Aerie (28 page)

Then he had sat down where he stood, without any preparations, elaborate or otherwise, and apparently went off into meditation.

That left Kiron and Aket-ten to set up the living space, fetch water, prepare food, and hunt, all in blistering heat. From time to time Aket-ten would glance at the Chosen with resentment.

“I don’t know why he wanted me,” she finally said, crossly, as she kneaded dough. “All I’m doing is acting as a servant.”

“So am I,” Kiron reminded her, thinking as he did so that being made a wingleader, the one thing she had wanted above all others, had not improved her temper any.

“Yes, but I’m having to cook,” she continued, looking down at the dough resentfully.

“So am I,” Kiron reminded her, as he banked coals around the pot of lentils they would be having for dinner.

“Yes, but anyone could have done this,” she responded. “Probably better than I could.”

At this point, it was clear to Kiron that Aket-ten didn’t want to hear anything logical, she only wanted to vent her frustrations. On the one hand, he could agree with her. After all, he was certain that, eventually, Rakaten-te would have magical need of Aket-ten’s training and skills. All
he
had served as was a kind of cart driver on a very superior cart indeed. And now his only purpose here was to attend to whatever need the Chosen had.

Aket-ten fretted and fidgeted, wondered aloud what she was doing here, and became more irritated and irritating as the chores they were doing to make things livable clearly made her feel as if she was nothing more than a servant.

And how would she feel in Aerie?
he wondered. Perhaps that was the real reason why she had not wanted to stay there with him. There was too much drudge work for her. Now he began to be irritated with her, and some of his mother’s comments about the noble-born who had never known what it was to work hard began to ring truer . . . .

Perhaps he didn’t fit so well with her. Perhaps this was the true Aket-ten, nobly born, she who had never had to do without servants, who had never known what it was to take care of herself. Life at Aerie, life as the new sort of Jouster, was going to be hard for a very long time. Perhaps the feelings they had for each other could not stand up under that hardship.

Despite the bright sun, a shadow seemed to fall over them both, and his spirits sank further and further. He had been deceived, or he had deceived himself. Why should someone like Aket-ten waste any time on someone like him? He was nothing more than a novelty to someone like her. Exciting for a while, certainly, but after that, after the novelty wore off . . .

And what had he seen in her anyway? Oh, she was pretty, and he supposed she must be a good lover, though he certainly didn’t have anyone else to compare her to. But to listen to her whine about how terrible it was to have to make the bread that she was going to eat, to have to sweep out the spot where she was going to sleep—oh, it was maddening! He’d have spanked her like a petulant child if he hadn’t felt so leaden. It was just too much effort.

No, what he really wanted to do was just leave. Leave this place, this whining girl, this old blind cripple. Leave them to their own devices and let them take care of themselves without him. He didn’t have to be their servant. Why should he be, after all? Who had appointed them as his master? He wasn’t a serf anymore, to be loaded down with common labor.

He should go back to Alta. He
would
go back to Alta. He would do that right now, this instant! In fact, there was nothing in this world he wanted to do more than to go home, back to the farm, where someone else would take care of him.

He left the loaves he had been shaping, and turned to march out of the kitchen-court of the temple, into the east, heading home with a determination that nothing and no one would stop him. It barely registered with him that Aket-ten had done the same. And for a brief moment there was uncertainty—a flutter of a thought—
Alta is not in the east, and the farm
—but the thought was gone in the next moment, and the
need
to go east rose up and crested over him like a flood wave—

He saw the old priest stepping into his path and thought only with annoyance that he was going to have to shove the old man aside—

And then the Chosen of Seft lashed out with his staff and shouted a guttural phrase, and lightning exploded in his skull.

 

“I am very sorry about that,” Rakaten-te said, as Kiron sipped at a cup of some herbal stuff that was as thick as silt-laden flood-waters and tasted green. Whatever it was, Kiron hoped it would go to work soon, because his skull felt as if it was going to crack in half at any moment.

Aket-ten didn’t look as if she felt any better. There were black rings around both her eyes, as if someone had punched her, and her face was pasty. She sipped at a clay cup of the same herbal muck.

“Couldn’t you have shielded against that?” she asked the Chosen of Seft.

He shook his head. “Regrettably, I am finding that Them-noh-thet was correct. Something around here drains magic. Fortunately, mine is of the sort less susceptible to such things, but if I had set some sort of shields upon you, they would still have been reduced to nothing, and the result would have been the same.”

“Shouldn’t we go out there?” he asked. “Go to the spot where the townspeople were taken? We could catch whoever set this—”

Again, the priest shook his head. “We would catch only the slavemasters who had been told where to go,” he corrected. “And perhaps—not even then. I do not think that anyone is aware that we are here. I think it was simply set up in the full knowledge that sooner or later, someone would come to investigate, and when they did, the trap would close and they would walk out into the desert and die.”

Kiron shuddered, remembering his conviction that he
had
to go home, and that home lay in the east. He knew what would have happened had the Chosen not stopped them. He would have gone out and kept walking. . . .

“An insidious trap, too,” Rakaten-te continued, in a musing sort of voice. “The magic caught you both in moments of doubt, amplified those doubts out of all proportion, then offered you a way out of the bitter unhappiness it had created in your minds. You actually supplied what would have been the instrument of your demise. If you had felt a simple compulsion to walk into the east, you likely would have fought it. But instead, you had
reasons
to walk into the east. Reasons that were vitally important to you at the time.” His lips twisted wryly. “A master-work of magic.”

“Please tell me you broke it,” said Aket-ten.

His mouth quirked in a sour smile. “Oh, yes. I broke it. Which is a pity, because now I cannot study it. I can only tell you that there was more than one hand involved in the making of it. And more than one kind of magician.”

“The Magi?” Kiron asked, mouth going dry.

Rakaten-te sighed. “Now that—I do not know.”

FIFTEEN

“THE
first thing is to find the source of whatever is consuming magic.”

There had been silence for a long time as Kiron and Aket-ten finished the last of the green muck and waited for their respective headaches to fade. Though “headache” was far too mild a word for something that made him want to crack his own skull open to let the pain out. Neither he nor Aket-ten had wanted anything to eat, and the Chosen had seemed happy enough with bread and some cold meat. Well, that would just leave the pot of cooked lentil stew for the morning; it would certainly stay warm enough in the ashes, and if the bottom was burned to the pot, no matter; there were a hundred pots where that one had come from.

They sat in silence for a very long time, as the oblong of sun coming in through the ventilation slit crept up the wall.

When the silence was finally broken, it was with those words from Rakaten-te.

“That seems logical,” Kiron said slowly, trying to be very careful not to set his head off again. He worked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to get the taste off. “And there must be a way in which we can be useful in that hunt, or you never would have said anything about it right now. Correct?”

“Correct.” The Chosen’s face was unusually hard to read because of the bandage across his eyes, so Kiron had not a clue as to what he was actually thinking. “In a moment, you will begin to feel sleepy. You should go to rest as soon as you do. You will need all your senses alert in the morning.”

Right on cue, Aket-ten yawned, and he found himself yawning in return. “Go,” said the Chosen, then a very faint suggestion of a smile crossed his lips. “You feared I had selected you as little more than my servants. I assure you, I pondered all my choices with extreme care. I need the two of you, specifically. You will find yourselves using skills you did not even know you possessed.”

Ah,
Kiron thought.
Grand.
So now he was going to be mucking about with magic, which was perhaps the very last thing he wanted to do. He didn’t much like it, he didn’t much trust it, and truth to be told, if it weren’t for the useful things it could do like heating the sands of the dragon pens and making the cold rooms, he could well do without it.

He got up carefully and offered Aket-ten a hand when she didn’t move. She looked up at him, sighed, and took it. The only lamps were here, in the sanctuary, and they only lit the center of the room where the Chosen was, and where, since he had directed them to place his pallet there, he would presumably sleep. But there was enough of the fading twilight for them to find their way into the chamber they had taken to sleep in—not one of the inner chambers, but one that had probably once housed servants, at the back of the temple. It opened onto the kitchen-court, which suited Kiron fine. The wind off the desert that carried away the kitchen smells also served to cool their room.

Their room. Without thinking about it, they had placed their pallets together, in the same room. But after this afternoon . . . she had surely had similar thoughts to his, unflattering at best, downright hostile at worst. It seemed almost impossible to span the gulf the things he had been thinking had cut between him and her. She didn’t know what he had been thinking, of course, but she could surely guess. And the worst part, perhaps, was that there was a grain of truth in all of it.

He dreaded what she was going to say.

But, in fact, she said nothing. She only shoved their pallets together with her foot and collapsed on one. And when he gingerly laid himself down on the other, she turned to him and put her arms around him, slowly, as if they were weighted with stones and she could hardly move them.

He found himself doing the same. Found himself unaccountably relaxing, and felt her going quiet and losing the tenseness in her muscles. And without a word, they fell into healing sleep.

 

Breakfast, over bowls of lentil stew, came in the still cool light of dawn. They woke fitted together like the stones of a wall. He didn’t want to say anything, and he suspected Aket-ten didn’t either.

They found the Chosen already awake. “You must be my ears and eyes, feet and hands,” said Rakaten-te. “Here is what you need to know. Some creatures are sensitive to magic; the presence of it, the lack of it, and even to specific kinds. The scarabus beetle, for instance: one can hardly keep the creatures away from any place where there is Healing magic present. Flies swarm to the rituals of blood and death, and to the practitioners of those magics.”

They both nodded, Aket-ten knowingly, Kiron only because he did understand to this point, but frankly expected to become confused very shortly.

“Whatever is consuming magic here must have a physical focus. There is probably more than one, in fact.” Rakaten-te pursed his lips. “I think that someone must have come here and planted these things. A stranger would not have been out of place in a town like this.”

Kiron nodded. That was certainly true. A border town saw all manner of wanderers coming through at irregular intervals. There was no state of war here, no reason to be alert, really, and the men who were garrisoned out here in this least desirable of all postings did not tend to be highly motivated at the best of times.

“Now as for the magic that caused you two to decide to take a sudden journey—I do not know if it had a physical focus and, alas, I may never know. Nor am I certain how it was able to work when all other magic was being drained.” He shrugged. “Whoever did all of this is a magician of great skill and subtlety.”

Greater than you?
But Kiron knew that was an unfair question. Rakaten-te had the unenviable task of trying to unravel what another mage had done without knowing anything about the magician or his magic. He hid his eyes and his unfair thoughts by looking down at his breakfast.

“But before I can do anything, we must find and destroy the objects that are absorbing magic.” The Chosen set aside his empty bowl. “Now I do not know what creatures will react to these things, but I do know that some will. That is what you must look for. Some sort of live thing either avoiding a place or swarming to it.”

Kiron felt very dubious, but decided it was better not to say anything. What could he say, after all? That this was a very thin clue, and not much in the way of direction? The Chosen surely was aware of that.

“Failing this hunt working to uncover the foci, the only other expedient will be for me to walk every thumb-length of this town, and for some distance beyond,” Rakaten-te said rather grimly. “My god is not offering any sort of hint, which means that Seft sees that I can solve this myself. He is . . . a very challenging god to serve. But we can hope that the creatures of the earth will show us what we need to know.”

“And if they do not, we will need to guide you across the town, back and forth until you find something” said Aket-ten. “But how is it you think you can find these things, if you cannot use magic to find them?”