Meeting Kitarak the Tohr-Kreen: The Darkness Before the Dawn Chapter 4
The dying creature is not what they think it is.
Jedra looks down at it and sees a thri-kreen, one of those giant mantis-like insect people. But something about it seems off. Bigger cranial bulge behind the eyes. Narrower face. And strapped to its back is a massive pack stuffed with gear, most of it made of metal. On Athas, where a single metal knife can buy you a month of food, this creature is carrying a fortune in hardware. Cooking pots, gythka blades, curved throwing weapons, and tools Jedra cannot even identify.
The creature’s mandibles click open. “Water,” it croaks.
Kayan backs away. “Sorry. We don’t even have enough for ourselves.”
“Water,” it says again. “I know where is water. You give me yours, then I get more for all of us.”
The Gamble
Jedra and Kayan step away to argue about it. Kayan thinks the creature is desperate and will say anything to get their water. Jedra points out that they are pretty much dead anyway. Their waterskins hold maybe one more swallow each. That is not enough to reach any city. But a thri-kreen does not need much water to revive. If this thing actually knows where a well is, their only shot at survival is betting everything on a stranger.
“We certainly don’t have much to lose,” Kayan finally admits.
They give the creature every last drop of water they have. Within minutes, it pushes itself up to its full height. It towers over them, powerful foreclaws cocked forward, mantis head swiveling to study them.
Jedra grips his spear. Kayan gets ready to fight.
“I am not thri-kreen,” the creature says. Its voice is much stronger now. “I am tohr-kreen. Related, but more civilized. We do not harm other intelligent creatures.”
Its name is Kitarak.
The Tinkerer
Kitarak leads them through the ruins to a pile of stones at the base of a crumbling building. He starts tossing boulders aside with his four arms, and underneath is a piece of ancient machinery. Jedra recognizes a pump handle and spout. But everything else is levers, gears, cranks, and a vertical shaft going into the ground. And almost all of it is metal.
“Tinkercraft,” Kitarak explains. “An ancient discipline, lost to time for all but we few scholars who struggle to keep it alive.”
He starts working the pump. The water is too deep to bring up with normal pumping, he says. Something about atmospheric pressure only lifting water thirty-five feet at this elevation. So the mechanism pressurizes a containment vessel underground to push the water higher. Jedra and Kayan have no idea what he is talking about. But the gears turn, something vibrates deep underground, and then water comes gushing out of the spout.
Real, cold, clear water.
They fill their waterskins, splash each other, drink until their stomachs hurt. Kitarak scolds them for wasting it. “What wasteful creatures!” he says, backing away from the spray. They do not care. They are alive.
This scene is great because you can feel the science fiction writer behind the fantasy. Jerry Oltion clearly loves mechanics and engineering. Kitarak’s explanations sound like a physics lecture filtered through a giant praying mantis, and it works. The technology feels ancient and strange and believable all at once.
The Demonstration
Kitarak hunts food for them using an expanding gythka and a solar-powered stove made of curved mirrors. He cooks strips of dried lizard meat on it. He finds navigation instruments in the ruins and tries to explain how you can determine your position on the planet by measuring the sun’s angle. When he mentions that Athas is round, Kayan just stares at him. “Athas is round?” Nobody has told her this before.
Eventually Kitarak wants proof that Jedra and Kayan’s psionic powers are real. He is not aggressive about it. He is curious. But he insists.
Jedra and Kayan link minds. The rush of power hits them like a wind. They feel themselves become something greater. And they decide to push over a six-story tower down the street. Just to show what they can do.
The wall buckles. The top half rains down in massive blocks. The collapse gutters the building and takes out the back wall. That building falls into the next one. Which falls into the next. A chain reaction of destruction rolls up the street toward them. They run. Kitarak runs. The building where they had been resting minutes before thunders to the ground.
Dust everywhere. Silence.
“Was that enough of a demonstration for you?” Jedra asks, pretending they meant to do all of that.
Kitarak’s mandibles click nervously. “You didn’t have to do that. Throwing a single boulder across the street would have been enough.”
But here is the real problem. Jedra asks if they are ready to leave for Tyr now. Kitarak stares at him and says: “Whether or not I am ready, we must leave in any case.”
“Why?”
“Because you have destroyed the well.”
The chain of collapsing buildings buried the water pump under tons of stone. The only water source for hundreds of miles, and Jedra’s uncontrolled power wiped it out. This is the pattern. Every time they use their merged abilities, the destruction spirals beyond what they intended. They fought a mage and killed innocent bystanders. They stopped a cloud ray and crushed an elf. Now they have buried an ancient well that travelers have depended on for centuries.
They need a teacher. And they need one fast, because people keep getting hurt while they figure things out the hard way.
The three of them turn west toward Tyr. They have water, food, and a new companion who knows the desert. But behind them, an ancient city lies in even more ruin than before, and one more water source is gone from a world that cannot afford to lose a single drop.
Book: The Darkness Before the Dawn Author: Ryan Hughes (Jerry Oltion) Series: Dark Sun, Chronicles of Athas #2 ISBN: 0-7869-0104-7
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