exquisite detail, and the God Ghed was enjoined to take—something—from the palace, and put that same something here in the wallow. But what that was, Vetch could not make out.
Whatever they were doing took a lot of time, though, a great deal of chanting and effort, and the priests' pleated robes were beginning to wilt a little before they were done.
Inside the stifling storage room, Vetch was feeling a bit wilted himself.
Finally, though, they finished. With a last shake of the sistrums, the priests dropped their arms as one, and filed out the door, as solemnly as they had come. Haraket followed them out, and Vetch heard the chiming and footsteps moving on to the next pen.
Nevertheless, he waited until the chanting on the other side of the walls had started up again before venturing out.
There was no doubt that their magic had worked, and worked well. The sands were hotter than ever, and as Vetch hauled all of the things out of storage that he'd so hastily shoved in. he saw a heat shimmer playing over the top of the wallow. He had to work quickly; he was already a little late to clean Ari's quarters. Fortunately, that hardly mattered; there just wasn't that much work to be done there, and he had gotten it down to an art.
Kashet greeted the change in his wallow with a surprised snort, then gleefully plunged in. Ari raised his eyebrow, and paused for a moment instead of heading straight for his quarters.
'Were the Ghed priests here?' he asked.
Vetch nodded. He was still alive with curiosity. 'Haraket said the magic needed renewing.'
'1 thought things were getting a little cooler than Kashet prefers,' Ari replied, and allowed his eyebrow to drop again. 'Good.'
'Ah—' Vetch wasn't sure he should be asking the question, but he couldn't bear not to. 'What were they doing, anyway? I mean, how do they make things hotter?'
Ari had half-turned away, on his way out the door. Now he turned back and gave Vetch a long, level look. 'You were listening, weren't you.'
It wasn't a question. Vetch looked at his feet, then at Ari, and swallowed. He was about to be punished. He knew it, he just knew it. 'Yes, sir,' he admitted.
'Don't tell anyone else. The Ghed priests would have a litter of kittens over the idea that an Altan serf was inside their sacred square.' But Ari's normally solemn, brown eyes were full of amusement, and Vetch took heart again. 'As to how they did it—if I knew, I'd be a priest-mage, not a Jouster. But I know what they do, because I've copied out the rituals and spells for them before. Have you ever been to the Great King's palace?'
Before Vetch could shake his head—after all, why would he get into a palace!—Ari was going on.
'If you had, the first thing that would strike you is that while everything else is hot enough to bake bread, inside the walls of the palace it's cool enough for the ladies to wear lambswool mantles. And that is because the Ghed priests, with their magic, are taking the heat from there, and putting it in our sand wallows. That's what the spell is for; it's like an irrigation ditch that allows the heat to flow from there to here.'
Vetch stared at him. He'd have doubted Ari's sanity, except that there was no reason to disbelieve the Jouster. 'But,' he said, 'what about in winter? You wouldn't want to make it colder.' It was the only thing he could think of.
'In winter, they take it from somewhere else. My guess would be forges, bakehouses, places where there is a lot of heat it would be good to get rid of, even in winter. In fact, since the winter rains aren't far off now, they probably did just that this time around, rather than come back a second time to recast the spell.' Ari shrugged. 'They might even take it from the fire vents and lava cones out there past the desert; I might have copied some of their spells, but magic is something it's best not to know too much about. Now—don't let anyone know you watched the magic, and don't let anyone know I told you how the spell works.'
And with that, he was gone, leaving Vetch with quite a bit more to think about.
That night, when Ari appeared to tend to Kashet, not a word was spoken about magic. But now Vetch was curious about other things that were not so dangerous to know.
The weather was about to turn; the nights were more than chill, they were cold, and Kashet was very happy with his sand wallow this evening.
'There are hot sands that the wild dragons use?' he said, making it a question, as Ari rubbed under Kashet's chin.
'Of course there are—though, mind, dragons also use the heat of their own bodies to hatch their eggs. Wild dragons take it turn and turn about, males and females, to brood the eggs. That way they both can eat and drink. At night, when it's coldest, they brood the eggs together.'
