Aerie

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