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"Not here," Jedra protested. "I was in a psionic vision, searching for Sahalik. I couldn't find him, but I saw what I thought might be another psionicist, so I thought I'd ask if he'd seen him, but when I tried to make contact he attacked me."
"Not surprising, if you approached him like you did me," Kayan said. She glowered at him a moment longer, then she saw the cake waiting for her at the head of her mat and her expression softened a bit. She picked up the cake and took a bite of it. Around a mouthful of crumbs she said, "So why were you looking for Sahalik? You want a rematch?"
Jedra was getting a little upset at her caustic attitude, but he told himself she had just been awakened suddenly and had jumped to a false conclusion, so he would give her a few minutes to come around. "He's still missing," he told her, "and the elves are worried about him. They've delayed the morning march until they can find him."
She laughed. "Hah, good luck to 'em. He's probably halfway to the Ringing Mountains by now."
"What do you mean? What did you do to him?"
Kayan ate another bite of cake. She watched Jedra as she ate, as if sizing him up to see how much she wanted to tell him. When she swallowed, she simply said, "I used an old templar trick we sometimes used on prisoners and such to make 'em cooperative."
"What kind of trick?" Jedra asked, but Kayan only smiled coyly and took another bite of cake.
"What's this?" Jedra asked. "Are you going to start hiding things from me now?"
She looked away at the stitchery on the tent wall beside her. "Is it hiding things to protect you from yourself?" She looked back at him, her expression serious. "Jedra, every time I teach you something, you use it to get into trouble. We need somebody with some experience at this to help us before we start playing with dangerous abilities."
"You think so?" Kayan flipped her hair back behind her ears with a haughty shake of her head. "Try living in a woman's body for a dozen years, and then maybe I'll listen to your advice. In my experience, men don't take no for an answer unless you make it very clear you mean it."
"You certainly made it clear enough to Sahalik. The trouble is, now the whole tribe is afraid of us."
"Is that necessarily a bad-?"
A cry from just outside the tent interrupted her. It was in elvish, a single word that sounded like "Chimbu!" Neither Jedra nor Kayan knew what it meant, but other voices picked up the cry and soon the whole camp was shouting it.
"Maybe Sahalik has come back," Jedra said. He was about to get up to go see, but before he had risen more than a few inches off his sleeping mat something made a swooshing sound that drowned out even the elves' cries of alarm, and a thick rope edged with spines slashed through the tent. If Jedra had been standing it would have taken off his head, but as it was the rope
merely ripped away the top of the tent at the four-foot level. The remaining walls slumped to the ground like clothing taken off and dropped at day's end.
The sudden sunlight made Jedra squint, but a moment later the sun disappeared behind a triangular silhouette. Was that the top of the tent blowing away? No, the tent was over to the side, a small rag still dangling from the spikes at the end of the thick rope that issued from the base of the triangle. A quick twitch of the rope from side to side shook the tent free, and Jedra suddenly realized the rope was a tail, and the dark triangle was some kind of flying creature.
A loud boom rolled over the desert: the whip-crack of the thing's tail. Jedra revised his estimate of its size. The creature was enormous. It must have been a hundred feet across.
The elves were screaming in terror. Archers fired arrows at the thing, but the arrows seemed to slow just before they hit it, then fall back to the ground.
Over the cry of the elves, Kayan shouted, "That wasn't a psionicist you found while you were out looking for Sahalik, that was a cloud ray!"
Jedra felt a sinking feeling in his gut. "What's a cloud ray?" he asked, but he already knew the important thing: it was trouble.
Kayan confirmed it. "They're carnivorous, and they use psionic levitation to fly around looking for food. They normally leave people on the ground alone, but they hate other psionics users. When they encounter one, they almost always try to kill him."
Jedra looked at the creature again. It was mostly wing, with a thick ridge down the center between its bulging head and its whip tail. It was hard to tell with the glare of the sun directly behind it, but it looked like the underside was mostly white, blending into a light brownish green near the edges. Muscles rippled when it flapped its leathery wings. It couldn't have flown by just flapping alone-it was far too large and shaped wrong for that- but evidently that was how it maneuvered. It banked silently around, exposing the sun again. Jedra's eyes watered, and he sneezed.
"It hates psionicists? Then how do we fight it?" he asked, looking away.
"Not with longbows, that's for sure," Kayan said. The elves were figuring that out, too. Their arrows were doing more damage to the tribe when they fell back to the ground than to the cloud ray. The chief-standing among the warriors on a dune top-shouted something, and they tried firing over the top of the ray and letting their arrows fall on its upper surface, but the mysterious barrier slowed them from above, too.
The other elves began scattering out into the desert, either trying to get better angles to pierce the ray's invisible armor or just trying to get away before it came around and attacked the camp again. That would be soon; despite its size, the thing was fast. And deadly. Its spiky tail could cut a person in two without even slowing down.
"We've got to link up," Jedra said. "If we don't do something, it could kill the whole tribe."
He looked back up at the aerial monster, now turned to expose a mouth wide enough to swallow a dozen people at once. Four jet-black eyes, two on either side of the mouth, seemed to lock on to his own. The cloud ray flapped its wide, leathery wings again and began to descend, obviously not content with a single attack. "I think you're right," Kayan said.
The being they had become vibrated with energy. They felt it coursing through them in ever-strengthening pulses, bathing their psyches with sensual waves of delicious power. They were exultant, they were invincible, they were life itself, born to conquer the forces of death and destruction.
They rose upward from the desert floor, becoming a swift, powerful bird of prey. Overhead, the cloud ray was a lumbering balloon of flesh, wallowing through the air by comparison with their darting flight.
It holds the arrows off with an inertial barrier, the Kayan part of their combined being thought. If we can remove its shield, the elves can kill it.
