Since Pashet was both the goddess of cats and of love, it was generally agreed that Gan was right. And a sacrifice to that goddess was a light one, anyway—a bit of a tribute to one of the temple cats would serve. Kaleth had lured a few wild mau-cats out of the desert, and their first litters of kittens had grown up tame. They had taken up residence in the temple he and Heklatis had set up. And to make doubly sure, a little incense burned at Pashet’s image would do the trick. Pashet was the sort of deity that preferred admiration to worship, and a practical tribute to one of her chosen creatures to an expensive or elaborate sacrifice.
Kiron yawned hugely. “Sacrifice to Pashet or not, as you will. I agree with Gan in this; there is a great deal to do, and I very much wish Avatre to have a pen all to herself soon. With these new people about, the sooner I can give her privacy, the better.”
“There is . . . something you should know,” Kaleth said, and the hesitation in his voice caught the attention of all of them instantly. “There is another group of people coming. And on the one hand, you will be pleased because of what it will mean for your dragons. But on the other hand . . . I do not know what you will think.”
There was such a long silence following that astonishing statement that finally Kalen burst out with, “Well? You cannot just say something like this and leave us hanging! Out with the rest of it!”
Kaleth sighed. “The new group will be here in two days, three at the most. You will be pleased because they will give you heated sands for your dragons. But you may not be pleased because—because they are priests from several temples. From Tia.”
FIVE
THE entire population of Sanctuary was waiting, when the travel-worn and weary caravan of Tians arrived with a light escort of Bedu. There was no doubt that they were priests—their shaved and wig-less heads marked them. But these were not the sleek, polished, and gold-bedecked priests and priestesses Kiron remembered.
They wore the simplest of garments, nothing more than linen kilts for the men, simple sheath gowns for the women and mantles for both to shelter them from the worst of the direct rays of the sun. The kohl about their eyes was smeared, and it did not look as if they had renewed it since they left the borders of Tian lands. They were not laden with gold and faience jewelry either; the most any of them had were common amulets on leather thongs to mark which god they served. The little priestesses were in the saddest condition, nearly fainting with weariness, thin and parched looking, so much so that it would have taken someone with a much harder heart than anyone here possessed to turn them away.
But it was Kaleth who stepped forward first, to extend his hand to the priest in the lead of the group, as the Bedu who had guided them here dropped discreetly back.
The leading priest drew himself up with weary dignity. “We have come to fling ourselves at your mercy, Altan,” he said, his voice hoarse, the Tian accent and pronunciation sounding strange in Kiron’s ears after all this time away from it. “We are no longer safe in our own land.” Not only did he look weary, he looked bleak, as if he had no real hope of anything other than being turned away.
“This is why we called this city Sanctuary, my friend,” said Kaleth, his hand still extended. The priest looked at it for a moment, as if he could not quite believe it—then he stretched out his own hand, and the two clasped arms, hands to wrists. “Welcome, brother,” Kaleth added softly.
One of the little priestesses burst into tears of relief, and as her sisters clustered around her, the rest of the women of Sanctuary, Aket-ten among them, hurried up to them, enveloped them, and carried them off before the priests could say a word.
The priest smiled wanly. “Trust the women to cut through all the nonsense we men put up as barriers. I am Baket-ke-aput.”
Kaleth’s smile was broader. “I am Kaleth, and you all are weary, hungry, and, most especially, thirsty. Come. You can tell us the rest after you have remedied all these ills, and when you are not standing in the desert sun.”
But the priest held up his hand. “There are some others with us. I would know if they, too, are welcome.”
Some of the priests stepped slightly aside, and from the back of the group came forward—a set of faces that Kiron had never expected to see again. Especially the tall, blocky, bald-pated, white-kilted man in the front of the group of much younger men and boys.
Nor, it seemed, had Ari.
“Haraket?” they exclaimed simultaneously in disbelief.
Haraket, once the Overseer of the Tian Dragon Courts, squinted in equal disbelief, looked briefly stunned, and then stumbled forward. “Ari? Ari? By Nofet’s breasts—you miserable cur! You’re alive! You’re alive!”
They fell on each other, embracing like long-lost brothers. “Sobek’s teeth, I should have known you were too evil to die!” Haraket rasped out. “You jackal! You dog! How did you come here? Did the Bedu bring you? Tell me you have not lost Kashet—”
“I have not lost him; it would take a god to part us, I think. But there is more—” Ari said, pushing Haraket a little away and gesturing behind him. And as Haraket’s eyes fell on Kiron, he saw them widen yet again with disbelief. When he and Ari parted completely, he continued to stare at Kiron and finally said, “Is that—that can’t be—but you’re dead!”
“No more than Ari,” Kiron said, flushing a little. “And I’m afraid you have Ari to blame for the deception.” Then he raised his head, with pardonable pride. “I did not steal that little red dragon, Haraket. I raised her from the egg, as Ari raised Kashet, but in secret; and in truth, you could say that she stole me.” And with that, he whistled.
Avatre might have been waiting for his call; she shot up out of the pen to the complaints of the others, whose rest she had disturbed. It was too crowded there for her to fly straight up from the sand, but as the Tians exclaimed and pointed, she half leaped, and half flew from the rooftop she jumped up onto, hovered for just a moment to pick out a clear space, and landed in a backwash of wing-made wind and airborne sand. In the next moment she was butting Kiron with her head, and looking curiously at the newcomers, while Ari beamed.
“Hu!” exclaimed someone from behind Haraket. “She’s a beauty, by Haras!”
“You think she’s a beauty, wait until you see Tathulan and Re-eth-ke,” Kiron replied, rubbing the sensitive skin under Avatre’s chin.
“You have more?” said another, raw envy in his voice.
Haraket shook his head, and passed his hand over his shaved head. “I am—I am at a loss. Vetch—I suppose you have another name now?”
“Kiron, son of Kiron.” He looked up at Haraket, and realized that he did not have nearly so far up to look now . . . “Which is my right and proper name.”
“A man’s name, and you are growing into it.” Haraket managed a smile. “You look so unlike the boy Vetch, I do not think I will have difficulty remembering what to name you.” He looked back to Ari. “In truth, I do not know what to think or say, so I shall say nothing and allow you to do my thinking for me, Ari. Are we welcome? I have with me all the dragon boys trained by Baken, aye, and Baken himself. We could not stay, Ari, not when—But the priests will tell you.”
“The priests will tell us all, when you are all rested and calmer,” Kaleth told him firmly. “And yes, you are welcome, too. This is, after all, Sanctuary, and it would be a poor sort of sanctuary that did not offer shelter to anyone who needed it.”
In the end, not everyone in Sanctuary came to hear the tale the Tians told that night, when they were fed and rested, but most people elected to. Some came out of curiosity, some out of concern, and some, sad to say, to gloat over the sad state of the former enemy.
They gathered in an open square, beneath the stars, the only place big enough to hold them all. At the center were the Tians that seemed to have been given the authority to speak for the rest; Haraket and several of the senior priests. So, too, were the most-senior in Sanctuary; Kaleth of course, and Heklatis and Lord Khumun, Lord Ya-tiren, his wife Iris-aten, and their eldest
son, and Ari—
—and somewhat to his own surprise, Kiron, drawn firmly out of the crowd by Lord Khumun and Kaleth. The rest—with the exception of some of the Tians who were still deep in the sleep of exhaustion—arrayed themselves around the court, or on the roofs of the nearby buildings. The court had the acoustic advantage that anyone speaking at the center of it could be easily heard by everyone in and around it. Rugs were spread for the group at the center to sit on; anyone else sat or stood as he or she wished. Most stood, the better to see the proceedings. It was a calm and windless night, still warm enough to be comfortable, though by midnight anyone under the stars would need a mantle.
The Tians began to explain what had brought them across the desert to seek a haven here, and the sense that Kiron had at first was that his fellow Altans were prepared to enjoy their tale of woe.
But it did not take long until they were all united in shock and a certain sick feeling of déjà vu. The tale was all too familiar.
“When the dragons revolted, we didn’t really have a good idea of what had happened,” said Haraket. “We knew the dragons had been getting restive and hard to control, but you know, none of us ever really thought that there was anything wrong with the tala; not even Baken or me. My guess was that your sea witches were to blame somehow, but it never really occurred to any of us, I don’t think, that we’d actually lose the dragons until it happened.”
“No one knew the dragons actually had been lost for days,” one of the priests put in. “It wasn’t until messengers came back from the battlefield with the report that we knew why no Jousters had returned from the battle.”
“And until then,” Haraket continued, “we actually thought your sea witches had found some way to make lightning strike them out of the air—or something. About half the riders came back afoot, though most of the ones that didn’t were not actually killed by their dragons or by falls. Or so I’m told. They generally managed to get their dragons to land, but it was the soldiers on the ground that got them.”
Kiron nodded. There was some relief in that. Not that he had any great love for most of the Tian Jousters, but—well, he wouldn’t wish the kind of terror and death (or the terrible life-in-death of a paralyzing injury) that came from plummeting out of a dragon’s saddle on anyone. Well, anyone except, perhaps, the Magi. . . .
“So, without dragons, and with no means to control captured dragonets, there was no need for the Courts of the Jousters,” Haraket said glumly. “It wasn’t long before orders came that took most of the servants and slaves away; only a few of the dragon boys, me, and a couple of slaves remained. The Jousters that survived generally went into the King’s army, and most of the dragon boys dispersed as did most of the servants. Baken decided he’d try either to pay one or more of the trappers to try to get an unfledged young dragonet right out of the nest, or else he’d get one himself, but right about the time I was going to attempt to persuade the Great King’s advisers that this was worth trying, the Great King—got new advisers.”
He looked over at Baket-ke-aput, who took up the thread of the story. The priest looked much better now; shaved and bathed, and with a proper headcloth and a bead collar that might have come from one of the ancient city treasure troves. That was Kaleth’s touch, Kiron had no doubt. Kaleth knew that to have respect, oft-times one had to look, as well as be, impressive. The man was dressed in a fashion that clearly marked him as a priest, yet he no longer had the distinctive look of a Tian priest about him. The priest’s eyes remained on Lord Khumun and Lord Ya-tiren as he spoke, but Kiron had the sense that he was very aware of everyone else whose face he could see in the torchlight. “The first we knew of these new advisers was when the Great King’s previous advisers were suddenly called up, thanked, and dismissed. Sent back to their estates, if you please! And in their place, as if conjured from air, there were strangers who remained with the Highest at all times, and that was when the trouble started.” He shook his head. “Small things, at first. The temple tribute was reduced; not by a great deal, but it was reduced in order to support these new advisers, who had no land, and seemingly no family. Then there were—accusations. People who objected to the presence of the advisers, or even voiced any questions about where they had come from and who they were, why the Great One had chosen them, were sent out to the provinces.”
“That was if they were of wealth or birth,” growled another priest. “If they were neither—they tended to disappear. And it wasn’t wise to ask after them either.”
Baket-ke-aput sighed. “Then—came the orders that certain young people in each temple should come to serve the Highest at the Palace. It took some while, though, and the god-touched were summoned from each temple separately, by name.” He paused a moment, rubbing the back of his right hand with his left. “Perhaps I should explain that in our land, those who are god-touched with special powers are spread about all of the Temples of the Gods, rather than being concentrated in a single temple as, so I understand, you Altans manage things—”
Baket-ke-aput cast an inquiring glance at Kaleth, who nodded. “We call them Winged Ones,” he said. “The priests are Winged, those who are not yet trained are Nestlings or Fledglings, and they all serve and are trained together in the Temple of the Twins. Well, except for the Healers, who have their own temple, in which all gods are honored, including those we Altans know not.”
“That,” said Heklatis briskly, “is because all Healers, whether they Heal by the knife, by the leaf, the flower, and the root, or by the touch of a hand, must learn every aspect of Healing, and all gods favor the Healer. It is so in Akkadia as well.”
“I suppose being scattered thinly through every temple in Mefis and outside it was the reason why it took these so-called Advisers so long to find our equivalent of Nestlings and Fledglings, which we call acolytes,” Baket-ke-aput said with a grimace. “And because they were spread about the temples, and the summons came, not all at once, but over days and weeks, it took us longer to realize that these so-called ‘advisers’ were making off with every child and adolescent that was god-touched.”
“Nothing like this had ever happened before?” Kaleth asked, in tones that suggested he knew that it hadn’t.
Baket-ke-aput shook his head. “Never. What need had the Great King of those who were untrained or half-trained? I know that I asked why they were being taken, and I was told that since there were no more Jousters, the untrained were going to be learning to act in concert, as the Altan sea witches could. This was meant to give Tia a weapon equal in magic to what Alta had. And since Haras priests do use magic—when they have it—in combat, I thought no more about it.”
Lord Ya-tiren pursed his lips. “Even though these were the youngest, and untrained, and not the experienced and trained?”
Baket-ke-aput closed his eyes, as if in pain. “To my shame and sorrow, if I thought at all, I was simply glad that the ones called were those whose untrained or half-trained abilities we could afford to do without. And to be honest, we didn’t, any of us, think that there was anything wrong. After all, these were the Great King’s advisers who had issued the orders! Why would they do anything to harm Tians, especially consecrated youngsters?”
“We soon found out differently,” said another priest, bitterly. “We did not see the young ones at all after a time. Some parents began to make diffident inquiries. Still, there was no sign of them, no rumors, and no one within the Palace would talk about where they had been taken.
“And then, one terrible dawn, the bodies began to turn up—thrown by night into Great Mother River!” Baket-ke-aput looked sick. “That was when we realized how wrong we were.”
“What?” Ari exclaimed, turning white.
“Bodies,” said Baket-ke-aput succinctly. “The bodies of the god-touched that we had allowed the minions of those advisers to take. Something in the Palace, or wherever those demons are working their evil magic, was killing them—the youngest and weakest first.”
Kiron felt sick. Kaleth only
shook his head.
“This is what I feared,” he said quietly. “When I stopped being able to See what lay within Tian lands, I feared there were Magi there now, and that somehow they had wormed their way into the Tian King’s good graces.”
Another priest, considerably younger than Baket-ke-aput, who wore the amulet of Thet about his neck, leaned forward. “We should never have known, had they not been so greedy about draining so many of the children of their power until they died,” he said bitterly. “There were too many for the crocodiles to take them all, and so we found some of them. That was when I made to approach the Great King, and as soon as I was given audience, I knew that I should say nothing. Not only was there a shadow upon him, but he looked to be as he had been in the full flower of young manhood. And so did the three advisers.”
“That has a familiar taste to it,” Lord Khumun said, with controlled anger in his voice. For some time now, Kiron had been a little concerned about the older man. Being forced to flee his own land had taken something out of him. But now—now the old warrior was back. And Kiron was relieved to see it. “So did the Magi of Alta, and our rulers, when our Winged Ones began to be taken.”
The Thet priest looked angry, and resolute, and just as much a warrior as Lord Khumun. “I know the forbidden spells that can give one a second youth, though I am sworn never to use them; it is the business of those of Thet to be upon the watch for shadow magic and the powers of darkness. We know these spells so that we may combat them; I knew the signs of what was happening. Those children had been killed so that their power might be absorbed and their years might be stolen and given to the Great King and his advisers.”
Every time those words were spoken, Kiron felt colder. Bad enough to be profiting magically from the deaths of fighters in combat, but to murder children . . . !
“You said nothing,” Heklatis said shrewdly. “Else you would not be here. And do not feel guilt; if you had confronted them, I think none of you would be sitting here now.”
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