AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Open water? It couldn't be, not out here. But it might be something else useful, so they veered northward and with a few powerful wingbeats flew toward it.
A city slid up from behind the horizon, its buildings taller and straighter-sided than anything either of them had ever seen. Even the modest ones were larger than the pyramid under construction at Tyr, and there were dozens even bigger. What they had seen was sunlight reflecting off the flat sides of the buildings.
What could it be? Jedra asked, and Kayan answered, An ancient ruin? I've heard the desert is littered with them.
This doesn't look very ruined.
Maybe we're seeing it as it used to be.
They circled around, looking at the buildings from all sides. At their bases grew trees and green grass so thick the dirt couldn't be seen between the blades. In the middle of one open courtyard a fountain sprayed three jets of water high into the air.
And seated on a bench beside the fountain, a six-limbed, mantislike thri-kreen leaned its head back and watched them with its black, multifaceted eyes.
We've found it! Jedra said. This has to be the oasis.
It doesn't have to be anything, Kayan said.
Sure it does. And whatever it is, it's better than nothing. We should come here instead.
No, we should stick with our original course. If we start chasing mirages, we'll never make it anywhere.
This isn't a mirage.
They felt the same rending of their union that they had felt last time they had begun to argue, the same diminishing of their synergy. Kayan said, Let's unlink and talk about it.
Jedra sensed that she was going to break the link anyway, so he readied himself for the shock and said, All right.
It wasn't quite so bad as before. Their roc body and the city below flickered and vanished like a burst soap bubble, and Jedra once again found himself sitting on the hard rock with Kayan by his side. Their makeshift tent flapped softly overhead in a faint breeze.
Neither of them spoke for a minute while they tried to corral their stressed emotions. The letdown was just as intense as always, but they were getting familiar with it, and they simply waited for it to pass.
Jedra spoke first. "I still think we should go for the city. It's only another day and a half away."
"It may not be a city," Kayan said. "And if it is, I bet it's nothing but rubble now, no matter what we saw." "And the thri-kre
en?"
"Who knows? Maybe it was the ghost of the king." Jedra leaned back against the rock. They had pitched their lean-to tent on the west side of it, which hadn't received sun yet today and was still a few degrees cooler than the surrounding air. "Maybe it wasn't," he said. "Maybe it was an actual, living thri-kreen. Maybe it lives out there, and the city was its mental image of home."
Kayan picked up a fist-sized rock and turned it over in her hand. "You want to go into a thri-kreen's home? They eat elves, did you know that?"
"I'm not an elf," Jedra told her. "I'm a half-elf."
"So it'll only eat half of you."
"We can defend ourselves if necessary," Jedra said, "but I'll bet we won't have to. Thri-kreen and elves get along fine in the city. I'll bet it'll sell us food and water if we offer to buy it. I've still got Dornal's money bag. And maybe the thri-kreen will know a better way across the desert than the way we're going."
" 'Maybe' is a pretty unsure thing to hang your hopes on," Kayan said to the rock.
"So is thinking we can walk all the way to Tyr on two half-empty waterskins and ten honeycakes."
Kayan took a deep breath and let it out slowly, but didn't speak.
"This is serious," Jedra said. "We could die out here. We will die if we make the wrong decision."
"I know that." Kayan flung the rock she'd been holding out into the desert, where it clacked against another rock and bounced to the side. "That's why I don't want to waste our last resources wandering off after a psionic chimera."
Since they weren't speaking mind-to-mind Jedra didn't get a definition of "chimera," but he had an idea of what she meant anyway.
