With plenty of light to see by, they all landed together, too, letting down their exhausted passengers into the hands of equally exhausted servants, who bustled them off before the Jousters were even out of their saddles. The rest of the dragons and their riders were already dead asleep, and from the look of them, not even another earthshake would wake them.
But Kiron found himself being helped in unsaddling Avatre by a handsome, muscular young man with the powerful upper torso of a charioteer, who had also come wheeling up a heaped-high barrow of meat that Avatre began wolfing down without waiting to be unharnessed.
“You’ve gotten out eighteen Nestlings,” he said without preamble, raising his voice enough so that Ari and Aket-ten could hear. “That was the first trip. You got out twice that many Fledglings on the second and third trips, another six Fledglings and three Winged Ones on the fourth, six Winged Ones on the fifth trip, five on the sixth, and three on the seventh trip, which is three more trips than anyone ever thought you’d make in their wildest dreams.”
Kiron tried to add the total up in his mind, and felt the numbers slipping through his mind like the yolk from a broken egg. “Um. Sixty—ah—”
“Seventy-seven,” the young man corrected him. “One more night, and you’ll have all the Winged Ones out. If you want to try for three nights, you can probably evacuate the servants that are left, too.”
Kiron looked over at Ari, and rubbed a gritty hand over his forehead.
“I think we should,” Ari said firmly. “The dragons are clearly willing, and I don’t want to leave anyone to suffer back there.”
There was something intensely bitter and angry in Ari’s tone as he said that—something that cast Kiron back in time to a moment when he had heard Ari cry out,
“I do not make war on children!”
It rocked him back on his heels, and he stared at Ari wide-eyed.
Ari stared back. “There are some things,” he said, “that no man can countenance.”
Someone told him something. Maybe more than one someone.
Well, Ari was the only one with a dragon strong enough to carry the largest of the adults. Once the youngest had been gotten out, surely the next to go would have been the very oldest. No one had been draining the Winged Ones for several days now, which meant some of them would have started to recover their powers. They
had
to have recovered their wits, or they would never have been able to barricade themselves in the temple.
If one of them recognized Ari for what he was—and it would take a Winged One no more than an unguarded touch to do that—then they would have known that their rescuer was also the titular King of Sanctuary.
So of course they told him something. They probably told him everything they could before they were set down. He’s the King. He has to know.
It was one thing to be told in abstract that the Magi were draining the god-touched, damaging them, sometimes killing them. Kiron suspected that it was quite another thing to be told what that was like,
by
someone who had experienced it, day after day, for the last year.
Well, that was a good thing. If Ari had any doubts about what he should do, they were gone now.
But Kiron was very, very glad that he was not the one who’d had to hear those tales. Truth be told, he already knew more than was comfortable.
“Mother is sending the strongest of them off today,” the young man continued—that clue telling Kiron that his helper was the horse-training son of Aunt Re, which explained his family resemblance. “But they will be very, very glad to hear that you intend to evacuate the entire temple. I’ll go tell them now.”
“Do that,” Ari said, and managed a wan smile. “And meanwhile, I think we had better emulate our wingmates.”
Avatre was already doing just that, dropping down where she stood after swallowing a last mouthful of meat. With a groan, Kashet did the same. Re-eth-ke looked about and went to curl up beside Tathulan, then changed her mind and put her back up against Avatre, who didn’t even stir.
Ari raised an eyebrow at Kiron, who was too tired to even blush.
More servants brought them meat, onions, and soured milk wrapped up in flatbread, and jars of beer, that they ate and drank while pallets were spread beside their dragons. Then, like their dragons, they dropped down to sleep, and did not awaken until their dragons’ hunger roused everyone.
SIXTEEN
HE
had thought they had slept like the dead yesterday. That was nothing, compared with today. Even an earthshake didn’t wake them, for they did get a minor rumble, and neither he nor any of the others was aware there had been one until they clawed their way up out of slumber. He didn’t even remember stumbling his way to a couch in the shade when the sun grew too hot; he only knew he had gone to sleep beside Avatre and woke, once again on the couch, and not even the same one as the last time.
But when he woke, it was with a rush, and he woke all at once, out of a dream of flying Winged Ones off the roof of the temple, burning with a desire to get more of them away before the Magi understood what was happening.
He didn’t sit up with a yell, though he might as well have. He startled the servant who was sitting beside him. But the boy recovered quickly.
“It is not yet time, master,” he said, before Kiron could say anything. “You have time to see to your dragon, to bathe and eat. There was another small shake after dawn. Did you feel it?”
He shook his head, but his attention was caught by a single word. Bathe! At the sound of that word, Kiron itched all over; not that there wasn’t water enough to bathe at Sanctuary, but it seemed wrong to use so precious a thing for bathing. They all
did,
of course, but it seemed wrong. Now, the hot spring at Coresan’s nest was another matter entirely—but he hadn’t had a bath there since two days before this journey.
But this was Alta, where water was abundant, so after he saw Avatre fed, he allowed the servant to take him off to the baths, both hot and cold. And once re-clothed in a common tunic of the sort Aunt Re gave her upper servants, which was enough like what the Jousters wore these days that it made no difference, he helped himself from the food left out for all of them and made a hasty meal. Aket-ten was the last of the riders to wake, and he didn’t blame her for sleeping so long; she had been doing two jobs at once—guiding her own dragon, and keeping track of all of the rest of them.
She woke just as quickly as he had when she finally did break through her slumbers, and was just as impatient to be gone as the rest of them. She surely imparted that impatience to the dragons, all ten of them, for the moment she came awake, they began to fidget and look skyward. And at that moment, Kiron would have given all that he had or ever hoped to have for one flight—just one!—with all the wings that Alta had once had. With that many dragons, they could have left
now,
to arrive just after sunset, and it wouldn’t matter who saw them. The Magi couldn’t use the Eye at night, and they would have been able to pull out every last person all at once.
But dragons had no mystical ability to go back or forward in time, so the wing he had was all he was going to get. And as soon as Aket-ten had rejoined them, hair plastered flat to her skull from her bath, he called a meeting.
“Last night was the easy one,” he told them, and at Orest’s indignant stare, shook his head. “Yes, I know, from just the point of view of uncertainty about whether we’d get the dragons up at all, it was the hard one. But in terms of getting people out, it was the easy one.” He tilted his head to the side, then lifted his head and looked each of them in the eyes. “Think about it; we had it all our own way last night. The Magi were busy making sure of their own safety, and didn’t give a toss about anyone else. We got out the children, the old, and the sick, all of them lightweight, all of them tractable.”
“Or unconscious,” Gan said soberly, raking his fingers through his hair to help it dry. “You have a good point, though; easy to fly, and they didn’t make a fuss, or scream, or anything.”
“Tonight, we get the able-bodied and the heaviest, but there’s more to it than that,” he replied. “The people we will take out tonight are the senior Winged Ones, ruling priests, important priestesses. They’re used to giving orders and having them obeyed.”
“What possible orders could they give?” Pe-atep asked, incredulously. “ ‘Fly faster’? As if we could?”
Oset-re made a face and shook his head. “They’re Great Lords and Ladies in their own right. Who knows what they’ll demand when we are airborne?”
Kiron silently applauded Oset-re for seeing at once where the danger was. He was very aware of Aunt Re standing off to one side, listening, but not commenting. “We are very young men, all looking rather like servants—and one young woman with what is, by their standards, a minor power, who should by all rights rank just about Fledgling status. They won’t think when they see us. If they aren’t too sick and tired to do anything but hang on, there is no telling what they might try to order us to do.”
“Fly lower!” squeaked Gan in an imperious-old-lady voice, swatting at Pe-atep. Aunt Re hid a smile behind her hand.
He nodded. Now he had to remind them of what they were and that they had to disobey. “Or higher. Certainly faster or slower. And while you might be able to fob them off by telling them the dragons can’t do that, there’s other things they might want you to do.
Stop,
because I must get this or that treasure or sacred object. Land
there
to tell my mother I’m safe—” he shrugged. “There’s no telling. But they might well become real nuisances, some of them, when they’re in the air. They’ve been powerless a long time. They’ll want to command something, if only us.”
“Trouble.” Orest shook his head. “You don’t think they’ll go so far as to fight us, do you?”
For that, he had to look to Aket-ten and Orest.
Aket-ten shook her head. “I think they’ll still be torn between the excitement of escape and the fear of being captured. But they might start to shout, and—voices coming from the sky might not be a good idea.”
“Try telling them no matter what they want, it’s Lord Khumun’s orders,” Orest offered. “Most of them know they can half-bully Father, but nobody’s ever gotten around Lord Khumun, not even a Winged One.”
Well, if it came to that, Lord Khumun was going to end up with an earful when they finally all got to Sanctuary.
Lord Khumun can take care of himself,
he decided.
“I just want you to keep those things in mind,” he went on. “First, heavier passengers. Second, passengers who want to make demands. And three—” he paused. “We don’t know what the Magi have done in our absence, nor what they might do after darkness falls.
Maybe
they’ll still be too concerned with their own safety and comfort after so big a shake that they won’t keep a magical eye on the temple. But I don’t think we can count on that. Do you?”
One by one, the others shook their heads. Overhead, vultures circled on the thermals their dragons would be using, if only they could, dared, fly by day. At least darkness would hide them in part. Until they came in to pick up the first escapees. Until they came into the light.
“So tonight we run the risk of being seen.” He chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t think there’s anything we can really do about that—not being overlooked by magic, anyway.”
“Uh—” Aket-ten flushed, and held up a fistful of leather thongs. “I think these might help.”
He peered at them, frowning. There were little faience medallions hanging from them. They looked familiar.
“Pashet’s teeth!” exclaimed Oset-re with delight. “Heklatis’ amulets!” He jumped to his feet, pulled Aket-ten up, whirled her around like a child, and kissed her on the top of the head before letting her drop back down again, flushed and laughing.
“Here,” she said, passing them out. “I collected them after we came to Sanctuary; you lot kept losing them or leaving them lying around, and there’s no point in discarding something magic, even if you don’t need it at the time. I thought they might be useful again. Heklatis knows I have them and I told him I was taking them along. He said it was a good thing, otherwise he’d have had to make a new batch and send them along, and I saved him the work.”
Kiron accepted the amulet with a rueful shrug; once in the safety of Sanctuary, he’d been one of the worst at forgetting to keep track of his amulet. Heklatis had made them to interfere with the Magi’s scrying, or seeing-at-a-distance, back when they were all in the Jousters’ Compound together. But although the protection had been priceless while they were scheming to destroy the
tala
and escape right under the Magi’s noses, they had seemed of little utility out in the middle of the trackless desert, where the distance
and
Kaleth’s god-assisted protections kept them from being overlooked by means of magic.
But Aket-ten never forgot anything, it seemed.
“All right, then,” he said, pulling the thong over his head. “We can keep them from seeing us with magic, but we can’t stop someone from spotting us just by looking up. So we have to assume they will have eyes in the city, especially eyes keeping watch on the temple, and those eyes will report whatever they see. Even if it’s dragons where no dragons should be.”