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

The sky seemed to be traveling faster, too. The stars slid westward almost as quickly as they did, and the sky was growing light behind them when Kitarak stopped at the rim of a small canyon. It seemed identical to all the others they had crossed, but Kitarak unerringly found a pathway leading down to the bottom of this one, and he led the way down the narrow trail, going ahead while Jedra and Kayan followed.

The bottom of the canyon was a flat, sinuous channel that had once held a river, but not for many centuries. There was evidently still moisture in the ground, however; a few stubby bushes grew in the cracked soil, and even a tree grew near the edge of a big rock pile.

Kitarak stepped closer to the rock pile, and Jedra saw that he had misjudged it. It was a house. He hadn't recognized the curved walls at first because they weren't smooth or even straight up and down. They were made from unmortared stone, and they bulged in odd places, giving the whole structure the appearance of a haphazard pile of rocks. Kitarak walked around to the back side of the structure and tugged on what looked like a loose piece of shale sticking out of a slanting gravel slope, and the whole business swung out on silent hinges. The gravel had been glued to a stone slab door.

A white, smooth-walled entry led into a hemispherical central room, its walls also finished in white stucco or something similar, and the whole space lit from milky-white skylights shaped like the hollow insides of rocks. From outside, Jedra supposed, they would look just like all the others in the pile.

Two circular cushions on the floor were the only furnishings, aside from the narrow stands supporting sculptures and the shelves on the walls holding hundreds of tinkercraft artifacts. Doorways led off in four directions from the central room, but Kitarak knelt down on one of the cushions and motioned for Jedra and Kayan to lie down on the other. When they had done so, he reached out with his lower hands and touched their heads.

For Jedra, the sensation felt as if his mind had been poured from one vessel to another. He had been in Kitarak's viewpoint, but when the tohr-kreen awakened him he suddenly felt his consciousness slide back into his own head. He blinked, and the room came into focus without the hexagonal array. He sat up and felt the welcome response of his own body moving to his commands.

Kayan sat up beside him, blinking and flexing her arms and legs as well. She ran her hands over her body as if reaffirming that everything was still there.

Kitarak merely tilted his head and looked around the interior of the room. "Ah, yes," he said. "Here we are. Welcome to my humble abode."

This was humble? Jedra felt as if he had just awakened in a palace. The waking in itself was incredible enough, miles away from where he had gone to sleep, but the surroundings managed to overshadow even the method of travel. He looked around at all the things on the walls, at the paintings and other artwork, at the unfathomable pieces of tinkercraft-some of it art in its own right-and thought, Yes, this was a good decision.

Chapter Six

Irregular-shaped windows looked out through nooks in the rock, preserving the house's camouflage while providing even more light than in the skylit central room. Another circular cushion in the middle of the floor had the much-rumpled look of long use. It was obvious that Kitarak spent a great deal of his time here.

Kayan admired the library. "There are more books here than in the templar archives)" she said.

"More valuable ones, too, I'll bet," Kitarak said. "Some of these date back to the collapse."

"I'd love to read them," said Kayan, picking up a cracked leatherbound volume from one of die stacks and opening it carefully.

Her face fell, and Kitarak laughed his clicking laugh. "You're welcome to try, but first you'll have to learn the language. Don't worry; it took me only five years."

Kayan set the book back on the stack. Jedra didn't bother to pick up one; no matter what language it was written in, he wouldn't be able to read it. He had never learned that skill. Maybe he would be able to now, but by the sounds of it that would take a while.

All the rooms in the house were interconnected. Kitarak led Jedra and Kayan through a side doorway from the library into another room, this one much less orderly. A chest-high workbench ran along the circular outer wall, and on it rested the disassembled remains of more tinkercraft gadgets. Parts lay strewn everywhere, and more filled boxes on the floor. The odor of metal and oil was strong here.

"This is my workshop," Kitarak said. "Don't touch anything in here without my permission. Some of the equipment can be easily damaged, and some of it could easily damage you."

Jedra was about to pick up a twisted piece of metal from the workbench; he dropped his hand instead and backed away.

The next room was the kitchen. Kitarak had built a stove into the outer wall, and cabinets on either side of it provided work surface and storage. A wide basin had been set into one cabinet, and beside it a hand-pump provided water from a well dug directly beneath the kitchen. Trust Kitarak to have an indoor well, Jedra thought. He was relie

ved to see that it had just a single up-and-down handle; he wouldn't have to learn how to operate all that arcane machinery the tohr-kreen had used in the ruined city. Pots and pans hung from hooks overhead-nearly out of reach for Jedra, and definitely out of reach for Kayan.

"Can either of you cook?" Kitarak asked.

Kayan shook her head. "The templars all took their meals together. Slaves did the cooking."

Kitarak looked at Jedra, who said, "I've scorched many a lizard over a campfire, but I've never used anything like this."

The tohr-kreen made his rasping noise with his arms. "I can see there is much to teach you," he said.

Jedra was beginning to feel uneasy. It looked like he would have to learn reading, cooking, and maybe even tinkercraft along with psionics. How much else had he gotten himself into?

From the kitchen they went into the storage room. This was much cooler than the others, with no windows or skylights. In the dim light filtering in from the kitchen they could see sacks of vegetables hanging from hooks and a rectangular wooden chest nearly as tall as Kayan standing on end against the wall. When Kitarak opened its door, tendrils of white vapor wafted outward and a cold draft spread across the floor. Inside, haunches of meat were packed tight, and a pebbly white layer of frost coated them all. Jedra had seen frost only once in his life, on an exceptionally clear night after a cloudy day, when all the heat had radiated into the sky.

"Is this some kind of tinkercraft?" he asked.

Kitarak weaved his head from side to side. "No. I have tried for years without success to design a mechanical cold-maker. Instead, I must still use psionics to slow the dance of particles that makes things hot."

"I didn't know it was possible to make something cold," Jedra said. "Why don't the templars use it to cool our cities?"