Alta dj-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  The Jouster shuddered with the look of someone who did not care to find himself wrapped up in wool at all. “Better you than me, boy. Deflea yourself after, the gods only know where those sheepskins have been, or what they’ve collected.”

  Kiron laughed, and promised, and went off to Lord Khumun to report what he and Aket-ten were going to do. And Lord Khumun gave him a look that asked, Is this expedition concerning something I don’t want to know about?

  Kiron gave a terse little nod, and went on with his explanation of what he and Aket-ten were going to wear to keep from turning blue with cold.

  Lord Khumun gave his permission readily enough, and so the path was clear.

  He could hardly sleep at all that night. He lay in the darkness, tossing and turning, trying to relax, and trying not to fly the whole plan in his mind, over and over and over—and especially trying not to think of all of the things that could go wrong.

  Finally he managed to wear himself out so badly, that he fell asleep in spite of himself. Not that his dreams were any more tranquil, but at least they were dreams.

  He woke, as he had last rain season, to the sound of thunder. The scent of rain pervaded everything, and over it, the odd, sharp smell that came when lightning struck nearby. Once again, he rolled out of his cot with the canvas of the awning over the pen glowing with continuous lightning.

  This time, however, he pulled on a long-sleeved woolen tunic and a set of one-piece woolen leggings, and tied over them a couple of foot-shaped woolen bags to keep his feet warm. Wool, he had been told, stayed warm even when it was wet; if they managed to get above the storm, it would be freezing cold up there, and by the time they got there, they would be soaked. As it was, it was uncomfortably cold now, and the odd woolen clothing, heavy and clumsy as it made him feel, was rather comfortable.

  He picked up a cape made of sheepskin, and padded past Avatre, awkward in the woolen foot bags. In the corridor outside, itself covered with an awning, there was no sign of life. That was odd; he would have expected to find Aket-ten dancing from foot to foot with impatience.

  He went to Re-eth-ke’s pen and eased past the dragon to peek into Aket-ten’s sleeping chamber. The long lump under her blanket told him that she was still asleep. Very odd. He didn’t think she was faking it either.

  He was dreadfully tempted then to leave her there and try to take up Vash alone—

  But I told her it was too dangerous to go up alone under conditions like this, he reminded himself. She’ll never believe my cautions again if I turn around and go up by myself. Besides, without her, Vash probably won’t move.

  He eased into the chamber, reached out a cautious hand and shook what he thought was her shoulder. It was hard to tell for certain; it was very dark in here, and apparently Aket-ten was one of those people who slept with the blanket pulled up over her head. There was a faint scent of flowers in the air; he thought it might be from the perfume cones she kept around. She seldom actually wore them on her hair or wigs as most noble ladies did; instead, she left them where the sun would shine on them, or where gentle heat from a brazier would release the perfume into the room.

  As it happened, the thing he shook was her shoulder. And a grunt was her only response. He shook her again, harder this time. It was like trying to shake a rock outcropping.

  “Mmph!” she complained, without really moving much. “Wha—?” The blanket stirred a little.

  “Aket-ten!” he said sharply, speaking loudly to be heard above the thunder, giving her a really hard shake. “Get up! The rains are beginning, and we need to take the dragons up in it!”

  “Go ’way—” she mumbled, and pulled the blanket tighter around herself. She didn’t even react to his presence in her room.

  He stood there, confused. She had been twice as eager as he to take on this task! What was her problem? He knew she couldn’t be sick. Had she changed her mind about going up? Surely not—

  No, there had to be some other reason, and once again, he wondered why no one else seemed to find the terrible lightning storm overhead in the least disturbing.

  It is thundering so hard I can scarcely hear myself think, yet everyone but me is sleeping through it, just like last time. I wonder—

  It was beginning to look to him that the Magi had spread some sort of spell across the city to keep the sleepers in their beds until the rains were triggered by their magic. Could it be that the reason he was not still asleep was that he had not been born in Alta City? It was the only explanation that he could think of, though it was just as possible that he was unusually resistant to whatever magic they were doing. Some people were harder to drug than others; he supposed that some people were harder to cast spells upon.

  It could well be, then, that the Magi were to blame for Aket-ten’s apparent sloth—but such idle speculations were not getting Aket-ten up.

  He tried shaking her so hard he rattled the cot, with just about the same result. The harder he shook her, the tighter she curled up. Short of bringing a wall down on her, he didn’t think merely shaking her was going to do any good.

  So with a sigh, he finally decided that he would have to resort to the unthinkably rude. Even serfs who had been worked to exhaustion and were more dead than asleep responded to what he was about to do.

  He went out, got a pot full of cold water, came back to her chamber, pulled back the covers over her head, and dumped the contents of the pot over her face.

  Then he jumped back and a good thing, too, because she came up with a yell, swinging wildly at the darkness around her. She was awake now, all right, angry, and spitting fury. And it was a good thing that she was still tangled up in her blanket, because she probably would have given him a bloody nose for his little trick.

  But she was tangled up in her blanket, and the time it took her to struggle free was enough for him to protest and try to explain, with all the sincerity he could muster and from the other side of the chamber, “Aket-ten! I’m sorry! I swear I am sorry, and I will make it up to you! It was the only way I could wake you up, I swear to you, and I tried, I really tried!”

  She stood there in the semidarkness, kicking free of the blanket, and he was terribly glad that it was semidarkness that filled the chamber because she wasn’t wearing anything at all beneath that blanket. All that wool suddenly felt very hot, and very prickly, as he flushed. Not that what she usually wore was much less revealing, but still—

  She stood panting with anger, but it was anger that was cooling as she listened to him babble out his explanation. Finally, she tossed her wet hair over her shoulder and said, with great suspicion, “You swear on your father’s ghost? You swear that my brother didn’t put you up to this?”

  “I swear!” he said immediately. “And there’s something very odd going on. There’s not a single other person awake, and I bet if you were to lie down, you’d be asleep in a moment. What’s more, I bet if we tried to go wake any of the others up, they’d be as hard to stir as you were. It was just like this at the start of the rains last year. I was the only one awake. It was—” he shook his head “—it was disturbing.”

  “The Magi,” she said instantly, confirming his suspicion. “There must be something that they don’t want anyone to see about the start of the rains.” He couldn’t see her face, but he could hear the frown in her voice. “I’m not sure I want to know what it is, or why.”

  He swallowed. He wasn’t either, now that he came to think about it. If the Magi were not at all reticent about people knowing they were interfering with the Winged Ones, what was it they felt they had to hide—and felt it so strongly they had to put the entire city to sleep?

  His mouth tasted sour. I can’t do everything, he reminded himself. All I can do is try to follow Toreth’s plan, and hope that once we take the Jousters out of the mix—it will weaken the Magi. Only then can we try to come up with the next plan.

  “Whatever it is, it’s nothing we can do anything about,” she said flatly, echoing his own thoughts. “We take the Jou
sters out of the war and free the Winged Ones. They have more authority than we.”

  She moved over to the wall, into the complete darkness, and he heard her fumbling about, then the sounds of someone putting on unfamiliar garments. Then she came back into the dim light from the doorway, pausing only to tie her wool foot bags in place. “If there’s something that the Magi don’t want people to watch, I want to see it. Come on!”

  Together, carrying their sheepskin capes, they padded down the corridor to the landing courtyard. And there, just as last year, they watched the spectacular lighting and thunder show that centered on the Tower of Wisdom. Kiron was not altogether certain, but it seemed to him that it was more violent than it had been last year. Then again, the Magi were using the Winged Ones now, and not the Fledglings. He felt sick, wondering just what it was that was happening inside that tower.

  Aket-ten frowned with concentration as she watched it, braiding up her hair as she did. “I wish I knew what to look for,” she mumbled, staring fixedly at the point in the sky that was just above the tower, around which all of the storm clouds seemed to be rotating. “Gods take them! What could be so important that they need to keep the whole city asleep? I wish I had thought to ask Heklatis to watch this. Is it too late to try and wake him, do you think?”

  “Maybe. If everything happens the way it did last year, the whole storm is going to break soon. How long has that been going on?” he asked.

  She shook her head, and tossed the end of her braid over her shoulder. “I don’t know. I mean, everyone always sleeps on the first day of the rains, it’s a holiday even for slaves. There’s not a lot of point in getting up early, the downpour is too heavy, and it’s too dark to do anything until later in the day. I always looked forward to it and never thought about it, not really, and I suppose that’s how everyone else feels. It’s been this way for years, anyway.”

  Finally the show ended in that tremendous crack of lightning and peal of thunder that he remembered from the previous year, and the skies opened up. They stood there, staring at the waterfalls of rain pouring from the sky, then finally she shook her head.

  “Let’s go get the dust,” she said. “Heklatis said he was fixing rainproof bags for us last night.”

  They made their way to Heklatis’ quarters. Aket-ten pulled her cape over her head and made a dash across his courtyard to the first door, which led into a room Heklatis used as a workshop. She came back a moment later with four bulging, heavy-looking bags, made of leather, shiny with beeswax rubbed on the outside.

  “Here they are,” she said, putting two of them down at his feet. “And he rigged them that way to release the dust for us, like he promised! He must have found a way to make it work.”

  Kiron picked up one of the bags to examine it with interest. Heklatis had pledged that he was going to try to find a way for them to trickle the dust out gradually without having to cut a hole in the bottom of the bag while flying. He couldn’t test it without losing the dust, of course, but it looked as if the clever Akkadian had been as good as his word. There was a sturdy wooden handle attached to a stout leather cord, which in turn was attached to a patch on the bottom of the bag that looked as if it was meant to rip free with a good hard tug. He put the bag down again.

  “I hope you brought a knife anyway,” he said. Aket-ten fumbled at the front of her tunic and pulled up a cord, which was attached to a small knife in a leather sheath hung around her neck. Kiron’s was strapped over his woolen leg coverings on his right calf. He nodded.

  “The day isn’t getting longer,” he said, and led the way to Vash’s pen.

  It took some doing to get the swamp dragon up out of her wallow. It was cold out of the water, and dark, and she didn’t want to leave. He didn’t blame her; if he’d had any choice, he would be in bed at this moment himself. Aket-ten spent a great deal of time nose-to-nose with the dull green dragon before she emerged from the water with a groan, and grumbled her way over to the saddle stand so that he could put her rig on her.

  Once Aket-ten judged it was safe to leave the two of them alone, she went back out into the corridor to deal with Letoth herself.

  Either Letoth was more cooperative, or Vash was much more stubborn—in either case, by the time Kiron finished harnessing Vash, fastening the bags behind her saddle, and leading her out into the corridor, Aket-ten and Letoth were waiting for them. The rain drumming on the canvas awning and pouring down the sides into the drainage channel was a reminder that they were in for a miserable ride.

  Both dragons balked at the entrance to the landing courtyard, and once again, Aket-ten had to stand nose-to-nose with both of them for some time before they heaved huge, hot sighs that that smelled of iron and blood, and allowed themselves to be led out into the rain.

  And once in the rain, it was impossible to speak except in a shout.

  The dragons snorted their distaste, and tossed their heads unhappily, while Kiron and Aket-ten found themselves wrapped in sodden, heavy cloth. And if the wet wool wasn’t cold, it also wasn’t particularly pleasant; it was heavy, it clung and made it hard to move, and it stank of soggy sheep. They made their way into the center of the court, Aket-ten got both beasts to lie down, and the two of them clambered up into their saddles.

  Vash got to her feet first, groaning. Letoth followed suit. It was Aket-ten who gave the signal to fly; Letoth rose first, flying heavily, and Vash followed her a moment later. With the rain pouring down on them, they wallowed into the sky. Kiron and Aket-ten were just baggage at that point; for his part, Kiron couldn’t see anything beyond the curtain of rain, and certainly couldn’t hear. He just hung on and let the dragon pick her course, so long as it was up. Her wings pounded through the sodden air, as she labored upward with all her might. Kiron was just glad that he and Aket-ten were much smaller than the Jousters who usually rode these beasts, or they never would have gotten into the air at all.

  It took forever. There was no way to keep track of time, as Vash’s lungs heaved under his legs, and he felt her muscles straining to drive her upward, while his muscles ached from the strain of being in the saddle of a dragon in a steep climb. Occasionally, there was a flash of lightning, followed by a distant roar of thunder, but somehow the dragons were staying out of the area around the tower.

  Then came the winds.

  It must have been right beneath the clouds, or perhaps just inside them; the rain slackened a little, and then—

  Vash bucked sideways as a gust of wind hit her wings and flung her over. She fought for control, Kiron balancing in his saddle to help her, and kept from being tumbled through the air by a small miracle. Then, before they could fully recover, another gust hit them, driving them in a different direction. Now they were inside the cloud, some rain, but mostly inky-black, tempest-driven mist that stung when it hit like a sandstorm, and winds that tossed poor Vash around like a leaf.

  Vash spread her wings as the third gust hit her, and with a strangled cry, drove upward with all her might. She surged underneath him, throwing him back in the saddle with powerful wing-beats, and he fought for balance, then flung himself forward over her neck and clinging to avoid overbalancing her. The lightning stink was in his nostrils; it was all he could smell, and he wondered with horrified fascination what would happen if lightning struck the two of them.

  He could see in the set of her head and neck, and in the spread of her wings, that she was angry. Angry enough, it seemed, to be determined to fight her way up through this cloud and into the blue sky above. He doubted that she was even thinking of him now. All of her concentration was on up—she knew the sun was up there, and she could, she would, get up there with it!

  And then, just when he thought the darkness inside the cloud would never end, just when he wondered if he and Vash had died back there, and this was the limbo of an unhappy ghost, she drove through the top of the cloud and up into the sunlight.

  He barely had time to look around before Aket-ten and Letoth came surging up beside them like a lea
ping fish, trailing wisps of cloud stuff behind them.

  Aket-ten recovered first. She shook back her woolen sheepskin cape as Letoth spread her wings and let the strong wind carry her, panting with exertion. With a nudge of his knee and a pull on the reins, Kiron sent Vash after her.

  It was a different world. He had been high before, but never this high. Together they soared in a strange world, floored with white fleeces, roofed with the blue sky, and empty but for swift, strong winds. Cold—it was as cold as he had ever remembered being, and he dared not think how high they must be. And it was silent, but for the high, thin whistle of the wind in his ears, and the beating of the dragons’ wings. Surely this was far, far higher than he had ever flown, even on Avatre.

  It was wonderful beyond words. He took a deep breath of the clean, clear air, and felt as intoxicated as if he had drunk three jars of palm wine. This was freedom such as he had never tasted before. It was as if he and Aket-ten were the only two humans alive in the world, a world made solely for their pleasure.

  Aket-ten cast him a wild glance, full of delight, and despite the gravity of their task, he grinned back at her.

  Even the dragons seemed to enjoy this place of white and blue and intense light. They soared and tacked back and forth on the wind, staying just above the cloud tops, as he and Aket-ten whooped and laughed with the sheer pleasure of the flight. The air might be cold, but it was also as dry as that over the desert; in no time their clothing and even their cloaks were no more than damp, and the wool was doing its proper job of keeping them warm. Only his nose, his hands, and his ears were cold, and he solved the last by hunching his head down into the fleece of his cloak.

  Finally, with a sigh, Kiron recalled himself to duty. He waved a hand at Aket-ten—not wanting to take more than one hand off the saddle hold—and pointed at the bags. She nodded, and pulled the wooden handle on the one nearest him so he could signal her if it had ripped loose properly.