Aerie

almost impossible to span the gulf the things he had been thinking had cut between him and her. She didn’t know what he had been thinking, of course, but she could surely guess. And the worst part, perhaps, was that there was a grain of truth in all of it.

He dreaded what she was going to say.

But, in fact, she said nothing. She only shoved their pallets together with her foot and collapsed on one. And when he gingerly laid himself down on the other, she turned to him and put her arms around him, slowly, as if they were weighted with stones and she could hardly move them.

He found himself doing the same. Found himself unaccountably relaxing, and felt her going quiet and losing the tenseness in her muscles. And without a word, they fell into healing sleep.

Breakfast, over bowls of lentil stew, came in the still cool light of dawn. They woke fitted together like the stones of a wall. He didn’t want to say anything, and he suspected Aket-ten didn’t either.

They found the Chosen already awake. “You must be my ears and eyes, feet and hands,” said Rakaten-te. “Here is what you need to know. Some creatures are sensitive to magic; the presence of it, the lack of it, and even to specific kinds. The scarabus beetle, for instance: one can hardly keep the creatures away from any place where there is Healing magic present. Flies swarm to the rituals of blood and death, and to the practitioners of those magics.”

They both nodded, Aket-ten knowingly, Kiron only because he did understand to this point, but frankly expected to become confused very shortly.

“Whatever is consuming magic here must have a physical focus. There is probably more than one, in fact.” Rakaten-te pursed his lips. “I think that someone must have come here and planted these things. A stranger would not have been out of place in a town like this.”

Kiron nodded. That was certainly true. A border town saw all manner of wanderers coming through at irregular intervals. There was no state of war here, no reason to be alert, really, and the men who were garrisoned out here in this least desirable of all postings did not tend to be highly motivated at the best of times.

“Now as for the magic that caused you two to decide to take a sudden journey—I do not know if it had a physical focus and, alas, I may never know. Nor am I certain how it was able to work when all other magic was being drained.” He shrugged. “Whoever did all of this is a magician of great skill and subtlety.”

Greater than you? But Kiron knew that was an unfair question. Rakaten-te had the unenviable task of trying to unravel what another mage had done without knowing anything about the magician or his magic. He hid his eyes and his unfair thoughts by looking down at his breakfast.

“But before I can do anything, we must find and destroy the objects that are absorbing magic.” The Chosen set aside his empty bowl. “Now I do not know what creatures will react to these things, but I do know that some will. That is what you must look for. Some sort of live thing either avoiding a place or swarming to it.”

Kiron felt very dubious, but decided it was better not to say anything. What could he say, after all? That this was a very thin clue, and not much in the way of direction? The Chosen surely was aware of that.

“Failing this hunt working to uncover the foci, the only other expedient will be for me to walk every thumb- length of this town, and for some distance beyond,” Rakaten-te said rather grimly. “My god is not offering any sort of hint, which means that Seft sees that I can solve this myself. He is . . . a very challenging god to serve. But we can hope that the creatures of the earth will show us what we need to know.”

“And if they do not, we will need to guide you across the town, back and forth until you find something” said Aket-ten. “But how is it you think you can find these things, if you cannot use magic to find them?”

“Ah, but I can, just in a more roundabout way.” The Chosen shrugged. “If I do the search in this way, I will have to cast small magics and try to determine where their power is being drawn to.”

“That could take weeks!” Aket-ten exclaimed, her eyes widening in open dismay. Kiron couldn’t blame her. The prospect of remaining here for more than a few days was not a pleasant one.

Rakaten-te nodded. “Yes, it could. But it is another possible solution. I had rather not use it, but if I must, I will. Seeing if the animals react will be faster. You two will either notice something, or not. If this does not work, we will approach it the hard way. And if that fails—I shall think of something else.”

The determination in Rakaten-te’s voice surprised Kiron. He was not used to hearing that sort of response from a priest. Like Kaleth, they tended to cultivate an aura of serenity. Kiron had the feeling that if this man had not been blind, he would have been a warrior. He had the “falcon look.” As Ari called it.

“If we are going to look for things as small as flies,” Aket-ten mused, glancing at the open door and the growing light outside, “We had better go on foot.”

Kiron groaned, but silently, only within his own mind. Aket-ten was right. They could not spot swarms of flies from dragonback.

“Do we dare turn Avatre and Re-eth-ke loose to hunt for themselves?” he asked aloud instead. Aket-ten turned to smile a little at him.

“You read my thoughts, I think. Yes, not only do I think we dare, I think they will be fine. There are plenty of goats about here, and goats are scarcely a challenge for those two. I shall put it in their minds what we want, and we can then go out and hunt for—well, I suppose I must say, hunt for unnatural nature.” She raked her hair with her fingers and stood up. At least this morning they were all fully and nicely fed. The lentil stew had improved with overnighting, rather than burning as he had feared it might.

Avatre gave him the most comical look of astonishment he had ever seen on the face of a dragon when Aket-ten persuaded her that she was to go hunting in the town alone, without her Jouster. She blinked at him for several long moments, then, with a hard headshake, she launched herself into the air—

Only to come down almost immediately, just on the other side of the wall around the temple. There was a bleat swiftly cut off with a crunch, and it was quite clear that Avatre was having an early success.

Re-eth-ke lofted into the air going in the opposite direction, showing none of the signs of surprise that Avatre had.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” he said, suddenly realizing the implications. “Let her hunt on her own—”

“Not often, and only in the desert, but yes,” she admitted. “I thought it might be good practice for times, well, like this one. Where we don’t want to tie up time hunting with them.”

He gave her a look. She flushed.

“All right,” she said slowly, with a shrug. “I admit it. I was being lazy. But it is a good idea.”

“And I’m jealous I didn’t think of it first,” he admitted. “You have a lot of good ideas, like getting all the babies to sleep in one pen, like they would in a nest, so that only one person has to look after them.”

“That’s open to abuse, though,” she said, frowning, then shrugged. “You go in Avatre’s direction, I’ll follow Re-eth-ke. Let’s hope we see something.”

The goats were acting like goats, tame or wild. The cats—the few that he saw—were rapidly going feral, slinking away from him when they saw him. The dogs had all packed, holding several territories, and were also going feral. The fowl had long since been killed and eaten. The camels had created herds and wandered off into the desert. The donkeys had created a herd that was wandering through the streets, eating whatever green things they could find, and were keeping a wary eye on him.

None of them were acting in any way out of the ordinary that he could tell. The cats dozed in the sun or slunk away into the shadows, the dogs barked from a distance, and dozed in the shadows. The goats and donkeys wandered, looking for forage.

Maybe the birds, he thought, and turned his attention from the animals to the sparrows, pigeons, and the few desert birds that had decided to investigate the now-silent town.

But as the morning became afternoon, and he stopped long enough to eat the flatbread and dried meat he was carrying, he decided he was going to take a different tactic.

The Chosen said he thought that someone had carried objects into the town; a stranger, in fact. So where would a stranger actually be able to go without drawing notice? He certainly couldn’t wander about the fortress and garrison, nor could he poke about in peoples’ private houses nor their shops.

Taverns and inns, of course. The town square and market. Not the temples; if you were not from Tia, you wouldn’t know the gods or the rituals, and you would stand out.

Taverns and inns, though, that would be perfect. If the object was something small, you could pick one that wasn’t exactly clean, kick it into a corner, and it would probably stay there for a season. If it was something large, you could pick one that was honest, ask the tavernkeeper to hold it for you until you got back from a journey, and go off and leave it.