The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,20

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