So, in this city, too, there were the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy. It was quite possible, actually, that farther down this canyon—or others—he would come to a place where the living spaces were nothing more than caves crudely recut.
The second side canyon was similar, and a third was completely blocked by fallen stone.
As in Sanctuary, however, there was no sign that people had ever shared their city with dragons, not even the wild, tala-controlled kind. That was disappointing, though he was sure that the buildings could be fitted with the sort of things the dragons needed.
And there was no obvious water source, which was more worrying. Given the evidence of earthshakes, he had to wonder if the reason that the place had been abandoned was because a tremor had cut off the water source and it had failed.
In the fourth side canyon, however, which was almost as wide as the main canyon, the buildings were virtually intact—and had a sense about them that they were not private dwellings, but public places. Temples, perhaps, and schools, libraries, records houses, courts—he couldn’t have told why he felt this way, there was just something about the facades that seemed impersonal, yet open. Certainly they were all more uniform than the ones in the first canyon, even though the carving was just as high a quality.
As he approached the largest he caught a whiff of—water!
He sniffed eagerly; yes, there was no doubt of it, he smelled water! There was another scent along with the moisture; a hint of sulfur, that suggested that this might be a hot, rather than a cold spring. That was all right; they could make do. They could build catchments and cisterns for rainwater, so long as there was a water source that wouldn’t run dry.
Thinking now of nothing but the water, he broke into a trot, noting that for the first time he’d found a building that already had an enormous front entrance. Quite large enough for a dragon, actually—
Without thinking, he hurried toward that entrance, and the increasing dampness to the air as he neared made him move faster. From the scent, there was a lot of water there! Maybe as much as flowed beneath Sanctuary!
Then an angry hiss from the darkness made him stop for a moment, while his feet refused to move.
The hiss came again. And it wasn’t the hissing of steam escaping from a vent in the rock.
Slowly, never taking his eyes off that black rectangle of a door, he started to back away. His heart had started again, but now it was pounding, and he felt very much like a mouse that had inadvertently walked up to a cobra’s den. There was something moving in there, back in the deeper shadows. Something big. And he had a pretty good idea what it was—
Move slowly. Don’t run, or you tell it that you’re prey. Keep your eyes on it, and hope that it doesn’t decide you’re prey anyway.
It would be the height of irony if he had come through all he’d weathered so far, to be eaten by a wild dragon through his own inattention and carelessness.
If I get out of this one, I don’t think I’ll be telling the rest just how I discovered there were dragons living here.
He had managed to get about halfway back up the valley when the wild dragon inside that building made up its mind to charge him. Maybe it decided that it wasn’t going to let him get away. Maybe it thought he was going to bring back other humans—if it was a former Jousting dragon, it wouldn’t want to be caught again.
For whatever reason, he glanced back for a moment to see how far he was from the main canyon, and when he looked back, a thing that seemed to be all teeth and talons and three times the size of Avatre was bearing down on him.
Despite that he had thought he was ready to face an attack, he wasn’t.
All he could see was death with teeth as long as his arm, and eyes that held nothing but rage.
He couldn’t help himself; he screamed with fright, the sound was driven out of him, and his heart, which had been racing, now pounded like a madman’s drum. He ran backward as fast as he could go, still not daring to take his eyes off the beast. Bad decision; he tripped and fell and landed sprawling, and the dragon kept coming.
He scrambled in the fine sand, desperately trying to get to his feet without taking his eyes off the beast. “Get away!” he yelled shrilly, knowing the creature would never obey him, yet madly hoping for a miracle. “Get back! Back!”
It kept coming. He scrambled up, but he knew he could never get into cover quickly enough, and as the beast came close enough to rear back for a strike, he screamed, unashamedly—
Then felt himself shouldered aside as Avatre counter-charged.
He fell down, but this time he didn’t try to get up. She got within talon range of the wild dragon, swiveled to put her whole body between him and the other dragon, and put her head down, hissing defiance.
With a snort of astonishment, the other dragon, a green, skidded to a halt. He was much bigger than Avatre, but she caught him by surprise, and as she stood between him and Kiron, tearing at the sand with her talons, neck outstretched and hissing furiously, he backed up a pace, his neck stretching upward, eyes wide and shocked.
This was a strange dragon in his territory. A strange, young dragon, who should have given way to him. But she was defending the creature he had thought to make a meal of!
Kiron watched the wild dragon blinking at her as surprise turned to bewilderment. Wild—or now-wild, for although he didn’t recognize the beast, he thought that it probably was one of the Tian Jousting dragons. Most wild dragons avoided humans; they fought back with particularly nasty weapons, they didn’t taste as good as oryx or wild ass or ox, and there wasn’t as much meat on them. Wild dragons mostly didn’t see humans as worth the bother.
But a Jousting dragon would know the difference between an armed and an unarmed human, and a Jousting dragon wasn’t as good a hunter as a wild dragon. He’d settle for anything he could catch.
Poor thing, he was caught now in a war with his own instincts. Avatre was a youngster, and his instincts said she was off-limits to fighting. She was female, and that, too, cooled his aggression. But she was protecting the enemy—and standing between him and his next meal.
Kiron got to his feet again, and moved slowly, very slowly toward Avatre. This was not the time to startle her. She might turn around and lash out at him without knowing who she was striking at.
She glanced back at him briefly, and when the green male made no further move to attack, raised her head a little and turned it so she could watch both of them at the same time, though she was still hissing like a steam vent and kept most of her attention on the other dragon.
Kiron moved up beside her and put his hand on her shoulder. He’d never felt her so hot! She almost scorched his hand. He had the feeling that in this case he was going to be a lot safer on her back than on the ground. But he didn’t want her to crouch; that might give the other dragon a chance to attack. “Avatre,” he said quietly. “Leg.”
Without taking her eyes off the green male, Avatre slowly backed up a pace, then extended her foreleg for him to use as a step to vault up into her saddle. The moment he was in place, she straightened her neck, and still keeping her eyes on the other dragon, began to back up.
The male remained where he was, still looking thoroughly bewildered. Kiron, meanwhile, was losing no time in fishing for his restraining straps; he wanted to be buckled into place and quickly.
He hadn’t quite realized how frightened he’d been—and was!—until he tried to get the straps buckled and discovered that his hands were shaking so much he was having a hard time with that relatively simple task. He fought with the metal and leather, and it felt as if someone had glued all of his fingers together. They just wouldn’t work right—
Come on! he told himself, fiercely, feeling his heart pounding so hard he had to swallow around the pulse in his throat. If she has to fly for it—
But the straps were not cooperating, and neither were his hands. As Avatre reached the mouth of the side canyon, the green male suddenly made up his mind to charge again. And this time, instead of ch
arging back, Avatre leaped for the sky.
And he only had one strap fastened.
With a yell, he grabbed for the front of the saddle and hung on for dear life, wedging his feet into the chest straps and clamping his legs hard against her sides. Forget the reins! She sideslipped and turned in the air with a lurch that sent his stomach where his heart had been, and put his heart in his throat. Fear ran through him like a bolt of lightning as he nearly came out of her saddle.
With tremendous wing surges, she threw herself upward. He clung like a flea on the nose of a racing camel, while she clawed for height. Height was her only hope if this green decided to challenge her after all. The only way that a smaller dragon could win against a larger was to have the height advantage.
But as he dared a glance down—in between trying to wedge himself more firmly into the saddle and trying not to be sick—he saw the green claw the ground, snort, and stare upward at them.
He wasn’t going to follow. Either he wasn’t that hungry, or he didn’t want to have to work that hard for his meal.
A couple of wingbeats later, Kiron saw him retire back into the building where he was making his den. So if he wasn’t going to pursue—time to get Avatre down before he fell out of her saddle!
And Avatre responded to his frantic directions to land on the top of the cliff. It wasn’t the best place in the world to pause, but as his heartbeat sounded in his own ears like the pounding of war drums, he managed to get the saddle straps fastened securely around him and tightened down, and gave her the signal to take to the air again.
This time she made his heart race for an entirely different reason.
Instead of leaping up and using her powerful wings to send her higher in surging jolts, she looked down into the canyon, seemed to make up her mind about something—and pushed off from the cliff.
And fell——and fell—fell almost three stories, then at the last moment before she hit the canyon floor, snapped her wings open just as it seemed as if she was going to hit the sand. If this hadn’t been exactly the kind of maneuver they had practiced to run against the Tian Jousters, he’d have probably dropped dead out of fear. As it was, he found himself yelling involuntarily and once again hanging onto the saddle for dear life just before she turned the drop into a climb.
By the time she was flying high, drifting sedately from one thermal to another on the way back to Sanctuary, he was dripping with sweat, the waistband of his kilt and the roots of his hair absolutely saturated.
If I never have to go through that again, I will be very, very grateful.
He could have been killed. Avatre could have been hurt. It could all have gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Yet as the fear wore off, the exhilaration of what he had just discovered replaced it. Not only had he found Kaleth’s mysterious hidden city, but he had found wild dragons and they had a place where they could incubate any eggs that were laid!
Avatre was still agitated, but not seriously so. She seemed more concerned about him, turning her head to look back at him from time to time as if to reassure herself that he hadn’t come to any harm.
Well, with all that yelling, she had probably thought he’d gotten hurt. He leaned over her shoulder and patted her neck, telling her what a fine, brave lady she had been, and how proud he was of her. After he’d done that for the third time, she finally heaved a great sigh, her sides inflating and deflating under his legs. Then he felt her relaxing, stretching out, lengthening as her muscles let go. She stopped looking back over her shoulder at him, concentrating on the far-off smudge on the horizon that was Sanctuary.
He half expected her to try to land, as usual, in the old communal pen, but to his pleased surprise she spiraled in on her new pen and dropped down lightly and under complete control precisely where she belonged.
He was off her in a moment; and within the space of time that it took to unsaddle her, he realized that except for her emotional agitation, which was mostly fading, she was by no means as tired by her exertions as he had thought she would be. She had just spent an overlong hunt, had faced down an older dragon, and made a fear-charged escape flight, and she wasn’t really breathing heavily. All this hunting for themselves was putting the dragons of Sanctuary into better physical shape than any of the Jousting dragons had ever been.
Which meant—could they actually face down wild dragons on a regular basis? If they could, then two or three could go out when nests were discovered, and hold off the mother if she turned up before an egg was successfully taken.
“Kiron!” Pe-atep called from the door to his pen. “Any luck?”
“The best!” he replied, “Come on, you’ll all want to hear about what we found today!”
NINE
THERE were eight fertile eggs in the hatching pen, claimed by six Altan and two Tian dragon boys, one of whom was Baken. At last, the slave who taught all of them the best way of training young dragons to be ridden had won not only his freedom but his own dragon. Kiron was both amused and bemused to see how the acquisition of his very own egg had changed him. He had gone from a young man who was all business about the beasts he was training, to one just as egg-obsessed as anyone else who had ever been granted the chance to hatch out a tame dragon of his own.
Those eggs came from four different clutches; only half of the eggs had proved to be fertile, and all four clutches had been abandoned before the female in question began incubation. To Kiron’s mind, and to Ari’s, this meant that the females must be former Jousting dragons, who were too inexperienced to know what to do, and whose mothering instincts had not yet fully awakened. Which, in turn, meant that their theories were right. At least some of the Tian Jousting dragons had not gone back to the desert and the hills near Mefis when they fought free of the last of the tala. Two Tian boys were with some curious Bedu their own age watching two more dragons to see if they’d abandon their clutches, too. There were six more would-be Jousters waiting besides those two if all of those eggs proved worth incubating.
Quietly, Kiron took Kalen and Pe-atep aside when they knew that at least some of the eggs were going to hatch. He intercepted both of them after their dragons were bedded down for the night, before they went looking for something to eat for themselves. Lord Ya-tiren had issued a standing invitation to the Jousters to come to his kitchen whenever they needed to be fed, and they had jumped at the offer. Anything other than have to eat their own cooking. . . .
But Kiron wanted to talk to these two alone, and had asked Aket-ten to bring food for four to Avatre’s pen. She had been so curious about the odd request that she hadn’t even registered a weak protest.
She was waiting with the plain fare that all of them subsisted on these days; flatbread, vegetables, herbs, and whatever the Jousters scavenged from their dragons’ kills. Kiron had decided a long time ago that meat was meat, and it was better to wrestle with a bit of tough wild ass in freedom than the sweetest cut of young calf with one eye out for the Magi. Since he didn’t hear any complaints from the others—except, perhaps, the sort of complaining one always heard in situations like this one—he thought it reasonable to suppose the rest felt about the same.
“I suppose you have a reason for this little party,” Kalen said, blunt as ever. “And from the look on her face, you didn’t tell Aket-ten what it is.”
The interesting thing about Kalen was that although he was small, thin, and almost as dark as a Tian, he was nothing like the falcons he had once tended. He was more like one of the small brown owls, always watching, silent and still—and when he moved, moving so quietly you were unaware that he had until he was gone.
“We have eight fertile eggs, and more coming, I expect,” Kiron replied. “That’s eight new Jousters. They’ll have to be trained—we’ll have to train them, once they get into the air. And then?”
“I don’t think we should have a wing any larger than eight,” Kalen said, after a moment of struggle with his strip of meat. “Eight’s more than enough to muck up coordination. More wou
ld be impossible to keep track of.”
“Exactly my thought,” Kiron agreed. “And now we get to the reason why I had you all choose colors in the first place. Eventually, each of you will have a wing, and each of your fliers will wear one of your colors, so we can tell who the wingleader is because he has two.”
“Oho!” Pe-atep said, raising his eyebrows. “Now it makes sense!”
“You two are the two steadiest, and you’ve come from lives where you were used to being in charge of something other than servants,” Kiron continued, as Aket-ten nodded sagely. “I want you to take the first two new wings as wingleaders. But if you don’t feel equal to it, I want to know now, please, so I can take my third or fourth choice.”
“Oh,” Pe-atep said, with a glance at Kalen, modulating his deep voice into a more conversational tone. “I think we can manage. These dragon boys aren’t really boys at all. They’ve been training young wild dragons with that Baken fellow. And they’re the faithful, the ones that stuck after the tala wore off and the dragons escaped. The Altans are our own dragon boys from home, so they should be all right, too.” He smiled, then frowned. “The only question is, how are we going to feed all those growing dragonets?”
“Kaleth says he’s arranging something with the Bedu.” Kiron replied. “That’s all I know.”
But Kalen, the former falconer who shared that passion with the nomadic desert dwellers, snickered. “What he’s arranging is cattle raids in Tia. The priests have told the Bedu where the sacrificial herds are, how they’re guarded, and how to frighten off the herders. The Bedu either don’t believe in our night-walking ghosts, or don’t care. They’re going to come in by night, convince the herders that they’re demons, and ride off with the herds.”
Kiron stared at him for a moment, and then began to laugh. Pe-atep looked at his friend with something akin to affrontery.
“What?” Kalen demanded.
“But those cattle are meant for the gods!” Pe-atep protested.
“If the gods put this idea in Kaleth’s mind, I suspect they don’t care,” said Kalen carelessly. “And besides, the priests can sacrifice them here just as well as there.”
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