more happened.
She couldn’t have been poisoned; she had checked the food carefully before she ate any of it. So what was the problem?
Jedra wasn’t doing so well, either. He felt faint, and his vision swirled as if someone had stirred the world with a spoon. A couple of deep breaths helped, but not for long; the moment he tried to stand, his eyes went dark and he fell back down.
Kayan! he mindsent again. “Kayan!” He knelt beside her and shook her shoulder, pinched her arm, even rugged her into a semi-upright position, but the effort nearly tumbled him into unconsciousness again.
They both fell back to the grass. Jedra tried to sit up again, but he couldn’t manage even that. He tried to break their mental link with the crystal, but there was none to break. Once they had burst through into this world, they had stayed without effort. It would probably take a similar effort to leave, but they were too exhausted now to do it.
The world swirled around him. Fighting disorientation, he tried again to mindlink with Kayan, attempting to cut through the mysterious lethargy with a burst of psionic power, but he couldn’t feel her presence. He felt something out there, some flicker of response far away in the vast crystal world, but he couldn’t maintain it for more than a second.
The effort drained him even further, but that in itself provided an idea. If trying to mindlink tired him, then breaking the existing link with Kayan might give him more energy.
He concentrated on the mind-shielding technique that Kitarak had taught him, the one for stopping unwanted psionic contact. Closing his eyes so the swirling world wouldn’t distract him, he carefully built up a barrier. He felt the contact with Kayan growing weaker, stretching out until the link finally broke and with a final wave of vertigo he tumbled back to reality in Kitarak’s library.
It was dark. The candles had all burned out and it was still night, or it was night once again. Jedra tried to see with psionic vision, but there wasn’t enough light to amplify. He tried to levitate a candle from one of the other rooms, but he didn’t have the energy for it. He had to crawl into the great room for a candle, light it with the last of his power, and bring it back to the library.
Kayan lay on the cushion, sprawled on her side as if she had tumbled there without any attempt to break her fall. Her face and arms and legs looked thin and angular, the skin draped in folds over her bones. She looked like one of the starving street beggars who were so far gone that nobody bothered to feed them anymore.
His own arms and legs were just as bad, but he didn’t need to look at them to know the problem: He was starving.
“It wasn’t real,” he whispered. “None of it was real. Not even the food.” And in the real world, he and Kayan had been mindlinked for at least a day, burning energy at dozens of times their normal rate. It had had the same effect on them as going without food for weeks.
“Kayan,” he said, shaking her. Kayan.
She didn’t move, except to draw in another slow, shallow breath. He tried to mindlink with her again, but he couldn’t reach her. Her mind wasn’t there—it was still in the crystal. And now that he had broken their link she was completely out of reach.
Chapter Eight
His first impulse was to shatter the crystal and let her out, but he didn’t know if that would work. It wasn’t just a box holding her mind captive; it was an entire world. She might die in the cataclysm that would surely wrack it if he damaged the crystal. He didn’t know if death in there would mean anything outside, but he didn’t want to risk it. Not yet.
He looked at the crystal lying there on the floor in front of him. Such a tiny thing to hold such wonders—and to present such a trap. He was afraid to touch it now, for fear he would cause earthquakes inside. If he started another chain reaction of falling buildings, Kayan could be caught in it.
No, the first thing to do was to stave off starvation before he collapsed as well. He would be no use to her at all if he let that happen. He crawled into the kitchen and pulled himself up to reach the water jug on