Alta

NINE

KIRON moved the brazier closer to their corner; he did not light a lamp, however. “The Great Ones do not rule in Alta,” said Toreth bluntly, when he and Kiron had settled into the corner of Kiron’s room off Avatre’s pen, a corner where it would not be apparent that the room was even occupied. “The Magi do.”
They had each taken a cushion and had settled with their backs to the wall. Rain drummed on the roof, and far-off thunder rumbled; inside, Toreth had dropped easily into the scribe’s erect, kneeling posture, while Kiron crossed his legs under him and put his back against the wall, the better to look the prince in the face. There wasn’t much light coming from the door and the ceiling-height air slits, but it would have to do. While this statement did not come as a complete surprise to Kiron, the knowledge had a bitter edge to it. “I think I had begun to see the shape of this,” he admitted. “Nevertheless, it is ill hearing. How long, do you think?”
Toreth grimaced, and shrugged. “It is hard to say when; rot never sets in all at once. The tree in your garden looks a bit seedy, but you think, ‘oh, it is just this or that,’ and it does not really concern you until the storm comes and it smashes the roof of your house, and you see that it was all hollow inside, eaten away. It probably began before my great-grandfather was born. I will tell you something that you, who are new-come to Alta, did not know. The Great Ones that currently sit in the Twin Thrones are well over seventy Floods in age.”
“That old?” Kiron exclaimed, shocked. In his village, the oldest person was no more than fifty when he died. Most were fortunate to attain forty. Wedded at fourteen or fifteen, they would certainly see the first of their grandchildren born, and what more did anyone need?
Toreth nodded. “And the Great Ones before them were near eighty when they died. And the ones before them were ninety.”
“But—” Kiron’s brow wrinkled as he tried to recall dim memories of adults talking about other adults—marking the generations—saying, “and Old Man so-and-so must have been—” “The oldest man I ever heard of was no more than sixty, and—”
The prince leaned forward intently. “And what would you say if you were a ruler, and a Magus came to you and said, ‘I can make you live to see your great-great-grandchildren.’ What would you grant a man who could offer you that? A position as adviser? A council seat? The post of Vizier? Positions for his friends? And if these people were the same who created a weapon that absolutely meant that this city could never be taken by enemies? What would you give him then? If all he wanted was to take some of the burden of rule from you, and leave you to deal with only the pleasant aspects of the Twin Thrones?”
Kiron blinked. “Is that the way of it, then?” he asked softly, feeling dread steal over him.
Toreth pinched the bridge of his nose as if his head pained him. “I have no proof,” he admitted. “I have not even a rumor. But at some point three hundred years ago, the Magi began to live to see eighty, ninety, or even a hundred Floods. And about a generation later, the Great Ones of Alta did the same. Kaleth has searched the records, and from the time that the Great Ones began to see such long years, the Magi have had greater and greater say in things, until now—” He shrugged. “What does any man want, if you ask him and he answers without thought? Wealth, power, and a long life. The Great Ones have always had the first two. Now, for the last three reigns, they have the second. And all they had to give up,” his voice turned mocking, “was a little responsibility.”
Kiron tried to reckon up the years in his head. “Toreth—does it seem to you that the war between Alta and Tia began about that time?”
Toreth’s eyes narrowed. “As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, “It does. There is a thought in your head. What is it?”
“The Magi can take heat from one place where it is not wanted, and put it in the sands of our pens,” he said, feeling his way to the heart of the thought. “But where does one get extra years of life? Except that in war. . . .”
Toreth rocked back on his heels, eyes wide. “I like that thought not at all!” he said, and though it was a whisper, the shock in his tone made it as “loud” as a shout.
“No more do I,” Kiron replied grimly. “But it is one way to ‘profit’ from a war.”
“There are others,” Toreth said, after a long silence. “Yet were I to examine things closely, I doubt not that I should find the Magi’s hands outstretched there, too. They are wealthy men; wealthy enough to be above such things as mere noble blood. And when one has the ears of the Great Ones, there are many ways of obtaining more wealth. Theirs is shadow power, but the shadows can hold many things.”
Kiron thought silently of all the ways that one could profit from war. The making of weapons, certainly. The supply of tents, of food for the army, of horses, of other gear, from cooking pots to the linen for bandages. And he wondered; certainly the Great One of Tia was a man of no more than middle years, and there were no Magi as such in Tia. But had he not heard of a certain adviser, a little man, a crafty man, a man to whom the Great Onelistened more often than to others, who had remarkably served in the same capacity to his father, and his father’s father? How long before that adviser whispered in the Tian’s ear, and was heeded and believed—being, in fact, his own best evidence?
He could not be sure. The thought made him ill.
It also had a terrible logic. How else to explain something as senseless as this war, unless someone profited by it?
“I wonder who began it.” A peal of thunder punctuated the question.
He did not realize he had said the words aloud until he saw Toreth shrug.
“I do not think that it matters now,” Toreth replied. “The question is, how to stop it?”
The words hit Kiron like a hard brick, and stunned him nearly as thoroughly. Once again, he spoke without thinking, as his mind put handfuls of bits of disparate thoughts together. “So long as the Tians have more Jousters than we, there is nothing Altans can do to stop it. If the war were fought man to man—”
“Then they could advance no farther, and might be driven back.” Toreth nodded approvingly. “Kaleth thinks that if the Tian Jouster advantage could be nullified, so that we could say to our people ‘there is no more to fear from the Jousters of Tia, let us have a truce,’ then no matter what was whispered in whose ear, the Altans, common and noble alike, would support a truce. The Priests would support a truce; no few of them have lost brothers, fathers, and children to the armies. If the Priests were united, and the Great Ones fostering it, even the Magi would not dare to oppose it. And he believes that if the Tian Jousters no longer ruled the skies, that they could no longer descend upon a village and terrorize it, then the Tians would begin to think on the possibility that it might soon be one of their villages that is served the selfsame dish, and support a truce.”
“But what of those who poison wells and burn fields by night?” Kiron asked reluctantly.
Toreth sighed. “We had not thought that far,” he admitted. “But we have a start. And the Great Ones are old. They grow no younger, and stolen years are not healthy years, they only prolong life, not turn back the sands of time. Eventually, Kaleth and I will take their places, and then—” his eyes gleamed. “—then the Magi had best look to themselves. We will not be gulled by promises of stolen years. We are not greedy. We will content ourselves with power and wealth, and let the gods send as long a life as they may.”
“And in the meantime?” Kiron asked.
The prince tilted his head to the side and shrugged. “We think. We plan. We gather friends to support us when the time comes. Friends of all sorts,” he added meaningfully.
Once again, Kiron felt as if he had been stunned, as the pieces came together. “Like a wing of a new sort of Jouster?” he asked dryly. “Am I the last?”
Toreth laughed, although it was a laugh with a great deal of irony in it. “No, not quite. Is Orest to be trusted, do you think?”
“With my life, yes,” he replied honestly. “With my secret—I am not so sure.”
Toreth shook his head with mock-sadness. “Gossips worse than a girl, that one. Perhaps raising a dragonet will steady him. Right now, I would sooner trust his sister. And I wish that she were one of us; she has sense, that Aket-ten, and she is as good a scholar as my brother. And if she grows into the promise of her powers—I could do far worse than have a Far-Sighted Winged One who is not afraid to speak the truth as an adviser. I hope she recovers from her illness and returns to the city soon.”
It was on the tip of Kiron’s tongue to tell the prince the truth about Aket-ten, but he bit it back. This would be a bad time to spill someone else’s secret. Nevertheless—“I might find someone as useful,” he said instead. “A Healer, perhaps. I have a friend in the Temple of All Gods.”
“ ‘Trust your wife with your household, your brother with your purse, and a Healer with all,’ ” Toreth quoted the old proverb. “A Healer would be a good addition to our cadre.”
“Well, I will wait and speak with her, and perhaps bring her to you.” Kiron decided to commit to no more than that.
“Oh, a she is it? You sly young jackal!” Toreth grinned and winked. Kiron blushed, which only made it worse. Fortunately, Toreth was not the sort to pursue it any further, except to say, “Well, if she has a sister or a pretty friend, think on me.”
“And you a betrothed man!” Kiron chided.
Toreth shrugged and grinned further. “I do not prevent my betrothed from seeking things she finds pleasurable, and she makes no demands upon me. Which is just as well, since I would pay no heed anyway. It was our parents made the arrangement, not us.”
That seemed to be the end of the dangerous revelations, but Kiron was perfectly satisfied to leave many more questions unspoken and unanswered. He had more than enough to think on as it was.

Looking back on that conversation a few days later, he could point to it as the moment when his life took another unexpected direction. He seemed to have passed some sort of test, and been accepted into a fellowship that he had not, until that moment, known even existed, a fellowship of which Toreth and Kaleth were the tacit leaders. Nevertheless, when it came to the dragons, he was still the trainer and the leader, and if anything, the others tendered him even more respect.
Perhaps that was because he was earning it. Knowing that he would have to show them what to do, even in the midst of the rains, he was training with Avatre. She did not like it, not in the least, but he insisted that she fly in the rain, and learn to handle the tricky currents of the storms. He would not fly her when there was lightning, or up into or above the clouds, but otherwise they were going up once a day at least.
With Toreth’s plan already in his mind, he was looking for all the advantages he could find. The Tian Jousters did not fly in the rain; therefore, Altan Jousters would learn how to, beginning with himself and Avatre, for every tiny advantage was something to be snatched. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that no one could force even the most heavily drugged wild-caught desert dragon into the sky in the rain, but the tame ones—well, that was another story. And in this, at least, the Altans were better equipped, for the swamp dragons found it no hardship.
He had figured that he could coax Avatre into it, for certainly even the desert dragons living in the wild had to fly and hunt no matter what the weather, so the thing was possible. And Avatre complained, but cooperated.
He did make sure to reward and praise her lavishly whenever the task was done.
Lord Khumun was astonished—but a handful of the riders of swamp dragons watched them with speculation, and soon began taking their mounts up for short practice flights as well. Rain flight was dangerous; everything was slippery, leather straps stretched and loosened, and the wind was hard to read. Sudden downpours could leave you blinded at a critical moment, and the really important thing was to make sure to get the dragon back down before she was chilled, or she would start to weaken. And a chilled dragon could sicken, even die.
Rain flight was miserable, too; it was not possible to wear a rain cape, of course. It wasn’t hard to remember to get the dragon out of the sky before she chilled, when the rider was getting numb in the fingers and toes long before that point.
Still, it was an advantage, and the riders of swamp dragons were able to go out on patrol and even thwart some Tian raids by being “where they shouldn’t be.” Lord Khumun was pleased. The swamp dragon riders were more than pleased; finally they were getting their own blows in, and though the victories were small, the effect on morale was enormous.
Kiron was now getting the respect of the older Jousters that he had not gotten before. First, his training (or in some cases, retraining) suggestions, using falconry techniques, had made intractable dragons a bit easier to handle. Now, it was clear that his tame dragon was not “spoiled” since she was doing for him what no other desert dragon was willing to do. He had, with his experiments, given them victories at last. And he was taking the punishment of riding in this miserable wet weather, learning how to do it all the hard way, since there were no other examples. He sensed this new respect in the changed ways that the older men looked at him at first—then the demonstrations went from covert to overt. Someone would have their dragon boy waiting in the landing court with a flask of hot wine when he came down. The best table—the one nearest the kitchen—was left open for him and whoever cared to sit down with him at meals. Greetings went from a cool nod to a slap on the back and a hearty “Saw you up today, good flying, boy.”
These were, after all, veterans, and men as much as ten or fifteen years his senior. They were hardly going to socialize with him, and he didn’t expect it—nor particularly want it. But the respect, after all those years of being kicked and beaten and regarded as low as the lowly weed he’d been named for—that was victory for him, and it tasted as sweet as the victories over the Tians.
And by extension, the boys of his new wing got some of that respect, too. If they didn’t have the background required to savor it as much as he did, they still appreciated it. He had proved that they were not some crazed experiment doomed to fail. And some of those older Jousters who had come to see him and Avatre when they were recovering in Lord Ya-tiren’s villa were now speculating enthusiastically about the day when there would be enough of the “youngsters” up and flying that these old veterans could afford the time to raise a tame dragon of their own.
Well, he thought, when he first overheard one of those conversations at mealtime, I will make a point of seeing you get a fine egg on that day.
He watched the prince watching these scarred veterans, and now that he knew Toreth and Kaleth’s long-term plans, he could see Toreth weighing the men in his mind. At some point, the prince’s cadre would have to expand beyond the dozen or so of his peers that he had taken into his confidence, and the logical place to start was here, among the Jousters. Of all of the inhabitants of Alta, these men were the ones who had the least fear of the Magi, and possibly the most (though carefully veiled) contempt—though Kiron suspected that if one was to investigate, probably most soldiers felt the same. And of all of the fighters of Alta, these were the men who saw the most combat. Front-line troops would face Tian troops for short periods in pitched battles; Altan Jousters faced Tian Jousters every day outside the season of Rains. And this had been going on for generations—while the Magi sat safely in their tower and did—what? They said they were working their spells against the Tians, and protecting Altans, but how could you tell? Until recently, that is—there was no doubt with the new storms that they were sending that they had hit upon something that obviously worked.
But still. They were safe in their tower while they did it. There were probably few fighting men who could view that with less than contempt.
So the prince’s plans would probably meet with a great deal of approval here.
“But not now,” Toreth said calmly, as he, Gan, Kalen, Oset-re and Kiron gathered one night in Can’s pen. It was no kind of formal planning session, but whenever any of the cadre got together, talk tended to drift toward the future, and often a good idea or two came out of it. It was Gan, not Kiron, who suggested seeking support among the older Jousters, and Toreth met the idea with approval. “But not now,” he repeated. “First, we have to prove ourselves. All we are this moment is mother hens, sitting on our eggs. Kiron hasn’t even proved himself yet, except as a flyer and someone who knows his dragons. Until I am a fighting Jouster, and can talk to them as an equal, I won’t have respect that I have I’ve earned for myself.”
“But you have the rank,” countered Gan, with the unconscious air of superiority of the noble-born. Kiron wondered when he would see how much that rankled those who were of more humble birth. That he would, eventually, Kiron was sure; that languid manner covered a keen mind. “That demands respect!”
“You cannot demand the respect of the common man, Gan,” said Kalen, from where he sat in the pool of light cast by Can’s lamp, stitching a giant version of a falcon’s hood, for use with new-caught wild dragons. “You can demand obedience and get it, and deference, surely, but you can’t demand respect, you have to earn it. Actually, that’s exactly how Toreth earned my respect.” He looked up with a lazy smile. “At the age of eleven, he and Kaleth had already figured that out, and came to where the hawks were mewed, working side by side with me, learning how to care for, tame, and train young falcons exactly as I had. Thus earning my respect. Clever lads.”
“Say rather, observant,” Toreth replied. “Having a father who is a Commander of Hundreds with a low level of patience makes you observant rather quickly.” He pitched his voice to a growl. “Boys! Princes you may be, but until you are Great Ones, I can whip you from here to the Seventh Canal if you don’t care for that hound properly!”
“Oh, I recall another bellow altogether,” said Gan, and put his voice into the same truculent tone. “I will drown you in the First Canal with my own hands if you do not return my seal ring!”
“And just what were you doing with your father’s seal ring?” asked Oset-re, amused.
“Trying to forge letters making us Captains of Tens, of course!” Toreth replied. “With chariots of our own, plumed helmets, and honey cakes in perpetuity.”
Gan choked on his beer, laughing, and Kalen had to pound on his back until he stopped coughing.
Sometimes Kiron could only marvel at the prince’s patience, working out plans that could not possibly come to pass in less than a decade. First, he would become a Jouster, while his brother insinuated himself into an administrative position where he would have access to the kinds of documents that would, in Toreth’s words, “map out the rot and tell us how far we have to burn.” Then he would make sure that no matter what else happened, the Jousters were built up until their numbers equaled or bettered those of the Tians, so that when he and Kaleth rose to the Thrones, they could call for that truce without sacrificing the safety of their people. Meanwhile, Kaleth would be collecting information, finding who among the powerful and the noble could be counted upon to back Toreth against the Magi, and slowly revealing to them some of their plans. Not the end of the war, however. That was to remain a carefully guarded secret within the inner circle until Toreth and Kaleth were securely in the Twin Thrones. Then would come the overthrow of the Magi, and the signing of a truce with Tia. The farther into the future, of course, the vaguer the plans became, until they were goals rather than plans—but for the near-term, Toreth and his twin had a great deal already mapped out.
Perhaps, especially given their suspicions about the long lives of the Great Ones, other young men would have been plotting the overthrow of the current Great Ones, not a peaceful transition. Not Toreth and Kaleth. “That would undermine everything—and probably get us caught and strangled,” Toreth confided to Kiron later that evening. “No. We will have the thrones legitimately, in our time. The only thing that anyone will ever be able to prove, even if someone betrays us, is that we wish to restore some of the power that the Magi took back to the priesthood. There is naught wrong with that—and much that would be considered pious.”
“Have the Magi tried to cultivate you?” Kiron asked, curiously. He could not imagine the Magi not trying so obvious a ploy with the next in line to the throne.
Toreth laughed aloud, and the others glanced up from the game of hounds and jackals they were playing. “What?” asked Can.
“Have the Magi tried to cultivate my brother and me?” Toreth asked aloud.
Oset-re snorted. “Like experienced old whores sidling up to drunken sailors!” he replied. Once again, he exercised his talent for imitation, somehow making himself look both haughty and oily at the same time.
“Has my Lord Toreth any need for my humble services?” he oozed. “A spell to catch a young lady’s attention, perhaps? A talisman for gambling luck, or one against drunkenness?” He flared his nostrils delicately. “Or perhaps you, my Lord Kaleth—I have some scrolls you might find of—interest.” He pretended to unfurl a scroll.
Toreth mock-gagged. “I tried to play the cocky—and none too bright—spoiled brat, who is so certain of himself that he mocks the very idea of needing any arcane help. I hope I didn’t overplay it. Kaleth simply looked myopic and horrified. He was horrified, and properly so—as erotic scrolls go, that one was singularly awful.”

Kiron managed to find time to visit Aket-ten twice more during the next half moon. He actually wanted to visit her more than that, but he was afraid that if he went too often, he would draw unwelcome attention to her.
As it was, he took care to pick a time when the rains were particularly heavy—heavy enough that he had the bridge and the streets to himself. Furthermore, he took the precaution of stopping in a very popular food and beer shop on the way. If anyone was following him, they’d be hard-put to distinguish which of the patrons of the place he was when he came out. As a Jouster, he was paid just like any other soldier, even if he hadn’t actually fought yet, so he had some money in his pouch. That allowed him to stay just long enough to have some duck sausage and hot wine, and when he left, it was at the same time as two other men.
Once again he presented himself at the door of the Temple of All Gods, but this time the slave took him into another part of the private quarters.
A library, of course.
Niches lined the walls, scrolls piled in them, and characters written on the wall beneath each niche told the category. Care for these precious objects was a constant battle between damp and fire, so there were no open windows or open flames here. All the lamps were carefully shielded, but the lack of windows meant that there had to be a great many of them.
The girl who was seated at a distant table, bent over a scroll, looked a lot more like the Aket-ten he knew, though the woolen gown was enough like the one she’d been wearing the last time to be its charcoal-colored sister, and it clung to her young body in a very interesting fashion. Again, as he watched her before she became aware of his presence, he had to think that she was not Orest’s “little” sister anymore.
The slave went to her and whispered in her ear; she looked up, and this time, both to his relief and his disappointment, she did not leap up and fling herself at him.
She took the weights off the scroll and let it roll itself back up, stored it in its niche, and only then did she rise to greet him.
She did hurry toward him, though, her face alight with pleasure at seeing him. And she seized both his hands and squeezed them as soon as she was in reach.
“Where’s the disguise?” he asked. She was wearing more makeup than usual, but not as much as the last time. He thought she looked very pretty this way.
“One of the Akkadian Healers, my friend Heklatis, is also a Magus,” she said. “He didn’t tell anyone about it until I arrived, though, because he didn’t like what our Magi were doing and he didn’t want to have to put up with them trying to get him to join them. He gave me an amulet that he says will make their spells slide off me, and he says that as long as I don’t leave the temple without a physical disguise, they won’t find me.” She made a face. “I don’t understand all of it; magic works differently from what a Winged One does. Father gave the Temple money to buy me a body slave and a fan bearer, so when I go out, I’m all wigged and painted and escorted. It’s such a bother that I only did it once.” She sighed. “Still, it’s not a loss. Kephru does wonderful massages, and Takit is useful running errands, so most of the time they’re working for the Healers.”
“Are you able to practice your skills?” he asked, knowing how strongly she felt about her abilities. The panic in her voice when she had described being temporarily without them made him think that not being able to use them would be very like being cut off from some essential part of her, or having her soul cut in half. “Is it safe?”
“Heklatis says it is,” she replied, and shrugged. “Certainly no one has come running here looking for me after I’ve used them—though I haven’t dared to try to See what the Magi are doing or to See the Temple of the Twins. I’m afraid that—” she bit her lip. “—I’m afraid that if another Winged One feels me Watching, the Magi will be told.”
Would the Winged Ones actually betray one of their own to the Magi? “You think it’s that bad?” he asked soberly.
“I don’t know,” she replied, looking profoundly unhappy. “I just don’t know. Someone is allowing them to take the Fledglings every day, and as far as I can tell, no one is objecting to it.” Her brows came together and she looked as if she was holding back tears. “And even if the reason they’re letting this happen is not that they’re on the Magis’ side but that they’re afraid of the Magi and what they can do, it doesn’t make much difference in the long run. People who are afraid would tell on me, too.”
Now it was his turn to squeeze her hands, as comfortingly as he could manage. There was hurt in her eyes as well as unhappiness and that lurking fear. She’s been betrayed by the people she thought she could trust the most, and now she is not entirely sure what the truth is, or who she can trust. And a little thought followed that. But she trusts me . . . oh, gods, my thanks, she trusts me!
“I wish there was something I could say or do to help,” he said aloud. “I wish I could visit you more often—but Aket-ten, not only have I work I can’t neglect, but if I come here too often when I never did before, someone might take notice.”
She nodded, and smiled wanly. “And I haven’t sent for you for the same reason. I’m keeping busy. The library is where I spend a lot of time. I’ve mostly been helping the animal Healers though, and just trying to See that Father is all right. He seems all right. I don’t think they’ve done anything to him.”
“I’ll check on him myself on the way back,” he promised, and tried to move the conversation to a more cheerful note. “Well, this looks like a place after your own heart! You don’t seem so—unhappy as you were last time.”
She brightened, and looked more like her old self. “I’m not. The library here is wonderful; I haven’t run across more than a handful of scrolls that I’ve seen before. When I think of something I can do to help, I try to do it, and the rest of the time I stay out of the way. I’m learning what I can about the dragons.” Then her jaw jutted a little, stubbornly. “I still think I could be a Jouster. Think of how easily I talk to Avatre! I wish you and Father would have let me hide with Orest.”
He suppressed a snicker to avoid hurting her feelings. “Let’s find somewhere warm where I can dry off. I want to tell you something. Do you remember Prince Toreth?”
“I think so,” she said, leading him out of the library and back to her room. Someone had put up tightly woven reed screens up on the window, which darkened the room and cut off the view of the garden, but which also cut off the draft. Her brazier had made the place comfortably warm; she lit a splinter at it, then went around lighting all the lamps until the room was filled with a warm, golden glow. He hung up his rain cape to dry, then both of them took stools on either side of the brazier.
And he told her all about Prince Toreth and his plans. “And he spoke about you, actually,” he finished. “He said that he would much rather have you in his cadre than Orest, because Orest’s tongue is a bit too loose, but that you are sensible and intelligent, and he thinks it would be no bad thing to have a Far-Sighted Winged One who is not afraid to speak the truth to advise him.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, putting one hand to her lips in surprise. “I—I am not certain what to say!”
“At the moment, you’re supposed to be on a farm beyond the Seventh Canal, so you don’t need to say anything,” he reminded her. “There is no way you could know this if you were where you were supposed to be.”
“That’s true,” she admitted. “I want to think about this.” She paused. “Did you mean that—about my becoming a Healer for the dragons and going to the Jousters’ Compound once the Magi stop being interested in me?”
“As long as Lord Khumun and your father agree,” he replied. “We don’t need a Healer for the dragons much, but it would be very useful to have a Far-Sighted Winged One about. And it would be very useful to have someone who could talk to the dragons. You might get somewhere in soothing the wild-caught ones, now that we’ve got them to where they can actually be handled safely, and you can help us train the little ones.”
She frowned in thought. “I need to think about this,” she repeated.
He decided it was time to drop the subject, and instead went on to tell her about flying in the rain, and the sorties that the swamp dragon riders were doing.
“Their dragons are smaller than the desert dragons, and I think it’s the first time some of them have gotten a taste of victory,” he concluded. “If there were more of them, it would be all right, because two of them could take a rider on a desert dragon. But being outnumbered and riding smaller beasts makes things hard for them.”
“You’re making a real difference, then!” she exclaimed with pleasure. “Oh, how wonderful! I wish I was doing half as much.”
“And what is it you always told Orest when he started fretting about not being a soldier?” he asked her, with a raised eyebrow.
“ ‘The job of a student is to be a student,’ ” she sighed. “I suppose I’m a student all over again, then.”
“You might as well be,” he agreed. “But why don’t you tell me why it is that the Healers do not care for the Magi? Because, obviously, they don’t or you wouldn’t be safe here.”
She pursed her lips, and rested her chin on her fist. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I never thought to ask.”
“Then why don’t you ask?” he suggested. “I’d start with that Akkadian you talked about.”
“All right,” she agreed. “I will.”
The remainder of the visit was confined to inconsequential things, and he left her feeling much better about her situation than he had when he had seen her the first time. As he had promised, he looked in on her father on the way back, and with a few carefully chosen words and glances, Lord Ya-tiren indicated that he thought there was still a spy in his household, but that no further pressure had been brought to bear on him to produce his daughter.
The second time he went to visit Aket-ten, he had no news other than that, but she had enough information to make up for it.
“I’ve asked about,” she told him, “though I have tried to be—um—circumspect. And all I’ve gotten were hints as to the quarrel the Healers have with the Magi. Very mysterious hints, too, with a lot of anger in them. I did find out one thing, though. Partly it’s because the Magi are at least half responsible for the war with Tia, and you know how Healers feel about war.”
Actually, he didn’t know, but he could well guess. You could not be a Healer without feeling a desire to cure the sick and repair the injured so deep it often ran counter to self-preservation. So war must be entirely offensive to a Healer, at the same deep level.
Especially this war, which, the more he learned about it, seemed less understandable. As far as he could tell, it did not serve a purpose now for either side. The Tians could easily expand to the south, going up the Great Mother River instead of down, and the Altans did not seem to have any real interest in the land outside of that needed to support their city.
“How did you find that out?” he asked.
“I’ve been reading some of the personal commentaries and diaries that got stored in the library,” she replied. “I mean, at least they were more interesting than recipes for curing impotence and spots! I found an entire rack of them rolled up in jars at the back of the library, and it turned out that each jar held the personal accounts of each Chief Healer here for—oh, hundreds of years. And right in the middle of one of them was a long tirade against the Magi, because the Magi had managed to persuade the Great Ones to use some trivial border incident as an excuse for war!”
So—there it was. Part of the speculation that he and Toreth had made had been borne out. “Who was in the wrong?” he asked.
She shrugged. “There was no telling. It was in a border village, and by the time it was over, anybody who might have known was either dead or too frightened to talk. The Magi blew it up into a treacherous attack on one of our patrols, unprovoked of course, and the irony is that they must have been looking for an excuse, too, because their declaration of war was delivered to us about the same time as ours was to them. But it was quite clear from the tone of the scroll that the Chief Healer was certain that if the Magi hadn’t been egging on the Great Ones, it could all have been smoothed over.”
He rubbed his ear thoughtfully. “Are there other reasons?”
“I think there are,” she told him. “But no one will tell me. They hint at it—and it has something to do with something that the Magi are doing either with or for the Great Ones, but they won’t tell me. They act as if—well, partly I think it’s that they aren’t entirely sure that what they think is happening is what is really going on. And partly it’s that if what they think is happening is the truth, it’s so horrifying to them that they don’t want to think about it. If I’m making any sense.”
“Oh, you are,” he said, and paused. Should I tell her?
He stopped, tried to clear his mind of all of his notions of what Aket-ten was, and tried to look at her objectively. It didn’t take more than a moment to come to a resolution; he wasn’t going to help her by protecting her from things he “thought” she shouldn’t know. She had been growing fast in the time he had known her, and that had been accelerated by her recent experiences.
“Toreth and I have been talking about this,” he said, slowly, and outlined the whole nauseating scenario. The war, as an excuse to cut lives short—the stolen years from those who had died—
Aket-ten’s eyes got bigger and bigger as he went along, and her face grew paler and paler. When at last he finished, she was as white as a lily.
“That’s worse than necromancy,” she whispered. “But it makes a horrible kind of sense—”
“And if that is what the Healers suspect?” he persisted.
“It would explain a lot.” She blinked, as though her eyes were stinging, and now he knew she was trying not to cry. “This is really horrible, you know. I don’t think you have any idea how horrible this would be to a Winged One.”
“Or a Healer,” he agreed. “No, I don’t.” And really, he didn’t, perhaps because so much of his own life had been stolen from him that—well, stolen years, a stolen childhood, a life spent in bondage—they all seemed equally wretched. Men died in fighting all the time, whether it was in war, or in a fight over a woman. That someone would plan for so many deaths was sickening, but so were poisoned wells, burned fields, and jars of scorpions tipped into granaries.
“I suppose you couldn’t,” she said, swallowing. “It—well, it’s hard to describe. But—to someone like me, it seems like the most horrible and vicious sort of rape.”
He nodded. That made sense. To her it would be much worse than “theft,” he could see that. “There’s even more to it than that; I think there’s something else being stolen by the Magi. I think that they are getting the—the—whatever it is they put into their magic to send the storms against Tia, I think they’re stealing from the Fledglings. I think that is why the Fledglings come back drained and exhausted. I think that is why they wanted you so much—because whatever it is, you have a lot of it.”
Now she looked angry as well as sick. “Heklatis—the Akkadian—hinted as much,” she admitted. “Though he wouldn’t come out and say so. But why don’t they just ask?” That last came out of her in a kind of wail.
“However the war began, we’re loyal Altans, if they’d just ask, we’d do whatever was needed!”
“Probably because they aren’t the sort of people who ask. They’re too used to taking,” he said bitterly. Oh, yes. I know that type. “Anyway, taking is easier. Asking requires that you admit that you need something; taking means you’re the strong one and you can have whatever it is that you want.”
But this was getting him angry, and that was counterproductive at this moment. He forced himself to calm down. “Anyway, now you know. Or at least, you know the best guesses. You might want to see if you can’t get something more out of the Healers; letting them know that you have some idea of what’s going on might loosen their tongues. If the Healers have some proof that this is what’s going on—well, as the next in line to the Twin Thrones, I think Toreth has a right to know.”
“I intend to,” she said grimly. “ ‘It is better to have a scorpion out in the open than under the bed,’ ” she quoted one of the proverbs that he remembered his mother using.
“True,” he agreed. “But it’s better still to have it dead beneath your sandal.”