Alta

by Mercedes Lackey

  Kiron managed to find time to visit Aket-ten twice more during the next half moon. He actually wanted to visit her more than that, but he was afraid that if he went too often, he would draw unwelcome attention to her.

  As it was, he took care to pick a time when the rains were particularly heavy—heavy enough that he had the bridge and the streets to himself. Furthermore, he took the precaution of stopping in a very popular food and beer shop on the way. If anyone was following him, they’d be hard-put to distinguish which of the patrons of the place he was when he came out. As a Jouster, he was paid just like any other soldier, even if he hadn’t actually fought yet, so he had some money in his pouch. That allowed him to stay just long enough to have some duck sausage and hot wine, and when he left, it was at the same time as two other men.

  Once again he presented himself at the door of the Temple of All Gods, but this time the slave took him into another part of the private quarters.

  A library, of course.

  Niches lined the walls, scrolls piled in them, and characters written on the wall beneath each niche told the category. Care for these precious objects was a constant battle between damp and fire, so there were no open windows or open flames here. All the lamps were carefully shielded, but the lack of windows meant that there had to be a great many of them.

  The girl who was seated at a distant table, bent over a scroll, looked a lot more like the Aket-ten he knew, though the woolen gown was enough like the one she’d been wearing the last time to be its charcoal-colored sister, and it clung to her young body in a very interesting fashion. Again, as he watched her before she became aware of his presence, he had to think that she was not Orest’s “little” sister anymore.

  The slave went to her and whispered in her ear; she looked up, and this time, both to his relief and his disappointment, she did not leap up and fling herself at him.

  She took the weights off the scroll and let it roll itself back up, stored it in its niche, and only then did she rise to greet him.

  She did hurry toward him, though, her face alight with pleasure at seeing him. And she seized both his hands and squeezed them as soon as she was in reach.

  “Where’s the disguise?” he asked. She was wearing more makeup than usual, but not as much as the last time. He thought she looked very pretty this way.

  “One of the Akkadian Healers, my friend Heklatis, is also a Magus,” she said. “He didn’t tell anyone about it until I arrived, though, because he didn’t like what our Magi were doing and he didn’t want to have to put up with them trying to get him to join them. He gave me an amulet that he says will make their spells slide off me, and he says that as long as I don’t leave the temple without a physical disguise, they won’t find me.” She made a face. “I don’t understand all of it; magic works differently from what a Winged One does. Father gave the Temple money to buy me a body slave and a fan bearer, so when I go out, I’m all wigged and painted and escorted. It’s such a bother that I only did it once.” She sighed. “Still, it’s not a loss. Kephru does wonderful massages, and Takit is useful running errands, so most of the time they’re working for the Healers.”

  “Are you able to practice your skills?” he asked, knowing how strongly she felt about her abilities. The panic in her voice when she had described being temporarily without them made him think that not being able to use them would be very like being cut off from some essential part of her, or having her soul cut in half. “Is it safe?”

  “Heklatis says it is,” she replied, and shrugged. “Certainly no one has come running here looking for me after I’ve used them—though I haven’t dared to try to See what the Magi are doing or to See the Temple of the Twins. I’m afraid that—” she bit her lip. “—I’m afraid that if another Winged One feels me Watching, the Magi will be told.”

  Would the Winged Ones actually betray one of their own to the Magi? “You think it’s that bad?” he asked soberly.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, looking profoundly unhappy. “I just don’t know. Someone is allowing them to take the Fledglings every day, and as far as I can tell, no one is objecting to it.” Her brows came together and she looked as if she was holding back tears. “And even if the reason they’re letting this happen is not that they’re on the Magis’ side but that they’re afraid of the Magi and what they can do, it doesn’t make much difference in the long run. People who are afraid would tell on me, too.”

  Now it was his turn to squeeze her hands, as comfortingly as he could manage. There was hurt in her eyes as well as unhappiness and that lurking fear. She’s been betrayed by the people she thought she could trust the most, and now she is not entirely sure what the truth is, or who she can trust. And a little thought followed that. But she trusts me . . . oh, gods, my thanks, she trusts me!

  “I wish there was something I could say or do to help,” he said aloud. “I wish I could visit you more often—but Aket-ten, not only have I work I can’t neglect, but if I come here too often when I never did before, someone might take notice.”

  She nodded, and smiled wanly. “And I haven’t sent for you for the same reason. I’m keeping busy. The library is where I spend a lot of time. I’ve mostly been helping the animal Healers though, and just trying to See that Father is all right. He seems all right. I don’t think they’ve done anything to him.”

  “I’ll check on him myself on the way back,” he promised, and tried to move the conversation to a more cheerful note. “Well, this looks like a place after your own heart! You don’t seem so—unhappy as you were last time.”

  She brightened, and looked more like her old self. “I’m not. The library here is wonderful; I haven’t run across more than a handful of scrolls that I’ve seen before. When I think of something I can do to help, I try to do it, and the rest of the time I stay out of the way. I’m learning what I can about the dragons.” Then her jaw jutted a little, stubbornly. “I still think I could be a Jouster. Think of how easily I talk to Avatre! I wish you and Father would have let me hide with Orest.”

  He suppressed a snicker to avoid hurting her feelings. “Let’s find somewhere warm where I can dry off. I want to tell you something. Do you remember Prince Toreth?”

  “I think so,” she said, leading him out of the library and back to her room. Someone had put up tightly woven reed screens up on the window, which darkened the room and cut off the view of the garden, but which also cut off the draft. Her brazier had made the place comfortably warm; she lit a splinter at it, then went around lighting all the lamps until the room was filled with a warm, golden glow. He hung up his rain cape to dry, then both of them took stools on either side of the brazier.

  And he told her all about Prince Toreth and his plans. “And he spoke about you, actually,” he finished. “He said that he would much rather have you in his cadre than Orest, because Orest’s tongue is a bit too loose, but that you are sensible and intelligent, and he thinks it would be no bad thing to have a Far-Sighted Winged One who is not afraid to speak the truth to advise him.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, putting one hand to her lips in surprise. “I—I am not certain what to say!”

  “At the moment, you’re supposed to be on a farm beyond the Seventh Canal, so you don’t need to say anything,” he reminded her. “There is no way you could know this if you were where you were supposed to be.”

  “That’s true,” she admitted. “I want to think about this.” She paused. “Did you mean that—about my becoming a Healer for the dragons and going to the Jousters’ Compound once the Magi stop being interested in me?”

  “As long as Lord Khumun and your father agree,” he replied. “We don’t need a Healer for the dragons much, but it would be very useful to have a Far-Sighted Winged One about. And it would be very useful to have someone who could talk to the dragons. You might get somewhere in soothing the wild-caught ones, now that we’ve got them to where they can actually be handled safely, and you can help us train the little ones.”

  Sh
e frowned in thought. “I need to think about this,” she repeated.

  He decided it was time to drop the subject, and instead went on to tell her about flying in the rain, and the sorties that the swamp dragon riders were doing.

  “Their dragons are smaller than the desert dragons, and I think it’s the first time some of them have gotten a taste of victory,” he concluded. “If there were more of them, it would be all right, because two of them could take a rider on a desert dragon. But being outnumbered and riding smaller beasts makes things hard for them.”

  “You’re making a real difference, then!” she exclaimed with pleasure. “Oh, how wonderful! I wish I was doing half as much.”

  “And what is it you always told Orest when he started fretting about not being a soldier?” he asked her, with a raised eyebrow.

  “ ‘The job of a student is to be a student,’ ” she sighed. “I suppose I’m a student all over again, then.”

  “You might as well be,” he agreed. “But why don’t you tell me why it is that the Healers do not care for the Magi? Because, obviously, they don’t or you wouldn’t be safe here.”

  She pursed her lips, and rested her chin on her fist. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I never thought to ask.”

  “Then why don’t you ask?” he suggested. “I’d start with that Akkadian you talked about.”

  “All right,” she agreed. “I will.”

  The remainder of the visit was confined to inconsequential things, and he left her feeling much better about her situation than he had when he had seen her the first time. As he had promised, he looked in on her father on the way back, and with a few carefully chosen words and glances, Lord Ya-tiren indicated that he thought there was still a spy in his household, but that no further pressure had been brought to bear on him to produce his daughter.

  The second time he went to visit Aket-ten, he had no news other than that, but she had enough information to make up for it.

  “I’ve asked about,” she told him, “though I have tried to be—um—circumspect. And all I’ve gotten were hints as to the quarrel the Healers have with the Magi. Very mysterious hints, too, with a lot of anger in them. I did find out one thing, though. Partly it’s because the Magi are at least half responsible for the war with Tia, and you know how Healers feel about war.”

  Actually, he didn’t know, but he could well guess. You could not be a Healer without feeling a desire to cure the sick and repair the injured so deep it often ran counter to self-preservation. So war must be entirely offensive to a Healer, at the same deep level.

  Especially this war, which, the more he learned about it, seemed less understandable. As far as he could tell, it did not serve a purpose now for either side. The Tians could easily expand to the south, going up the Great Mother River instead of down, and the Altans did not seem to have any real interest in the land outside of that needed to support their city.

  “How did you find that out?” he asked.

  “I’ve been reading some of the personal commentaries and diaries that got stored in the library,” she replied. “I mean, at least they were more interesting than recipes for curing impotence and spots! I found an entire rack of them rolled up in jars at the back of the library, and it turned out that each jar held the personal accounts of each Chief Healer here for—oh, hundreds of years. And right in the middle of one of them was a long tirade against the Magi, because the Magi had managed to persuade the Great Ones to use some trivial border incident as an excuse for war!”

  So—there it was. Part of the speculation that he and Toreth had made had been borne out. “Who was in the wrong?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “There was no telling. It was in a border village, and by the time it was over, anybody who might have known was either dead or too frightened to talk. The Magi blew it up into a treacherous attack on one of our patrols, unprovoked of course, and the irony is that they must have been looking for an excuse, too, because their declaration of war was delivered to us about the same time as ours was to them. But it was quite clear from the tone of the scroll that the Chief Healer was certain that if the Magi hadn’t been egging on the Great Ones, it could all have been smoothed over.”

  He rubbed his ear thoughtfully. “Are there other reasons?”

  “I think there are,” she told him. “But no one will tell me. They hint at it—and it has something to do with something that the Magi are doing either with or for the Great Ones, but they won’t tell me. They act as if—well, partly I think it’s that they aren’t entirely sure that what they think is happening is what is really going on. And partly it’s that if what they think is happening is the truth, it’s so horrifying to them that they don’t want to think about it. If I’m making any sense.”

  “Oh, you are,” he said, and paused. Should I tell her?

  He stopped, tried to clear his mind of all of his notions of what Aket-ten was, and tried to look at her objectively. It didn’t take more than a moment to come to a resolution; he wasn’t going to help her by protecting her from things he “thought” she shouldn’t know. She had been growing fast in the time he had known her, and that had been accelerated by her recent experiences.

  “Toreth and I have been talking about this,” he said, slowly, and outlined the whole nauseating scenario. The war, as an excuse to cut lives short—the stolen years from those who had died—

  Aket-ten’s eyes got bigger and bigger as he went along, and her face grew paler and paler. When at last he finished, she was as white as a lily.

  “That’s worse than necromancy,” she whispered. “But it makes a horrible kind of sense—”

  “And if that is what the Healers suspect?” he persisted.

  “It would explain a lot.” She blinked, as though her eyes were stinging, and now he knew she was trying not to cry. “This is really horrible, you know. I don’t think you have any idea how horrible this would be to a Winged One.”

  “Or a Healer,” he agreed. “No, I don’t.” And really, he didn’t, perhaps because so much of his own life had been stolen from him that—well, stolen years, a stolen childhood, a life spent in bondage—they all seemed equally wretched. Men died in fighting all the time, whether it was in war, or in a fight over a woman. That someone would plan for so many deaths was sickening, but so were poisoned wells, burned fields, and jars of scorpions tipped into granaries.

  “I suppose you couldn’t,” she said, swallowing. “It—well, it’s hard to describe. But—to someone like me, it seems like the most horrible and vicious sort of rape.”

  He nodded. That made sense. To her it would be much worse than “theft,” he could see that. “There’s even more to it than that; I think there’s something else being stolen by the Magi. I think that they are getting the—the—whatever it is they put into their magic to send the storms against Tia, I think they’re stealing from the Fledglings. I think that is why the Fledglings come back drained and exhausted. I think that is why they wanted you so much—because whatever it is, you have a lot of it.”

  Now she looked angry as well as sick. “Heklatis—the Akkadian—hinted as much,” she admitted. “Though he wouldn’t come out and say so. But why don’t they just ask?” That last came out of her in a kind of wail.

  “However the war began, we’re loyal Altans, if they’d just ask, we’d do whatever was needed!”

  “Probably because they aren’t the sort of people who ask. They’re too used to taking,” he said bitterly. Oh, yes. I know that type. “Anyway, taking is easier. Asking requires that you admit that you need something; taking means you’re the strong one and you can have whatever it is that you want.”

  But this was getting him angry, and that was counterproductive at this moment. He forced himself to calm down. “Anyway, now you know. Or at least, you know the best guesses. You might want to see if you can’t get something more out of the Healers; letting them know that you have some idea of what’s going on might loosen their tongues. If the Healers have some proof
that this is what’s going on—well, as the next in line to the Twin Thrones, I think Toreth has a right to know.”

  “I intend to,” she said grimly. “ ‘It is better to have a scorpion out in the open than under the bed,’ ” she quoted one of the proverbs that he remembered his mother using.

  “True,” he agreed. “But it’s better still to have it dead beneath your sandal.”

  TEN

  “KIRON! Kiron!” The frantic shout from the pen ‘next to his startled Kiron out of a sound sleep, and it was only thanks to his “training” at the hands of Khefti-the-Fat that he came awake all at once. “Kiron!” the shout came again, and this time, amid the startled replies and complaints all around him, he knew where it had come from and who it was that had called him.

  And he grinned, in spite of the panicked tone of Menet-ka’s voice. There was only one reason for that level of panic at this particular time, coming from Menet-ka.

  The first egg was hatching.

  Kiron had actually been expecting this for the past couple of days, and had advised Menet-ka to move a pallet down into the sand next to the egg so that if it began to move, he would know immediately. Not that this would make a great deal of difference to the hatching egg, but it would to Menet-ka, whose hair had begun to stand on end from the shy boy’s new habit of constantly and nervously running his fingers through it. So, like Avatre, these babies would be born amid thunder and rain. He considered that a good omen.

  And another good thing—though not an omen—was that Menet-ka had begun to come out of his shell since the hatching was so near, to ask questions of Kiron without whispering or mumbling them.

  He pulled on a wrap and kilt, ducked under the curtain of water pouring off his awning, went out into the corridor, and poked his head through the door to Menet-ka’s pen.

  “So the youngsters will be born amid lightning, just like Avatre! That is a fine omen!” he said heartily.

  Menet-ka just stared at him, as if he hadn’t any idea of what Kiron was talking about.