Aerie

He turned on his heel and retraced his steps. There were at least three back the way he had come; a simple beer shop, a full tavern that served food, and an inn that took in travelers.

He checked the tavern first, going over it minutely, but couldn’t really find anything. The beer shop was next, nearest the garrison, and a wretched little place it was, too. Even with the town being deserted for so long, it still stank faintly of beer and unwashed bodies and things best not named.

Roaming animals had pretty much cleaned up everything there was that was large; now it was up to scavenging insects to actually scour it.

Bearing in mind what the Chosen had said, Kiron paid very close attention to those insects . . . even going so far as to take a polished plate from another home and use it to reflect some light into the noisome and dark corners.

And that was when he found it.

It was the ants that told him.

At first, he thought there was nothing unusual there, just the work of a horde of ants, taking advantage of the situation to scour the very mud bricks bare of anything even remotely edible.

But then he saw it. Yes, the ants were scouring the corner, a steady stream of them coming in and leaving with their tiny burdens. But while they were actually in the corner, they moved in a circle. An anti-sunwise circle. There was, in fact, a swirl of ants on the floor in that corner, all moving in the same direction.

He went to get a metal signaling plate from the garrison. He was going to need more light.

By carefully reflecting a spot of sun into that dark corner, he was able to search it for anything that the ants were surrounding but leaving alone. And, eventually, he found it.

A bead.

A tiny, ordinary, dirt-colored faience bead. When he took it away, the ants stopped moving in a circle and went back to behaving like ants.

And when he took it out into the sunlight, he saw that what he had taken for irregularities in the glaze were, in fact, some sort of writing. At least, he assumed it was writing. The minute shapes were very regular and marched around the surface of the bead in a swirl, the way the ants had marched around it.

Now it could be that this was just an ordinary talisman; there was no way for him to tell that. It would have to go to the Chosen.

But he could not imagine how a talisman would have survived the magic-consuming spell enough to still have affected the ants, if it was not, itself, part of that spell.

So he ran as fast as he could back to the temple, excitement giving his feet an extra boost. Finally, finally, there was some change in this situation. It was only a toehold, but by the gods, a toehold he would take!

And in fact, his efforts were rewarded when, just as he crossed the threshold of the Temple, he heard Rakaten-te shout, “Stop!”

Obediently, he did just that. Rakaten-te got up slowly and walked with careful steps toward him. “You found one of the objects, and you brought it with you.” The blind face showed some of the same excitement that Kiron felt. “I sensed the magic draining from the holy fire I had kindled on the altar just as I heard your footsteps. Describe the object to me.”

“It is a faience bead, about the size of the last joint of my smallest finger,” Kiron told him. “It is the same color as dirt, making it hard to see. There are black markings in a spiral around it, but I cannot read them. They look like the tracks of birds.”

“Alas that I do not know either what writing looks like, nor what the tracks of birds look like,” the Chosen said dryly, and Kiron flushed. “No matter. How did you find it?”

Kiron laughed nervously. “I thought like a stranger who wanted to leave these things in a town and a land that was not his own. I went to a filthy tavern and looked for anything strange. Ants were swirling about this thing, and when I looked closer in the dirt, I saw it.”

“Ants . . . so it may be an earth power. Hmm.” The Chosen pursed his lips. “That does not sound like the Altan Magi. Their power was based in water.”

“Whose power?” Kiron turned at the voice. Aket-ten stood wearily in the door. “Please tell me you have found something. I have been chasing a goat that I thought was acting oddly, that in fact had only gotten into something fermented, or perhaps had eaten an intoxicating drug. Do you know how high a drunken goat can leap? And what he will try to leap up to?”

“Yes, Kiron has found one of the keystones,” Rakaten-te ignored her question about drunken goats, which was probably just as well. Quickly, at an impatient hand gesture from the Chosen, Kiron described what he had done and where he had found the thing. “I would like you to collect as many of them as you can find between now and sunset, and bring them here. Even if I cannot decipher the magic, with some of the keystones in hand I can destroy it.”

“Think like a stranger,” Kiron prompted her, as she turned to go. “A stranger in a hurry to place these things, perhaps. They are the color of dirt, so perhaps places where there is a bit of debris. But it will have to be a place that a stranger would not have to hunt for.”

Aket-ten nodded. “I reminded the dragons that they are to hunt on their own. They don’t much like it. Avatre was positively sulking. When we hunt with them, they never miss kills, and the goats and donkeys here are getting much more aware of a dragon in the sky.”

He shook his head. Poor Avatre; well, he need never worry about her wanting to fly off and leave him then. Her belly would keep her right at his side, even if love and loyalty didn’t.

Not that he had any doubts about the latter.

Consulting his mental map of the town, he headed off in the direction of the next seedy beer shop. This was a garrison town. There were many such. It might be a long afternoon, especially if there were no more helpful swarms of ants.

A half dozen of the dirt-colored beads lay in a pile in a flat bowl Aket-ten had fetched from the kitchen and placed in front of the Chosen. Kiron stared at them. They seemed very innocuous to have made such trouble.

“Is it fully night yet?” Rakaten-te asked, turning his sightless eyes toward the door. Kiron shook his head, then remembered that Rakaten-te could not see it, and said “No. The sun-disk is just now passing below the horizon.” Rakaten-te did not have to explain why he wanted to perform his ritual after dark. Seft was the god of shadows, after all.

Rakaten-te pondered his course of action. Finally, he spoke aloud. “This magic is strange to me, yet all magic comes from the same roots. It either comes from the elements about us, or the gods themselves. I do not think this particular spell is of the gods. This means it is of the elements . . . .”

“You said something earlier about it being earth-magic, Chosen,” Aket-ten reminded him.

He nodded. “And that in turn would make a great deal of sense. The earth can absorb a great deal, and that could account for so small a thing having so great an effect.” He smiled a very little. “I muse aloud here, so that we all may learn. I find that those who come to a path with few or no preconceptions are often the ones to suggest new directions. Now . . . earth’s opposite is air, and unfortunately, air is not very strong against it.” He grimaced. “Nor, I fear, is the magic of Seft strong in the element of air. That would be for a Priest of Haras—I think I shall have to oppose earth with earth, and that is where you two come in.”

To Kiron’s surprise, Aket-ten began to blush. “I know that some magic requires that—” she stammered. “That—ah—certain—conditions—”

What is she on about? Kiron was baffled as to what the problem could possibly be. But not so the Chosen. He chuckled dryly.

“Not that of Seft,” he said. “I told you, I had made a very careful choice in you two. Just because I cannot see, it does not follow that I am blind.”

Aket-ten was quite scarlet by this point, and Kiron decided that this was one of those points on which he was probably better off remaining silent.

“I have no sense of whether our time is running short,” Rakaten-te continued, “but it is better to err on the side of caution. So to counter this magic, I am going to use brute force. It is faster. The drawback is that it is . . . likely to draw attention.”

Kiron frowned and rubbed the back of his neck. He had spent most of the afternoon hunched over looking for