The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,93

and within a heartbeat their center of consciousness was there, looking down into the immense gladiator arena at the base of the half-finished ziggurat.

From above, the city of Tyr looked like two colorful plates just barely overlapping. The smaller one held the sorcerer-king’s palace and gardens, while the larger one held the ziggurat, the arena, the elven market and the merchant district, and every kind of dwelling from nobles’ houses to the warrens to the slave pits. Streets provided the cracks, like crazing in the glaze of a much-used piece of pottery.

Fitting, Jedra and Kayan thought when they saw the likeness, for despite the enormous ziggurat still under construction in the middle of it, Tyr was an old city. They focused their attention on the slave pits—the deep excavation into which the king’s captives were herded when they weren’t fighting or working on the ziggurat—but they didn’t see any sign of a tohr-kreen among the milling mass of unfortunate humans and demihumans. They checked the arena itself, but no games were being fought today and Kitarak wasn’t among the dozen or so gladiators practicing in the dusty red field. He wasn’t among the myriad slaves toiling on the ziggurat, either.

They did see signs of the other psionicists Kitarak had mentioned. There were hundreds of them, though. Around the slave pits and the practicing gladiators and in a few other places throughput town, bubbles of darkness showed up in their psionic vision. They were shields, through which Kayan and Jedra’s power could not reach. Presumably they were suppression fields similar to the one Kitarak had used on them when they had fought just before he left. Psionics wouldn’t work inside the fields, which allowed the slave masters to keep their captives in line even if they had psionic powers of their own.

Considering Kitarak’s talents, his captors would need a powerful suppression field. Jedra and Kayan scanned the city for one, blanking out as much of the other detail as they could until the city itself was a mere shadow, and when they did that their target became obvious. High on the hill on which the nobles had built their mansions rested a single intense sphere of blackness. That was good news. Kitarak would get better treatment from a noble than from the sorcerer-king or any of his templars. But even so, slavery was slavery; Jedra and Kayan weren’t about to let him remain captive.

Assuming Kitarak was inside the suppression-field bubble.

Let’s look at it in regular light, Jedra suggested, and the estates themselves grew more substantial. The one that housed the force bubble was built like a miniature version of the city itself. A twenty-foot-high wall ran all around a cluster of low stone buildings, all of which in turn encircled a two-story dwelling built of wood. Whoever had captured Kitarak was rich even for a noble, wood was the most expensive building material in Athas. The mansion was big enough to contain an open courtyard in the center, in which two tall trees provided shade and over which the inner rooms looked. Observation towers rose from the outside corners of both the mansion and the outer wall enclosing the grounds, and two guards armed with crossbows waited at constant alert atop each tower. Evidently the noble who owned all this was as paranoid as he was rich.

Ah, the price of success, Kayan said with amusement, but she and Jedra were anything but amused when they realized that they would have to get past those guards somehow. Not to mention the dozens of others who patrolled the compound on foot, and probably hundreds more inside the bunkhouses. The bubble of force that presumably held Kitarak had disappeared beneath the roof of one of the low buildings at the rear of the compound. That was probably the gladiators’ quarters, judging by the bloodstained practice field in front of it. Jedra and Kayan lowered their viewpoint until they could see in through the barred windows, and sure enough there was Kitarak, bound in chains by all four arms and linked to an enormous bolt that ran completely through the back wall. Two other slaves—a human man and an elven woman—were also chained to the wall. The prisoners had enough chain to allow them to sit or lie down on their cots, but no more.

The four psionicists guarding them—two young women and two bored-looking old men, one of them elven—sat in comfortable chairs across the building’s single room. That could explain how Jedra and Kayan