The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,70

watch when you get exhausted? And what will you do if another tokamak finds you?”

“I’ll hit it with the same thing I did to you,” Kayan said. “The same thing I did to Sahalik. Very useful for driving off unwanted advances.”

The fear he’d felt just a few minutes ago had been the same thing she’d done to Sahalik? No wonder the elf had run away. If Kitarak hadn’t blocked it before the fear had had a chance to burn into Jedra’s memory, he would probably be running away himself, instead of Kayan.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked her suddenly.

“Huh?” She tied her pack closed.

“Why are you so eager to run off into the desert? Just because we had an argument? Because Kitarak left? Or are you afraid of me?”

She pushed past him into the great room again. “I’m not afraid of you or anybody else,” she said. She pulled on her pack and pushed open the door. Wind swirled inside, carrying a cloud of fine sand with it. The evening light outside was dirty red, filtered through all the airborne sand.

“It’s going to be dark soon, and there’s a storm blowing up,” Jedra told her. “You ought to at least be afraid of that.”

She looked out into the blowing sand, but if it scared her, she didn’t show it. When she looked back at Jedra, her expression was hard as stone. “Good-bye,” she said, then she stepped through the door and closed it behind her.

Jedra wanted to go after her, to bring her back and make her listen to him, but he knew she wouldn’t let him. He thought about mindspeaking an apology to her, but she probably wouldn’t listen to that, either. The only thing he could do for her was watch over her psionically, and get ready to go to her rescue if she needed it.

The storm saved him the trouble. His disembodied mind hovering over her every step of the way, he watched her climb out of the canyon, but she had hardly made it up the switchbacks before the wind hit with gale force. Billowing clouds of sand made it nearly impossible to breathe, much less find the trail. Kayan tried it anyway, probably using her psionic vision to see through the blinding sand, but even so she only made it a quarter mile or so beyond the rim of the canyon before she turned around and headed back.

Jedra let her fight her way to the switchbacks again, then when he was sure she was committed to returning he used his newly learned skill to calm the wind immediately around her while she trudged dispiritedly back to Kitarak’s stronghold.

He met her at the door.

“Aren’t you going to say ‘I told you so’?” she asked when he opened it for her.

“How about ‘I’m sorry’ instead?” He took her pack from her and brushed off the sand that had blown into the seams.

She looked at him incredulously. “You’re sorry? For what?”

“For making you mad. And for making you think I was mad at you.”

“Oh, now you weren’t even mad at me. Tell me another one.” She grabbed her pack from him and took it into the library. There wasn’t a door to slam, but the rejection was just as intense as if there had been.

Oh, but she was hard to convince. As Jedra stared after her, his apology ignored, he wondered why he even bothered to try. He went back to their bedroom—now his own, he supposed—and lay back on the cushion. The wind howled overhead, whistling through the rocks that camouflaged the house, and Jedra wondered where Kitarak might be. Had he found shelter somewhere, or was he wandering blindly through the storm?

He closed his eyes and let his mind drift outward again. The blowing sand was only a shadow of motion in the psionic vision, easily ignored, so he concentrated on finding the dark whirlwind that signaled an intelligent mind. He searched all around the canyon, spiraling outward until he’d gone a dozen miles, but Kitarak was nowhere to be seen. Jedra tried straight mindsending, but he got no response that way, either.

Finally he got up and walked across the house to the library. Kayan was curled up on the cushion, not reading or sleeping, but just staring at the murky red light beyond the room’s single irregular window. Night was not far away.

“What do you want?” she demanded when she heard him behind her.

“I want your help finding Kitarak. He’s out in this storm