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

After a few minutes in the healing trance, she leaned back with a weary sigh and opened her eyes. "He'll live," she said to the chief. "He'll even walk again, but you should give him a couple of days to rest before you make him march the way we did yesterday."

The chief laughed bitterly and waved his arms to encompass the devastated camp. The elves who hadn't helped dig had erected a couple of the tents again, but most of the shelters were still in shredded heaps on the ground. "It will take at least that long before we can repair the damage," the chief said.

"Good," Kayan said. "Then let's get him out from under the hot sun and let him sleep."

Under her direction, six elves picked up the injured one and carried him carefully down into the camp, where they laid him inside one of the tents. Kayan went in to help finish his healing, and Jedra followed her. "How are you holding up?" he asked her.

Jedra knelt down beside her. "You've been putting out a lot more energy than I have; let's link back up and I'll share some of mine with you."

She considered it. He could see it in the way her eyes unfocused and her face relaxed for a second. Oh, yes, to merge their minds and become that supreme being again, to feel strength and power spread through them like fire through dry tinder....

She shook her head. "No. It always costs more than we get out of it."

True enough, Jedra supposed. But still he yearned for the experience, especially now when he was already drained from doing it once today. The memory of how it had felt overrode even the immediate here-and-now reminder of its price. He was glad Kayan had the willpower to resist it; left to himself he might not.

"All right," he said. "We'll sleep and recover our energy that way instead."

He lay down to attempt just that, but it seemed he'd hardly closed his eyes when he heard something thud to the ground just outside the tent. Then the door flap was pulled aside, and the chief stuck his head in the opening. "Come out," he said.

Jedra and Kayan exchanged a puzzled glance, then rose and stepped out of the tent. There on the ground just outside the door was the source of the noise they had heard: their knapsacks. Twenty or thirty elves stood silently in a semicircle around the tent door, and they didn't look happy.

The chief didn't waste time on a lengthy speech. "For saving Harat's life, we have decided to let you live," he said. "But only if you leave... now."

Chapter Three

They made it almost a mile before Kayan collapsed. In the hot middle of the day with the relentless sun beating down on them, Jedra was surprised she'd made it that far. He wasn't sure how much farther he could go himself, but the chief's final words had kept him walking long after he normally would have stopped.

"If we ever see you again," the chief had said, "we will bury you up to your necks in the sand and let the carrion eaters feast on your roasted brains."

That's gratitude for you, Jedra had nearly said, but he had decided to hold his tongue while he still had one. Some of the elves wanted blood.

Galar had come to their rescue one last time, insisting that the tribe give them food and water enough to keep them alive until they reached civilization. When some of the other elves protested, the chief had compromised on three days' provisions, which he said was enough to get them to an oasis. When Galar left to pack the food he even gave them directions for finding it-at the base of a long, rocky ridge just south of due west-but what they did from there was up to them. They would just have to figure that out when the time came; right now they had more immediate problems.

Jedra bent down beside Kayan, letting his shadow fall across her while he worked her pack off and helped her lean back against it. He removed his own pack and got out the waterskin, gave her a swallow of its precious contents, and put it back without drinking any himself. The oasis might be three days away for an elf, but he had the feeling they would need every drop of water they had and then some before he and Kayan managed to reach it.

To think that he had bathed in a barrel of the stuff only two days ago. The elves had been right: fortunes changed quickly in the desert.

Theirs were going to have to change back awfully fast or the two of them would be dead of heat stroke or dehydration by nightfall. Jedra didn't see much opportunity for shelter in the immediate vicinity, only gently rolling dunes and occasional rock outcrops as far as he could see in any direction, dotted here and there with stubby bushes and gnarled, spiny cacti. He didn't see any of the barrel-shaped plants like the one the elf child had cut open for water yesterday, nor anything else that looked promising. All the vegetation he could see was too thin to have a pulpy core. Too thin to provide shade, either, which was an even more pressing need at the moment.

Kayan moaned and tried to sit up.

"Stay there," Jedra told her. "We wouldn't get twenty paces in this heat before we had to stop again. I can see that far, and there's nothing better over there." He spoke aloud, even though mindspeech would have been easier. He still felt so drained from the battle with the cloud ray that he didn't want to use even that little bit of psionic energy. Either Kayan felt the same way, or she just followed his example. "We have to keep moving," she whispered.

"I suppose that does make sense," she admitted.

Jedra looked around again, trying to think like an elf. What would they do in a similar situation? Spend the hot hours in the shade, for starters, but the Jura-Dai's generosity hadn't extended to a tent.

Or had it? He looked again at the thin, spiny cactus growing only a few yards away. It branched in two about four feet off the ground, and each arm extended out and upward another four or five feet. If he were to stretch his robe across those arms, the thorns would hold it in place and the cloth-even as thin as it was-would provide shade.

There was only one problem with that idea: he'd seen how some of the desert plants protected themselves by swinging their thorny arms at passersby. He wasn't sure if this was one of that kind, but he didn't want to find out the hard way.

Hmm. How could he tell whether or not it was dangerous without getting too close? Throw rocks at it?

It was worth a try. Jedra found a small outcrop not far from the cactus and picked up a flat slab of flagstone a little bigger than his hand. He didn't see the multilegged beetle that had been hiding under it until it clicked angrily at him, startling him into dropping the rock on his toe. The beetle scurried under another slab of flagstone, and Jedra once again picked up the piece it had been under to begin with, making a mental note to check more carefully before he grabbed something like that again. Even the smallest desert creatures had some kind

of defense against predators, and most of them were poisonous.

He carried the rock to within easy throwing distance of the cactus, took aim, and tossed it at the trunk. The rock thunked into it and broke off a few spines, but the branches never moved. Hmm. Maybe it wasn't the mobile kind, but Jedra still wasn't convinced. He could try all day to see if the cactus was dangerous, but even if all his tests came up negative, he would never be certain he hadn't missed something obvious. Only if it did prove to be dangerous somehow would he know for sure.