This—this was a very bad sign. This did not look like the result of a private quarrel. If it had been—the man would have been tended to by his own garrison healer. If he had done murder, he would not have been trying to get back to civilization. Could it be the work of bandits?
Well it could, but if they had gotten fierce enough to take down the border guards . . . it would need the army to take them.
“Whoever did it, this fellow tried to get word back—” Huras ventured.
They all looked at Kiron.
“Huras,” he said finally, “you go to Sanctuary and get a priest to look at this body, or at least someone to fetch it back there. The rest of you go on back to Aerie. I’ll take word to Mefis.”
No one argued. Kiron remounted Avatre and sent her up, his mouth dry, his heart pounding.
It wasn’t that the man was dead. Kiron had seen dead men in plenty, far more than he liked to think about. He’d killed before today; not gladly, and certainly not easily, but he had done so. No, his fear was due to the fact that this was a sign, a sign that something was very wrong on the eastern border. If this man was the lone survivor of a massacre—
Well, that was high on the list of what could have happened. He must have been the only one left, or the only one still mobile, otherwise there would have been someone else with him. Something had gone badly wrong out there, and it must have come with no warning.
He stopped only long enough to claim a meal for Avatre at a temple; he was in such a hurry that he didn’t even notice which god the temple enshrined. Once she had eaten, he pushed her ruthlessly into the sky. She was in good condition; though tired, she was far from winded, and she obeyed his commands without a protest. She did keep glancing over her shoulder at him as she flew, as if she was picking up some of his anxiety. His mouth felt dry, no matter how many times he pulled at his waterskin, and he tried to reckon how long it would have taken that border guard to get to where he had been found. It didn’t look to Kiron as if he had been lying there for more than a day—and he would have thought, with all of the dragons in the sky, someone would have spotted him if he had been lying there for much longer.
Now all they had was a mystery.
Just as the sun-disk touched the horizon, the first of the buildings of Mefis came into view, and recognizing that rest and food were close in reach, Avatre found a little more energy and pushed herself to a little more speed.
He welcomed her effort and urged her on, leaning down over her shoulder to help her. She recognized her old pen and backwinged straight down into it, landing lightly.
The two pens on either side of hers showed recent occupation, and those on the right both held blue-and- green dragons, two of the four he had sent here as couriers. Their Jousters were, as he had trained them, giving their charges the final grooming of the day—more for affection and bonding than for any practical purpose. They both ran into the pen as Avatre landed, clearly recognizing him.
“Find me someone who knows who is in charge of the border guards,” he said without preamble, sliding down out of the saddle.
“That would be the vizier—” said the first, Wesh-ta-he, doubtfully. “Nef-kham-het. But he is surely at his meal—”
“Kiron would not have flown here if it had not been urgent, you goose!” exclaimed Aket-ten from the doorway. “Come on, Kiron, I’ll take you to him.”
“Take care of Avatre!” Kiron ordered. “She has flown long since her last meal.”
Aket-ten turned and trotted down the long, high-walled corridor between the mostly empty pens. Even though the complex was empty, someone had still stocked all the torch holders along the walls with torches, and as they turned a corner, they passed a servant lighting them. The passages had a haunting familiarity to them; the beautiful, larger-than-life-sized paintings of gods and goddesses and dragons, the flickering torches, the smell of hot sand . . .
He wanted to ask Aket-ten what she was doing here, but she didn’t slow down long enough for him to get in a word. As soon as they left the Dragon Courts, she broke into a run, pelting down the broad avenue leading to the Palace as if she were a runner-courier herself.
She headed not for the Palace itself but for the row of Great Houses near it, where important officials lived. Kiron almost balked at that; this might not be a matter for an overseer as important as that—
But then again, it might. And it was not his call to judge.
There were a few people out on the avenue in the dusk, one or two servants trotting along, and some of those important folks in their litters, borne aloft by slaves and lit by servants with torches. None of them even glanced at the two Jousters. Those servants had errands on their minds, and the important folk were likely thinking about what they were going to say and do at whatever banquet or meeting they were going to.
Aket-ten slowed down and stopped at the gate of one of those houses, speaking briefly to the servant on guard there. By the time Kiron arrived, the servant had stepped aside, and Aket-ten waved him on to follow her.
Another servant escorted them into the house, Kiron acutely aware of his disheveled and filthy state. He hoped that the servant was not going to take them to the dining chamber—he was in no fit condition to be seen in such a place.
But as they passed through the antechamber, lined with benches for those who would be waiting on the Vizier’s attention, and painted with murals of the Vizier supervising the Queen’s household, receiving the Gold of Honor, and dictating to a small army of scribes, another servant appeared at a door, followed by the Vizier himself.
He was not someone that Kiron knew, but evidently Aket-ten did, for the man greeted her warmly.
“I know you would not have summoned me from my meal if this had not been urgent,” he said, with a wry smile. “You are not given to hysterics.”
“Actually, my lord, I don’t know what the situation is,” Aket-ten admitted. “But I do know that Kiron would not have flown all the way from Aerie himself if it was not a serious problem—”
Now she glanced at him, and there was something else in that glance that made him uneasy. Something personal.
Still nothing to be done about that. He saluted the Vizier. “My lord . . . while returning from an action against bandits, my wings discovered a body.”
He went on to describe everything that he could remember about the body and its disposition while the vizier listened carefully, arms folded over his chest. Torchlight flickering over the murals gave them a strange semblance of life, making it doubly odd to be talking to one Vizier while four more went about their business.
When he finished, the vizier nodded, face expressionless. Kiron’s heart sank. He had disturbed a very important man for nothing—
“This could be of no consequence,” the vizier said, and Kiron’s heart sank further. “But—we cannot take that chance. The gods may have placed a warning in our laps, and we ignore it at our peril. You acted properly in bringing this to me.”
Kiron felt a weight lifting from his shoulders. “Then I will leave it in the wise hands of Vizier Nef-kham-het,” he said. And he left it at that, bowing himself out, Aket-ten coming with him. He wanted to be sure Avatre had been properly tended, and he wanted a meal and a bath in that order.
However, he knew he wasn’t going to get any of those things soon when Aket-ten turned to him just outside the vizier’s gate and said somberly, “We need to talk. . . .”
SEVEN
“NOW?”he asked, wishing he dared walk on, but knowing—unless he wanted a quarrel— he had better stop where he was.
Ah, but he had forgotten one thing. Aket-ten was a Jouster as well as a young woman. She pursed her lips
