Alta (48 page)

But that certainly got their attention. Heklatis’ quarters were securely guarded against every sort of magical spying that the Healer knew of; they had only gone there once or twice, when they wanted to be sure that nothing they said could be overheard. The first time had been when he and Aket-ten reported the successful release of the dust, the second, when Heklatis wanted them to hear that the Temple of the Twins was now tended only by servants, the Winged Ones being in their quarters from the time the Magi brought them back from the tower until the time the Magi came for them again in the morning.

Now, Heklatis had certainly lived up to the reputation of Akkadians as being as clever as five cats and as slippery as a serpent, because he had managed to arrange things so that even if a Magus discovered all of the protections on his quarters, himself, and the boys, he had a perfectly logical explanation that would hold up to the closest scrutiny.

All of the “shields and wards” as he called them had been cast on the images of
his
gods in his quarters, images that had indisputably come with him from Akkad. He could protest in all innocence that he had no idea there was any magic on them, but that they
had
been blessed by the priests of his nation. And as for the protections on himself, the boys, and Aket-ten, well,
those
were all centered in Akkadian amulets, which he could claim had also come with him and been similarly blessed, and to prove it, he still had a chest full of similar amulets, all of which had gotten the same “blessing.”

It was unlikely in the extreme that anyone would even guess that he and Kiron had spent the better part of two days making a mold of his amulet, casting dozens of copies, firing them, and stringing them on cords, nor that it had been Heklatis, not some priest, who had put the spells on them. How supremely ironic it had been, that Kiron had used the skills he had picked up in the service of Khefti-the-Fat!

As for why Heklatis would have bestowed those amulets on the boys—the reason was simple. He, and they, would claim truthfully that they had asked for them, seeing the image of a winged solar disk on them, so like the same symbol of the Altan sun god.

Clever, clever Akkadian. How would they have managed without him?

He would have liked to ask Kaleth about a hundred questions, but Kaleth downed the last of his soup, drinking it straight from the bowl, and left the table. The rest of them exchanged glances after he left that varied from resignation to astonishment. Whatever was going on, it was Kaleth, above all of them, who had the most to lose, and knew how careful they must be. He would not have told them to do this unless there was a very, very good reason.

So, how to come up with a good excuse for the whole lot of them to descend on Heklatis. . . .

It seems as if I spend half my life now trying to come up with innocent reasons to do something in case someone is watching,
he thought wearily.
I am very tired of this.

He couldn’t help but wonder now—if he had known that this was what his life would come to, would he have returned to Alta at all?

Finally Kiron spoke aloud. “You all look like trampled barley,” he said. “And I
feel
like trampled barley. Finish your dinner, and as wingleader, I am ordering the entire wing to visit the Healer. I want him to look us over carefully, one and all. Potions at dinner are all very well, but I think we ought to get the Healer to check us completely. The last thing I want is for one or more of us to fall ill. A mistake in the air can be fatal.”

“Well,” said Gan, after a moment. “Since he mixed the last potion he gave
me
with distilled palm wine, I’m not going to object too strongly. I’m tired, but too nervy to sleep anyway; maybe he can give me something to make me relax and drop off.”

The rest nodded. “I want something for this eye,” Orest said ruefully—ruefully, because the eye was his own fault. He had actually smacked himself with the Jousting lance.

Kiron didn’t hurry them as they finished their meal. That would have looked odd, and the last thing he wanted was for anything to look odd at the moment.

Besides, no matter how urgent Kaleth thought the situation was, he was in no great hurry to hear it. Only when they were all through, Aket-ten included, did he nod and climb stiffly over the bench to lead them to Heklatis’ rooms.

They were able to walk under awnings most of the way, and only had to dash under the young waterfall pouring down over the awning at the break where the corridor met the entrance to the courtyard. By now it was dark, but the door of the main room was open and warm lantern light shone invitingly out at them.

The room was as inviting as the light had promised, and their host had laid out cushions and stools for all of them. Kaleth was already there, waiting for them and looking as tense as a strung harp, and so was Heklatis, of course. Once they were all inside, Heklatis shut the door after them, and made a peculiar, twisting little gesture on the surface of it.

Kaleth relaxed at once. “Now we can talk,” he said with gratitude. “Kiron, I have to leave.”

Kiron was more than a little startled. That was not what he had expected to hear! “All right,” he said cautiously. “So—”

“It’s not what you think,” Kaleth interrupted. “It’s not that the Magi are coming for me yet, and it’s not that I don’t feel as if I belong among you, because I do.”

“What is it, then?” Orest asked.

“I had a vision today while you were all at afternoon practice,” he said. “Heklatis was with me, and what made it different was that this is one I remembered afterward.” His expression took on a little of that far-away look it got when he was actually having a vision. “I spoke with one of the Bedu, the Blue People, and he said—I think it was a ‘he’—said you would remember him. He said he was the one who guided you to the edge of the delta marshes from the last oasis, and told you that you had to stop being Vetch and start being Kiron.”

Kiron blinked. He might have been skeptical about this “vision”—except that right there was the proof that it was a true one. There was no way that Kaleth could have known what that final Mouth of the Bedu had said to him about leaving his serf-self behind, because he had never told anyone. “All right,” he repeated. “So what else did you see?”

“It wasn’t so much what I saw as what I was shown,” Kaleth said, and now he looked at them each in turn, his expression sober and a little frightened. “I have to leave, and meet with this Bedu. He’s going to help me find a place where we can make a refuge, a secure hiding place, a
sanctuary.
He—the Bedu—said, and my vision showed me, that we’re going to need it. He said he and the other Bedu like him had been having the same vision as me, and he had been appointed to vision-speak me to make me understand, because I hadn’t been trained and otherwise I might not understand how important it was that I do this.”

“A refuge?” Gan said, skeptically. “For who?”

“You, at least at first,” Kaleth replied. “Because once the Jousters are no more because the
tala
fails and the dragons all escape, the Magi won’t let you nine live.”

Even though Kiron had more than half expected to hear something like this some day, it came as a jolt. He felt cold all over, and it wasn’t because of the rain, winds, and chill. It was an ugly thing to hear that someone intended your death.

Kiron turned his gaze on Aket-ten. “You’re in that nine. You need to understand that.”

“I already did,” Aket-ten said bitterly.

Kiron suspected that he wasn’t the only person to feel as if a line of ice-laced fire ran down his spine at that moment. But he believed Kaleth. Oh, my, yes.

He had seen what the Magi could and would do to those they considered threats, and the last remaining Jousters in Alta would be a threat to their continued aggrandizement of power, if nothing else.

“Me, too, of course—well, I’ll already be there. And after us, others will come,” Kaleth continued, “Mostly from Alta, though not all. You, too, Heklatis.”

“I suspected as much,” the Healer said dryly. “For one thing, I’m rather too closely linked with the lot of you, for another, if there are no Jousters, they won’t need a Healer now, will they?”

“But the thing is, I have to meet with the Bedu, and pay them to help me in the desert, and find the place.
They
don’t even know it exists, the one who spoke to me said that the Bedu think it’s only a legend.” He looked triumphant. “It’s Te-pa-ten-ke, the Lost City, and my visions are going to lead me to it.”

That
held them frozen in their seats for a moment. Everyone knew about the Lost City, how it had been buried by a mammoth sandstorm in a single night. It had supposedly incurred the anger of the god Haras, because the inhabitants had turned into brigands, preying on their neighbors, and after they cast out their own priests for warning them, he had raised his hand against them. But no one had ever seen it, not even the Bedu whose home the desert was.

“I should say,” Kaleth continued, “that I’ll pay them for passage, and then when I find the city, I know where to find a store of gold to pay them to help me set it up for you. The Bedu with the visions trust me, of course, but they’re poor—”

“Exactly,” Kiron put in, as the others began to look a bit skeptical at all this talk of payment. “The desert takes everything you have just to survive. The Bedu have nothing to spare to sustain an outsider. They need payment in order to get extra supplies for you.”

He nodded. “And then, they’ll need more gold to get the supplies to help me make the place livable for the rest of us.” He looked a little feverish, but had an air of triumph about him, and a look as if he had at last found meaning for his life and a great goal to pursue.

Well, if that was the case, Kiron couldn’t blame him for looking triumphant. In many ways, he had emerged from Toreth’s shadow and come into his own kingdom. . . .

“So if you’re going to be wandering out in the desert, just how are we supposed to find you and this refuge?” Oset-re asked, with a touch of irony. “I don’t fancy flying off across the wastelands trying to find a place that shouldn’t exist.”

“You won’t have to. The Bedu will find you and bring you to me when the time comes. The Mouth will know when and where to find you. That’s all I know.” He shrugged. “The visions showed me the city, but not how you’ll end up there, though I think it’s bound to be when the dragons go wild. And it’s getting dangerous for me to be here; I’m not sure why, I only know that it is. The Bedu said so, too. I’ll leave in the morning, so this is the last time we’ll all meet before I see you in Te-pa-ten-ke.”

Kiron cast a glance over at Heklatis, who interpreted the look correctly. “I believe him, Kiron,” the Healer said. “I think this is a true vision. I told you once that these things come in fragments; we should just be glad that he got enough to know the next part of the plan.”

“We essentially destroy the Jousters, then escape into a refuge,” Kiron mused aloud. “It could be worse, I suppose.”

Kaleth scowled at him. “Yes, it
could,
” he said with annoyance verging on anger. “You could come back to the compound after the battle, and the Magi could wipe you all out of the sky with the Eye. I’ve seen
that,
too, and I don’t want to see it truly happen instead of being a maybe-future!”

That stopped Kiron dead; in fact, they all went as still as stone for a moment, and in the silence, the rain outside was very loud indeed.

“All right,” Kiron said into the silence. “In that case, let’s all work on making sure that particular maybe-future never has a chance of coming true.”

 

Kiron half expected that no one outside of their little group and Marit and her sister Nofret would even notice that Kaleth was gone, and as far as he was able to tell, that was the case. Lord Khumun did not mention it, there were no rumors from the court, and in fact, Kaleth’s absence might well even be a relief for some. Kiron did not even attempt to keep up the fiction that he was still there, though if anyone asked him, he was going to say, truthfully, that Kaleth had left one night leaving no word of where he was going, and then add, “Though he spoke once of trying to find the Lost City.”

He figured that such a statement would brand Kaleth as completely mad. Even the Magi would probably not bother to look for him after that.

But no one outside the group ever spoke of him; perhaps, like Toreth, they were all trying to pretend he had never existed. Perhaps they were trying not to draw attention to themselves. Perhaps both.

But within half a moon, and deep into the rains, they all got a rude shock, and Kiron was very, very glad that Kaleth
had
gone. It went down as one of the black moments of his life.

Lord Khumun sent dragon boys around to the entire compound that morning as they all awakened, saying that he wished to address them over breakfast. Kiron fed Avatre without thinking very much about it; though it wasn’t unusual for Lord Khumun to address them all together, it wasn’t unheard of. Perhaps the work of the rains had gotten noticed and the Great Ones wanted to send a reward of some sort, or at least, a word of commendation.

They certainly deserve it,
he thought, with more than a bit of bitterness.
More than the Magi, if you were to ask me.
After all,
they
were having to fly in that magic-befouled weather, and because of their efforts, the border had been pressed back yet again—almost to the place it had been when Kiron’s own village had been lost to the Tians so many years ago.

But when Lord Khumun finally appeared to the restless crowd of Jousters waiting for him in the kitchen courtyard, he was not alone.

There was a Magus with him, and at the sight of the man, the muttering men in the courtyard went deathly quiet. It seemed at that moment that every drop of rain on the awnings overhead, and dripping down between the gaps in the cloth, was terribly, terribly loud.