asked.
“Well, sure,” Kayan said, wiping the spray from her face. “It just didn’t seem very likely, that’s all, especially when we found you collapsed there.”
“Understandable,” Kitarak said. “But as you have seen, appearances can be deceiving.” He stepped over to his pack, which leaned up against one of the surviving walls of the pump house, and untied a many-bladed gythka head from the bundle of tools below the bag. Normally a long pole separated the two wicked blades, but this one had only a stub of a shaft, leaving barely room to grasp it. Not for long, though. Kitarak held it overhead, then spun it quickly, and with a hiss of sliding metal the shaft seemed to magically extend itself until it was nearly eight feet long.
Jedra backed uneasily toward the b’rohg’s spear, which now seemed pitifully inadequate against the expanding gythka, but Kitarak paid no attention to him. The tohr-kreen bent down to his pack again and untied the curved, spiky throwing weapon, then stood and said, “Guard the pump. I will go hunt for food.” Before Jedra or Kayan could reply, he leaped straight over the wall—nearly fifteen feet—and came down with a clatter on the other side. They heard him kick off again, then all was silent.
“What do you think?” Jedra asked. “Do you trust him?”
Kayan laughed. “Do we have a choice?”
“We could make a break for it while he’s gone.”
“Break for where?”
Jedra had no answer for her. Tyr was the closest city they knew of, and it was at least five days away. They had water enough now—barely—but no food.
Kitarak had said he would hunt for some. He’d kept his promise about the water; maybe he would do the same with food.
As they waited for him to return, they heard occasional animal squeals that suggested he was doing just that. Jedra tried following him psionically, but he couldn’t see clearly on his own what the tohr-kreen was doing, and he didn’t think it was important enough to link up with Kayan to try it. When the sun dropped below the horizon and Kitarak still hadn’t returned, they flapped their robes to dry them before the night grew chilly, then settled into the protected corner of the pump house to take turns sleeping and standing guard.
* * *
Kitarak returned at dawn, bearing a rope from which dangled a slender, six-legged leathery kip at least a foot and a half long, a scaly z’tal lizard nearly that large, and a round, furry jankx as big as Jedra’s head.
“Breakfast,” Kitarak said nonchalantly, as if he had merely brought them an erdlu egg. He put Jedra and Kayan to work cleaning his kills while he set up another piece of tinkercraft from his pack. This was a metal grate surrounded by thin, curved mirrors that reflected sunlight from all sides onto it. He set the contraption in a shaft of light that slanted down into the well house from between two buildings across the way. The morning sun wasn’t particularly hot yet, but when Kitarak placed a strip of jankx meat on the grate, it immediately began to sizzle.
“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