Alta (36 page)

It was light enough that he could see her frown. “I don’t know, not for certain,” she replied flatly. “But I can guess. The Fledglings weren’t enough to satisfy the need for whatever it is that the Magi were draining from them, or maybe they’ve started to drain some of them so dry that their powers really are gone for good, and the Magi have started to come for the Winged Ones themselves. That’s the only reason
I
can think of why the ones with the Fore-Visions didn’t see this earthshake and warn everyone it was coming. They should have. They’ve always known when a shake was coming, even a little one that barely rattles the pots, and they’ve always sent out warnings.”

Maybe later he would be as angry as she clearly was; now all he could think of was the welfare of the rest of the compound. “Is anyone in the compound hurt? Are the rest of the dragons all right?” He couldn’t hear any more whimpering or keening; in fact, all he heard was the usual groans and complaints of dragons who hated to be roused in the morning.

“A few people were hurt by falling stone, all but one of them servants,” she said, “but not badly. This compound is built to handle shakes. The dragons are all fine. One of the pools cracked and drained, and the poor dragon in it spent a miserable and cold night so far as he was concerned, but there are spare pens, and we’ve already moved the dragon there. It’ll be worse in the city,” she added with resignation. “There will be people killed, I’m sure, several hundred, if not several thousand. And a lot more will be hurt and probably half of those will die, too, eventually.”

“Um—why?” he asked.

“Because they weren’t warned!” she snapped. “I told you, we know what to do when there is going to be a big shake! With warning, we all move out to sleep in our gardens! Even if you don’t have a garden, when there’s a shake warning, people sleep in the temple gardens, beside the canals, anywhere that there’s no walls to fall on them. Without warning—people are inside, their walls come down, their roofs collapse—” He heard the mounting anger in her voice, and she must have realized it too. She stopped for a moment, and closed her eyes. He could hear her breathing carefully, taking several slow, deep breaths before opening her eyes again, and continuing in a more controlled voice. She was still angry, though; he knew her well enough to understand that her stony expression meant that she was just controlling herself. He had first seen it when she was trying not to show how afraid she was of the Magi; now he doubted that she was hiding fear. “That’s the thing, you see. If we have warning, an earthshake doesn’t hurt anything but buildings, and buildings can be mended. It will be bad in the Second and Third Ring, but in the Fourth and Fifth—it will be horrible. The poorer the district is, the worse it will be. The wealthy have homes built to account for shaking, but the poor build of mud brick, on land that becomes like quicksand when there’s a shake. That’s why there
must
be a warning—”

Her voice trembled with rage, and her jaw was clenched. “The Magi,” she said, her facade cracking again. “The Magi did this.”

“If the Magi are to blame,” he ventured, “then surely the Great Ones will act?” He couldn’t imagine the Great Ones not acting. They were the guardians of their people. How could they ignore something as egregious as this?

“One hopes,” she replied, all the anger suddenly draining from her, as the water had drained from that cracked pool. “I’d better go. I’m the only one that can soothe the wild-caught dragons, and every time there is a little shake, or they even think there is a little shake, they are becoming hysterical. If we aren’t to have to drug them to sleep with
tala,
I’d better do that.”

She got up off her knees, brushed the sand off her sleeveless robe, and left. He stared after her. He had never seen her look so hopeless before. What did she know about the Winged Ones and the Magi that he didn’t?

Whatever it was, she was evidently certain that the Magi would never be taken to task for draining the power from those who were supposed to protect Alta from catastrophes such as this one. What was it that made her so certain?

Maybe it was nothing worse than her own fears speaking. After all, the Winged Ones had failed to protect her from the Magi; now she probably mistrusted everyone. And he couldn’t blame her either.

As the light strengthened, he looked around Avatre’s pen and assessed the damages. All the lanterns were smashed, fallen out of their niches or off their shelves, lying in broken pieces on the floor. There was a crack running up one wall of the pen, and there was another at the corner of his room. Gan and Toreth’s quarters hadn’t fared so well. In fact, had Toreth been in his cot, he probably would have been dead, because a huge block of stone had dislodged itself from his ceiling and flattened his cot. But in fact, Toreth had been sleeping outside his room since the Dry season began because of the heat, and that liking for fresh air had probably saved his life. It turned out that he was not the only one who had been sleeping outside; most of the wing had been doing so. This was incomprehensible to Kiron, who had been forced to sleep under the stars for most of his life, and found the presence of a roof equated to a feeling of—well, of luxury. Free people slept in houses; only serfs and slaves slept in the open.

As for Gan, one whole corner of the outer wall of his dragon’s pen was gone, collapsed, and Gan was swearing that he was going to find the stonemason who was responsible and make him fix it with nothing more than his bare hands. Kiron was a little worried; there was so much more to worry about than the collapse of a wall—

“Huh,” said Kalen, when Gan went back to his pen, still ranting. “Don’t worry about it, Kiron. This is just his way of exhausting his fear. We’re all scared—if we can’t rely on the Winged Ones to warn us anymore, what are we going to do?”

Kiron realized that the falconer was right. With one exception—himself—it wasn’t what had happened that was the disaster, it was that they hadn’t been warned.

In the end, the reports that came from the rest of the city were not as disastrous as Aket-ten had feared. Many people (in fact, virtually anyone who had a garden)
were
sleeping in their gardens for the sake of coolness, and so were safe when the shaking began. There were deaths, though, and many, many injuries, and people all over the city were asking why there had been no warning.

Aket-ten would have taken up her very rudimentary Healing kit and gone out to help the Healers, except that both her father and Lord Khumun forbade her to do any such thing. Lord Khumun told her so first, when she came to him to ask permission to leave; a note from her father (who evidently knew his daughter well) came a little later.

Kiron had gone with her, after failing to dissuade her from her fixed purpose himself. He hung back as Lord Khumun gave her a very stony glare. “The dragons are a hair’s breadth from going mad with fear,” Lord Khumun told her sternly. “Every time there is an after-shaking, they bellow worse than after the first shake. Who is there to soothe them if you go running off in the city? And just what do you think several dozen terrified, loose dragons would do, if they broke loose from their chains, and escaped the compound?”

Aket-ten looked as if she had eaten something very sour. Then she took another deep breath, and bowed her head in obedience to Lord Khumun’s orders.

And he was right, of course, excepting only that several dozen newly freed and terrified dragons would probably do nothing worse than fly off. Still, there was always the chance that one would decide to get a bit of his own back, as it were. And Aket-ten was the only person in the compound that could soothe the dragons. By now, some of them were so upset that they didn’t want to eat, which meant until she got them quieted, it wouldn’t be possible to get
tala
into them either.

Kiron didn’t want her out there for reasons of his own. If she was right, and the Magi were taking up the Winged Ones as well as the Fledglings, then the moment she stepped outside the compound walls, she was in danger.

He didn’t tell her that, though. He had the feeling, looking at her strained, angry face all day, that any little thing might cause her to lose all self-control. Maybe that had already occurred to her. And maybe she was using anger as a bulwark against fear. If so, if he pressed her with more warnings, she might break down into hysterics—certainly there were plenty of other people right in the compound who had lost their heads today; more than one senior Jouster, as a matter of fact. There were several people who had been taken off and plied with palm wine or qat until they felt calm or just too drunk to care. He wouldn’t blame her if she blew up—but right now, they couldn’t afford to be without her.

Because earthshake or no, they had to get at least one wing into the sky. And the only way they could do that was for her to get enough dragons calmed down to form a wing. The troops in the south needed dragons and Jousters to distract the Jousters of Tia; the disaster in the city could be compounded by a disastrous loss of men and territory if no dragons could get to the combat.

The ground continued to shake a little, all that day and into the night. None of the dragonets wanted to fly, and Kiron didn’t blame them. Finally by the following morning, he told the boys to stuff the little ones with as much food as they would eat.

“If they’re full, they’ll sleep, and if they sleep, they’ll get over their fear,” he said reasonably. And when Lord Khumun heard what he had ordered, he ordered the same for every dragon that was not flying the working wing that day.

Kiron even got Avatre stuffed as full as she could hold, and eventually she, too, slept fitfully in the hot sand of her pen.

That left him with time on his hands, and seeing Aket-ten still vibrating between fear and anger and nearly bursting with the need to do something, he finally took her aside.

“Look,” he said, “You can’t go out, but I can. I’ll go out into the city for you, and help. Will that make you feel any better?”

“Just what do you think
you
can do?” she responded waspishly, then clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes filling with tears. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean that—”

He had held back a retort of his own; seeing two tears spill over and run down her cheeks made him glad of that momentary restraint. “I can do something you can’t,” he pointed out gently. “I’m bigger and stronger than you, and I am quite, quite used to hard physical labor. I can help dig people out. And if you stay here and keep an eye on Avatre and the little ones, I can do that without needing to worry about them.”

She bowed her head. “Then, thank you,” she said quietly—and went back to her work of calming the agitated dragons.

The other boys decided that going into the city would be a good idea. Pe-atep wanted to look in on his successor anyway; he was worried about the cats. And Kalen wanted to check on the health of his former charges, the falcons. Huras was dying to find out how his father and neighbors were, and perhaps, if there was heavy damage, help get some of the ovens going again. “People need to eat,” he pointed out. “If they can’t bake their own bread, we can do it for them.” Menet-ka, Orest, Gan, and Oset-re volunteered to stay to mind the dragonets so that the others could go out; Toreth promised to check on all of the families of the nobly born and pass on word to both sides.

After telling Lord Khumun of their intentions, Kiron did go out, dressed in an old kilt, and not to the Second Ring either. Assuming that the military could take care of themselves, and the nobles and wealthy could purchase whatever help they needed, he went across the causeways to the Fifth Ring, where most of the poorer sections of Alta were. There, as he had promised her, he labored for the rest of the day in a gang of other common folk, digging out houses where there might have been injured folk still trapped.

By the end of the day they were only finding bodies, and he reckoned it was time to go home. Not to be crude about it—but it would not matter one day, or two, if a body was recovered. The spirit would be satisfied by the proper prayers and rites whenever it was found.

He trudged back across the causeways, feeling tired enough to lie down in Avatre’s hot sand and bake all night to get the aches out. It had been a hard, hard day. He hadn’t labored this much since he’d worked for Khefti. But every time they’d gotten someone out still alive, still able to go to the hands of the Healers that had swarmed down to the Fifth Ring, it had felt as if he had won a prize.

Because of detours, of causeways and bridges being closed or blocked, he actually had to go to the Second Ring to get down to the Third again. His path took him past the Temple of the Twins just at dusk. He hadn’t planned it that way, but just as he got close enough to see the front portico, he realized that the nightly procession of Fledglings to the Tower of Wisdom had just begun.

He stopped, and stared. What were they thinking? The city lay disorganized and, in places, in ruins! Surely they could put off their regular magics for a few nights!

Then he realized that by gawping at them, he was making himself conspicuous, and put his head down, walking onward, trusting to his coating of dust to make him anonymous.

And as he drew nearer, he also realized that a good half of the people trudging slack-faced at the orders of the Magi in charge were far too old to be Fledglings.

Nor was he the only one to have noted this.

“Hoi!”
shouted an old man, face contorted with anger, and so covered in dust from stone and brick it was impossible to see what color his complexion really was. “Where are you a-goin’ with them Winged Ones?”

He planted himself firmly in the path of the Magi, and stood there with his hands on his hips, staring defiantly at them.

The Magus in the lead drew himself up in affront. “Just who—” the man began.

The commoner interrupted him. “They was supposed to warn us!” he shouted, growing more angry by the moment. “They was supposed to
tell
us so none got hurt! And how come they didn’t, eh? Eh?”