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"What, this?" He kissed her again.
"You know what I mean."
"I do." He reached over and picked up the crystal off the floor beside the blood-drenched sleeping cushion. He hefted it in his hand, contemplating its fate. The way he felt right now he could smash it to splinters, but when he tried to throw it against the stone wall he couldn't bring himself to do it, even to as outrageous and unfriendly a world as that. Psionics didn't work there; he couldn't know if all those millions of people were truly mindless, or if he just couldn't sense them. And the immortal who'd created them, if that's how the world had come to be... no matter how crazy he'd grown in his millennia of isolation, it wasn't Jedra's place to judge him.
But he didn't want to leave it for someone else to stumble across. He got up and took the crystal into the kitchen, where he stuck it in through the pump spout and levitated it all the way down the shaft, past the lifting valve, and on into the deep recesses of the well.
There. The inhabitants could go on about their bizarre business without hurting anyone now.
As long as he was in the kitchen, he began preparing a meal. He took more inix steaks out of the cold-box- pausing to still the heat that had leaked into it while he'd been away-and rummaged through the vegetable storage bins until he found the makings for stew, Kayan joined him, helping cut things and putting everything into a pot that Jedra heated psionically, and within a half hour the whole house smelled wonderful. They were both suddenly ravenous; they sat down across from each other at Kitarak's oversized table and began to devour the stew like tigones at a fresh kill.
The last of the daylight had faded by the time their stew finished cooking; they ate by candlelight. After his second bowl, Jedra looked across the table at Kayan's shadowy form and said, "Do you forgive me?"
"For what?" she asked, her spoon half raised to her mouth.
"For everything."
"That's a lot to forgive someone for."
"I suppose." He took another bite. "On the other hand, think how virtuous it'll make you feel."
"Hmm. That's a point." She ate another few bites. "I know what you're thinking."
Jedra laughed. "Then tell me so we'll both know."
"You're thinking we should ask Kitarak to come back and finish teaching us what we need to know."
He hadn't been thinking that-he'd only wanted to reconcile with Kayan-but now that she mentioned it, that did sound like a good idea. "Do you think he'd come?" he asked. "It's only been a few days."
Kayan shrugged. "All we can do is ask him and see."
"All right." Jedra reached out his right hand and took her left. "Let's see if we can find him."
Their mental union felt like old times-the intense rush of pleasure, the complete blending of their personalities, the orders-of-magnitude increase in their power. They concentrated on the unique signature of Kitarak's mind and sent their message radiating out to find him wherever he had gone: We're ready for you to come home now.
With mindsending they couldn't tell where their target was, or even if he had heard them, but they kept their minds open for a response, which was only a few seconds in coming.
I'd love to, but I'm temporarily indisposed. I've been captured and forced into the gladiator games in Tyr. Along with his words came an image of the tohr-kreen standing outside the city's walls, so absorbed in measuring the northness with his tinkercraft jernan that he didn't notice the soldiers until they had completely surrounded him.
We'll come get you out, they told him.
That will be difficult, Kitarak said. They have four psionicists in conjunction at all times to keep me under control. In fact, I'm surprised they haven't detec-His voice cut off in midword.
Looks as if they just did. Jedra and Kayan imagined themselves hovering over the city, and within a heartbeat their center of consciousness was there, looking down into the immense gladiator arena at the base of the half-finished ziggurat.
From above, the city of Tyr looked like two colorful plates just barely overlapping. The smaller one held the sorcerer-king's palace and gardens, while the larger one held the ziggurat, the arena, the elven market and the merchant district, and every kind of dwelling from nobles' houses to the warrens to the slave pits. Streets provided the cracks, like crazing in the glaze of a much-used piece of pottery.
Fitting, Jedra and Kayan thought when they saw the likeness, for despite the enormous ziggurat still under construction in the middle of it, Tyr was an old city. They focused their attention on the slave pits-the deep excavation into which the king's captives were herded when they weren't fighting or working on the ziggurat- but they didn't see any sign of a tohr-kreen among the milling mass of unfortunate humans and demihumans. They checked the arena itself, but no games were being fought today and Kitarak wasn't among the dozen or so gladiators practicing in the dusty red field. He wasn't among the myriad slaves toiling on the ziggurat, either.
Considering Kitarak's talents, his captors would need a powerful suppression field. Jedra and Kayan scanned the city for one, blanking out as much of the other detail as they could until the city itself was a mere shadow, and when they did that their target became obvious. High on the hill on which the nobles had built their mansions rested a single intense sphere of blackness. That was good news. Kitarak would get better treatment from a noble than from the sorcerer-king or any of his templars. But even so, slavery was slavery; Jedra and Kayan weren't about to let him remain captive.
Assuming Kitarak was inside the suppression-field bubble.
Let's look at it in regular light, Jedra suggested, and the estates themselves grew more substantial. The one that housed the force bubble was built like a miniature version of the city itself. A twenty-foot-high wall ran all around a cluster of low stone buildings, all of which in turn encircled a two-story dwelling built of wood. Whoever had captured Kitarak was rich even for a noble, wood was the most expensive building material in Athas. The mansion was big enough to contain an open courtyard in the center, in which two tall trees provided shade and over which the inner rooms looked. Observation towers rose from the outside corners of both the mansion and the outer wall enclosing the grounds, and two guards armed with crossbows waited at constant alert atop each tower. Evidently the noble who owned all this was as paranoid as he was rich.
Ah, the price of success, Kayan said with amusement, but she and Jedra were anything but amused when they realized that they would have to get past those guards somehow. Not to mention the dozens of others who patrolled the compound on foot, and probably hundreds more inside the bunkhouses. The bubble of force that presumably held Kitarak had disappeared beneath the roof of one of the low buildings at the rear of the compound. That was probably the gladiators' quarters, judging by the bloodstained practice field in front of it. Jedra and Kayan lowered their viewpoint until they could see in through the barred windows, and sure enough there was Kitarak, bound in chains by all four arms and linked to an enormous bolt that ran completely through the back wall. Two other slaves-a human man and an elven woman-were also chained to the wall. The prisoners had enough chain to allow them to sit or lie down on their cots, but no more.
The four psionicists guarding them-two young women and two bored-looking old men, one of them elven-sat in comfortable chairs across the building's single room. That could explain how Jedra and Kayan had reached Kitarak and how he had managed to reply before they had stopped him. His guards had been too relaxed, saving their energy for when they needed it, but they were alert now.
