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

Kayan mindsent, He thinks we're going to-to- The mental picture that came with her thoughts said what she couldn't bring herself to.

Jedra blushed, but he said, I'd certainly rather do that than go up against a nobleman's entire army.

Kayan appraised him silently, her eyes wide and dark in the dim light. "What, are you nervous?" she asked. He noticed she said it aloud, so he couldn't tell if she'd intended a double meaning or not.

So he said, "Who wouldn't be?" and took another bite of cloud ray.

* * *

They emerged from the inn at dusk. A few stars were already showing in the deepening sky, and a glow in the east promised a moon before long. Jedra and Kayan didn't plan to wait for it. They wouldn't need the extra light once they were mindlinked, and the darkness might help. They hiked up the hill on which the Rokur estate stood, trying to look like slaves returning home after a long day in the fields. They would have tried looking like nobles, but Jedra would have failed miserably at that, and Kayan had at least a little experience being a slave.

They found the compound easily enough; the landmarks they had memorized from their psionic inspection guided them directly there. Finding a secluded spot from which they could work proved more difficult, but they finally found a dark corner in the servants' alley that led to the back entrance of the compound, not far from the point in the wall nearest Kitarak's quarters.

As they squeezed into the shadows, which Jedra expanded with his light-manipulating ability, Kayan mindsent, This is exactly the sort of place the innkeeper expected us to wind up tonight, isn't it?

Something like this, Jedra admitted. He was definitely nervous now, and not because of Kayan's proximity. He touched the crystal he wore around his neck for luck, took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then took Kayan's hands in his own. Let's do it before I get too scared, he said.

Yes, let's, she said. Here goes. She leaned forward to kiss him, and at the same time as their lips touched, so did their minds. Mmmm. They separated their consciousness from their bodies and drifted through the wall. This is a good start.

That was practically the last thing that went right for them. They found Kitarak easily enough, but when they tried to telekinetically loosen the nut holding his restraining bolt to the wall, it resisted until they nearly twisted it off, and then it screeched like a banshee when it finally began to turn. The guards came instantly alert, and Jedra and Kayan had to flee the building to avoid being detected. They watched through their psionic vision from across the weapons practice field while dark tendrils of psionic force wove out into the night, seeking the source of the sound, but eventually the psionicists gave up and pulled back inside.

Jedra and Kayan slid back toward the building and peeked through the barred window. Kitarak and one of the other slaves-the human-were sitting up on their cots while the four psionicists faced them from their chairs, their eyes half-closed in deep concentration. The elf woman wasn't in the building.

Even with their eyes closed, the two old men looked more interested than they had last night. They and the younger women were definitely on alert. Jedra and Kayan could see the dark bubble of the psionic suppression field surrounding the prisoners, and a lighter, wider bubble of awareness surrounding the whole building. If they disturbed that, the psionicists would know they were there.

We'll just have to break the chains when we push over the building, Jedra said. All right, then, time for the diversion.

They rose up over the estate, looking for the best way to distract the la

rgest number of soldiers. They could see where most of them were: relaxing in and around their own quarters after a long day. Some polished weapons, some played dice or card games, others simply sat outside in the cooling air and watched the sky change color. A few still stood guard in the towers in the main house and along the wall, and a few patrolled the compound as well.

The nobles who owned the estate were in their wooden house's central courtyard, lying in cool net hammocks while servants plied them with food and drink.

Maybe we can take care of them all at once, Kayan suggested when they saw the situation. The soldiers' quarters were built of square blocks of stone, but the nobles house had been built of wood to show off their wealth. And wood burned...

It didn't take long for someone to notice. The guards in the tower directly over the fire cried out in alarm at the first whiff of smoke, and the entire estate suddenly became a frenzy of motion. Soldiers ran from their barracks and servants boiled out of every outbuilding, most of them carrying water-soaked cloths or heavy leather hides for beating out the flames. They leaped in through the windows and doors, heedless of the smoke and flame, and flailed away at the fire until they had it nearly under control.

They've practiced this, Jedra said. Well, let's give them more. They moved through the mansion, setting fire after fire, straining against the magical protection spell with each one. Simply exciting the wood into flame with their own power proved too taxing to sustain, so they switched tactics, borrowing heat from the air and pouring it back into the wood. It was the same technique Kitarak used to keep his food cold, and it had the same effect: flakes of snow began to fall over the burning mansion.

That proved more distraction than the fire. Everyone outside stopped to stare up in wonder and feel the cold flakes melt on their outstretched palms, while the people inside screamed at them to come help with the fire. Jedra and Kayan kept it up for another few minutes, manipulating the crackling sound and flickering light of the fires to make explosions and lightning flashes and phantom attackers rushing out of the shadows to confuse the scene even more, then they abandoned the building and the servants and soldiers to their fate.

The soldiers were well trained; not all of them rushed to the fire. The ones in the guard towers stayed put- even the ones atop the burning mansion-and the ones on patrol took up positions near the front and rear gates and along the perimeter wall. Jedra and Kayan used Kayan's medical powers to incapacitate the ones on the side of the compound near Kitarak's quarters, giving them stomach cramps and blinding headaches and dizziness until nobody could move.

Time for step three, Jedra said, moving toward the gladiators' quarters. They peered inside again, cautiously; the psionicists had sent feelers out far into the night to warn them of attack. Kitarak and the other slave were lying flat on their cots, evidently knocked out cold to prevent them from attempting to escape.

Kitarak won't be able to help us! Kayan cried in alarm, but it was too late to back down. After the trouble they'd caused, the estate would never again be left so unguarded against psionic attack. They would just have to break Kitarak free by themselves.

There was no point in waiting. With a silent prayer to whatever gods were listening, they gathered their psionic power and shoved against the wall of the gladiators' quarters. The building shuddered under the blow, and slate fell from the roof, but it didn't go over. They hit it again, shattering the entire front wall, but still it didn't go over. Only when they smashed one of the side walls as well did the roof finally begin to crumble and fall in.

The psionicists inside thrust it away from them and their unconscious charges, letting the building crack open and fall away on all sides, but that took their combined power to accomplish and while they were doing that Jedra and Kayan struck directly at them. They attacked their convergent link first, trying to break the four psionicists apart so they couldn't draw on each other's power. They hadn't learned a direct method from Kitarak for that, so they tried their old visual methods, imagining the link as four ropes tied in a knot and themselves as a spinning kyorkcha slicing through the knot. They passed through like a knife through a waterskin, but their passage didn't accomplish quite what they expected. They broke the link all right, but the four psionicists each struck back at them individually. Jedra and Kayan felt four separate minds thrust at them, pressing for dominance and battering at their own link.

They could feel themselves slipping apart. Hold on! Jedra said, striking out telekinetically at their opponents. He tugged down more roof tiles and flung them at the psionicists, striking the old elf on the head and knocking him out. He felt Kayan using her medical skills to stop one of the young women's heart long enough to put her out of the battle, but by then the other two had linked up again and pressed the attack.

Jedra and Kayan's link grew weaker under blow after blow from the other psionicists. Jedra tried burning them, he tried blinding them with flashes of enhanced light, he even tried levitating them high into the air and dropping them, but they countered everything he threw at them. He felt the energy drain as Kayan tried her own specialties on them, but she was no more successful than he.

Then reinforcements arrived. Suddenly instead of two linked minds, there were three, then four again. Jedra thought maybe the two they had knocked unconscious had revived, but then there were five, then six. Their enormously enhanced power beat Jedra and Kayan back, then began to close around them. They didn't attack so much as suppress Jedra and Kayan's abilities, smothering their mindlink the way Kitarak had when he had stopped them from fighting each other back in his house. Where are they all coming from? Jedra asked as he fought to keep from being overwhelmed, but he realized the answer as soon as he asked the question. There had to be more of them resting at any given moment in order to keep a continuous guard over Kitarak. As demanding as convergence was, there had to be at least a dozen psionicists in the noble's pay.

No, they'll catch us! Jedra said, but Kayan was already trying to link with the unconscious tohr-kreen. She managed it, too, and they felt a surge of power as Kitarak woke, but the six combined psionicists bore down on them without mercy.