Alta

by Mercedes Lackey

  Kiron never counted on anything. Especially not luck.

  But before the sun reached the appointed spot, the clouds began to thin in front of them. Soon there were gaps below where Kiron could see the green of the farmlands. And then, when he looked ahead, he realized that it was not the white of more clouds that formed the horizon, but the white sands of the desert—

  And the farms beneath turned to scrub, the scrub to dry-scape plants, and then, just as the wind dropped away to nothing and Avatre went into a long, slow glide downward, the sparse desert-edge plants turned to true desert.

  This was the moment that he realized just how high they were.

  His passenger realized it at the same moment that he did; she shrieked in his ear, startling Avatre into a side-slip, and buried her face in his shoulder.

  He didn’t blame her.

  Their woolens had kept them warm, but it had been a bit hard to get his breath. Now he knew why.

  Suddenly Re-eth-ke folded her wings and went into a dive; taken by complete surprise, he only had the wit to direct Avatre to follow her. And follow she did.

  It was not the sort of heart-thumping, near-vertical stoop that he and Aket-ten had endured on their first such flight, but it was steep enough, and he heard his passenger’s muffled wails of pure terror against his shoulder. Re-eth-ke evidently saw something that he couldn’t, for she had her eyes fixed on some point in the blank expanse of desert below. This was not so much a dive as a series of steep spirals; the dragons were somehow steering with their tails, and had just enough wing extended to slow their fall a little.

  About the time when he made out that the thing that Re-eth-ke had spotted was a group of four beasts and two men, she tucked her hindquarters under and fanned her wings more, slowing the dive even further; a moment later, Avatre did the same. When he made out that the riders were muffled in Bedu robes and veils, and the beasts were camels, they were moving no faster than they usually were when they made landings, and they were spiraling down in a series of shallow, lazy circles, while the men and beasts watched, the men calmly, the camels nervously. The honks and groans of their complaints drifted up to him, and one of the men laughed at something the other said.

  Then the wings of both dragons snapped open to the fullest, simultaneously, and they began backwinging furiously. They touched down within a heartbeat of each other.

  Kiron’s passenger might have been still too terrified to move; that was not the case with the other passenger. She had unbuckled her restraining strap and was sliding down Re-eth-ke’s back unassisted while the dust they had kicked up was still settling.

  One of the men jumped out of his saddle, and began trotting toward them. She hardly seemed to touch the ground as she ran to meet him, cape flying behind her. He caught her up in a tight embrace and held her, while Kiron muttered to the young woman behind him, “You can look up now, Nofret. We’re down, Kaleth’s here, and something a little easier to ride is with him.”

  “I’m not a coward. . . .” came the trembling reply.

  “You’d be a fool if that ride hadn’t terrified you,” Kiron replied. “And you didn’t have anything to take your mind off the end of it. Here, I’ll help you.” He helped her to detach her icy-cold, fear-rigid fingers from his belt, while the second man took something off the back of one of the camels and beckoned to Aket-ten.

  By the time he got Nofret down off the back of Avatre, Aket-ten was dragging a woven palm-leaf cloth full of dead goat over to Re-eth-ke, who had her neck stretched out toward it, nostrils flared. The man was dragging a second such burden right behind her; while Re-eth-ke started hungrily on the first installment of her meal, Aket-ten took the second from him. Kiron caught up with the man at the camels, and they brought both halves of Avatre’s meat to her. Kaleth had thought of everything. But then, he should have figured on that. Even before the Wings descended on him, Kaleth tried to think of everything.

  Marit and Kaleth were still locked in their embrace, to no one’s surprise. Nofret was sitting on their baggage, which she had managed to get down off Avatre’s back, her head in her hands, now the very image of patient waiting.

  “Well, I see you have left Vetch far behind you, Jouster,” said the Bedu, in an amused voice.

  “And I see that your clan has prospered enough to afford us four goats this time, Mouth of the Bedu,” Kiron replied, with a lopsided grin.

  “Oh, they have been paid for, be assured of that, Kiron of Alta,” said the Bedu. “We have found your city, and have renamed it Sanctuary. As the young Eyes of Alta foresaw, there was treasure there, enough to provision it and make it ready.”

  So the Lost City really did exist! He thought longingly of it—it would be so good not to have to go back, to be able to fly on, into the clean desert, and land at the end of the journey in a place where he did not have to fear spying eyes, and the fingers of accusation—

  But he still had a great task unfinished. “Let’s hope it is indeed a sanctuary for those who need it,” he said stoically, as Marit and Kaleth at last broke their embrace, and finally came to help Nofret with the bags. Re-eth-ke had finished the last of her meal; Avatre was on the last mouthful. “Right now, if we aren’t to need it prematurely, we need to get back. I want our part in this all to be over with as little shed blood as may be, and that will need all nine of us.”

  “Indeed.” The Mouth bowed his head, then raised it again, and looked at Kiron shrewdly. “In the depths of the night we count those whose lives our actions have cost, yet the gods never tell us the numbers of those whose lives were spared because of what we have done. You may choose to think on that, when the night seems long.” He blinked owlishly above his veil. “And that is as it is. Your part is yet to come, and after that, it is in the hands of the gods. Fly fast and safe, Jouster. We will meet in Sanctuary.”

  Aket-ten was already in the saddle again, buckling on her restraining strap. She looked back at him, grinned, but gestured upward. He took the hint, and signaled Avatre to kneel, climbing up in the saddle himself.

  “Ride swift and safe, Mouth of the Bedu!” he replied, as he buckled on his strap. “We meet in Sanctuary!”

  His last sight of them, as the two dragons clawed for height into the clear sky, was of the four camels plodding back into the desert. He hoped that whatever was to come, Sanctuary would live up to its name.

  TWENTY

  IT didn’t look like anything at all, really; just a faint, grayish haze on the surface of the three ripe tala berries in Kiron’s hand. It could have been dust, except that dust didn’t rub off. It could have been almost anything, or nothing at all, just an odd color on the hard little berries. Kiron handed them back to Heklatis, who took them with a smile and a raised eyebrow. “The harvest looks good this year,” he said.

  “Yes,” Heklatis replied blandly. “They’re all like that, plump and well-colored. From here to the southern border of Tia, or so I’m told by the few who venture there. Whatever else, the rains were good for the tala.”

  Lord Khumun nodded gravely. “So a week to dry, and then we can use them, which is just as well, since I think we have scarcely a week in stockpile.” He knew, of course. He had frowned at the odd color of the berries, had looked up at Heklatis who had nodded, then both of them smiled, just a little. Kiron contained his glee with an effort, for he knew that the Tians had no more tala stockpiled than the Altans did. The Altan agents had not been able to steal any tala, but they had done the next best thing; during the rains, they had made holes in the roofs of the storage rooms where it was kept, to deny it to the enemy. The rain and the rot that followed spoiled it, or most of it. Only the tala actually stored at the Jousters’ Compound had been spared.

  Lord Khumun’s smile was a weary one; once the rains had ended, his lot had been fraught with difficulty, for the Magus placed in governance over all of them had flexed his muscles and ordered impossible things. A return to traditional Jousting; that had been the first thing, of course—well, he could order
all he wanted, but the Magi could not compel obedience on the battlefield, at least, not yet, and the Jousters had bowed their heads and continued with Kiron’s tactics. But besides that, he had ordered all of them into the sky, twice a day, every day, with no rest and little recovery for the injured, and that was taking a toll on them. As tired as they had been during the rains, they were bone-weary now. Lord Khumun’s sad smile told Kiron that he would be glad to see an end to the situation at last, even though it meant there would be no more Jousters and he would have no more command.

  Kiron could not imagine what the Magi were thinking of. Were they trying to be rid of the Jousters themselves? It seemed unlikely—

  Or were they only trying to get rid of the old Jousters, seeking to replace them with young men of their choosing?

  Kiron decided to ask Heklatis about that, this evening. Right now, he had a practice session to run.

  They had gone back to using that distant practice field the day that the rains started to taper off, even though the senior Jousters were so much in the air that they didn’t have time, much less the need, to practice. Kiron didn’t want an audience where the Magi could see that they had gathered one. He did not want attention drawn to his wing.

  They did have an audience, though, for their new exercises, which were quite exciting, even though there wasn’t a single person out there other than the wing and Heklatis who knew what they were for.

  He got back to the pen in time to find his dragon boy cinching the last strap down on Avatre; he checked them all, as he always did, and smiled. “Good job,” he said. “As always.”

  The lad grinned, as he gave Avatre the command to kneel. No more vaulting into the saddle from the ground for him anymore; Avatre had gotten too big for that. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind now that tala slowed the dragons’ growth as well as dulling their minds and instincts. Avatre was much bigger than her mother had been, and might even be a hair bigger than Kashet when he last saw Ari’s dragon, and she still had another two to four years of growth ahead of her. She was bigger than every other adult desert dragon in the compound.

  He gave her the signal to fly, and she leaped straight up from the pen, just as Kashet always had. He took her up over the compound and waited, circling on a thermal, while the rest finished their harnessing and joined him. They lined up in a V-shaped formation, with Avatre at the point, and headed for the practice grounds.

  He was the target, since Avatre was the oldest and most experienced flyer. By now she could perform everything he remembered Kashet doing, which meant that she could outperform most, if not all, of the Tian dragons. The exercises they were all running now—which would be crucial very soon—were harassing maneuvers. Kiron had gone to the swamps and watched as the swamp dragons challenged each other and drove each other out of hunting territories. Then he had come home and taught the harassment techniques to the wing. Avatre hated this; what the others were doing spoke to her deepest instincts, and she wanted, badly, to turn on them. That she didn’t bespoke her deep bond of trust with Kiron; he only wished he could reward her patience as it deserved.

  Tala-drugged dragons would respond with irritation, but would continue to obey their riders. Undrugged dragons, or those for whom the tala was wearing off, would try to chase the interlopers out of their territory until they realized that the dragon was immature—he’d seen that, too, in the swamp. Then they would realize that there was a sky full of better targets and potential mates, and there were wretched little hairless baboons on their backs that should be gotten rid of before the proper business of draconic life could be taken up.

  And that would be the end of the Jousters.

  There was still one matter that he had not come up with a plan for—warning the Altan Jousters of what was to come. He wanted to do that; it didn’t seem at all fair not to. But there might be one or more among them who would tell the Magus, and he did not know what would happen then. . . .

  But that was a week or more away, and he still had time to think of a plan, or so he hoped.

  They arrived at the practice field, which was just on the inside of the Seventh Canal. On the other side were the great estates and small, unprotected villages. He was not particularly surprised to see that there was a crowd gathered to watch. At least, this was so far out that it was unlikely there were any Magi here to note that they were not practicing traditional Jousting. He set Avatre up; the others went higher; each of them would take it in turn to harass her. She hissed; she knew what was coming, and she hated it.

  The wild-caught dragons would hate it even more. And when the battle was over, and all the dragons scattered, Kiron’s wing would fly due west until—well, probably until they picked up a guide at the edge of the desert. Kashet had found them once; presumably he would find them again. It was a more tenuous plan than Kiron liked, but it was a lot less fragile than it had been before Marit and Nofret had been forced to flee.

  The search for them had begun—discreetly—two weeks after their actual escape, but it had not been kept quiet for long. Too many people knew, and more people were involved all the time as the search spread outward. Nothing had been found; their choice of collaborators had been perfect. Not that this had stopped the Magi’s plan; the “twin” Magi had simply been rebetrothed to another set of girl twins—only this was a pair of toddlers. The marriage would not be able to take place for another decade at best, though this was nothing more than a postponement.

  Given their recent record, it was entirely possible that the spouses of some other set of royal female twins—including the current Heirs-apparent—might come to an unfortunate end. People would talk, but if nothing could be proved. . . .

  Huras and his dragon came down first. Kiron ducked, as they few by close enough that Tathulan’s talons brushed his back. Avatre snapped; he didn’t bother to stop her reflexive action, because their enemies would do the same, and he wanted the youngsters to learn to avoid the deadly jaws. Tathulan dodged neatly out of the way with a squeal, and Huras side-slipped her out of the way.

  It was all horribly depressing, and it made Kiron want to throw himself into a canal and drown sometimes. Only the promise of Kaleth’s visions kept him going, these days, for if things in the compound were bad, things in the city were worse.

  It seemed as if every time he looked, someone else had been taken up for treason. The Temple of the Twins was actually closed; supposedly, because the Winged Ones were so important to Alta, they were husbanding their strength so that they could answer the Great Ones’ needs on the instant. Kiron knew the truth, though, and it was exactly as he and Aket-ten had feared.

  The Magi had exhausted the Fledglings completely, leaving many of them without power anymore, and even some feebleminded or comatose. The Winged Ones, older and stronger and better trained, had resisted being burned out in that way, and now that the rains were over, they might be left alone to recover. But with no new Fledglings left to train to replace those who had failed—and another season of rains ahead—there was no telling what was going to happen. Certainly the people of Alta were now vulnerable to earthshakes in a way that they had not been for generations. And already there had been mutterings about “testing” the Healers to see if they could “aid” the Magi as well as the Winged Ones could.

  Heklatis said that there was rebellion among the Healers, though; so much so that no Magi would be allowed to get near the Temple of All Gods, much less inside it. And if anyone tried—well, they would have to bring a force big enough to overpower all the Healers and all their servants, and there were weapons being improvised that would probably break any spells of coercion such as were apparently used on the Winged Ones. Heklatis said such things required the Magi’s concentration; they’d be hard put to concentrate after getting facefuls of vinegar or lemon juice—or having leeches drop from the ceiling on them. If the Healers felt savage—

  You shouldn’t anger someone who knows as much about pain as a Healer does.

  Re-eth-ke and Me
net-ka’s Bethlan came in together, one on either side of him, moving fast. Fast enough to knock Avatre down a few feet with the turbulence of their passing. Avatre was too busy trying to recover to notice that Orest’s blue Wastet was right behind them; he came in low enough to snatch one of the tear-away streamers from Avatre’s saddle with his foreclaws. Avatre was enraged, and gave chase; Kiron was thrilled. They could get an entire wing aroused with a single pass with moves like that!

  And just as Avatre started to gain on the fleeing dragonets, they parted, going left, right, and straight up—and there, coming straight at them, was Oset-re and Apetma. Avatre yelped, and folded her wings to drop. Apetma passed right through the spot where she had been.

  Poor Avatre had had enough. She went all the way to the ground, and Kiron had to spend a goodly amount of time soothing her hurt feelings while the others chased after each other to catch streamers in a general melee. She might have a ruffled temper, but he was extremely satisfied. The tala could run out tomorrow, and they would be ready.

  Except for telling their own Jousters what was about to happen.

  He still had no answer for that question.

  When they got back to the compound, they all landed in the landing courtyard; not even Avatre was quite skilled enough yet to land in her own pen. Once down, he made sure to spend some time walking Avatre around to all the other dragons before they all went back to their pens, to make certain they were all friends again. Aket-ten went with him, “talking” to Avatre about it, and to the others as well.

  “Does it do any good?” he asked her anxiously as they walked Avatre and Re-eth-ke back together. “Do they understand?”

  “Actually, I think so, more each time we do this.