The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,19

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