Alta

by Mercedes Lackey

  So, how to come up with a good excuse for the whole lot of them to descend on Heklatis. . . .

  It seems as if I spend half my life now trying to come up with innocent reasons to do something in case someone is watching, he thought wearily. I am very tired of this.

  He couldn’t help but wonder now—if he had known that this was what his life would come to, would he have returned to Alta at all?

  Finally Kiron spoke aloud. “You all look like trampled barley,” he said. “And I feel like trampled barley. Finish your dinner, and as wingleader, I am ordering the entire wing to visit the Healer. I want him to look us over carefully, one and all. Potions at dinner are all very well, but I think we ought to get the Healer to check us completely. The last thing I want is for one or more of us to fall ill. A mistake in the air can be fatal.”

  “Well,” said Gan, after a moment. “Since he mixed the last potion he gave me with distilled palm wine, I’m not going to object too strongly. I’m tired, but too nervy to sleep anyway; maybe he can give me something to make me relax and drop off.”

  The rest nodded. “I want something for this eye,” Orest said ruefully—ruefully, because the eye was his own fault. He had actually smacked himself with the Jousting lance.

  Kiron didn’t hurry them as they finished their meal. That would have looked odd, and the last thing he wanted was for anything to look odd at the moment.

  Besides, no matter how urgent Kaleth thought the situation was, he was in no great hurry to hear it. Only when they were all through, Aket-ten included, did he nod and climb stiffly over the bench to lead them to Heklatis’ rooms.

  They were able to walk under awnings most of the way, and only had to dash under the young waterfall pouring down over the awning at the break where the corridor met the entrance to the courtyard. By now it was dark, but the door of the main room was open and warm lantern light shone invitingly out at them.

  The room was as inviting as the light had promised, and their host had laid out cushions and stools for all of them. Kaleth was already there, waiting for them and looking as tense as a strung harp, and so was Heklatis, of course. Once they were all inside, Heklatis shut the door after them, and made a peculiar, twisting little gesture on the surface of it.

  Kaleth relaxed at once. “Now we can talk,” he said with gratitude. “Kiron, I have to leave.”

  Kiron was more than a little startled. That was not what he had expected to hear! “All right,” he said cautiously. “So—”

  “It’s not what you think,” Kaleth interrupted. “It’s not that the Magi are coming for me yet, and it’s not that I don’t feel as if I belong among you, because I do.”

  “What is it, then?” Orest asked.

  “I had a vision today while you were all at afternoon practice,” he said. “Heklatis was with me, and what made it different was that this is one I remembered afterward.” His expression took on a little of that far-away look it got when he was actually having a vision. “I spoke with one of the Bedu, the Blue People, and he said—I think it was a ‘he’—said you would remember him. He said he was the one who guided you to the edge of the delta marshes from the last oasis, and told you that you had to stop being Vetch and start being Kiron.”

  Kiron blinked. He might have been skeptical about this “vision”—except that right there was the proof that it was a true one. There was no way that Kaleth could have known what that final Mouth of the Bedu had said to him about leaving his serf-self behind, because he had never told anyone. “All right,” he repeated. “So what else did you see?”

  “It wasn’t so much what I saw as what I was shown,” Kaleth said, and now he looked at them each in turn, his expression sober and a little frightened. “I have to leave, and meet with this Bedu. He’s going to help me find a place where we can make a refuge, a secure hiding place, a sanctuary. He—the Bedu—said, and my vision showed me, that we’re going to need it. He said he and the other Bedu like him had been having the same vision as me, and he had been appointed to vision-speak me to make me understand, because I hadn’t been trained and otherwise I might not understand how important it was that I do this.”

  “A refuge?” Gan said, skeptically. “For who?”

  “You, at least at first,” Kaleth replied. “Because once the Jousters are no more because the tala fails and the dragons all escape, the Magi won’t let you nine live.”

  Even though Kiron had more than half expected to hear something like this some day, it came as a jolt. He felt cold all over, and it wasn’t because of the rain, winds, and chill. It was an ugly thing to hear that someone intended your death.

  Kiron turned his gaze on Aket-ten. “You’re in that nine. You need to understand that.”

  “I already did,” Aket-ten said bitterly.

  Kiron suspected that he wasn’t the only person to feel as if a line of ice-laced fire ran down his spine at that moment. But he believed Kaleth. Oh, my, yes.

  He had seen what the Magi could and would do to those they considered threats, and the last remaining Jousters in Alta would be a threat to their continued aggrandizement of power, if nothing else.

  “Me, too, of course—well, I’ll already be there. And after us, others will come,” Kaleth continued, “Mostly from Alta, though not all. You, too, Heklatis.”

  “I suspected as much,” the Healer said dryly. “For one thing, I’m rather too closely linked with the lot of you, for another, if there are no Jousters, they won’t need a Healer now, will they?”

  “But the thing is, I have to meet with the Bedu, and pay them to help me in the desert, and find the place. They don’t even know it exists, the one who spoke to me said that the Bedu think it’s only a legend.” He looked triumphant. “It’s Te-pa-ten-ke, the Lost City, and my visions are going to lead me to it.”

  That held them frozen in their seats for a moment. Everyone knew about the Lost City, how it had been buried by a mammoth sandstorm in a single night. It had supposedly incurred the anger of the god Haras, because the inhabitants had turned into brigands, preying on their neighbors, and after they cast out their own priests for warning them, he had raised his hand against them. But no one had ever seen it, not even the Bedu whose home the desert was.

  “I should say,” Kaleth continued, “that I’ll pay them for passage, and then when I find the city, I know where to find a store of gold to pay them to help me set it up for you. The Bedu with the visions trust me, of course, but they’re poor—”

  “Exactly,” Kiron put in, as the others began to look a bit skeptical at all this talk of payment. “The desert takes everything you have just to survive. The Bedu have nothing to spare to sustain an outsider. They need payment in order to get extra supplies for you.”

  He nodded. “And then, they’ll need more gold to get the supplies to help me make the place livable for the rest of us.” He looked a little feverish, but had an air of triumph about him, and a look as if he had at last found meaning for his life and a great goal to pursue.

  Well, if that was the case, Kiron couldn’t blame him for looking triumphant. In many ways, he had emerged from Toreth’s shadow and come into his own kingdom. . . .

  “So if you’re going to be wandering out in the desert, just how are we supposed to find you and this refuge?” Oset-re asked, with a touch of irony. “I don’t fancy flying off across the wastelands trying to find a place that shouldn’t exist.”

  “You won’t have to. The Bedu will find you and bring you to me when the time comes. The Mouth will know when and where to find you. That’s all I know.” He shrugged. “The visions showed me the city, but not how you’ll end up there, though I think it’s bound to be when the dragons go wild. And it’s getting dangerous for me to be here; I’m not sure why, I only know that it is. The Bedu said so, too. I’ll leave in the morning, so this is the last time we’ll all meet before I see you in Te-pa-ten-ke.”

  Kiron cast a glance over at Heklatis, who interpreted the look correctly. “I believe him, Kiro
n,” the Healer said. “I think this is a true vision. I told you once that these things come in fragments; we should just be glad that he got enough to know the next part of the plan.”

  “We essentially destroy the Jousters, then escape into a refuge,” Kiron mused aloud. “It could be worse, I suppose.”

  Kaleth scowled at him. “Yes, it could,” he said with annoyance verging on anger. “You could come back to the compound after the battle, and the Magi could wipe you all out of the sky with the Eye. I’ve seen that, too, and I don’t want to see it truly happen instead of being a maybe-future!”

  That stopped Kiron dead; in fact, they all went as still as stone for a moment, and in the silence, the rain outside was very loud indeed.

  “All right,” Kiron said into the silence. “In that case, let’s all work on making sure that particular maybe-future never has a chance of coming true.”

  Kiron half expected that no one outside of their little group and Marit and her sister Nofret would even notice that Kaleth was gone, and as far as he was able to tell, that was the case. Lord Khumun did not mention it, there were no rumors from the court, and in fact, Kaleth’s absence might well even be a relief for some. Kiron did not even attempt to keep up the fiction that he was still there, though if anyone asked him, he was going to say, truthfully, that Kaleth had left one night leaving no word of where he was going, and then add, “Though he spoke once of trying to find the Lost City.”

  He figured that such a statement would brand Kaleth as completely mad. Even the Magi would probably not bother to look for him after that.

  But no one outside the group ever spoke of him; perhaps, like Toreth, they were all trying to pretend he had never existed. Perhaps they were trying not to draw attention to themselves. Perhaps both.

  But within half a moon, and deep into the rains, they all got a rude shock, and Kiron was very, very glad that Kaleth had gone. It went down as one of the black moments of his life.

  Lord Khumun sent dragon boys around to the entire compound that morning as they all awakened, saying that he wished to address them over breakfast. Kiron fed Avatre without thinking very much about it; though it wasn’t unusual for Lord Khumun to address them all together, it wasn’t unheard of. Perhaps the work of the rains had gotten noticed and the Great Ones wanted to send a reward of some sort, or at least, a word of commendation.

  They certainly deserve it, he thought, with more than a bit of bitterness. More than the Magi, if you were to ask me. After all, they were having to fly in that magic-befouled weather, and because of their efforts, the border had been pressed back yet again—almost to the place it had been when Kiron’s own village had been lost to the Tians so many years ago.

  But when Lord Khumun finally appeared to the restless crowd of Jousters waiting for him in the kitchen courtyard, he was not alone.

  There was a Magus with him, and at the sight of the man, the muttering men in the courtyard went deathly quiet. It seemed at that moment that every drop of rain on the awnings overhead, and dripping down between the gaps in the cloth, was terribly, terribly loud.

  Aket-ten sucked in a breath, and Kiron was very glad that she was sitting at the back of them all, and they were at a table at the back of the wall. There were a lot of taller, older men between them and the Magus, and yet the man’s penetrating eyes seemed to sweep the crowd and see all of them. Kiron would very much rather have been in complete shadow at that moment, and he hoped that the Magus had only seen a sort of shape, and not that there was a girl among them. He did not want Aket-ten to be noticed.

  It was not a comfortable sensation. Those eyes were as cold and as dead as opaque pebbles, and Kiron would have wagered at that moment that he was looking at a man who would bury his own mother alive if it got him something he wanted. But at least his gaze didn’t rest on any of them.

  “This is Magus Mut-ke-re,” said Lord Khumun carefully—too carefully—into the silence. “The Great Ones have decreed that he is to have oversight of the Jousters, in order that the Magi may make the best use of us. Our tactics, so successful now, they say, will become even more successful with a Magus to guide us.” There were worlds of hidden meaning there, and Kiron was under no illusion that he could read more than half of them. It would have taken someone like Toreth or Kaleth, versed in the double-dealing of the court, to decipher all of them. Some were clear enough, though. Lord Khumun was under no illusion that the Magus was there to “help” the Jousters.

  The man is here to spy on us, he means, Kiron thought instantly, and was passionately grateful that now there was nothing to hide—no dust, no plan to spread it, and no Kaleth with his visions. What would the Magi have done, had they discovered Toreth’s brother had become a Winged One, untrained, and of the sort that they dreaded most? At the least he could have expected to be dragged off to the Tower of Wisdom to be used and used up. At the worst—Kiron preferred not to think about what the worst could be. He had the horrible suspicion he couldn’t possibly imagine it.

  No wonder Kaleth had said that he was in danger. If he’d had any hint from his visions that this was coming, he could only have read it as imperative that he get away.

  And how fortunate it was that they had already found ways of explaining everything else that the Magi might take exception to! Everyone had the stories straight, and no one would deviate from them or fumble out contradictory explanations.

  The Magus nodded at Lord Khumun’s words, but said nothing. He only looked, looked at all of them, hunting with his eyes, searching for some sign of rebellion, perhaps. Kiron set his chin, straightened his back, and looked right back again. He would not show this man that he was afraid. If he saw anything, let him see defiance and be damned to him. Let him see rebellion, if that was what he was looking for. He could suspect it all he wanted; Kiron’s actions would not give him any ammunition for an accusation.

  “The Magus’ words are to be obeyed as mine,” Lord Khumun said tonelessly, making it very clear in that moment just who was the new ruler here—if the Magus’ attitude hadn’t already made that clear.

  It was not an auspicious beginning for the day.

  By the time the day was over, it was quite clear that there was no love lost between the Magus and his new charges. Kiron was not the only Jouster to meet the appearances of the Magus with outward—but bare—civility. Mut-ke-re poked his long nose into everything, from the kitchen to the sand-bath pen, and asked abrupt questions wherever he went. The dragons didn’t like him, and greeted his appearance with hisses and whines. Even the best-tempered of them made no bones about their dislike of him. He repaid their displays with no visible expression whatsoever.

  The Jousters ignored him, except when he addressed one of them directly, and they gave him as little opportunity to do that as possible. They kept out of his way until time to fly, then quickly took their dragons to the landing courtyard, knowing he would not venture out into the rain, then mounted as fast as they could, and got their dragons into the air. The dragons didn’t even care to linger.

  That left him only Kiron’s wing to inspect.

  He surprised Kiron by appearing soundlessly in the door to Avatre’s pen, appearing out of the gloom while Kiron was harnessing her. The first Kiron knew he was there was when he cleared his throat ostentatiously. Kiron might have jumped, but Avatre covered it by swinging her head toward the doorway, eyes wide.

  “Well,” the Magus said, in an arrogant tone of voice, “So this is the famous Tian Jouster boy and his dragon.”

  There were many replies that Kiron could have made to that, and most of them would have been rude. He bit his tongue as Avatre stuck out her neck and hissed at him, and confined himself to simply saying, “I am still in training, and I was not aware that I was famous, my Lord.”

  The Magus grunted. Kiron remained silent, continuing his work, moving slowly and carefully to keep from fumbling anything out of nervousness. Avatre showed her teeth.

  “Isn’t she big enough to fly to combat?” th
e Magus said, with growing irritation when his continuing silence could not prod anything more out of Kiron.

  “She is not fully trained, my Lord, and neither am I,” he replied, deciding that it was more than worth the irritation it would cause the Magus to hear the same answers repeated and rephrased, over and over. “And we are both much younger than even the traditionally trained Jousters and their dragons. Size is no indication of age or skill, my Lord, nor of readiness, much less of trained competence.”

  This time the reply was a snort. “So what is it that you claim? That you are inept?”

  “That I am untrained in traditional Jousting, my Lord,” Kiron said, keeping his tone even. “Avatre is a desert dragon, my Lord, and they grow to be much larger than those you are used to seeing. She is no older than three years; the youngest of your fighting dragons is three times that age. And I have been training for little more than one year; the least training that your Jousters receive before they take to the battlefield is two years.” He couldn’t help it; his voice took on an edge of anger, though he did his best to control it. “Are you suggesting, my Lord, that I should attempt things that are beyond my skill and hers? That we should risk, not only ourselves, but the lives of those who would wrongly depend on us, thinking we are skilled and practiced Jousters? That we should engage in the monumental hubris of believing we are ready for things we have no business trying, merely because we are—if indeed we are—famous? That, my Lord, would not only be foolhardy, it would border on—treason, wouldn’t you say? To knowingly go into a battle, aware that we cannot do what is asked of us when there are others depending on us to do what we cannot? Are you suggesting that this would be a good idea?”

  There, he had flung the challenge back in the Magus’ face. And now he looked up, to see a most peculiar expression there. Surprise—and perhaps a touch of fear?