down it, spear held ready. The presence was in the second room.
“Come out slowly,” he said aloud. “I know you’re in there.”
The awareness didn’t change, which was not surprising, weak as it was. Whoever was in there must be nearly dead. Jedra stepped to the door and peered inside. The room had no window, but enough light filtered in through cracks in the outer wall for him to see a smaller room than the one in front, only twenty feet or so long and maybe fifteen deep, with a wide stone workbench set against the wall all the way around. The stone had been cut perfectly flat and polished smooth, and at regular three-foot intervals atop the bench stood intricate rectangular frameworks of metal and crystal, now rusted and sagging under their own weight.
The awareness came from the near right corner, the one opposite the cracks in the walls. Jedra waited until his eyes adjusted to the dimness, then peered under the bench, expecting to see someone crouched there, but the space was empty. The bench itself held another of the metal frameworks, but nothing else.
There was definitely a presence of some sort in that corner, though. Jedra stepped closer and reached out to touch one of the crystals in the framework. It was about the size of his thumb and milky white in color, one of eight identical crystals mounted at the corners of an open cube. They had been mounted there, at any rate; three of the top four had fallen off after their supports had rusted through, and now lay on the stone slab.
The presence definitely came from the crystals—four of them, anyway—two in the framework and two on the table. The other four, as well as all the others in the room, were just crystals, like ones Jedra had seen worn countless times for ornamentation or used as magical talismans.
Jedra wondered what had been done to them to make them register to his psionic sense as though they were alive. Had some ancient magician stored life energy in them to power one of his spells? Jedra could hardly imagine a dead crystal holding much life energy, but maybe something happened when they were linked together, the way he and Kayan drew upon more power when they mindlinked than they could produce separately.
Or maybe the crystals were psionic. Jedra concentrated on one of them, but he didn’t sense any contact. The mysterious life-force continued undisturbed.
The squeak of Kitarak’s backpack and the scritch of clawed feet on stone came down the hallway.
“Kitarak,” Jedra said when the tohr-kreen drew near, “I’ve found something in here.”
The tohr-kreen stuck his bulbous head in the doorway. “Oh, those,” he said when Jedra held up one of the crystals. “Yes, I saw them. Crystals. Hah. Magical foolery. They’re nothing. Come see what I’ve found.” He waved something metallic in one claw, then headed on out of the building into the light.
Jedra looked back at the crystals. Worthless, were they? That’s what Kitarak had said about his lightning glass, too, but Jedra didn’t necessarily believe him. Feeling a little like a thief, he scooped up the three loose crystals off the bench and stuffed them in his pack, then hurried after the tohr-kreen.
Kitarak was showing off his discovery to Kayan. It was a short tube with a piece of glass at one end, mounted on what looked like a wedge taken out of a small wheel. A tarnished mirror about the size of a coin stuck out of the top of the wedge, and another one was mounted on one side, right in front of the tube.
“It’s a jernan,” Kitarak said. “Part far-seer and part angulator. Used for determining northness.”
“Determining what?” Kayan asked.
“Northness. One’s position north or south on the surface of the planet.”
“The what?”
“The planet. Athas. Our world.”
“Oh.”
“Athas is round,” Kitarak said impatiently, sensing that his explanation was going astray somehow. His voice grew more abrupt, filled with clicks and buzzing. “You can tell where you are on the surface by measuring how high the sun is in the sky. That’s called your northness. The ancients had a way of measuring eastness as well, which is the position around the globe in the direction it spins, but that depended upon accurate timekeepers, and we no longer—”
“Athas is round?” Kayan asked.
“Of course it—” Kitarak stopped. “Never mind.” He held the piece of tinkercraft up to his compound eyes, then lowered it again. It had obviously been designed for humanoid eyes. “Never mind,” he said