Mercedes Lackey - Aerie

by Aerie (lit)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He blinked. "It is?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Ever.

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

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

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

  "She does! And it is not funny! Even if I did not… love you…"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "I never unpacked," sighed Rakaten-te.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  EIGHTEEN

  « ^ »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  With a grating sound, the rock began to move.

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

  Maybe he was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Kiron obeyed, throttling down his own impatience. From Aket-ten's explanations, he had a good idea what the priest was asking for. The strength for a spell had to come from somewhere. Either it came from inside the magic worker himself—which was why those other priests had collapsed—or it came from some source outside. The Altan Magi had stolen their power, stripping it from t
he god-touched priests and acolytes of Alta, and from the premature deaths of the war. The Tian priests—the ones he'd seen so far, at any rate—were more ethical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was the sound of dripping water.

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