She nodded. “We are. There are three other Jousters here, and Kaleth has a task for us.”
Kiron made a face. “More courier duty—”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. At least, it didn’t seem that way to me. But he wanted me to get you, so he can explain it to all of us at the same time.”
He became uncomfortably aware of how grimy he was, especially after noting that Aket-ten had apparently had a bath and a change of clothing already. “Before I see anyone, I want to be cleaner.”
She nodded. “I’ll tell him you’re coming. Get something to eat, too. It might be a long meeting, I don’t know.”
Well, that was not exactly what he wanted to hear.
Bathed, in truly clean clothing for the first time in days, and fed, he checked on Avatre and Re-eth-ke again. A servant was just taking away the last of the empty barrows, and Avatre had flopped down in the sand again to sleep. Re-eth-ke was already dozing. The fast flight here had taken a great deal out of both of them.
He knew exactly how they felt, too. It seemed to him that he could easily sleep for a week. Unfortunately, he did not have that luxury.
One might have thought that the Mouth of the Gods and his mate would have the use of the largest temple building in all of Sanctuary. In fact, their choice was to have the smallest. Because there were priests of both Alta and Tia here now, and because even the least and littlest cult had sent representatives here, the largest was dubbed the “Temple of All Gods,” and there was a shrine to every deity with a representative here in the city. The next largest was given over to Haras, in no small part because ornamentation and carvings indicated it had once been the home to priests of the hawk-headed god before the city vanished under the sand.
After that, Kaleth had somehow apportioned out buildings to various sects without anyone having apoplexy. How he had done that, Kiron could not imagine. Perhaps the gods themselves had gotten involved.
However it had happened, the end result was that Kaleth and Marit, the Mouth of the Gods and his beloved, ruled over a building of only two rooms. There was the sanctuary, and behind it an all-purpose living space. There was no kitchen, but a kitchen wasn’t really needed, as food was brought over from other temples.
And, in fact, as Kiron entered the door to the sanctuary, he sidestepped a couple of young women in the robes of those who served the goddess Mhat, who were just leaving with large, empty platters. The sanctuary was empty, but voices coming from beyond the door curtain told him where everyone was. Like all buildings in Sanctuary, here in the heart of the desert, the walls were as thick as his arm was long, and had very few openings. Even the customary ventilation slits near the ceilings of Tian buildings were missing here. Small wonder. The sand crept in through every aperture under normal circumstances, and when a midnight kamiseen blew, you could have found yourself buried alive in your own home as the sand flooded in.
So the interiors of buildings were dark, except where there were lamps. But lamps made heat, so for the most part people preferred the dark.
He took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the darkness before walking across the cool stone floor of the sanctuary to the curtained doorway at the rear.
Pushing aside the curtain, he found Aket-ten, Rakaten-te, Kaleth, Marit, and two priests he did not know sharing a somber meal. Rakaten-te turned his bandaged eyes toward the doorway, detecting Kiron’s presence before anyone else did.
“Ah,” he said. “The last of our group.”
Kaleth looked up and nodded at him somberly. “Kiron, come eat, and you will hear what we have been doing here in your absence. It bears directly on what we will be asking you to do.”
With a certain amount of trepidation, Kiron folded his legs beneath him and helped himself to food. One thing was certain, they were eating better in Sanctuary than they were in Aerie.
I am very tired of desert, he thought suddenly. He thought with sudden longing about Alta, the estate of Aket-ten’s aunt. Streams and ponds, and the river running alongside it. Not like Sanctuary, where the air was so dry it sucked water out of you.
He pulled his wandering attention back to the conversation, which had started up without him.
“. . . Heyksin,” one of the two stranger priests was saying somberly.
That got his attention.
“How sure of this are you?” Kaleth asked sharply. His head was up and he frowned, and well he might. This was not good hearing.
The priest shrugged. “We have but a few words from the written tongue of the Nameless Ones, copied down centuries ago, recopied over and over without the scribe that made the copies knowing what the words were supposed to mean. And we have the words on this amulet. Some of the characters are identical. Some are a mismatch. Does that mean that these Magi are of the Nameless Ones? We think so. Our written tongue looks nothing like this, the Bedu have no written language, and Heklatis tells us it looks like no language he knows.”
All fell silent at that point. Kiron felt chilled as a stone in winter. If there was one thing that the people of Tia and Alta feared equally, it was the Nameless Ones. And if they were the ones responsible for the disappearance of a town full of people . . .
“Then I must tell you still another unpleasant thing,” Rakaten-te said slowly, fingering the carvings on his staff. “You know that we of Seft are accustomed to keeping our own counsel and hold many secrets.”
Everyone nodded at that, but none more emphatically than Kaleth. The Mouth of the Gods raised an eyebrow but held his peace.
The Chosen of Seft coughed lightly. “Some seasons back, one of our . . . agents . . . got his hands on a book of spells of the Magi of Alta.”
He could not have secured their attention more fully if he had stood up, smashed Kaleth over the head with his staff, and proclaimed himself the Mouth of the Gods. Every eye in the room was riveted on him, as he sat there with the hint of a sardonic smile playing about his lips.
For that matter, Kiron felt rather as he had right after the Chosen had smashed him in the head with his staff.
It was Kaleth who finally spoke first. “But—how—”
“It was when those so-called advisers to the Great King first turned up, and we of Seft got whiffs of darkest magic about them,” Rakaten-te said and shrugged. “Caution bid us work in silence and in secret, as we are wont to do anyway. These men were respected, and not all dark magic is turned to evil ends. It was early days, the would-be adviser was living in a house he had rented, and our agent caught the fellow at something unsavory. Trust me, you would rather not know the details. There are some things that even one who lives in the shadows will not tolerate, and the Magus met with an—accident.”
“And the crocodiles with an offering?” asked one of the strangers.
The Chosen of Seft tilted his head to one side. “It is true that we of Seft have an understanding with the spawn of Sobekesh. And from time to time we offer them tribute. It might have been that the Magus fell into a pool where they were accustomed to be fed. Of course, we did not know he was one of the Magi then, nor did we have any clue of this until very recently. To avoid difficulties, our agent took all of the man’s personal belongings, making it look as if the fellow had run off on his own. He brought the belongings to his master, the master brought them to the temple, and an underpriest, not knowing what to do with them, took them to the Chief Scribe of Seft who ordered them put away in a chest. Recently a number of such storage chests were being gone through, and that was when we uncovered the book.” One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Our scribes are very thorough. The antecedents of the contents of that chest were tallied in a scroll on top of everything in it. Knowing now that this adviser must have been an Altan Magus, the contents were searched and the book found. It was no bigger than my hand, and I am told, written in such small characters that a man was like to have his eyes cross trying to read it.”
Kiron was waiting for the other sandal to fall. Rakaten-te had certainly been dangling it in
one finger long enough. He took pity on them then and let it go. “When we realized it was written neither in Tian nor in the Altan variant script, we began trying to find someone who could read it. When that was fruitless, we began a search of the library for scrolls in obscure tongues. To shorten this tale, it appears that the book of magic is written in the tongue of the Heyksin.”
The silence was like a shout.
“The Magi of Alta were really Nameless Ones?” It was Marit who asked this, in an oddly calm voice. But Kaleth’s beloved moved to take his hand, and he to hold hers. Her slightly slanted eyes were wide with alarm that she otherwise did not show.
“Let us say that we think that the Magi of Alta were—perhaps I should say ‘are’—descended from the Nameless Ones.” Rakaten-te shrugged. “It is difficult to say whether they still had any connection with their former peoples.”
Kiron was still trying to get his mind to work. He thought it might be some time before he got his mouth to do so.
It was one thing to have his worst and yet most nebulous fear confirmed, that the shadowy attackers were in fact the Heyksin. At least he had anticipated that much.
But that the Magi were Heyksin—this smacked of a plan, a conspiracy, that must have been going on ever since the Nameless Ones were expelled from the Two Kingdoms.
“This . . . explains something,” Kaleth said slowly. “I may be the Mouth of the Gods of Alta and Tia but . . . there are other gods. . . .”
The stranger priests now turned to stare at him as if he was speaking nonsense. But Rakaten-te nodded, his lips compressed into a thin, hard line. “There are other gods. And mine is the god of difficult choices. When gods war, it is often we mortals who serve as the armies.”
The two stranger priests blanched.
Rakaten-te ignored them. “Go and commune, Mouth of the Gods of Tia and Alta. Ask them if it is war in heaven we face. And I hope you will return to me with an answer.”
The quietest and coolest place in all of Sanctuary was the cavern beneath the city where a tributary of the Great Mother River ran hidden beneath the sand and rock of the desert. At the downstream end, past where people were pulling out their water for drinking and cooking, the current inhabitants had made a kind of area for swimming and bathing. Lit by a few lanterns whose light was reflected in the placid, deep waters, when there was no one else present, it was a place of deep peace and very, very quiet. This was where Kiron took his dazed and aching head, to immerse himself in the slowly-moving water and try not to think.
This was just too big. It had all gotten completely out of hand—
Except that wasn’t it already out of hand? If what Rakaten-te had said was true? If this was all about the Gods of Tia and Alta at war with the Gods of the Nameless Ones . . . and had been all along . . . then the only difference was that now the poor mortals caught up in this conflict knew about it.
It made him feel as if he was in the middle of an earthshake.
I don’t want to be in the middle of this.
But he was in the middle of it whether he liked it or not.
I’m not like Ari and Kaleth. I’m not royal, I’m not a priest, I’m just the son of a farmer. . . .
He lay there with his eyes closed, listening to the slow lapping of the water against the stone and sand of the verge, with the cool water covering all of him but his chin and face. This was insane. How could he be caught up in something this big?
Someone padded softly, with bare feet, down to the waterline and dove in, being careful to do so far enough from him so as to not splash him unduly. He opened his eyes and was not surprised to see Aket-ten’s head surfacing nearby.
She looked at him out of the shadows as if she knew his thoughts. “This changes nothing, you know,” she said calmly. “We’d still defend our land and our people. The Nameless Ones would still try and conquer us again. It’s just as valid to say that we are causing this ‘war in heaven’ as it is to say the other way around.”
He blinked. “It is?”
She smirked a little and pulled damp hair out of her eyes. “The Seft cult isn’t the only one to have its little secrets. As a Fledgling, I was taught that ‘as above, so below’ also works the other way. As we, the worshippers, tend, so tend the gods. That’s one reason why Kaleth is working so hard at reconciling the cults of Alta and Tia. Eventually in every Altan/Tian pairing, if the worshippers and the priests become reconciled . . . the two Gods will become one.”
He had a funny mental image of two gods melting together like two unbaked abshati figures left out in the rain, and started to laugh. But then he sobered. “So we affect the gods?”
She nodded. “This ‘war in heaven’ may only be a reflection of the war the Nameless Ones brought to us so long ago. There is no telling for certain.”
She swam over to him as he moved into the deeper water. “I just—don’t like the whole idea of the gods swooping in and using us as pieces in a game,” he replied, his stomach clenching.
She said nothing, for a very long time. “It’s not a game,” she said very quietly. “Not for us, certainly, but not for Them either. It’s more complicated than that. I’ve been told that if they lose their followers, Gods can even die.”
“Well, maybe the Gods ought to think twice about sticking people in wars where they can die, then,” he said, irritated. It still made him queasy to think about it. Life was complicated enough without the Gods mucking about with it. “How long do you think they’ll want us to stay here?” he asked, changing the subject. “The Chosen and Kaleth, I mean.”
“I don’t know.” She swam over to the side and climbed out on the rocks to dry herself off. “I’m anxious to get back.”
He felt a pang. So she would rather be with her new wing of dragons than with him for another day. . . .
The moment he had that thought, he knew it was unfair, but he couldn’t help it. She had her duty. And these young women—they were shaping up well. Of course she needed to be with them.
He just wished she needed to be with him as much.
And he suddenly realized, with a very sour feeling in his gut, that he did not want to go back to Mefis. Not at all.
“Do you think you and Re-eth-ke could manage Rakaten-te alone?” he asked. She pulled a clean tunic over her head and tugged it down in place before turning to look at him, a hurt expression in her eyes. “It’s not you!” he exclaimed quickly. “It’s . . . my mother.”
He clambered out beside her as she eyed him with a peculiar expression. He pulled his own clothing on without bothering to dry himself off. “She’s driving me mad,” he said pathetically. “She’s my own mother, and she’s driving me mad.”
“She might be your mother, but you have seen nothing of her since you were very small.” Aket-ten sat down on a rock, chin on her fist. “How can she possibly drive you mad? Now my mother—she knows exactly how to get me to do what she wants. She can make me feel guilty without saying a word, just using a look! She knows me too well. Your mother knows you not at all.”
He ducked his head a little, feeling guilty already. “I should be happy to see her. I should want to spend as much time as I can with her and my sister. But my sister sits in the corner and plays with toys like a child because of how badly hurt she was. And my mother . . . all she talks about, all she wants to talk about, is getting the farm back.”
He couldn’t bring himself to call it “our” farm. He didn’t belong there. He hardly remembered anything about living there, and he certainly didn’t want to go back.
Ever.
Aket-ten blinked. “What would she do with it if she had it?” she asked logically. “One woman and a feeble-minded girl could not possibly keep up with the work. Does she have a man interested in her? Could she marry again if she had the land?”
Kiron groaned. “No, she does not, and would that she did! I know what she wants me to do. She wants me to find some girl in our old village, marry her, and become a farmer myself.”
Somewhat
to his indignation, Aket-ten burst into laughter.
“She does! And it is not funny! Even if I did not . . . love you . . .”
There, it was out. Words that hadn’t been said between them for too long.
Words that broke the unspoken tension that had been between them. She looked up at him, eyes wide. He reached for her.
And for a long while there were no words between them, nor any need for them.
Dawn brought another summons to Kaleth’s tiny temple. This time there were only the five of them there to confer; Kaleth and Marit, Kiron and Aket-ten, and the Chosen of Seft. Kaleth looked worn; Marit, worried.
And the word was not what Kiron had expected. “We’re going back to Aerie? All of us?” Kiron repeated what Kaleth had just told them with some incredulity. “But I thought—”
“The gods have not said much, Lord Kiron,” Rakaten-te said somewhat sardonically, “But they have said that Aerie is the place where we must all be.”
“The place where it began and where it all shall end to be precise,” Kaleth added, equally sardonic. “Though they were exceedingly vague on what it was supposed to be.” He sighed. “Sometimes even I grow weary of cryptic pronouncements.
“An end to bad poetry, perhaps?” Aket-ten suggested lightly. “Or the end to watered beer? Since no one has Foreseen the end of the world, I prefer to assume that the world will go on.” She helped herself to a honeyed cake and nibbled it.
“Well,” Kaleth said reluctantly, “we were given certain . . . directions. Seek at the source of the life giver, once gracious and free, choked by enmity, now free again but crippled. If that makes any sense to all of you—”
“Only that, as ever, the Gods are fond of bad poetry and—” began Aket-ten, shaking her head.
“—not as cryptic as you think,” Kiron said slowly, interrupting her.
They all turned to face him as he spoke, the picture of the debris-choked cavern of the main spring of Aerie vivid in his mind. “The spring that once supplied water for most of Aerie in its prime was blocked up by an earthshake in the distant past, the same one that did most of the damage to the buildings there. We think that is why the city was abandoned; without that water, they could never have supported all the people that once lived there. The water’s been working a way out toward the surface for—centuries at least. Before we found the city, the spring created another outlet, but we’d been planning to dig the entire area out when we had time—”
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