Alta (37 page)

By now, the shouting had attracted a crowd—angry people, most of them, who were surrounding the Magi and their charges, looking daggers at them. No—not at the Winged Ones, who were oblivious to all of this. All the anger was directed straight at the Magi.

“I don’t—” said the Magus in charge haughtily, but what he
“didn’t,”
Kiron would never know, for he was shouted down again by a different commoner.

“
We
know why!” the man cried out. “We seen you, comin’ here every night! First ye drag off the young ’uns, and they come back looking like ye sucked ’em up dry and threw back the husk.
Then
that’s not good enough for ye, and ye start a-takin’ the Winged Ones, them as is supposed to be our protection, and
they
come back a-lookin’ the same! Ye think we be blind? Ye think we be stupid?”

Since this was probably precisely what the Magi had thought, they exchanged bewildered and alarmed gazes.

“Well, we ain’t!” shouted the first man. “We know what’s what! ’Tis
your
fault my sister’s boys are dead! ’Tis
your
fault innkeeper’s girl’s lost a leg! Without your meddlin’ we’d have
had
our warning’, as is proper! ’Tis
your
fault, all of it!”

The crowd began to shout, and just as the Magi belatedly realized their danger, the crowd became a mob.

At that point, the Winged Ones seemed to come out of their stupor, and with looks of alarm, scuttled back to their temple. They needn’t have worried; they weren’t the targets of the mob’s anger. The Magi, however, were.

Not just anger either. People at the rear were picking up stones and pieces of wood, and there just happened to be quite a bit of that sort of thing lying around at the moment.

And at that point, Kiron decided that the smart thing would be to leave.

He doubled back on his path and took the long way back to the compound, leaving the shouting behind him as he dropped any pretense of dignity and ran. A mob of a few dozen people wasn’t going to win against the Magi, of course. But he didn’t want to get caught in the middle of it.

And besides, he needed to get back to Toreth, and tell him that their surmise was correct. If anyone could get the ear of the Great Ones with the truth now, it would be him.

TORETH
went white. “No—” he said, aghast. “Surely not—”

But Kiron saw by his expression that he really didn’t need to repeat his assertion; Toreth’s reply was not an indication that he didn’t believe his wingleader, it was more that the very idea of leaving the city defenseless against its worst threat was so unthinkable and appalling.

“I—” Toreth said, staring blankly into space for a moment. “This is evil hearing,” he said at last. “I would not have thought any creature of this city, be he never so base, would have put his own desires ahead of the safety of all.”

Kiron had had plenty of time to think about this before he took Toreth aside after dinner and told him what he’d seen. Several things had occurred to him.

Now, although he had been perfectly willing to accept as a given that the Magi were stealing the years of soldiers slain in battle to prolong their own lives, it had occurred to him that to the others, this was just idle speculation, a kind of ghost story. It was horrible to contemplate, and deep down inside, they didn’t truly believe it. And he could hardly blame them for their skepticism, for none of them had seen the blank-faced Fledglings being led away, nor the look of stark terror on Aket-ten’s face when she fled the Magi.

But if it was really true, then the victories of the Altan troops must have been maddening to them. Victorious armies do not take as many casualties as those that are losing. If they had come to depend on those stolen years, they must have been growing desperate. Desperate enough to take away a primary protection for the city and steal its power?

Desperate enough to take that protection away in the hopes of making up the falling number of available deaths?

Kiron thought it more than likely.

“Consider that our thought was right: they may have been battening on the deaths of Altan soldiers to prolong their own lives,” Kiron said bluntly. “Is it so short a step from stealing the years of dead soldiers to stealing the years of children crushed beneath a falling wall?”

“May the gods save us, if that be so,” Toreth said softly. “I find it hard to countenance—”

It made him sick, it made him angry. Here he had faced down Tian tyranny only to find it in the place where he had thought to find his sanctuary. He had thought that only the Tians were the evil ones in this war. He had been wrong. Evil flourished on both sides.

Active evil, and passive, in the shape of the Great Ones, who were supposed to protect their people and guard them, and who were happy to leave the real responsibility in the hands of others that they might have only the pleasure of the office, and not the duty. . . .

“Here is another prediction, then,” Kiron retorted, who had seen the fear on the faces of the Magi facing the mob. Men like that did not like being made to feel fear. When they got to safety, their first thought would be of revenge. “And if it comes to pass, then you may take it that the Magi are capable of every bit of that and more. The Eye of Light—”

“What of it?” Toreth replied, absently, still contemplating with horror the idea that anyone in authority could deliberately choose something that would cause so much death and devastation, purely so that he and his could profit from it.

“I believe the Magi will demonstrate it tomorrow,” said Kiron, his voice hard with anger. “Or the next day. Soon, at any rate. When they were set upon by common folk, it would hardly have pleased them, and they are going to want both revenge and a way to make the commoners fear them too much to interfere with them ever again. I believe that they will find some excuse—that there is a plague of rats there, or some other specious reason—to destroy the ruins in the neighborhood of the beer shop across the avenue from the Temple of the Twins. And I shouldn’t be at all surprised if perfectly repairable homes and businesses are turned to glass in the process.”

Toreth looked up sharply.
“Why?”
he demanded.

Kiron shrugged. “The Magi are men to whom little matters but their own good,” he said. “Like my old master Khefti. When anything bad happened to Khefti, as soon as he was over his first fright, he looked for revenge. I believe they will, too. If they have grown so great in their own minds as to place their power above the welfare of the folk of the city, they will have grown great enough to believe that whatever they want is also right and proper.”

“Ah, gods.” Toreth buried his face in his hands. “The rot goes deep,” he said, his voice muffled.

Kiron thought it best to leave him alone at that point. He had a lot to think about. In some ways, Toreth and Kaleth, raised amid the endless political infighting among the royal families, had been anything but sheltered. Still, there were other ways in which they had been very sheltered indeed. They had never seen evil, amoral men under conditions in which their evil was recognizable. They were so used to petty evil that they had a great deal of difficulty in believing in great evil. And they had not made the intuitive leap that those who practiced petty evil were perfectly capable of undertaking great evil, and lacked only the perceived need and the opportunity to do so. Kiron felt oddly sorry for him. He had once been certain that there were things in his world he could be certain of. Not anymore.

He stood in the corridor—still only partly cleaned up, and with fewer than a third of the lamps replaced—and debated telling Aket-ten what he had seen and heard. On the one hand, it could make her more angry, more fearful, or both. On the other—it might serve to warn her.

Not tonight,
he decided at last.
Not until things are closer to normal. Unless, of course, she insists on going where the Magi can find her.

As he turned into his own door, something struck him so forcibly that he stopped dead in his tracks. When he had first come here, he had only been afraid that he would not be accepted. It had never occurred to him that he would find Khefti’s form of evil writ larger among his own people. The rot went deep. Just
how
deep? Could it be cut out, or was it too deep to cut out without killing the tree? He had once told Ari and the Bedu that if he did not like Alta, or was mistreated there, he and Avatre would just leave. That was still an option—

There was no such rot among the Jousters; he was fairly sure of that. Yet the Jousters were a tool, and the weakness of any tool is that it may be used all unwittingly. And there was the war to consider—the Tians would not cease from pressing their attack, no matter what was going on in Alta, nor would they stop committing atrocities on Altan villagers. Toreth’s plan called for negating the Tian advantage so that a real truce could be pressed for, by drastically increasing the number of Jousters.

But what if the Jousters could be eliminated altogether, from both sides?

The armies will have to square off man-to-man, and there will be very little that the Magi can do that will make any appreciable difference.
Would that mean a change in their status?

Probably not.
He sighed, and went straight to Avatre who was sitting up in her sand. Waiting for him, patient as a statue made of rubies and gold, but far warmer and infinitely more desirable.

He went to her and sat down in the sand beside her. No matter how bad things got, at least he had Avatre, and she had him.

He only hoped that Toreth got the same measure of comfort from Re-eth-katen, because tonight, he sorely needed it.

 

By morning there were rumors of the confrontation with the Magi “somewhere” on the Second Ring, but nothing was confirmed. Kiron kept his mouth shut, even around the boys, but Toreth looked very unhappy to hear Kiron’s story confirmed.

There were more rumors flying when he went out for the second day in a row to help on the Fourth and Fifth Rings. And this time, Menet-ka, Orest, and Oset-re took a turn in going to see their families. They let Huras go out for the second day in a row, because he was, indeed, helping his father to bake for the entire area—but he was not going to be restricted to walking. He was flying Tathulan; the heat from the ovens would keep her happy.

Kiron, however, was walking. He decided to make a detour across the Second Ring—considerably out of his way, but he wanted to see if there was any sign of yesterday’s near-riot. When he passed the Temple of the Twins, he saw that it was shut up tight, which was a very new thing indeed. There was some damage around the Second Ring, as he had seen yesterday, but with the exception of a few places like beer shops and markets, it was minimal. There was no sign of yesterday’s disturbance.

To say that things were in a state of chaos was a profound understatement, and the contrast between the Second and Third Rings, where rescue, cleanup, and even rebuilding were organized and well underway, was profound. No one was rebuilding in the Fourth and Fifth Rings. In fact, no one was really cleaning up. There was no organization, except as people organized the members of their own families into work parties. And if there was only one survivor left—well, that one person worked alone, moving the rubble, usually with bare hands.

The shake did not seem to have struck everywhere in the Rings with the same force. In some places, damage was minimal; in others, shocked and bewildered people sat outside the piles of broken bricks and cracked timbers that had been their homes, unable to comprehend what had happened to them, or were slowly and methodically moving over the piles, removing them brick by brick, hoping to find something to save—or someone. You could easily tell the latter. They were the ones working with tears cutting channels through the caked dirt and dust on their faces. They were the ones Kiron tried to help first.

Even when all he could do was to help move bricks. “Where did you see him last?” he would ask. “Where was she sleeping?” And the survivor, so choked with grief that he or she was unable to speak, would point instead. And Kiron would start, trying to pick a “safe” spot to pitch the rubble to, because he did not want to discover that the survivor had been wrong, and he had, all unwittingly, been piling more debris atop someone already buried. Yesterday had been bad after the first rescues were done, because the people he found were sometimes still alive, but one look told him that not even the finest Healer could save them. Today, at least as he worked, he knew that he was only going to recover the bodies so that the ghosts would not wander. Once he uncovered a hand, and once, a foot, and the survivor shoved him aside, weeping, to do the rest of the work. That was when he left, with his part over.