“It sounds to me as if that time has more than come.” Rakaten-te sat up alertly. “The rest of your pronouncement was blessedly clear if wretchedly inconvenient for me. Fortunately, there are two messengers here already, so at least there are dragons enough to haul us like so many sacks of provender off to the middle of the howling wilderness. I am too old to endure a jaunt on a racing camel in the ungentle care of one of the Blue People.” One corner of his mouth turned up a little. “Here I am, who wished for adventure in his youth and got none, now beset by adventure uncomfortable and hazardous in my declining years. Truly it is said, ‘Take care what you wish for, the Gods will deliver it at the worst possible time.’ ”
But he did not sound unhappy about it. Not in the least, in fact. Kiron had the distinct impression that Rakaten-te was enjoying every minute of this, even (or perhaps especially) the danger.
“It’s not the middle of the howling wilderness,” Kiron protested mildly. “I will admit that you can see the middle of the howling wilderness from there, but—”
“—there is no point sitting about and nattering about it,” Aket-ten said briskly, standing up. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we will discover what it is the Gods want us to find.”
“And that is truth. Let us gather our things and go. Marit and I can be ready by the time the dragons are finished eating.” Kaleth stood up, and Marit with him.
“I never unpacked,” sighed Rakaten-te.
“Anything Aket-ten and I need is already there,” Kiron put in, with a glance at Aket-ten. She returned his look warmly.
They had agreed on a few things, down there beside the slow-moving, hidden river. She wouldn’t be going back to Mefis. Certainly not until this crisis was over, and after that—
She told Kiron that she had more than half made up her mind that Huras was a better teacher than she, certainly more patient and definitely better able to get things out of people. It might be, now that the group of female Jousters had been more-or-less (if grudgingly) accepted, that it would be good for them to get their training from someone who was actually suited to teaching. And one thing was certain. The Queen’s Wing would be led, for the nonce, by the son of Altan bakers.
But first, before any plans for the future could be made, it was time to defend the Two Kingdoms.
“Then we will gather at the pens when you are ready,” Kiron said. “I will alert the other two Jousters. Let us be gone and quickly.”
“Aye,” Rakaten-te said, all of his humor vanishing. “All we know about our enemy is that he has been a step ahead of us until now. We must hope he is not still, but act as if he was.”
EIGHTEEN
W HEN the Gods speak . . . things get done. Kiron wiped the back of his neck and his forehead with the rag he’d had tied around it, and took a much-needed break from what at any other time he would have balked at doing. Virtually every able-bodied person in Aerie that was not out patrolling or supporting the day-today activities of the place had put in some time on clearing the rocks from the cave-in.
It helped that one of the priests had some sort of magic that told him what places were unsteady and needed careful work. It also helped that the initial effort at clearing the tunnel must have taken place immediately after the earthshake until the presumably desperate inhabitants had given up and packed themselves out. It also helped that another effort, if a desultory one, had taken place as the new inhabitants of Aerie now and again moved a few rocks, or even came looking for a good place to find stone for partitions and the like.
But now . . . now the real effort was underway, and even Lord Kiron, Captain of the Jousters, was stripped down to a loinwrap and was part of a human chain moving rocks out to be piled beside the ever-more-freely-running spring. And Aket-ten, Wingleader of the Queen’s Wing, was carrying water like any serf girl.
It was brutally hot, even deep in the tunnel, and the air was thick with sweat and dust. Although most of the labor was of the unskilled, brute-strength variety—barrow-loads of smaller stones being carted out and dumped, those rocks that could be lifted being passed from hand to hand, and the truly enormous boulders being levered from where they were wedged and pulled by teams of the strongest hitched to ropes—Kiron was seeing more real magic in this place than he had since the use of the Eye in Alta. And now he knew why priests and Magi so seldom did purely ordinary things by means of magic.
There was the priest who could somehow “read” instability, of course. That was not what Kiron would have called “impressive” except in that there had been no rockfalls and no cave-ins. But three times now, they had come upon a huge boulder that was far, far too big to lever out, and even if it could have been freed, it was too heavy to move. Three times, a different priest had come forward with a different solution.
The first had sent everyone out of the cave. What happened next, was known only to the priest and presumably others of his rank, but there was a thunderclap from within the cave, followed by a violent blast of dust-carrying wind rushing out of the mouth of it. They all scrambled back in, to find the boulder shattered and the priest unconscious on the ground.
Kiron was in a panic at the sight of the unconscious man, but his fellows seemed perfectly at ease, and merely picked him up and carried him out without any fuss.
The second time, the rectangular rock was not wedged in like a cork in the mouth of a bottle, it simply filled most, not all, of a rather narrow space. This time another priest came forward and directed them to clear all debris out of the way and from around the sides of the boulder. Then, chanting and gesturing, he “went to work” with all of them watching.
With a grating sound, the rock began to move.
It moved forward at an agonizingly slow pace, hardly more than the width of a nail paring for every breath. The priest was soon white-faced and sweating as hard as any of them; it looked for all the world as if he was moving the wretched thing himself, by main strength.
Maybe he was.
Finally, just as he got it far enough out of the bottleneck that it would be possible to get ropes around it to haul it out over rollers, he collapsed and was in his turn carried out.
And now the third. Another fall of rock, again bottlenecked in with the spring creeping under some hair-thin gap beneath it, and another priest.
“This is the last,” said the one who could sense when falls were about to take place. Eyes closed and sweating as hard as any of them, it was clear that what he was doing was no light task either. “When this is gone, the way will be clear.”
“But there is much water built up behind this stone.” The new priest placed both hands on the rock and leaned his forehead on it. “Hmm. This will be tricky—”
“Not to mention dangerous,” the stone reader replied. “If it is released all at once—”
“I do not speak to you of the ways of stone, Tam-kalet; do not preach to me of the paths of water!” the priest snapped, then immediately apologized. “Forgive me. Great Mother River is no easy mistress. And she wants her child released.”
The reader of rocks chuckled, opened his eyes, and mopped his brow. “They all move in us this day, and it seems we deal in more tasks for them than just one. Need you my services?”
The newcomer looked around the cavern. “Indeed, I need none save perhaps Lord Kiron. . . .”
“Why me?” he asked, astonished. “The other priest—”
“The other priest was not me.” That was all the explanation Kiron was going to get, it seemed, for as everyone else took the hint and began an ordered but hurried evacuation of the tunnel, the priest turned his attention back to the rock. “Have I your consent to draw upon your strength?” the man asked brusquely, eyes closed and one hand on the rock.
As if I have a choice? This was the final barrier. It needed to come down. Whatever lay on the other side of it, they needed and needed swiftly. “Yes,” Kiron replied, just as brusquely.
The priest grunted, then said, “Sit somewhere near me. And be silent. This
is not a magic of brute force, but of planning and concentration.”
Kiron obeyed, throttling down his own impatience. From Aket-ten’s explanations, he had a good idea what the priest was asking for. The strength for a spell had to come from somewhere. Either it came from inside the magic worker himself—which was why those other priests had collapsed—or it came from some source outside. The Altan Magi had stolen their power, stripping it from the god-touched priests and acolytes of Alta, and from the premature deaths of the war. The Tian priests—the ones he’d seen so far, at any rate—were more ethical.
This one wanted to use Kiron as his source of strength.
Well, if it would get the job done . . . from Kiron’s perspective, this was certainly preferable to hauling stone.
So he sat where the priest directed and put his back against the wall. He had the feeling he was going to need the support before it was all over. Now there was nothing but silence, and the very occasional plashing of the spring running under that final blockage.
He knew when the priest was taking—whatever it was—too. It felt as if he was running, except that he wasn’t. It was just a steady drain of strength and energy. Not a lot, nor all at once, and not debilitating to the point where he was passing out, but there was no doubt that something was going on, that in some way, life energy was sapping from him and going somewhere else.
Even though all he could see from where he sat was the priest with his hands and forehead pressed up against the rock.
But then a new sound in the tunnel made him look more closely.
It was the sound of dripping water.
The departing workers had left all their lamps and torches stuck wherever they could be wedged or balanced, so there was plenty of light, and in addition, sheets of reflective, polished metal outside were sending bright patches of sunlight down here. And now, in that light, Kiron first noticed that the volume of water running through the channel at his feet had easily doubled.
The next thing that he noticed was that all around the edges of the bottom half of the stone jamming the bottleneck, there were little trickles, tiny streamlets that had not been there before. And even as he watched a spot that had been previously dry, he saw first a single drop of water well to the surface of the hairline crack, then a second and a third, then the drops became a trickle, then the trickle a thin stream down the face of the rock,
And he realized a moment later that somehow that crack, almost invisible to the eye, was widening.
He had to pull his feet up now, the water was getting so deep.
Then there was a wet pop, and the rock itself cracked across the middle from right to left, and water began to trickle from the crack.
That was the beginning of the end. The rock cracked, and cracked, and cracked again, but only the bottom half. Soon the bottom half of the rock shimmered with water, and even with his feet pulled up, Kiron was ankle-deep in the stream.
Then the priest pulled away from the stone, and the steady drain on Kiron ended.
“I think we need to leave here and let Tam-kalet do his work,” the priest—whose name Kiron still didn’t know—said hoarsely. “The water has undermined the entire bottom half of that blockage; that is why it was cracking. I do not know when it will succumb to the stress.”
Kiron didn’t need a second invitation. He shoved himself up off the rock and realized, as he staggered away, that he was as completely spent as he had ever been in his life.
And cold, cold. As he stumbled into the harsh sunlight, the warmth felt good on his numb skin. He sat down abruptly on the first place that looked comfortable, as the priest’s fellows came and assisted him away. Tam-kalet and two others went back inside the tunnel, after warning everyone else to stay back.
Just as Kiron was actually starting to feel warm again, they came running out, a grinding sound echoing from the tunnel behind them.
Tam-kalet jumped up onto the rocks stacked up to the right of the tunnel entrance. The other two scrambled over the ones to the left. And just in time, for a muddy wave of water and rocks tumbled together surged out hard on their heels with a roar.
When everything had settled again, the spring was back in its old bed. As near as Kiron could tell, the stream it fed was back at the highest level it had been in when Aerie was in its prime.
The priests that remained stared at the stream in satisfaction, but it was Rakaten-te who spoke, standing off to one side and leaning on his staff.
“Kaleth, Marit. It is our turn now.”
Kaleth gestured to two of the younger priests. One stepped forward to act as Rakaten-te’s guide, the other followed the trio. Kiron was curious, but his exhaustion overcame his curiosity. He knew he would find out what, if anything, was in there eventually, and for the moment, recovering his strength seemed more important than anything else.
It was not very much later that all five of them came out again. This time it was Kaleth who led the elder priest, while the two junior priests carried a small chest between them. It seemed very heavy for its size; after a moment, it occurred to him that it must be made of stone, and he wondered what could be so important that it required a stone chest to hold it.
Well, whatever it was, it seemed to be what Kaleth and Rakaten-te were looking for. They paused, as the two young priests went on with the chest, presumably to the Temple of Haras.
“We have found what we were sent to find,” Kaleth said into the waiting stillness. “The Great King and Queen have been sent for, because the enemy comes apace, and the time has come to end what was here begun.”
His words did not have the otherworldly ring about them that they had when he was speaking directly for the gods, but Kiron had no doubt that his words came from them anyway. As the rest of those waiting, Jousters, workers, priests and all, looked at one another in befuddlement and began to murmur, Rakaten-te rapped his staff three times on the stone to silence them.
“Prepare yourselves, people of Aerie, of the Two Kingdoms. The Heyksin come. And this time their Magi, and perhaps their gods, come with them.”
Outside the temple, even through stone walls as thick as his arm was long, Kiron could hear the murmur of voices. Not surprising since just about every living soul in Aerie was out there right now.
With that single word, “Heyksin,” every difference that had ever existed between the people, and the Jousters, of Tia and Alta had disappeared. It was what Ari and Nofret had wanted so badly—
Be careful what you wish for . . .
Kiron could not help thinking about those words, now so grimly prophetic. And yet, that wish had nothing to do with a plan that must have been a-building for tens of tens of years. Even if the Magi of Alta were not in league with their Heyksin cousins, it still must have been a-building for that long. It was just too well-plotted, too well-executed. Had not that one single man escaped . . . had he not gotten far enough and at the right time for his body to have been spotted by patrolling Jousters . . . then all of the border towns could have been removed and the way would have been clear for a Heyksin army led by Magi to strike straight at the heart of Tia. Alta was already weak and shaking. Tia’s troops were decimated even if the land itself and the majority of the people were still secure. It would have been the ideal time to strike. Heyksin forces could have taken Mefis with scarcely a battle. And even if Ari and Nofret had escaped by dragon, where could they have gone?
They were here now, and along with the strongest priests of Sanctuary, and Aket-ten and Kiron, they waited to see what it was that the gods had wanted Kaleth to find.
Kiron had suspected a weapon of some type, perhaps something like the great Eye of Alta—though hopefully, one that could be powered without the dreadful cost of lives—but the box was far too small for that. Kiron had thought it was stone; it wasn’t. It was made of some metal he could not identify, black either by design or blackened with age. And utterly plain, without any of the bas-reliefs or carved letters beloved of the craftsmen of the present day. In fact, in i
ts simplicity, it seemed of a piece with this very city, a place where even the statues of the gods were curiously simplified and refined down to a few basic lines.
No one, not even Kaleth knew what was in there. He had been waiting for Ari and Nofret to arrive. And now was the moment of truth. . . .
With great care, Kaleth reverently put his hand on the lid. Kiron held his breath—and truth to tell, he more than halfway expected that the box would be sealed, either by some invisible lock or by age. Or maybe by magic.
But the lid came up easily in Kaleth’s hand, swinging on hinges that were invisible. Kaleth reached inside—and pulled out an oval, flat package, wrapped in age-yellowed linen that literally fell to pieces in his hands, revealing the gleam of gold.
It was a circlet, a crown, of the sort that could be worn alone, or over the Greater Crowns. This one, though—the hawk head meant to be worn on the brow was of nearly identical design to that of the statues outside, and standing in the sanctuary of this very temple. Very simple. Very stylized. The hawk head was all smooth curves, suggesting beak, eyes, the hunch of wings, rather than actually depicting them. Kiron stared at it, fascinated by the gleaming metal. He wanted to touch that little casting, feel the metal smooth beneath his fingertips. . . .
But there were more. Five more times, Kaleth reached into that box and came out again with a crown, until he had placed the sixth and last on the floor, in a circle.
There was a stylized cobra and a scorpion. The hawk and the arching horns of a cow. The curled horns of the ram and the long-necked head of the vulture. Six crowns.
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