Kayan lay on a separate mat beside him, still inhaling and exhaling the long, soft breaths of deep sleep. Jedra felt wide awake and perfectly healthy, which no doubt explained Kayan’s exhaustion. She had finished healing him during the night.

  There weren’t any free rides in this world. Energy used for one thing had to come from somewhere else. With sorcery it was life-energy; every magical spell required the vital force of living things and life-giving elements to power it. Careful mages-preservers-took care to use only what the land could spare, but defilers used up everything around them, leaving only a circle of ash when they cast a spell. The streets of Urik were nearly impassable with potholes left over from defilers’ magic.

  Psionics didn’t require external energy, but that ecological nicety exacted its price on the psionicist. Every time Kayan or Jedra used their powers, it drained their own stamina. With mental contact and other simple skills that drain was hardly significant, but healing someone’s injuries required a great deal from the psionicist. Only rest could restore what the healer had lost. Small wonder if Kayan slept until noon-provided the elves would let her. Jedra was surprised they had allowed either of them to sleep in as long as they had; according to Galar they were usually up and moving long before dawn.

  He rose quietly and left the tent to see if he could find out what was going on, but the first elves he saw gave him such chilly looks that he didn’t ask. He found the community tent and recovered both his and Kayan’s knapsacks, leaving their old sleeping mats behind; then he followed his nose to the food tent where he picked up a couple more of the crumbly cakes and filled their waterskins for the day’s hike. They hadn’t had time for breakfast yesterday, but today nobody seemed in a hurry. Still none of the elves spoke with Jedra-in fact, when they saw him coming they got out of his way. Maybe they’re just embarrassed at their behavior last night, Jedra thought. They should have been. Next time Sahalik decided to beat up on someone, Jedra would enjoy shouting “Fight, fight, fight!” as they had done and see how they liked it.

  He took the food and knapsacks back to the chief’s tent and set them down beside Kayan. He nibbled his cake slowly, watching her sleep. She looked so innocent there, her head resting in the crook of her arm and her face pressed into the mat, her small, round human nose pushed to the side and her straight brown hair falling over her eyes. Jedra let his gaze drift down over her loosely shrouded body. Even through her robe he could see how curvaceous she was. Small wonder Sahalik had been attracted. Jedra was, too, but at least he had the decency to wait for her to return his interest.

  Or was it unwillingness to believe that she might actually feel the same way about him? Jedra had grown up on the streets; his home had been a nook in a wall at the end of a dead-end alley. People with his background usually didn’t associate with templar women. His and Kayan’s time together in a slave pen had brought them both down to the same social level-the very bottom-but it hadn’t erased their pasts. Now that they were in the lap of luxury again, Jedra felt completely out of place, while Kayan would no doubt feel right at home.

  Actually, considering her former station, she would probably think this was still roughing it. But would she accept it, and Jedra, as part of her new life? He couldn’t make himself believe that she would.

  There was their age difference to consider, too. Jedra was at least three years younger than Kayan, maybe more. He’d had to grow up fast to make it on his own in the city, but he was still naive about a lot of things that she had probably experienced many times. Did she find that attractive, or would she become bored with him? He didn’t know that, either.

  The richly appointed tent made Jedra nervous. He got up and went back outside, and this time he stopped the first elf he saw-one of the old women who couldn’t get out of his way in time-and asked why the tribe wasn’t moving out at dawn.

  She peered at him through eyes gone white in patches, but Jedra got the impression she was looking deeper than the surface level anyway. Finally she sniffed and said, “We’re waitin’ on Sahalik. He’s not back yet.”

  “Oh,” Jedra said. He felt a mixture of relief and anxiety. He didn’t necessarily want to see the big elf again, but on the other hand, if anything had happened to him, Kayan would be responsible. “How about Galar?” he asked. “Has he returned?”

  The woman started to laugh, but it turned into a dry, hacking cough. When she got it under control she said, “Come and gone again, hours ago. The night creatures chased him and Ralok back to camp before they tracked Sahalik more than a mile, but they went back out as soon as it was safe.”

  “Oh,” Jedra said again. No, this wasn’t good at all. “Thank you,” he told the woman, then he went straight back into the tent.

  Kayan was still asleep. “Wake up,” he said, shaking her softly by the shoulder. “Kayan, wake up.” When she didn’t stir, he shook her a bit harder, but she didn’t respond.

  Kayan, he mindsent.

  Mmmm?

  Kayan, wake up. We have to find Sahalik.

  Mmmm-mmmm.

  Come on, this is important! He shook her again, but she didn’t awaken. He felt the mindlink break, and when he tried again he couldn’t make contact. Evidently Kayan had blocked him out. He didn’t even know if she had understood him, or if she was just too much in need of sleep to be roused.

  Well, maybe he could do something by himself. He didn’t have nearly the control that Kayan had, but he could still make mental contact with people. Much as he hated the idea, maybe he could track down Sahalik and persuade him to return. Or failing that, he might at least be able to find out if the elf was all right.

  Jedra tried to orient himself inside the tent. The fire pit was beyond the wall to his right, and Sahalik’s tent was behind him and a bit to the right as well. Sahalik had run away from the fire and over another tent, which would mean he had gone more or less directly to Jedra’s left. To the east. Jedra sat cross-legged on his sleeping mat facing that direction and closed his eyes so he could concentrate.

  The first time he had gone on a psionic voyage, it had felt like he was dreaming. He had found himself face down in a crystal-clear pool of water, a pool so impossibly large he had actually floated in it. Far away at the bottom of the pool had been the desert floor, over which he had drifted like a cloud in a breeze. He tried to recapture that image now, tried to become a cloud, or a bird like the second time he’d gone voyaging with Kayan. Now that he was concentrating on it of course it was harder to do, but the camp was quiet and the tent peaceful enough; eventually he felt his consciousness drift free of his body and begin to rise.

  The camp receded below him, the dozen or more sand-colored tents of varying sizes looking more like an outcrop of rock than anything. Puzzled, Jedra swooped down and realized that the camp was a rock outcrop, at least in his psionic vision. The insectlike kanks in their pens beyond the tents had become dung beetles, then metamorphosed into ants as he rose into the sky. Great.

  He couldn’t count on any correspondence with reality, then. Except for one thing: himself. He was still a half-elf in a light blue robe, seated in midair on a rectangular sleeping mat. He gripped the edges so he wouldn’t fall off and directed the mat upward.

  The elves themselves registered in the vision as long, slender, silvery funnels reaching upward toward him. Jedra knew from previous experience in the slave caravan that if he flew down any of those funnels he would find himself mindlinked with the person at the base of it, or at least making preliminary contact. When he and Kayan had done this while mentally joined the funnels had been great wide things, and when they flew down one they found themselves seeing through the eyes and hearing through the ears of whomever they encountered, but Jedra couldn’t do that alone. Many times he couldn’t even recognize who he’d contacted, in which case he couldn’t make his presence known, but if it was someone he knew then he could usually at least send them a message.

  He stopped rising when the elf camp was a mere speck in the desert. Sahalik had gone east, so Jedra turned toward the golden apple the rising sun had become and began to move across the crumpled gray cloth of the dunes. He saw two more funnels a few miles out-Galar and Ralok, no doubt-but he didn’t see any more beyond that. Sahalik had been moving pretty fast, though; he could have gone a long way in an entire night.

  The air blew Jedra’s robe into billowing folds behind him. The fringe at the edge of the mat flapped in the wind, too, but the mat itself only undulated a little. Jedra slowly began to relax, but he never let go his grip on the edge. He didn’t think falling off in a psionic vision would be fatal, but he didn’t know for sure, and it was a long way down….

  After he had traveled for ten or fifteen minutes straight east, he began to wonder if he had missed his quarry. At the speed he was flying, he must have covered a full day’s march and then some; if Sahalik were out here, he should have found him by now. Of course Sahalik might not have continued straight east. He had been in a panic, after all; he might have started running in circles for all Jedra knew. So he turned to the south and flew along in that direction for a few minutes, then turned west for just a mile or two, then back north again. He swept back and forth through the dreamscape, crisscrossing the desert in search of any hint of a silvery funnel, but he found nothing.

  At last, exhausted from the effort, he turned back toward the elf camp, thinking that he might be able to rouse Kayan and the two of them might be able to search more thoroughly. The sun was considerably higher now, but he banked around and put it behind him, then swept back across the desert, keeping his eye out for the rock outcrop that would be the tents. But after he’d flown a few minutes and still not found it he began to wonder if he had overshot. Or possibly he had gone too far north or south; he’d zigzagged back and forth so much he really didn’t know where he was anymore.

  Well this is silly, he thought. All I have to do is open my eyes and I’ll be back in the tent. He tried it, but he found that he had to close his eyes first to even make the attempt, and when he opened them he was right back in the vision. If he swung his arms below the mat he didn’t encounter tent floor, either, just more air.

  The beginnings of panic closed in on him, but he fought it down and tried to think of his options. The elf camp was full of minds, so taken together they should make a single enormous funnel that would extend up well above the horizon; maybe if he thought of it that way he could see a silvery, shimmering vortex or something off in the distance.

  Sure enough, now that he was looking for that instead of the rock outcrop, he could see it clearly to the south. He directed his mat toward it, faster now because he could feel himself growing tired from the extended psionic voyage, but when he drew closer he realized he I had made a mistake. This funnel didn’t issue from the ground; it came from a source high in the sky. Jedra veered to the side and circled around it. It looked like a tangle of thorny vines, a dense knot of sharp points that said clear as words: Do not touch. Jedra wondered what it looked like in the real world. Was it a creature of some sort, or maybe another psionicist or wizard flying between cities on kings’ business? Maybe those thorns were the psionic representation of magical wards.

  The silvery vortex twisted around toward him. Jedra wasn’t sure if he wanted to make contact, but whoever it was might have spotted Sahalik. Whether or not that person would deign to speak with Jedra was anybody’s guess, but Jedra didn’t suppose it would hurt to try.

  He flew into the maw of the vortex. The mat bucked, and Jedra hung on tight, but then he felt the familiar sliding sensation as he fell into contact with the other mind, and—

  Wham.

  Intense rage, directed straight at Jedra’s unprotected mind. Rage and some kind of force as well; it felt as if his head were suddenly full of pressure, as if it were going to explode at any second. Pain and terror accomplished what his imagination had not: he tumbled off his mat to land heavily on his side-right on top of Kayan.

  That in turn did what his earlier shaking could not. Kayan cried out in panic and struggled to sit up, shoving Jedra aside and striking out with her hands at the same time as she directed some sort of psionic attack at him. Jedra ducked her blow, but he couldn’t duck the wave of unreasonable panic that passed through him, a brief surge of terror as if he’d just realized he was about to die. The sensation momentarily paralyzed him, and Kayan’s shove sent him tumbling off her to the floor of the tent.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

  Shaking his head to clear it-he wasn’t going to die after all, it seemed-Jedra sat up and said, “I was looking for Sahalik.”

  “By climbing all over me?” she asked sarcastically.

  “No, no, I fell on you when the-whatever it was attacked me.”

  “The whatever it was?” Kayan rubbed her eyes and looked around the interior of the tent.

  “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.”

  Jedra supposed there was some truth to what she said, but it still annoyed him to be considered the dumb half of the team. “Look here,” he said, “I’m not the only one who gets us into trouble. If you’d turned down Sahalik gently instead of getting all high and mighty about it, I never would have had to go look for him.”

  “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.