Aerie

Them-noh-thet, the Priest of Haras who had gone with Kiron the first time, had spent hours setting up elaborate ritual equipment to work his magic.

Rakaten-te, the Chosen of Seft, set up nothing but himself.

Kiron had more than expected the Chosen to ask him to find some other venue than the Temple of Haras and had resigned himself to moving all of the provisions that they had found to a new location.

Instead, Rakaten-te had dismounted—a bit stiffly, which was hardly a surprise, given his age—and followed Kiron into the temple by the simple expedient of keeping one hand on Kiron’s shoulder. He had stood in the middle of the sanctuary floor for some time, with his head cocked a little to one side as if he was listening to something.

“Properly cleansed and purged,” he had said at long last, with an approving nod. “I shall have to tender Them-noh-thet a compliment when we return.”

Then he had sat down where he stood, without any preparations, elaborate or otherwise, and apparently went off into meditation.

That left Kiron and Aket-ten to set up the living space, fetch water, prepare food, and hunt, all in blistering heat. From time to time Aket-ten would glance at the Chosen with resentment.

“I don’t know why he wanted me,” she finally said, crossly, as she kneaded dough. “All I’m doing is acting as a servant.”

“So am I,” Kiron reminded her, thinking as he did so that being made a wingleader, the one thing she had wanted above all others, had not improved her temper any.

“Yes, but I’m having to cook,” she continued, looking down at the dough resentfully.

“So am I,” Kiron reminded her, as he banked coals around the pot of lentils they would be having for dinner.

“Yes, but anyone could have done this,” she responded. “Probably better than I could.”

At this point, it was clear to Kiron that Aket-ten didn’t want to hear anything logical, she only wanted to vent her frustrations. On the one hand, he could agree with her. After all, he was certain that, eventually, Rakaten-te would have magical need of Aket-ten’s training and skills. All he had served as was a kind of cart driver on a very superior cart indeed. And now his only purpose here was to attend to whatever need the Chosen had.

Aket-ten fretted and fidgeted, wondered aloud what she was doing here, and became more irritated and irritating as the chores they were doing to make things livable clearly made her feel as if she was nothing more than a servant.

And how would she feel in Aerie? he wondered. Perhaps that was the real reason why she had not wanted to stay there with him. There was too much drudge work for her. Now he began to be irritated with her, and some of his mother’s comments about the noble-born who had never known what it was to work hard began to ring truer . . . .

Perhaps he didn’t fit so well with her. Perhaps this was the true Aket-ten, nobly born, she who had never had to do without servants, who had never known what it was to take care of herself. Life at Aerie, life as the new sort of Jouster, was going to be hard for a very long time. Perhaps the feelings they had for each other could not stand up under that hardship.

Despite the bright sun, a shadow seemed to fall over them both, and his spirits sank further and further. He had been deceived, or he had deceived himself. Why should someone like Aket-ten waste any time on someone like him? He was nothing more than a novelty to someone like her. Exciting for a while, certainly, but after that, after the novelty wore off . . .

And what had he seen in her anyway? Oh, she was pretty, and he supposed she must be a good lover, though he certainly didn’t have anyone else to compare her to. But to listen to her whine about how terrible it was to have to make the bread that she was going to eat, to have to sweep out the spot where she was going to sleep—oh, it was maddening! He’d have spanked her like a petulant child if he hadn’t felt so leaden. It was just too much effort.

No, what he really wanted to do was just leave. Leave this place, this whining girl, this old blind cripple. Leave them to their own devices and let them take care of themselves without him. He didn’t have to be their servant. Why should he be, after all? Who had appointed them as his master? He wasn’t a serf anymore, to be loaded down with common labor.

He should go back to Alta. He would go back to Alta. He would do that right now, this instant! In fact, there was nothing in this world he wanted to do more than to go home, back to the farm, where someone else would take care of him.

He left the loaves he had been shaping, and turned to march out of the kitchen-court of the temple, into the east, heading home with a determination that nothing and no one would stop him. It barely registered with him that Aket-ten had done the same. And for a brief moment there was uncertainty—a flutter of a thought—Alta is not in the east, and the farm—but the thought was gone in the next moment, and the need to go east rose up and crested over him like a flood wave—

He saw the old priest stepping into his path and thought only with annoyance that he was going to have to shove the old man aside—

And then the Chosen of Seft lashed out with his staff and shouted a guttural phrase, and lightning exploded in his skull.

“I am very sorry about that,” Rakaten-te said, as Kiron sipped at a cup of some herbal stuff that was as thick as silt-laden flood-waters and tasted green. Whatever it was, Kiron hoped it would go to work soon, because his skull felt as if it was going to crack in half at any moment.

Aket-ten didn’t look as if she felt any better. There were black rings around both her eyes, as if someone had punched her, and her face was pasty. She sipped at a clay cup of the same herbal muck.

“Couldn’t you have shielded against that?” she asked the Chosen of Seft.

He shook his head. “Regrettably, I am finding that Them-noh-thet was correct. Something around here drains magic. Fortunately, mine is of the sort less susceptible to such things, but if I had set some sort of shields upon you, they would still have been reduced to nothing, and the result would have been the same.”

“Shouldn’t we go out there?” he asked. “Go to the spot where the townspeople were taken? We could catch whoever set this—”

Again, the priest shook his head. “We would catch only the slavemasters who had been told where to go,” he corrected. “And perhaps—not even then. I do not think that anyone is aware that we are here. I think it was simply set up in the full knowledge that sooner or later, someone would come to investigate, and when they did, the trap would close and they would walk out into the desert and die.”

Kiron shuddered, remembering his conviction that he had to go home, and that home lay in the east. He knew what would have happened had the Chosen not stopped them. He would have gone out and kept walking. . . .

“An insidious trap, too,” Rakaten-te continued, in a musing sort of voice. “The magic caught you both in moments of doubt, amplified those doubts out of all proportion, then offered you a way out of the bitter unhappiness it had created in your minds. You actually supplied what would have been the instrument of your demise. If you had felt a simple compulsion to walk into the east, you likely would have fought it. But instead, you had reasons to walk into the east. Reasons that were vitally important to you at the time.” His lips twisted wryly. “A master-work of magic.”

“Please tell me you broke it,” said Aket-ten.

His mouth quirked in a sour smile. “Oh, yes. I broke it. Which is a pity, because now I cannot study it. I can only tell you that there was more than one hand involved in the making of it. And more than one kind of magician.”

“The Magi?” Kiron asked, mouth going dry.

Rakaten-te sighed. “Now that—I do not know.”

FIFTEEN

“THE first thing is to find the source of whatever is consuming magic.”

There had been silence for a long time as Kiron and Aket-ten finished the last of the green muck and waited for their respective headaches to fade. Though “headache” was far too mild a word for something that made him want to crack his own skull open to let the pain out. Neither he nor Aket-ten had wanted anything to eat, and the Chosen had seemed happy enough with bread and some cold meat. Well, that would just leave the pot of cooked lentil stew for the morning; it would certainly stay warm enough in the ashes, and if the bottom was burned to the pot, no matter; there were a hundred pots where that one had come from.

They sat in silence for a very long time, as the oblong of sun coming in through the ventilation slit crept up the wall.

When the silence was finally broken, it was with those words from Rakaten-te.

“That seems logical,” Kiron said slowly, trying to be very careful not to set his head off again. He worked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to get the taste off. “And there must be a way in which we can be useful in that hunt, or you never would have said anything about it right now. Correct?”

“Correct.” The Chosen’s face was unusually hard to read because of the bandage across his eyes, so Kiron had not a clue as to what he was actually thinking. “In a moment, you will begin to feel sleepy. You should go to rest as soon as you do. You will need all your senses alert in the morning.”

Right on cue, Aket-ten yawned, and he found himself yawning in return. “Go,” said the Chosen, then a very faint suggestion of a smile crossed his lips. “You feared I had selected you as little more than my servants. I assure you, I pondered all my choices with extreme care. I need the two of you, specifically. You will find yourselves using skills you did not even know you possessed.”

Ah, Kiron thought. Grand. So now he was going to be mucking about with magic, which was perhaps the very last thing he wanted to do. He didn’t much like it, he didn’t much trust it, and truth to be told, if it weren’t for the useful things it could do like heating the sands of the dragon pens and making the cold rooms, he could well do without it.

He got up carefully and offered Aket-ten a hand when she didn’t move. She looked up at him, sighed, and took it. The only lamps were here, in the sanctuary, and they only lit the center of the room where the Chosen was, and where, since he had directed them to place his pallet there, he would presumably sleep. But there was enough of the fading twilight for them to find their way into the chamber they had taken to sleep in—not one of the inner chambers, but one that had probably once housed servants, at the back of the temple. It opened onto the kitchen-court, which suited Kiron fine. The wind off the desert that carried away the kitchen smells also served to cool their room.

Their room. Without thinking about it, they had placed their pallets together, in the same room. But after this afternoon . . . she had surely had similar thoughts to his, unflattering at best, downright hostile at worst. It seemed almost impossible to span the gulf the things he had been thinking had cut between him and her. She didn’t know what he had been thinking, of course, but she could surely guess. And the worst part, perhaps, was that there was a grain of truth in all of it.

He dreaded what she was going to say.

But, in fact, she said nothing. She only shoved their pallets together with her foot and collapsed on one. And when he gingerly laid himself down on the other, she turned to him and put her arms around him, slowly, as if they were weighted with stones and she could hardly move them.

He found himself doing the same. Found himself unaccountably relaxing, and felt her going quiet and losing the tenseness in her muscles. And without a word, they fell into healing sleep.

Breakfast, over bowls of lentil stew, came in the still cool light of dawn. They woke fitted together like the stones of a wall. He didn’t want to say anything, and he suspected Aket-ten didn’t either.

They found the Chosen already awake. “You must be my ears and eyes, feet and hands,” said Rakaten-te. “Here is what you need to know. Some creatures are sensitive to magic; the presence of it, the lack of it, and even to specific kinds. The scarabus beetle, for instance: one can hardly keep the creatures away from any place where there is Healing magic present. Flies swarm to the rituals of blood and death, and to the practitioners of those magics.”

They both nodded, Aket-ten knowingly, Kiron only because he did understand to this point, but frankly expected to become confused very shortly.

“Whatever is consuming magic here must have a physical focus. There is probably more than one, in fact.” Rakaten-te pursed his lips. “I think that someone must have come here and planted these things. A stranger would not have been out of place in a town like this.”

Kiron nodded. That was certainly true. A border town saw all manner of wanderers coming through at irregular intervals. There was no state of war here, no reason to be alert, really, and the men who were garrisoned out here in this least desirable of all postings did not tend to be highly motivated at the best of times.

“Now as for the magic that caused you two to decide to take a sudden journey—I do not know if it had a physical focus and, alas, I may never know. Nor am I certain how it was able to work when all other magic was being drained.” He shrugged. “Whoever did all of this is a magician of great skill and subtlety.”

Greater than you? But Kiron knew that was an unfair question. Rakaten-te had the unenviable task of trying to unravel what another mage had done without knowing anything about the magician or his magic. He hid his eyes and his unfair thoughts by looking down at his breakfast.

“But before I can do anything, we must find and destroy the objects that are absorbing magic.” The Chosen set aside his empty bowl. “Now I do not know what creatures will react to these things, but I do know that some will. That is what you must look for. Some sort of live thing either avoiding a place or swarming to it.”

Kiron felt very dubious, but decided it was better not to say anything. What could he say, after all? That this was a very thin clue, and not much in the way of direction? The Chosen surely was aware of that.

“Failing this hunt working to uncover the foci, the only other expedient will be for me to walk every thumb-length of this town, and for some distance beyond,” Rakaten-te said rather grimly. “My god is not offering any sort of hint, which means that Seft sees that I can solve this myself. He is . . . a very challenging god to serve. But we can hope that the creatures of the earth will show us what we need to know.”

“And if they do not, we will need to guide you across the town, back and forth until you find something” said Aket-ten. “But how is it you think you can find these things, if you cannot use magic to find them?”

“Ah, but I can, just in a more roundabout way.” The Chosen shrugged. “If I do the search in this way, I will have to cast small magics and try to determine where their power is being drawn to.”

“That could take weeks!” Aket-ten exclaimed, her eyes widening in open dismay. Kiron couldn’t blame her. The prospect of remaining here for more than a few days was not a pleasant one.

Rakaten-te nodded. “Yes, it could. But it is another possible solution. I had rather not use it, but if I must, I will. Seeing if the animals react will be faster. You two will either notice something, or not. If this does not work, we will approach it the hard way. And if that fails—I shall think of something else.”

The determination in Rakaten-te’s voice surprised Kiron. He was not used to hearing that sort of response from a priest. Like Kaleth, they tended to cultivate an aura of serenity. Kiron had the feeling that if this man had not been blind, he would have been a warrior. He had the “falcon look.” As Ari called it.

“If we are going to look for things as small as flies,” Aket-ten mused, glancing at the open door and the growing light outside, “We had better go on foot.”

Kiron groaned, but silently, only within his own mind. Aket-ten was right. They could not spot swarms of flies from dragonback.

“Do we dare turn Avatre and Re-eth-ke loose to hunt for themselves?” he asked aloud instead. Aket-ten turned to smile a little at him.

“You read my thoughts, I think. Yes, not only do I think we dare, I think they will be fine. There are plenty of goats about here, and goats are scarcely a challenge for those two. I shall put it in their minds what we want, and we can then go out and hunt for—well, I suppose I must say, hunt for unnatural nature.” She raked her hair with her fingers and stood up. At least this morning they were all fully and nicely fed. The lentil stew had improved with overnighting, rather than burning as he had feared it might.

Avatre gave him the most comical look of astonishment he had ever seen on the face of a dragon when Aket-ten persuaded her that she was to go hunting in the town alone, without her Jouster. She blinked at him for several long moments, then, with a hard headshake, she launched herself into the air—

Only to come down almost immediately, just on the other side of the wall around the temple. There was a bleat swiftly cut off with a crunch, and it was quite clear that Avatre was having an early success.

Re-eth-ke lofted into the air going in the opposite direction, showing none of the signs of surprise that Avatre had.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” he said, suddenly realizing the implications. “Let her hunt on her own—”

“Not often, and only in the desert, but yes,” she admitted. “I thought it might be good practice for times, well, like this one. Where we don’t want to tie up time hunting with them.”

He gave her a look. She flushed.

“All right,” she said slowly, with a shrug. “I admit it. I was being lazy. But it is a good idea.”

“And I’m jealous I didn’t think of it first,” he admitted. “You have a lot of good ideas, like getting all the babies to sleep in one pen, like they would in a nest, so that only one person has to look after them.”

“That’s open to abuse, though,” she said, frowning, then shrugged. “You go in Avatre’s direction, I’ll follow Re-eth-ke. Let’s hope we see something.”

The goats were acting like goats, tame or wild. The cats—the few that he saw—were rapidly going feral, slinking away from him when they saw him. The dogs had all packed, holding several territories, and were also going feral. The fowl had long since been killed and eaten. The camels had created herds and wandered off into the desert. The donkeys had created a herd that was wandering through the streets, eating whatever green things they could find, and were keeping a wary eye on him.

None of them were acting in any way out of the ordinary that he could tell. The cats dozed in the sun or slunk away into the shadows, the dogs barked from a distance, and dozed in the shadows. The goats and donkeys wandered, looking for forage.

Maybe the birds, he thought, and turned his attention from the animals to the sparrows, pigeons, and the few desert birds that had decided to investigate the now-silent town.

But as the morning became afternoon, and he stopped long enough to eat the flatbread and dried meat he was carrying, he decided he was going to take a different tactic.

The Chosen said he thought that someone had carried objects into the town; a stranger, in fact. So where would a stranger actually be able to go without drawing notice? He certainly couldn’t wander about the fortress and garrison, nor could he poke about in peoples’ private houses nor their shops.

Taverns and inns, of course. The town square and market. Not the temples; if you were not from Tia, you wouldn’t know the gods or the rituals, and you would stand out.

Taverns and inns, though, that would be perfect. If the object was something small, you could pick one that wasn’t exactly clean, kick it into a corner, and it would probably stay there for a season. If it was something large, you could pick one that was honest, ask the tavernkeeper to hold it for you until you got back from a journey, and go off and leave it.

He turned on his heel and retraced his steps. There were at least three back the way he had come; a simple beer shop, a full tavern that served food, and an inn that took in travelers.

He checked the tavern first, going over it minutely, but couldn’t really find anything. The beer shop was next, nearest the garrison, and a wretched little place it was, too. Even with the town being deserted for so long, it still stank faintly of beer and unwashed bodies and things best not named.

Roaming animals had pretty much cleaned up everything there was that was large; now it was up to scavenging insects to actually scour it.

Bearing in mind what the Chosen had said, Kiron paid very close attention to those insects . . . even going so far as to take a polished plate from another home and use it to reflect some light into the noisome and dark corners.

And that was when he found it.

It was the ants that told him.

At first, he thought there was nothing unusual there, just the work of a horde of ants, taking advantage of the situation to scour the very mud bricks bare of anything even remotely edible.

But then he saw it. Yes, the ants were scouring the corner, a steady stream of them coming in and leaving with their tiny burdens. But while they were actually in the corner, they moved in a circle. An anti-sunwise circle. There was, in fact, a swirl of ants on the floor in that corner, all moving in the same direction.

He went to get a metal signaling plate from the garrison. He was going to need more light.

By carefully reflecting a spot of sun into that dark corner, he was able to search it for anything that the ants were surrounding but leaving alone. And, eventually, he found it.

A bead.

A tiny, ordinary, dirt-colored faience bead. When he took it away, the ants stopped moving in a circle and went back to behaving like ants.

And when he took it out into the sunlight, he saw that what he had taken for irregularities in the glaze were, in fact, some sort of writing. At least, he assumed it was writing. The minute shapes were very regular and marched around the surface of the bead in a swirl, the way the ants had marched around it.

Now it could be that this was just an ordinary talisman; there was no way for him to tell that. It would have to go to the Chosen.

But he could not imagine how a talisman would have survived the magic-consuming spell enough to still have affected the ants, if it was not, itself, part of that spell.

So he ran as fast as he could back to the temple, excitement giving his feet an extra boost. Finally, finally, there was some change in this situation. It was only a toehold, but by the gods, a toehold he would take!

And in fact, his efforts were rewarded when, just as he crossed the threshold of the Temple, he heard Rakaten-te shout, “Stop!”

Obediently, he did just that. Rakaten-te got up slowly and walked with careful steps toward him. “You found one of the objects, and you brought it with you.” The blind face showed some of the same excitement that Kiron felt. “I sensed the magic draining from the holy fire I had kindled on the altar just as I heard your footsteps. Describe the object to me.”

“It is a faience bead, about the size of the last joint of my smallest finger,” Kiron told him. “It is the same color as dirt, making it hard to see. There are black markings in a spiral around it, but I cannot read them. They look like the tracks of birds.”

“Alas that I do not know either what writing looks like, nor what the tracks of birds look like,” the Chosen said dryly, and Kiron flushed. “No matter. How did you find it?”

Kiron laughed nervously. “I thought like a stranger who wanted to leave these things in a town and a land that was not his own. I went to a filthy tavern and looked for anything strange. Ants were swirling about this thing, and when I looked closer in the dirt, I saw it.”

“Ants . . . so it may be an earth power. Hmm.” The Chosen pursed his lips. “That does not sound like the Altan Magi. Their power was based in water.”

“Whose power?” Kiron turned at the voice. Aket-ten stood wearily in the door. “Please tell me you have found something. I have been chasing a goat that I thought was acting oddly, that in fact had only gotten into something fermented, or perhaps had eaten an intoxicating drug. Do you know how high a drunken goat can leap? And what he will try to leap up to?”

“Yes, Kiron has found one of the keystones,” Rakaten-te ignored her question about drunken goats, which was probably just as well. Quickly, at an impatient hand gesture from the Chosen, Kiron described what he had done and where he had found the thing. “I would like you to collect as many of them as you can find between now and sunset, and bring them here. Even if I cannot decipher the magic, with some of the keystones in hand I can destroy it.”

“Think like a stranger,” Kiron prompted her, as she turned to go. “A stranger in a hurry to place these things, perhaps. They are the color of dirt, so perhaps places where there is a bit of debris. But it will have to be a place that a stranger would not have to hunt for.”

Aket-ten nodded. “I reminded the dragons that they are to hunt on their own. They don’t much like it. Avatre was positively sulking. When we hunt with them, they never miss kills, and the goats and donkeys here are getting much more aware of a dragon in the sky.”

He shook his head. Poor Avatre; well, he need never worry about her wanting to fly off and leave him then. Her belly would keep her right at his side, even if love and loyalty didn’t.

Not that he had any doubts about the latter.

Consulting his mental map of the town, he headed off in the direction of the next seedy beer shop. This was a garrison town. There were many such. It might be a long afternoon, especially if there were no more helpful swarms of ants.

A half dozen of the dirt-colored beads lay in a pile in a flat bowl Aket-ten had fetched from the kitchen and placed in front of the Chosen. Kiron stared at them. They seemed very innocuous to have made such trouble.

“Is it fully night yet?” Rakaten-te asked, turning his sightless eyes toward the door. Kiron shook his head, then remembered that Rakaten-te could not see it, and said “No. The sun-disk is just now passing below the horizon.” Rakaten-te did not have to explain why he wanted to perform his ritual after dark. Seft was the god of shadows, after all.

Rakaten-te pondered his course of action. Finally, he spoke aloud. “This magic is strange to me, yet all magic comes from the same roots. It either comes from the elements about us, or the gods themselves. I do not think this particular spell is of the gods. This means it is of the elements . . . .”

“You said something earlier about it being earth-magic, Chosen,” Aket-ten reminded him.

He nodded. “And that in turn would make a great deal of sense. The earth can absorb a great deal, and that could account for so small a thing having so great an effect.” He smiled a very little. “I muse aloud here, so that we all may learn. I find that those who come to a path with few or no preconceptions are often the ones to suggest new directions. Now . . . earth’s opposite is air, and unfortunately, air is not very strong against it.” He grimaced. “Nor, I fear, is the magic of Seft strong in the element of air. That would be for a Priest of Haras—I think I shall have to oppose earth with earth, and that is where you two come in.”

To Kiron’s surprise, Aket-ten began to blush. “I know that some magic requires that—” she stammered. “That—ah—certain—conditions—”

What is she on about? Kiron was baffled as to what the problem could possibly be. But not so the Chosen. He chuckled dryly.

“Not that of Seft,” he said. “I told you, I had made a very careful choice in you two. Just because I cannot see, it does not follow that I am blind.”

Aket-ten was quite scarlet by this point, and Kiron decided that this was one of those points on which he was probably better off remaining silent.

“I have no sense of whether our time is running short,” Rakaten-te continued, “but it is better to err on the side of caution. So to counter this magic, I am going to use brute force. It is faster. The drawback is that it is . . . likely to draw attention.”

Kiron frowned and rubbed the back of his neck. He had spent most of the afternoon hunched over looking for ants. He hadn’t spent that much time hunched over since he had been a drudge of a serf.

“What does that mean?” he asked, and shook his head. “I confess all this magic business leaves me baffled.”

“It means that if the magus or magi who set this spell happens to be—for lack of a better word—‘watching’ it for interference, then it will be as obvious as a club to the side of the head that I am destroying it, where I am, and possibly even who and what I am.” The Chosen nodded, and so did Aket-ten. They apparently knew exactly what this entailed. Kiron could only guess.

But it wasn’t difficult to imagine that if these unknown magicians could, they would probably attack Rakaten-te. The only real question was what form that attack would take.

Since the Chosen himself probably couldn’t predict that, all Kiron could do was be ready and try to react quickly, whatever happened.

“If you can try and find me two large flat stones that have never been carved or altered in any way—” the Chosen began.

Aket-ten had revived from her earlier confusion, and now wore a look of triumph. “I already have, Chosen,” she said. “A half dozen of them, in fact. I also have fuel for a fire that are sticks that were broken and not cut, and I have been harvesting such herbs as I can find in what is left of the gardens. I think I can collect water without using a container that was made by man—”

“That will not be needed. It is earth and fire that are the elements Seft’s priests use. I knew I had chosen wisely,” Rakaten-te said with satisfaction. “Well done, Aket-ten; please bring me two of those stones. Then the two of you do as you please until I summon you.”

None of this made any sense at all to Kiron, but he was fairly content to leave it at that. Why the Chosen would need unaltered stones, or sticks for a fire that had been broken and not cut, he could not imagine. Since Aket-ten was practically glowing after Rakaten-te’s praise, that was enough for him. And besides, he was starving.

“Is there any reason why we should not eat?” he asked hopefully. She shook her head. “It’s probably a good idea, and also not a bad idea to bring some oil for the lamps to the sanctuary,” she said. “If it’s a long night, we might need to refill them several times over.”

“Oh, we meaning me,” he said, with a good-natured grumble. “Since the oil jars weigh as much as a donkey—”

“As a donkey?” She raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“A small donkey. A foal.” He chuckled as she sighed with exasperation. “Nevertheless, I shall move one of them into the sanctuary, in obedience to your wishes.”

“You make me sound like a small-minded overseer,” she complained. “Isn’t it better to have the jar there if we need it?”

It seemed to him that this was unnecessarily cluttering up the sanctuary, but he didn’t say so. Instead he carefully wrestled and rolled the big jar to the room, leaving it just inside the door. Rakaten-te was chanting something and seemed deep in concentration. If he noticed Kiron, he said nothing and reacted not at all, which was exactly the way Kiron liked it. He was of two minds about the blind priest. On the one hand, Rakaten-te for himself was someone that Kiron was coming to like. He had a dry wit and sense of humor Kiron appreciated. He might not be telling them everything, but what priest ever did? There was a reason why the rites of the gods were called “Mysteries.”

On the other hand . . . Chosen of Seft. Seft the Prince of Lies, Seft the Treacherous. And the Chosen of Seft might have a plausible-sounding explanation for the story of Seft’s betrayal, but . . . that could be just as much a lie as anything else.

But Avatre liked him, and so did Re-eth-ke. Perhaps that was what he should go on. The dragons did not care about gods and their histories; they relied on their instincts. They had hated, loathed the Magi of Alta, one and all; every dragon in the compound would go mad whenever one was near. Avatre and Re-eth-ke not only tolerated Rakaten-te as a rider, but they would carefully, gently nudge him to solicit scratches.

He relaxed a little at that thought. If he could trust nothing else in the world, he knew he could trust Avatre as a guide.

Aket-ten came to stand beside him just as he came to that conclusion. She watched the Chosen chanting with a furrowed brow. “Not only do I not know what he is saying,” she confessed in a low voice, “I don’t even know what language it is in. It sounds like Tian, but . . . it isn’t, exactly.”

“Huh.” He became aware of a sense of . . . unease? Portent? Both really. A feeling of pressure in a way. Despite the fact that the sanctuary still held the heat of the day, he felt a chill and shivered.

But then he felt more than a chill, as Rakaten-te’s chanting increased in volume and intensity, and the Chosen of Seft raised the smaller of the two stones and smashed it down on the collection of beads.

Suddenly every hair on Kiron’s body threatened to stand on end. A strange, dry silence dropped over them all. Kiron could hear his own heart pounding in his ears. But then, he heard something else entirely.

Something that sounded like—rain? Or a shower of sand on a roof?

Movement on the floor by the door caught his eye. It looked as if the shadows there were moving. And that was where the sound was coming from, too . . . a strange, sharp, musty odor suddenly assailed his nose, and as his heartbeat quickened, he peered at the moving shadow, trying to make out what it was.

Wait. That was no shadow. That was—

A living carpet of black scorpions, moving slowly toward them.

Aket-ten gasped the same moment he realized what they were. She stood there, paralyzed with fear, her eyes blank and black with sheer terror.

The deadly creatures paused at the edge of the light, as if making up their minds whether to go on or not. Their eyes glittered in the lamplight like a myriad of tiny black gems, and the sound of their claws on the sandstone floor was exactly like the sound of a rain of pebbles on a roof. They stared at him, and he stared back.

“Kiron!” Rakaten-te’s voice cut across his paralysis. “Aket-ten! What do you see?”

“Scorpions,” Kiron said, as Aket-ten whimpered the same word. “There must be hundreds of them—”

The carpet of insects surged forward at that moment. Reflexively, Kiron grabbed the object nearest to him and hurled it at them.

It was a lamp.

It broke just in front of the scorpions, spilling its fuel all over the stone floor. The oil caught fire before the wick spluttered out—

And with a scuttling of claws, the scorpions got out of the way of the flames.

Fire! Kiron ran for the jar of oil. Ruthlessly, he broke in the top and tilted it over. The oil spread toward the scorpions, forming a barrier between them and the venomous insects. Paying it no heed, the scorpions scuttled forward again, into the oil.

And Kiron threw another lamp into the middle of the pool of oil. Flames spread across the surface of the oil, catching some of the scorpions before they could escape.

Yes!

Shaking off her paralysis, Aket-ten ran out of the room and came back with unlit torches. He seized one from her, lit it, and began beating at the scorpions with it. The insects retreated, making an angry, dry clicking sound. Some of them tried to find a way around the burning barrier of oil; Aket-ten spotted them first and ran to intercept them with her torch. He gave her his and turned and sprinted for the overturned jar; there was still plenty of oil in it. He manhandled it into his arms, then staggered with it to Aket-ten’s side, sloshing the oil clumsily out to finish the barrier that accident had started.

Wave after wave of the black creatures surged toward them over the burning floor. Each time they met the wave with torches and more oil. Even as they tried to build a bridge across the burning oil out of their own bodies by smothering it, he and Aket-ten threw more oil on them and then set fire to them.

Kiron’s world narrowed to the oil jar, the torch in his hand, and the army of scorpions.

He fought them until his hands were burned and his body dripping sweat.

And then—suddenly—they were gone. The only trace of them was what was left of the ones that had burned.

Kiron let his knees go and sat down rather abruptly on the floor, with Aket-ten beside him.

“Well,” said the Chosen of Seft. “That was unexpected.”

SIXTEEN

A KET-TEN jerked her head around to stare at the priest, suddenly filled with fury. “You knew something like that was going to happen!” she snarled. “You knew it and you didn’t warn us!” The heat of the dying flames was nothing to the heat of her anger. How dared he? Priest or no priest, how dared he?

“Aket-ten—” Kiron said, making a placating gesture. “I don’t—”

“I knew? Child, my life was as much in danger as yours. More.” The priest’s tone was mild, with no hint that he was affronted by her accusations. He made a little gesture at his bandaged eyes, as if to emphasize his point. “I could not even detect what had been sent against us with my magic, which requires preparation and spells. Had you not defended me, I would have been swarmed within moments. You, at least, could have run away.”

Shame overcame her. She bowed her head. Of course. I’m being stupid. What was I thinking?

Rakaten-te could have been killed far more easily than she or Kiron.

“Now I will say that I guessed that breaking the spell so abruptly might draw unwanted attention,” the priest continued, sounding a little shamefaced. “But I honestly thought it would come in the form of magic sent against magic, directed at me, and not at all of us. I anticipated retaliation that was magical in nature rather than material. It was a clever strategy. And one I did not anticipate.” Now he sounded irritated. Aket-ten guessed that it was irritation at himself, and his next words confirmed that. “I am at fault there.”

“Well, now what do we do?” Aket-ten demanded, bringing her head up. This was not the time to indulge in recriminations, self or otherwise. “Whoever ‘they’ are, ‘they’ know we’ve uncovered them—”

“You two remain on watch for things I cannot deal with,” Rakaten-te said, firmly taking charge of the situation. Aket-ten bristled a little, then forced herself to back down. He was in charge. They were there as his hands and eyes, no more. She was spoiled, really, having a leader who simply didn’t act like one most of the time, and that even more so with her. Her nose twitched a little at the smell of hot stone and the odd scent of fried scorpion. She really needed to sweep those things out the door. The cats would probably love them.

She gritted her teeth and nodded acceptance. “Now that you can use magic, can’t you do something about helping us keep watch?” she asked instead. Surely there was something he could do! Neither she nor Kiron were in any shape to stand on watch all night. Her hands were already starting to hurt in the places where hot oil or torch fire had scorched them.

He shrugged. “Not until I use that same magic to speak with my own priests, and if possible, with the priests of other gods in Sanctuary. After that, we will see. Magic is like anything else. You spend it, and it is gone, nor can you do more until you have more of it.”

She sighed; she knew that of course, it was one of the fundamental tenets of magic. She had hoped he had reservoirs of power stored . . . but if he didn’t or if he had used them, then so be it. There was no arguing with that. As he turned his attention back to his simple tools and preparations, she turned to Kiron.

He was frowning, black brows furrowed together. “If he’s at this all night, we’ll be hard-pressed to stay awake, much less on guard,” he said quietly, echoing her thoughts exactly. “It’s all very well to tell us to guard him, but I was tired before this started, and now . . .” He let his voice trail off. He looked about as bad as she felt; his eyes were puffy and red, with dark shadows beneath them, he had soot smudges all over him, and the red of burn marks on his hands and arms. He did not look as if he would do well in another fight.

She chewed on her lower lip. What they needed was some help, something that would at least make a fuss if there was something dangerous about. A couple of geese would have been ideal, but of course, there was little water here and she doubted this town had seen a goose outside of wall paintings. If only they had a dog! But the dogs around here had gone thoroughly feral, and were not approaching humans. Even if they could catch one in the dark and tied it in here with them, it would spend all its time fighting the rope, or whining and making a fuss, and it would be hard to tell whether noises it was making were because of danger or because it wanted to get loose.

The dragons would be too sleepy to be of any use, and besides, they would never notice anything as small as a scorpion, not even a legion of them. Things that would kill a human, the dragons could often merely ignore. More scorpions, snakes, poisonous spiders—those were the things most likely to be thrown against them, by Aket-ten’s way of thinking.

She racked her brain for a way to guard against such things for as long as need be. What they needed were barriers across the two thresholds. The scorpions had come swarming in through the doorway that led to the open court in front of the temple. Closing the door wouldn’t help; there was more than enough of a gap under the door for them to squeeze in. Short of bricking up that gap, nothing was going to stop them. Stuffing cloth or straw under it wouldn’t hold them for long. The stones she had collected for Rakaten-te were too irregular to serve as a barrier. Was there any way they could use the oil to create a regular fire barrier?

Kiron was also frowning in thought. “Dishes of oil with wicks in them?” he said, sounding doubtful. “Set across each threshold? If we can find troughs, maybe . . . bread molds? Kneading troughs? I don’t know, maybe we can stack enough dishes to cover gaps?”

It was as good a thought as any. Better than the half-formed notions she’d had so far. The flames would keep the oil hot, and enough wicks would even heat the dishes until they burned at the touch. “We don’t really need to kill anything, just keep them back,” she agreed. “At least . . . I hope.”

They took a discarded torch, lit it, and went back to the stores together. They found a number of objects that looked as if they would work, and there were years worth of linen lamp wicks in bundles there. As she gathered them up, Kiron looked over an assortment of salves from the shelves, selecting some that appeared to be beneficial, as well as some flatbread and honey, and took them into their haven. While she was at it, Aket-ten got a broom. Before they did anything else, she wanted the charred remains of those scorpions out of the sanctuary.

With the room swept clean and both thresholds guarded by these improvised barriers three dishes deep, food and water and whatever else they could think of in a corner, they settled down. At least there was plenty of light. The Chosen of Seft had settled into his silent attempts at communion with his fellows. The room smelled of hot oil; it was too warm, and sweat made her scalp itch and trickled down the back of her neck.

“I’ll take first watch,” Kiron said, opening one of the jars of salve. “When I can’t keep my eyes open anymore, I’ll wake you.”

She was too tired to argue, and made herself as comfortable as she could on the floor of the sanctuary. She felt the stone start to pull the heat out of her body, and spread herself out to get as much of her flesh in contact with the stone as possible.

The next thing she knew, Kiron was shaking her shoulder, and she struggled up out of half-formed dreams of flames and glittering eyes.

“I can’t even stay awake standing up,” he said, swaying where he stood. She scrubbed at her eyes with one hand and nodded, getting up to take his place. At least she wasn’t sweating. But she wanted a bath.

She kept an eye on the dishes of oil. Carefully topping them up when they got low, keeping the wicks alight. It was more work than she had thought it would be, and hard to do without getting burned. Or rather, burned more. Her hands were laced with burns that she was awake enough to start feeling, and she began trying every unguent she could find in the things that Kiron had taken from the temple stores in hopes that something would work.

Finally, something did. It was green, and had an odd, pungent aroma that reminded her of something she couldn’t quite put a finger on. Whatever it was, it seemed to cool the burns and numb the pain significantly, for which she breathed a sigh of relief. It might have been what Kiron had used; there was a completely empty jar there that might have held something similar.

So she paced, salved her hands and arms, tended the lamps and paced, until she, in her turn, found herself swaying on her feet and awoke Kiron, who had been sleeping so soundly he might have been a stone image. Like her, he had spread himself out on the cool stone floor, and that looked as comfortable as any bed to her right now.

And she was asleep again without a clear memory of lying down.

“The priests at Sanctuary and I are of the same mind,” Rakaten-te said rather grimly as the two groggy Jousters joined him at breakfast. “If it is possible, we must secure whatever amulet or focus has been used for the spell that sent our people into the east. But we must not delay too long. A day, no more. If I cannot find it by then, we must leave in the morning anyway. There is too much at stake, and there is only a limited amount of information that I can send by means of my magic. I need to be back among other priests, so that we can compare what we know, and among scholars, so that we can look in the oldest scrolls for more wisdom. The Great King and Queen are debating how best to alert the Two Kingdoms.”

Aket-ten blinked him. What was this? They already had a good idea how the first stage of this tragedy had been put into place! All they had to do was to intercept the first bearers of those insidious amulets! “How best?” she said. “But surely we must send urgent messengers, couriers, to every village and estate! We must send soldiers to every trade road, to every inn and tavern and beer shop, to stop strangers, search—”

“That,” the Chosen said crisply, “is precisely what we must not do.”

She stared at him openmouthed. Had he gone mad?

His mouth firmed, and his tone took on an edge of exasperation and sarcasm. “What? Blanket the Two Kingdoms with soldiers? Oh, surely that will make relations with Alta so much better! And are we to begin intercepting each and every traveler? Stop and search each and every person who is a stranger to a village? And how are soldiers to know who is a stranger and who is not? Do you think, with all these soldiers, who are strangers themselves to a town, that the townsfolk will warm to their presence and come running to them to identify every new person on the road?”

“But—” Aket-ten protested, “surely they—”

But Kiron, who had lived in a small village, was shaking his head. “No, Aket-ten, they will not. The soldiers will be regarded with suspicion, scorn, and anger for interfering in village matters. Worse, every man that has a quarrel with a neighbor will come to the soldiers to report his neighbor as suspicious. The soldiers themselves will do what they were trained to do for the war—harass and intimidate all civilians to bully information from them. It will be bad if only Altan soldiers are in Alta and Tians in Tia, but worse, much worse, if the borders are crossed.”

The Chosen nodded forcefully. “A fool’s course, and a waster of time while the real villains find some other means to cast their spells, or even begin a different sort of campaign altogether. Meanwhile our soldiers are scattered from one end of the Two Lands to the other, accomplishing nothing save to raise the level of fear and distrust. No, and no again. This is trying to catch the wind in a sieve.”

“A wall—” Kiron began, then shook his head.

“No, that is just as foolish. How can we wall a whole border? A wall will not keep out magic, and any man can find a place to go under, over, or around it.”

“And we do not have the time to build a wall even if we could,” Rakaten-te said bluntly. “Which we cannot. The cost would bankrupt both nations. Whatever the solution that the Great King and Queen arrive at, it will not be any of those. Meanwhile, we must try and accomplish the task that was set for us. We must find one of the amulets that sent our people out into the wilderness, sure that this was the thing they wanted to do the most.”

Once again, Aket-ten and Kiron found themselves standing by while the Chosen performed a series of arcane rituals, things which appeared absurdly simple. Some chanting to a shaken sistrum, the burning of pungent incense, a few gestures with hand or staff, and a great deal of sitting or standing in silence. Aket-ten had the distinct feeling, however, that this impression was deceptive, and as the morning wore on, she found herself thinking that if one of the powerful Magi of Alta had gone head-to-head against Rakaten-te, the Magus would have come off distinctly second-best.

But the old man was definitely flagging. And when, in midmorning, he exploded in a fit of temper and threw his staff to the ground, she was not entirely surprised.

“Curse it!” he swore. “How can an amulet move? And more, how can it waft through the air? I find them, I have found three of them, and yet they are traveling all over this town! Twice now I have sensed one over my head for a moment, before it moved off! I cannot pin these things to a place! This is impossible!”

Waft through the air . . . How could an amulet fly? Perhaps part of the magic was to make it fly? Like the enchanted rug in the tale? Aket-ten thought for a moment, then went outside. She looked about in the kitchen-court, where a flock of pigeons was pecking at the remains of the stale flatbread she had torn up and thrown to them—as she did every day. Her presence startled them into flight, and as they circled above the roof of the Temple, she heard Rakaten-te howl, “And there it is again!”

Waft—

It struck her like a blow to the head, and she ran inside. “An amulet can fly, when it is bound to the leg of a pigeon,” she shouted, as soon as she was in the sanctuary.

Both Kiron, who was picking up the much-abused staff, and the Chosen, who had both hands cupped to his head, shaking it in frustration, stopped dead. For one long moment, both stood frozen, without saying a word. The Chosen was the first to speak.

“A pigeon?” he exclaimed, for the first time in Aket-ten’s knowledge looking honestly bewildered. “But—how would—” He shook his head. “These things came in from outside, as the amulets that ate magic did. How—”

“By putting out bread and netting one,” Aket-ten said excitedly. “Or grain. Or making a sticky-trap. Whoever did this would have to take care that no one saw him, because I am sure all the pigeons in this town belong to someone, but it is not hard to take a pigeon.” Pigeons were a good source of meat for anyone who could afford the bit of grain it took to bring them home to roost at night. During the day, they could scavenge whatever food they could peck up. And of course, there were dove sellers who raised doves and pigeons to offer as sacrifices for those who could afford a slightly better gift to the gods than a loaf of bread, a bunch of latas flowers, or a jar of beer.

“And pigeons always come home to roost,” said Kiron, straightening, and handing the Chosen his staff. “That was one of my jobs as a serf, tending to the pigeon cote. They always come home to roost. If you sell one and the buyer is foolish enough to turn it loose, it will come back to you. Khefti-the-Fat, my old master, gulled many a fool in that way.”

“In Alta, traders sometimes carry pigeons with them to send messages home,” Aket-ten explained with growing, if weary, satisfaction. “It is a one-way journey, of course, which is why a dragon courier is so much better. But—if I wanted to slip amulets bearing spells into a city, I would buy some pigeons from a cheat, and I would tie the amulets to their legs, and then turn them loose. Or I would buy doves from a dove seller in the temple court, and instead of taking it inside to sacrifice, tie the amulet to its leg and turn it loose.”

“By all the gods . . .” The Chosen stood stark still, but then his face darkened. “And how are we to get our hands on one of these birds? You cannot sense which one it is, I cannot see to aim a sling or a bow! We cannot net every bird in the town!”

Aket-ten laughed, and both Kiron and the Chosen stared at her as if they thought she had gone mad. “You cried out ‘there it is again’ as I startled the flock that was feeding in the kitchen court. They will already have settled again and are surely the ones that eat here every day. We have more bread, do we not?” she countered, with memories of birds lurching around her mother’s courtyard after feasting on fermented berries flashing through her mind. “And we have palm wine? Trust me. We will have one of those birds before the sun sets.”

Every scrap of their bread was soon soaking up the wine as Rakaten-te made certain that the flock that held his amulet did not venture off somewhere else, by the simple expedient of sitting in the courtyard and distributing a miserly few grains of barley at intervals. The continued promise of food held the flock on the roof until the bread was ready. Then Kiron and Aket-ten carried it out in platters, and the three of them retired to the shade of the kitchen to wait.

It did not take long. The pigeons quickly swarmed the pans of bread, gobbling it as fast as they could, and before very long, the entire flock was lurching around the courtyard completely unable to fly. It would have been funny at any time, but in their exhausted state, Kiron and Aket-ten found it hilarious. Aket-ten laughed herself weak in the knees, watching the poor birds stagger, flap, and fall over. Rakaten-te was in the sanctuary, which was just as well in a way, since he would never be able to appreciate the sight.

Even funnier, in a macabre way, was what they did next.

Kiron had gotten a pair of bird nets used for taking up pigeons from the cote, and he and Aket-ten slowly made their way around the courtyard, scooping up birds, examining them for anything fastened to them, then tossing them over the wall to avoid netting them up a second time. After a while, Aket-ten began hearing snarling and spitting, then barking. Curious, she tossed the bird she had rejected over the wall, and found a box to stand on so she could see what was going on.

She was just in time to see an uneasy standoff between one of the dog packs, and a loose conglomeration of cats end in a swirl of angry barking and flashing claws, as one of the cats darted in, snatched the poor bird, then whisked itself over the rooftops with the pigeon in its mouth as about a third of the cats arrowed off in hot pursuit. There was some more snarling and spitting, then the fight resolved itself, and about two dozen pairs of hopeful eyes turned back to the top of the wall where Aket-ten was looking over. She began laughing helplessly, and Kiron climbed up beside her to see what was going on.

“Oh, dear—” Kiron shoved his hand up to his mouth to smother his own reaction. “I should be appalled—”

Aket-ten giggled. “I know. But it’s funny—”

“It’s hardly fair,” Kiron pointed out. “I know the dogs and cats are hungry, but it still seems unfair—”

“So maybe we should stop tossing them over the wall—”

Kiron looked around, and shrugged helplessly. “Where do we toss them, then? If we throw them on the roof—”

“Maybe the cats will get them, but at least the dogs won’t,” she said, still giggling, and then broke up into gales of laughter, until her sides ached and tears came, as something else occurred to her. “Bounty from the temple court! They must think that the god Anbas and the goddess Pashet have come here to reward their creatures!”

But as it happened, the poor pigeons got a reprieve, and were permitted to recover from their inebriation without further decimation of their numbers, since the very next bird that Kiron took up proved to have a tiny scroll of leather so thin it was translucent bound to its left leg. Kiron tried not to touch the thing. It was magic, and it was not something he wanted to take a chance on. For all he knew, this was the same amulet that had sent him and Aket-ten off to wander. Would the spell work now that they knew about it? There was no telling, but he wasn’t going to risk it.

Bearing the bird, scroll and all, they hurried into the Sanctuary.

The Chosen “examined” the bird without touching it. “Kill the bird,” he said shortly. “Get the scroll off the bird without cutting the binding or letting it unroll. Then put the scroll in one of those empty unguent jars we found and seal the jar.”

Kiron and Aket-ten exchanged a glance, and Kiron took the bird from her while she hurried off after a jar. When she returned, the bird was gone, and Kiron was just cutting the foot off the birdless leg, carefully not touching the scroll, leaving only the bit of skin and bone with the amulet attached. Wordlessly, she held out the jar; he dropped it in, and she gave the jar to the Chosen.

With heavy weariness, Rakaten-te made some gestures and muttered something and a bit of that odd darkness billowed up out of the ground at his feet and wrapped itself around the jar, vanishing as it did so.

“Have we enough provisions for the journey?” he asked, raising his head slowly as if it ached. “Now, I mean. This very moment.”

Kiron shrugged, then seemed to remember that the Chosen couldn’t see the gesture, and coughed. “We’ve got no bread, but other than that—”

“Then call your dragons, gather no more than what we need, and let us be gone from here,” Rakaten-te said grimly. “I do not believe this city will be safe for us to be in for much longer.”

Rather than flying back to Mefis, the Chosen of Seft insisted that they go to Sanctuary. Kiron could not have been happier; though Aket-ten fretted about leaving her wing for so long. Sanctuary was closer by far, and after the ordeal of the scorpions, Kiron wanted nothing more than to be able to get a sound night’s sleep in a place that had so many priests and priest-mages in it that surely not even the strongest magician could slip an attack inside. Or even if they could, there were hordes of acolytes and servants to deal with it.

They pushed the dragons to the limit, taking straight off as soon as there was light, pausing to hunt the moment they saw something large enough to be prey rather than hunting first before going on, and stopping to make camp and hunt again well before sunset. Each night the Chosen settled for wordless communion with other priests long into the night. He slept little, ate little, and spoke no more than a few words at a time.

They reached Sanctuary as the last of the light left the sky on the third day. The dragons were ravenous, and it was with profound relief that Kiron saw the servants waiting below as he and Aket-ten spiraled down to the pens. Rakaten-te slid off the saddle as soon as he could unbuckle the strap holding him; two acolytes led him away without a word, with his hand on the shoulder of one of them.

Kiron did not give the Chosen another thought, for more servants arrived with meat for the dragons, who fell on it avidly, snatching the chunks out of the barrows and wolfing them down so fast that one chunk was still visible traveling down as a lump in their necks while they were gulping down a second. For the first time in Kiron’s memory, there was some jostling and snapping between Re-eth-ke and Avatre over the food. It took Aket-ten to get them to settle again, but Kiron took this as a warning of trouble if dragons were ever allowed to go hungry. Even tame dragons had their limits.

And so did even the strongest of Jousters. As he pulled the harness from Avatre’s back, he felt himself flagging. Food was not his need, of course, but oh, sleep, sleep—

He grabbed the arm of one of the servants as the man passed. “Are we needed, Aket-ten and I?” he asked, more harshly and abruptly than he intended.

The man shook his head. “I have no orders—” he ventured.

Avatre finished the last of her meat, and with an enormous sigh, settled into her hot sand, wiggled a little to work herself into it, and was instantly asleep. That was all Kiron needed.

“Good. Then until someone comes to fetch us, I will be here,” he replied, and without even pausing to fetch bedding or ask the servant for some, he settled in next to Avatre’s warm bulk, as he had when she was just an unfledged baby, and grabbed for sleep with both hands.

SEVENTEEN

THE baby dragons were not such babies anymore.

All of the things that Ari, Kiron, and the Altan wing had learned when raising their babies were showing impressive results with the babies of the Queen’s Wing. They were growing faster and stronger than any wild dragon could. Sutema was already flying short distances with a weighted saddle, although she was not yet up to Peri’s full weight. The others were at the same flapping stage that Sutema had reached a few days ago. They would all be flying soon.

That was what was really on her mind, when she came back to her courtyard to have a bath before dinner. She had not expected to find Letis waiting for her.

“I am told,” the older woman said, without preamble, “That my son is in the place called Sanctuary. What is this place?”

Peri was spared having to answer by the timely appearance of Helet-ani, which was just as well, since she didn’t actually know the answer.

“Sanctuary is the desert city of priests,” the former priestess said. “Priests of both Tian and Altan gods gather there. It was the refuge for the Altan priests against the depredations of the Altan Magi, and when those Magi tempted the Great King of Tia and became his advisers and the same troubles began here, as many as could escaped to its shelter.

“Ah,” Letis said enigmatically. Helet-ani gave her a curious look, but when nothing else was forthcoming, shrugged and went on her way.

Peri, who wanted a bath far more than she wanted to be polite and deferential, went on her way to her quarters. The sun was very hot, and she had just spent far too long in it, exercising Sutema. Letis followed her, the mulish look on her face telling Peri that her putative mother-in-law had something to say and was not going to leave until she had delivered her lecture.

Peri pulled her tunic over her head as soon as she entered the door of her own rooms and dropped it on the floor. Once, it would have been she who would have scuttled in afterward to retrieve the soiled garment and take it off to be cleaned. Now that was someone else’s duty. She reflected, as Letis’ lips tightened, that she was getting used to being waited on instead of doing the servants’ work herself. Not that long ago she had tried to tidy her own quarters and make as little work for the servants as possible. That was, until the Overseer for the Dragons’ Court took her aside and explained to her, in the kindliest possible manner, that she was making the servant assigned to her unhappy by doing that servant’s job.

“If you do not let her tend to you, not only does she lose pride in thinking that you feel she will not do her work properly, she then, because there are no idle hands here, has to do work she would really rather not do. Much harder and less pleasant work.”

So now she made as much light work as possible for the nearly invisible girl to do.

But Letis, of course, frowned, then with an exaggerated sigh, picked up the tunic, folded it neatly, and put it on the bed before following Peri into the bathing room. This place was a true wonder to Peri, what with cool water appearing like magic in the bath jars every day. It wasn’t magic, of course; it was the servants, but it might as well have been magic.

Peri dipped out water and cleaned herself, sighing with relief to feel the sweat and grime sluice away. This was usually a peaceful part of the day for her, but Letis clearly had something on her mind, so Peri thought it best to get it over with.

“So Lord Kiron is in Sanctuary?” she said quietly.

“And I would like to know why he is not here, with his mother!” Letis said angrily.

“I presume because his duty took him there. He was escorting a priest, after all. Is there something that you need?” Peri asked. “I can certainly see that you get it—”

Letis gave her a withering look. “Only my son. And what of you? Are you not anxious for him to return?”

Peri flushed a little. Letis took that for maidenly blushes, and finally smiled and nodded knowingly. But the truth was that Peri had been so busy with Sutema that she hadn’t actually thought much about Kiron.

“It would be good to have him here, but his duties truly rest in Aerie,” she pointed out. “And that is likely where he will return.”

That made Letis frown again, and she was off on a scolding plaint about filial duty, the lost farm, and all the worn old complaints, until Peri was close to telling her to hold her tongue.

And long before the screed was over, Peri wished she had.

“Kiron . . .” Aket-ten was shaking his shoulder, as Kiron swam up out of dreamless sleep. He vaguely recalled someone rousing him earlier, about dawn, and steering him into the darkened comfort of the little room attached to the pen and the bed therein. Just as well; he’d have been turned to a strip of dried leather if he had slept out in the sun.

He yawned, stretched, and in a burst of mischief, started to reach for Aket-ten to pull her down beside him.

But the seriousness of her expression made him halt that impulsive gesture before it began. “You look as if we’re needed,” he said instead.

She nodded. “We are. There are three other Jousters here, and Kaleth has a task for us.”

Kiron made a face. “More courier duty—”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. At least, it didn’t seem that way to me. But he wanted me to get you, so he can explain it to all of us at the same time.”

He became uncomfortably aware of how grimy he was, especially after noting that Aket-ten had apparently had a bath and a change of clothing already. “Before I see anyone, I want to be cleaner.”

She nodded. “I’ll tell him you’re coming. Get something to eat, too. It might be a long meeting, I don’t know.”

Well, that was not exactly what he wanted to hear.

Bathed, in truly clean clothing for the first time in days, and fed, he checked on Avatre and Re-eth-ke again. A servant was just taking away the last of the empty barrows, and Avatre had flopped down in the sand again to sleep. Re-eth-ke was already dozing. The fast flight here had taken a great deal out of both of them.

He knew exactly how they felt, too. It seemed to him that he could easily sleep for a week. Unfortunately, he did not have that luxury.

One might have thought that the Mouth of the Gods and his mate would have the use of the largest temple building in all of Sanctuary. In fact, their choice was to have the smallest. Because there were priests of both Alta and Tia here now, and because even the least and littlest cult had sent representatives here, the largest was dubbed the “Temple of All Gods,” and there was a shrine to every deity with a representative here in the city. The next largest was given over to Haras, in no small part because ornamentation and carvings indicated it had once been the home to priests of the hawk-headed god before the city vanished under the sand.

After that, Kaleth had somehow apportioned out buildings to various sects without anyone having apoplexy. How he had done that, Kiron could not imagine. Perhaps the gods themselves had gotten involved.

However it had happened, the end result was that Kaleth and Marit, the Mouth of the Gods and his beloved, ruled over a building of only two rooms. There was the sanctuary, and behind it an all-purpose living space. There was no kitchen, but a kitchen wasn’t really needed, as food was brought over from other temples.

And, in fact, as Kiron entered the door to the sanctuary, he sidestepped a couple of young women in the robes of those who served the goddess Mhat, who were just leaving with large, empty platters. The sanctuary was empty, but voices coming from beyond the door curtain told him where everyone was. Like all buildings in Sanctuary, here in the heart of the desert, the walls were as thick as his arm was long, and had very few openings. Even the customary ventilation slits near the ceilings of Tian buildings were missing here. Small wonder. The sand crept in through every aperture under normal circumstances, and when a midnight kamiseen blew, you could have found yourself buried alive in your own home as the sand flooded in.

So the interiors of buildings were dark, except where there were lamps. But lamps made heat, so for the most part people preferred the dark.

He took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the darkness before walking across the cool stone floor of the sanctuary to the curtained doorway at the rear.

Pushing aside the curtain, he found Aket-ten, Rakaten-te, Kaleth, Marit, and two priests he did not know sharing a somber meal. Rakaten-te turned his bandaged eyes toward the doorway, detecting Kiron’s presence before anyone else did.

“Ah,” he said. “The last of our group.”

Kaleth looked up and nodded at him somberly. “Kiron, come eat, and you will hear what we have been doing here in your absence. It bears directly on what we will be asking you to do.”

With a certain amount of trepidation, Kiron folded his legs beneath him and helped himself to food. One thing was certain, they were eating better in Sanctuary than they were in Aerie.

I am very tired of desert, he thought suddenly. He thought with sudden longing about Alta, the estate of Aket-ten’s aunt. Streams and ponds, and the river running alongside it. Not like Sanctuary, where the air was so dry it sucked water out of you.

He pulled his wandering attention back to the conversation, which had started up without him.

“. . . Heyksin,” one of the two stranger priests was saying somberly.

That got his attention.

“How sure of this are you?” Kaleth asked sharply. His head was up and he frowned, and well he might. This was not good hearing.

The priest shrugged. “We have but a few words from the written tongue of the Nameless Ones, copied down centuries ago, recopied over and over without the scribe that made the copies knowing what the words were supposed to mean. And we have the words on this amulet. Some of the characters are identical. Some are a mismatch. Does that mean that these Magi are of the Nameless Ones? We think so. Our written tongue looks nothing like this, the Bedu have no written language, and Heklatis tells us it looks like no language he knows.”

All fell silent at that point. Kiron felt chilled as a stone in winter. If there was one thing that the people of Tia and Alta feared equally, it was the Nameless Ones. And if they were the ones responsible for the disappearance of a town full of people . . .

“Then I must tell you still another unpleasant thing,” Rakaten-te said slowly, fingering the carvings on his staff. “You know that we of Seft are accustomed to keeping our own counsel and hold many secrets.”

Everyone nodded at that, but none more emphatically than Kaleth. The Mouth of the Gods raised an eyebrow but held his peace.

The Chosen of Seft coughed lightly. “Some seasons back, one of our . . . agents . . . got his hands on a book of spells of the Magi of Alta.”

He could not have secured their attention more fully if he had stood up, smashed Kaleth over the head with his staff, and proclaimed himself the Mouth of the Gods. Every eye in the room was riveted on him, as he sat there with the hint of a sardonic smile playing about his lips.

For that matter, Kiron felt rather as he had right after the Chosen had smashed him in the head with his staff.

It was Kaleth who finally spoke first. “But—how—”

“It was when those so-called advisers to the Great King first turned up, and we of Seft got whiffs of darkest magic about them,” Rakaten-te said and shrugged. “Caution bid us work in silence and in secret, as we are wont to do anyway. These men were respected, and not all dark magic is turned to evil ends. It was early days, the would-be adviser was living in a house he had rented, and our agent caught the fellow at something unsavory. Trust me, you would rather not know the details. There are some things that even one who lives in the shadows will not tolerate, and the Magus met with an—accident.”

“And the crocodiles with an offering?” asked one of the strangers.

The Chosen of Seft tilted his head to one side. “It is true that we of Seft have an understanding with the spawn of Sobekesh. And from time to time we offer them tribute. It might have been that the Magus fell into a pool where they were accustomed to be fed. Of course, we did not know he was one of the Magi then, nor did we have any clue of this until very recently. To avoid difficulties, our agent took all of the man’s personal belongings, making it look as if the fellow had run off on his own. He brought the belongings to his master, the master brought them to the temple, and an underpriest, not knowing what to do with them, took them to the Chief Scribe of Seft who ordered them put away in a chest. Recently a number of such storage chests were being gone through, and that was when we uncovered the book.” One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Our scribes are very thorough. The antecedents of the contents of that chest were tallied in a scroll on top of everything in it. Knowing now that this adviser must have been an Altan Magus, the contents were searched and the book found. It was no bigger than my hand, and I am told, written in such small characters that a man was like to have his eyes cross trying to read it.”

Kiron was waiting for the other sandal to fall. Rakaten-te had certainly been dangling it in one finger long enough. He took pity on them then and let it go. “When we realized it was written neither in Tian nor in the Altan variant script, we began trying to find someone who could read it. When that was fruitless, we began a search of the library for scrolls in obscure tongues. To shorten this tale, it appears that the book of magic is written in the tongue of the Heyksin.”

The silence was like a shout.

“The Magi of Alta were really Nameless Ones?” It was Marit who asked this, in an oddly calm voice. But Kaleth’s beloved moved to take his hand, and he to hold hers. Her slightly slanted eyes were wide with alarm that she otherwise did not show.

“Let us say that we think that the Magi of Alta were—perhaps I should say ‘are’—descended from the Nameless Ones.” Rakaten-te shrugged. “It is difficult to say whether they still had any connection with their former peoples.”

Kiron was still trying to get his mind to work. He thought it might be some time before he got his mouth to do so.

It was one thing to have his worst and yet most nebulous fear confirmed, that the shadowy attackers were in fact the Heyksin. At least he had anticipated that much.

But that the Magi were Heyksin—this smacked of a plan, a conspiracy, that must have been going on ever since the Nameless Ones were expelled from the Two Kingdoms.

“This . . . explains something,” Kaleth said slowly. “I may be the Mouth of the Gods of Alta and Tia but . . . there are other gods. . . .”

The stranger priests now turned to stare at him as if he was speaking nonsense. But Rakaten-te nodded, his lips compressed into a thin, hard line. “There are other gods. And mine is the god of difficult choices. When gods war, it is often we mortals who serve as the armies.”

The two stranger priests blanched.

Rakaten-te ignored them. “Go and commune, Mouth of the Gods of Tia and Alta. Ask them if it is war in heaven we face. And I hope you will return to me with an answer.”

The quietest and coolest place in all of Sanctuary was the cavern beneath the city where a tributary of the Great Mother River ran hidden beneath the sand and rock of the desert. At the downstream end, past where people were pulling out their water for drinking and cooking, the current inhabitants had made a kind of area for swimming and bathing. Lit by a few lanterns whose light was reflected in the placid, deep waters, when there was no one else present, it was a place of deep peace and very, very quiet. This was where Kiron took his dazed and aching head, to immerse himself in the slowly-moving water and try not to think.

This was just too big. It had all gotten completely out of hand—

Except that wasn’t it already out of hand? If what Rakaten-te had said was true? If this was all about the Gods of Tia and Alta at war with the Gods of the Nameless Ones . . . and had been all along . . . then the only difference was that now the poor mortals caught up in this conflict knew about it.

It made him feel as if he was in the middle of an earthshake.

I don’t want to be in the middle of this.

But he was in the middle of it whether he liked it or not.

I’m not like Ari and Kaleth. I’m not royal, I’m not a priest, I’m just the son of a farmer. . . .

He lay there with his eyes closed, listening to the slow lapping of the water against the stone and sand of the verge, with the cool water covering all of him but his chin and face. This was insane. How could he be caught up in something this big?

Someone padded softly, with bare feet, down to the waterline and dove in, being careful to do so far enough from him so as to not splash him unduly. He opened his eyes and was not surprised to see Aket-ten’s head surfacing nearby.

She looked at him out of the shadows as if she knew his thoughts. “This changes nothing, you know,” she said calmly. “We’d still defend our land and our people. The Nameless Ones would still try and conquer us again. It’s just as valid to say that we are causing this ‘war in heaven’ as it is to say the other way around.”

He blinked. “It is?”

She smirked a little and pulled damp hair out of her eyes. “The Seft cult isn’t the only one to have its little secrets. As a Fledgling, I was taught that ‘as above, so below’ also works the other way. As we, the worshippers, tend, so tend the gods. That’s one reason why Kaleth is working so hard at reconciling the cults of Alta and Tia. Eventually in every Altan/Tian pairing, if the worshippers and the priests become reconciled . . . the two Gods will become one.”

He had a funny mental image of two gods melting together like two unbaked abshati figures left out in the rain, and started to laugh. But then he sobered. “So we affect the gods?”

She nodded. “This ‘war in heaven’ may only be a reflection of the war the Nameless Ones brought to us so long ago. There is no telling for certain.”

She swam over to him as he moved into the deeper water. “I just—don’t like the whole idea of the gods swooping in and using us as pieces in a game,” he replied, his stomach clenching.

She said nothing, for a very long time. “It’s not a game,” she said very quietly. “Not for us, certainly, but not for Them either. It’s more complicated than that. I’ve been told that if they lose their followers, Gods can even die.”

“Well, maybe the Gods ought to think twice about sticking people in wars where they can die, then,” he said, irritated. It still made him queasy to think about it. Life was complicated enough without the Gods mucking about with it. “How long do you think they’ll want us to stay here?” he asked, changing the subject. “The Chosen and Kaleth, I mean.”

“I don’t know.” She swam over to the side and climbed out on the rocks to dry herself off. “I’m anxious to get back.”

He felt a pang. So she would rather be with her new wing of dragons than with him for another day. . . .

The moment he had that thought, he knew it was unfair, but he couldn’t help it. She had her duty. And these young women—they were shaping up well. Of course she needed to be with them.

He just wished she needed to be with him as much.

And he suddenly realized, with a very sour feeling in his gut, that he did not want to go back to Mefis. Not at all.

“Do you think you and Re-eth-ke could manage Rakaten-te alone?” he asked. She pulled a clean tunic over her head and tugged it down in place before turning to look at him, a hurt expression in her eyes. “It’s not you!” he exclaimed quickly. “It’s . . . my mother.”

He clambered out beside her as she eyed him with a peculiar expression. He pulled his own clothing on without bothering to dry himself off. “She’s driving me mad,” he said pathetically. “She’s my own mother, and she’s driving me mad.”

“She might be your mother, but you have seen nothing of her since you were very small.” Aket-ten sat down on a rock, chin on her fist. “How can she possibly drive you mad? Now my mother—she knows exactly how to get me to do what she wants. She can make me feel guilty without saying a word, just using a look! She knows me too well. Your mother knows you not at all.”

He ducked his head a little, feeling guilty already. “I should be happy to see her. I should want to spend as much time as I can with her and my sister. But my sister sits in the corner and plays with toys like a child because of how badly hurt she was. And my mother . . . all she talks about, all she wants to talk about, is getting the farm back.”

He couldn’t bring himself to call it “our” farm. He didn’t belong there. He hardly remembered anything about living there, and he certainly didn’t want to go back.

Ever.

Aket-ten blinked. “What would she do with it if she had it?” she asked logically. “One woman and a feeble-minded girl could not possibly keep up with the work. Does she have a man interested in her? Could she marry again if she had the land?”

Kiron groaned. “No, she does not, and would that she did! I know what she wants me to do. She wants me to find some girl in our old village, marry her, and become a farmer myself.”

Somewhat to his indignation, Aket-ten burst into laughter.

“She does! And it is not funny! Even if I did not . . . love you . . .”

There, it was out. Words that hadn’t been said between them for too long.

Words that broke the unspoken tension that had been between them. She looked up at him, eyes wide. He reached for her.

And for a long while there were no words between them, nor any need for them.

Dawn brought another summons to Kaleth’s tiny temple. This time there were only the five of them there to confer; Kaleth and Marit, Kiron and Aket-ten, and the Chosen of Seft. Kaleth looked worn; Marit, worried.

And the word was not what Kiron had expected. “We’re going back to Aerie? All of us?” Kiron repeated what Kaleth had just told them with some incredulity. “But I thought—”

“The gods have not said much, Lord Kiron,” Rakaten-te said somewhat sardonically, “But they have said that Aerie is the place where we must all be.”

“The place where it began and where it all shall end to be precise,” Kaleth added, equally sardonic. “Though they were exceedingly vague on what it was supposed to be.” He sighed. “Sometimes even I grow weary of cryptic pronouncements.

“An end to bad poetry, perhaps?” Aket-ten suggested lightly. “Or the end to watered beer? Since no one has Foreseen the end of the world, I prefer to assume that the world will go on.” She helped herself to a honeyed cake and nibbled it.

“Well,” Kaleth said reluctantly, “we were given certain . . . directions. Seek at the source of the life giver, once gracious and free, choked by enmity, now free again but crippled. If that makes any sense to all of you—”

“Only that, as ever, the Gods are fond of bad poetry and—” began Aket-ten, shaking her head.

“—not as cryptic as you think,” Kiron said slowly, interrupting her.

They all turned to face him as he spoke, the picture of the debris-choked cavern of the main spring of Aerie vivid in his mind. “The spring that once supplied water for most of Aerie in its prime was blocked up by an earthshake in the distant past, the same one that did most of the damage to the buildings there. We think that is why the city was abandoned; without that water, they could never have supported all the people that once lived there. The water’s been working a way out toward the surface for—centuries at least. Before we found the city, the spring created another outlet, but we’d been planning to dig the entire area out when we had time—”

“It sounds to me as if that time has more than come.” Rakaten-te sat up alertly. “The rest of your pronouncement was blessedly clear if wretchedly inconvenient for me. Fortunately, there are two messengers here already, so at least there are dragons enough to haul us like so many sacks of provender off to the middle of the howling wilderness. I am too old to endure a jaunt on a racing camel in the ungentle care of one of the Blue People.” One corner of his mouth turned up a little. “Here I am, who wished for adventure in his youth and got none, now beset by adventure uncomfortable and hazardous in my declining years. Truly it is said, ‘Take care what you wish for, the Gods will deliver it at the worst possible time.’ ”

But he did not sound unhappy about it. Not in the least, in fact. Kiron had the distinct impression that Rakaten-te was enjoying every minute of this, even (or perhaps especially) the danger.

“It’s not the middle of the howling wilderness,” Kiron protested mildly. “I will admit that you can see the middle of the howling wilderness from there, but—”

“—there is no point sitting about and nattering about it,” Aket-ten said briskly, standing up. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we will discover what it is the Gods want us to find.”

“And that is truth. Let us gather our things and go. Marit and I can be ready by the time the dragons are finished eating.” Kaleth stood up, and Marit with him.

“I never unpacked,” sighed Rakaten-te.

“Anything Aket-ten and I need is already there,” Kiron put in, with a glance at Aket-ten. She returned his look warmly.

They had agreed on a few things, down there beside the slow-moving, hidden river. She wouldn’t be going back to Mefis. Certainly not until this crisis was over, and after that—

She told Kiron that she had more than half made up her mind that Huras was a better teacher than she, certainly more patient and definitely better able to get things out of people. It might be, now that the group of female Jousters had been more-or-less (if grudgingly) accepted, that it would be good for them to get their training from someone who was actually suited to teaching. And one thing was certain. The Queen’s Wing would be led, for the nonce, by the son of Altan bakers.

But first, before any plans for the future could be made, it was time to defend the Two Kingdoms.

“Then we will gather at the pens when you are ready,” Kiron said. “I will alert the other two Jousters. Let us be gone and quickly.”

“Aye,” Rakaten-te said, all of his humor vanishing. “All we know about our enemy is that he has been a step ahead of us until now. We must hope he is not still, but act as if he was.”

EIGHTEEN

WHEN the Gods speak . . . things get done. Kiron wiped the back of his neck and his forehead with the rag he’d had tied around it, and took a much-needed break from what at any other time he would have balked at doing. Virtually every able-bodied person in Aerie that was not out patrolling or supporting the day-today activities of the place had put in some time on clearing the rocks from the cave-in.

It helped that one of the priests had some sort of magic that told him what places were unsteady and needed careful work. It also helped that the initial effort at clearing the tunnel must have taken place immediately after the earthshake until the presumably desperate inhabitants had given up and packed themselves out. It also helped that another effort, if a desultory one, had taken place as the new inhabitants of Aerie now and again moved a few rocks, or even came looking for a good place to find stone for partitions and the like.

But now . . . now the real effort was underway, and even Lord Kiron, Captain of the Jousters, was stripped down to a loinwrap and was part of a human chain moving rocks out to be piled beside the ever-more-freely-running spring. And Aket-ten, Wingleader of the Queen’s Wing, was carrying water like any serf girl.

It was brutally hot, even deep in the tunnel, and the air was thick with sweat and dust. Although most of the labor was of the unskilled, brute-strength variety—barrow-loads of smaller stones being carted out and dumped, those rocks that could be lifted being passed from hand to hand, and the truly enormous boulders being levered from where they were wedged and pulled by teams of the strongest hitched to ropes—Kiron was seeing more real magic in this place than he had since the use of the Eye in Alta. And now he knew why priests and Magi so seldom did purely ordinary things by means of magic.

There was the priest who could somehow “read” instability, of course. That was not what Kiron would have called “impressive” except in that there had been no rockfalls and no cave-ins. But three times now, they had come upon a huge boulder that was far, far too big to lever out, and even if it could have been freed, it was too heavy to move. Three times, a different priest had come forward with a different solution.

The first had sent everyone out of the cave. What happened next, was known only to the priest and presumably others of his rank, but there was a thunderclap from within the cave, followed by a violent blast of dust-carrying wind rushing out of the mouth of it. They all scrambled back in, to find the boulder shattered and the priest unconscious on the ground.

Kiron was in a panic at the sight of the unconscious man, but his fellows seemed perfectly at ease, and merely picked him up and carried him out without any fuss.

The second time, the rectangular rock was not wedged in like a cork in the mouth of a bottle, it simply filled most, not all, of a rather narrow space. This time another priest came forward and directed them to clear all debris out of the way and from around the sides of the boulder. Then, chanting and gesturing, he “went to work” with all of them watching.

With a grating sound, the rock began to move.

It moved forward at an agonizingly slow pace, hardly more than the width of a nail paring for every breath. The priest was soon white-faced and sweating as hard as any of them; it looked for all the world as if he was moving the wretched thing himself, by main strength.

Maybe he was.

Finally, just as he got it far enough out of the bottleneck that it would be possible to get ropes around it to haul it out over rollers, he collapsed and was in his turn carried out.

And now the third. Another fall of rock, again bottlenecked in with the spring creeping under some hair-thin gap beneath it, and another priest.

“This is the last,” said the one who could sense when falls were about to take place. Eyes closed and sweating as hard as any of them, it was clear that what he was doing was no light task either. “When this is gone, the way will be clear.”

“But there is much water built up behind this stone.” The new priest placed both hands on the rock and leaned his forehead on it. “Hmm. This will be tricky—”

“Not to mention dangerous,” the stone reader replied. “If it is released all at once—”

“I do not speak to you of the ways of stone, Tam-kalet; do not preach to me of the paths of water!” the priest snapped, then immediately apologized. “Forgive me. Great Mother River is no easy mistress. And she wants her child released.”

The reader of rocks chuckled, opened his eyes, and mopped his brow. “They all move in us this day, and it seems we deal in more tasks for them than just one. Need you my services?”

The newcomer looked around the cavern. “Indeed, I need none save perhaps Lord Kiron. . . .”

“Why me?” he asked, astonished. “The other priest—”

“The other priest was not me.” That was all the explanation Kiron was going to get, it seemed, for as everyone else took the hint and began an ordered but hurried evacuation of the tunnel, the priest turned his attention back to the rock. “Have I your consent to draw upon your strength?” the man asked brusquely, eyes closed and one hand on the rock.

As if I have a choice? This was the final barrier. It needed to come down. Whatever lay on the other side of it, they needed and needed swiftly. “Yes,” Kiron replied, just as brusquely.

The priest grunted, then said, “Sit somewhere near me. And be silent. This is not a magic of brute force, but of planning and concentration.”

Kiron obeyed, throttling down his own impatience. From Aket-ten’s explanations, he had a good idea what the priest was asking for. The strength for a spell had to come from somewhere. Either it came from inside the magic worker himself—which was why those other priests had collapsed—or it came from some source outside. The Altan Magi had stolen their power, stripping it from the god-touched priests and acolytes of Alta, and from the premature deaths of the war. The Tian priests—the ones he’d seen so far, at any rate—were more ethical.

This one wanted to use Kiron as his source of strength.

Well, if it would get the job done . . . from Kiron’s perspective, this was certainly preferable to hauling stone.

So he sat where the priest directed and put his back against the wall. He had the feeling he was going to need the support before it was all over. Now there was nothing but silence, and the very occasional plashing of the spring running under that final blockage.

He knew when the priest was taking—whatever it was—too. It felt as if he was running, except that he wasn’t. It was just a steady drain of strength and energy. Not a lot, nor all at once, and not debilitating to the point where he was passing out, but there was no doubt that something was going on, that in some way, life energy was sapping from him and going somewhere else.

Even though all he could see from where he sat was the priest with his hands and forehead pressed up against the rock.

But then a new sound in the tunnel made him look more closely.

It was the sound of dripping water.

The departing workers had left all their lamps and torches stuck wherever they could be wedged or balanced, so there was plenty of light, and in addition, sheets of reflective, polished metal outside were sending bright patches of sunlight down here. And now, in that light, Kiron first noticed that the volume of water running through the channel at his feet had easily doubled.

The next thing that he noticed was that all around the edges of the bottom half of the stone jamming the bottleneck, there were little trickles, tiny streamlets that had not been there before. And even as he watched a spot that had been previously dry, he saw first a single drop of water well to the surface of the hairline crack, then a second and a third, then the drops became a trickle, then the trickle a thin stream down the face of the rock,

And he realized a moment later that somehow that crack, almost invisible to the eye, was widening.

He had to pull his feet up now, the water was getting so deep.

Then there was a wet pop, and the rock itself cracked across the middle from right to left, and water began to trickle from the crack.

That was the beginning of the end. The rock cracked, and cracked, and cracked again, but only the bottom half. Soon the bottom half of the rock shimmered with water, and even with his feet pulled up, Kiron was ankle-deep in the stream.

Then the priest pulled away from the stone, and the steady drain on Kiron ended.

“I think we need to leave here and let Tam-kalet do his work,” the priest—whose name Kiron still didn’t know—said hoarsely. “The water has undermined the entire bottom half of that blockage; that is why it was cracking. I do not know when it will succumb to the stress.”

Kiron didn’t need a second invitation. He shoved himself up off the rock and realized, as he staggered away, that he was as completely spent as he had ever been in his life.

And cold, cold. As he stumbled into the harsh sunlight, the warmth felt good on his numb skin. He sat down abruptly on the first place that looked comfortable, as the priest’s fellows came and assisted him away. Tam-kalet and two others went back inside the tunnel, after warning everyone else to stay back.

Just as Kiron was actually starting to feel warm again, they came running out, a grinding sound echoing from the tunnel behind them.

Tam-kalet jumped up onto the rocks stacked up to the right of the tunnel entrance. The other two scrambled over the ones to the left. And just in time, for a muddy wave of water and rocks tumbled together surged out hard on their heels with a roar.

When everything had settled again, the spring was back in its old bed. As near as Kiron could tell, the stream it fed was back at the highest level it had been in when Aerie was in its prime.

The priests that remained stared at the stream in satisfaction, but it was Rakaten-te who spoke, standing off to one side and leaning on his staff.

“Kaleth, Marit. It is our turn now.”

Kaleth gestured to two of the younger priests. One stepped forward to act as Rakaten-te’s guide, the other followed the trio. Kiron was curious, but his exhaustion overcame his curiosity. He knew he would find out what, if anything, was in there eventually, and for the moment, recovering his strength seemed more important than anything else.

It was not very much later that all five of them came out again. This time it was Kaleth who led the elder priest, while the two junior priests carried a small chest between them. It seemed very heavy for its size; after a moment, it occurred to him that it must be made of stone, and he wondered what could be so important that it required a stone chest to hold it.

Well, whatever it was, it seemed to be what Kaleth and Rakaten-te were looking for. They paused, as the two young priests went on with the chest, presumably to the Temple of Haras.

“We have found what we were sent to find,” Kaleth said into the waiting stillness. “The Great King and Queen have been sent for, because the enemy comes apace, and the time has come to end what was here begun.”

His words did not have the otherworldly ring about them that they had when he was speaking directly for the gods, but Kiron had no doubt that his words came from them anyway. As the rest of those waiting, Jousters, workers, priests and all, looked at one another in befuddlement and began to murmur, Rakaten-te rapped his staff three times on the stone to silence them.

“Prepare yourselves, people of Aerie, of the Two Kingdoms. The Heyksin come. And this time their Magi, and perhaps their gods, come with them.”

Outside the temple, even through stone walls as thick as his arm was long, Kiron could hear the murmur of voices. Not surprising since just about every living soul in Aerie was out there right now.

With that single word, “Heyksin,” every difference that had ever existed between the people, and the Jousters, of Tia and Alta had disappeared. It was what Ari and Nofret had wanted so badly—

Be careful what you wish for . . .

Kiron could not help thinking about those words, now so grimly prophetic. And yet, that wish had nothing to do with a plan that must have been a-building for tens of tens of years. Even if the Magi of Alta were not in league with their Heyksin cousins, it still must have been a-building for that long. It was just too well-plotted, too well-executed. Had not that one single man escaped . . . had he not gotten far enough and at the right time for his body to have been spotted by patrolling Jousters . . . then all of the border towns could have been removed and the way would have been clear for a Heyksin army led by Magi to strike straight at the heart of Tia. Alta was already weak and shaking. Tia’s troops were decimated even if the land itself and the majority of the people were still secure. It would have been the ideal time to strike. Heyksin forces could have taken Mefis with scarcely a battle. And even if Ari and Nofret had escaped by dragon, where could they have gone?

They were here now, and along with the strongest priests of Sanctuary, and Aket-ten and Kiron, they waited to see what it was that the gods had wanted Kaleth to find.

Kiron had suspected a weapon of some type, perhaps something like the great Eye of Alta—though hopefully, one that could be powered without the dreadful cost of lives—but the box was far too small for that. Kiron had thought it was stone; it wasn’t. It was made of some metal he could not identify, black either by design or blackened with age. And utterly plain, without any of the bas-reliefs or carved letters beloved of the craftsmen of the present day. In fact, in its simplicity, it seemed of a piece with this very city, a place where even the statues of the gods were curiously simplified and refined down to a few basic lines.

No one, not even Kaleth knew what was in there. He had been waiting for Ari and Nofret to arrive. And now was the moment of truth. . . .

With great care, Kaleth reverently put his hand on the lid. Kiron held his breath—and truth to tell, he more than halfway expected that the box would be sealed, either by some invisible lock or by age. Or maybe by magic.

But the lid came up easily in Kaleth’s hand, swinging on hinges that were invisible. Kaleth reached inside—and pulled out an oval, flat package, wrapped in age-yellowed linen that literally fell to pieces in his hands, revealing the gleam of gold.

It was a circlet, a crown, of the sort that could be worn alone, or over the Greater Crowns. This one, though—the hawk head meant to be worn on the brow was of nearly identical design to that of the statues outside, and standing in the sanctuary of this very temple. Very simple. Very stylized. The hawk head was all smooth curves, suggesting beak, eyes, the hunch of wings, rather than actually depicting them. Kiron stared at it, fascinated by the gleaming metal. He wanted to touch that little casting, feel the metal smooth beneath his fingertips. . . .

But there were more. Five more times, Kaleth reached into that box and came out again with a crown, until he had placed the sixth and last on the floor, in a circle.

There was a stylized cobra and a scorpion. The hawk and the arching horns of a cow. The curled horns of the ram and the long-necked head of the vulture. Six crowns.

The representations of six gods and goddesses.

“The crowns of the gods?” Kaleth asked out loud.

“Ah, I wondered what you had uncovered.” The Chosen of Seft nodded. “Such things were said to have been made. By the gods themselves, in fact. One wonders now if the blocking up of that spring was deliberate, not to stop the water, but to prevent the priests of this city from getting their hands on these relics.”

For Siris, chief of the gods and lord of the dead, there was the ram. For his wife Iris, the cobra, wise and cunning. For Haras, the hawk of course, and for his wife Hattar, the curved cow horns surrounding a fertile full moon.

And for Seft . . . the scorpion crown. And for his wife Nebt, the vulture.

For a long time, everyone stared at the six crowns and no one moved. Finally, though he could not have said why he did this, Kiron reached avidly for the hawk crown.

Just as his fingers caressed the smooth surface of the gold, the crown suddenly flared to life. To his credit, Kiron did not even flinch. White-gold light blazed from the circlet for a moment, making them all squint, then faded to a soft, warm glow.

“Do—can I hold that?” Aket-ten said, hesitantly. Without a qualm, Kiron handed it to her.

The light was quenched as suddenly as if a lamp flame had been blown out. Aket-ten bit back an exclamation of disappointment and handed the crown back to Kiron.

The moment his fingers touched it, the light returned.

“I sense the magic,” said Rakaten-te mildly. “If I were you, I would not put that on just yet.”

Kiron blinked. He had, in fact, been thinking of doing just that. But the Chosen of Seft’s words made him think twice about that idea. “Ah . . . you may be right,” he said. But he didn’t put the crown down.

He couldn’t. Not even when another thought occurred to him. He hadn’t been at all happy about the notion of the Gods pulling them about . . . and now, here he was . . .

“So. Kiron has—what?” Rakaten-te asked.

“The diadem of Haras,” replied Kaleth. “So this, Chosen, is surely meant for you—”

Kaleth gingerly picked up the diadem of Seft and began to put it in Rakaten-te’s hands. But as soon as the metal circlet got even close to the Chosen, a darker, redder light blazed from the gold, and Rakaten-te gave a swift intake of breath.

He reached out his hands, and Kaleth quickly dropped the circlet in them. He let out a long sigh, as the light dimmed to a ruddy glow. Meanwhile, with some hesitation, Aket-ten was reaching for the diadem of Hattar. As her fingers neared it, silver-gold light blossomed as if to welcome her, and she picked up the circlet with wide eyes, lips parted a little in wonder.

“I—feel the power, too!” she said. “I have never done that before—”

“You have never held something that the gods themselves have made,” Rakaten-te said with a slight smile. “And I think there is a reason why the Great King and Queen were called for—”

But Ari hesitated, looking dubiously at the remaining three crowns. “I didn’t want, didn’t choose to be King,” he said slowly. “This—this is so far beyond being merely King—”

The Chosen of Seft raised his chin, frowning. “And this may well be the only way you can save your peoples, Great King. You did not choose this task, it chose you. Nevertheless—”

“Nevertheless . . . it is a task I accepted. And this is a piece of that task.” Ari took a deep breath and reached for the diadem of Siris, as Nofret reached confidently for that of Iris. Blue-white light, a little darker for the crown of Siris, answered their touch.

I am holding the crown of Haras. I am about to become a hound on the game board of the gods. He felt a chill, a sinking feeling in his gut, and yet . . . now that it had come this far, he could not put down that diadem. He could not back away from the game. More lives than just his depended on this.

And the game had been put in motion long, long before he was born. If Aket-ten was to be believed . . . maybe it had been started, not by the gods, but by men. As below, so above, she said. He clutched the crown and willed himself to be steady. He was on the path now. There was no turning back.

That left only one crown, that of the wife of Seft, Nebt, the Lady of the desert, the Voice of Prophecy, the Dweller Between, unclaimed. Kaleth stared at it for a long time. Finally, he picked it up. It remained lifeless gold in his hands.

He placed it reverently back in the metal box. “Not today, I think,” he said, and put down the lid, which closed with a muffled click. Then he turned back to the Chosen of Seft. “I assume you know something of these objects?”

Rakaten-te shook his head, but he was smiling. “Only that they once existed and were lost. But the gods do not leave anything to chance when the situation is as grave as this one, and they will guide us as to what we must do next. I suggest all of you listen to your crowns. They will tell you what you need to know.”

Kiron shook his head, even as his fingers caressed the cool gold. Listen to the crown? That was ridiculous . . . . . . wasn’t it?

But he closed his eyes for a moment, and felt the weight of the thing that he held in both hands, felt its solidity, its power, and . . .

Blinked, as his head jerked up, as if he had been nodding off, and he knew in that moment exactly what it was he needed to do, and when. He didn’t know what would happen after that, but he did know that much. The crown was a conduit for Haras, somehow, and made it possible for the god to manifest when it was worn by a living human.

Provided, of course, that Kaleth knew what he needed to—these things required a ritual, it seemed—

“The crown has given me the ritual that we will need, Mouth of the Gods,” Rakaten-te said, with great formality. “I shall teach it to you as soon as may be.”

Kaleth looked around the circle of faces, lit from beneath by the softly glowing diadems on their laps. “You all know what you have to do?”

As he met the eyes of each of them in turn, they nodded.

He let out his breath in a sigh.

“Then teach me, Chosen of Seft, and let it be now,” he replied. “The gods have spoken. Tamat the Render is coming, the ravaging goddess of the Heyksin, and there is very little time to waste.”

The Chosen of Seft could not look at him, but Kiron sensed all of Rakaten-te’s concentration was focused on Kaleth, with a fierce heat like that of the sun on the Anvil of the Sun.

“There is no time to waste, Mouth of the Gods,” the Chosen said, in a very controlled voice. “No time at all.”

NINETEEN

THE tallest flat spot in Aerie—on the top of the cliffs overlooking the main chasm—was their rallying point. Whatever Tamat the Render was, she was not coming alone. The Heyksin were bringing an army, the like of which only the Heyksin could field. For the Heyksin had in abundance something that was rare in Tia and unheard of, practically, in Alta.

The Heyksin had horses.

Now, the Tian army did have chariots, about as many as they had dragons. Which was to say, formidable against foes afoot but nothing like what the Heyksin were bringing.

Orest’s wing was running scouting forays, and caught them just leaving the Anvil of the Sun, at the farthest point of practical scouting range. The Heyksin force paused and camped overnight, resting for the assault on Aerie, and Jousters continued to watch the camp until it was too dark to see anything but the occasional torch, for they camped without fires.

That morning, a final set of scouts had gone out to take actual numbers, if they could. Orest himself returned, white-faced and shaking, to give the report.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he stammered, balancing in his saddle as his blue dragon Wastet perched gracefully on an outcrop that really looked too small to support so much weight. “They cover the land from edge to edge. You can probably see their dust cloud from here. Thousands of them. And not like our chariots, no, these things have slicing blades on the wheels, and armor. They’ll mow down foot soldiers like so many farmers cutting barley.” He wiped his forehead with his hand. “Those blades and things weren’t on the chariots before. They must have had them all stored and put them on last night.”

The Chosen of Seft nodded gravely. “This was how they conquered before. But we will have no foot soldiers on the ground today. We will have archers, spearmen, and sling wielders on the cliffs of Aerie. And we will have the Jousters in the air—”

“Every Jouster that can drop a pot,” Kiron said grimly, shading his eyes with one hand as he peered toward the horizon, looking for the haze of a dust cloud. “We have had every pair of hands that can busy brewing Akkadian Fire and sealing it in beer jars. The Jousters, too, are trained with javelin and sling. And I hope that the Heyksin horses are not accustomed to dragons.”

“Do not count too much on that,” Ari cautioned. “They have had a very long time to learn about our dragons. They might not have any themselves, but they surely have some weapons to counter them.” He looked to Kiron. “Only our newest techniques are likely to work.”

Kiron nodded, and turned to Gan. “Tell the Jousters that they must stay out of reach of the ground. Ari is right; the Nameless Ones must be expecting dragons and plan on us using the old tactics. I don’t want anyone flying down to seize an officer. Stick to attacking from above, and choose your targets with care.”

Gan nodded, and strode off to the edge of the cliff. He whistled shrilly, and with a flash of green, his Khaleph rose up from a ledge below to land beside him. He swung himself up into the saddle and Khaleph pushed off, carrying them both to pass the word on to the Jousters.

And perhaps the diadems they all held in uncertain hands would not be needed. He could hope for that. Perhaps whatever it was that the Heyksin had in mind to conjure up this “Tamat”—whatever it was—wouldn’t work. Perhaps the real battle would be won by mortal hands, hands that the Heyksin had outnumbered by as much as a hundred to one.

And perhaps you will do as your mother wishes, take back the farm and house, marry whatever girl still living in your village happens to consent, and settle down to raise barley. One was as likely as the other.

The dust cloud that stretched across the eastern horizon grew nearer. And now Kiron heard it, felt it, a rumble like distant thunder, except the thunder didn’t end, and it grew louder, nearer. He felt the faint vibration of the stone beneath his feet. And the Heyksin army still was not in sight, only the dust they raised.

The dragons shifted, stirred, complained. Below him, in the valley and on the cliffs, they turned their heads to look at their riders. Those few that had been in battle knew what this meant, and they wanted to be off. The rest took their cue from those few.

But Ari’s—and Kiron’s—orders were explicit. Let the Nameless Ones wear themselves out to come to us. Let the sun and the heat be our weapons. For there was a small, an infinitesimal bit of luck on their side. The season of the rains was not yet come. The sun still burned his way across the sky in the fury of full summer. The Heyksin were driving chariots, not riding camels.

Down below, the last of the feverish preparations ended, and people retreated behind their barricades of stone. The way had been made as cruel for horses as possible with every handspan of open ground strewn with sharp-edged shards of rock. The ways into the city were barricaded with piles of thorns. There was not a drop of water to be had; what water was freely available came from within the city, and those water-courses had been rerouted.

And now it became clear why every dwelling in the city had those sunken ground floors that seemed so perfect for dragon pens.

They were for water, probably in the event of just such a siege as they were facing. With a minimum of effort, each could be filled in turn from the now freely flowing spring. It would take days, weeks to fill them all, during which time the water was not going out to where the Heyksin army would be. Of course, those that had been made into dragon pens couldn’t be filled with water, but those were few compared to the number of empty dwellings, or those that held folk who were not Jousters.

The Heyksin army might be huge, but they were facing a more implacable enemy than the united force of Alta and Tia.

Time.

They were living on only what they had brought, food and water both. They were under the punishing sun. Their supply line was impossibly long, unless they could somehow send supplies across the Anvil of the Sun in the blink of an eye. They could not wait out a long siege. For once, the advantage was to the besieged, not the besiegers.

But they had to know that. Either they were mad and did not care, or . . .

Or what they bring with them is worse than anything we could possibly imagine.

Kiron clutched the diadem so hard his hands ached. It still had not lost that soft glow, nor had any of the others.

But as the thunder of the approaching chariots neared, as a dark line beneath the dun-colored dust cloud resolved into a mass of tiny, moving figures, he had a final fear that he could not still. Off to one side stood the Chosen of Seft, his own diadem held lightly in his hands, his bandaged eyes betraying nothing.

Seft the Liar. Seft the Betrayer.

Could they trust the god, or his Chosen?

Kiron didn’t know, and that terrified him as much as that army of chariots.

But it was too late now. Their feet were on the path, and there was no way to turn back, as the chariots finally came within easy range of the first dragon attack.

Kiron watched with sick longing as the wing in his colors of scarlet and black led the attack, and tiny jars rained down on the line of charioteers from above. They must have laughed—

Until those jars shattered, and their evil contents splattered over drivers, warriors, and horses alike, bursting into flame.

Obviously not all, nor even most, of the jars hit their marks. Nor did the contents find useful targets. But enough did that suddenly the front line erupted into chaos. Men screeched and horses screamed in pain. Flames blossomed out of the cups of the war chariots, eating everything they touched. Horses reared and bolted, trying to escape the fires burning on their backs, their rumps, making brief, fiery banners of manes and tails. Kiron cheered with the rest, although there was a part of him that felt sick at watching the horrible sight—a flaming chariot careering wildly across the space between the army and Aerie, with neither driver nor fighter aboard, with the horses crying their fear and pain until they encountered one of the many traps set for them and went down in a tangle of metal and broken legs, slashing wheels and blood. Or two chariots locked together, scything their way through the Heyksin’s own ranks until a quick-witted archer on their own side brought the horses down. Men lying on the ground aflame, howling out their agony until the fires, or one of their fellows ended their pain.

A second wave of Jousters, this time in Menet-ka’s green and white, bore down on the line with another round of their deadly cargo.

But this time they were met by a storm of arrows, rising from the ground so thick they formed a black cloud. Kiron began waving his diadem in the air and shouting wildly, even though there was no chance that Menet-ka could hear him. His heart plummeted. No dragon could fly into that—

But Menet-ka made the right decision; a signal from the indigo-blue’s rider told the whole wing to veer off. There was a groan of disappointment from the defenders of Aerie, but Kiron breathed a sigh of relief.

They came at the line again, but this time from high above the point where the arrows were falling off and arcing back to earth. Unfortunately, from that height most of the jars missed their marks and splattered their contents on the ground, flames boiling up from the ground uselessly.

Trumpets sounded in the enemy ranks and the chariots reorganized, protected by the archers, as foot soldiers ran out to collect the spent arrows. They were still out of reach of weapons from the cliffs of Aerie.

“They can’t charge,” Ari murmured. Kiron turned his head.

“What? Why?”

“They can’t charge, because if they do, their archers can’t protect them. But if they advance slowly, they lose all the advantage those chariots give them. They weren’t expecting the Akkadian Fire . . .”

He was interrupted by Aket-ten’s gasp, which, as she pointed to the northern end of the enemy lines, was echoed all over Aerie.

A pillar of black cloud and purple lightning was forming where she pointed, a slowly rotating pillar growing taller and broader with every passing moment.

As a chill fell over Kiron, he vaguely heard Kaleth beginning to chant behind him. The diadem in his hands grew warm as he stared at the apparition that grew and grew until it towered overhead and blotted out half the sky. A cold, harsh wind sprang up, spiraling toward the pillar, whipping up sand and dust, lashing them all with punishing gusts and carrying with it a stench of stagnant water and decay.

Thunder growled from it—real thunder—and the lightnings that laced the thing grew hotter and brighter until—

A bolt sizzled out of the pillar and lashed at the outermost cliff face. With a roar, stone exploded in every direction, and dragons reacted by launching themselves into the sky, in every direction, propelled by fear.

They weren’t the only ones jolted into terror by the lightnings that now arced toward Aerie’s cliffs. Everywhere, the defenders were screaming and trying to scramble down off the heights. But the lightning wasn’t what riveted Kiron’s attention. His eyes were fixed on the vague shape forming near the top of the pillar, and the six baleful green eyes glaring down from within.

Then the great wings unfolded with a booming sound that rivaled the thunder, Tamat raised her three heads to the sky and sang her song of death.

She was not a dragon, although she sported wings. These were huge, tattered things of bone and black feathers, like the wings of the carcass of a bird that the insects have almost finished with. The rest of her body was an unhealthy shade of pale, corpse-blue, a naked woman’s body, skin a glowing pallor with a faint, slick sheen of scales. She had legs like a bird, too, a great vulture perhaps, but a lizardlike tail, and her three heads were like nothing that Kiron had ever seen before. Scaled, enormous jaws, bulging fish-eyes glowing green, the curving horns of a ram, all of it the same sickly blue as her body.

And she must have been the size of the largest building in Aerie. Maybe larger.

That corpse stench came from her. With every beat of her wings it drove down at them as she looked down at them and sang.

Give up, said the song. Give up, despair, and die. Death is inevitable. I will have you, and you will go down into the darkness and be forgotten. I am the End of All Things, and you cannot escape me.

Kiron felt his will being sapped, his knees weakening, and black depression surrounding him, smothering him, drowning him.

Surrender to me. I am Inevitable. Hope is an illusion.

This was where that insidious, corrupting voice had come from, the voice that had whispered in his mind and told him how foolish it was to believe that Aket-ten cared for him—

That moment of recognition flashed across his spirit and jolted him awake, out of the mire of despair, giving him one tiny moment of freedom in which to act.

He put on the diadem.

Around him, he sensed the others doing the same, as some strength in each of them lashed back at Tamat’s Song.

Then his mind was clear, clearer than it had ever been in his life.

Of course, his mind was no longer in control of his body. Something—Someone—else, was.

That Presence filled him; he felt his mortality straining to contain it, like too much grain being poured into a sack until the fabric was tight enough to drum upon. It was Light. He was Light. He was Haras, offspring of Siris and Iris, the Hawk of the Sun. But . . . what that was . . . was so much more than anyone had ever written.

Beside him, his other self, his complement, She who completed him.

In fact, Kiron sensed all of this only dimly. This Being that had taken him over, and was using him as an anchor to the mortal world, was too enormous to grasp, and as for comprehending it—he might just as well as a beetle could comprehend the thoughts of a man.

And yet to act in the mortal world, these immortal beings required a mortal anchor, one person who would give them that right-of-usage. He had given that consent, and Haras had taken it.

And Kiron was now only baggage.

Peri stood on the edge of the path leading up to the top of the cliff where Kiron and the others had been overseeing the battle. She had brought them water—no, truth, she had brought Kiron water, and the others would be welcome to have some, but she had brought it for Kiron—

But now she clutched the water jar to her chest, unthinking, as she stared up at the monstrous shape of the column of darkness looming over them all. A cold storm wind whipped her clothing against her body, and the lightning that lashed out of the column to strike nearby made her jump and scream, dropping the jar, which shattered at her feet.

What have I done? she thought, as terror froze her.

When Huras had told them all he was returning to Aerie, that he was needed there, and that there was going to be a battle, she had begged him to take her with him. Sutema wasn’t strong enough to make such a long, grueling trip with a rider, but she could and would follow, if Peri was carried behind another Jouster. In fact, that had been one of Peri’s own ideas, to train fledglings too young to carry much weight how to fly. Sutema had been flying strongly for a sennight or more now.

Huras hadn’t hesitated, not for a moment. “We’ll need every hand,” he had said, somewhat grimly, and gave her only as long as it took for Sutema and Tathulan to eat their fill to gather what she needed. She realized just how urgent it was when he did not stop for the dragons to hunt midway through their journey. Sutema had been tired beyond measure when they had arrived, and Peri hadn’t been in much better shape. They both ate and drank enormously and curled up to sleep together in a strange sort of cavelike house that had a dragon pen in the bottom of it, alongside Huras’ Tathulan. Peri had not even had the strength to go up the stairs to try and find a proper bed.

And when she woke, an army was already almost to Aerie itself.

She knew better than to pester Kiron; instead she made herself as useful as she could. She had fetched and carried all manner of things, helped to build barricades, helped to channel water into a reservoir, even cooked and baked so that food would be ready and on hand when fighters needed it. Finally, she got a moment of respite and decided that there would be nothing wrong with taking water up to the commanders of this battle.

She had only really been aware of a harsh wind whipping up; the switchback path she had taken to the top of the cliff where they were faced away from where the army was assembled. So until she got to the rim, she’d had no idea of the horror hanging in the sky, a pillar of lightning and darkness that was taller than the cliff—and had eyes.

This was not what she had expected to see. There was nothing in this world that she could compare this to, and horror dried her mouth, knotted her gut, and froze her feet in place.

And then the—Thing—came out of the top of the pillar and began to sing, and she could not even scream. Her mouth opened, but all that came out was a strangled squeal. Tears of fear and despair poured down her cheeks, and she wanted to throw herself off the top of this cliff, because breaking her neck on the rocks below would be a blessing compared to what that—Thing—was going to do to them. To her. It told her somehow, deep in her mind, in a whirlwind of horror and panic, it showed her what her fate was to be.

We’re going to die. We are all going to die.

The Being that inhabited Kiron bowed with deep respect to the One looking from Ari’s eyes. The five who wore the diadems now wore power and glory like so many shining mantles. Their eyes glowed with it; their faces were radiant, and auras of light coruscated around them. “Father,” he said, his voice sounding strange and echoing in his own ears. The Being cast a glance at the Chosen, who had discarded his staff and moved to join them striding as surely as if he could see despite his bandaged eyes. “Uncle. I greet you.”

Tamat screamed, and all five of them looked up at her. She hovered in place, wingbeats spreading her noisome stench, all three heads glaring down at them.

“She is not yet a god,” observed Seft, through his vessel’s lips.

“Not yet,” said Iris, as Tamat shrieked in outrage at the sight of the five of them. “But enough blood has been spilled to unbind her. She is loose now in the world and if we do not bind her again, enough blood will likely be spilled to make her a god. And that would be an evil day indeed.”

“She is stronger than we,” replied Siris doubtfully. “We have never faced her thus. Always before, we have been on equal footing with her. We are constrained by the limits of our mortal hosts. She has made a body to suit herself.”

“Then we must be wiser, faster, and more skilled!” said Haras, with all the fierce determination of a desert falcon. His words rang out against the screams from Tamat above them, and the whine of the wind in the rocks.

Seft’s dark powers pulsed with the beat of his heart, and against the brilliant gold and incandescent white of Haras and Siris, he looked like a shadow. His words echoed ominously. “Blood called her. It may require blood to bind her again.” Despite the bandages shrouding his eyes, there was no doubt that he was looking directly at Siris. “As it was in the past, so it may be again. It may be that one must fall. It may be that only then will the power be sufficient to bind her.”

“No!” Iris moved forward in protest, but Siris waved her back.

“She cannot be left to rage across this mortal soil. So be it.” The words had all the weight and finality that only a god could give them. “But that moment is not yet. Let us see what mortal hands and immortal powers can do.” He turned toward the waiting dragons, that had not moved in all this time. He spread his hands wide, and Power filled the cliff top.

The top of the cliff blossomed with light, as if the sun-disk itself had alighted there. At last the terror let her go, and Peri dropped to her knees, whimpering. She turned her face away from the shining creatures that had once been people she knew, or at least recognized. They were nothing she recognized anymore. They seemed twice the height of perfectly ordinary people; they radiated light and force, she didn’t even dare look at their faces, and merely being in their presence made her gasp as if she had been running for half a day.

Gods. These were gods. How they had come to take the place of the people she knew, that was a mystery. But the gods were mysteries, not just mysterious, they were Mysteries and they did things she could not even begin to understand.

Blinding light filled the top of the cliff, making her cover her eyes, and when she could look again, four of the gods were in the sky, flying toward the hideous Thing in the midst of its darkness, mounted on—

Well, what they were riding bore as much resemblance to dragons as these Beings bore to humans. If someone had taken pure light and shaped it into the form of a dragon—well, that was the closest she could come to what was winging toward the demonic nightmare in the sky. A blue more intense than the sky itself, a scarlet that flames could only envy, a purple-shaded scarlet that would make the most glorious sunset look washed out, and a blue-black that vibrated with intensity; these were the colors of the celestial creatures that the gods rode. There was nothing in her experience to compare these colors, these creatures, to. The colors of jewels perhaps, but nothing less.

The monstrous vision screeched, a sound that made Peri cover her ears and duck her head, overcome by panic. When she could look up again, it was to a sky gone mad.

The Thing lashed out against the four attackers with bolts of lightning. Somehow they evaded these, and returned the favor with balls of light, great gouts of flame, and some lightning of their own. For Peri, it was impossible to sort out who was doing what, the sky was too full of light, the air too full of thunder.

The ground shook with the force of their exchange.

She felt a hand seize her shoulder and shake it, and turned to find Huras kneeling beside her. It gave her some small measure of comfort to see that he looked as terrified as she felt. “Peri!” shouted Huras over the sound of the unearthly battle. “Peri, what’s going on? Where are Kiron and the others?”

Hands glowing with dark power seized both their shoulders and pulled them to their feet. “What do you think is going on, Children of Alta?” shouted the one who held them.

He, too, must have once been a man; his eyes were bandaged, and he wore the robes of a priest and a coronet with the image of Seft’s Scorpion. But he moved as surely as a sighted man, and his face was full of that same terrible glory as the others. It burned in his regard, it invested every word, and every tiniest gesture.

He did not wait for them to answer.

“The gods war to put back what should never have been released,” he continued, shouting over the howl of the wind and the crashing and booming of strike and counterstrike.

Huras seized their captor’s hand. “Is that Thing a goddess?” he shouted.

“Not yet, you mortal children of the Two Kingdoms. Not yet,” the being shouted back, with a bitter laugh. “Foolish, foolish mortals—the Heyksin being fools, and not you—as below so above, the wretched Heyksin wanted a God of Vengeance, and so they strove to create one in their own image. Look at it!” he continued, flinging out an arm, and the power behind his words forced Peri to look back up at the raging battle, and at the dreadful Thing that was the center of it. “Look at it! Do you think for one moment that something like that is going to go quietly away when this battle is over?”

Numbly, Peri shook her head, sheltering her eyes with one hand from the wind.

“Wiser than they, you are. Of course it won’t. If we lose here, it will not be content with that! It will remain manifest and demand blood and blood and still more blood, and it won’t be the blood of bulls it calls for.” The Being let them go. “The blood of men made it, and the blood of men is what it feeds upon. And one must fall to bind it again.”

But he gave Huras a push. “You! There is another battle being fought, and it is mortal against mortal. Gather your Jousters, Huras of Alta! Strike now, while the enemy is as befuddled as you! It will serve you ill if the Gods win their battle, only for the mortals they serve to lose theirs!”

Huras did not hesitate for a moment. He turned and ran for the edge of the cliff, leaving Peri standing before——before a god.

Kaleth and Marit were chanting, lost deep inside ritual and magic. Essentially, Peri was alone with this god. Seft. Seft the Dark, Seft the Liar, Seft the Betrayer.

She turned her eyes back toward the four who hung in the midst of Light and Darkness. “Kiron—” she whispered, without thinking. What were her dreams in the face of something like this?

What had her dreams ever been—when he could become—a god?

“He does not love you,” the Being said flatly, without emotion. “Here and now, in this place and time where will can become manifest, there must be Truth. And he does not love you. He was being kind to you, nothing more.”

She felt tears spring up in her eyes, and turned to the Being angrily. “You cannot know that!”

“Oh, I can, and I do. If he had loved you, it would be you up there beside him, wearing the diadem of Hattar, and not Aket-ten.”

Her eyes stung, and her cheeks burned. But she could not deny what she saw. With a little mew of despair, she turned away. The Being seized her shoulders and shook her.

“Fool!” he snapped. “Look higher than the mud at your feet! Look at the Truth in you! You do not love him either. You love a dream of what you thought he was! The lies you hold give That thing power! You blundered into the place of power, and you can overset Us or aid Us by what you are! Now give over the pretty lie, and give Us your strength! Be strong, as strong as the one who survived the loss of all! Be strong as you do not yet realize you are! That thing came to life on the will of her worshippers—she is everything that they are writ large across the sky—now you are in this place of power—serve the same purpose for us!”

Shocked into silence, she looked, since she could not look into his eyes, at his mouth.

Why me? was her first thought. But he had answered that. She had stumbled inside a place of magic. He had said that “will became manifest” here. If she persisted in her illusions——would that weaken the bond between the Haras and Hattar that battled above her head?

She knew the answer before the question finished forming. Yes.

And if that happened—

“Any weakness, that Thing can exploit!” the Being said ruthlessly, giving her another shake. “Any doubt feeds her, any despair aids her. Face the Truth! Give Us your strength! Be strong, and become their channel to help us!”

He does not love you. That was hard, hard to face. But . . . you do not love him—that was . . .

Truth.

She felt something turn inside her, as she faced her innermost self and saw—the Truth. She . . . she had wanted, not love but . . . protection. She had wanted to be dependent on someone else. For all that she had joined the Queen’s Wing, for all that she had taken on responsibilities there—she had wanted, in her heart of hearts, to be told what to do. To be taken care of. Had wanted her story to end in some vision of unrealistic harmony, where nothing ever went wrong, where she and—this vague man-shaped image—never quarreled, never differed, never experienced the least little bump in their unending contentment. A storyteller’s ending . . . and they lived happily until the end of their days.

And in that storyteller’s tale of a life, she would tend to this image’s every want, serving as a faithful priestess, and in turn, being protected and told exactly what to be, what to do, what to think, in return for this fat, stupid, sheeplike contentment.

That was what she had been in love with. Not a man. Not even a dream of a man. And not a woman’s dream, but the dream of a child, lost and bereft, wanting only someone who would make her safe.

False and hollow, all of it. She was no longer that child, and safety was always an illusion.

She felt the fragments of falsehood falling away from her, like bits of a dragon’s shed skin as she slowly straightened her back.

There was no safety in the world. This Thing howling and fighting above her head should tell her that. Contentment was for cattle and sheep—who were used, herded, and then slaughtered, never knowing the reason why.

Freedom was not safe. Love, if and when it did come, was not safe. Life was not safe, it was full of brawling and strife and terror and pain—and love and joy and bravery and passion.

She could choose to be a sheep, or a dragon. A child, or a responsible adult.

Without even being aware of starting to move, she found herself joining the priest Kaleth and his consort.

If the gods needed her will, her strength, then by all that was holy, they would have it. And it was more than time to grow up.

TWENTY

THE Jousters of Alta and Tia rained down jars of Akkadian Fire on the heads of the Heyksin.

That was a kind of strength that poured into those who wore the mortal shells of Jousters themselves. The Jousters believed that their Gods would overcome this abomination that the Heyksin had created and that bolstered the battle going on above their heads. As below, so above. Belief.

That, at least, was what Marit told Peri, as she paused for a precious drop of water to moisten a throat gone hoarse with chanting.

Peri could not watch the battle above; not because she was afraid—though she was—but because she couldn’t see anything of what was going on, amid a maelstrom of fire and lightning and glare. And even if she could have seen it—it was all too big for her to grasp. The battle below, however—she could tell how that was going.

And at the moment, it was stalemate. The Jousters were able to keep the front lines of the enemy in a state of chaos, as flames blossomed among them, and men and horses screamed and tried without success to extinguish the Akkadian fire. As she watched, little eddies in the chaos emerged. Three chariots tangled together, dragging their drivers. The sickening stench of burning flesh, the sharp smell of Akkadian fire, the stink of flamed hair. The sting of sand whipped into her face and bare skin by the wind. The chill of the wind and the chill in her gut.

More bits emerged from the smoke below. Jewel-bright dragons swooping, kiting, diving and arcing back up again, clawing desperately for height to get out of the way of arrows. A red blossom of fire below.

A knot of archers taking a brave stand and sending volley after volley into the dragons, until someone, by plan or chance, dropped a jar onto the rim of a chariot, splashing driver and horses with liquid fire—and the horses bolted, screaming, straight into the archers, while the driver lurched out of the back, arms flailing, head a ball of flame.

But there, a long line of archers, keeping the dragons off the chariots they protected. A dragon suddenly stiffening, then lurching sideways, and floundering its way back to the safety of the cliffs, one wing web torn and shedding drops of blood.

A lucky arrow hitting a Jouster in Oset-re’s colors . . .

And the battle in the sky was having its effect on those fighting below as well. Some were staring, doing nothing, paralyzed.

But it seemed plenty of them were encouraged by the appearance of their goddess. And there were still far more of them than there were of the people of the Two Kingdoms.

As below, so above. This was belief. And it was power.

The Avatars of Haras and Hattar, Siris and Iris, supported by Seft, flung their weapons of fire and fury at the unchained creature Tamat. Haras sent javelins of sunfire at the hideous creature’s heads, while his father called down lightning from the stars themselves. Hattar shot silver arrow after arrow from the curved moon bow that was her own special weapon, while Iris rained down the Blood of the Earth upon it, white-hot molten stone that sizzled when it struck flesh. The transformed dragons they rode, though not god-ridden, were still possessed of their own vast courage and even greater loyalty. They dared as close as their riders would let them go, darting in and out, dodging Tamat’s lightnings and the dreadful black sky-metal death swords in her hands, and trying to score her with teeth and talon.

From below, Seft’s dark powers lashed out, and connected. They wrapped about the eyes of her three heads, blinding her as much as possible; his magic put fetters and weights on her arms, binding her for moments, making her clumsy, causing her to miss them when she could strike at them. She shook them off, but he sent them again and again and again, and while they lasted, they hampered her.

So far, none of them had taken any serious injury that a moment’s attention from Iris could not heal.

As above, so below. This battle, too, was at a stalemate. Their weapons were marking her. But not fast enough.

They were able to distract her from the mortals below, and keep her from supporting her army, but Tamat’s blood-fueled magic was healing her as fast as they wounded her.

And Tamat remained as strong as ever, and they, bound by mortality and their mortal vessels, were tiring. Their Light hammered her Darkness, but her Darkness could swallow it up.

From mind to mind, the thoughts flashed.

Her priests are feeding her. Iris lashed the unholy creature with the flail of earth-focused power she held in Her hand, as her dragon dove in beneath Tamat’s blade to get the goddess in near enough to strike. The corn-gold chains of the flail struck home across the dark-blinded eyes of the third head, and the dragon writhed out of the way of a lashing claw to fling herself and her rider out of harm’s way.

There is pain and death in abundance below Us. That feeds her . . . Siris fended off a volley of lightning with a shield made out of His own Being, and sent His dragon kiting sideways as the shield failed. If we can stop her from being fed—if we can remove that source of her strength—

No. It was the Avatar of Seft.

. . . no? One thought from four minds jolted by the response.

It is not that she is being fed. It is that she is not bound by flesh, except the flesh of her own creation. We are tiring. She is not. We are anchored by mortality. She is not. There was conviction in that. But more than that. There was Truth.

But surely one of Us can— The thought went unfinished. Yes, any one of them could, indeed, manifest enough power to equal, even to rival, Tamat.

And to do that, their mortal vessel would have to die, both because no mortal could encompass that much power and live, and because it would be the manifestation itself that destroyed Tamat.

One must fall. The answer was flat, implacable, inescapable.

No! Protest from three of the four.

Yes. Resignation from Siris, as he reached within himself, found the consent of his mortal vessel and prepared to make of himself a sacrifice—spurred by her own anguish and that of her vessel, Iris reached for him—

No! she cried, all the heartbreak of goddess and mortal together bound in that word. And as Haras hung his head in anguish, Kiron tried to think frantically if there was some other way—

Yes. Siris and Ari together shut them out.

Kashet hung in the sky, hovered, blinding blue against the churning dark. The dragon understood, too—and Kiron felt it, felt the dragon’s assent. He and his beloved Jouster would take this together if that was what it would take to save all.

Together, they faced Tamat, and—

Not this time, my brother.

A blast of dark energies struck Siris in the back, knocking him from his dragon. With a cry of anger and despair, Haras dove Avatre down in the maneuver that Kiron had practiced so often. Traitor! Betrayer! You show your true self at—

A laugh. Not this time, my nephew. I am the god of difficult choices. Remember that in the future.

Just as Avatre got under the plummeting body, arced herself with grace and power, and caught him across the saddlebow, something dark bloomed on the cliff below them.

Across the face of Aerie, across the battlefield, a voice louder than the thunder and sharp as the kiss of a blade rang out.

“Tamat! Corruptor! Destroyer! I dare you to face Me! I am Seft, Lord of the Darkness and Despair, and I am your Master!”

A second pillar of darkness rose from the top of the cliff in the heart of Aerie. A second Being spread shadow wings against the sunlight, blotting it out. Unable to resist the challenge, Tamat roared her answer, and the two surged together——and in that moment of meeting, Seft snapped the bonds of His vessel’s mortality, sending a wave of force across the battlefield that flattened everything in its path.

Kiron picked himself up off the ground. Beside him, Ari stirred and moaned a little. Both had been flung from Avatre’s back when Seft and Tamat had met and—

Avatre! He turned at the sound of a whine, to see the red-and-gold dragon, rather the worse for wear, climbing up over the edge of the cliff, with Kashet right behind her. They both flopped down next to their respective Jousters, stretched out their long necks and sighed with exhaustion.

The air stank. Burned flesh, burned hair, burned stone. A lingering taint of decay.

And the silence.

Gingerly, he removed the diadem of Haras from his head, and looked it over. It was in better shape than he was, for all its apparent fragility. But it no longer glowed with magic, and he was just as glad. Haras was gone, to wherever it was that the gods dwelled, and Kiron could quite do without the “honor” of serving as His vessel again. With careful deliberation, he removed Ari’s diadem, too.

“Ari!” The-on flapped heavily down onto the cliff top, and Nofret tumbled from her back to cradle Ari in her arms. Her hair was half-scorched on the left side of her face, and there were burns on her hands. Ari, of course, was going to be black and blue from head to toe. He groaned once, then opened his eyes and smiled, and she burst into tears.

“If—if you ever—do that again—” Whatever she was going to say vanished in incoherent sobs and kisses. A little embarrassed, Kiron looked away—

And saw, with a shock of recognition, the crumpled body of Rakaten-te, Chosen of Seft.

And a shadow-enshrouded form that held that body in His arms.

Kiron, who had been struggling to his feet, instinctively bent the knee.

The shadow gently laid Rakaten-te down, and passed a hand over his face. The bandages that had always covered his eyes melted away and Lord Seft flowed to his—feet? It wasn’t possible to tell, but Kiron got the impression of someone standing, someone with furled wings, or a cloak like wings, brooding down on him.

I am the god of difficult choices, said a voice that came from everywhere and nowhere. Never forget that. He knew that, my Chosen did, and he knew that we must share that choice. And now—

He turned toward the place where Tamat’s army had been. Kiron stood, slowly and looked in that direction.

The army was fleeing, in disorder, in panic. No one pursued them; most of the defenders on the cliffs had been flattened when Seft and Tamat collided. As for the Jousters—like Kiron, Nofret, and Ari, they and their dragons were picking themselves up from whatever place they had been flung.

It matters not. They cannot cross the Anvil of the Sun twice unprovisioned and live. Oh, a handful will survive. And they will carry back the tale—the tale of how their goddess was immolated, how Tia and Alta are one now . . . and how that land is defended.

A kind of fierce, dark exaltation infused those last words. And Kiron shivered to hear them.

My remaining time is short. Kiron saw, as the shadowed god turned, that He had His diadem in his hands. My Chosen has crossed the Bridge of Stars, and I am in need of a new avatar.

For one moment of unbearable horror, Kiron feared that Seft was going to—

No! No! Never again! Never—

But the god turned away from him, and toward the trio that stood a little ways away, the first to have gotten to their feet.

I am in need of a Chosen One, Kaleth, Mouth of the Gods. I am the god of difficult choices. Will you make the choice to serve Me?

“You are a difficult master,” Kaleth replied, regarding the form of shadow gravely.

And yet you have served Me already, as you have served all the gods. Will you serve Me alone? A pause. The choice that Rakaten-te assented to is not one that is asked often of My Chosen. But it is one that they must be ready to make. Could you make it?

Kaleth took a slow, deep breath and looked the God fearlessly in the face. “Aye,” he said, as, to Kiron’s wide-eyed astonishment, Marit nodded gravely in agreement. “For the sake of the Two Kingdoms, aye. And for their sake, I will be your Chosen,” said Kaleth, the Mouth of the Gods.

Then this is yours. The diadem of Seft floated across the space between them, and down into Kaleth’s waiting hands. Keep it safe, against need, my Chosen.

But then the shadow turned toward Marit. The gods will need another Speaker, faithful one. And Prophecy, and standing between Life and Death, Light and Shadow, has ever been the providence of Nebt. Will you take your mate’s place as the Mouth of the Gods?

Marit nodded, and the diadem of Nebt rose from the box where it had been left. As it neared her outstretched hands, for a moment, it took on a soft, metallic glow.

All unnoticed, Aket-ten had landed Re-eth-ke and come to stand beside Kiron. The god merely glanced in their direction but said nothing.

Nofret had helped Ari to his feet again, and the god turned back to them. Make the Two Kingdoms into One. Guard your borders, yet do not expel the stranger. Be vigilant, but not despotic. Remember that the difficult choice is almost always the right one. And now I go.

With those words, the god vanished, leaving no trace of Himself behind.

The last trace of the Nameless Ones was gone from the desert outside the cliff walls of Aerie. From where Kiron and Aket-ten had stood on the cliffs in the early morning light, you could not tell there had even been a battle.

Since the casualties had been relatively few on the Altian side—“Altia” being the name that Nofret and Ari had jointly decreed was to be the new name of their combined Kingdoms—in some ways the war had created a windfall for the desert city. Those horses that had died became dragon food. Those that lived had already been taken off to be traded for more useful asses, donkeys, and camels. The chariots and some of the weapons were already being converted into furniture and hardware, tools and other useful objects. So useful was the detritus of war, in fact, that scavengers from Aerie tracked the fleeing army well into the Anvil of the Sun to loot the fallen.

And there were a great many fallen.

And that was where the last mystery had occurred, in regard to all those fallen.

That first night, one of the things that the weary council that Ari convened tried to consider was what to do with the hundreds, thousands of corpses right on their doorstep. They were dangerous there; besides the stench that would start to arise when they began to decay, there was the disease, the flies, and all that to consider.

“We can’t burn them,” Ari had said helplessly. “There is not enough wood in all of Aerie to burn a tenth of them. We can’t bury them, we haven’t enough hands . . . .”

And just as he said that, there came the unearthly howl of a jackal cutting across the quiet night air. “Unearthly,” because it hadn’t come from the desert.

It had come from everywhere. And nowhere.

They all froze, then had looked at one another cautiously. Anbenis, the god of the dead, had the head of a jackal. . . .

The howl came again, filling Kiron’s upper room where they all sat on mats, like so many scribes, because Kiron didn’t have chairs.

“Perhaps we should sleep on a decision,” Ari said after a moment.

And in the morning, the bodies were simply gone. Not as in “dragged off by jackals” gone either. As in “vanished, leaving even their clothing and armor behind” gone.

That, thankfully, was the last manifestation of the hands of the gods.

Kiron had felt very uneasy about stooping to the level of looting the dead so as to make use of that discarded clothing, but others were not so squeamish. After a thorough washing, there were plenty of folk walking about on this day sporting Heyksin tunics. Aside from the garish colors, which would soon fade, they were not so unlike Altian tunics.

So he and Aket-ten sat on the carved window ledge of his uppermost room, and watched the unaccustomed splotches of bright crimson, eye-searing blue, and acidic yellow moving purposefully beneath them. There were too many weighty matters to be discussed, and they wanted to discuss none of them.

So, instead, they talked about furniture, of which there was very little here. It was a relief, a relief to speak of commonplaces, to debate the type of table, the style of lamp. It meant they did not yet need to think about what all this meant . . . or could mean.

Or what it had been like to play host to a god.

“I should like a proper bed,” Aket-ten said at last, speaking aloud. “Raised off the floor, with a real mattress. There are enough rags now to stuff mattresses for every person in Aerie twice over.”

Kiron decided to say nothing of his misgivings about sleeping on dead men’s clothing; instead, he suggested, “Don’t you think grass would be more comfortable?”

“Well, so would goose-down,” she said, giving him a dubious look, but I don’t see any parades of geese in Aerie—nor fields of grass either—”

“Perhaps the Lord of the Jousters can ask for a mattress to be brought,” suggested Marit from the stair. “Ari and Nofret are off safely, which is just as well, considering that it would not be wise for her to be flying soon.”

“Ah, goo—” The implications of that last sentence brought Kiron’s thoughts to a crashing halt. “What?”

Kaleth followed his mate up into the dwelling room. “Oh, do give over. You are not so dense as that, Kiron,” the Chosen said with a smirk. He now wore the same sort of robes that Rakaten-te had worn, and carried the very staff the former Chosen had used, but to Kiron’s relief, he had not been blinded. Kaleth did not explain this, nor did Kiron ask.

“Why do you think that Seft made the choice he did?” Marit asked, and then at a look from Kaleth, amended, “All right, it was one of the reasons. There will soon be a Haras-in-the-nest.”

“And you will have to give up the honor of being the wearer of the diadem of Haras if there is need,” added Kaleth, and snorted at Kiron’s expression of relief.

Kiron did not say what he was thinking, which was I prefer my gods in Their Temples, and not in my head, opting instead for “Why are you strolling about like any baker’s son? I thought the Chosen of Seft was supposed to remain secluded.”

Kaleth shrugged. “The god has not told me to scuttle into hiding. I assume that it does not matter here, nor in Sanctuary, which are both cities of the gods. We have tended to live somewhat withdrawn anyway, Marit and I, so I anticipate no great change.”

Kiron was about to ask something else, when a commotion below made all of them turn and stare at the stairs.

“—I don’t care if he is bathing or eating or speaking with the Mouth of the Gods!” said an all-too-familiar, scolding voice. “—I will see my son!”

Letis stormed up the last few steps and turned to look for Kiron. Since he was hard to miss, she made a little grunt of mingled exasperation and satisfaction, and strode up to him to stand in front of him with her arms crossed over her chest. “I have made enough allowances for you, and I have heard more than enough nonsensical reasons why you did not return. You are my son! It is time you obeyed me. You must return to Mefis now, and get back our farm. Then you can marry Peri, settle down to a proper life with a proper wife, breed me proper grandchildren who will honor their grandmother, and forget all this dragon foolishness.” She scowled, and muttered, under her breath. “Wars with the Nameless Ones, indeed!”

Kiron simply stared at her. First of all, he could not imagine how she had gotten here. Secondly, he could not imagine how to answer her.

She stood there, utterly recalcitrant, completely unembarrassed. Peri, however, who had followed her up here, was embarrassed enough for three.

When he did not answer, Letis cast about the room for someone to support her. “You! Priest!” she said, arrogantly. “Tell him! Tell him it is his filial duty before the gods to obey his mother!”

Kaleth scratched his head. “As I am the Chosen of Seft . . .” he began. “My advice would be to make the difficult choice to tell you that his duties lie to a higher authority than his mother.”

As Letis’ eyes widened, Kiron seized the moment. “I am very sorry for you, Mother, but I have already provided for you every thing that a filial son should. You are well cared for. You have a house, a comfortable life, even servants, which is more than you had when Father was alive. The Chosen is right; my duty to my King and Queen, my land, and my Jousters supersedes any duties to obey you, when you demand things that are not only not possible, but possibly foolish.” He crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at her. “In a word, Mother, no. No, I will not give up my duty. No, I will not get back the farm. And no, I certainly will not marry Peri.” He looked apologetically at poor Peri, caught in the middle and red as a sunset. “Peri is a very pleasant young woman, but I will marry Lady Aket-ten, and we will train the next generations of Jousters, male and female, and we will make Aerie our home.”

Letis spluttered for a moment, then turned to Peri. “Don’t just stand there! Tell him!”

For a very long moment there was only silence. And Kiron was struck by the uncomfortable possibility that poor Peri—

She had spent a great deal of time with him. Gone out of her way to keep him company. He had put it all down to just being two people with a very similar background cheering each other up, but what if—his mother hadn’t gotten his notion that he would be marrying her out of nothing. What if this was something that his mother had been cooking up all along? And what if that was what Peri wanted and expected?

“Then I must make a difficult choice, too,” Peri said slowly. “Because it is more than time that I did so.” She turned to Kiron’s mother. “Letis,” she said forcefully. “Shut up.”

Letis could not possibly have looked more astonished if those words had come from the mouth of Kiron’s cat.

“Kiron does not care for me except as another Jouster,” Peri went on. “Nor do I care for him except as he is a kind and generous man. And I will not give up Sutema, nor my position here, nor all the responsibility nor all the pleasures that taking that responsibility brings. Especially not for the life of a farmer’s wife, which is better than being a serf only in that I would be free.” She snorted, clearly both amused and angry. “Free, that is until the first babies come, when I would be bound more closely than if I had been clapped on a slave coffle. So Letis, I love you as my friend, but no. I will not marry your son. Let him wed his love, and let them live as happily as they can.”

Letis gaped at her, then managed to splutter, “Then you will die a childless old maid!”

“I think not,” Marit said thoughtfully, looking at both Peri and Letis. “But even if so . . . there are worse fates.”

“Aye, being a farmer’s wife,” said Peri.

“It is safe!” Letis cried out, her face reflecting her bewilderment. “It is safe, and certain! Great Mother River rises and falls, the seasons turn and every one is like the one the year before! You know where you are, you know your place, and Great Kings can come and go and it matters nothing at all!”

Peri went to the window, gesturing out at the dragons, perched and flying, everywhere. “Safe, true, but how boring! How confining! How sad! How could that compare with this? And what is safe? You were not safe on your little farm. War came to you and took all your safety away! If I am to be in this world, I want more than to be a hound upon the game board, tucked away in a corner until the jackals come and sweep all away!”

Letis looked from one to another of them. “You are all, all of you mad,” she said at last. Then mustering the shreds of her dignity, she raised her chin. “I am returning to Mefis and the daughter who appreciates me.”

She stalked off. The three Jousters looked at one another, and then at Kaleth and Marit . . . . . . hounds upon the game board . . . swept up by the Gods and now . . .

And given what Kiron had just been through . . .

“She may be right,” he said finally. “We may all be mad.”

Kaleth shrugged. “Then I choose to be mad, rather than blind,” he retorted, and smiled. “Besides, if it is madness, it is glorious madness, a madness that builds rather than merely endures. I choose to be the hawk, not the calf. And there is a great deal to be said for that.”

The hawk and not the calf . . . He thought about that, and about something else. As below, so above. If the Gods had moved him on the board . . . still, the people moved Them. The manipulation, it seemed, went both ways.

“A difficult choice,” he agreed. “But yes. I choose the hawk.”