Aerie

magic in this place than he had since the use of the Eye in Alta. And now he knew why priests and Magi so seldom did purely ordinary things by means of magic.

There was the priest who could somehow “read” instability, of course. That was not what Kiron would have called “impressive” except in that there had been no rockfalls and no cave-ins. But three times now, they had come upon a huge boulder that was far, far too big to lever out, and even if it could have been freed, it was too heavy to move. Three times, a different priest had come forward with a different solution.

The first had sent everyone out of the cave. What happened next, was known only to the priest and presumably others of his rank, but there was a thunderclap from within the cave, followed by a violent blast of dust-carrying wind rushing out of the mouth of it. They all scrambled back in, to find the boulder shattered and the priest unconscious on the ground.

Kiron was in a panic at the sight of the unconscious man, but his fellows seemed perfectly at ease, and merely picked him up and carried him out without any fuss.

The second time, the rectangular rock was not wedged in like a cork in the mouth of a bottle, it simply filled most, not all, of a rather narrow space. This time another priest came forward and directed them to clear all debris out of the way and from around the sides of the boulder. Then, chanting and gesturing, he “went to work” with all of them watching.

With a grating sound, the rock began to move.

It moved forward at an agonizingly slow pace, hardly more than the width of a nail paring for every breath. The priest was soon white-faced and sweating as hard as any of them; it looked for all the world as if he was moving the wretched thing himself, by main strength.

Maybe he was.

Finally, just as he got it far enough out of the bottleneck that it would be possible to get ropes around it to haul it out over rollers, he collapsed and was in his turn carried out.

And now the third. Another fall of rock, again bottlenecked in with the spring creeping under some hair-thin gap beneath it, and another priest.

“This is the last,” said the one who could sense when falls were about to take place. Eyes closed and sweating as hard as any of them, it was clear that what he was doing was no light task either. “When this is gone, the way will be clear.”

“But there is much water built up behind this stone.” The new priest placed both hands on the rock and leaned his forehead on it. “Hmm. This will be tricky—”

“Not to mention dangerous,” the stone reader replied. “If it is released all at once—”

“I do not speak to you of the ways of stone, Tam-kalet; do not preach to me of the paths of water!” the priest snapped, then immediately apologized. “Forgive me. Great Mother River is no easy mistress. And she wants her child released.”

The reader of rocks chuckled, opened his eyes, and mopped his brow. “They all move in us this day, and it seems we deal in more tasks for them than just one. Need you my services?”

The newcomer looked around the cavern. “Indeed, I need none save perhaps Lord Kiron. . . .”

“Why me?” he asked, astonished. “The other priest—”

“The other priest was not me.” That was all the explanation Kiron was going to get, it seemed, for as everyone else took the hint and began an ordered but hurried evacuation of the tunnel, the priest turned his attention back to the rock. “Have I your consent to draw upon your strength?” the man asked brusquely, eyes closed and one hand on the rock.

As if I have a choice? This was the final barrier. It needed to come down. Whatever lay on the other side of it, they needed and needed swiftly. “Yes,” Kiron replied, just as brusquely.

The priest grunted, then said, “Sit somewhere near me. And be silent. This is not a magic of brute force, but of planning and concentration.”

Kiron obeyed, throttling down his own impatience. From Aket-ten’s explanations, he had a good idea what the priest was asking for. The strength for a spell had to come from somewhere. Either it came from inside the magic worker himself—which was why those other priests had collapsed—or it came from some source outside. The Altan Magi had stolen their power, stripping it from the god-touched priests and acolytes of Alta, and from the premature deaths of the war. The Tian priests—the ones he’d seen so far, at any rate—were more ethical.

This one wanted to use Kiron as his source of strength.

Well, if it would get the job done . . . from Kiron’s perspective, this was certainly preferable to hauling stone.

So he sat where the priest directed and put his back against the wall. He had the feeling he was going to need the support before it was all over. Now there was nothing but silence, and the very occasional plashing of the spring running under that final blockage.

He knew when the priest was taking—whatever it was—too. It felt as if he was running, except that he wasn’t. It was just a steady drain of strength and energy. Not a lot, nor all at once, and not debilitating to the point where he was passing out, but there was no doubt that something was going on, that in some way, life energy was sapping from him and going somewhere else.

Even though all he could see from where he sat was the priest with his hands and forehead pressed up against the rock.

But then a new sound in the tunnel made him look more closely.

It was the sound of dripping water.

The departing workers had left all their lamps and torches stuck wherever they could be wedged or balanced, so there was plenty of light, and in addition, sheets of reflective, polished metal outside were sending bright patches of sunlight down here. And now, in that light, Kiron first noticed that the volume of water running through the channel at his feet had easily doubled.

The next thing that he noticed was that all around the edges of the bottom half of the stone jamming the bottleneck, there were little trickles, tiny streamlets that had not been there before. And even as he watched a spot that had been previously dry, he saw first a single drop of water well to the surface of the hairline crack, then a second and a third, then the drops became a trickle, then the trickle a thin stream down the face of the rock,

And he realized a moment later that somehow that crack, almost invisible to the eye, was widening.

He had to pull his feet up now, the water was getting so deep.

Then there was a wet pop, and the rock itself cracked across the middle from right to left, and water began to trickle from the crack.

That was the beginning of the end. The rock cracked, and cracked, and cracked again, but only the bottom half. Soon the bottom half of the rock shimmered with water, and even with his feet pulled up, Kiron was ankle- deep in the stream.

Then the priest pulled away from the stone, and the steady drain on Kiron ended.

“I think we need to leave here and let Tam-kalet do his work,” the priest—whose name Kiron still didn’t know—said hoarsely. “The water has undermined the entire bottom half of that blockage; that is why it was cracking. I do not know when it will succumb to the stress.”

Kiron didn’t need a second invitation. He shoved himself up off the rock and realized, as he staggered away, that he was as completely spent as he had ever been in his life.

And cold, cold. As he stumbled into the harsh sunlight, the warmth felt good on his numb skin. He sat down abruptly on the first place that looked comfortable, as the priest’s fellows came and assisted him away. Tam-kalet and two others went back inside the tunnel, after warning everyone else to stay back.

Just as Kiron was actually starting to feel warm again, they came running out, a grinding sound echoing from the tunnel behind them.

Tam-kalet jumped up onto the rocks stacked up to the right of the tunnel entrance. The other two scrambled over the ones to the left. And just in time, for a muddy wave of water and rocks tumbled together surged out hard on their heels with a roar.

When everything had settled again, the spring was back in its old bed. As near as Kiron could tell, the stream it fed was back at the highest level it had been in when Aerie was in its prime.

The priests that remained stared at the stream in satisfaction, but it was Rakaten-te who spoke, standing off to one side and leaning on his staff.