Sanctuary

Aket-ten grinned around a mouthful of palm fruit. “Aunt Re, I don’t think any of us would disagree with you.”

“And which of these young men is the Queen-in-waiting’s Consort?” she asked, and not waiting for an answer, picked out Ari with her keen eyes. “Ah, there you are! Come here, boy, if you would.”

Ari wisely did as he was told, rising from his cross-legged position on the pallet spread next to Kashet (already dozing) and coming to stand before Aunt Re like a soldier about to be evaluated by his commander. She looked up at him with her arms crossed over her chest, and nodded.

“I like you, Tian,” she said. “You’ll do. It’s about time we got someone with some spine in his bloodline on a throne. You see to it that this nonsense is ended once and for all, and crush those vipers calling themselves Magi under your heel.”

And with that, she looked over the rest of them. “Get what sleep you can,” she said. “When the sun rises, and it gets too hot for humans, you can either move under the canopies I’ll have brought or come inside. My people will bring you more food for yourselves and your beasts; all you have to do is ask for it.”

She patted Ari’s arm. “Back to your dragon, before he misses you.”

And with that, she turned and led her procession of servants back out of the training ground, leaving behind a few lit torches, filled water jars and dippers, and the semichaotic sprawl of dragons and riders.

Aket-ten saw to Re-eth-ke—who, having been here before, had settled down as soon as she was stuffed full and now was sleeping blissfully—and flopped down beside Kiron.

“Why wasn’t that woman on one of the Twin Thrones?” he demanded, half laughing, half seriously.

“Because she didn’t want to be?” Aket-ten grinned. “Aunt Re, so far as I can tell, has never had any patience with what she calls ‘trivialities.’ That’s probably why the family put her out here in the first place. According to Father, it was a minor estate when she was sent here mostly to keep her from outraging anyone she talked to. She took over the management of it, made it into a very wealthy estate, married her Overseer, had six sons, and all of it without asking anyone’s permission. Father adores her.”

“You’d either adore her or hate her.” He nibbled his lip. “I think I adore her, too. Has she any magic?”

Aket-ten shook her head. “Not a bit. All of her Healing is done with herb and knife, and she’s very, very good. When her husband died, she just decided one day that she was going to learn Healing, brought in several Healers to teach her, and just—absorbed it all the way dry ground absorbs rain.”

“But why Healing?” he persisted.

“I don’t know. She only told me that no other man could ever fill her life the way We-ra-te did, so she wasn’t going to try to find another husband, that the estate was pretty much running itself and what little it needed ought to be her eldest son’s purview anyway, so she needed something that would fill her thoughts and her time, if not her life.” Aket-ten shrugged. “If you were going to ask me, I’d say it was probably something she’d wanted to do before she was sent here, and wasn’t allowed.”

“She’s a wonder,” Kiron said, looking at the gate through which she had exited.

“She’s every bit of that.” Aket-ten yawned. “Now I want to sleep. If that earthshake comes tomorrow, we’ll need all the rest we can get.”

Kiron nodded, looked around, and saw that pretty much everyone else had come to the same conclusion. Ari was already asleep, with his hand on Kashet’s foreleg. The others had curled up in various other positions of contact with their dragons, each taking comfort from the other in this strange place. Aket-ten bent and softly kissed his forehead before taking herself to her own pallet, and he found the most comfortable position for himself, with his back against Avatre’s belly.

Sleep was a long time in coming, as he played over in his mind all the possible variations the rescue could have, and tried to think of others that hadn’t yet occurred to him. But eventually, sleep did come, and took all further thoughts and plans away.

FIFTEEN

THE dragons slept like so many statues, and for a while, so did their riders—until the sun rose a bit too far and it was too hot for a human to take, even those used to the heat of the desert. As the riders woke, one by one, the dragons roused just enough to eat, but went back to sleep immediately. Kiron worried about turning their night and day all round about for them, but there really wasn’t a choice, not if they were going to have any hope at all of rescuing the Winged Ones. Still, as he stumbled with the rest to the shelter of the canopies Aunt Re’s servants had erected, stomach a bit queasy, thoughts fogged, and head aching, he wondered—if the humans felt this unsettled, how did the dragons feel?

He fell asleep again almost as soon as he’d had a drink and gotten into the shade, as had the rest. The rest! They were flat as dried-up lizards on their low Altan couches, made to stand as near to the ground and the cooler air near the floor as possible without actually being on the floor. It probably would have been cooler inside, but none of them wanted to leave the dragons.

He woke again, feeling much more clear-headed, to the sound of quiet voices, and levered himself off the couch to see that it was mid- to late afternoon, and Aunt Re was deep in conversation with Ari. Oset-re was cleaning his harness. Gan, Pe-atep, and Orest were feeding their dragons; only Kalen, Huras, and Aket-ten still slept. His mind felt immensely clearer, and the dragons looked quite their normal selves. In fact, Avatre caught the slight movement he made in looking up and raised her head to snort at him in that demanding fashion that told him she wanted food and she wanted it now. The others were being fed, and here he was asleep!

Aunt Re glanced over at the imperious scarlet beauty and chuckled. He knuckled the last sleep out of his eyes and got up to obey her, nudging the couches of Aket-ten and Huras as he passed to stir them up. Kalen was already blinking, looking as ruffled as an owl awakened during the day.

It was all so peaceful, it was easy to forget the situation that brought them here, the crisis that was building within an easy flight of this place, the war, the Magi, and everything else.

He asked one of the waiting servants to bring him meat for Avatre, and trundled the waiting barrow to her with a pang of regret. This was a very temporary respite in a terrible conflict, and he found himself longing for this peace as much as starving little Vetch had longed for food. Avatre bent her head to the barrow of meat and, rather than gulping down the chunks as he had expected she would, ate them daintily as she had in Alta; slowly, as if savoring the fleeting moment herself and trying to make it last.

By the time she was done, the rest had all finished feeding, even Re-eth-ke; none of the others was willing to linger over a meal, however tasty. And as the servants filled the horse troughs so that the dragons could get a drink, they all, even Avatre, kept their heads up, looking about warily, as if expecting something. Even when they were all led to the water, they would not all drink at the same time, but took it in turns to keep watch for something only they could sense.

And Kiron wondered—had the Magi employed the Eye, as Kaleth had said they would? Could the dragons sense the horror scorching down out of the Tower out there? Kaleth’s vision had shown it happening late some afternoon, but there was no telling which afternoon it would be; they had picked the most likely, but it could come tomorrow, or the day after that, or yet another day. And part of him wanted desperately to put the hour off, but the rest of him wanted just as desperately to get it all over with.

Whatever was causing them to be wary, the dragons didn’t settle down completely once they’d drunk. Not even a rubdown and a brisk oiling made them give over that constant looking around for something that no one else could sense. Aket-ten could only say, “They’re uneasy, they’re on edge, and they don’t know why,” which was obvious enough even to anyone without the ability to speak with them.

The boat of the sun sank to the horizon, and still they would not settle, even though their instincts were surely telling them it was getting on time to sleep. The servants reported that none of the other animals around the estate were keyed up—with the single exception of Aunt Re’s pet cheetah, who was prowling the confines of her special chamber with the same wary urgency with which the dragons were prowling the training grounds.

And just as the sun-disk sank out of sight—everything suddenly went very, very quiet. Too quiet. Not a goose honked, not a bird sang, not even a single insect buzzed or rattled. The hair suddenly rose on the back of Kiron’s neck, and he felt cold all over, and instinctively looked around for something to clutch. The dragons went rigid.

Then—it came.

That moment of silence warned them, and they had all braced themselves, but it was still gut-wrenching. When the ground below one moves, the body automatically reacts, sharply, and with the most acute of terror.

And this was no ordinary shake, for it went on for what seemed like an eternity. It was not bad as such things went; in fact, it was no worse than many such that Kiron had felt before the Magi began employing the Eye on a regular basis. But it went on, and on, and on, while humans and animals alike screamed with atavistic fear, while birds exploded up into the darkening sky, calling alarm at the tops of their lungs, and the dragons ramped and snorted and hissed, clustering close until their heads and long necks formed a bizarre, ever-weaving bouquet. Under the crash of things falling over, pottery breaking, cries and howls and screams was another sound, deep, that rattled the chest and the gut. It was worse than the worst thunder he had ever heard, a moaning of earth and stone providing the drumming of this dance of disaster. The voice of the earthshake was like the groan of an earth wounded near to death.

But only Khaleph lifted off, and even then, not for long, only for a moment, and he set down again in spite of the fact that the ground was still heaving.

Nearly all of them had dropped to their knees, not because it was hard to keep their footing, but because the terror that welled up inside them made it impossible to stand. Only Ari and Aunt Re remained on their feet, and Kiron could not imagine how they were coping with abject fear that made his insides turn to water and his muscles to dough. They felt it; he could see it on their faces. Yet they were holding against it.

The shake continued to go on and on for far too long, until he could scarcely think or see, hardly draw a breath for the terror that tightened his chest.

Then, as abruptly as it had begun, it stopped, leaving behind only the cacophony of birds, the terrified whinnying of horses from the stables and paddocks beside the training ground, and the hissing and whining of the dragons. Kiron picked himself up and went to Avatre to calm her; around the courtyard, the rest were doing the same. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Aunt Re going to her servants, one after the other, helping them up, giving them a maternal pat here, a bit of a shake there, a shove to get them moving again.

“. . . knew it was coming,” she said briskly, as she moved into his range of hearing. “Now we need to find out the damage! Come on, come on, we don’t want to find river horses trying to take shelter in the duck pond, now, do we?”

Even as he was calming Avatre, he had to admire her; she was like a general mustering the courage of her troops.

“I’m glad she’s on our side,” he said to Aket-ten, who had quickly gotten Re-eth-ke under control, and was now working her way around the other dragons, bestowing calm with a touch, a silent “word,” or both.

She gave him a shaky smile, her teeth flashing whitely in the growing darkness, but said nothing.

By this time, the birds had settled again, and though there was anxious complaining from the trees around the house, there was no more shrieking. Those that could still see in the half light had flown off, the rest had no choice but to settle down. Someone was getting to the horses, too; they were calming.

We have to go, he realized, still numb with the after-shock. This is it. We have to go, and soon.

It wasn’t long before Aunt Re had her servants out of the training ground and back in again, bringing back those fire pots. They placed the pots exactly as they had for the dragons’ arrival, and Kiron was grateful; Aunt Re must have understood it would be impossible to get the dragons up into the air without light now.

He only hoped it would be possible to get them up into the air with light.

With hands that still shook more than a little he saddled and harnessed Avatre while the servants placed and lit the fire pots, lighting up the training ground with a welcome golden glow. Light seemed to make everything safer; this made no sense at all, of course, because an overturned fire pot was more danger than the earthshake, but there was no reasoning with feelings.

The dragons certainly felt that way, though given how little they could see in the dark, their reaction was perfectly understandable. The question was, after that shake, could he possibly induce them to leave this “safe” haven of light?

Well, there was only one way to find out, and this time, Aket-ten would have to lead the way. If she could get Re-eth-ke up, the rest would surely follow.

He whistled the signal to mount; a little raggedly, they all got into their saddles. He looked over to Aket-ten, met her dark, serious gaze, and nodded. It was up to her now. From here on, she would lead the way, and it would all be done by the numbers.

“Re-eth-ke!” she called, her voice sounding a little high and shrill. “Up!”

And as if she could not shake the dust of the treacherous earth from her talons swiftly enough, Re-eth-ke leaped into the deepening blue of the sky.

He didn’t have to do more than lift his reins to signal Avatre, she was up like a shot, and she must have been taking comfort in a routine they had practiced until it was second nature.

Perhaps, like the birds, she felt that safety was in the air, not the ground.

As she labored higher, her sides heaving under his legs and growing warmer with exertion with every wingbeat, he glanced behind, to see that Khaleph was already airborne as well, and Wastet leaping upward with wings outstretched.

Beneath them, in Aunt Re’s compound, there was ordered activity. He could not see much damage, although things like cracked walls would not be visible until daylight. But servants were going here and there, gathering children together for comfort, moving pallets out into open spaces for safety if there were after-shakes, seeing that beasts were secure, tending to the few—remarkably few, he was relieved to see—injured. Outside her estate, however, as the full moon crested the horizon and spread her cold light over the fields, the case was otherwise. People ran here and there with torches, without really seeming to know where they needed to go. He saw collapsed farmhouses, broken walls, cattle, goats, and pigs running loose. There were fires, too, and shouts and weeping came up to them on the night air.

It made him angry that because there was a greater need for them in Alta City, they could not stop to help here. He could only hope that Aunt Re had already considered that, and when her estate was secure, would send her people out to help her neighbors.

Meanwhile, the river beckoned, a long, flat silver ribbon in the moonlight, and their guide to their goal. But it was not the serene river it had been last night; there was a taste of mud and ancient muck in the air. The animals voiced their own outrage; river horses bellowed their anger from among the pools and backwaters, and crocodiles roared and thrashed as they fought with each other or caught—well, he only hoped they were catching some luckless farmer’s terrified stock, and not the farmer’s children, or the farmer himself.

The closer they came to the Outer Canal and the Seventh Ring, the worse the damage, and the greater the chaos, and now it was physically painful to see from the air what he had not been able to see the night of his first experience of earthshake. There were fires everywhere, and not just shouts and weeping, but real screaming coming up from below. He could see places where buildings had canted over and fallen sideways, or where they were sunk up to the roofline, as if the ground had turned to water beneath them.

And that shook him. There had been nothing like that before. . . .

What had they done?

Not us, he reminded himself desperately. We didn’t do this. We didn’t trigger it, we didn’t ask for the riot that made the Magi use the Eye. All we did was take advantage of what the gods showed us the people would do, and the Magi would do, and what would come of it—it wasn’t our fault. And we couldn’t have stopped it.

But his insides were not convinced.

The shake must have been terrible indeed to have reached this far. Up until now, the worst damage had been confined within the first three rings. And what could have made the ground behave in that strange fashion, to swallow up whole buildings?

Ahead of him, the dark, silver-gilt shadow that was Re-eth-ke flew steadily onward. Behind him trailed the rest of the wing, or at least the rest of it up to Orest and Wastet. A new concern; how many of them had made it into the air?

They passed the Sixth Ring; the Fifth. Then, at the Fourth Ring, though there were still fires, was still shouting and crying and chaos, there was, unaccountably, less of it.

And at the Third Ring, there was order again, and he could have shouted with relief. Not surprising; this was where the military were housed and trained. But still, to look down and see people dealing with the aftermath of the earthshake with the same calm as Aunt Re’s people made him feel considerably less guilty.

Then Second Ring, and again, there did not seem to be the same amount of chaos and catastrophe as in the Outer Rings, although there certainly was more than enough—and it suddenly dawned on him why. So much damage had been wrought here already by the shakes before they had left, as well as the ones after, that almost everything that could be knocked down had been, and many people were probably sleeping in the open at night out of hopeless resignation.

For some reason, that realization transmuted his feelings from guilt into anger, and if he could have gotten his hands around the throat of a Magus just then, he’d have throttled any one of them without a second thought.

This was what they had brought the great city-state of Alta to! This state of helpless apathy, this fear that drained even the ability to properly feel fear, this crawling wretchedness not even a slave would envy! You worms! he thought angrily up at Royal Hill. You vermin! You scorpions, that eat your own young! How dare you do this—may the gods help me to bring you down for it—

But ahead of them, among the many buildings that were damaged, or afire, or ominously dark and silent, stood one he knew well. The Temple of the Twins. And though its ornamental pools were cracked and empty, and some of its statues and columns toppled, the building itself stood strong.

And visible only from above, there was a carefully laid-out square of torches on the roof.

As they drew nearer, he could see people up there, too, and after all that devastation below, his heart rose a little to see that the plan they had made in faith was being carried out in fact.

Now it all depended on the dragons; if they would remember and stick to the drill, even though the drill had taken place amid calm, and without all the screaming, the fires, and the upset from the shake.

They had paced out the dimensions of the temple, they had plotted it and the grounds around it on the earth in a pattern of stones. And now, as Kiron watched, Re-eth-ke banked slightly to take herself and Aket-ten down to that lighted rooftop—not nearly as well-lit as Aunt Re’s training ground, but it would have to do, because it was all they had. And as Re-eth-ke banked, he took Avatre to one corner of that rough square they had paced out, marked by a clump of date palms, a square whose dimensions were large enough that eight or nine dragons could fly the perimeter in the darkness and not be afraid of collisions

By the numbers— he reminded himself, and began to count under his breath.

By the numbers—because they would not necessarily be able to see when each of them landed and took off again.

The first count of thirty took him to the second corner of the square; he risked a glance at the rooftop as Avatre made a sharp left-hand bank, and thought he saw Re-eth-ke was safely down. The next count took him to the third corner, and he searched the sky at his own height for the dark-winged shadows of the others.

Yes! One, two—he counted up to eight, and let out a strangled cheer, that would surely be lost in the noise below. They had all followed from Aunt Re’s estate! It was working!

One more count of thirty, and a glance at the roof showed it empty of anything but people; Avatre made her turn as neatly as if they were practicing over Sanctuary, a long, shallow glide down over the square of torches, a thunder of wings and a wind that made the flames stream sideways as she came in to a halt, the moment of fumbling hesitation beneath him as she felt for a secure talonhold, and then—

Then she was down.

She barely had time to pull in her wings, and he didn’t get time to draw a breath before someone with a pale blur of a face wrapped in a dark cloak shoved two smaller objects wrapped in equally dark cloth at him.

Children; Nestlings, probably, not even old enough to be Fledglings, and their inert limpness made him go stiff with rage. But he wasted no time on speech; he couldn’t hold them and fly, so he belted them to himself before and behind the saddle with the straps they handed up to him silently. Below this place, weeping and cries of pain; here, only silence, as if he was being served by shadows and ghosts. And once they were secure, he gave Avatre the signal, and they were away.

Avatre seemed to have picked up on some of his emotion, however, for he could feel a new energy in her flight as they sped away into the darkness, deliberately going higher to take them above the flying square of dragons. As they neared Aunt Re’s estate, he thought he caught sight of Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke coming back, and once again he gave a little exclamation of triumph; this was the second sticking point—having come back to the safe haven, could the dragons be persuaded into the air again? Re-eth-ke, at least, could be.

They landed, and eager hands reached for the children, swarming over Avatre like cleaner birds over a river horse. She seemed to have grasped the serious nature of what they were doing now; she stood as patiently as anyone could have wished while strangers crowded her and treated her like nothing more than a living cart while getting the children unstrapped. Then, at last, they were free again, and Avatre took to the sky without a moment of hesitation.

As they made height, he definitely caught sight of Kashet coming in, though he could not tell what kind of burden he and Ari carried. And then he passed the others, one at a time, really knowing who they were only by their order; Wastet and Orest, Deoth and Pe-atep, Apetma and Oset-re, Khaleph and Gan, Bethlan and Menet-ka, and last of all, the steadiest and strongest of the lot after Kashet and Avatre, big Tathulan and Huras.

Now—if they would all make the second trip, and not refuse—and if no one saw them, or realized what they were seeing if they did—

Only when he had formed up the second square did he know for certain that the plan was working in its entirety, and Avatre seemed to have been set afire by the urgency of what they were doing. She came in with the speed and snap she had when she was making a kill when hungry; she stood like a rock as the next to be rescued was helped onto her back. This time, though it was another pair of children, these must have been Fledglings, and they were able to cling to him and not be bound to him like inert bundles, though they were secured with straps. Avatre was in the air almost before the last of the Winged Ones was out of the way, and the two children gasped as she rowed for height.

Halfway to Aunt Re’s the one behind him tugged at his tunic. “Jouster?” came a thin, pathetic little whisper. “Are you taking us away from the Magi?”

“Far away,” he called back, over the steady, strong flapping of Avatre’s wings. “Far, far away, where the sand of the desert will hide you, and the swords of the Bedu will guard you, and they will never, ever find you again.”

Both children burst into tears of pure release, reaching for one another’s hands on either side of him, and it was all he could do to keep from joining them. Instead, he pointed out the white egrets in the tops of the trees they flew over, a pair of fighting river horses, the reflection of the moon on the river, the pattern of the stars—anything except the places where people were still trying to save themselves and their property below. His distraction must have been effective; they listened and watched, and most importantly, stopped crying.

They began again as soon as he handed them over to Aunt Re’s people, but at that point they were no longer his concern, and he had to concentrate on the next trip.

And the next.

And the next.

Avatre had never flown so strongly, but by the fourth trip, they had lost Deoth to exhaustion—not to unwillingness, because he tried to take off, but Pe-atep was too wise to let him. Apetma simply dropped, so tired she simply couldn’t rise. By the fifth, Se-atmen, Wastet, and Bethlan were out, too, and on the sixth, poor Khaleph and Tathulan were so tired their wings were trembling. That left only Kiron and Avatre, Ari and Kashet, and Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke for the seventh and final trip of the night. Kashet had carried double every time; probably Aket-ten’s lighter weight was what had made it possible for Re-eth-ke to carry on to the end. But she was lagging on that final leg, and as they actually flew into the gray of predawn, halfway back to Aunt Re’s compound, Kashet and Avatre caught up with her. Ari and Kiron exchanged a glance, and Kashet pulled into the lead, allowing Re-eth-ke and Avatre to fall back into the wake-position off his left and right wings. It was easier flying there; he could see Re-eth-ke’s breathing ease a little.

With plenty of light to see by, they all landed together, too, letting down their exhausted passengers into the hands of equally exhausted servants, who bustled them off before the Jousters were even out of their saddles. The rest of the dragons and their riders were already dead asleep, and from the look of them, not even another earthshake would wake them.

But Kiron found himself being helped in unsaddling Avatre by a handsome, muscular young man with the powerful upper torso of a charioteer, who had also come wheeling up a heaped-high barrow of meat that Avatre began wolfing down without waiting to be unharnessed.

“You’ve gotten out eighteen Nestlings,” he said without preamble, raising his voice enough so that Ari and Aket-ten could hear. “That was the first trip. You got out twice that many Fledglings on the second and third trips, another six Fledglings and three Winged Ones on the fourth, six Winged Ones on the fifth trip, five on the sixth, and three on the seventh trip, which is three more trips than anyone ever thought you’d make in their wildest dreams.”

Kiron tried to add the total up in his mind, and felt the numbers slipping through his mind like the yolk from a broken egg. “Um. Sixty—ah—”

“Seventy-seven,” the young man corrected him. “One more night, and you’ll have all the Winged Ones out. If you want to try for three nights, you can probably evacuate the servants that are left, too.”

Kiron looked over at Ari, and rubbed a gritty hand over his forehead.

“I think we should,” Ari said firmly. “The dragons are clearly willing, and I don’t want to leave anyone to suffer back there.”

There was something intensely bitter and angry in Ari’s tone as he said that—something that cast Kiron back in time to a moment when he had heard Ari cry out, “I do not make war on children!” It rocked him back on his heels, and he stared at Ari wide-eyed.

Ari stared back. “There are some things,” he said, “that no man can countenance.”

Someone told him something. Maybe more than one someone. Well, Ari was the only one with a dragon strong enough to carry the largest of the adults. Once the youngest had been gotten out, surely the next to go would have been the very oldest. No one had been draining the Winged Ones for several days now, which meant some of them would have started to recover their powers. They had to have recovered their wits, or they would never have been able to barricade themselves in the temple.

If one of them recognized Ari for what he was—and it would take a Winged One no more than an unguarded touch to do that—then they would have known that their rescuer was also the titular King of Sanctuary.

So of course they told him something. They probably told him everything they could before they were set down. He’s the King. He has to know.

It was one thing to be told in abstract that the Magi were draining the god-touched, damaging them, sometimes killing them. Kiron suspected that it was quite another thing to be told what that was like, by someone who had experienced it, day after day, for the last year.

Well, that was a good thing. If Ari had any doubts about what he should do, they were gone now.

But Kiron was very, very glad that he was not the one who’d had to hear those tales. Truth be told, he already knew more than was comfortable.

“Mother is sending the strongest of them off today,” the young man continued—that clue telling Kiron that his helper was the horse-training son of Aunt Re, which explained his family resemblance. “But they will be very, very glad to hear that you intend to evacuate the entire temple. I’ll go tell them now.”

“Do that,” Ari said, and managed a wan smile. “And meanwhile, I think we had better emulate our wingmates.”

Avatre was already doing just that, dropping down where she stood after swallowing a last mouthful of meat. With a groan, Kashet did the same. Re-eth-ke looked about and went to curl up beside Tathulan, then changed her mind and put her back up against Avatre, who didn’t even stir.

Ari raised an eyebrow at Kiron, who was too tired to even blush.

More servants brought them meat, onions, and soured milk wrapped up in flatbread, and jars of beer, that they ate and drank while pallets were spread beside their dragons. Then, like their dragons, they dropped down to sleep, and did not awaken until their dragons’ hunger roused everyone.

SIXTEEN

HE had thought they had slept like the dead yesterday. That was nothing, compared with today. Even an earthshake didn’t wake them, for they did get a minor rumble, and neither he nor any of the others was aware there had been one until they clawed their way up out of slumber. He didn’t even remember stumbling his way to a couch in the shade when the sun grew too hot; he only knew he had gone to sleep beside Avatre and woke, once again on the couch, and not even the same one as the last time.

But when he woke, it was with a rush, and he woke all at once, out of a dream of flying Winged Ones off the roof of the temple, burning with a desire to get more of them away before the Magi understood what was happening.

He didn’t sit up with a yell, though he might as well have. He startled the servant who was sitting beside him. But the boy recovered quickly.

“It is not yet time, master,” he said, before Kiron could say anything. “You have time to see to your dragon, to bathe and eat. There was another small shake after dawn. Did you feel it?”

He shook his head, but his attention was caught by a single word. Bathe! At the sound of that word, Kiron itched all over; not that there wasn’t water enough to bathe at Sanctuary, but it seemed wrong to use so precious a thing for bathing. They all did, of course, but it seemed wrong. Now, the hot spring at Coresan’s nest was another matter entirely—but he hadn’t had a bath there since two days before this journey.

But this was Alta, where water was abundant, so after he saw Avatre fed, he allowed the servant to take him off to the baths, both hot and cold. And once re-clothed in a common tunic of the sort Aunt Re gave her upper servants, which was enough like what the Jousters wore these days that it made no difference, he helped himself from the food left out for all of them and made a hasty meal. Aket-ten was the last of the riders to wake, and he didn’t blame her for sleeping so long; she had been doing two jobs at once—guiding her own dragon, and keeping track of all of the rest of them.

She woke just as quickly as he had when she finally did break through her slumbers, and was just as impatient to be gone as the rest of them. She surely imparted that impatience to the dragons, all ten of them, for the moment she came awake, they began to fidget and look skyward. And at that moment, Kiron would have given all that he had or ever hoped to have for one flight—just one!—with all the wings that Alta had once had. With that many dragons, they could have left now, to arrive just after sunset, and it wouldn’t matter who saw them. The Magi couldn’t use the Eye at night, and they would have been able to pull out every last person all at once.

But dragons had no mystical ability to go back or forward in time, so the wing he had was all he was going to get. And as soon as Aket-ten had rejoined them, hair plastered flat to her skull from her bath, he called a meeting.

“Last night was the easy one,” he told them, and at Orest’s indignant stare, shook his head. “Yes, I know, from just the point of view of uncertainty about whether we’d get the dragons up at all, it was the hard one. But in terms of getting people out, it was the easy one.” He tilted his head to the side, then lifted his head and looked each of them in the eyes. “Think about it; we had it all our own way last night. The Magi were busy making sure of their own safety, and didn’t give a toss about anyone else. We got out the children, the old, and the sick, all of them lightweight, all of them tractable.”

“Or unconscious,” Gan said soberly, raking his fingers through his hair to help it dry. “You have a good point, though; easy to fly, and they didn’t make a fuss, or scream, or anything.”

“Tonight, we get the able-bodied and the heaviest, but there’s more to it than that,” he replied. “The people we will take out tonight are the senior Winged Ones, ruling priests, important priestesses. They’re used to giving orders and having them obeyed.”

“What possible orders could they give?” Pe-atep asked, incredulously. “ ‘Fly faster’? As if we could?”

Oset-re made a face and shook his head. “They’re Great Lords and Ladies in their own right. Who knows what they’ll demand when we are airborne?”

Kiron silently applauded Oset-re for seeing at once where the danger was. He was very aware of Aunt Re standing off to one side, listening, but not commenting. “We are very young men, all looking rather like servants—and one young woman with what is, by their standards, a minor power, who should by all rights rank just about Fledgling status. They won’t think when they see us. If they aren’t too sick and tired to do anything but hang on, there is no telling what they might try to order us to do.”

“Fly lower!” squeaked Gan in an imperious-old-lady voice, swatting at Pe-atep. Aunt Re hid a smile behind her hand.

He nodded. Now he had to remind them of what they were and that they had to disobey. “Or higher. Certainly faster or slower. And while you might be able to fob them off by telling them the dragons can’t do that, there’s other things they might want you to do. Stop, because I must get this or that treasure or sacred object. Land there to tell my mother I’m safe—” he shrugged. “There’s no telling. But they might well become real nuisances, some of them, when they’re in the air. They’ve been powerless a long time. They’ll want to command something, if only us.”

“Trouble.” Orest shook his head. “You don’t think they’ll go so far as to fight us, do you?”

For that, he had to look to Aket-ten and Orest.

Aket-ten shook her head. “I think they’ll still be torn between the excitement of escape and the fear of being captured. But they might start to shout, and—voices coming from the sky might not be a good idea.”

“Try telling them no matter what they want, it’s Lord Khumun’s orders,” Orest offered. “Most of them know they can half-bully Father, but nobody’s ever gotten around Lord Khumun, not even a Winged One.”

Well, if it came to that, Lord Khumun was going to end up with an earful when they finally all got to Sanctuary.

Lord Khumun can take care of himself, he decided.

“I just want you to keep those things in mind,” he went on. “First, heavier passengers. Second, passengers who want to make demands. And three—” he paused. “We don’t know what the Magi have done in our absence, nor what they might do after darkness falls. Maybe they’ll still be too concerned with their own safety and comfort after so big a shake that they won’t keep a magical eye on the temple. But I don’t think we can count on that. Do you?”

One by one, the others shook their heads. Overhead, vultures circled on the thermals their dragons would be using, if only they could, dared, fly by day. At least darkness would hide them in part. Until they came in to pick up the first escapees. Until they came into the light.

“So tonight we run the risk of being seen.” He chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t think there’s anything we can really do about that—not being overlooked by magic, anyway.”

“Uh—” Aket-ten flushed, and held up a fistful of leather thongs. “I think these might help.”

He peered at them, frowning. There were little faience medallions hanging from them. They looked familiar.

“Pashet’s teeth!” exclaimed Oset-re with delight. “Heklatis’ amulets!” He jumped to his feet, pulled Aket-ten up, whirled her around like a child, and kissed her on the top of the head before letting her drop back down again, flushed and laughing.

“Here,” she said, passing them out. “I collected them after we came to Sanctuary; you lot kept losing them or leaving them lying around, and there’s no point in discarding something magic, even if you don’t need it at the time. I thought they might be useful again. Heklatis knows I have them and I told him I was taking them along. He said it was a good thing, otherwise he’d have had to make a new batch and send them along, and I saved him the work.”

Kiron accepted the amulet with a rueful shrug; once in the safety of Sanctuary, he’d been one of the worst at forgetting to keep track of his amulet. Heklatis had made them to interfere with the Magi’s scrying, or seeing-at-a-distance, back when they were all in the Jousters’ Compound together. But although the protection had been priceless while they were scheming to destroy the tala and escape right under the Magi’s noses, they had seemed of little utility out in the middle of the trackless desert, where the distance and Kaleth’s god-assisted protections kept them from being overlooked by means of magic.

But Aket-ten never forgot anything, it seemed.

“All right, then,” he said, pulling the thong over his head. “We can keep them from seeing us with magic, but we can’t stop someone from spotting us just by looking up. So we have to assume they will have eyes in the city, especially eyes keeping watch on the temple, and those eyes will report whatever they see. Even if it’s dragons where no dragons should be.”

Oset-re snorted, and behind him, her neck arched so that her head was right above his, coppery Apetma snorted so exactly like him that, serious as the situation was, it startled a laugh out of all of them.

“Especially dragons where no dragons should be, you mean,” Oset-re said. “No, you’re right. Those miserable crocodiles wouldn’t spare a man to help a single person on the Outer Rings, but once they’re certain of being comfortable and safe, they’ll put spies back on the temple.” He thrust out his jaw belligerently. “All the more reason to get out as many tonight as we can. We know what to do now.”

“Which is, above all else, to not let your dragons fly past their strength.” Kiron glared at him. “You can’t afford to go to ground between here and the temple. But—it did come to me that if a dragon were to stop at round three or four, but regain enough strength to join the final round—I think it would be important enough to let him, or her, do so. But you must judge your dragon’s strength to the last wingbeat. Failure on the return leg—” He shook his head. “—landing in the dark, or in the river, with the crocodiles and the river horses so excited and upset by the earthshake—”

Most of them had seen men hurt or killed in a river horse hunt. All had seen the injuries men got from the seemingly soft and passive beasts. And a crocodile, or worse yet, a swarm of them—they’d take a man and a dragon to pieces in moments. Swamp dragons could hold their own against both river horse and crocodile, but these were desert dragons, and utterly unsuited to such foes.

“No, we can’t afford that,” Kalen agreed. “And I’ve got a horrible truth for you. There are a lot more Winged Ones than there are Jousters. We cannot go into this certain that we will get them all out; we must try, but we might not be able to. If someone has to be left behind, it had better not be a Jouster.”

Aket-ten made a little cry of protest, but Ari nodded, and so did Kiron. “An ugly truth, too, and that is what, as your wingleader, I am ordering you to do, if it comes to that,” he said, making his voice as hard as he could manage. “There are ten of us, and already we have saved six times that number of Winged Ones. I can’t replace one of you. I can probably replace a Winged One. Agreed?”

Aket-ten’s face crumpled and she looked utterly miserable, but glancing at Ari gave her no reprieve, so reluctantly, she nodded.

“With luck, it won’t come up,” he said, injecting a little cheer into his tone. “Haras give us strength and luck, we’ll succeed despite their ill will. Can anybody think of anything else?”

No one could, so at that point, it was just a matter of waiting.

Just! If there was anything harder than waiting, he certainly didn’t know what it was.

The first passenger was an imperious old woman, with a voice so exactly like Gan’s imitation that he had to catch himself to keep from laughing aloud. “Fly faster!” she demanded in his ear—at least she was making an effort to keep her commands quiet.

“Dragon’s flying as fast as she can, Great Lady,” he replied, taking a moment to remind himself who these people were, and how much respect they were due. And he heard the fear under the arrogance; perhaps the arrogance was born of fear. He wanted that respect in his voice before he answered her. “None of them are used to carrying double.”

The old woman mulled that over for a bit, then poked him in the ribs with a bony finger. “Then land beside Te-aten-ka’s apothecary shop on Fourth Ring. I need—”

“I’m sorry, Great Lady, but no landing until we get to Re-keron’s estate in the country,” he interrupted. “Lord Khumun’s orders. Even if I knew where the place was, which I don’t, and even if it’s still standing when we got there, which it probably isn’t. What Lady Re-keron doesn’t have you’ll have to do without until you can find a way to get it.”

She bristled, forgetting her fear in the shock of being thwarted by a mere boy. He could feel her back behind him, bristling up with indignation like a hedgehog. “Now see here, young man, I will not—”

“Great Lady, I’m afraid you must,” he interrupted again. “What you don’t have, you will have to do without, and anyone you wished to speak with to assure them of your safety will have to go unwarned. Avatre is not like a chariot; if you seize the reins, you will only confuse and upset her, and if you upset her, she may well decide you are too much trouble to carry.”

Astonished silence followed that revelation, “But—” she began again, this time with more uncertainty in her voice.

“Great Lady, can you swim?” Kiron interrupted again. “Because if Avatre decides to rid herself of you, there is very little I can do about it, but at least we will be above the Great Mother River’s daughter most of the way.”

Behind him, he sensed that the old woman was opening and closing her mouth silently, like a fish pulled up on the bank. Well, she could do whatever she wanted, as far as he was concerned, as long as she made no noise.

Her shock kept her silent the rest of the way; when he handed her down to her waiting attendants, she looked up as if she was about to say something, but didn’t get a chance to before they rushed her away.

The next trip, the man they put up behind him was silent and looked exhausted. He said not a word until they landed, and then it was only a whispered “thank you,” as he dismounted.

The third trip, however, and the passenger being a tall, cadaverous looking man with haunted eyes, the ones who helped him strap himself to Kiron looked faintly familiar. Enough so that he glanced back in puzzlement as Avatre took off.

“Think you know them, do you?” the Winged One said in his ear. “You probably do. They were two of your little friend Aket-ten’s teachers.”

But they weren’t wearing the medallions of the Winged Ones, his mind protested.

He didn’t say it aloud, but he had forgotten, for a moment, that with these people, he didn’t have to say something aloud to be heard. “They aren’t Winged anymore,” the bitter man said, in a tone of venomous anger.

Not Winged? But—that wasn’t possible, surely, you were either Winged or not—

“They fought the Magi. The Magi didn’t like that, so they kept the ones who fought instead of letting them come back to the temple to rest, and used them until they burned them out. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t die of it.” Not only hatred but fear, and the kind of anger that gripped Kiron like the talons of a vulture. “Then, the Magi brought them back as a lesson to the rest of us. They’re no more god-touched now than you are.”

“At least they’re alive,” Kiron offered, feeling it was a weak solace, but still—they were alive when all those acolytes in Tia weren’t. They might not be Winged anymore but thousands of people weren’t Winged—

“I wouldn’t call it living,” the bitter man said, acid etching every word. “A man can live without a hand, a foot, even an eye, but what happens when you take part of what he is? He’s better off dead! I’d say that, and they’d say the same!”

Kiron had no good response for that. There was no good response for that. All he could do was to guide Avatre through the night, and wonder what, if anything, the angry man thought he could do about it.

“I’m sorry” seemed a bit inadequate, but it was all he had.

The man didn’t say anything more until they reached the estate and landed. Then, once he was down on the ground, he gave Kiron a searching gaze.

“You’re a good lad,” he said. “Just do what you came to do as best you can, and don’t take more on yourself than you can be responsible for.”

And with that he staggered away, limping heavily and leaning on the arm of an attendant, and if there had been time, Kiron would have hurried after him to demand a meaning for such cryptic remarks.

But there wasn’t, and he didn’t, and Avatre was already off the ground as he wrenched his gaze back to the direction of Alta City.

When he picked up the seventh passenger of the night, there were people bringing heavy coils of rope up to the top of the building.

And as he took off with the man—he and Ari were getting the men, of course, since their dragons were the oldest and biggest—the Winged One kept looking back. Kiron followed his gaze and saw that the rope had been tied off to some ornamental stone-work, and someone was just slipping over the edge to climb down.

“That’s a relief,” his passenger said, turning back to face forward. “I’m glad to see someone talked sense into them.”

“Talked sense into who?” Kiron asked.

“Some of the servants—young ones, who actually have the strength to go down a rope like a monkey.” The man sighed. “With two thirds of us gone, there’s no need for all of the servants, and there’s no telling what They’re up to, spying on us, I’ve no doubt. If they discover that some of us are gone, they’ll try and break the siege, and we’ve been telling the servants that there’s no odds one way or another on whether you’ll be able to get them out before the Magi and their guards turn up. Someone must have talked them around to going out over the wall.”

“It’s what I’d do,” Kiron agreed, “If I wasn’t needed.”

“They aren’t, and if the Magi guess what’s happening, they’re likely to get—” the man paused choosing his words carefully, “—vindictive.”

Vindictive.

Kiron didn’t like the sound of that. “Would they turn the Eye on the temple?” he asked, feeling his stomach sink with dread.

But the answer he got reassured him. “They can’t. Once they use it, they have to recharge it for days before it’s fit to be used again. But it would be better for no one to be here when the temple is broken into.”

That was surely an understatement.

When they landed in the beginning light of dawn, the man went off with Re’s servants without saying a thing more—but then, Kiron was so tired, he probably couldn’t have asked his questions coherently anyway.

So for the third night, he fell asleep in the curve of Avatre’s belly, more exhausted than he would ever have thought possible.

For the third afternoon, he woke in a rush, this time out of a confused dream of flying, fire, and death. He lay there for a moment while his heart pounded with anxiety, and forced it to calm.

After all, it was only a dream. And it was a dream of things he’d gone through many times before this, and would do so many times in the future. He wasn’t a Winged One, to have dreams of portent.

In fact, right now, he was altogether glad that was the case. It would have been much too heavy a burden to carry.

And this time, there was someone from among the rescued of last night waiting for him when he gathered all of them for their meeting, a lady with more of the air of a Queen about her than Nofret.

Someone Aket-ten clearly knew very well. “Wingleader Kiron, I make you known to Winged One Ma-an-ed-jat,” she said, with utmost formality. “She is the High Priestess of all of the Winged Ones of Alta.”

Kiron bowed about as much as he did to Lord Khumun. The lady lifted a sardonic brow, but gave him a little smile of approval. “Not afraid, I see.”

He shrugged. “Fear of you would serve no purpose, and we need to keep our wits about us. How many Winged Ones are left to be rescued?”

“No more than a handful,” the High Priestess said. “You’ll have them out on your first trip. The rest are all servants and—” she hesitated, then said, “—servants and friends. But I came to tell you that the Magi suspect something. I am Far-Sighted, and I have been bending my will to see what I may see this day. They’ve brought their private guards there now, and it looks as if they’re planning to break down the doors.”

Before Kiron could say anything, Oset-re laughed, although it did not sound as if what he was about to say was something he considered humorous. “Much good may it do them. My last man said you people have moved everything movable and packed the antechamber behind every door solid. They can break the doors, but they won’t get in until they clear the place.”

The woman nodded. “But our time is short,” she told them all. “That is what I came to say, and to thank you, and to tell you that I know that not only will you and your dragons do their best, I also know that no one anywhere would put as much of themselves into this as you have.”

She bowed—deeply—to all of them, then turned and left the training ground without a backward glance.

Huras broke the silence, laughing shakily. “I feel as if I have just had Lady Iris appear, pat my head, and tell me I have been a good boy and to finish cleaning my room and run along now,” he said, which made them all laugh.

“The ways of gods are strange, and the ways of their servants even stranger,” Ari said briskly.

“She’s exhausted,” Aket-ten said doubtfully, looking after the woman. “I’ve never seen her so thin and drained-looking.”

“So the sooner we finish this thing, the sooner she’ll have no people back in that temple to worry about,” Kiron replied, putting a bit of a whip-crack into his words. “You heard the Winged One. Let’s get into the saddle and into the air. Either the Magi will spot us, or they won’t, and in either case this is the last night, and we’ll be gone before they can do anything about it.”

“From your mouth to the ear of Haras,” Menet-ka said, earning himself a swat from Oset-re.

“Haras helps those who help themselves,” Kiron reminded them. “Into the sky, Jousters! We’ll be seeing our own beds again by midmorning!”

Which reminder was enough to put fire into the most tired of them, after all.

SEVENTEEN

BUT as they approached the temple this time, it was clear that something was very different. There was a lot of light on the horizon, and a red glow in the sky. It looked like a fire—

As they got nearer, what had looked like a building on fire resolved itself into a scene of purposeful activity. Armed men with torches swarmed the grounds, and there were bonfires burning under the walls, the light reflected in the pale stone from bottom to top. Smoke rose into the air in clouds, making his nose itch.

No one would be escaping over the walls by ropes tonight.

His heart sank a little. He could only hope that anyone willing to get out that way had, last night.

How many were left? No one had given him a number.

Maybe no one could. Or maybe no one was going to, to spare him knowing it was not going to be possible to get them all out before daylight. They dared not fly by day, or those on the ground would see where they went, leading the Magi straight to Aunt Re.

The dragons didn’t like the smoke and the fires, but they were bred for cavorting in and around sulfurous springs. The smoke was going to bother their riders a lot more than it would trouble them. It was a still night, and the smoke rose into the air and hung there like low clouds; though it made his eyes burn, it might not be a bad thing; they might be able to use it to hide behind. There was one thing; the extra light would make it easier for the dragons to see where they were going.

He kept Avatre high as they came in behind Aket-ten, forming the square well into those clouds of smoke. He glanced behind to see if the next rider caught the hint and was gratified to see that the others were following his lead.

At least there will be more light to land by.

Re-eth-ke descended into the smoke to the square defined by torches on the roof of the Temple. There were a lot of torches up there now, more than there had been last night. More than enough for all those men on the ground to notice.

Well, it’s not as if it’s going to make any difference.

Incredibly, no one on the ground saw the dragon landing on the roof. But then, Re-eth-ke was a flickering shadow in the smoke, indigo with a confusing touch of silver. When she rose again with her double burden, she was still barely visible among the shifting shadows in the smoke, and there was no outcry.

Not so for Avatre.

As she fanned her wings to land, he heard the cries from below, and ducked instinctively as arrows whistled through the night sky. As his helpers handed his next passenger up behind him, and tied them together with rope, he saw that they all had improvised wicker shields strapped to their backs. A moment later, he understood why, as a clatter of spent arrows bounced off the shields or the rooftop. One or two had a little more energy and stuck in the shields.

His young female passenger shook with fear; no older than Aket-ten, surely, and just as surely had never personally seen a shot fired in anger, much less had one directed at her. Those who helped tie her in place were made of sterner stuff.

“Clever story they’re putting out about you,” said one of those men he’d thought he’d recognized last night. “Evidently you’re Tians, come to steal us away.”

“Really?” He gave the rope a good hard tug to test it, and coughed as he breathed in a little too much smoke. “I don’t suppose they’ve got an explanation as to why you’re tying yourselves onto our dragons.”

“Not yet,” came the reply, and a sardonic sneer. “But I expect they’ll think of something soon. They’re shooting to kill us, you know. I overheard the Captain of Tens giving the orders. We’re better off dead than in your hands, according to him.”

A muffled wail behind his back made it very clear what his passenger thought of all this.

“Then we’ll just have to be where the arrows aren’t,” he said, keeping his tone confident. The helpers stepped away, and he sent Avatre up.

His passenger alternated distraught sobs with coughs the entire way back; he tried to get some answers out of her, but she replied with nothing but weeping. He tried not to be too irritated with her, but it was difficult; he desperately wanted to know how many people were left in that temple, and she was about as sensible as a terrified hare and just as articulate.

As he approached the temple the second time, he saw that there were archers not only on the ground, but on the roofs of nearby buildings, trying to keep up a steady barrage of arrows. Most fell short, but there were enough that were reaching the roof of the temple that he felt a thrill of alarm. But when he landed this time, instead of the clattering of falling shafts, or worse, the sound of arrows striking nearby, there was nothing, and he wondered why—

Wondered, until he heard the swish of arrows through air again and a thudding—but it was a thudding sound that was far off to the right, literally as far away as it was possible to get and still be on the rooftop. He looked to that side, and to his utter astonishment, saw a roll of straw matting standing on the edge of the roof, bristling with arrows, with more thudding into it with each moment.

“Magic,” said one of the helpers, following his glance. “Your current passenger’s idea.” He patted the middle-aged woman’s plump arm, and she smiled wanly. “Seems she’s been dabbling in Magus work; learned it from some Akkadian friend of hers. Now that straw roll somehow sucks all the arrows toward it. Damned useful, but now it’s time for you to get her out of here.”

Avatre launched herself skyward before he could reply; she didn’t want to be on that roof any more than he did. His passenger looked down at the besiegers as they passed overhead, and shivered.

“It’s a very difficult thing, seeing all those people and knowing they want to kill you,” she said forlornly, as they passed into darker, cleaner air and out over the canal.

“It’s what every soldier sees, when he looks at the enemy,” he offered, hoping to make her feel a little better, or at least, less vulnerable.

“You’re right, of course,” she said. “But it’s still a hard thing. No one ever wanted to kill me before.”

He thought about how cherished, how respected, admired, even loved the Winged Ones had been, and felt a certain sympathy for her distress.

“You’ve been very sheltered,” he said reluctantly.

She said nothing for a while. Then, “Too sheltered,” she replied, sounding a little less sorry for herself. “If we had been paying attention, instead of isolating ourselves in our own little world, we would have noticed that rot beginning. What’s happening now is partly our own fault. There were signs . . . when the Magi singled out certain Nestlings for extra training that somehow made them lose their powers, or sent them on errands during which there were . . . accidents. But when the Magi proposed making the storms stronger, it seemed like such a good idea at the time—”

“It might go back farther than that,” he pointed out, as Avatre sneezed, then pumped her wings to get a little more height. “Back to when they first made the Eye.”

“Oh, yes. The Eye.” He felt her shiver. “How could we ever have thought that was a good idea? It’s not like building walls; walls can’t be turned against your own people. We should have known then that they were on no one’s side but their own.”

Yes, you should have, he thought. For people who were supposedly Far-Sighted, you certainly kept looking in the wrong places.

His passenger didn’t know how many people were left in the temple, but when he returned for another trip, he saw something going on below that made him think they had even less time than he’d assumed.

The besiegers were building piles of wood against the doors. And he thought about what the man on the roof had said; “Better dead than in your hands.”

The doors were wood, not stone; set fires against them and the doors would burn through, the fire moving into the building through all that closely-packed furniture and debris. How long would the fires burn before they reached the roof? The rooms below were crammed full of all manner of flammable furnishings to prevent the besiegers from breaking in once the doors were broken down. Fire would block the exits as soon as the doors burned through. There would be no escape that way.

There was a crowd gathering on the edge of the temple grounds, watching. Would they do anything if they saw the Magi’s men were going to burn out the Winged Ones? Or were they, by this point, too afraid? Had the use of the Eye destroyed any spirit of rebellion that still lay within them? He was rather afraid that it had.

He landed, and took aboard his first physically injured passenger, a middle-aged man with a heavily bandaged head who seemed dizzy and partly disoriented. “When he saw what they were doing down there, he went to the edge of the roof and tried to reason with them,” said the man Kiron thought had once been a Winged One, and whose name he still didn’t know. “Somebody got him with a stone from a sling. Don’t let him fall asleep.”

“No fear of that,” Kiron replied, as the man climbed up behind him, clumsily. “It’s not exactly a smooth ride.”

“They’re coming!” called someone who was watching at the edge of the roof under cover of an improvised shield.

“Get out of here!” the man barked at Kiron, slapping at Avatre’s shoulder, startling her into rearing away from him, then leaping skyward, before he could ask who or what was coming.

Not that it mattered; he saw what it was as soon as Avatre cleared the rooftop. “They” were more of the Magi’s men, and they were firing the wood stacked up against the doors of the Temple.

Time had just run out.

He wanted to turn back and take on another passenger, but Avatre was not having any of that idea, and at any rate, she was burdened with as much as she could bear right now. So Kiron and his passenger flapped off into the darkness, both of them looking over their shoulders in white-lipped silence, until the temple, with its rising fires, was out of sight.

In fact, it was a rougher ride than before, as Avatre dodged and snapped at arrows as she rose, and continued to fly evasively even when there were no missiles speeding toward them. His passenger hung on grimly, arms wrapped around Kiron’s chest, sucking in his breath in pain whenever Avatre jolted sideways.

Despite his orders to everyone else, he urged Avatre to greater speed. This was only the fourth trip. How many more would they be able to manage before fire consumed the temple? One? Two at most? There was no point in saving her strength now. . . .

Mercifully, his passenger was silent except for the occasional whimper of pain. Kiron wondered what he had been to the Winged Ones, since he was not wearing their emblem, but evidently felt enough authority to try to reason with the Magi’s men. Was he the Overseer of the Temple Servants? Merely someone of rank caught in the temple when the siege started?

The flight took far, far longer than he wanted it to, even though Avatre had caught his urgency and was flying faster than she’d ever dared do in darkness before. He landed Avatre hard, and hurried to untie himself from his passenger, but because of the man’s head injury, the helpers had tied him on far more securely than the last, and the knots resisted his clawing fingers. Orest landed while he was still trying to get the ropes undone—

—and then, with the edges of his passenger’s cloak still smoldering, Ari landed—and behind him, in a cluster, all the rest. Including Aket-ten.

And no one had a passenger except Orest and Ari.

He felt a sick numbness wash over him as his hands went cold. He caught Ari’s eyes as Ari handed down a middle-aged woman who was still coughing, and Ari shook his head.

His mind wouldn’t encompass it. Surely the fires couldn’t have moved that fast! Surely there was time for another round of rescues—

But Aket-ten was weeping silently, tears making black tracks through the soot and ash on her face.

“I don’t understand it,” Gan said, his voice flat and expressionless. “It all burned like everything was soaked in oil. Even the stone was burning! It makes no sense!”

“Some mischief of the Magi, I’ve no doubt,” replied Aunt Re grimly, as two of her servants cut the last man free from Kiron and handed him down. “Some way to make stone burn like wood, and wood like oil-soaked papyrus.” She said nothing more then, only went to Aket-ten, who slid down from Re-eth-ke’s back and into her aunt’s comforting arms.

Kiron felt cold all over. He thought about the men he’d last seen on that rooftop, about the servants that might have been still waiting just below, and wanted to vomit. He glanced up in the direction of the city, and saw an ugly red glare on the horizon.

When he looked back down again, one of Re’s servants was handing him a bundle: a waterskin and food. “What—” he began.

The High Priestess moved out of the shadows like a ghost, startling him. “New orders, Wingleader,” she said gravely. “Orders sent through me to you, from the Mouth of the Gods who is called Kaleth. There is no reason to stay, and your presence will bring danger to Re-keron as the Magi seek for your dragons. Come home, he says. We will scatter, and come to Sanctuary safe.”

Kiron swallowed down his nausea and looked at the others. “Can you all make the flight?” he asked.

One by one, they nodded as Re’s servants handed them identical bundles to his. Even Aket-ten looked up, face smeared with tears and soot, and nodded. And he felt, at that moment, a terrible, aching need for the desert, for a place that was clean, where people did not put each other to the flame because they could not be controlled.

And where other people did not stand by and watch them do so. He had thought the Tians were cruel. What the Magi had turned his own people into was something far worse—people who now were so afraid for themselves that they had lost every vestige of morality.

“Right,” he said harshly. “Let’s get out of here.”

And that was what haunted him, the entire flight back. The priestess had called it a “rot.” If so, it was a rot that killed the conscience, and maybe the soul along with it. Those people had watched the Magi drag the Winged Ones away, day after day, and had done nothing. They had watched the Magi’s men lay siege to the temple for weeks, and had done nothing. The mob that had finally gathered to protest had done very little, and had scattered quickly when the Eye was used. And it should have been possible to save the Winged Ones; why had the army not rebelled at their treatment? No point in saying they were under orders either; since when was it right to follow orders you knew were immoral?

And tonight, they had watched while the Magi’s men prepared to burn the temple to the ground, and had done nothing.

And it had all begun long before this. Hadn’t they been spending these last moons simply looking the other way while friends and relations were denounced and hauled away? Hadn’t many of them been willing to make accusations of their own to prove their “loyalty” and turn suspicious eyes away from themselves?

And why? Because they were too attached to possessions, to the city itself, to flee? Because it was easy to look away when the Magi were only hurting the foreigners, or the nobles, or the people in the next Ring that you didn’t know, and because when you looked the other way once, it was easy to keep doing so?

Or because it was easier to believe the lies that the Magi told? Easier not to think for one’s own self? Easier to accept at face value everything that was told to you?

It gnawed at him all the way back, and when he and Avatre finally landed in the gray light of dawn, he felt as if he could not sleep until he had cleaned his body of the stench of burning. He went down into the cavern, and took a rare bath, scrubbing himself until his skin felt raw to be rid of the smell.

He went to find Aket-ten, but she was nowhere to be seen. Maybe that was just as well. He wasn’t sure he could offer her any kind of comfort, when she had just seen a place where she knew people burning to the ground.

When he staggered off to his bed, Avatre was already asleep, and as he gazed on her, he felt a moment of envy to see her, so calm and peaceful, with no nightmares to trouble her sleep.

They certainly troubled his, that night, and for many nights to come.

And yet, sooner than he would have thought, things got back to normal, or mostly normal.

Perhaps it was because he had not actually seen the temple burning. Only Ari had endured that particular sight, and maybe his experience in fighting had hardened him somewhat to such things. Maybe it was because, once the last of the Winged Ones arrived, there was another shrine made to the memories and spirits of those who had been lost.

Maybe it was nothing more than time—time which was, of a certainty, filled.

It would have been far worse had Aket-ten actually witnessed the horror of the burning temple, but the others had turned her back at the halfway point, and all she knew was that it had burned, and those who were left, with it. She sought Kiron out the night after their return to Sanctuary, and spent all of it weeping herself sick in his arms. It was a very long night; perhaps the longest in his life, save only one. He would have spared her that distress if he could have.

And yet, this was the face of war from which she had been sheltered. Death, and not death in battle, but terrible, useless, needless death, the deaths of those you knew, cared about—even loved.

War was no longer an abstract to her. And, in fact, neither was death.

After that, though he was sure it preyed on her mind as nothing in her life ever had before, not even her own fear, she never said another word about it.

She drooped despondently about for a while, and that was worse than if she had wept and raged and railed against the Magi. And he was tempted—oh, how tempted!—to weigh his pain against hers; the miserable deaths of father, mother, sisters against the deaths of her friends.

But he didn’t. You couldn’t weigh pain as if it was the Feather of Truth. He knew that now, something he had not known before Toreth’s murder. One pain couldn’t outweigh another; no pain could balance out another. In the end, all pain stood alone.

And that wasn’t something he could tell her either. It was something she would have to learn herself.

Eventually, she regained her spirits as the Winged Ones trickled in a few at a time, and she was able to gain some sort of consolation with them. This was one place in her life where Kiron felt absolutely helpless to give her exactly the kind of consolation she needed. He didn’t know these people; they hadn’t been his friends. He could only mourn them in the abstract—and it wasn’t as if he didn’t already have enough deaths in his life to mourn.

And it wasn’t as if their days didn’t have plenty to fill them.

Not only were the dragonets hatched out in Sanctuary growing rapidly and requiring preliminary training, but Coresan’s family was doing so as well, and he had a whole new problem to deal with.

Nofret was besotted. It was all anyone could do to get her to tear herself away from the dragonets every evening, and she was beside herself with impatience to get out to them in the morning. Kiron wouldn’t have credited it. He would have thought that while she would feel some affection for them, she wouldn’t have felt that bond that every other Jouster with a hand-raised dragon did.

But there was not a shadow of a doubt; she obsessed over those dragonets just as if she was their own mother. In particular, she was attracted to a gorgeous little creature of Thurian purple shading to deep scarlet that she named “The-on”; the smallest of the lot, but still larger than the smallest dragonet back in Sanctuary, for once again, Coresan had thrown an outstanding clutch. And this little female was just as attracted to Nofret as Nofret was to her. Every day, she ventured nearer and nearer to her human watcher, always with one eye on her mother, who would snort warningly whenever her offspring drew too near to the human. But every day, what Coresan considered “too near” grew less, until one day while Coresan was dozing and all of them were worn out from playing, the dragonet waddled over to Nofret, dropped her head in Nofret’s lap, and fell immediately asleep.

Nofret froze, not daring to touch; Aket-ten and Kiron tensed, Kiron signaling Avatre to be ready to dive in to the rescue if need be. Coresan raised her head, gave Nofret a penetrating look, and dropped her head back down to her own foreclaws, closing her eyes.

After that, Coresan allowed Nofret to touch, clean, and play with all four babies, and even to feed them. In fact, the older and more clamorous the babies got, the more she seemed to welcome the help. Aket-ten reported that Coresan was coming to think of Nofret as another dragon; a very peculiarly shaped, tragically dwarfed, and inadequately scaled dragon, but a dragon, nevertheless.

Even Ari began to relax when he saw how Coresan acted around Nofret. The peculiar thing was, even as Coresan acted as if Nofret was a dragon, she continued to make threat postures whenever any other humans ventured too near. Aket-ten couldn’t explain it.

“Nofret is a dragon, and we aren’t, not in Coresan’s mind,” was all she could say. “Maybe it’s because we always dropped food from a height, and Nofret was the first to bring it to her on the ground. Maybe it’s because Nofret doesn’t look like a Jouster.”

“Then if Coresan lays again and we can find her and the clutch, we have to replicate everything we did this time,” he said firmly. Aket-ten nodded.

There was no change in either the situation in Alta or in Tia, and Kiron was content to leave all such weighty matters in the minds and hands of those his senior in experience and wisdom. Often enough, as he lay staring into the dark at night, he thought of the uncertain future and he felt, with Orest, that he would rather, far rather, not think of it at all. That he would rather be told what to do.

But that was the path that had led here in the first place—people giving over thinking to others, and doing what they were told, believing what they were told to believe, even when it went against their own good sense and all reason.

Still, he was glad enough to have something else to occupy his mind, however temporarily.

As the days passed, the babies began to exercise their wings, pumping them vigorously and making little hops into the air. Those back in Sanctuary were learning to bear saddle and rider, and exercising against weight. Coresan’s offspring, however, were not to be meddled with. They would be fledging soon—

“—and I have no idea how we’re going to get The-on to follow me,” Nofret said, as Kiron and Avatre flew her out to Coresan’s nest the morning after the first of the Sanctuary dragonets had made his First Flight. “I know Coresan’s getting restless. Are they like cats, where they move their nest periodically?”

“Not so far as I know,” he said truthfully. “I wish I could tell you more, but all I know is how the hand-raised ones act.”

“Well, I’m afraid she’s trying to move the nest, and if the little ones follow her, we might never find them again,” she fretted.

As they swooped in to land, it looked as if Nofret’s fears might be well-founded. Coresan was pacing, fanning her wings, then pacing again, peering up at the sky whenever she snapped her wings open. The babies were imitating her, and they usually were not awake at this hour.

Aket-ten landed Re-eth-ke beside Avatre on the canyon floor, as Nofret hurried over to Coresan and the dragonets with the first lot of meat. Coresan took it—

Then, uncharacteristically, began to eat it herself, leaving it to Nofret to feed the little ones.

Aket-ten watched them with her eyes narrowed and a speculative look on her face.

“What?” Kiron demanded.

“I don’t—know,” she said slowly. “There is something very odd going on.” She continued to stare. “I’m trying to encourage the little ones to stay with Nofret if Coresan flies.”

Coresan finished her first portion, and looked straight at Kiron, rather than Nofret. And snorted, in that old imperious fashion he had come to know. He didn’t need Aket-ten’s interpretation to take down another portion of meat and drag it over to her. She seized it, and began tearing chunks off of it, one eye on him, and one on the sky.

It took a third and a fourth to satisfy her, and not once in all that time did she feed any of her babies, not even when they came to her, nudged her portion, and begged pitiably. After a while, the beggar would go right back to Nofret, who was infinitely more reliable, if rather too slow. . . .

Then, when the fourth helping was a memory, Coresan stood up, raised her head and stared at Nofret for a very long moment, as if measuring her for something.

Nofret stopped feeding the dragonets, feeling the eyes of their mother on her, and turned.

She swallowed hard—and visibly. Coresan had Nofret fixed in an unwinking gaze, and Kiron didn’t blame Nofret for a sudden surge of unease. He started to loosen his knife in its sheath, but Aket-ten stopped him with a gesture.

“It’s not what you think,” she whispered.

Just then, Nofret began to slowly back away from the dragonets. It wasn’t the first time that Coresan had leveled a challenging stare at her, and always, once Nofret began to move away from them, Coresan stopped challenging.

Not this time.

This time, Coresan took the two enormous strides needed to reach Nofret, bent her head down before anyone could react, and shoved Nofret in the gut with her nose, tumbling her back into the midst of the dragonet pack.

And then she turned, spread her wings wide, and with a few lumbering steps threw herself into the air. Within moments, she was a dot in the sky. In another, she was gone.

“She’s gone!” Aket-ten said with astonishment.

Kiron shrugged. “Off to hunt, I suppose,” he said. This wasn’t the first time she’d gone off to do so; the only real difference was that this time she had very graphically put Nofret in charge of the babies.

“No, I mean she’s gone,” said Aket-ten. “She’s gone for good! I felt what she meant in my mind. She left Nofret in charge, and now she’s gone for good and she’s not coming back!”

Nofret hauled herself to her feet, pulling on dragonet necks and shoulders to get there. “She might have been a bit more polite about it!” she said indignantly. And then, as Kiron stared at her, she blinked. “What do you mean, she’s gone for good and left me in charge?”

It took a while for the implications of that to sink in, but when they finally did, Kiron found himself at a loss for words.

“Oh,” was all he could manage. “Ah—how are we going to get them back to Sanctuary?”

In the end, there was no good way to get them back to Sanctuary. They weren’t fledged yet; they couldn’t fly on their own. They certainly couldn’t walk. You couldn’t tie them to a camel. They were too big for even Kashet to carry, and at any rate, no one wanted to terrify them by bundling them into a carry net to be flown back. So the only answer was for Nofret to spend the night with them.

Perhaps more than one night with them, but he wasn’t going to suggest that just now.

Ari was not happy about that, but what could he do? They accepted Re-eth-ke and Re-eth-ke was willing to curl up with them, though they were wary about Avatre, so Aket-ten stayed with her, which Kiron was no happier about than Ari was.

But in the morning, three of the dragon boys who had not gotten an egg were flown in by himself, Ari, and Gan, to join Nofret in her baby tending.

A night without their mother had made them a lot more accepting, and having someone willing to feed them without having to take turns competing with a sibling cemented the acceptance of these strangers. They were not shy at all after about midmorning, and at least that meant that Nofret did not have to spend another night with them; the boys could do that, taking it in turns to play night guard.

By the next day, an additional night guard of actual former soldiers from Tia had managed to make the journey over the sands by camel. And at that point, there seemed no reason why this batch of dragonets needed to leave.

And, since no one else seemed inclined to bring it up, Kiron did, in council.

He waxed a great deal more eloquent on the subject than he had expected to be. No reason why some of those strange cliff dwellings couldn’t be made habitable either. Granted, no one had mentioned that the abandoned city should be inhabited again right now, but if Sanctuary was going to be the city of priests, then the new city would have to be made ready for everyone else at some point. Why not now? The repairs and improvements could be made gradually, if they began now. Wouldn’t it be better to have them underway, if an emergency came up?

“After all, if Sanctuary is attacked, we’re going to need somewhere more defensible to send the children to,” Kiron pointed out, as Kaleth hid a smile. Ari threw up his hands.

“You won’t rest until you’ve got your dragon city, will you?” he said crossly. “All right. Have it your way. But when The-on fledges, Nofret is bringing her back here.”

The-on did fledge shortly thereafter, and Nofret did lead her back to Sanctuary, riding behind Kiron while The-on lumbered clumsily along behind, whining piteously and looking absolutely exhausted when they all came in to land. But the other three dragonets and their putative riders stayed—and so did the guards. And, too, some of the Altans who found the desert too dry elected to try the new city, and found it to their liking. As more refugees arrived, some stayed at Sanctuary, but some moved on to Dragon Court (as the new city was dubbed), finding that Sanctuary was just a little too full of Winged Ones and priests and priestly magic to be altogether comfortable for ordinary mortals. When all of the new dragons were fledged, all (except The-on) moved to Dragon Court for their initial training; there was more room there, for one thing, and Baken was perfectly capable of taking them up to the point where they needed to form wings.

And at that point, Kalen and Pe-atep moved there as well, wingleaders of the new Black and Yellow Wings, to take over the training from Baken. Kiron actually felt a little relief at that; there was something about having all of the dragons quartered in one place that made him nervous. Having them divided like this meant a greater margin of safety for them all. They met for joint training in the air over the desert, halfway between the two strongholds. Day by day, the dragonets grew into their size and strength and coordination.

Day by day, the older dragons grew in skill. There were new maneuvers to learn; now that they no longer needed to evade other Jousters, their strategy must be directed against men on the ground, and as they were few and vulnerable, they must choose their targets carefully. . . .

And that was how matters stood, the day that another messenger came from Alta, bloody and battered, with word that the Magi had finally stepped over the boundary of sanity.

They had decided that yet another group required being brought to heel.

This time, it was the Healers that they had put under siege.

EIGHTEEN

AND the people are doing what?” Kaleth demanded of the messenger, who shrugged wearily.

“The people are doing nothing. The Healers have been trying to foment discontent ever since the burning of the temple,” he replied. “The Magi finally took notice. They say—” He paused, and his brow wrinkled in exhausted thought. “They say that the Healers hear much—and a great deal of truth—from those who are in pain or otherwise vulnerable. They say the Healers must speak for the good of Alta. They demand that the Healers are to turn over to them any who have spoken against the Magi, and also all those who Heal by touch, rather than by herb or knife.”

“All those who Heal by touch. . . .” Nofret’s lip lifted. “It seems they have decided to drain even Alta’s most precious resource to serve their own needs.”

“And they demand that the sanctity of a Healer’s silence be broken.” Marit was absolutely white-lipped with anger. Odd. Kiron would have thought that it would be Heklatis who would be furious, but the Akkadian only looked sad and resigned.

“It is said—” the messenger began, then stopped.

“It is said, what?” Ari demanded sharply.

“It is said that the Magi are looking—older. Older than they have in years, though who knows what their true ages are.” He shrugged. “I have not seen them, so I cannot be sure.”

Ari looked to Lord Khumun. “How goes the war?”

“My spies tell me that it has stalled on the edge of the marshlands,” Lord Khumun replied. “The Tians are reluctant to go into the true marshlands, and the Altans are reluctant to come out of them.”

“So the Magi are not battening on the deaths that they had hoped for.” Ari looked to the messenger and then to Kaleth. “Mouth of the Gods, I think it begins.”

There was silence, and Kaleth bowed his head. Kiron held his breath.

“It begins,” Kaleth said, from behind the curtain of his hair. “And only the gods know how it will end. I have seen the beginning; I cannot thread my way through the maze that will follow this bad beginning.”

Ari nodded, as if he had expected exactly this answer. “Then it is for mortals to decide. And one thing I do know; we cannot let the Healers stand alone. Agreed?”

Heklatis’ eyes lit, as if he had not expected that answer. Kaleth, however, raised his head again, and regarded Ari with a wry smile—as if he had.

Time was not on their side, they needed to act quickly, and the means of getting messages to the Healers were very limited. There was, in fact, only one sure way, and reluctant as he was to use it, at least the time of year was in their favor. The rains had just begun, and the Magi would not be able to use the Eye even during daylight hours if there was no sun.

Which was a good thing, since the way to get a message to the Healers was to drop it on them from the sky. While the best time to drop such a message was at night, it could not be too late at night, or it might be lost. Furthermore, with the Magi now aware that there were dragons and Jousters still in the world, and acting as the heart of the rebellion, they would be watching the skies.

There was a great deal of sky between Sanctuary and Alta. And of all the dragons that were capable of such a journey, there were really only two of colors that would blend in with the storm clouds. Bethlan was one, and Kiron had no issues with Menet-ka taking the task. But the other was Re-eth-ke, and Aket-ten’s reaction when she discovered that Kiron had assigned Menet-ka without even considering her was . . . emphatic.

In fact, she stormed into Avatre’s pen as if she was taking a citadel, and with nearly as much noise.

“I can’t believe you simply assumed Menet-ka was the only person fit to take this job without even considering me!” she shouted, as she shoved her way past her brother, who was lingering in the doorway, listening, while Kiron went over the plan with Menet-ka. “You must be insane! I’m the smallest Jouster, I’ll be less of a burden to my dragon—”

“Menet-ka is not much larger than you, Bethlan is bigger than Re-eth-ke, and both of them have more experience flying in the rain than Re-eth-ke does,” Kiron countered, as she stood there with her fists on her hips, glaring.

“Not as much in storms!” she shouted back.

“He won’t be flying in a storm!” Kiron replied. “And Bethlan is steadier in bad weather than Re-eth-ke!”

“Who says?” she demanded furiously.

“I say, and I’m the wingleader!” he replied, his own anger rising to meet hers halfway.

“Oh, fine. Use that as an argument.” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. “Abandon logic altogether and fall back on ‘I’m the wingleader.’ Never mind that I have more communication with my dragon than he has with his, or that I have more experience flying high and in storms and long distances, or that I’m lighter, or that silver and blue-black blends into clouds better than indigo and purple. Ignore all that. Ignore the fact that if you’re going to do something risky, it’s better to have two people doing it to double your chances of getting through. And completely forget about the fact that it looks as if you’re cosseting me because I’m a girl. . . .”

There were tears in her voice when she said that last, and he couldn’t meet her accusing gaze, because he was trying to protect her, and it was entirely true that the only reason he had dismissed the idea of her going was because she was who and what she was—his beloved, and yes, “a girl.”

“How can I expect to deserve equal treatment if you won’t give me equal responsibility?” she asked tearfully when he still wouldn’t look at her.

“She has a point, Kiron,” Orest said, not at all helpfully.

He clenched his jaw so hard it hurt. He wanted to tell Orest to mind his own business, but that would mean he would have to pull wingleader rank again, and that ploy was growing weaker by the moment.

“Don’t you think you ought to give her the chance?” Orest continued, even less helpfully. “It’s only fair.”

He glared at Orest and decided to bring up family instead. “Lord Ya-tiren wouldn’t thank me for putting her in danger. Neither would Lady Iris-aten.”

He’d hoped invoking both parents would get Aket-ten to reconsider. Unfortunately, she was made of sterner stuff than he’d thought.

“I’ll get his consent,” she said, clenching her own jaw. “When he gives his consent to anything, Mother simply steps aside and lets it happen. If I get his consent, will you assign this to me?”

Dear gods. Well, at least Lord Ya-tiren won’t be able to put the blame on me for sending his daughter into danger. He’ll know it was all her own idea. “And Lord Khumun’s,” he replied, transferring his glare to her.

She traded him glare for glare. “And Lord Khumun’s,” she agreed. She sounded confident. He only hoped that confidence would be shattered.

“If both of them give their consent, then you can go,” he said, sure that even if she could convince her father, Lord Khumun would never agree.

Lord Khumun agreed.

So did Lord Ya-tiren, although he was not at all happy about it, which left Kiron without any reason to forbid her. He even went to Heklatis to beg something that would make her feel too ill to fly; the Healer stared at him as if he thought Kiron had gone mad, and simply answered, “Are you daft? It would be worth my life, because you know she’d know I’d done it. No. Absolutely, positively, no.”

And Kaleth was no help either; he simply shrugged, opined that no one could hope to stop Aket-ten from doing anything she really wanted to do, and repeated that he could not “see” past the Magi interference, not into the city, and not into the future.

So, despite his misgivings, despite the nebulous feeling of dread in the bottom of his stomach, there was nothing Kiron could say or do, reasonably, to keep her from going. All he could do was to make her swear to be cautious.

She and Menet-ka were going to drop sandbags with messages in them into the inner courts of the Healers, messages detailing what the Jousters already knew, and advising them that when there was a huge distraction, the Healers should escape by whatever means they could.

The distraction was already well in hand. Heklatis knew the formulation of some vile concoction called “Akkadian Fire,” a substance that stuck to anything it splashed on and burned and couldn’t be put out with water. He was making pots of the evil stuff; they would all come in with a load of pots and a brazier apiece, drop in coals, and drop the pots. Half of them would unload their burdens on the men besieging the Healers, but the other half would unload over the Tower of Wisdom, the Magi’s stronghold. When they found their home burning down around their ears, Kiron doubted very much that any of them would think about the Healers.

That was the hope anyway.

As for the besiegers, this Akkadian Fire stuck to flesh as well as wood and stone, and the higher the Jousters were, the more it would splash about when it hit. A nasty trick . . . but anyone who had stood by while the Temple of the Twins and those left inside it burned, deserved whatever he got, to Kiron’s way of thinking.

The Healers likely would not agree, but that was why Lord Khumun wasn’t going to tell them what the distraction was going to be.

Well, some of the Healers wouldn’t agree . . . Heklatis, after all, was a Healer, and he was the one who would be making up those fire pots.

“Don’t take any risks,” he told Menet-ka and Aket-ten, for the hundredth time. “Don’t let yourselves be seen. Just drop your messages and get out of there. The best revenge we can have is to get the Healers out underneath their noses, like we got ourselves and the Winged Ones out.”

They both nodded, Menet-ka earnestly, Aket-ten with impatience and rebellion in her eyes. He saw it, and it made him sick with dread, but what could he do? He had given his word, and she already resented that she’d been forced to prove she had the right to a place among the Jousters and an equal share in the danger they all faced. All he could do was to urge the utmost caution.

“This is probably even part of an elaborate trap,” he went on, knowing he was grasping at straws, but hoping against hope that something would get through to her. “You know how much the Magi hated the Jousters, and that was before we pulled the Winged Ones out under their noses. Now, they must really loathe us, and they would probably do anything to capture any of us.”

Unfortunately, Menet-ka chose to take this as evidence that Kiron was letting his concerns and fears get the better of him. “I doubt it’s gone that far,” the Jouster said with a weak laugh. “Oh, I’m sure you’re right about the Magi hating us, but they have no reason to think we would come to the rescue of the Healers.”

Kiron didn’t agree with that in the least, but there was no point in arguing. “Just remember what they did to the Winged Ones,” he repeated, and stepped back.

Aket-ten was only waiting for that, it seemed, because she was in the air and flying toward Alta the moment he was clear of Re-eth-ke’s wings. Menet-ka gave him a sympathetic look, and then sent Bethlan into the sky after her. And all he could do was to watch after them.

“She feels as if she has to do this, Kiron,” said Nofret quietly in his ear. “She feels guilty that she didn’t manage to save all of the Winged Ones; she thinks if she’d just been brave enough, or fast enough, or—something, the gods only know what—she’d have been able to get them all out. You can’t argue with that sort of guilt; it doesn’t answer to logic.”

“Well, if she wants me to treat her as if she’s a logical person, she ought to behave like one,” he replied, irritation momentarily overcoming his feeling of sick dread.

Nofret gave him a crooked smile, and patted his arm. “This is logical,” she pointed out. “No one is going to take her seriously if she doesn’t do everything one of the boys is doing.”

And what, after all, could he say? The Far-sighted Priestesses saw nothing—well, they actually could not see anything anyway, for the Magi had now effectively blocked their ability to See inside the Seventh Ring. But they had no intuitions of anything going wrong. Kaleth saw nothing, and the gods had not spoken through him to warn them. By all logic, he was overreacting, being overprotective of Aket-ten.

And yet, he was certain, so completely certain down deep in his soul that this was going to end in disaster that he avoided everyone else for the rest of the evening, and all but hid in Avatre’s pen. She seemed to be just as uneasy as he was—

But that could just be because she’s picking up my unhappiness, he reminded himself, and tried to soothe her even if he could not himself be soothed.

And he resolved not to sleep. They were supposed to return before dawn, and he was going to be awake—

Despite his best efforts, he dozed off, sitting in Avatre’s sand, some time after the middle of the night. And it was a cry of wordless anguish coming from above that woke him.

It woke him out of nightmare into nightmare. And he knew. He knew, without being told, what that haunting cry on the wind meant. The nameless dread he had been laboring under turned to the certainty of disaster, and as he struggled to clear the fog of sleep from his eyes and stagger upright, he felt, not an anguish matching the wails now coming from the landing field, but a kind of numbness.

It was as if someone had just cut off his arm, and he hadn’t yet felt it. It was going to hurt; he knew it was going to hurt. But at the moment, he could only stare at the bleeding stump in a mingling of despair and disbelief. . . .

Except that instead of a bleeding stump of a limb, he knew that it was Aket-ten who had been amputated out of his life. He knew when he felt what had happened, it would be worse than any physical wound.

With leaden feet, he forced himself to go to Bethlan’s pen. There, they were all gathered, all those who were still awake and eager to hear how the message drop had gone. And he did not say a word, could not manage a single syllable, as he listened to Menet-ka stammer out the tale, while someone else unsaddled Bethlan. Both of them looked terrible. Menet-ka must have pushed Bethlan to new speeds to get here as quickly as he had.

“There was fog,” he said, exhaustion dulling his eyes and blurring his voice, as he leaned heavily against the wall. “We hadn’t expected fog. We couldn’t tell where we were. Except that we could see a ring of torches and bonfires, and I figured that was where the soldiers that the Magi had set to watch had put up a line of guards. I thought we should just drop our messages in the center of all of that and hope that some of them landed in courtyards instead of on the roof. But she wouldn’t hear of it, and before I could say or do anything, she took Re-eth-ke down. And that was when the fog just—cleared away. It practically melted out of sight; she wasn’t more than halfway down when it was all gone, and by then, it was too late to pull up.”

“It was magic, then?” Gan managed, his eyes gone round and horrified.

“A trap,” said Ari flatly, and closed his eyes. “Curse it all, Kiron was right. At least half of this business with going after the Healers was a trap meant to take Jousters. They set a trap for you, Menet-ka. They knew we’d send Jousters if they did to another group what they’d done to the Winged Ones, at least to scout, and they set it all up as a trap and used the Healers as bait.”

I was right, he thought dully, with no sense of triumph. He had never wished to have been wrong more.

“They used war javelins and throwing sticks, they didn’t use bows and arrows,” Menet-ka said trying to control the quaver in his voice. “And they weren’t wasting time trying to hit the rider or me; they aimed for Re-eth-ke.”

“They hit her?” Orest gulped, and Kiron choked back a sob.

Menet-ka nodded miserably. “I couldn’t see how many hit or where; enough anyway, that she just—just crumpled her wings and fell out of the sky. They were both screaming and screaming—it was horrible, hearing them scream like that.”

He could see it; in his mind’s eye, he could see it. The javelins filling the air, the dragon folding up in pain. He could almost hear Aket-ten’s scream of fear and anguish. . . .

“She hit the ground with Aket-ten still in the saddle, and she absorbed most of the impact,” Menet-ka continued, unconsciously pulling at his own hair with his right hand. “But I knew she hadn’t been that high, just skimming the rooftops—I pulled Bethlan around, and I saw Aket-ten moving, and I tried to get down to her—”

What? After all that, he expected to hear that she’d broken her neck in the fall!

She was alive—but she was also a Winged One.

He felt himself shuddering. By now she might be wishing she’d died in the fall.

“You mean Aket-ten’s alive!” Gan shouted incredulously. “She’s all right! We can go back, we can rescue her!”

But Menet-ka shook his head, bleakly, and voiced the same thoughts that were running through Kiron’s head. “The soldiers were just all over her before I could even get Bethlan’s head around. They’ve got her, Gan—the Magi have her. And you know what they almost did to her before! The soldiers spotted me and started shooting, and I couldn’t hold Bethlan; she was scared, scared by seeing Re-eth-ke drop out of the sky and hearing both Re-eth-ke and Aket-ten screaming, scared of the arrows, I couldn’t hold her—” Kiron heard the emotion, the thought behind the words. I failed her.

I should tell him it’s not his fault— But he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Menet-ka what he himself did not feel. It was Menet-ka’s fault, and his. He should have trusted the presentiment of disaster. Menet-ka should have kept her from going down into the fog; should have insisted on turning back the moment they saw the fog.

Menet-ka looked up, past the others, and saw him. The others followed Menet-ka’s gaze, and an echoing silence fell, one those silences in which, no matter how it is broken, it just sounds wroing.

He stared at them, stared at their stricken expressions, at the guilt in Menet-ka’s eyes, at the pain in Ari’s face. Stared, and finally, because there was nothing he could say to any of them that would not simply have brought more pain, he turned away.

He stumbled blindly back to Avatre’s pen, falling into walls and bruising his shoulders, as his eyes burned and he held back his tears by main force of will. He couldn’t weep until he got some privacy. But once he was back in Avatre’s pen, he threw himself down onto the sand next to her, and howled his grief to the stars.

They left him alone. Not even Heklatis came near him. And that suited him just fine, because he didn’t want their pain, he wanted only his own; he didn’t want their apologies, he wanted to nurse his anger against everyone who hadn’t listened to him and had encouraged her in this madness. But even the anger wasn’t enough to overcome his own guilt or his anguish, and he wept into Avatre’s neck until he had no more tears to weep. He pillowed his face against her cheek, moaning like a dying animal under his breath, clinging to Avatre’s neck as the only place of safety in the world, as the sun rose, and burned its way across the heavens, and sank again. Someone brought Avatre food; he wasn’t sure who. They had to bring the meat right into her sand pit, for she wouldn’t come out to them.

In fact, Avatre refused to leave him, even long enough to eat. So long as he was clinging to her neck, she showed no signs of budging. So whoever fed her brought her food to her, and she ate it with one eye on Kiron, her tail coiled protectively around him.

Which was how Kaleth found him, at some point before sunset.

He heard the footsteps and looked up dully. “What?” he asked, not really caring to hear the answer, and hoping that Kaleth would respond to the rudeness by going away.

But Kaleth didn’t go away. Instead, he squatted down in the sand next to both of them.

“Don’t give up. She’s alive, and she’s not even hurt,” he said. “We’ve been able to see that much. They’re saving her for something—”

“They’ve killed her dragon,” Kiron interrupted, harshly. “They shot Re-eth-ke right out from under her. They don’t have to do anything to her to destroy her now! Don’t you understand that?”

Kaleth sat back on his heels, and watched him measuringly. “We aren’t even seeing a fraction of what is going on,” he replied, with an urgency that penetrated even Kiron’s grief. “Listen to me—they won’t hurt her, not right now. They’re keeping her for some purpose—and that gives us a chance; we can get her away. She’s tough. She knows we won’t give up on her, and she knows we’ll do anything we can think of to rescue her. She’ll stay strong as long as there’s any chance at all. And we will find a way—”

His heart leaped, and he seized Kaleth’s shoulders and shook him. “You’ve Seen it?” he gasped, hope making him choke on his own words. “You’ve Seen us rescuing her?”

And his heart plummeted again, as Kaleth shook his head. “Nothing so sure—nothing so definite,” he admitted. “But—”

“Then stop toying with me!” He shoved Kaleth away. “Don’t give me hope and snatch it away again!”

“Now listen to me, damn you!” Kaleth burst out, grabbing his shoulders and forcing him to look into Kaleth’s eyes. “In all of the futures I’ve seen that end in Sanctuary prospering, Aket-ten is there!” He gave Kiron a little shake. “Why would I lie to you? That was why I wasn’t concerned, why I thought, since she felt so resentful about being protected, I should just encourage you to let her do this thing!” He shook Kiron again hard, twice. “I cannot See the way to those futures, but I have Seen it, and I know that once we have all the facts, what is happening will make sense and we will find a way to rescue her!”

He looked into those deep, black eyes, could not look away, and found his heart rising again, just a little. Kaleth believed this. Kaleth had not been wrong yet. . . .

“Be patient!” Kaleth said, with a bit less force. “I don’t know how this will be, but—the only futures I have seen that do not have her in them are futures we do not wish to live in anyway.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and tried not to think of the other implications of that statement—that the fact that Aket-ten had been taken meant that losing her had doomed them all. . . .

“Wait,” said Kaleth. “Hold to hope. That is all I can tell you right now.”

He stood up, and although Kiron would have done the same under ordinary circumstances, all he could do was to sag back against Avatre’s shoulder and stare. “You ask a great deal,” he managed. “And you promise very little.”

“That is so I do not play you false,” said Kaleth somberly. “Now—I go to consult with the Tian priestesses, the Thet priests, the Winged Ones, and Heklatis. And, shortly, what we know, you will know.”

With that, he turned and left Avatre’s pen.

Avatre blew into his hair and whined. He looked up at her numbly and realized that she must be hungry. Whoever had brought her meat, it had only been for the morning meal. The fact that she had put off her hunger while he needed comfort almost made him burst into tears again.

But weeping wouldn’t get her fed, and she had been patient long enough.

He got to his feet, and headed for the cold room and some of the stored meat that was there.

If he did not yet have hope—he would try not to sink into despair. Not yet anyway.

After all, even if there was nothing else for him, there was always revenge.

NINETEEN

SOMEHOW he stumbled through taking care of Avatre; Pe-atep tried to get him to eat and drink something. He managed the drink, but his throat closed when he tried to swallow food, and he ended up giving it to one of the dragon boys. After Kaleth and Pe-atep left him, he sank back into leaden despair. Easy enough to say “hold to hope,” but there didn’t seem to be any hope to hold onto.

If anything, knowing that Aket-ten was probably alive made it all worse. He kept thinking of the bleak despair in that former Winged One’s eyes, and wondering how long it would take before the Magi burned her out. Or, with Re-eth-ke gone, would she even care anymore? He remembered only too sharply how, faced with losing Avatre, he had intended to die rather than lose her. Aket-ten had been immeasurably closer to Re-eth-ke than that. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how she must be feeling now.

He curled himself up against Avatre’s warm side, as she crooned over him with anxiety. He closed his sore eyes, mostly because they hurt, rather than with any expectation of falling asleep.

I’ll just rest here for a moment, he thought, insofar as he could still think at all—

And then, the next thing he knew, Huras was shaking him awake, and it was black night.

“Wha—” he said confusedly.

“Kaleth wants you,” the big fellow announced. “Now.”

He got awkwardly to his feet, stiff and sore from sleeping in such a tortured position. “What is it?” he asked, still sleep-fogged.

Huras shook his head. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “But messengers came in not long ago, and then half the Tian priests came running over. I think something really unexpected and big has happened. I’m supposed to get the others.”

He helped Kiron to his feet, and then disappeared, leaving Kiron to make his own way.

When he got to the audience chamber, the place was lit, and Kaleth, Lord Khumun, and Ari were all bent over a map that was spread out on the floor of the chamber because it was too long for a table. “—so they’re coming here and here,” Kaleth was saying, tapping the end of a long stick on some place on the map.

Kaleth looked up at Kiron’s entrance. “Good, you’re here. Now we have all the pieces. Everything just erupted; there was no warning. All at once, we’re looking at a full-scale invasion of Alta. The war we’ve had up until now is nothing to the war that we’re about to see.”

“The Tian army is on the move,” said Ari, studying the map with a frown in his face. “They’re actually invading Altan lands right this moment; they’ve crossed the last border and they’re into the delta.”

“And I think I know what the Magi are saving Aket-ten for,” Kaleth said, bluntly, looking up at him as he winced. “Look here, what season is this?”

“Rains,” Kiron replied, wondering why that should be relevant—except that the season of rains was a miserable time to be invading the delta. Normally, the Tian army remained on simple border guard during this season. If they were invading now, they must have a compelling reason to think they needed to.

Or—perhaps the advisers believed there was a compelling reason to mount their invasion in the face of constant rain and rising waters.

“And the Magi can’t use the Eye when it’s dark, or there’s cloud cover,” Kaleth said, his mouth set in a grim line. “The Magi now posing as advisers to the Great King of Tia know that. They were waiting for the rains. They must have been.”

Kiron nodded, interest fading fast. What did he care what the Tian Magi did or did not decide to do? What could this invasion possibly matter? How could it change anything?

“It looks like real war between the two sets of Magi,” Kaleth told him. “I don’t know what happened that the ones with the Tians got exiled from Alta, but it looks as if it isn’t just that they’re battening on the war dead that keeps them there, and it certainly doesn’t look as if they’re cooperating with the Altan Magi. They seem to want it all, and they’ve now got the army to get it for them.”

“But—if the Magi are really fighting each other—” Could this be the key to getting Aket-ten free?

“We forgot one thing,” said Ari, as Kiron nodded. “And so did the Tian Magi. The Magi have been—and are—weather workers.”

Kiron shook his head. “Which means what, exactly? They haven’t the power anymore to send a storm down on the Tian forces—”

“No,” Kaleth agreed grimly. “But if they use Aket-ten, they have the power to clear the storm over Alta City. At least, for a little while.”

He blinked, and suddenly it all made sense. “The Tians were waiting for the rains to invade!” he exclaimed. “But the Altans were waiting for them to invade and get as far as where the Eye would reach before clearing the storm!”

It all made perfect sense. Horrible, perfect sense. Once the Altan Magi knew that their exiles had attained positions of power in Tia, they must have known what would happen, that their exiles would challenge them. But the Altans had the advantage; they knew what the exiles knew, so they could predict what the exiles would do.

Kaleth nodded. “I told you it would all become clear when we put the pieces together. They planned this all along, as soon as they knew the Magi that had been ousted had gotten established in Tia. They knew the Tian Magi would know the Eye didn’t work without sun, and that the rains would be the only safe time to invade.” He shook his head. “The exiles are playing right into their hands. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they’ve pulled back some of the Altan army to tempt them. Certainly by the time we found out about this and went to look, the Altans had already fallen back to here—and here—”

Kiron nodded; it made altogether too much sense to him, too.

“Look here—” Lord Khumun pointed to where squares of stone were playing the part of the Tian forces on the map. “This is what Gan and Huras reported to me when I sent them to scout, and the Tians are definitely being funneled.”

“But how does this have anything to do with Aket-ten?” he demanded desperately. “How can this possibly connect to her?”

“It’s the timing; Aket-ten is captured, and then by midafternoon, the Tians are making their way across Altan lands,” said Lord Khumun. “It’s too much to be a coincidence, not when a fast courier could have gotten to those in command of the Altan forces by early afternoon, telling them the time has come to start the trap. If the Tians had been waiting for an opportunity to open up, the Magi just gave it to them on a platter.”

He shook his head; not that he disbelieved them, because it made entirely too much sense, but what would the Magi have done if they hadn’t gotten their hands on Aket-ten?

“They probably planned this a long time ago,” Kaleth mused aloud. “Then they lost the Winged Ones. They must have been frantic, trying to figure out how to get the power they needed to clear the skies and use the Eye.”

“Frantic enough to be willing to try draining a Healer by touch,” Ari said, with a nod. “And knowing they could lure some of us there by putting the Healers under siege is probably why they didn’t just lure a few of the Healers by touch out and have their men seize some of them. When they discovered who the Jouster was that they had captured, they must have been beside themselves with glee.”

Kiron gritted his teeth. He could well imagine it, especially the couple of Magi that had personally given Aket-ten trouble in the past. “Or because the Healers aren’t going anywhere alone anymore, not after some of them have been drained by stealth in the past.”

“They only have to clear the clouds for a little while,” Kaleth went on. “For that, given how strong Aket-ten is, and that she hasn’t been drained over and over—well, they probably only need her to give them open skies for as long as they want. They’re going to allow the Tian army to close in, then close the jaws of the trap on them and wipe them out with the Eye.”

“And then—then they can take Tia at their leisure,” Lord Khumun said somberly. “Aket-ten is their key. Small wonder they want to use her now, before the Tian Magi know they have her. And the Tians’ greed has made them play right into the Altan Magi’s hands.”

“We have to get to her before—” he couldn’t finish the sentence; he choked on the words. “But—where?”

“Ah. That part I know,” Kaleth said, much to his relief. “The Tian priests came to me with the news of the invasion, then, when I sent Jousters to scout, turned their attention back to the Magi of Alta. The Tian Far-Sighted Priestesses didn’t see much, but one of them did see the single piece of information that was crucial—one of those who sees the future got a brief glimpse of Aket-ten in what I suspect must be the Tower of Wisdom, in a chamber with some mechanism holding an enormous piece of crystal. We believe, the Haras priests and I, that in that future moment they were preparing to clear the sky, then somehow tie her power into the Eye.”

All in an instant, his mind went from grief-clouded and leaden to alert and sharp as a shard of obsidian. Hope! Now he had it; now he could think again.

“We’ll have to divide the wing,” he said, thinking aloud. “Five need to go after the Tian forces; I’m sure the Magi calling themselves advisers will be with the army, and we can’t risk them getting away.” He paused. “That should be you, Orest, Menet-ka, and Gan under Kalen, I think. Get both Menet-ka and Orest away from the rescue attempt, so they don’t feel as if they need to kill themselves in the rescue or have the opportunity to try something without thinking first.”

“Good,” Ari said, nodding. “And the rest—except for you, that is—under Pe-atep to run a feint, while you go for the actual rescue, I presume?”

He rubbed his eyes with one hand, and felt something inside him falter. “I—that’s what I want, but it might be better if you were the rescuer, because I’m afraid I might try something stupid—”

“You won’t,” Ari said flatly. “And of the two of us, you are the most likely to be able to get into that Tower. Avatre will do anything you ask; I do not have that level of cooperation from Kashet. No, you’ll keep your head, and you do the rescue attempt while we run a feint, let them think we’re trying to rescue Healers.”

“All right, then.” He closed his eyes a moment to think. “You’re right in thinking our best chance is to rescue her out of the Tower; I wouldn’t have the faintest idea where they’d be keeping her before then. We’ll have to come in above the clouds for the surprise to work in our favor, and it will have to be at night.”

“Kashet would never do that,” Ari said firmly. “He went in where there was light, but he will refuse to land in the dark. And on the top of the Tower? Impossible.”

Kiron nodded. “Kaleth, have you any idea when this business in the Tower is going to happen? Aside from tomorrow, that is?”

Kaleth shook his head regretfully, then brightened. “But—the priests say this kind of magic takes time, so they’ll probably begin as soon as the sun is up.”

“Which means I should be in place that night.” He pondered that for a moment. “Avatre can’t take a full night of cold on the bare top of the Tower. And I can’t get into the Tower from the ground.” He thought for a moment more. “I need to talk to someone who knows magic. I need to talk—”

“To a Thet priest,” said a deep voice from the door. “And here is one.”

One of the tallest and most heavily muscled men Kiron had ever seen outside of the army or the Jousters stood in the door.

“Be-ka-re at your service,” he said soberly. “The High Priest tells me you have need of magic. Tell me what you need, and I will tell you if any of us can do this.”

“A way to keep Avatre warm all night at the top of a tower,” Kiron said instantly. “And I need a way to know, from above the clouds, that the Magi’s Tower is right below me.” Now he had something he could do.

These were simple things, and yet—so crucial, and so impossible to achieve without magic.

Be-ka-re pursed his lips, then looked up at the ceiling. Kiron waited; he got the impression that the priest was thinking hard and rapidly.

Finally, the reward for his patience.

“I think,” Be-ka-re said, “we can do this.”

As the last light faded, Kiron and Avatre circled above the clouds over Alta City. No one could see him from here; the only problem, of course, was that he couldn’t see anything. And he needed to wait until darkness fell, while people’s eyes were still making the adjustment from light to dark, and a shadow could fall from the clouds and have less chance of being seen.

In his hand was a disk made of glass, and on that disk was a glowing spot that moved as he moved. When the spot was in the center of the disk, it meant he was directly over the Tower.

So small a thing, and it would not last for long. By midnight, its power would be exhausted. But by midnight he would be on the Tower, and would not need it. Without it, he would have to come in beneath the clouds and approach the Tower from a distance, drastically increasing the chance of being seen. With it, he could drop down from directly above.

The Tower, it seemed, sent out magic. The little glowing spot was a reflection of that magic. The disk was not, as the use of the Far-Seeing Eye was, an active thing that could be blocked. It was more like a mirror, a passive thing showing only what another Magus might see merely by looking in the right way.

“Magi and those of us priests who also know the ways of magic can see this,” Be-ka-re had told him. “I merely give you a way to see what I can see.”

The last of the sun tipped below the clouds, which turned blood-red below him. He hoped it wasn’t an omen; Avatre continued to circle at his direction, though she was growing uneasy, as her frequent glances down showed him. She knew it would be dark soon, and she didn’t like to land in the dark any more than any other dragon did. But other than her glances downward, she did nothing; she trusted him.

When the last red of sunset had left the sky, and stars had begun to appear in the east, he centered the glowing spot on the disk, and sent Avatre plunging down through the clouds. She could not have been more willing; she pulled in her wings and dove, trusting to him to be her eyes. As the drop sent his heart racing and his stomach clenched, there was also a moment of eye-stinging awe that she did trust him so much.

It was nothing like the wild plunges he and Aket-ten had made when they seeded the winds with the plant disease that rendered tala useless. There didn’t seem to be any lightning anywhere around, and if there was wind, it was too little to take note of. What there was a great deal of, however, was rain. Avatre was forced to moderate her fall, spreading her wings and turning the plunge into a tight spiral downward.

He was soaked within moments of passing into the clouds, as if someone had emptied an entire bath over him. And the farther they dropped, the worse it got until, as they broke through the bottom of the clouds, he had begun to wonder if he was going to find himself swimming to the Tower.

This was the central island of Alta City, the place where the elite of the elite lived. Here, too, stood the temples to the most important gods, the Royal Palace, and, of course, the Tower of Wisdom, the tallest building on the island, and the symbol of the power of the Magi.

Though even in the semidarkness the damage wrought by Eye and earthshake on the rings was obvious, there was no obvious sign of any such damage here on the center island. There were no buildings in ruins, no burned-out places—

But Kiron didn’t have much time to look either; he and Avatre were coming straight down to the top of the Tower to avoid being seen, and the faster he got her down, the better.

And, of course, Avatre was all but blind in this light, depending on him to tell her what to do in time for her to do it.

At the height of a single-storied house above the top of the Tower, he signaled her to backwing and start to land. She responded instantly, fanning her wings furiously and tucking her hindquarters under, then stretching out with her back legs as she felt for the surface she trusted would soon be there. This was the moment they were most likely to be seen—or heard, as her wings pumped, creating a kind of thunder.

He felt it when a single talon touched that surface; she backwinged a little harder, and he felt her hindquarters stretching, then as she got her weight onto the surface, he felt her legs take it. She folded her wings and settled onto the Tower top with hardly more than a whisper of sound.

Kiron sagged against her neck for a moment in relief. She’d never done this in the full dark before, and yet she had trusted him, trusted him even though they had no more communication than shifting weight, hand signals on her neck, and whispered voice.

He told her fervently what a clever dragon she was, then slipped off her back and onto the wet sandstone of the Tower. He saw with relief that there was a knee-high parapet running all around the edge. So Avatre would not be immediately visible.

Of course, when dawn came, there was the little problem of a scarlet dragon perching on the top of the pale stone of the Tower of Knowledge. Not all of her was going to fit behind that parapet.

But first, she needed to be fed.

There were two bundles of food for her, in baskets on either side of her flanks. Not butchered meat; this was all whole small animals, things she could, and would, swallow whole. There would be no blood and no mess.

He emptied one pannier in front of her, and she gulped down everything while he untied the other and put it aside. He’d feed it to her in the morning, before he went—inside.

He quickly untied the bundle he’d brought from behind the saddle and shook it out as she finished the last of her meal.

It was, to all outward signs, a simple huge square of canvas, like one of the awnings that used to keep rain off the pens, or a sail of the sort you would find on any vessel moving up and down the Great Mother River and her daughters. But the moment he shook it out, this expanse of canvas began to radiate the same heat as a flat rock on a pleasant summer day.

The same heating spell that kept the sands of the dragons’ pens hot kept this piece of fabric just as warm—courtesy of the Thet priests. This was how Avatre would be able to endure the cold and rain of the night. He shook it out over Avatre and made sure that she was entirely covered, before climbing in under it with her.

His clothing quickly began to steam; this was every bit as hot as the sands. Avatre was already relaxing.

It’s a pity this is so complicated a bit of magic, he thought, trying to keep his mind on something other than the fact that Aket-ten was somewhere below. Well, perhaps someday . . . someday when there are more of us. And no Magi.

The canvas had another use besides keeping Avatre warm all night. It was nearly the same color as the sandstone; if Avatre kept her head down and her tail tucked in, chances were no one would see her from directly below. And it wasn’t likely anyone across the canal would look at the Tower long enough to notice a lump on the top of it.

At least, no one would see her until he needed her to be seen.

And Aket-ten was somewhere below. Hurt, perhaps. Kaleth said that she hadn’t been hurt, but how could he be sure? Frightened, she was surely frightened, and mourning her dragon. Praying that help would somehow come before it was too late.

I’m here! he thought, hard, wondering if she could somehow pick it up. We’ll get you out, just hold on. . . .

It was very comfortable under the folds of that cloth. The canvas was waterproof enough that his clothing was drying out. The Thet priests said that the Magi wouldn’t sense this magic, even though it was so close to them, because the thing in the Tower was so magical already. The sail would be like a lit lantern under the desert sun at noon; you wouldn’t see the flame unless you were looking for it, and even then you would have to be practically on top of it.

How scared is she? How hurt is she? Have they already done anything to her? Was she in a bare, cold cell somewhere down below, chilled, aching, maybe hungry?

What had they been doing to her? He didn’t really want to think about it. . . .

He went over his plan in his mind. Before dawn he would have to get into place, moving while there was just enough light to see by, but not so much that anyone would be around to spot him. He hoped. There was a lot of hope involved in this. An awful lot of hope.

Avatre was already asleep. He could feel her breathing; she was very comfortable under this sail. And with the rain drumming on it, it was like the old days, back when he was just beginning the new wing of dragons, with rain drumming on the canopy that kept the water out of the hot sand.

Back when Toreth was alive. Before Aket-ten became one of them.

If they’ve hurt her. . . .

His stomach knotted, and not just with anxiety over Aket-ten.

He wished he was doing something other than just waiting.

Fear crept slowly over him, chilling his heart; he tried to drive it away by throwing himself into his planning.

There wasn’t a lot of room inside the tower; he would probably not have to face more than two people, the Magus and whoever he brought to help him. A guard, probably. He would have to get rid of both of them. . . .

Be honest. I’m going to have to kill them.

This was going to be hard. He’d never killed anyone face-to-face before, and he might have to. Would have to. Almost a certainty.

Actually, he hadn’t ever killed anyone—not that he was certain of. In that last fight when the tala ran out, he and the others had mostly just tried to make the Tian dragons angry, so they’d throw their riders. Or at least, get the dragons so agitated that they’d fight their Jousters, force them to make their beasts go to ground just so the Jouster could get off before the dragon could throw them. He’d wanted people dead, but he’d never done the deed with his own hands. He felt very conscious of the long knife at his hip. He was going to have to use that knife. . . .

That, he tried not to think about. He just drilled himself in what he had to do next when dawn came, dozing off, then waking, to go over it all again. He willed himself to see every step, over and over, until, as the rain slackened just a little and the first hint of dawn lightened the sky, he shook off the last of his sleepiness and went to work.

And it felt like he had done it a hundred times before.

First, he unloaded the second pannier in front of Avatre; she wasn’t awake enough to be hungry yet, but when she was, her breakfast would be waiting right there for her and she wouldn’t have to move from under the comfortable canvas to eat it. And then, she could go right back to sleep again. She probably would.

He fastened his rope to Avatre’s saddle, pulled on it to make sure it was going to hold. Avatre opened one eye sleepily.

“Stay,” he whispered to her. “Hold.”

Not at all loath to do just that, she closed her eye again, and went back to drowsing.

He slipped over the parapet at the corner, where the rope wouldn’t dangle in front of the window, getting soaked in the process, and walked his way down the wall until he got to a window. He’d been afraid it might be a narrow squeeze, but there was plenty of room for the windows were enormous, far bigger than he had thought, and there was nothing in the way of shutters or bars on them.

Then again, why should there be shutters or bars? Who would be up here? Who would want to break into the stronghold of the Magi?

Um, that would be me.

He clambered in through the window, flipped the rope out of the way so it wouldn’t show if anyone looked out, and waited right in the opening in the darkness. He had to wait for his eyes to adjust, and he wanted to avoid betraying his presence to someone who was paying attention by dripping all over the floor and leaving patches of water there.

The room in this tower was half full of something mechanical, and it was not what he had expected. He’d thought vaguely of statues of strange gods, of a room thick with incense, of—well, now he couldn’t put a name to what he’d expected.

It stood in the middle of a “magic circle” of inlaid brass in the middle of the room. He knew it was a magic circle because he had watched the Thet priests lay out something similar when they made the canvas for Avatre—in chalk on the floor, not in permanent brass inlaid in the floor. But the construction itself looked like one of Heklatis’ little mechanical toys. Except that it wasn’t so very “little.”

The mechanism itself was also made of brass. From the look of things, it could be swiveled and pointed in just about any direction.

The heart of the thing was the biggest crystal he had ever seen. Shaped like two pyramids clapped together, an enormous, perfect octahedron, he had never seen anything like it. It was flawless, clear, and half again as tall as he was. For a long moment, all he could do was to stare at it in wonder. He hadn’t known quite what to expect, but whatever it had been, his imagination had not been able to anticipate this.

Though why it should be called an “Eye,” he couldn’t think.

He shook off his amazement, and began looking for a place to hide. He might be here a long time.

There weren’t a lot of hiding places here; he finally found a kind of storage area, a three-sided cupboard in the corner between the windows opposite the place where he had come in. When he pulled the door open, it looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years. If there had ever been shelves in there, they were gone now. There were dusty bottles and jars on the floor, some of which inexplicably made his skin crawl. He shoved them aside and squeezed himself in, watching the room through the crack in the door. And it made him wonder, what had this place been used for, before it had been made into the home for the Eye? The Tower was older than the Eye. Probably the reason that the cupboard was still here was only because it was too much trouble to pull it out.

So far, so good.

Back to the hard part.

Waiting.

TWENTY

THERE were two possibilities for what would happen next. Either the Magi would bring Aket-ten here before the rest of the wing began their attack, or they would do so because the wing had begun their attack. He thought he was ready in either case.

It turned out to be the former rather than the latter.

He heard them coming long before he saw them. The hollow tower amplified every little sound from below.

A door opening and slamming shut, then footsteps, then voices.

A harsh, angry voice. “Get her under control, curse you! OW!”

“My lord specified that she is not to be damaged.” A second voice. Much calmer and deeper than the first.

“Not being damaged doesn’t—OW!—mean you can’t secure her—OW!—legs—OW! Seft take you, bitch! But not before I’m—OW!”

Kiron clutched the side of the cupboard, overcome by mingled elation and rage. Elation, because Aket-ten was clearly very much herself, and doing her best to inflict as much damage on her captor as she could. And rage—he wanted to fly down those stairs and slaughter both the men he could hear on the spot. Or the Magus, at least.

“If my Lord would just permit me to knock the girl unconscious—” Perfectly calm, and matter-of-fact. Which only made Kiron’s blood heat as he clenched his fists. Not just the Magus, then. He’d kill both of them.

“No! I need her awake and aware and undamaged in any—OW!—way!”

The first speaker was obviously the Magus. The other—probably a guard or a servant. From the sound of things, Aket-ten was concentrating on taking out her anger on the Magus.

“The stair is too steep to risk carrying a struggling girl up it, and carry her is what I shall be forced to do. So my lord will have to permit her the freedom of her legs, and bear with the consequences. Unless my lord is going to insist on my carrying her and is willing to take the chance of both of us falling and breaking our respective necks?”

The long pause that followed the statement, and the sense that the Magus was actually considering the option, made Kiron wince in spite of the fact that he wanted to pound both of them into the floor. Whoever this Magus was, he hadn’t won himself any friends with that pause. “No, no of course not,” said the Magus, a little too late. “But—OW!”

“If my lord would at least walk a few paces ahead, so that the girl cannot reach him—” Now the voice sounded wary as well as impatient, and Kiron wasn’t at all surprised. The Magi were not known for their forbearance toward their servants. And if anything went wrong, it would be the servant who was blamed for it.

He wished he could see them. What kind of servant was this? A guard? Or someone less able to put up a fight if—when—Kiron attacked? It didn’t take being a guard or a soldier to talk about hitting a bound and gagged girl on the head.

He’d like to think that no real soldier would think of such a thing—but he knew better. From the Tian Jousters who had hauled helpless Altan peasants (including women and children) into the air and dropped them, to the Altan soldiers who had put the Temple of the Twins under siege, there was rot in both armies, and the only way to stop it was to stop the war that had made atrocity acceptable and rewarded the officers who ordered it or looked the other way while it happened.

“Seft take you! Just get her up these stairs, and I don’t care how you do it!” the voice snarled.

He’s not gaining any goodwill from the servants today, that’s for sure.

“My lord is surely aware that even if I do not carry her, the girl could succeed in pushing me down the stairs or tripping me if her feet are left free. Is this truly what my lord wishes?”

The Magus paused, for too long, leaving the impression that he was considering the option of risking his servant’s life and limb.

You’re not going higher in his estimation, you bastard.

“Just get that halter on her neck and get her up here!” There was the sound of one set of footsteps moving a bit faster up the stairs, while the other two plodded along behind. “Walk in front of her and drag her if you have to! Come on! Get her moving, you lack-wit!”

After that, there was only the sound of footsteps; evidently, Aket-ten wisely elected not to resist anymore. Kiron held his breath as they made their way up the staircase. The big question was what the nature of the man helping the Magus would be. And how big he was.

Stay hidden, he warned himself. If you rush out without thinking, they can take you. If you wait until you can catch them both by surprise, you can take them. At some point fairly soon, the others will begin their attack, and it will attract a lot of attention. If you haven’t found an opening before then, that will be the time.

But he didn’t want to wait, not at all. His stomach was in a knot, every muscle was alive with the need to fight, and he practically vibrated with tension. He wanted to get out there and hurt them, the moment they appeared—

But he wasn’t exactly trained or armed for a real fight, not the kind that was going to happen here. He didn’t have a sword, because he didn’t know how to use one. He had a club, and a knife, and his wits. Not so bad against a Magus, but suicide against a trained soldier.

From his vantage point behind the crack in the door, Kiron saw the gleam of a light in the opening in the floor through which the staircase rose. Moments later, the Magus himself, carrying a lantern, emerged through the opening.

He wasn’t one of the Magi that Kiron knew, but his clothing, a fine long robe of purple linen and short cloak of the same material, a belt of gold plates, and a matching collar, marked him as someone important. Otherwise, he looked perfectly ordinary, not the sort of man that Kiron would look twice at, if they passed each other in the street. Middle-aged, thinning hair cropped at chin-level, clean-shaven, with the kind of visage that Orest called a “face-shaped face” with nothing to distinguish it from a thousand like it.

It struck him, as he looked at the perfectly average, beardless face, neither young nor old-looking, perhaps a little plumper than he should be, but nothing that could be called “fat,” that it was wrong that evil should look so banal. For evil this man was; he might or might not be personally responsible for the murder of dozens, the deaths of thousands, but he was involved, he knew about it, and he had willingly agreed to it, had probably participated in some fashion.

He had definitely participated in draining the Winged Ones, and their inability to see into the future as a consequence had killed and hurt people all over Alta during the earthshakes they could no longer predict.

So how was it that someone who had done all of this looked like a prosperous merchant about to make a great deal? There was a smug, self-satisfied smirk on the man’s face that made Kiron want to punch it.

But the next man rising out of the stair prevented him from doing any such thing.

Definitely a professional soldier, or at least, a professional bodyguard. The man was big, well-muscled, and Kiron was nowhere near a match for him.

But he was also angry. Kiron read that in his posture and his lack of expression. He might feign a servile nature, but he hated this Magus, and given half a chance and the certain knowledge that he could not be blamed for what followed, he would desert his “lord” in a heartbeat.

Trailing behind him, with a kind of collar and leash around her neck, gagged, with her hands tied in front of her, was Aket-ten.

Once again, he had to restrain himself to keep from rushing out.

If the bodyguard was angry, she was furious. Her eyes above the gag flashed with rage. Her posture was rigid, her whole manner proclaiming that, the moment she got a chance, she was going to do something to the man that he would regret for the rest of his days.

And that if she had anything to say about it, those days would be very short indeed,

That made him weak-kneed with relief. If she had been cowed, intimidated, beaten down, he would not have been able to keep himself from running in to rescue her immediately. And if she had been sunk deep in depression and mourning for Re-eth-ke, it would be a lot harder to get her motivated to get her out. She was ready to fight for her life and her freedom and that meant she was an ally and a potential accomplice, not a potential burden.

“Tie her over there,” the Magus said, pointing to a spot Kiron couldn’t see. “Look there—see the ring in the wall. Get her wrists tied up to that, then go, get out of here. I won’t need your so-called services any more.”

“If my lord is quite certain,” said the man.

“Yes, I am quite certain!” the Magus snapped. “I do not need your halfhearted and incompetent help, and what is more, you’ll only be a hindrance once I begin working magic.”

“Very well, my lord,” the man said, hiding both anger and satisfaction under a bland façade. “It will be as you wish.”

He took Aket-ten to the other side of the Eye, where Kiron couldn’t see them. When he moved back into Kiron’s narrow field of vision, he was alone.

“Go on, get out of here,” the Magus snarled, as he moved around to the same side of the device and out of sight. “Go! I don’t need you anymore.”

“Very well, my lord.” The guard bowed just enough to keep from being reprimanded, then followed his orders to the letter, leaving by the stair so quickly that if the Magus had been paying attention, he would have been more than just reprimanded.

But the Magus was busy with the device. Kiron knew that it was the device he was meddling with, and not Aket-ten, because the huge crystal began moving, very slowly rotating. And the Magus was muttering something, too low for Kiron to hear what it was.

The entire atmosphere of the room changed. Kiron felt his hair starting to stand on end, and not just metaphorically, but physically, the way it did sometimes during midnight kamiseens or when he was flying in the dangerous tempests of the season of rains, when lightning played in the storm.

There was a low hum coming from the Eye, like the droning of bees about to swarm. The Magus moved into his field of vision again, sketching signs in the air with his hands, still muttering under his breath.

The Eye rotated a little faster. It still wasn’t going at any great speed; a desert tortoise was a hundred times faster than it, but the fact that it was moving without anyone touching it was disturbing.

Aket-ten made a noise around her gag. If it had been a scream, or anything that sounded like a cry for help, Kiron would have been out there in an instant. It wasn’t; it sounded like an insult. The Magus ignored it, and Aket-ten. Whatever he wanted her for, she wasn’t a priority right now.

The room began to brighten. At first, for a confused moment, Kiron thought it was because the light was coming from the Eye. Then he realized that the light was coming from the wrong direction—not from the Eye, but roughly from the east.

He’s cleared the sky above the Tower. Now he has light to work with.

The Eye rotated a little faster, the hum deepened and strengthened, and now Kiron felt not only his hair standing on end, but a gut-deep reaction that made his knees feel weak. This was—wrong—wrong in a way he couldn’t put a name to, but could only feel.

No, it was more than that, worse than that. This was something that had once been right and good, and had been twisted out of all recognition; something deep inside him recognized that evil for what it was, and wanted only to run.

Never in all his life had he felt this deep, soul-shaking fear. Khefti-the-Fat had only threatened his body. The Tian soldiers had only taken his father. The Tian Jousters would only have taken his heart, had they taken Avatre. This thing—this thing would eat everything that he was, ever had been, or ever would be and leave behind an empty shell that might live, speak, talk, but would be less than an ashabti-figure of flesh instead of clay—and worst of all, the most horrible of all, he would know what had happened, know what he had lost, and know he would never get it back. All pleasure, all joy, all creativity would be sucked out of him, leaving nothing but an interminable gray and unvarying existence.

No wonder those former Winged Ones had done so little to save themselves. Death was preferable to that death-in-life of emptiness.

Aket-ten screamed, her shriek muffled by her gag, but giving voice to exactly the same terror that he was feeling.

He clutched the frame of the cupboard to keep himself upright, and concentrated all his will on not giving in to the terror.

And then, the Eye began to move faster, the pitch of that steady hum rose a little, and the terrible fear faded. It didn’t disappear, but it faded enough so that it was bearable.

What—was—that?

He shook his head a little to clear it. His stomach was still churning, and he was so drenched with sweat he was surprised the Magus couldn’t smell him. What had caused that overwhelming fear?

Why hadn’t the Magus been affected?

Now he could hear Aket-ten, choking on the gag, weeping hysterically and moaning. The Magus came into his field of vision, tilting his head to the side, and wearing an expression of pleased avidity.

“So sorry to upset you, girl,” he said, sounding gleeful rather than sorry. “But I needed to test you. The more power you have, the more strongly you react to the Eye as it spins up to full speed. By your reaction, I would say that you have quite a lot of power. Far more than we suspected.”

Kiron took a very slow, deep breath, as anger chased out the last remnants of terror. And in the brief moment when terror was gone, but anger had not yet flooded him with unreason, he knew he would have to keep that rage under complete control.

And he also knew that he could.

A slave, a serf, lives with endurance and patience. He learns it because he has no other choice; he must learn to be patient or die. Orest would have attacked the Magus the moment he appeared with Aket-ten in tow. Any of the others would have burst out of hiding in rage or terror by now. Even Ari probably would not have managed to control himself.

So maybe he was the right person to be here. . . . Keep gloating, you bastard, he thought, behind the white-hot rage invoked by the sound of Aket-ten weeping. Keep right on. When the Feather of Truth is weighed against your heart . . . I would not care to be you. And I swear you are going to meet the Judges a great deal sooner than you think.

“Now, I will just bring the Eye fully to life,” the Magus went on blithely. “Would you like to hear what your destined fate is?”

Aket-ten’s sobs choked off. Kiron couldn’t tell if it was because her own fear had turned to anger, or if it was because she was too terrified to weep. He hoped it was the former. He was controlling himself so tightly that every muscle felt as tight as a bowstring.

The Magus laughed. “Oh, do glare at me, girl. Really, you should feel flattered and honored. Your power will be going to serve Alta far more effectively than that trivial ability of yours to speak with animals ever could. Or—well, it goes to serve the Magi, but soon enough our welfare and that of Alta will be one and the same, so it hardly matters. First—” He made a few more passes in the air, and this time Kiron’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head as he saw the fingers leaving trails of glow in the air where they had passed, forming, for just one moment, signs and glyphs. “—first, I will bring the Eye up to full speed. I have already used some of your power, oh, about half of it, to clear the storm out of the skies over the Tower, so that the Eye has some sunlight to work with. I will use the rest of your power to keep the sky over the Tower clear forever, no matter what the season, by making a link between the earth and air energies, using the Eye itself as the physical aspect of that link. Never again will the rains prevent us from using the Eye to punish those who defy and endanger us. Just think! As long as the sun shines, the Eye will always be usable by daylight after this! Then, when I am finished with you—well, by then that pesky Tian army under the command of our renegades will be at the Fourth Ring, and I will proceed to use the Eye to remove them all from our consideration. Do you understand now what your trivial sacrifice is—”

The Magus stopped in midsentence, and stared out the window somewhere behind Aket-ten. “—what in the—”

Kiron strained his ears, and thought he heard faint and far-off crashes, screams.

“Curse them all to Seft!” the Magus exclaimed angrily. “Wretched dragons! I knew we should have exterminated them all while we had the chance!”

They’ve begun! Kiron thought, with a lift of his heart. The others had begun the attack on the forces surrounding the Temple of All Gods, using the jars of Akkadian Fire. They could not have chosen a better moment to mount their distraction.

“Well, we’ll just have to speed this up so I can exterminate them now,” the Magus muttered under his breath. “Burn the vermin out of the sky—about time—should have been done years ago.” He made a few more passes, and this time the glowing lines he left in the air hung there and stayed. And then, as the Eye spun faster and faster, it, too, began to emit light, until a glowing blur hung in its place.

“And now, girl, it’s time for you to fulfill your destiny,” the Magus said, and turned his back on Kiron’s hiding place.

Knowing he would never get a better chance, Kiron grabbed his dagger, and flung open the door. It crashed into the wall as he leaped for the Magus’s back.

Only a last-moment dodge by his opponent saved the Magus from the fate he had meted out to others.

The Magus twisted cleverly out of the way, then whirled and grappled with him, trying to seize control of the dagger he held. At that moment, he realized something else. For someone as portly and out-of-shape as the Magus looked, he was still heavier and stronger than Kiron.

Kiron was angry; the Magus would not hesitate for a moment to kill.

Immobilize him—

The Magus wrenched free of him, leaving his cloak in Kiron’s hands. Kiron flung it aside, and the Magus went for him again, all of his attention on the knife in Kiron’s hand.

Behind them, the Eye was glowing white-hot, too bright to look at directly, spinning so fast that the hum had become a howl.

The Magus grabbed with both hands for his knife hand, intent on getting the weapon away from him, and suddenly Kiron had a flash of inspiration.

He let the Magus have the knife, just let it go as soon as the Magus got his hands on the hilt. And in the moment of confusion, while the Magus stared at the weapon he was now in control of, Kiron pulled the club he was carrying out of the waistband of his kilt, and cracked it down, hard, on the offending wrist.

With a screech of pain, the Magus dropped the knife from fingers that suddenly didn’t want to work anymore.

On the backswing, Kiron connected with his temple with a solid thunk that nearly knocked the Magus over.

The Magus staggered sideways, rotated on his heel, stumbled blindly toward the Eye and—

And crossed the brass circle inlaid in the floor.

And that was when every plan Kiron had made went right out the metaphorical window.

The Magus went rigidly upright, and began to scream, as his body began to—

Well, Kiron could only think “unravel” because as Kiron stared in horrified disbelief, it looked as if invisible fingers were tearing him apart, bit by bit, except the bits didn’t bleed. All the bits were sucked into the glowing vortex that the Eye had become as they were torn off. It started at his hands and feet, and as his feet vanished, he just hung in the air, as if suspended on a hook, like a discarded garment.

The screaming went on and on, as the unraveling went on, and the Eye glowed brighter and brighter with every little bit of the Magus that it sucked into itself. And part of Kiron wanted to stand and watch in stunned amazement—

But the part of him that was in control scooped up the knife from the floor, and ran to where Aket-ten was standing with her back against the wall, her hands over her head, tied at the wrist to a brass ring embedded in the wall. As he sawed through the leather thongs biting into her wrist, the screaming mercifully stopped.

But the Eye continued to spin—

There was a feeling of intense pressure as he cut through the last of the thongs, and then, a kind of dull whuff, as if something very heavy, but soft, had been dropped in the middle of the room.

As he untied the gag holding a ball of rags in her mouth, Aket-ten’s eyes went wider than he’d ever seen before. And when he turned to look, he understood.

The Eye was awake, and evidently had a mind of its own about what should be done now. That beam of light, thicker than his thigh, and too bright to look at, lanced out of the window, and was burning its way across the buildings of the Central Island. Flames rose beneath the Tower, and the sounds of screams and a terrible heat and the smell of scorched rock surrounded him.

The Eye had already incinerated the Royal Palace by the time he turned, had decimated the buildings around it, and was cutting a swathe across the Island toward the canal. When it reached the edge of the canal and kept going, water bubbled and exploded in steam where it passed.

“How do you stop this thing?” he yelled at Aket-ten over the discordant howl the thing was putting out.

“I don’t know!” she shouted back.

And just as if the situation they were in wasn’t bad enough, he felt the stone of the Tower beneath him tremble, and his stomach lurched with that all-too-familiar, sickening sensation that marked an earthshake.

No time for argument. He grabbed Aket-ten’s wrist and ran for the window—not, thank heavens, the one the Eye was aiming its light-weapon out of.

He thrust his arm out of it, and groped for the rope.

It wasn’t there.

His stomach lurched again, this time with fear. Oh, no—where’s Avatre? Did she fly off? Did the Eye frighten her? Great Hamun, is she anywhere nearby?

Panicked now, he whistled, praying she was near and could hear him, because if she wasn’t—

And Avatre swooped down out of the sky, just as the Tower shook and swayed under his feet again, and out of the window he could see the ripple of the earthshake move across the land and water, as if someone had shaken out a rug.

It flung them toward the window as Aket-ten shrieked at the top of her lungs; it tossed Aket-ten over the sill, while he shouted for Avatre and the dragon tried desperately to maneuver closer.

“Kiron!” Aket-ten screamed—the rest was undecipherable.

“Hold on!” he screamed back. He hung on with one hand to the windowframe, precariously sprawled over the windowsill; Aket-ten had been pitched right out of the window and only his grip on her wrist kept her from plummeting to her death below. A second jolt rocked the Tower and broke his grip on the stone, and he felt himself rolling over the windowsill and out the window, completely unable to stop himself, pulled by Aket-ten’s weight.

Avatre twisted herself over sideways in some impossible maneuver his eyes refused to accept just as he began to fall, and somehow she got herself halfway under him, with Aket-ten still hanging desperately onto his left hand, and he sprawled over the saddle, holding on desperately with his right. As the beam of the Eye began to go everywhere with the rocking of the Tower, Avatre lurched over in the air and kited sideways, trying to compensate for their weight, trying to get down to the ground before they fell—

No— Aket-ten’s hand slipped a little out of his grip, as she continued to scream at the top of her lungs, her eyes fixed on his and full of terror. Sweat poured down his arm, making his hand, and hers, slippery. He tried to pull her up to where she could grab a harness strap or something, but though his arm screamed with the effort, he couldn’t raise her at all. She flailed, trying to catch his hand with her free hand, but couldn’t seem to get a grip.

No! Her hand slipped a little more, despite the fact that they were both holding on as hard as they could. Now instead of holding to her wrist, he only had hold of her hand. And his fingers were loosening. . . .

NO! He felt it—she was still slipping, as the tower collapsed behind them in a tumble and roar of stone and dust, as the earth continued to shake, as Avatre fanned her wings and tilted over sideways, desperately trying to keep them from falling—

She screamed, he screamed—

And then, lumbering clumsily out of the dust cloud, canted to one side, an indigo-and-silver miracle.

Mouth gaping open with effort, Re-eth-ke tucked herself under Aket-ten just as her fingers slipped out of his.

And caught her, as they had all practiced with sandbags, sliding her head under the falling human and forcing the victim to slide down her neck to her shoulders. It was perfect. It was beautiful. He shouted aloud with elation.

Aket-ten sprawled athwart her dragon’s neck and shoulders, and as Re-eth-ke sank lower with every wingbeat, she clung on desperately without saddle or reins to help her.

There was a wound in the dragon’s shoulder that had been stitched shut, and holes in the webbing of her wing. Still she bravely fought to get her rider to the ground safely—which, in her mind, quite clearly meant away from the Central Island, across the canal.

Across the canal, where a line of fire divided the half-ruined Temple of All Gods from the armed force that had been besieging it (and which now was fleeing to a man). Well, staggering away, because the earth was still convulsing, and mounting wreckage made every step hazardous.

Re-eth-ke landed heavily in an open courtyard, with Avatre right behind her. Half a dozen Healers came running into the center of the courtyard to take Aket-ten from Re-eth-ke’s back, but she slid off by herself, and flung herself into Kiron’s arms as he jumped down from Avatre’s saddle to meet her.

Ah, gods! I have you, I have you safe at last!

“I knew you’d come!” she sobbed, as she clung to him, her wet cheek pressed into his chest. “I knew you’d come! I knew it!” She was trembling all over, his brave Aket-ten, but so was he.

As he held her, it dawned on him now just why she had been so aggressive and ready to fight, rather than sunk in mourning. She had known, of course, that Re-eth-ke was alive, something none of the rest of them had any way of knowing, and that had bolstered her courage and her spirits. She had what he did not, the bond of mind-to-mind communication with her dragon, so she had known all along how hurt Re-eth-ke was, that her injuries were being tended to (which they obviously had been), and what was happening to her. Very probably, it had been the Healers themselves who had gone out to bring the wounded dragon into the shelter of their temple when the guards had taken Aket-ten away.

And the moment that the injured dragon had sensed that Aket-ten was in deadly danger and afraid, she came, as fast as her damaged body would carry her. Given how slowly she was flying, she had probably begun looking for release from the moment that the Magus worked that magic that had so frightened them both.

But now, she needed human reassurance as well.

For that matter, so did he. He had come close, so close to losing her. He wrapped his arms around her and held her; his heart seemed to swell until it occupied his whole chest, and all he could think was how he never wanted to let her go. “I’d come for you no matter where you were,” he murmured into her hair. “I always will.”

Another earthshake rocked the courtyard, throwing them against each other. The dragons flattened out their necks and whined, looking anxiously from side to side, and as the shaking went on, something odd, some inner prompting, made him look up and across the canal to the central island——the central island. Which was sinking. Or least, the buildings were sinking. Even as he watched, bracing himself against the trembling of the earth, arms holding tight to Aket-ten, a great plume of mixed sand and water erupted from the place where the Tower had stood, and the remains of the Temple of Hamun vanished from sight.

TWENTY-ONE

WHEN the shake stopped, Kiron reached out to seize one of the Healers without letting go of Aket-ten. “Where are—” he began.

“The rest of the Jousters have already taken some of our people to safety,” the Healer replied, even though she was shaking with reaction. “They said they are coming back—”

“We cannot count on them returning soon enough, nor often enough to get you all out,” he interrupted her. “You have to get off this ring, maybe out of Alta altogether. The shocks are getting worse and—” He let go of her arm and gestured at the Central Island, at buildings half-sunk or completely vanished. “—Look. I don’t know why this is happening, but it is, and it isn’t—”

Another shake began, he and Aket-ten held each other up, and the water of the canal began to heave and splash. Across the canal a spout of sand and water erupted in a new place, and what was left of the Palace began to sink.

This one was definitely worse. Colonnades around the garden went over, one after another, and several people were knocked off their feet. And the Temple of All Gods had been made to withstand shakes.

“This isn’t right!” the woman cried, when the shake was over, from where she was kneeling on the ground. “They’re getting stronger!”

“And longer. We have to get you out of here.” He thought, hard. “On the water is safest. Have you boats?”

She nodded, relief suffusing her round features. “Enough for everyone, I think, since so many of us have already escaped. And people who know how to row them.” Without waiting for direction, she got to her feet and moved purposefully in the direction of the Healers clustered around Re-eth-ke.

One of them shortly came over to him. “We can get out by water,” he said soberly, “But there are hundreds, thousands of people on this ring.” And he looked at Kiron expectantly.

Kiron blinked, realizing that this man, this Healer—who was by no means an inexperienced man by his age—was looking to him for an answer.

And one came to him. “Aket-ten and I can get where no one else can, and see what no one else can—from above. And the people of Alta know Jousters, and probably trust Jousters more than anyone else right now.”

Aket-ten wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and gently shoved at him to get him to loosen his arms. She stood away from him a little bit, and sniffed, but raised her chin. “I am Aket-ten, Winged One, Daughter of Lord Ya-tiren. People will listen to me. We will guide folk off this ring, and off the next, until they are safely away from danger. But Alta is dead, and there is no saving it.”

The Healer dropped his head, and when he raised it again, Kiron saw the marks of grief on his face. “You say no more than what we have thought these many moons, Winged One. But it is an ill moment, hearing it spoken aloud.”

“Someone must say it, or we will all perish.”

The speaker was an old woman, hair entirely white, falling in the “royal” hairstyle of hundreds of tiny plaits, each ending in a gold bead. She stood very erect, and her eyes, dark and shadowed, looked directly into Kiron’s. He had never seen her, but he knew who she was, the Eldest, the Chief Healer of the Temple of All Gods. “We must save what we can. We will take the boats and make for the harbor—”

“No!” That was still another Healer, a rough-looking old fellow with a fair number of scars. “Not so, Eldest. I know the sea, and the sea does strange things in shakes; it can withdraw for leagues, then come rushing back and overwhelm all in its path. No, we must take the boats and make our way through the canals inland, to one of the Daughters, and thence up the Great Mother River if we must.”

“I bow to your experience, Te-ren-hatem,” she said, after a moment. “But there is one thing we must do; it is more important to Heal that dragon now than anything else, no matter how much it costs our Healers by touch.”

The man looked at her aghast. “But Eldest, it is but an animal, and there are many, many injured and more to come!”

“You Healers by touch can Heal a few, perhaps even a dozen, before you are exhausted,” the old woman said, with a look that dared him to challenge her. “But unless you spend that same strength to heal that dragon, she will not last past noon. And then, where will all those thousands be who will need the guidance of her Jouster?” As the man’s face fell, she softened her tone. “I know it is hard hearing this, Te,” she said softly. “But you know as well as I that Healing is, and always has been, a balancing game, weighing out resources against the greatest good. In the best of times, that balancing never needs to come into play, but this is the worst of times, and we must do what must be done. The greatest good, right now, is to heal that poor, faithful animal, so that she can serve all of Alta that survives.”

He bowed. “Yes, Eldest,” he said softly. “I will get the others.”

As he moved off, the Healer turned back to Kiron and Aket-ten. “And as for you—heed me, children. The same advice—nay, orders!—apply to you. Save the ones you can. Save the most that you can. There will be people trapped, hurt, begging for help that you cannot aid. You must leave them, leave them behind, leave them to others, but leave them. If there is a later, you may come back, but if you linger over one, when you could have saved many in that same time, you will have done the wrong thing.”

He gritted his teeth; he hated hearing that, but he knew it was true, and he silenced Aket-ten’s protest with a squeeze of his hand on hers. “Hard truths are still truths. Eldest, thank you. I will get aloft; I know that when Re-eth-ke is fit to fly, Aket-ten will do likewise, and as we see the others returning, I will send them to do the same.” He squeezed Aket-ten’s hand again, just as another shake began.

This time all three of them instinctively reached for each other and braced one another through the shake. “They are getting worse,” the Eldest Healer said, when the dreadful rumbling and crashing had subsided—and across the canal, yet another building (or what was left of one) had vanished.

“Then I must go.” He bent and kissed Aket-ten. “You and I must separate, to cover the widest area. If the sea does what that Healer thinks it will—you must go to the harbor and warn them first, for you are the daughter of Ya-tiren, and you know how to command.”

Her head came up, though her lower lip trembled a little. “I will do that,” she said, without hesitation. “Then I shall return and work the First Ring and so forth.”

“Good.” He did not say, I know you will be fine, or I am counting on you, because he did not need to say any such thing. This was Wingleader to Jouster. He would treat her as she wanted to be treated, not as his beloved whom he wished to protect, nor the noble daughter, but as any of the other members of his wing.

She could not manage a smile, but she gave a solemn nod. He sketched a salute, and sprinted for Avatre. She was only too happy to be in the air, even if that air was full of dust and thick with the smoke of many fires.

He began working his way along the canal, for that was where there were likely to be boats. His appearance was marked by shouts and cries for help, some of which made him want to break down and weep with frustration over how little he could actually do. But he hardened himself, and limited himself to sending people to where he had seen undamaged boats, despite pleas for other aid. “There are only two of us Jousters right now; we have to find and warn others. Make for the river,” he told them, over and over again. “The sea is not to be trusted in a shake! Get as far away as you can, until you can no longer feel the shaking.”

“The Magi?” he was asked, by virtually every party he encountered. “What has happened to the Magi?”

“They are dead,” he always responded, because even if it wasn’t entirely true, no Magus would be safe in these lands for generations to come. “As are the Great Kings and Queens, and most who dwelled on Central Island. The gods have deserted them, even the evil gods that they once served. Alta is dying and there is no saving her. Ocean and marsh alike are taking her back with each new shake; it is the gods’ own will, and you cannot fight the gods. Now fly! Fly, lest you die with her!”

And at that point, since most of them owned no more than what they stood up in or had saved from the wreckage of their homes, they did not argue with him, they picked up their belongings, aided the wounded, and made for the boats.

Strangely enough—at least, until he thought about it—was that no one begged him to carry them away. That was what he had most dreaded, especially if it came from someone who was injured.

But they didn’t. In fact, they kept a cautious distance from him when he landed. And then, after a few frantic reactions to sudden moves from Avatre he realized that they were used, not to tame dragons, but the wild-caught ones.

The wild-caught ones were still dangerous to anyone not a Jouster or a dragon boy. Someone visibly injured might well be considered a possible menu item . . . and the injured were well aware of that and made a great effort to appear perfectly fine. It might have been funny, if it hadn’t been so tragic.

The only times when he did stop and pick someone up were when he found children wandering alone, or—more tragically—infants with dead parents. Then he stopped, caught them up, and carried them to the next group with children or infants. He never gave the impromptu guardians a chance to object either. “We are all Altans,” he would say bluntly. “We will care for our own. Tend to this little one.”

No one refused. Maybe they were afraid to. In any event, when he checked back with groups with which he had left children, they were caring for the foundlings as well as their own. In a couple of cases, he found a woman in the party cradling the child possessively, and he wondered, had he united a bereft mother with a replacement for the child she had lost?

Ari was the first to return. Kiron spotted him coming in from the south, and went to meet him. By then, Aket-ten was in the air, had presumably dealt with the people at the harbor, and was working the interior of the First Ring, guiding people through the maze of broken buildings and toppled statues to the one causeway still intact—a floating footbridge made of raft sections lashed together, a replacement for a causeway that had collapsed in an earlier shake.

He didn’t even need to say anything, he just pointed at Re-eth-ke hovering in the middle distance, and Ari practically went limp with relief. He straightened immediately, though. “We saw Re-eth-ke rise from the Healers’ Court!” he called. “I thought I was having a vision at first. But Seft’s own chaos was breaking loose, so we landed and each took a sick or wounded Healer out.”

“It’s getting w—” Kiron began, when another shake interrupted him.

By now, there wasn’t much left of the Central Island, and with this shake, buildings were beginning to sink on First Ring as well. Ari took in the damage with widened eyes.

“By Hamun’s horns!” he exclaimed. “What is happening here?”

“We’re evacuating the city, sending them south, getting as many into boats as we can,” Kiron called. “The rest—we’re finding safe paths to that causeway and guiding them from the air, and I don’t know why things are sinking. Maybe it’s a different sort of shake than we’ve ever had before. I want you to intercept the others and tell them that’s what they’re to do. Then you go to the others, the ones with the Tian army, Great King. The Magi here are dead or running, the Queens and most of the nobles, if they were on Central Island, are dead, too. You are Great King and commander of the Armies of Alta, which are about to close in on the Tian forces. The greater need for you is there, not here.”

He’d thought about that, as well, in the time since he and Aket-ten had begun this evacuation. There was no doubt of it in his mind; under the heading of “greatest good,” Ari could help to save a few thousand, of which most could save themselves so long as they knew where a clear path was, or he could take his place as the ruler of Alta, and save—perhaps—hundreds of thousands.

And, Ari being Ari and very far from stupid, saw that for himself right away. So he just saluted, with no sense of irony or mocking at all, and turned Kashet’s head south without another word.

Oset-re was the next back, and he took immediately to working directly across First Ring from where Aket-ten was. By the time Huras arrived, they had most of First Ring cleared, or at least, as much as it was going to be cleared without help to extricate people who were trapped past bare hands getting them out. Those who hadn’t already gotten across the causeway at least knew where the clear path to it was. Aket-ten had gotten the brilliant notion of having the survivors splash paint, or mud, or use anything else that would make a mark on the way, to show where the safe route was. That sped up the evacuation of those behind the first out immeasurably.

The Second Ring had begun to evacuate itself, warned by the collapse of Central Island and the First Ring, and by those escaping across the causeway. Boats were already fleeing, and people streaming across the two floating-raft causeways linking the Second Ring to the Third.

And on the Third Ring—now there was help. The Third Ring was home to the army. There were fewer buildings as such; fewer places for people to get trapped in wreckage. But even more important, the soldiers of Alta were used to helping in the wake of shakes, and now they, under the direction of their officers, were organizing the evacuation as refugees poured over the causeways.

It was to these officers that Kiron now gave a different piece of news.

“The False Kings are dead,” he said grimly, “and their foolish or deluded Queens with them. But Alta has a Great Queen and a King; Queen Nofret-te-en, once betrothed of Toreth-aket. She was wedded by the Mouth of the Gods, Kaleth-aket, to Ari-en-anethet, rider of the dragon Kashet; he who was chosen to be Great King by birth, marriage to the Lady Nofret, and the will of the gods. And,” he would add with a significant lift of an eyebrow, “He is no friend of the Magi.”

Of course, this was news to them, but it was clearly welcome news. It put heart in them, gave impetus to their effort.

But the one thing they asked that he couldn’t answer was, “How far are we to evacuate?”

To which he could only answer “Judge by what you would do yourself. How far would you?”

Because he wanted to say that the Third Ring was far enough . . . but as another shake hit, and he got up into the air, he saw that half of First Ring was gone, the same sand-and-water geysers were spouting on Second, and buildings there were sinking.

“The shakes are getting worse,” said one grizzled Captain of Hundreds grimly, when it was over. “It’s not natural. You get a big shake, then you get your smaller after-shakes. You don’t get shakes that are bigger with each one that hits! It’s all the fault of those cursed Magi!”

Kiron nodded. By now, his half of the wing was back; Aket-ten, Kiron himself, Huras, Oset-re and Pe-atep had divided Third Ring into quarters. Aket-ten, Huras, Oset-re and Pe-atep were working the sections, while Kiron made contact with the officers. Some of those officers had, to his immense relief, sent rescue parties back to Second Ring to try and dig out the trapped.

Though, truth be told, there were fewer of those than he would have thought. The shakes that Altans had been living with since the Magi began using the Eye had knocked down most dubious structures a year or more ago, and living with so many shakes had taught most Altans how to survive them.

But now that the officers and fighters had shaken off their brief paralysis of being without orders or a leader to give those orders, it was looking as though the Jousters were redundant here.

Which meant it was time for the wing to reunite.

As the army moved its rescue and evacuation efforts to Fourth Ring, and the other four finished their segments of Third, he rounded them up, and signaled them to land. “We’re done!” he called, and got nods of agreement from all four.

“Seventh Ring and Ari?” Huras called back, looking much more at ease than he had in—well, months. By this, Kiron deduced he’d found his family intact, and they were already making their way to safer ground.

“Have you—” he began, then hesitated. “Are your families—”

“Mine’s in a boat,” Huras replied, with satisfaction.

“What there is of my family should be across the causeway to Third Ring by now,” Pe-atep told him, and shrugged.

“Our city manor is deserted,” Oset-re said. “But it was shut up in an orderly fashion. I assume the family went to the estate in River Horse Nome, and the servants and slaves left behind have gotten out.”

“Right. Then Ari needs us. Time to go be the Great King’s wing.”

“Time to find those so-called advisers, you mean,” Aket-ten said grimly, as he signaled Avatre to take off.

True enough, he thought, but what will we do with them when we find them?

He did not doubt that they were with the Tian army. The Tian King would be leading his forces, and he would insist on his three closest advisers being with him. No King, whether he be Tian, Altan, or skin-wearing barbarian, left the leading of his army at such a decisive moment to his generals. Such a duty was part of being King, and unless the King was very old, or sick, or had a coregent to wear the War Crown for him, it was expected. Where the King went, the advisers went also.

We aren’t Thet priests, to defend ourselves against magic. . . .

Then, of course, there was an entirely separate issue in Ari meeting with the Tian King—the King who had personally given him the Gold of Honor, not once, but several times. Impossible that he would not recognize Ari. What he would do about it was anybody’s guess.

And then to find out—if he didn’t already know—that Ari was a hitherto-unacknowledged, and possibly unknown nephew. . . .

But that was not Kiron’s problem, it was Ari’s. Kiron’s problem was to get the rest of the wing to wherever Ari was—

Then he realized that would be easier than he thought.

“Aket-ten!” he shouted, as they moved south across the Fifth Canal (which was now dotted with boats). “Ask Re-eth-ke where the others are!”

He suspected that the dragons would have some innate sense of where the rest of their kind might be, especially if they were nestmates, and it seemed he was right. Aket-ten pointed, and they all changed direction in accordance with her guidance, as another shake made the water of the canal slosh in its basin.

So intent was he on assessing the damage to the rings below them that it wasn’t until they were crossing the Seventh Ring (wide enough that entire farming estates were set up there) and approaching the eighth and final canal, that he realized he should have known all along where the Tian army would be.

Because the Tian army was just starting across the only “bridge” that could accommodate them all, the so-called “Grand Causeway” of the Eighth Canal. It was huge, wide enough for forty men to march side by side. Of course, it had to be that big, after all, the Altan army had to use it to get out of Alta City. It was also the only way for a large force to cross the Eighth Canal without going hundreds of leagues north.

The advisers—and Kiron could see them, in three war chariots behind the King’s chariot—knew that this was a potential ambush point, and they knew that the Eye could reach this far. But there was no sign of the Altan army, and the advisers must be certain that on an overcast and rainy day like this one, the Eye could not be used.

There was no need to look for Ari, though. Planted right in the middle of the causeway, just before it connected with the land of the Seventh Ring, were Ari and Kashet. Lined up behind them, Orest and blue Wastet, Menet-ka and indigo Bethlan, Gan and green Khaleph, and Kalen on brown Se-atmen.

The Tians might have expected an ambush. They didn’t expect this.

The Tian King, mindful of the fact that the massive number of troops behind him took time to react to anything, had already slowed his chariot to a crawl as they approached Ari. Ari was wearing his blue War Crown rather than a Jousting helmet, and that would keep the Tian King from recognizing him until they got very close, but it couldn’t be long now. And just how did Ari intend to stop the Tian army with five Jousters?

This isn’t what I’d have done, Kiron thought, as he urged Avatre to more speed; Ari was going to need all of them to back him if he had any hope of pulling off a bluff. I’d have come in and plucked those advisers off their chariots and dropped them. Then I’d have gone into negotiation. . . .

But he wasn’t the Great King. Ari was. And Ari was the one making the decisions.

Then, some instinct, something caught out of the corner of his eye, or a distant rumble made him turn his gaze briefly back the way they had come. So he was the one who saw the thing that was going to render all of Ari’s plans null, the ripples in the land, like ocean waves, racing toward Eighth Canal and the causeway. . . .

He shouted in alarm, and pointed back at the on-rushing earthshake; the others looked, and stared, dumbfounded. Knowing that Ari couldn’t hear him, he shouted at the Jouster anyway. When that wave hit the causeway—

Perhaps Ari couldn’t hear him, but Kashet most certainly could sense something.

With a startled bark of alarm, and with no warning to his rider, Kashet launched himself into the air, followed shortly thereafter by the other four.

The Tian King and his advisers had just about enough time to register that there was something else wrong, when the shake-wave hit where they were standing.

For hundreds of years, this causeway had stood firm, proof against the worst that man or nature could throw at it. Today, it met something it could not stand firm against.

As Avatre threw up her head, snorting with alarm, the causeway disintegrated in an explosion of churning water, sand spouts, flying stones and brick, and thrashing horses. The last few soldiers just setting foot on the causeway had enough time to fling themselves backward to save themselves. The rest were flung into the water of the Eighth Canal. Whether or not they could swim was irrelevant; very little was going to survive being dropped into the midst of a collapsing causeway.

The Great Tian King and his advisers did not even have time to understand what was happening before they were gone.

EPILOGUE

ROUGHLY half of the Tian army was left after the causeway collapsed, but most of the senior officers of the army were gone, and the rest were having no luck in convincing the common foot soldiers that the collapse had been anything other than the hand of the gods raised against the Tians.

Ari was in no way discouraging this attitude. When he landed again, wearing the very Tian Blue War Crown, and declaring his lineage, most of the army was perfectly willing to declare for him, and the rest were perfectly willing to keep their mouths shut about their opinions.

Especially after the Altan army that had been lying in ambush closed in behind them. They were trapped between the canal and an overwhelming opposing force; they were leaderless and masterless, and to a man, they surrendered.

With ruthless efficiency, Ari set the Tian army to creating shelters for the evacuees from the rings. That last shake was the final shake, but Kiron didn’t know that for two days, because he had gotten an idea, and as soon as Ari was firmly in charge, he took the entire wing back to Sanctuary. But not to stay.

The dragons remained only for a good long night’s rest, and then came flying back—but this time, carrying double burdens.

Kaleth, in full priestly regalia, was up behind Kiron. Nofret flew on her own dragon, which was just old enough and strong enough to keep up—and she was begowned in mist linen and a small fortune in ancient jewelry, wearing something enough like the Iris Crown of the Great Queens as made no difference. The rest of them carried Tian senior priests, except for Aket-ten, who had the Eldest Winged One.