The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,44

the mirrors and cooked the z’tal more slowly while they ate, drying the thin strips of lizard meat rather than roasting them. When it was done he split it three ways and returned the cooker and his weapons to his pack. Then the three of them piled the boulders up around the wellhead again.

When the site had been returned to its former abandoned-looking state, Kitarak pulled on his pack and said, “We have water and food; now we hunt for treasure.”

“Treasure?” asked Kayan. “What sort of treasure could you find here?”

“Tinkercraft, of course,” Kitarak said. He led off into the ruins, his pack once again squeaking with every step. He moved at a much more leisurely pace this time, poking around among the ruins whenever he found any hint that something might have survived the ravages of time. He stayed pretty much to the center of the city where the buildings were better preserved, and ventured inside any that still stood.

Jedra and Kayan followed along for lack of a better plan, but they soon grew bored with his explanations of how counterweighted door-opening mechanisms worked or how the rectangular holes in the interior walls meant the buildings had been centrally heated. When he entered one particularly well-preserved building—this one three stories high and still capped with most of an angled roof—Jedra and Kayan told him they would wait in the shade just inside the door. Kitarak didn’t seem to mind; he wandered off into the gloomy interior, poking his head into every room and shuffling through the debris on the floor as if he were looking for a misplaced pair of sandals.

It was a big building. The room they were in was at least fifty feet across, and that was just the first of many. Jedra and Kayan sat on a stone bench beside the door and listened to Kitarak proceed farther and farther, until his footsteps could no longer be heard and the squeaking of his pack blended with the sigh of air moving through the doorways and windows of the immense structure.

He’s certainly a strange one, isn’t he? Jedra mindsent, even though he was certain Kitarak was out of earshot.

I’m not sure I like it, Kayan replied. No matter what he says, I’ve always heard that this “tinkercraft” of his helped bring about the destruction of Athas.

I don’t see how it could have, Jedra said. Expanding gythka handles and stoves that cook with the heat of the sun are interesting devices, but they could hardly cause the destruction of the world.

I just know what I’ve been taught.

By mages, Jedra pointed out. The templars were the people who wrote the histories, but most of the templars were magic-users. Defiler mages at that, some of them anyway. Of course they aren’t going to say magic caused it.

I suppose you’re an expert on the subject, Kayan said, her eyes wide and angry.

Of course not, Jedra said, but Kitarak had a good point. We can see defiler magic taking life from the world every time it’s used. It makes sense that a large enough spell, or enough small ones, could have turned the world into the desert we live in today.

And so could a big enough cookstove, couldn’t it? Kayan stalked back outside the building.

Jedra winced at his stupidity. He’d just attacked the basis of her former life; no wonder she’d gotten mad. Why was it every time he tried to talk with her they wound up arguing instead? He wondered if he ought to go after her and try to patch things up, but he was afraid he’d just make an even bigger mess of it. Better to give her a little time to calm down.

He leaned back against the cool stone wall and closed his eyes, but a familiar sensation made him open them again almost immediately. Someone else was in the building with him.

Not Kayan, nor Kitarak either. When he concentrated he could sense them both, but this was a much fainter awareness, even fainter than Kitarak’s had been when he had been dying of dehydration. Jedra hadn’t noticed it until now because Kayan’s presence had masked it.

It came from the far wall, or beyond it. He picked up his spear from where he had leaned it beside the door and walked toward the source of the sensation, stepping over the shattered remains of furnishings millennia old, until he came to the wall. Yes, beyond there. He backed up until he reached the long, dark hallway and stepped carefully