The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,58

they looked to Kitarak: small, fragile, their flesh unpleasantly exposed and quivering on their bones when they moved. It was an unflattering image.

From Kitarak’s viewpoint, Jedra watched himself take one of the tohr-kreen’s extended arms while Kayan took another, then the three of them began walking to the southwest. It wasn’t a normal pace; each step they took moved them hundreds of yards in a long, smooth glide. They slid over boulderfields as if they weren’t there, rising and falling over the rolling hills with a hypnotic rhythm that matched their pace.

The feeling of internal movement was strange enough. Within Kitarak’s body, Jedra could feel muscles sliding back and forth inside the hollow skeleton. His breathing came not from lungs in his chest, but from the pulsing abdomen that trailed behind like an ungainly sack tied to his waist. The extra arms were a complex knot of muscle and nerves that defied all experience, and the long, slender snout ending in its mandibles was a constant distraction in front.

Jedra tried to ignore it all and just remain a passive observer, but once he saw a flicker of motion off to the right, and their smooth stride faltered for a moment. They veered toward the source of the distraction, but Kitarak pulled them back onto the straight course before they reached it. A good thing, too; as they passed it Jedra saw another flailer feasting on the remains of some unfortunate animal.

The terrain grew more rugged the farther they went. The hills grew higher, and the valleys between them steeper. Some had become true canyons, the ground suddenly dropping away in sheer cliffs hundreds of feet deep. There would often be no warning that one was there until the dreamers were right on top of it. Such terrain would have proved nearly impassable to travelers on the ground, but Kitarak’s pace never faltered; he stepped over the chasms as if they were merely cracks in his path.

We wouldn’t have made it on our own, Jedra thought when he saw them. He got no reply; this was evidently not like a mindlink.

The sky seemed to be traveling faster, too. The stars slid westward almost as quickly as they did, and the sky was growing light behind them when Kitarak stopped at the rim of a small canyon. It seemed identical to all the others they had crossed, but Kitarak unerringly found a pathway leading down to the bottom of this one, and he led the way down the narrow trail, going ahead while Jedra and Kayan followed.

The bottom of the canyon was a flat, sinuous channel that had once held a river, but not for many centuries. There was evidently still moisture in the ground, however; a few stubby bushes grew in the cracked soil, and even a tree grew near the edge of a big rock pile.

Kitarak stepped closer to the rock pile, and Jedra saw that he had misjudged it. It was a house. He hadn’t recognized the curved walls at first because they weren’t smooth or even straight up and down. They were made from unmortared stone, and they bulged in odd places, giving the whole structure the appearance of a haphazard pile of rocks. Kitarak walked around to the back side of the structure and tugged on what looked like a loose piece of shale sticking out of a slanting gravel slope, and the whole business swung out on silent hinges. The gravel had been glued to a stone slab door.

A white, smooth-walled entry led into a hemispherical central room, its walls also finished in white stucco or something similar, and the whole space lit from milky-white skylights shaped like the hollow insides of rocks. From outside, Jedra supposed, they would look just like all the others in the pile.

Two circular cushions on the floor were the only furnishings, aside from the narrow stands supporting sculptures and the shelves on the walls holding hundreds of tinkercraft artifacts. Doorways led off in four directions from the central room, but Kitarak knelt down on one of the cushions and motioned for Jedra and Kayan to lie down on the other. When they had done so, he reached out with his lower hands and touched their heads.

For Jedra, the sensation felt as if his mind had been poured from one vessel to another. He had been in Kitarak’s viewpoint, but when the tohr-kreen awakened him he suddenly felt his consciousness slide back into his own head. He blinked, and the room