It was one of the girls who wasn’t getting a ride who turned, saw her, and yelped.
That got the attention of everyone except one of the couriers and his passenger, who rather quickly reacted when one of those on the ground blurted, “Wingleader Aket-ten! What are you doing here?”
The three dragons dropped to the ground, and three girls slid down off of them wearing three very different expressions. One was defiant, one highly amused, and one simply looked bored. Of the other two, only one looked properly apprehensive, the other, the one that had yelped—
Was she actually looking down her nose at Aket-ten, like one of those lazy, good-for nothing girls that did nothing but lounge around a Court all day, looking decorative? Who did she think she was anyway? Every one of these girls had been minor priestesses with the very minor Gift of understanding the thoughts of animals. In the ordinary way of things, they would all, every one of them, have been sent off to some minor temple—or else, if nobly born, been relegated to wafting incense about or holding an ostrich-feather fan for the rest of their lives.
“I should be the one asking you all that question,” she said sharply. “I am where I should be. And that is no way to address your superior. So what, exactly, is going on here when you should be watching your babies?”
The one looking down her nose smirked. “Lord Kiron thought it was a good idea for us to learn how to fly so we would be ready when the babies were.”
Kiron again! Aket-ten opened her mouth to lash out at the girl, when suddenly something occurred to her, and instead, she smiled.
Nastily.
Apparently that smile got through to them. The identical expression of apprehension crept over all five faces.
She narrowed her eyes. “Lord Kiron suggested that, did he? Well, although I rather well doubt this was what he had in mind for his couriers to be doing, he just might have been right.” She turned her attention to the three boys. “I’m sure, couriers, that you have far more important things to do with your time, and your dragons, than give pleasure hops. Training, after all, never really stops, does it?”
They took the hint. One of them even saluted her as all three flew off.
She turned to her girls and crooked a finger. “Come along,” she said, in silken tones. “I want to introduce you to some new equipment. Since you all want to learn to fly so quickly, you are going to truly enjoy this. It is widely considered to be the highlight of training.”
She had, with an eye to the training, been looking for the same sorts of apparatus that she and the rest of the original Altan wing had used to learn how to stay in the saddle when combat flying. It had taken her some time to track down where it had all been stored. Now, she had no intention of having the Queen’s Wing in combat; much though she disagreed with Kiron’s strenuous objections to the idea, she also knew that he was scarcely alone in his objections. There were things she would be able to do without offending the sensibilities of people in a position to stop her. Putting the young ladies in combat was not one of them.
But she was not going to tell these girls that. Actually, she had no intention of telling them that what she was about to put them through was combat training. After all, if they had to fly through sudden turbulent weather, they’d need this sort of practice.
And a few bruises, wrenched shoulders, or occasional black eye would do them good. It would remind them that they were here to serve the Two Lands, not as some sort of decorative accessory. She had been very clear on that when she had brought them in, after all; the Queen’s Wing, regardless of what other people were being led to believe, was not merely here to provide a dramatic and beautiful backdrop for the Queen’s Royal Appearances.
If they wanted to be decorative accessories, they could always go back to their temples. Systrums and ostrich-feather fans were in plentiful supply.
“Here we are!” she said cheerfully, ushering them into the empty pen with unheated sands in it, and the selection of six bits of apparatus waiting for them. They stopped just inside and eyed the things with misgiving. “You wait right here, while I get some servants. Since you’re all so eager, there is no time like the present, right?”
It didn’t take her long; all that was required was one stop in the kitchen to send someone for six of the husky slaves who used to perform this very duty for the training Jousters. By the time she herself got back to the pen, the slaves were already there. But then, she had taken her time, wanting the girls to think about what they might be faced with. The slaves had surely run; she had sauntered.
The six men stationed themselves at each of the sets of apparatus. She walked over to the first of them. “I’m going to show you what real flying training is all about,” she told them, getting into the saddle at the end of the long pole poised on a fulcrum, and fastening the straps tightly before she stood up. She made very sure they were good and secure, too. “This will make sure that you’re really ready when your baby dragons are. After all, this is not that different from being a charioteer, and no charioteer trainer would ever put a green driver and green horses together.”
She nodded at the slave, who levered her up into the air, then let her carefully down again. Up, down, up—this was like the gentle flap-glide-flap of a relaxed dragon in perfect flying conditions. The girls relaxed a little.
“This is what your flying will be like under ideal circumstances,” she said. Then she raised an eyebrow. “But I am sure we all know just how often ideal circumstances come about. So most of your training will be so that you can stick with and guide your dragon under the worst conditions possible.”
She nodded again at the slave, who proceeded to throw her end of the pole in every direction possible for the admittedly limited equipment, as hard as he possibly could. She gripped the padded end of the pole and the saddle strapped to it with legs and arms, shifting her balance as the dynamics of the seat shifted, grinning a little as the slave grinned at her, grinning still more at the look of alarm on the faces of the girls. Oh, they had no idea. This was the easiest of the flying training.
Finally she signaled to the slave to stop. He let her down onto the sand, and she unbuckled the straps, then stood up, motioning to the others.
“Come on, then,” she said. “I thought you wanted to learn how to fly.”
By the time the babies were ready for their next feeding, the five who had found themselves “volunteered” for flight training were indeed sore, bruised, and even a little sick. “You’ll be here every day, twice a day, from now on,” Aket-ten told them. “You’ll take it in turns. Four of you will watch the babies and play with them, and start teaching them what they will need to know, while the other four of you train. I’ll send the first four back to get the other four when I think you’ve had enough.”
And then—we will graduate to the second stage.
Two of the girls suppressed groans, but Aket-ten wasn’t done with them yet. “It’s also more than time you started learning about dragon harness. As you just felt for yourself, properly fitted harness can save your life, while improperly fitted harness will kill you. You should never depend on a dragon boy to be certain your harness is right. You’ll be spending part of every morning learning how to care for, fit, and even repair your harness.”
“But—” the supercilious one began faintly.
Aket-ten cut her off with a look. “You are going to be couriers. You will spend at least half of your time somewhere where there will be no dragon boys, no harness makers, no one who knows how to help you. So you might as well start getting used to taking care of yourself, your dragon, and everything about both.”
They looked at each other, then back at her.
Finally, the supercilious one straightened and squared her shoulders. “Yes, Wingleader,” she said formally, saluting. “Now, by your leave, should we be getting back to the babies? By the sun, it should be feeding time.”
Aket-ten gave her an approving nod. Kene-maat, she thought. I have to start remembering their names p
roperly. “Indeed you should, Kene-maat,” she replied evenly. “I will see you all at evening meal.”
That one just might make a good Wingleader herself, Aket-ten thought as she headed for Re-eth-ke’s pen.
This thought, however, did not ease her anger with Kiron.
He had put this notion into their heads. Furthermore, he had undermined her authority in doing so. If he thought they were ready for flight training, he should have told her, not them.
In fact, there were a great many things he should have been telling her. Such as where to find those saddle trainers. There were the other sorts of advanced trainers, too, the barrels strung on the ropes—one of the slaves had told her about those. She’d have to find someone who knew where they were stored.
And on top of all of that, why had he simply left without even telling her good-bye?
She felt her temper flaring again and stopped right where she was in the corridor to force herself to calm down.
Then she used one of the meditative techniques she had learned as a priestess to clear her mind. Because there were surely things she could do to make all this work better if only—
Ari was a Jouster. He knows where all of those things are. And he can probably outline the training for me.
She almost hit herself because that had been so obvious. It wouldn’t take him but a moment. He’d probably enjoy taking a little bit of leisure out to describe what he thought would be a good training regimen for her couriers. And he wasn’t set on undermining her.
She relaxed a little further and—
I can ask that Nofret be made captain of all the couriers here in Mefis.
That would take care of the little matter of Kiron’s couriers playing lazy games with her lady Jousters. She smiled. She could certainly think of things for them to do. Things that would keep them within the bounds of Mefis. There were plenty of errands to be run for the temples that would be done faster and more efficiently with a dragon courier. And as for them being ready at all times—she could have someone put up a pole and fly a pennon from it if the absent courier was needed.
She began to smile again. Yes indeed. That would keep them out of mischief.
And as for the girls . . . the day she couldn’t think of ways to keep them out of mischief, she might just as well find another rider for Re-eth-ke and retire to a secluded temple somewhere because she most certainly would have lost touch with reality altogether.
TEN
THE sun had just touched the horizon. The eastern sky had grown dark. And Kiron noticed now that even the smell of this town was wrong. The air was almost like that of the empty desert, with just a touch of musky goat to it. It should have smelled of unwashed bodies coming home from a day of hard work, of incense from the temples, of cooking food, of beer, of the cheap perfumed cones that flute girls used and the expensive ones that the well-to-do sported.
Everything conspired to make his skin crawl. This was different from Sanctuary and Aerie. There, the towns had been abandoned for so long that they had ceased to be places where you could imagine that in the next moment, someone would come around a corner. Here . . . this was like being in a nightmare. You just knew that at any moment you would wake up and the streets would be full again. Except that didn’t happen.
Avatre whined unhappily behind him. The dragons had been trailing them all through the town as if they, too, were uneasy about this place. Now Avatre came up behind him and bumped his shoulder with her nose, wanting comfort. Absently, he cupped her snout against his face.
“People just don’t vanish into thin air,” Pe-atep said suddenly, looking up, and raking his sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes with one hand. “They leave a trail. Assuming they all went to the same place, that would be a pretty wide track. I’m going to find where they went before it gets too dark to see their traces.”
With that, he stalked off, leaving the rest of them to scramble to catch up. Kiron was the first to move, motioning to the others to follow, and the dragons straggled along behind. Once, they startled a little herd of goats, which tried to run toward the desert; as if they were coordinating their attack, each of the dragons pounced on a different victim. All that hunting practice made it absurdly easy for them; they caught and gulped down their prey in nothing flat, and were shortly following close on the Jousters’ heels again.
They’d made a circuit of about a third of the ragged periphery of the town in the gray twilight when they discovered that Pe-atep was right in all of his assumptions. The people that were gone had gone somewhere, with some appearance of purpose. They had all gone in the same direction, it looked as if they had all gone at the same time, and they had left a trail.
Under normal circumstances the hard-baked desert ground would never have retained enough impression of feet for any of them to read; they were not, after all, skilled hunters or trackers. Pe-atep was the closest in that regard; he had trained the great hunting cats for the nobles of Alta, and thus had some minimal hunting skills himself. But the rest of them—Kiron had been a farmer ’s son and then a serf for most of his life, big Huras was the child of bakers, and Oset-re the protected child of nobles. What they knew of tracking could have been written on a fingernail with room left over.
But this was not a “few” people. Clearly, the entire town had passed this way, funneling through the streets and between the houses until they were channeled here to this spot. The scuffs and kicked-up dirt of an entire town’s worth of people, all condensing into a kind of army, and all heading in the same direction left a path as wide as an avenue in Mefis and as easy to see. The only reason they hadn’t spotted it before, from the air, was because they had approached low, and from the opposite side of the town. By the time they were near enough to see it, they had been concentrating on the empty streets, and thinking more of possible ambush or horrors to come than of what might lie on the eastern outskirts of town.
For this trail was headed east, without a shadow of a doubt. Men, women, children, children too small to walk on their own—all had come this way and gone off with no known reason. Across the border into lands the Altans knew nothing about.
“East?” Kiron said out loud. “What’s east?”
Could there have been plague, or at least sickness? Was there some famous healer in that direction that everyone had decided to go to? Had there been a prophecy, some utterance from one of the gods ordering everyone out? Kaleth wasn’t the only Mouth of the Gods in the world. . . .
And there were also plenty of people who would claim that title without having any right to it, too. Could someone like that be entrancing enough that people would do whatever he told them to do?
All four of the young men looked to Them-noh-thet, who was stroking his unshaven chin and frowning at a sky growing rapidly black. “This . . . is odd,” he said slowly. “Very odd. There’s nothing for them to go to. There is supposed to be nothing to the east of Tia, nothing at all, save a few wandering tribes of herders. No tradesmen, no merchants have ever bothered to go there. Not even the Bedu go there; it is wilderness . . . but . . .”
His voice trailed off.
“But?” Kiron prompted sharply. There was something about the priest’s expression that he did not like. “If we are to solve this, we must know even your speculations.”
“But this is where the Nameless Ones came from,” the priest said slowly and reluctantly. “They came marching across the border at a place very near here, according to the old records. That is why there was a border garrison here in the first place, to watch for them should they come again.” He rubbed his eyes with one hand. “There is no reason for anyone to go marching off in that direction, much less all of the people in the town. Something is very wrong here.”
Kiron snorted. That much was blindingly obvious.
The priest glanced aside at him. “I mean, something more than the obvious is wrong. I was sure I would find traces of magic here, that whatever had happened would be obvious to the trained Sight and the kinds of thing
s I have with me. But—no. There is nothing other than the absence of the people and this track. None of my talismans are telling me of the presence of the kind of dark powers that the Altan Magi used,” the priest continued, peering uneasily down at the ground as the darkness of full night quickly descended. “In fact, I sense . . . nothing even of what I can see with my eyes. No more than did the Sighted among us from Sanctuary. I can see the buildings. I can see the signs of ordinary life everywhere. But what I see does not correspond to what I See. It is as if there never was a town here, that nothing has ever lived here but wild things. People leave echoes of themselves anywhere they have lived, and those echoes take years, not days, to fade. Yet those echoes are not here.”
Silence answered his words, and Kiron shivered. He knew nothing of magic except that it did follow rules—and the priest was talking as if all those rules had been completely violated. He sounds like I would, if Avatre suddenly turned on me with no warning.
“I am going to hunt while there is still a little light left,” Pe-atep said abruptly into that silence. “The dragons have fed, but we have not. We were counting on people to be here, on the garrison to take care of our needs when we got here.”
Kiron nodded slowly. “Yes, we were. But who could have thought—”
“No one,” Pe-atep said immediately. “This is not something you could have anticipated, Kiron, but it isn’t going to stop our hunger from making us weak if we don’t take care of ourselves. I will kill one of those wandering goats. That will be meat enough for us all, if nothing else.”
“I will see if there are stores of flour or the like,” Huras said slowly. “The scavengers can’t have gotten into everything. There plainly is nothing in this town to fear, not even ghosts—” He faltered to a halt. Kiron could empathize. When a place was this deserted, even a ghost would have been welcome, in a way.
And at least this was something constructive they could all do. Kiron took command of the situation. “Pe-atep, that is a good plan. We must sleep, and we must eat. Going to bed with our stomachs aching will not let us sleep. We cannot do much, even to return to Sanctuary, without food and rest. So let us divide ourselves—but carefully.”
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