Sanctuary

by Mercedes Lackey

  First, and hardest—landing in the dark. If they could manage to give their beasts the confidence that they could do this, that they could trust their riders to be their eyes, everything else would follow.

  They all began by taking their dragons up just as the sun set. Now, this was actually an advantage. The dragons could still see, and they were very anxious to be down again—

  So, as soon as the sun-disk dropped completely below the horizon, they all allowed their dragons to descend. Slowly. Very, very slowly.

  Which the dragons were all perfectly fine with—they were having trouble seeing, and were paying, as a consequence, exquisite attention to every tiny nuance of signal that their riders gave them.

  Then Kiron made them take off again, as the dragon boys, now freed by the coming of dark from tending their dragonets, lit the fires they would use to land by.

  This time, it was dusk, not sunset, and not all of them would rise. Kiron had figured as much; if they wouldn’t, he’d told the others not to force them; eventually, it would come. They might not be able to clearly see the rest of the wing taking off, but they could hear it, and instinct would urge them to do the same.

  Avatre answered to his order; a measure of her trust in him was that she whined and whimpered but did not hesitate, though her wingbeats were heavy and reluctant. He put her to flying in a slow circle with the fires below at its center. When he peered through the dusk and counted, he found he had been joined in the air by Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke, Ari and Kashet, and Kalen and Se-atmen. Ari’s Kashet was still visibly blue, even in the dusk; Re-eth-ke, however, was hardly more than a shadow with silver edges. And brown-and-gold Se-atmen was merely warm shades of gray. That made something else occur to him; it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to tell each other apart. They would have to have everything perfectly coordinated once darkness fell, and stick strictly to the plan.

  But he could feel Avatre’s panic under his legs, in her trembling muscles and the way she darted her head around, trying to see the other dragons that she could hear. And he knew that she wouldn’t rise a third time tonight; she was terrified of a collision in the dark, and rightly so.

  Of all of them, Kashet was probably the most panicked, because he was the most set in his ways, the least used to being asked to do the unusual. Only the love he had for Ari had driven him into the sky in the first place. “Ari!” he called into the growing darkness. “You down first!”

  Kashet was a wind and a shadow below them, as he spiraled down toward the four fires, for those, at least, he could see. And he didn’t make a graceful landing—it was certainly the clumsiest he’d made since he learned to fly properly—but there were no sounds of disaster, and in the flickering firelight below, Kiron made out the dragon shadow scuttling out of the square, clearing it for the next pair.

  “Kalen!” he called, but Se-atmen, having seen, however dimly, one dragon make a safe landing, was already on his way down.

  “You first,” Aket-ten called to him. “Re-eth-ke will stay as long as I need her to once the sky isn’t crowded anymore.”

  He didn’t intend to ask twice, for Avatre was straining her head toward the ground, whining anxiously, and he let her follow her instincts and the firelight, in a tight spiral down toward the light. But he could feel how much she trusted him and his eyes in the way she angled her flight to every shift in his weight, and the way she began her backwing instantly when he tugged on the reins. Her landing was much more graceful than Kashet’s had been, nearly as good as a daylight landing would have been. He jumped from her back and quickly led her out of the square of light, and none too soon, for not even Aket-ten could hold Re-eth-ke back when she knew she was going to be allowed to land.

  He didn’t wait to watch it; Avatre was straining toward her pen, and he wanted her to have the reward of good work as immediately as possible. She followed his lead through the streets and corridors open to the sky that he had ordered left dark, with no torches or lanterns as were usually in place. The dragons had to learn to place all their trust in what their riders “told” them, and this was a good, safe way for them to continue the night’s lesson. Avatre knew her pen as soon as they stepped across the threshold, and with a cry, she waded out into the sand without waiting for him to unsaddle her.

  And it just didn’t seem fair to make her get out again.

  So he removed her equipment right where she stood, even though he hadn’t had to work so hard since the first time he’d unharnessed Kashet. Then he left her to work herself into her wallow, and she was asleep before he’d finished putting the equipment on its racks.

  He joined the others by prearrangement in Lord Ya-tiren’s kitchen, where they were all enjoying well-earned jars of beer.

  “They hated it,” Orest called, spotting him as he came in. “They were terrified. If it hadn’t been for Aket-ten, we’d never have gotten them up.”

  “But they did it anyway,” Kiron pointed out. “And four of them actually took off again in the dark and landed a second time. I wish we could try this blindfolded and increase our training time, but we also need them to learn to use what little they can see. Ari, I am amazed Kaleth went up for you on the second try.”

  “Not half as amazed as I am,” Ari replied, gulping down half his jar at a single go. “I think I was almost as frightened as he was. I thought he was going to fly right into you, and so did he.”

  “We need more room,” Gan said decisively, shaking his head to get the hair out of his eyes. “Separate fires. They won’t be as frightened if they can’t hear other dragons flying so closely above them. That was why Khaleph wouldn’t rise; he heard the others and dug his talons in and wouldn’t move, and I know he was afraid of a collision. So more fires.”

  “Or torches,” said Oset-re. “Four torches ought to give plenty of light.”

  Good answer! “We’ll do it,” Kiron said instantly. “Absolutely. If it will make them feel more confident, we’ll do anything we have to.”

  “Yes,” Huras said slowly. “I think we will. I think we can do this.” He looked around at all of them, that Altan baker’s son who had never been more than two streets away from his home before he’d become a Jouster and a rider of one of the first full clutch of dragons to be raised from the egg in Alta. “I thought you were mad, you and Kaleth together—but after tonight—yes. We can do this.”

  “Yes, we can,” Ari replied, not quite slamming his empty jar on the table. “Yes, by the gods, we can. We have to; there’s no question. And we will.”

  FOURTEEN

  TEN dragons rose into the hot, late-afternoon sky, heading into the west, and climbing steeply for as much height as they could get. The higher they were, the less likely it would be that someone on the ground could see riders on the dragons. If anyone—other than the Bedu—saw them, Kiron wanted the watcher to think they were wild. Every bit of this scheme was fraught with peril, and every moment of it contained some potential for mischance. If it went off unthinkably well, no one would know how the Winged Ones escaped. If it all fell to pieces, either the dragons would refuse to fly, or be unable to rescue everyone, or the Winged Ones would refuse to take to the skies, or someone would find out in advance how they were to get out, and where their refuge was, and seize them as they landed.

  Realistically speaking, Kiron expected their outcome to fall somewhere in between. There wasn’t much more that they could do that they hadn’t already done to keep everything a secret.

  Aket-ten’s Aunt Re had already spread the word that she had taken patients with the pox into her care, and to bolster that tale, several artfully made-up “patients”—in reality, more covert escapees from the city—had been brought by donkey cart to her estate.

  Interestingly, no one was as yet making any attempt to stop people from leaving the city, so long as they were perfectly ordinary sorts. These were not perfectly ordinary sorts; they were lesser nobles, and had already been turned back once, probably because they had tried to leave with
everything portable they owned piled up on carts behind them. This time they had smuggled their portable goods out ahead, and themselves out as Re-keron’s patients, rather than trying to leave with all their goods and gear at once. And probably someone would steal some of those possessions on the way, but that was the price they would have to pay to get any of it out. They should count themselves lucky, or so Kiron thought, to get out with more than their skins and the clothing they stood up in.

  There was no way of telling if the Magi would have allowed them to leave had they simply walked out on their own two feet without taking all their belongings—or if the Magi didn’t care about the goods, but had no intention of allowing any of the city’s elite to leave. Forewarned by his children and Kaleth, Lord Ya-tiren had taken the precaution of moving people and goods in small quantities over a period of two fortnights, then had made a great show of taking the household, as he often did, to his riverside estate. He had encountered no opposition, but when it was discovered that he was not to be found, perhaps the Magi had decided that there would be no more such defections.

  The nobles who had been turned back had quickly found one of Lord Khumun’s covert agents, who had seen them as the ideal candidates for the initial move of the greater plan of rescue. He had suggested the disguise as pox victims; they had no idea that they were just one more item in a much larger plan.

  They had arrived at Re-keron’s home several days ago and were already gone, but Re-keron was keeping up the fiction that she was still tending them. As predicted, no one had ventured anywhere near the boundary of the estate as marked by the plague marker stones. It was by no means the first time Re-keron had taken in such people. She had a reputation for being able to make amazing cures, and an equal reputation for eccentricity that made people go to her only as a last resort.

  There were some things not even the Magi could compel a man to face, and the pox was one of them. No one had bothered to follow the donkey carts, and no one was going to go past the plague marker stones until Re-keron herself took them away.

  Re-keron’s son trained horses to pull chariots. He had a huge, bare-earth training ground hemmed in on all four sides by a wall for that purpose. That was where the dragons would be landing, just after dark. There were supposed to be fire pots all around the perimeter, and to every third one, some salts of copper had been added to make the flames green and blue. It should be easy to spot, even in the darkness, from the air. Aket-ten had flown there and back several times to get the timing right so that they would arrive after darkness fell.

  It was a good plan. Kiron only hoped that it would work exactly as they had mapped it out. There were a great many things that were out of their hands. They couldn’t predict exactly when the earthshake would strike, for instance, nor how much damage it would do. They couldn’t know how visible they would be when they landed on the roof of the temple.

  And no one knew if the earthshake would be felt as far as Re-keron’s estate or if the dragons would be so frightened by it that they would refuse to make the first flight out that night. Aket-ten had tried to explain it to them, but this was something that was going to happen in some nebulous “future,” and dragons were not very good at understanding things like “the future.”

  At least Avatre was no longer afraid to fly after darkness fell. She didn’t like it, and he didn’t blame her, but she wasn’t afraid, and she was willing to trust him to keep her safe. In fact, of all the dragons, the only one still showing some fear of flying by night was Kashet—once again, perhaps, because he was the oldest and the least used to changing his ways. But for Ari, he would do anything, and he was certainly proving that now. They were flying right outside of what Kashet considered to be “safe” territory, known lands, and they were doing it at sunset. Soon enough, it would be dark.

  It had been Nofret’s turn to fret tonight. Ari could not be spared from this mission. Kashet and Kashet alone was big enough to take some of the heaviest of the Winged Ones. Nofret had not made a scene, but she had been white-lipped and wide-eyed, and her farewell embrace was as fervent as even Ari could have wished.

  “I cannot come this time,” she had said, as they drew apart, “but the next time, I will have my dragon, and I will never leave your side!”

  Kiron’s shoulders were tight with apprehension, but he tried not to communicate that to Avatre. He actually had to fly without looking in the direction they were going, for the setting sun was straight ahead, and they were flying into it. Instead, he kept his eyes on the ground, judging their height by the landmarks they passed over.

  Shadows stretched long blue fingers over sands turning ruddy with the light from the setting sun. It was easy to make out every dune, every wind ripple, by the shadows they cast. From time to time, he spotted one of the Bedu on a camel, smaller than an ant, standing a motionless guard atop a dune or a ridge. They were there to keep watch over the desert, looking for spies along their path.

  But they had an advantage that the Magi did not. They had the gods with them. Kiron kept reminding himself of that.

  Thanks to Kaleth and the Tians, the Magi could no more use their powers to spy on Sanctuary—or even find it—than Kaleth could use his to spy on their counsels. They might guess that it existed, but they could not know where, nor could they know how many people had fled to it.

  And they could have no idea that there were still dragons that answered to the hand of man. And that was their best weapon at the moment. It was a secret that would probably not survive the rescue of the Winged Ones, but for now, the one direction that the Magi would not look for interference coming from was “up.”

  The two most dangerous parts of this mission were the physical landings and take offs, and being able to remain hidden at Aunt Re’s for the three days they thought it would take to get everyone out.

  At least the one thing they would not lack was food for the dragons—or for themselves, for that matter. Re-keron’s estate was very wealthy, so much so that she did not charge for her ministrations; she could afford to be a Healer as a hobby. It was that wealth, and her reputation as a doer of good works, as well as the distance from the capital, that had so far kept her safe from the Magi.

  The shadows below were blending into one another, with only the tops of things still gilded with the last light. It was possible to look at the sun now; it was a flattened ball on the horizon, red as a pomegranate. Desert was giving way to marginal land, and Kiron could only hope that anyone who saw them would think them a string of swamp dragons going back to their nests along the Red and Black Daughters of Great Mother River.

  The last of the sun tipped below the horizon as they flew over the first signs of arable land, and Kiron saluted the god in his heart, asking in a brief prayer for his blessing. Overhead, the stars on the robe of Nofet, the Goddess of Night, began to shine.

  Oh, sweet and gentle one, you who are the keeper of the shadows, make your shadows to hide us from your enemies and ours! he prayed, as the sky darkened. Hold your hand above us; let the night demons go to haunt those who have sent so many needlessly to their deaths—and shelter us from all those who would do harm to us.

  This was the next tricky part of the journey; they had to find the Black Daughter before the last light faded, so that they could follow it to Re-keron’s estate. Kiron took a quick glimpse over his shoulder, and with great relief, saw that the nearly-full moon was already above the horizon. So at least, once they actually found the river, they’d be able to see it by the moonlight on the water.

  As the sky turned black and filled with Nofet’s Jewels, he felt a moment of panic—looking for the Black Daughter, and still not seeing it—

  And then, at last, a glint of moonlight on the water, and there it was. With what was almost a sob of relief, he turned Avatre to follow it downstream, toward the sea, toward Alta once again—

  The others followed him, like a skein of geese. No fear now that anyone would spot them from below—or know what they saw, if by chance they di
d catch a glimpse of a shadow crossing the moon.

  As they winged their way across the star-strewn sky, their dragons’ wings making the pattern of three beats and a glide, a feeling that all of this was a dream came over him. It was certainly unnatural. He should not be flying by night. No dragon ever flew by night before. From below came an entirely different set of sounds from those that came up during the day; the song of the nightingale, the barking of dogs, a snatch of song from a hut as they passed over it, and in the distance, the bellow of a river horse. The scent of the river came up to his nostrils, thick, heavy, and very wet; a complicated aroma of mud and weeds, latas and lily, fish and decay. Overpowering for a moment; he had completely forgotten that scent in the relative absence of scent in the desert. It filled him with sudden memories of his first days and nights in Alta, his first days and nights of freedom. . . .

  It had taken so long to get to Alta City once he had crossed into the lands that Alta claimed! But then, Avatre had been young, and not nearly so strong as she was now. And they were not going to Alta City; Aunt Re’s estate was one of the farthest from the city on this river.

  It had taken him most of three days to get to the city. It would take them most of the night to get to Aunt Re’s Great House. That was a long time to be flying without thermals to help, but the dragons were all fit and well fed, and thoroughly rested. There would never be a better time for this.

  The first lights appeared below, marking the homes of farmers, fisher folk, the occasional Great House. Each time, Avatre looked longingly toward them and whined, but obeyed when Kiron gave her the signal to fly on. This was something they had not been able to train for, but apparently the general habit of obedience was enough.

  He would have liked to call to the others, but voices carried in the darkness, and voices out of the sky would certainly alert people below. Even if they thought it was ghosts or demons, they might be tempted to peek. So they were maintaining strict silence until they landed.