contemplated the bare corpse of Kitarak's shade tree. This was how everything on Athas ended-everything that escaped being eaten, anyway-bare and dry under the hot sun. Like the sun-bleached piles of bones that he and Kayan had seen in the deep desert, marking the lairs of underground cacti. Only the cacti themselves escaped the relentless rays of the dark sun.

That wouldn't stop them from dying, though, Jedra realized. Sand cacti had an even more prolonged death awaiting them, for after they trapped and fed on a desert creature, they had no way to get rid of the pile of bones. Nothing else would venture near, and the cactus would eventually starve to death, probably after sending forth seeds-most of which would in turn be eaten by scavengers before they could germinate.

Jedra sighed. It was all part of a bigger whole, he supposed, but that didn't make it any less depressing.

The sorcerer-kings cheated death with their magic, but if any of the legends were to be believed they usually died all the more horribly for it when their time finally came. And if Yoncalla was a fair representative of the ancients' method of achieving immortality, then that was hardly better. Immortality for Yoncalla seemed to be little more than the chance to go stir-crazy amid his own creations.

It might still beat the alternative. Jedra turned away from the tree and looked out across the sandy, rock-strewn ground to the steep canyon walls. Down here in the bottom of the gorge it was easy to forget that the rest of the world existed, but Jedra knew it carried on as usual. Someday he would have to venture back out into it, and even his psionic training couldn't guarantee him a better life than what he'd had living on the streets of Urik. The only certainty out there was the knowledge that the moment he let down his guard, someone or something would be waiting to exploit his moment of weakness.

His full bladder reminded him that he had come out here for a reason. He cast out with his danger sense, thinking wryly how ridiculous it would be to be caught with his pants down by some desert animal, but the only impression he got of life came from a couple hundred yards off, at the base of the canyon wall, and even that wasn't dangerous. In fact, its psionic impression was one of warmth and contentment.

This I've got to see, he thought as he finished his business and walked toward the consciousness he had sensed. He approached it cautiously, but his danger sense continued to tell him there was no threat so he climbed over the rocks near the base of the canyon wall until he found what he was looking for. There, in a tunnel burrowed beneath a boulder, was a jankx den, with two slender, golden babies curled up around each other, their long snouts tucked beneath their paws as they slept.

Jedra knelt there looking at the babies and wondering what to do with them. He had always thought of jankx as food animals, and relatively troublesome ones at that, since they had poison spurs in their paws, but he couldn't eat these two babies. Nor, he realized, could he just leave them to starve. But he couldn't bring them food in their den, because a scavenger would eventually find them and they wouldn't have any defense. He was just coming to the realization that he would have to build some kind of cage and take care of them until they matured when his danger sense finally twinged and he looked up to see a pair of lean, gray zhackals loping down the canyon toward him.

He immediately reached into the den with his tele-kinetic power and lifted the baby jankx out. They awoke and began to squirm, making tiny, high-pitched squeaks. The zhackals' ears perked up, and they increased their speed, running straight for Jedra. He took off toward the house, but he'd only gone a few steps before he realized that he wouldn't make it before they reached him. Not in the kind of shape he was in. He kept running anyway, trying to get as close as he could before he had to turn and fight.