Sanctuary

by Mercedes Lackey

  “So the Magi are not battening on the deaths that they had hoped for.” Ari looked to the messenger and then to Kaleth. “Mouth of the Gods, I think it begins.”

  There was silence, and Kaleth bowed his head. Kiron held his breath.

  “It begins,” Kaleth said, from behind the curtain of his hair. “And only the gods know how it will end. I have seen the beginning; I cannot thread my way through the maze that will follow this bad beginning.”

  Ari nodded, as if he had expected exactly this answer. “Then it is for mortals to decide. And one thing I do know; we cannot let the Healers stand alone. Agreed?”

  Heklatis’ eyes lit, as if he had not expected that answer. Kaleth, however, raised his head again, and regarded Ari with a wry smile—as if he had.

  Time was not on their side, they needed to act quickly, and the means of getting messages to the Healers were very limited. There was, in fact, only one sure way, and reluctant as he was to use it, at least the time of year was in their favor. The rains had just begun, and the Magi would not be able to use the Eye even during daylight hours if there was no sun.

  Which was a good thing, since the way to get a message to the Healers was to drop it on them from the sky. While the best time to drop such a message was at night, it could not be too late at night, or it might be lost. Furthermore, with the Magi now aware that there were dragons and Jousters still in the world, and acting as the heart of the rebellion, they would be watching the skies.

  There was a great deal of sky between Sanctuary and Alta. And of all the dragons that were capable of such a journey, there were really only two of colors that would blend in with the storm clouds. Bethlan was one, and Kiron had no issues with Menet-ka taking the task. But the other was Re-eth-ke, and Aket-ten’s reaction when she discovered that Kiron had assigned Menet-ka without even considering her was . . . emphatic.

  In fact, she stormed into Avatre’s pen as if she was taking a citadel, and with nearly as much noise.

  “I can’t believe you simply assumed Menet-ka was the only person fit to take this job without even considering me!” she shouted, as she shoved her way past her brother, who was lingering in the doorway, listening, while Kiron went over the plan with Menet-ka. “You must be insane! I’m the smallest Jouster, I’ll be less of a burden to my dragon—”

  “Menet-ka is not much larger than you, Bethlan is bigger than Re-eth-ke, and both of them have more experience flying in the rain than Re-eth-ke does,” Kiron countered, as she stood there with her fists on her hips, glaring.

  “Not as much in storms!” she shouted back.

  “He won’t be flying in a storm!” Kiron replied. “And Bethlan is steadier in bad weather than Re-eth-ke!”

  “Who says?” she demanded furiously.

  “I say, and I’m the wingleader!” he replied, his own anger rising to meet hers halfway.

  “Oh, fine. Use that as an argument.” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. “Abandon logic altogether and fall back on ‘I’m the wingleader.’ Never mind that I have more communication with my dragon than he has with his, or that I have more experience flying high and in storms and long distances, or that I’m lighter, or that silver and blue-black blends into clouds better than indigo and purple. Ignore all that. Ignore the fact that if you’re going to do something risky, it’s better to have two people doing it to double your chances of getting through. And completely forget about the fact that it looks as if you’re cosseting me because I’m a girl. . . .”

  There were tears in her voice when she said that last, and he couldn’t meet her accusing gaze, because he was trying to protect her, and it was entirely true that the only reason he had dismissed the idea of her going was because she was who and what she was—his beloved, and yes, “a girl.”

  “How can I expect to deserve equal treatment if you won’t give me equal responsibility?” she asked tearfully when he still wouldn’t look at her.

  “She has a point, Kiron,” Orest said, not at all helpfully.

  He clenched his jaw so hard it hurt. He wanted to tell Orest to mind his own business, but that would mean he would have to pull wingleader rank again, and that ploy was growing weaker by the moment.

  “Don’t you think you ought to give her the chance?” Orest continued, even less helpfully. “It’s only fair.”

  He glared at Orest and decided to bring up family instead. “Lord Ya-tiren wouldn’t thank me for putting her in danger. Neither would Lady Iris-aten.”

  He’d hoped invoking both parents would get Aket-ten to reconsider. Unfortunately, she was made of sterner stuff than he’d thought.

  “I’ll get his consent,” she said, clenching her own jaw. “When he gives his consent to anything, Mother simply steps aside and lets it happen. If I get his consent, will you assign this to me?”

  Dear gods. Well, at least Lord Ya-tiren won’t be able to put the blame on me for sending his daughter into danger. He’ll know it was all her own idea. “And Lord Khumun’s,” he replied, transferring his glare to her.

  She traded him glare for glare. “And Lord Khumun’s,” she agreed. She sounded confident. He only hoped that confidence would be shattered.

  “If both of them give their consent, then you can go,” he said, sure that even if she could convince her father, Lord Khumun would never agree.

  Lord Khumun agreed.

  So did Lord Ya-tiren, although he was not at all happy about it, which left Kiron without any reason to forbid her. He even went to Heklatis to beg something that would make her feel too ill to fly; the Healer stared at him as if he thought Kiron had gone mad, and simply answered, “Are you daft? It would be worth my life, because you know she’d know I’d done it. No. Absolutely, positively, no.”

  And Kaleth was no help either; he simply shrugged, opined that no one could hope to stop Aket-ten from doing anything she really wanted to do, and repeated that he could not “see” past the Magi interference, not into the city, and not into the future.

  So, despite his misgivings, despite the nebulous feeling of dread in the bottom of his stomach, there was nothing Kiron could say or do, reasonably, to keep her from going. All he could do was to make her swear to be cautious.

  She and Menet-ka were going to drop sandbags with messages in them into the inner courts of the Healers, messages detailing what the Jousters already knew, and advising them that when there was a huge distraction, the Healers should escape by whatever means they could.

  The distraction was already well in hand. Heklatis knew the formulation of some vile concoction called “Akkadian Fire,” a substance that stuck to anything it splashed on and burned and couldn’t be put out with water. He was making pots of the evil stuff; they would all come in with a load of pots and a brazier apiece, drop in coals, and drop the pots. Half of them would unload their burdens on the men besieging the Healers, but the other half would unload over the Tower of Wisdom, the Magi’s stronghold. When they found their home burning down around their ears, Kiron doubted very much that any of them would think about the Healers.

  That was the hope anyway.

  As for the besiegers, this Akkadian Fire stuck to flesh as well as wood and stone, and the higher the Jousters were, the more it would splash about when it hit. A nasty trick . . . but anyone who had stood by while the Temple of the Twins and those left inside it burned, deserved whatever he got, to Kiron’s way of thinking.

  The Healers likely would not agree, but that was why Lord Khumun wasn’t going to tell them what the distraction was going to be.

  Well, some of the Healers wouldn’t agree . . . Heklatis, after all, was a Healer, and he was the one who would be making up those fire pots.

  “Don’t take any risks,” he told Menet-ka and Aket-ten, for the hundredth time. “Don’t let yourselves be seen. Just drop your messages and get out of there. The best revenge we can have is to get the Healers out underneath their noses, like we got ourselves and the Winged Ones out.”

  They both nodd
ed, Menet-ka earnestly, Aket-ten with impatience and rebellion in her eyes. He saw it, and it made him sick with dread, but what could he do? He had given his word, and she already resented that she’d been forced to prove she had the right to a place among the Jousters and an equal share in the danger they all faced. All he could do was to urge the utmost caution.

  “This is probably even part of an elaborate trap,” he went on, knowing he was grasping at straws, but hoping against hope that something would get through to her. “You know how much the Magi hated the Jousters, and that was before we pulled the Winged Ones out under their noses. Now, they must really loathe us, and they would probably do anything to capture any of us.”

  Unfortunately, Menet-ka chose to take this as evidence that Kiron was letting his concerns and fears get the better of him. “I doubt it’s gone that far,” the Jouster said with a weak laugh. “Oh, I’m sure you’re right about the Magi hating us, but they have no reason to think we would come to the rescue of the Healers.”

  Kiron didn’t agree with that in the least, but there was no point in arguing. “Just remember what they did to the Winged Ones,” he repeated, and stepped back.

  Aket-ten was only waiting for that, it seemed, because she was in the air and flying toward Alta the moment he was clear of Re-eth-ke’s wings. Menet-ka gave him a sympathetic look, and then sent Bethlan into the sky after her. And all he could do was to watch after them.

  “She feels as if she has to do this, Kiron,” said Nofret quietly in his ear. “She feels guilty that she didn’t manage to save all of the Winged Ones; she thinks if she’d just been brave enough, or fast enough, or—something, the gods only know what—she’d have been able to get them all out. You can’t argue with that sort of guilt; it doesn’t answer to logic.”

  “Well, if she wants me to treat her as if she’s a logical person, she ought to behave like one,” he replied, irritation momentarily overcoming his feeling of sick dread.

  Nofret gave him a crooked smile, and patted his arm. “This is logical,” she pointed out. “No one is going to take her seriously if she doesn’t do everything one of the boys is doing.”

  And what, after all, could he say? The Far-sighted Priestesses saw nothing—well, they actually could not see anything anyway, for the Magi had now effectively blocked their ability to See inside the Seventh Ring. But they had no intuitions of anything going wrong. Kaleth saw nothing, and the gods had not spoken through him to warn them. By all logic, he was overreacting, being overprotective of Aket-ten.

  And yet, he was certain, so completely certain down deep in his soul that this was going to end in disaster that he avoided everyone else for the rest of the evening, and all but hid in Avatre’s pen. She seemed to be just as uneasy as he was—

  But that could just be because she’s picking up my unhappiness, he reminded himself, and tried to soothe her even if he could not himself be soothed.

  And he resolved not to sleep. They were supposed to return before dawn, and he was going to be awake—

  Despite his best efforts, he dozed off, sitting in Avatre’s sand, some time after the middle of the night. And it was a cry of wordless anguish coming from above that woke him.

  It woke him out of nightmare into nightmare. And he knew. He knew, without being told, what that haunting cry on the wind meant. The nameless dread he had been laboring under turned to the certainty of disaster, and as he struggled to clear the fog of sleep from his eyes and stagger upright, he felt, not an anguish matching the wails now coming from the landing field, but a kind of numbness.

  It was as if someone had just cut off his arm, and he hadn’t yet felt it. It was going to hurt; he knew it was going to hurt. But at the moment, he could only stare at the bleeding stump in a mingling of despair and disbelief. . . .

  Except that instead of a bleeding stump of a limb, he knew that it was Aket-ten who had been amputated out of his life. He knew when he felt what had happened, it would be worse than any physical wound.

  With leaden feet, he forced himself to go to Bethlan’s pen. There, they were all gathered, all those who were still awake and eager to hear how the message drop had gone. And he did not say a word, could not manage a single syllable, as he listened to Menet-ka stammer out the tale, while someone else unsaddled Bethlan. Both of them looked terrible. Menet-ka must have pushed Bethlan to new speeds to get here as quickly as he had.

  “There was fog,” he said, exhaustion dulling his eyes and blurring his voice, as he leaned heavily against the wall. “We hadn’t expected fog. We couldn’t tell where we were. Except that we could see a ring of torches and bonfires, and I figured that was where the soldiers that the Magi had set to watch had put up a line of guards. I thought we should just drop our messages in the center of all of that and hope that some of them landed in courtyards instead of on the roof. But she wouldn’t hear of it, and before I could say or do anything, she took Re-eth-ke down. And that was when the fog just—cleared away. It practically melted out of sight; she wasn’t more than halfway down when it was all gone, and by then, it was too late to pull up.”

  “It was magic, then?” Gan managed, his eyes gone round and horrified.

  “A trap,” said Ari flatly, and closed his eyes. “Curse it all, Kiron was right. At least half of this business with going after the Healers was a trap meant to take Jousters. They set a trap for you, Menet-ka. They knew we’d send Jousters if they did to another group what they’d done to the Winged Ones, at least to scout, and they set it all up as a trap and used the Healers as bait.”

  I was right, he thought dully, with no sense of triumph. He had never wished to have been wrong more.

  “They used war javelins and throwing sticks, they didn’t use bows and arrows,” Menet-ka said trying to control the quaver in his voice. “And they weren’t wasting time trying to hit the rider or me; they aimed for Re-eth-ke.”

  “They hit her?” Orest gulped, and Kiron choked back a sob.

  Menet-ka nodded miserably. “I couldn’t see how many hit or where; enough anyway, that she just—just crumpled her wings and fell out of the sky. They were both screaming and screaming—it was horrible, hearing them scream like that.”

  He could see it; in his mind’s eye, he could see it. The javelins filling the air, the dragon folding up in pain. He could almost hear Aket-ten’s scream of fear and anguish. . . .

  “She hit the ground with Aket-ten still in the saddle, and she absorbed most of the impact,” Menet-ka continued, unconsciously pulling at his own hair with his right hand. “But I knew she hadn’t been that high, just skimming the rooftops—I pulled Bethlan around, and I saw Aket-ten moving, and I tried to get down to her—”

  What? After all that, he expected to hear that she’d broken her neck in the fall!

  She was alive—but she was also a Winged One.

  He felt himself shuddering. By now she might be wishing she’d died in the fall.

  “You mean Aket-ten’s alive!” Gan shouted incredulously. “She’s all right! We can go back, we can rescue her!”

  But Menet-ka shook his head, bleakly, and voiced the same thoughts that were running through Kiron’s head. “The soldiers were just all over her before I could even get Bethlan’s head around. They’ve got her, Gan—the Magi have her. And you know what they almost did to her before! The soldiers spotted me and started shooting, and I couldn’t hold Bethlan; she was scared, scared by seeing Re-eth-ke drop out of the sky and hearing both Re-eth-ke and Aket-ten screaming, scared of the arrows, I couldn’t hold her—” Kiron heard the emotion, the thought behind the words. I failed her.

  I should tell him it’s not his fault— But he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Menet-ka what he himself did not feel. It was Menet-ka’s fault, and his. He should have trusted the presentiment of disaster. Menet-ka should have kept her from going down into the fog; should have insisted on turning back the moment they saw the fog.

  Menet-ka looked up, past the others, and saw him. The others foll
owed Menet-ka’s gaze, and an echoing silence fell, one those silences in which, no matter how it is broken, it just sounds wroing.

  He stared at them, stared at their stricken expressions, at the guilt in Menet-ka’s eyes, at the pain in Ari’s face. Stared, and finally, because there was nothing he could say to any of them that would not simply have brought more pain, he turned away.

  He stumbled blindly back to Avatre’s pen, falling into walls and bruising his shoulders, as his eyes burned and he held back his tears by main force of will. He couldn’t weep until he got some privacy. But once he was back in Avatre’s pen, he threw himself down onto the sand next to her, and howled his grief to the stars.

  They left him alone. Not even Heklatis came near him. And that suited him just fine, because he didn’t want their pain, he wanted only his own; he didn’t want their apologies, he wanted to nurse his anger against everyone who hadn’t listened to him and had encouraged her in this madness. But even the anger wasn’t enough to overcome his own guilt or his anguish, and he wept into Avatre’s neck until he had no more tears to weep. He pillowed his face against her cheek, moaning like a dying animal under his breath, clinging to Avatre’s neck as the only place of safety in the world, as the sun rose, and burned its way across the heavens, and sank again. Someone brought Avatre food; he wasn’t sure who. They had to bring the meat right into her sand pit, for she wouldn’t come out to them.

  In fact, Avatre refused to leave him, even long enough to eat. So long as he was clinging to her neck, she showed no signs of budging. So whoever fed her brought her food to her, and she ate it with one eye on Kiron, her tail coiled protectively around him.

  Which was how Kaleth found him, at some point before sunset.

  He heard the footsteps and looked up dully. “What?” he asked, not really caring to hear the answer, and hoping that Kaleth would respond to the rudeness by going away.