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 wante
d 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 wo
od 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?
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