Alta

didn’t specify what “that” was, but he didn’t exactly have to.

“Earthshake,” she said matter-of-factly. “We get them all the time, though usually not as bad as the one last night. But, of course—you were born and raised far enough down the Great Mother River that even when your family was still part of Alta, you never felt them, did you? Some people claim it is the anger of Seft that does it, but the Winged Ones know it isn’t.” She hesitated a moment. “Or at least, if it is, no Winged One has ever seen the actual hand of the God doing it. Besides that, we’ve always been able to warn people well in advance of when one was going to happen, so if it was the anger of a God, you’d think He would have stopped us from telling people.”

“What went wrong this time?” he asked thickly. His eyes were still sore from all of the grit, and he rubbed at his gluey lashes to try and unstick them. “Why wasn’t there a warning?”

It was light enough that he could see her frown. “I don’t know, not for certain,” she replied flatly. “But I can guess. The Fledglings weren’t enough to satisfy the need for whatever it is that the Magi were draining from them, or maybe they’ve started to drain some of them so dry that their powers really are gone for good, and the Magi have started to come for the Winged Ones themselves. That’s the only reason I can think of why the ones with the Fore-Visions didn’t see this earthshake and warn everyone it was coming. They should have. They’ve always known when a shake was coming, even a little one that barely rattles the pots, and they’ve always sent out warnings.”

Maybe later he would be as angry as she clearly was; now all he could think of was the welfare of the rest of the compound. “Is anyone in the compound hurt? Are the rest of the dragons all right?” He couldn’t hear any more whimpering or keening; in fact, all he heard was the usual groans and complaints of dragons who hated to be roused in the morning.

“A few people were hurt by falling stone, all but one of them servants,” she said, “but not badly. This compound is built to handle shakes. The dragons are all fine. One of the pools cracked and drained, and the poor dragon in it spent a miserable and cold night so far as he was concerned, but there are spare pens, and we’ve already moved the dragon there. It’ll be worse in the city,” she added with resignation. “There will be people killed, I’m sure, several hundred, if not several thousand. And a lot more will be hurt and probably half of those will die, too, eventually.”

“Um—why?” he asked.

“Because they weren’t warned!” she snapped. “I told you, we know what to do when there is going to be a big shake! With warning, we all move out to sleep in our gardens! Even if you don’t have a garden, when there’s a shake warning, people sleep in the temple gardens, beside the canals, anywhere that there’s no walls to fall on them. Without warning—people are inside, their walls come down, their roofs collapse—” He heard the mounting anger in her voice, and she must have realized it too. She stopped for a moment, and closed her eyes. He could hear her breathing carefully, taking several slow, deep breaths before opening her eyes again, and continuing in a more controlled voice. She was still angry, though; he knew her well enough to understand that her stony expression meant that she was just controlling herself. He had first seen it when she was trying not to show how afraid she was of the Magi; now he doubted that she was hiding fear. “That’s the thing, you see. If we have warning, an earthshake doesn’t hurt anything but buildings, and buildings can be mended. It will be bad in the Second and Third Ring, but in the Fourth and Fifth—it will be horrible. The poorer the district is, the worse it will be. The wealthy have homes built to account for shaking, but the poor build of mud brick, on land that becomes like quicksand when there’s a shake. That’s why there must be a warning—”

Her voice trembled with rage, and her jaw was clenched. “The Magi,” she said, her facade cracking again. “The Magi did this.”

“If the Magi are to blame,” he ventured, “then surely the Great Ones will act?” He couldn’t imagine the Great Ones not acting. They were the guardians of their people. How could they ignore something as egregious as this?

“One hopes,” she replied, all the anger suddenly draining from her, as the water had drained from that cracked pool. “I’d better go. I’m the only one that can soothe the wild-caught dragons, and every time there is a little shake, or they even think there is a little shake, they are becoming hysterical. If we aren’t to have to drug them to sleep with tala, I’d better do that.”

She got up off her knees, brushed the sand off her sleeveless robe, and left. He stared after her. He had never seen her look so hopeless before. What did she know about the Winged Ones and the Magi that he didn’t?

Whatever it was, she was evidently certain that the Magi would never be taken to task for draining the power from those who were supposed to protect Alta from catastrophes such as this one. What was it that made her so certain?

Maybe it was nothing worse than her own fears speaking. After all, the Winged Ones had failed to protect her from the Magi; now she probably mistrusted everyone. And he couldn’t blame her either.

As the light strengthened, he looked around Avatre’s pen and assessed the damages. All the lanterns were smashed, fallen out of their niches or off their shelves, lying in broken pieces on the floor. There was a crack running up one wall of the pen, and there was another at the corner of his room. Gan and Toreth’s quarters hadn’t fared so well. In fact, had Toreth been in his cot, he probably would have been dead, because a huge block of stone had dislodged itself from his ceiling and flattened his cot. But in fact, Toreth had been sleeping outside his room since the Dry season began because of the heat, and that liking for fresh air had probably saved his life. It turned out that he was not the only one who had been sleeping outside; most of the wing had been doing so. This was incomprehensible to Kiron, who had been forced to sleep under the stars for most of his life, and found the presence of a roof equated to a feeling of—well, of luxury. Free people slept in houses; only serfs and slaves slept in the open.

As for Gan, one whole corner of the outer wall of his dragon’s pen was gone, collapsed, and Gan was swearing that he was going to find the stonemason who was responsible and make him fix it with nothing more than his bare hands. Kiron was a little worried; there was so much more to worry about than the collapse of a wall—

“Huh,” said Kalen, when Gan went back to his pen, still ranting. “Don’t worry about it, Kiron. This is just his way of exhausting his fear. We’re all scared—if we can’t rely on the Winged Ones to warn us anymore, what are we going to do?”

Kiron realized that the falconer was right. With one exception—himself—it wasn’t what had happened that was the disaster, it was that they hadn’t been warned.

In the end, the reports that came from the rest of the city were not as disastrous as Aket-ten had feared. Many people (in fact, virtually anyone who had a garden) were sleeping in their gardens for the sake of coolness, and so were safe when the shaking began. There were deaths, though, and many, many injuries, and people all over the city were asking why there had been no warning.

Aket-ten would have taken up her very rudimentary Healing kit and gone out to help the Healers, except that both her father and Lord Khumun forbade her to do any such thing. Lord Khumun told her so first, when she came to him to ask permission to leave; a note from her father (who evidently knew his daughter well) came a little later.

Kiron had gone with her, after failing to dissuade her from her fixed purpose himself. He hung back as Lord Khumun gave her a very stony glare. “The dragons are a hair’s breadth from going mad with fear,” Lord Khumun told her sternly. “Every time there is an after-shaking, they bellow worse than after the first shake. Who is there to soothe them if you go running off in the city? And just what do you think several dozen terrified, loose dragons would do, if they broke loose from their chains, and escaped the compound?”

Aket-ten looked as if she had eaten something very sour. Then she took another deep breath, and bowed her head in obedience to Lord Khumun’s orders.

And he was right, of course, excepting only that several dozen newly freed and terrified dragons would probably do nothing worse than fly off. Still, there was always the chance that one would decide to get a bit of his own back, as it were. And Aket-ten was the only person in the compound that could soothe the dragons. By now, some of them were so upset that they didn’t want to eat, which meant until she got them quieted, it wouldn’t be possible to get tala into them either.

Kiron didn’t want her out there for reasons of his own. If she was right, and the Magi were taking up the Winged Ones as well as the Fledglings, then the moment she stepped outside the compound walls, she was in