Alta

happier with mud, but wet dragons were hard enough to harness; muddy ones would have been impossible. Once in a great while they were allowed a mud wallow, but it wasn’t often, and they were cleaned off almost immediately afterward. Last night, they had all gone to bed feeling the weather bearing down on them. The wind had changed direction, coming from the sea and the north, rather than the desert and the west. It was a slow, heavy wind, bringing yet more humidity to this city surrounded by marshes, and it carried a chill with it. Kiron was happy to roll up in a woolen blanket tonight, and Avatre, born amid the rain, was so buried in the sand she was nothing more than a hummock in her pit.

The sound of thunder rolling continuously overhead was what woke Kiron. He waited for it to stop—and waited—and waited—and still nothing happened.

He opened his eyes and rolled over with a groan. There was light out there in Avatre’s pen, but it wasn’t very bright. Either the clouds were thicker than he thought, or it was just dawn. Both, perhaps. It was cold, a penetrating cold, and he knew he was going to need a woolen tunic today beneath his rain cape.

The thunder continued to growl overhead, yet there wasn’t any rain pounding down on the canvas awning. That struck him as very odd, and it roused his curiosity enough that he decided to get up and have a look around. Besides, he was awake now. Until the rain started, he wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep. There was such heavy tension in the air, waiting for the storm to break, that dozing was impossible.

He pulled on a kilt and a tunic and tiptoed past Avatre, who was still sleeping. In fact, given how cool the air was, he doubted she’d be very happy about being awakened.

Not that he blamed her in the least; if he hadn’t been so curious, he would be back in his cot, under his warm woolen blanket, thank you.

Once he got out from under the canvas and into the corridor, he still couldn’t see anything, because the Altans sensibly had the same canvas roofs over the corridors that they strung over the dragon pens. He would have to get somewhere that was open to the sky, like the landing court.

No one else was awake and moving, though, which made him think that the continuous thunder was considered perfectly normal by the Altans. That was a bit of a comfort, anyway. He padded his way along the stone of the corridor, barefoot, until he came to the entrance into the landing court—and as he approached it, he saw, in the sky above the walls—

Lightning. Not striking the ground, but crawling across the base of the clouds, like veins of fire across charcoal-colored flesh. It wasn’t like any lightning he’d ever seen before; this was reddish, and didn’t seem at all inclined to strike the earth. Gingerly, he eased himself out from under the scant protection offered by the canvas and looked up to see that the reason why the thunder didn’t stop was that there was never so much as a heartbeat of time when there wasn’t any lightning crawling across some part of the sky.

Well, that certainly explained the thunder.

He moved out into the courtyard so he could see the whole sky, including the tops of the buildings on the central island. After a moment of watching it with the same fascination of a bird watching a snake, he noticed that it was all emanating from a central point. That point was just above the tip of the Tower of Wisdom. The clouds there were darker, much darker, completely black, in fact, and they swirled around that center point in a slow, somehow ominous, vortex. And even as he watched, a single lightning bolt, not just red-tinted but as red as blood, cracked upward from the tip of the tower into the center of that vortex. When it vanished, it seemed to Kiron that the clouds were spinning just a little faster.

There was one thing he was not mistaken about; there was a heaviness to the air, a drowsiness, warring with his sense that something was going to break loose at any moment. He had thought he could not possibly get back to sleep, but now—now he felt as if all he wanted to do was to get back into his bed.

This storm—it’s just strange, he thought, and he wondered if there was anyone else but the Magi awake at the moment to watch this. Or was it just so commonplace for the Magi to control the storms of the rainy season that no one even thought about it?

Or had the Magi done something to ensure that all of the citizens of Alta City stayed in their beds while they did their work? That heaviness in the air felt as if it was weighing him down, as if he could and should just lie down right here in the courtyard and go back to sleep. . . .

And that was not right. At that moment, he knew that this was exactly what the Magi wanted. They did not want anyone to see what they were doing. He had been at the mercy of someone who did not want others to know his secrets—Khefti-the- Fat had many secrets—and he knew the signs.

He shook himself awake just as he felt his eyelids drooping. Oh, no! he thought, clenching his jaw. If you don’t want me to see this, then that’s exactly what I want to watch!

And so he did, watching with grim determination not to miss a single moment, as the thunder rolled and the lightning raced across the sky to the horizon, and as the clouds spun, faster and faster, until the moment when a final bolt, a black bolt scarcely visible against the clouds, arced upward.

A deafening avalanche of thunder threatened to flatten him where he stood.

Then the heavens opened up, and the rain poured out of the sky, very nearly managing to flatten him, which the thunder had not.

He scrambled back under cover of the canvas, and after standing there, dripping and cold, gazing out into the sheeting rain and listening to the now-ordinary peals of thunder, he decided that whatever it was that he was not supposed to watch was over. The rains had begun, and he might just as well go back to bed.

And yet—it felt as if there was something that he ought to do. He just didn’t know what it was.

After a moment of indecision, he decided that he wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep anyway, so he might as well put on a rain cape and see if he couldn’t find Aket-ten. She always attended the Dawn Rites at her temple, so he knew that she would be awake. He hadn’t seen her since Orest got his egg; he had the feeling that she was tired of hearing about what might be inside it.

He went back to his quarters, checked on the sleeping dragon (who was as insensible as a stone), decided that he ought to change into something drier than he was wearing, and finally, with the compound still sleeping around him, went out into the rain.

Everyone in the city slumbered just as in heavily as in the Jousters’ Compound, as far as he could tell. Then again, who would want to go out in this rain? He had the streets all to himself at any event, and he bent his head to the pounding water and sloshed barefoot down the road toward Aket-ten’s temple.

This temple was devoted to a pair of twin deities that were unique to Alta as far as he knew; the Goddess Beshet of the Far-Seeing Eye, and the God Anut the Spirit Walker. Beshet presided over those Winged Ones who had visions—of the future, of the past, of events at a distance. He was the patron of those who spoke with the dead—but also those who could act at a distance, who did not just have visions of things far away, but who could, in spirit, travel there and perhaps act on them. Between the two, they oversaw everything—save magic—that a Winged One might do. Other than that, Kiron didn’t know a great deal about the Twins; their rites were secret, reserved for the Winged Ones, the Fledglings, and the Nestlings. Interestingly, though their rites were secret, the temple was one of the most open in the city, with lectures and discussions going on in every open spot and corner, and all through the gardens, every day. There were even little side chapels devoted to some of the lesser deities: the patrons of lovers, of mothers, of luck and—hardly surprising—one to Te- oth, the god of writing. Only the sanctuary itself was closed to the public, and then only during the rites.

The water sluicing off the crest of the hill toward the canal was ankle-deep at times, and cold enough to numb his feet, but it would have been of no use to put on sandals. Not only would the rain have ruined them, but the leather soles would have been slippery; better to trust to his feet, which were harder than leather soles after all those years of going barefoot anyway.

It was just as well that he knew where he was going, since the rain was so heavy it was like trying to peer through a waterfall. The rain cape kept most of it off him, but there was a steady drip through the seam of his hood down the back of his head, trickling down his neck. It was with benumbed gratitude that he finally made out the bulk of the temple he wanted, and splashed his way up the three steps into the forecourt, where he shook out his cape in the torch-lit gloom.

He stood there uncertainly for a moment—not that he didn’t know the layout of the temple, just that he wasn’t sure where to begin looking for Aket-ten—when he heard the sound of feet running lightly toward him from behind, and turned quickly.

And before he had time to react in any way except to recognize that the runner was exactly who he was