Come on!
he told himself, fiercely, feeling his heart pounding so hard he had to swallow around the pulse in his throat.
If she has to fly for it—
But the straps were not cooperating, and neither were his hands. As Avatre reached the mouth of the side canyon, the green male suddenly made up his mind to charge again. And this time, instead of charging back, Avatre leaped for the sky.
And he only had one strap fastened.
With a yell, he grabbed for the front of the saddle and hung on for dear life, wedging his feet into the chest straps and clamping his legs hard against her sides. Forget the reins! She sideslipped and turned in the air with a lurch that sent his stomach where his heart had been, and put his heart in his throat. Fear ran through him like a bolt of lightning as he nearly came out of her saddle.
With tremendous wing surges, she threw herself upward. He clung like a flea on the nose of a racing camel, while she clawed for height. Height was her only hope if this green decided to challenge her after all. The only way that a smaller dragon could win against a larger was to have the height advantage.
But as he dared a glance down—in between trying to wedge himself more firmly into the saddle and trying
not
to be sick—he saw the green claw the ground, snort, and stare upward at them.
He wasn’t going to follow. Either he wasn’t that hungry, or he didn’t want to have to work that hard for his meal.
A couple of wingbeats later, Kiron saw him retire back into the building where he was making his den. So if he wasn’t going to pursue—time to get Avatre down before he fell out of her saddle!
And Avatre responded to his frantic directions to land on the top of the cliff. It wasn’t the best place in the world to pause, but as his heartbeat sounded in his own ears like the pounding of war drums, he managed to get the saddle straps fastened securely around him and tightened down, and gave her the signal to take to the air again.
This time she made his heart race for an entirely different reason.
Instead of leaping up and using her powerful wings to send her higher in surging jolts, she looked down into the canyon, seemed to make up her mind about something—and pushed off from the cliff.
And fell——and fell—fell almost three stories, then at the last moment before she hit the canyon floor, snapped her wings open just as it seemed as if she was going to hit the sand. If this hadn’t been exactly the kind of maneuver they had practiced to run against the Tian Jousters, he’d have probably dropped dead out of fear. As it was, he found himself yelling involuntarily and once again hanging onto the saddle for dear life just before she turned the drop into a climb.
By the time she was flying high, drifting sedately from one thermal to another on the way back to Sanctuary, he was dripping with sweat, the waistband of his kilt and the roots of his hair absolutely saturated.
If I never have to go through that again, I will be very, very grateful.
He could have been killed. Avatre could have been hurt. It could all have gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Yet as the fear wore off, the exhilaration of what he had just discovered replaced it. Not only had he found Kaleth’s mysterious hidden city, but he had found wild dragons
and
they had a place where they could incubate any eggs that were laid!
Avatre was still agitated, but not seriously so. She seemed more concerned about him, turning her head to look back at him from time to time as if to reassure herself that he hadn’t come to any harm.
Well, with all that yelling, she had probably thought he’d gotten hurt. He leaned over her shoulder and patted her neck, telling her what a fine, brave lady she had been, and how proud he was of her. After he’d done that for the third time, she finally heaved a great sigh, her sides inflating and deflating under his legs. Then he felt her relaxing, stretching out, lengthening as her muscles let go. She stopped looking back over her shoulder at him, concentrating on the far-off smudge on the horizon that was Sanctuary.
He half expected her to try to land, as usual, in the old communal pen, but to his pleased surprise she spiraled in on her new pen and dropped down lightly and under complete control precisely where she belonged.
He was off her in a moment; and within the space of time that it took to unsaddle her, he realized that except for her emotional agitation, which was mostly fading, she was by no means as tired by her exertions as he had thought she would be. She had just spent an overlong hunt, had faced down an older dragon, and made a fear-charged escape flight, and she wasn’t really breathing heavily. All this hunting for themselves was putting the dragons of Sanctuary into better physical shape than any of the Jousting dragons had ever been.
Which meant—could they actually face down wild dragons on a regular basis? If they
could,
then two or three could go out when nests were discovered, and hold off the mother if she turned up before an egg was successfully taken.
“Kiron!” Pe-atep called from the door to his pen. “Any luck?”
“The best!” he replied, “Come on, you’ll all want to hear about what we found today!”
NINE
THERE
were eight fertile eggs in the hatching pen, claimed by six Altan and two Tian dragon boys, one of whom was Baken. At last, the slave who taught all of them the best way of training young dragons to be ridden had won not only his freedom but his own dragon. Kiron was both amused and bemused to see how the acquisition of his very own egg had changed him. He had gone from a young man who was all business about the beasts he was training, to one just as egg-obsessed as anyone else who had ever been granted the chance to hatch out a tame dragon of his own.
Those eggs came from four different clutches; only half of the eggs had proved to be fertile, and all four clutches had been abandoned before the female in question began incubation. To Kiron’s mind, and to Ari’s, this meant that the females must be former Jousting dragons, who were too inexperienced to know what to do, and whose mothering instincts had not yet fully awakened. Which, in turn, meant that their theories were right. At least some of the Tian Jousting dragons had not gone back to the desert and the hills near Mefis when they fought free of the last of the
tala.
Two Tian boys were with some curious Bedu their own age watching two more dragons to see if they’d abandon their clutches, too. There were six more would-be Jousters waiting besides those two if all of those eggs proved worth incubating.
Quietly, Kiron took Kalen and Pe-atep aside when they knew that at least some of the eggs were going to hatch. He intercepted both of them after their dragons were bedded down for the night, before they went looking for something to eat for themselves. Lord Ya-tiren had issued a standing invitation to the Jousters to come to his kitchen whenever they needed to be fed, and they had jumped at the offer. Anything other than have to eat their own cooking. . . .
But Kiron wanted to talk to these two alone, and had asked Aket-ten to bring food for four to Avatre’s pen. She had been so curious about the odd request that she hadn’t even registered a weak protest.
She was waiting with the plain fare that all of them subsisted on these days; flatbread, vegetables, herbs, and whatever the Jousters scavenged from their dragons’ kills. Kiron had decided a long time ago that meat was meat, and it was better to wrestle with a bit of tough wild ass in freedom than the sweetest cut of young calf with one eye out for the Magi. Since he didn’t hear any complaints from the others—except, perhaps, the sort of complaining one always heard in situations like this one—he thought it reasonable to suppose the rest felt about the same.
“I suppose you have a reason for this little party,” Kalen said, blunt as ever. “And from the look on her face, you didn’t tell Aket-ten what it is.”
The interesting thing about Kalen was that although he was small, thin, and almost as dark as a Tian, he was nothing like the falcons he had once tended. He was more like one of the small brown owls, always watching, silent and still—and when he moved, moving so quietly you were unaware that he had until he was gone.
“We have eight fertile eggs, and more coming, I expect,” Kiron replied. “That’s eight new Jousters. They’ll have to be trained—we’ll have to train them, once they get into the air. And then?”
“I don’t think we should have a wing any larger than eight,” Kalen said, after a moment of struggle with his strip of meat. “Eight’s more than enough to muck up coordination. More would be impossible to keep track of.”
“Exactly my thought,” Kiron agreed. “And now we get to the reason why I had you all choose colors in the first place. Eventually, each of you will have a wing, and each of your fliers will wear one of your colors, so we can tell who the wingleader is because he has two.”
“Oho!” Pe-atep said, raising his eyebrows. “Now it makes sense!”
“You two are the two steadiest, and you’ve come from lives where you were used to being in charge of something other than servants,” Kiron continued, as Aket-ten nodded sagely. “I want you to take the first two new wings as wingleaders. But if you don’t feel equal to it, I want to know now, please, so I can take my third or fourth choice.”
“Oh,” Pe-atep said, with a glance at Kalen, modulating his deep voice into a more conversational tone. “I think we can manage. These dragon boys aren’t really boys at all. They’ve been training young wild dragons with that Baken fellow. And they’re the faithful, the ones that stuck after the
tala
wore off and the dragons escaped. The Altans are our own dragon boys from home, so they should be all right, too.” He smiled, then frowned. “The only question is, how are we going to feed all those growing dragonets?”
“Kaleth says he’s arranging something with the Bedu.” Kiron replied. “That’s all I know.”
But Kalen, the former falconer who shared that passion with the nomadic desert dwellers, snickered. “What he’s arranging is cattle raids in Tia. The priests have told the Bedu where the sacrificial herds are, how they’re guarded, and how to frighten off the herders. The Bedu either don’t believe in our night-walking ghosts, or don’t care. They’re going to come in by night, convince the herders that they’re demons, and ride off with the herds.”
Kiron stared at him for a moment, and then began to laugh. Pe-atep looked at his friend with something akin to affrontery.
“What?” Kalen demanded.
“But those cattle are meant for the gods!” Pe-atep protested.
“If the gods put this idea in Kaleth’s mind, I suspect they don’t care,” said Kalen carelessly. “And besides, the priests can sacrifice them
here
just as well as
there.
”
“Well,” Pe-atep said, with some reluctance. “Ye-es.”
“And if people begin to get the idea that the actions of the advisers have so displeased the gods that their priests have abandoned the temples and night demons are stealing the sacred herds, that’s good for us.” Kiron remembered only too well his former master’s fear of the night demons and hungry ghosts, and Khefti-the-Fat was by no means the only Tian to fear those supernatural creatures so profoundly that
any
misfortune that befell after dark was immediately laid to their influence. So if
actual
(as opposed to imagined) catastrophes befell the gods’ own property—there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind that if the gods had not yet abandoned Tia, they were certainly angry.
“Ah, now that’s a stone that can strike a rock and rebound to hit the caster in the head,” said Kaleth, strolling in at the end of that sentence. “There is always a problem, you see, with making people afraid of you. Ari and I were just discussing this. I trust we are welcome to this discussion?”
“It started with me asking Pe-atep and Kalen to be the wingleaders for the new wings,” Kiron replied, as Ari joined Kaleth in the doorway. “Ari, I—”
“I don’t need to be wingleader of anything,” Ari replied, with a mournful, harried expression. “I have enough to concern me. When I am in the air, unless it is hunting, I want someone else to be in charge for a change. It will be a relief not to have to think a hundred moves in advance.”
Kiron sighed. He felt a little sorry for Ari—but only a little. The responsibility might be a burden, but everyone else was carrying burdens of their own these days.
“Explain to me how striking fear into the hearts of the Tians is bad for us!” Kalen demanded.
“Because fear is a sword with no hilt,” Ari replied. “It is as like to be turned against you as against the right target.” He sat down on the edge of the platform. Avatre opened one eye, saw who it was, and wriggled her way around so she could plant her head on the stone beside him, silently demanding a head scratch. Ari absently obliged. “Here is how it goes. The priests vanish. The Great King will surely not say they have run away! No, the advisers will concoct some wild tale of how they were abducted by Altan Magi, and the proof of it is the very bodies of the acolytes that proved to the Tian priests that their own lives were in danger.”
“But nobody will believe that,” said Pe-atep, then added doubtfully, “will they?”
“There are, and always will be, people who are so loyal to their leader that they will believe no evil of him, even if he were to commit the murder of an innocent before their faces,” Kaleth replied with a heavy sigh. “They would say that the victim was a threat, or that the leader was mistaken, or worst of all, convince themselves that the victim somehow deserved it and brought the punishment on himself. So, yes, there will be a solid core of those who will be convinced that the Altans somehow made away with the priests and murdered the acolytes, even though they
know
the acolytes were summoned to the Great King’s palace and were never seen alive again. In fact, I have no doubt that such tales are being bruited about as truth even now.”