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"Let's sleep on it," he said. "When we're ready to travel we can see if it's still there. If it's not, I'm willing to try for Tyr, but if it is I think we should go for the city."
"I don't know," Kayan said. "But you're right about one thing: We should sleep." She lay back against her pack and closed her eyes.
***** Jedra kept watch again, then traded with Kayan for a few hours' rest of his own. When he woke in the late afternoon they shared another honeycake and each had another mouthful of water. Then they joined minds again and looked for the mysterious city.
"That settles it," Jedra said. "We're going."
Kayan narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "I still don't like it. What's that city doing there, anyway? I've never heard of it before. And what's a thri-kreen doing roasting an erdlu in the middle of it? Where'd the erdlu come from? For that matter, where'd the thri-kreen come from? And where's everybody else? Something's not right here."
Jedra dismantled their tent and put on his robe again. "I don't care," he said. "It's better than trying for Tyr." He slung his pack over his shoulders and picked up the spear. "You coming?"
She blinked in surprise. "Jedra, what's gotten into you?"
He shrugged. "I guess I'm just trying to be decisive."
"What? You're rushing off into the unknown because I called you indecisive yesterday?"
"No." He tried to explain, but it was hard to put words around his reasons. "This just feels right. I know this is where we should go."
"It feels right. Oh, great." All the same, she apparently realized he was done arguing about it. She stood up and slowly drew on her pack. "If you're wrong..." She let the rest of the sentence hang.
Jedra finished it for her. "If I'm wrong, we're dead. But I'm not wrong; I can feel it. This is the right thing to do."
"I certainly hope so. All right, then, let's go."
* * *
The next day and a half passed much like the first, save that the terrain grew steadily rockier the farther they went. Once they had committed themselves to reaching the mystery city to the northeast there was no more argument about it, but Kayan obviously still doubted and resented the decision. There were no more goodnight Kisses; indeed, the rocks held the sun's heat well into the flight so they split the watch again and didn't even sleep together.
Jedra's danger sense never even twinged the whole time, either while they were walking or while they rested. This rocky wasteland was truly empty.
On the evening of the next day-their third since leaving the elves-they crested a shallow rise to find their goal laid out before them. It was indeed a city, and a vast one, too, but unfortunately Kayan's guess had been right: It was now a complete ruin. Stone buildings had collapsed into piles of rubble, and time had flattened the piles until the city was little more than a regular array of rocky hills. A few of the hardier structures- mostly toward the center of town-had fared better, some standing a few stories high, but most of the outlying buildings were mere fragments of their former selves.
Kayan refrained from saying "I told you so." Jedra was glad of that; ridicule on top of the intense letdown he felt would have probably driven him over the edge. Their waterskins held only a swallow of water for each of them; if they didn't find more soon, they would die.
"What about the thri-kreen?" Kayan asked. "Maybe he's real, at least."
Jedra cast about with his watcher sense, and sure enough he felt a faint tingling of a presence toward the center of the city. "Something's alive in there," he said.
"Can't you tell if it's the thri-kreen?"
He shook his head. "Just something alive."
"It could just as easily be something dangerous as something we want to meet," Kayan pointed out.
"It doesn't feel dangerous," Jedra said, concentrating. He felt a sense of urgency more than anything. "In fact, it feels like it's in trouble."
"What kind of trouble?"
"I don't know. I don't sense any threat to us, though."
Kayan looked at the piles of rubble they would have to navigate to reach whatever Jedra sensed, then with a sigh she said, "That's probably the only thing here in this slag heap; we might as well go see what it is."
* * *
It took them another hour of scrambling over boulders just to reach the city's center. They stayed to the middle of what had once been streets, finding that the debris wasn't as thick there, but the closer they got to the large buildings the deeper the rubble became simply because there had been more of it stacked up to begin with.
It was hardly a street at all, now. The top half of what must have been a ten-story rectangular tower had fallen into it, scattering its massive stone blocks the way the wind scatters sand. Jedra picked his way among them, some of them nearly as tall as he was, searching for the source of the life he sensed. Now that they were close it seemed to be weaker.
