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"Solar collector," he explained proudly when he noticed Jedra eyeing the device. "Doubles as a telescope, though it's very hard to collimate. I have a better one at home."
"Ah," Jedra said, nodding as if he understood. Then he suddenly remembered his lightning glass and dug it out of his pack. "like this?" he asked, holding his treasure out to Kitarak.
He had picked up the curved piece of glass from the sand after a templar had called down a lightning bolt to kill a slave who had stumbled while bearing the templar's sedan chair. The glass made tiny upside-down images of things when he looked through it, and if he held it just right it would make a tiny spot of sunlight that burned anything he touched with it.
Kitarak took it from Jedra's hand and looked it over casually. "Ah, yes, a flake off the top of a fulgurite," he said. "Remarkably free of inclusions, too. Useful for starting fires, I suppose, but not optical quality, I'm afraid." He handed it back to Jedra and adjusted his stove.
Jedra tried to hide his disappointment as he put the glass away. Dornal the mage had sold him into slavery to obtain that piece of 'fulgurite.' Certainly it held more value than Kitarak thought.
Breakfast soon took his mind off anything but food. They ate the whole jankx, and most of the kip as well. Kitarak adjusted the mirrors and cooked the z'tal more slowly while they ate, drying the thin strips of lizard meat rather than roasting them. When it was done he split it three ways and returned the cooker and his weapons to his pack. Then the three of them piled the boulders up around the wellhead again.
When the site had been returned to its former abandoned-looking state, Kitarak pulled on his pack and said, "We have water and food; now we hunt for treasure."
"Treasure?" asked Kayan. "What sort of treasure could you find here?"
"Tinkercraft, of course," Kitarak said. He led off into the ruins, his pack once again squeaking with every step. He moved at a much more leisurely pace this time, poking around among the ruins whenever he found any hint that something might have survived the ravages of time. He stayed pretty much to the center of the city where the buildings were better preserved, and ventured inside any that still stood.
Jedra and Kayan followed along for lack of a better plan, but they soon grew bored with his explanations of how counterweighted door-opening mechanisms worked or how the rectangular holes in the interior walls meant the buildings had been centrally heated. When he entered one particularly well-preserved building-this one three stories high and still capped with most of an angled roof-Jedra and Kayan told him they would wait in the shade just inside the door. Kitarak didn't seem to mind; he wandered off into the gloomy interior, poking his head into every room and shuffling through the debris on the floor as if he were looking for a misplaced pair of sandals.
It was a big building. The room they were in was at least fifty feet across, and that was
just the first of many. Jedra and Kayan sat on a stone bench beside the door and listened to Kitarak proceed farther and farther, until his footsteps could no longer be heard and the squeaking of his pack blended with the sigh of air moving through the doorways and windows of the immense structure.
He's certainly a strange one, isn't he? Jedra mindsent, even though he was certain Kitarak was out of earshot.
I don't see how it could have, Jedra said. Expanding gythka handles and stoves that cook with the heat of the sun are interesting devices, but they could hardly cause the destruction of the world.
I just know what I've been taught.
By mages, Jedra pointed out. The templars were the people who wrote the histories, but most of the templars were magic-users. Defiler mages at that, some of them anyway. Of course they aren't going to say magic caused it.
I suppose you're an expert on the subject, Kayan said, her eyes wide and angry.
Of course not, Jedra said, but Kitarak had a good point. We can see defiler magic taking life from the world every time it's used. It makes sense that a large enough spell, or enough small ones, could have turned the world into the desert we live in today.
And so could a big enough cookstove, couldn't it? Kayan stalked back outside the building.
Jedra winced at his stupidity. He'd just attacked the basis of her former life; no wonder she'd gotten mad. Why was it every time he tried to talk with her they wound up arguing instead? He wondered if he ought to go after her and try to patch things up, but he was afraid he'd just make an even bigger mess of it. Better to give her a little time to calm down.
He leaned back against the cool stone wall and closed his eyes, but a familiar sensation made him open them again almost immediately. Someone else was in the building with him.
Not Kayan, nor Kitarak either. When he concentrated he could sense them both, but this was a much fainter awareness, even fainter than Kitarak's had been when he had been dying of dehydration. Jedra hadn't noticed it until now because Kayan's presence had masked it.
It came from the far wall, or beyond it. He picked up his spear from where he had leaned it beside the door and walked toward the source of the sensation, stepping over the shattered remains of furnishings millennia old, until he came to the wall. Yes, beyond there. He backed up until he reached the long, dark hallway and stepped carefully down it, spear held ready. The presence was in the second room.
"Come out slowly," he said aloud. "I know you're in there."
The awareness didn't change, which was not surprising, weak as it was. Whoever was in there must be nearly dead. Jedra stepped to the door and peered inside. The room had no window, but enough light filtered in through cracks in the outer wall for him to see a smaller room than the one in front, only twenty feet or so long and maybe fifteen deep, with a wide stone workbench set against the wall all the way around. The stone had been cut perfectly flat and polished smooth, and at regular three-foot intervals atop the bench stood intricate rectangular frameworks of metal and crystal, now rusted and sagging under their own weight.
The awareness came from the near right corner, the one opposite the cracks in the walls. Jedra waited until his eyes adjusted to the dimness, then peered under the bench, expecting to see someone crouched there, but the space was empty. The bench itself held another of the metal frameworks, but nothing else.
There was definitely a presence of some sort in that corner, though. Jedra stepped closer and reached out to touch one of the crystals in the framework. It was about the size of his thumb and milky white in color, one of eight identical crystals mounted at the corners of an open cube. They had been mounted there, at any rate; three of the top four had fallen off after their supports had rusted through, and now lay on the stone slab.
The presence definitely came from the crystals-four of them, anyway-two in the framework and two on the table. The other four, as well as all the others in the room, were just crystals, like ones Jedra had seen worn countless times for ornamentation or used as magical talismans.
Jedra wondered what had been done to them to make them register to his psionic sense as though they were alive. Had some ancient magician stored life energy in them to power one of his spells? Jedra could hardly imagine a dead crystal holding much life energy, but maybe something happened when they were linked together, the way he and Kayan drew upon more power when they mindlinked than they could produce separately.
Or maybe the crystals were psionic. Jedra concentrated on one of them, but he didn't sense any contact. The mysterious life-force continued undisturbed.
