Mercedes Lackey - Aerie

by Aerie (lit)

  The animals were fairly evenly spaced out as if they had been roaming loose for days. Herd animals did that, especially in sparse grazing areas.

  This was delightful for the dragons, of course. It was easy hunting, and they were quite happy with it. But Kiron had a queasy feeling in his stomach, and he knew he was not the only one wondering with dread what they would find.

  Behind them, the sun-disk drew near enough to the horizon that the light began to change, growing more golden, less white. Their own shadows stretched long on the ground beneath and ahead of them, as did the shadows of the scrubby trees and the occasional animal. Heat now radiated up at them from the ground, rather than burning down on them from above. And those passing shadows the dragons cast—they made the animals below them startle and flee, suggesting that other dragons had been coming here of late for the easy hunting.

  There was a bump, a group of irregularities on the horizon, the wrong shape for a natural formation.

  The town. Kiron gave the others the signal to drop down closer to the ground. He needed to be able to see what—if anything—was moving down there. The shapes disappeared for a while into the general landscape, then sharpened out again, now close enough to make out that they were buildings. And there was just nothing there besides those buildings. No sign of humans. No one on the road. There should have been people on the road, people coming into town from gathering deadfall, herdsmen bringing in the herds—

  There should have been smoke from cooking fires.

  Nothing.

  As they approached their goal, more than just the absence of people going toward it struck Kiron.

  It was silent.

  A border town should be a noisy place. After all, it had sprung up purely to serve a garrison of men far from home. "Two taverns for every temple," was the saying about such places. At this time of day there should be men carousing in the beer shops. There should be people calling in families for dinner. Flute girls and storytellers should be setting up near the beer shops. Children should be crying, goats bawling, donkeys braying.

  But the only sounds were the barking and growling of dogs in the street.

  Cautiously, they circled the dragons overhead, but the only things moving anywhere were animals, all running wild, mostly dogs and cats, with a donkey drowsing at the side of one of the town wells, and a goat incongruously on a rooftop.

  And a pack of jackals slinking down the street, that dropped their ears and ran at the sight of the dragons overhead.

  As they circled, Kiron glanced over at the priest, who was frowning in concentration as he gripped the straps that held him in the double saddle. But the priest finally shook his head and gave the hand sign for "land."

  Kiron had to hope that the man hadn't sensed anything hostile.

  He picked what seemed to be a logical spot, just at the outskirts of town and near one of the taverns, open and with plenty of room for the dragons to take off again if they had to. He was glad now they had all come armed. Five men and four dragons—that was formidable if they were up against humans. But if they weren't—

  He'd never seen a demon, nor any other supernatural creature, and he really didn't want to. He couldn't doubt their existence, given that he had seen the Magi at work, and had heard Kaleth speaking as the Mouth of the Gods, but that was all. He didn't know anyone who had, much less anyone who had fought one. There were legends, of course; the trouble was, unlike Ari, he was no scribe to remember them all.

  The dragons landed one at a time, Avatre first, as he gave her the signal to be wary. Armed with spears, bows and slings—and in the case of the priest, presumably magic—they moved cautiously into the town.

  The streets were as deserted from ground level as they had appeared from above. They approached the first building cautiously. It was a tavern, with two small tables and six overturned stools outside, and a bundle of barley painted crudely on the wall next to the door. Huras motioned to them to stop, moved forward a few paces, and sniffed.

  "Don't smell anything rotting," he said.

  "Jackals—" Pe-atep pointed out reluctantly. "Wild dogs—"

  Kiron shivered. That wasn't anything he wanted to think about. If everyone was dead, that was almost unthinkable. But jackals… if jackals had gotten to the bodies here, this entire town would be haunted by hungry, unburied ghosts. And they would be very angry.

  "I don't think we should stay here after dark," Oset-re said, nervously.

  Huras squared his shoulders, and eyed the open door. The canvas door flap was down, so they couldn't see inside. "I'm going into the tavern."

  "We're all going into the tavern," Kiron said firmly. "And for right now we're all sticking together. No one is going wandering off by himself no matter what. I don't care what we see or hear, we all stay in a group. Let's go."

  They advanced on the building with no idea of what they were going to find when they pushed aside the door flap. Kiron felt sweat prickling all along his spine, and he gripped his spear tightly with both hands. The four dragons stirred and flipped the tips of their wings nervously, their eyes fixed on their riders.

  Kiron reached for the canvas flap, and shoved it over on its rod, letting the last of the light from the setting sun come streaming into the main room. And what they found was…

  Nothing.

  No bodies, no blood, no sign of an armed struggle. The room was in a shambles, of course, but it looked random. Not the sort of thing that would happen because of a fight. Plague had been Kiron's first thought, that the people here had been sick. That didn't explain the soldier they had found, but maybe his fate was unrelated. People could have just crawled inside to die, leaving the streets deserted.

  This had been a beer shop, as opposed to the sort of tavern that also sold food. They found overturned stools, opened jars of beer spilled on the two tables, and strangest of all, money on the counter, exactly as if someone had paid for beer and no one had collected his money. If there had been a fight, if some overwhelming force had come and taken the town, that money would not be there.

  And if it was plague—people in a plague town don't keep going to beer shops.

  It looked almost as if something had gotten the attention of everyone here, something so startling they had all gone out into the street to look at it. But there was no sign of what had then happened to them. The back of the shop had been set up as living quarters, and there were no signs of anyone there either. The only thing that they did find that was an absolute indicator that something had happened very abruptly—the family oven had been full of bread, which was now burned to a cinder. So whatever had happened here, it had happened some time between when the shop opened and when the bread would have been taken out of the oven. Late morning or early afternoon.

  It was clear that scavengers had been in the kitchen, but also in the beer shop. Any foodstuffs had long since been run off with. Some enterprising creature had determined that he could break the beer jars by shoving them off the shelves; presumably he and his friends had lapped up what they could before it ran away, dried up, or sank into the dirt floor. The floor under the shelves was littered with broken pots.

  But that must have happened after the people had gone… and where did they go?

  Kiron's stomach turned over. Surely the entire town wasn't like this? All right, finding bodies would have been horrid, but this, in a way, was even worse.

  They made their way—with less and less caution—up the street, checking every building, and finding—nothing. No people. Shops and houses in disarray. It looked for all the world as if suddenly, in the middle of the day, everyone in this town had put down what they were doing and walked out.

  From the barracks—where they found neatly-made pallets, weapons stowed, and where the kitchen had been torn to pieces by animals hungrily devouring every scrap of bread and meat they could find—to the huts of the shepherds, it all looked the same. Everyone in the town was gone. They found piles of soft swaddling where infants had been picked up out
of their corners. They found withered flowers and sticks and little clay dolls where toddlers had been taken away from their play in the dirt. The half dozen student scribes in one of the temples had put down their pens and their potsherds and walked out, along with their teacher.

  Everyone in this town had vanished without a trace.

  Well—

  Everyone but one; the lone soldier who had almost made it to safety. And not even his body had been able to tell them anything.

  Aket-ten was more than irritated with Kiron now; she was just about ready to remove his skin and salt him. Bad enough that he had only turned up when he had some bad news to deliver to an official, worse that he just vanished in the morning as soon as he could get Avatre in the air without even trying to see her. For that alone she had every right to feel slighted. But then to have gone out of his way to be charming to every Jouster here except her… The girls, in particular, were very annoying the next few days after he had left. They had been rather disgustingly impressed with his charm. And yes, he could be charming when he felt like it. It was rather too bad that he felt sure enough of her feelings that he didn't bother to be charming to her anymore. But the girls certainly could have done without being so…

  … ugh.

  It was "Lord Kiron said this" and "Lord Kiron thinks that" until she was ready to scream, throw something, or both. The only one that was sensible was Peri, who, as usual, was quiet and spoke only about her dragon, and didn't go on about "Lord Kiron" as if he was the God Haras come down to earth.

  Let them have to deal with him when he's being excessively dense some time and see how they feel about him then.

  Maybe it was that the other girls had all been priestesses. Aket-ten remembered what it was like back when she had been a Nestling and a Fledgling. The other girls never seemed to tire of talking about young men. Young priestesses all seemed to have more time on their hands than they should, though why that should be, she couldn't imagine. She had always managed to find plenty of things to do with herself—studying for one. There were always new things to learn. Just because you didn't have to learn them, that hardly meant you shouldn't.

  She was pondering just that when she passed by the pens and saw all of the babies in the middle one, piled in a drowsy heap with Peri and two of the others watching them, and she wondered where the other five girls were. And even as she wondered that, shrieks of laughter made her compress her lips and follow her ears.

  She found them quickly enough. With three of the four couriers, who were taking them in turns on short little rides dragonback… they weren't even wearing proper two-person saddles. The young men had the girls up in front of them, and were holding them in place with arms around their middles.

  She reined in her temper with an effort, and stood very visibly in the door, arms crossed over her chest until someone finally noticed her.

  It was one of the girls who wasn't getting a ride who turned, saw her, and yelped.

  That got the attention of everyone except one of the couriers and his passenger, who rather quickly reacted when one of those on the ground blurted," Wingleader Aket-ten! What are you doing here?"

  The three dragons dropped to the ground, and three girls slid down off of them wearing three very different expressions. One was defiant, one highly amused, and one simply looked bored. Of the other two, only one looked properly apprehensive, the other, the one that had yelped—

  Was she actually looking down her nose at Aket-ten, like one of those lazy, good-for nothing girls that did nothing but lounge around a Court all day, looking decorative? Who did she think she was anyway? Every one of these girls had been minor priestesses with the very minor Gift of understanding the thoughts of animals. In the ordinary way of things, they would all, every one of them, have been sent off to some minor temple—or else, if nobly born, been relegated to wafting incense about or holding an ostrich-feather fan for the rest of their lives.

  "I should be the one asking you all that question," she said sharply. "I am where I should be. And that is no way to address your superior. So what, exactly, is going on here when you should be watching your babies?"

  The one looking down her nose smirked. "Lord Kiron thought it was a good idea for us to learn how to fly so we would be ready when the babies were."

  Kiron again! Aket-ten opened her mouth to lash out at the girl, when suddenly something occurred to her, and instead, she smiled.

  Nastily.

  Apparently that smile got through to them. The identical expression of apprehension crept over all five faces.

  She narrowed her eyes. "Lord Kiron suggested that, did he? Well, although I rather well doubt this was what he had in mind for his couriers to be doing, he just might have been right." She turned her attention to the three boys. "I'm sure, couriers, that you have far more important things to do with your time, and your dragons, than give pleasure hops. Training, after all, never really stops, does it?"

  They took the hint. One of them even saluted her as all three flew off.

  She turned to her girls and crooked a finger. "Come along," she said, in silken tones. "I want to introduce you to some new equipment. Since you all want to learn to fly so quickly, you are going to truly enjoy this. It is widely considered to be the highlight of training."

  She had, with an eye to the training, been looking for the same sorts of apparatus that she and the rest of the original Altan wing had used to learn how to stay in the saddle when combat flying. It had taken her some time to track down where it had all been stored. Now, she had no intention of having the Queen's Wing in combat; much though she disagreed with Kiron's strenuous objections to the idea, she also knew that he was scarcely alone in his objections. There were things she would be able to do without offending the sensibilities of people in a position to stop her. Putting the young ladies in combat was not one of them.

  But she was not going to tell these girls that. Actually, she had no intention of telling them that what she was about to put them through was combat training. After all, if they had to fly through sudden turbulent weather, they'd need this sort of practice.

  And a few bruises, wrenched shoulders, or occasional black eye would do them good. It would remind them that they were here to serve the Two Lands, not as some sort of decorative accessory. She had been very clear on that when she had brought them in, after all; the Queen's Wing, regardless of what other people were being led to believe, was not merely here to provide a dramatic and beautiful backdrop for the Queen's Royal Appearances.

  If they wanted to be decorative accessories, they could always go back to their temples. Systrums and ostrich-feather fans were in plentiful supply.

  "Here we are!" she said cheerfully, ushering them into the empty pen with unheated sands in it, and the selection of six bits of apparatus waiting for them. They stopped just inside and eyed the things with misgiving. "You wait right here, while I get some servants. Since you're all so eager, there is no time like the present, right?"

  It didn't take her long; all that was required was one stop in the kitchen to send someone for six of the husky slaves who used to perform this very duty for the training Jousters. By the time she herself got back to the pen, the slaves were already there. But then, she had taken her time, wanting the girls to think about what they might be faced with. The slaves had surely run; she had sauntered.

  The six men stationed themselves at each of the sets of apparatus. She walked over to the first of them. "I'm going to show you what real flying training is all about," she told them, getting into the saddle at the end of the long pole poised on a fulcrum, and fastening the straps tightly before she stood up. She made very sure they were good and secure, too. "This will make sure that you're really ready when your baby dragons are. After all, this is not that different from being a charioteer, and no charioteer trainer would ever put a green driver and green horses together."

  She nodded at the slave, who levered her up into the air, then let her carefully down again. Up, down
, up—this was like the gentle flap-glide-flap of a relaxed dragon in perfect flying conditions. The girls relaxed a little.

  "This is what your flying will be like under ideal circumstances," she said. Then she raised an eyebrow. "But I am sure we all know just how often ideal circumstances come about. So most of your training will be so that you can stick with and guide your dragon under the worst conditions possible."

  She nodded again at the slave, who proceeded to throw her end of the pole in every direction possible for the admittedly limited equipment, as hard as he possibly could. She gripped the padded end of the pole and the saddle strapped to it with legs and arms, shifting her balance as the dynamics of the seat shifted, grinning a little as the slave grinned at her, grinning still more at the look of alarm on the faces of the girls. Oh, they had no idea. This was the easiest of the flying training.

  Finally she signaled to the slave to stop. He let her down onto the sand, and she unbuckled the straps, then stood up, motioning to the others.

  "Come on, then," she said. "I thought you wanted to learn how to fly."

  By the time the babies were ready for their next feeding, the five who had found themselves "volunteered" for flight training were indeed sore, bruised, and even a little sick. "You'll be here every day, twice a day, from now on," Aket-ten told them. "You'll take it in turns. Four of you will watch the babies and play with them, and start teaching them what they will need to know, while the other four of you train. I'll send the first four back to get the other four when I think you've had enough."

  And then—we will graduate to the second stage.

  Two of the girls suppressed groans, but Aket-ten wasn't done with them yet. "It's also more than time you started learning about dragon harness. As you just felt for yourself properly fitted harness can save your life, while improperly fitted harness will kill you. You should never depend on a dragon boy to be certain your harness is right. You'll be spending part of every morning learning how to care for, fit, and even repair your harness."