There was a wound in the dragon’s shoulder that had been stitched shut, and holes in the webbing of her wing. Still she bravely fought to get her rider to the ground safely—which, in her mind, quite clearly meant away from the Central Island, across the canal.
Across the canal, where a line of fire divided the half-ruined Temple of All Gods from the armed force that had been besieging it (and which now was fleeing to a man). Well, staggering away, because the earth was still convulsing, and mounting wreckage made every step hazardous.
Re-eth-ke landed heavily in an open courtyard, with Avatre right behind her. Half a dozen Healers came running into the center of the courtyard to take Aket-ten from Re-eth-ke’s back, but she slid off by herself, and flung herself into Kiron’s arms as he jumped down from Avatre’s saddle to meet her.
Ah, gods! I have you, I have you safe at last!
“I knew you’d come!” she sobbed, as she clung to him, her wet cheek pressed into his chest. “I knew you’d come! I knew it!” She was trembling all over, his brave Aket-ten, but so was he.
As he held her, it dawned on him now just why she had been so aggressive and ready to fight, rather than sunk in mourning. She had known, of course, that Re-eth-ke was alive, something none of the rest of them had any way of knowing, and that had bolstered her courage and her spirits. She had what he did not, the bond of mind-to-mind communication with her dragon, so she had known all along how hurt Re-eth-ke was, that her injuries were being tended to (which they obviously had been), and what was happening to her. Very probably, it had been the Healers themselves who had gone out to bring the wounded dragon into the shelter of their temple when the guards had taken Aket-ten away.
And the moment that the injured dragon had sensed that Aket-ten was in deadly danger and afraid, she came, as fast as her damaged body would carry her. Given how slowly she was flying, she had probably begun looking for release from the moment that the Magus worked that magic that had so frightened them both.
But now, she needed human reassurance as well.
For that matter, so did he. He had come close, so close to losing her. He wrapped his arms around her and held her; his heart seemed to swell until it occupied his whole chest, and all he could think was how he never wanted to let her go. “I’d come for you no matter where you were,” he murmured into her hair. “I always will.”
Another earthshake rocked the courtyard, throwing them against each other. The dragons flattened out their necks and whined, looking anxiously from side to side, and as the shaking went on, something odd, some inner prompting, made him look up and across the canal to the central island——the central island. Which was sinking. Or least, the buildings were sinking. Even as he watched, bracing himself against the trembling of the earth, arms holding tight to Aket-ten, a great plume of mixed sand and water erupted from the place where the Tower had stood, and the remains of the Temple of Hamun vanished from sight.
TWENTY-ONE
WHEN the shake stopped, Kiron reached out to seize one of the Healers without letting go of Aket-ten. “Where are—” he began.
“The rest of the Jousters have already taken some of our people to safety,” the Healer replied, even though she was shaking with reaction. “They said they are coming back—”
“We cannot count on them returning soon enough, nor often enough to get you all out,” he interrupted her. “You have to get off this ring, maybe out of Alta altogether. The shocks are getting worse and—” He let go of her arm and gestured at the Central Island, at buildings half-sunk or completely vanished. “—Look. I don’t know why this is happening, but it is, and it isn’t—”
Another shake began, he and Aket-ten held each other up, and the water of the canal began to heave and splash. Across the canal a spout of sand and water erupted in a new place, and what was left of the Palace began to sink.
This one was definitely worse. Colonnades around the garden went over, one after another, and several people were knocked off their feet. And the Temple of All Gods had been made to withstand shakes.
“This isn’t right!” the woman cried, when the shake was over, from where she was kneeling on the ground. “They’re getting stronger!”
“And longer. We have to get you out of here.” He thought, hard. “On the water is safest. Have you boats?”
She nodded, relief suffusing her round features. “Enough for everyone, I think, since so many of us have already escaped. And people who know how to row them.” Without waiting for direction, she got to her feet and moved purposefully in the direction of the Healers clustered around Re-eth-ke.
One of them shortly came over to him. “We can get out by water,” he said soberly, “But there are hundreds, thousands of people on this ring.” And he looked at Kiron expectantly.
Kiron blinked, realizing that this man, this Healer—who was by no means an inexperienced man by his age—was looking to him for an answer.
And one came to him. “Aket-ten and I can get where no one else can, and see what no one else can—from above. And the people of Alta know Jousters, and probably trust Jousters more than anyone else right now.”
Aket-ten wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and gently shoved at him to get him to loosen his arms. She stood away from him a little bit, and sniffed, but raised her chin. “I am Aket-ten, Winged One, Daughter of Lord Ya-tiren. People will listen to me. We will guide folk off this ring, and off the next, until they are safely away from danger. But Alta is dead, and there is no saving it.”
The Healer dropped his head, and when he raised it again, Kiron saw the marks of grief on his face. “You say no more than what we have thought these many moons, Winged One. But it is an ill moment, hearing it spoken aloud.”
“Someone must say it, or we will all perish.”
The speaker was an old woman, hair entirely white, falling in the “royal” hairstyle of hundreds of tiny plaits, each ending in a gold bead. She stood very erect, and her eyes, dark and shadowed, looked directly into Kiron’s. He had never seen her, but he knew who she was, the Eldest, the Chief Healer of the Temple of All Gods. “We must save what we can. We will take the boats and make for the harbor—”
“No!” That was still another Healer, a rough-looking old fellow with a fair number of scars. “Not so, Eldest. I know the sea, and the sea does strange things in shakes; it can withdraw for leagues, then come rushing back and overwhelm all in its path. No, we must take the boats and make our way through the canals inland, to one of the Daughters, and thence up the Great Mother River if we must.”
“I bow to your experience, Te-ren-hatem,” she said, after a moment. “But there is one thing we must do; it is more important to Heal that dragon now than anything else, no matter how much it costs our Healers by touch.”
The man looked at her aghast. “But Eldest, it is but an animal, and there are many, many injured and more to come!”
“You Healers by touch can Heal a few, perhaps even a dozen, before you are exhausted,” the old woman said, with a look that dared him to challenge her. “But unless you spend that same strength to heal that dragon, she will not last past noon. And then, where will all those thousands be who will need the guidance of her Jouster?” As the man’s face fell, she softened her tone. “I know it is hard hearing this, Te,” she said softly. “But you know as well as I that Healing is, and always has been, a balancing game, weighing out resources against the greatest good. In the best of times, that balancing never needs to come into play, but this is the worst of times, and we must do what must be done. The greatest good, right now, is to heal that poor, faithful animal, so that she can serve all of Alta that survives.”
He bowed. “Yes, Eldest,” he said softly. “I will get the others.”
As he moved off, the Healer turned back to Kiron and Aket-ten. “And as for you—heed me, children. The same advice—nay, orders!—apply to you. Save the ones you can. Save the most that you can. There will be people trapped, hurt, begging for help that you cannot aid. Yo
u must leave them, leave them behind, leave them to others, but leave them. If there is a later, you may come back, but if you linger over one, when you could have saved many in that same time, you will have done the wrong thing.”
He gritted his teeth; he hated hearing that, but he knew it was true, and he silenced Aket-ten’s protest with a squeeze of his hand on hers. “Hard truths are still truths. Eldest, thank you. I will get aloft; I know that when Re-eth-ke is fit to fly, Aket-ten will do likewise, and as we see the others returning, I will send them to do the same.” He squeezed Aket-ten’s hand again, just as another shake began.
This time all three of them instinctively reached for each other and braced one another through the shake. “They are getting worse,” the Eldest Healer said, when the dreadful rumbling and crashing had subsided—and across the canal, yet another building (or what was left of one) had vanished.
“Then I must go.” He bent and kissed Aket-ten. “You and I must separate, to cover the widest area. If the sea does what that Healer thinks it will—you must go to the harbor and warn them first, for you are the daughter of Ya-tiren, and you know how to command.”
Her head came up, though her lower lip trembled a little. “I will do that,” she said, without hesitation. “Then I shall return and work the First Ring and so forth.”
“Good.” He did not say, I know you will be fine, or I am counting on you, because he did not need to say any such thing. This was Wingleader to Jouster. He would treat her as she wanted to be treated, not as his beloved whom he wished to protect, nor the noble daughter, but as any of the other members of his wing.
She could not manage a smile, but she gave a solemn nod. He sketched a salute, and sprinted for Avatre. She was only too happy to be in the air, even if that air was full of dust and thick with the smoke of many fires.
He began working his way along the canal, for that was where there were likely to be boats. His appearance was marked by shouts and cries for help, some of which made him want to break down and weep with frustration over how little he could actually do. But he hardened himself, and limited himself to sending people to where he had seen undamaged boats, despite pleas for other aid. “There are only two of us Jousters right now; we have to find and warn others. Make for the river,” he told them, over and over again. “The sea is not to be trusted in a shake! Get as far away as you can, until you can no longer feel the shaking.”
“The Magi?” he was asked, by virtually every party he encountered. “What has happened to the Magi?”
“They are dead,” he always responded, because even if it wasn’t entirely true, no Magus would be safe in these lands for generations to come. “As are the Great Kings and Queens, and most who dwelled on Central Island. The gods have deserted them, even the evil gods that they once served. Alta is dying and there is no saving her. Ocean and marsh alike are taking her back with each new shake; it is the gods’ own will, and you cannot fight the gods. Now fly! Fly, lest you die with her!”
And at that point, since most of them owned no more than what they stood up in or had saved from the wreckage of their homes, they did not argue with him, they picked up their belongings, aided the wounded, and made for the boats.
Strangely enough—at least, until he thought about it—was that no one begged him to carry them away. That was what he had most dreaded, especially if it came from someone who was injured.
But they didn’t. In fact, they kept a cautious distance from him when he landed. And then, after a few frantic reactions to sudden moves from Avatre he realized that they were used, not to tame dragons, but the wild-caught ones.
The wild-caught ones were still dangerous to anyone not a Jouster or a dragon boy. Someone visibly injured might well be considered a possible menu item . . . and the injured were well aware of that and made a great effort to appear perfectly fine. It might have been funny, if it hadn’t been so tragic.
The only times when he did stop and pick someone up were when he found children wandering alone, or—more tragically—infants with dead parents. Then he stopped, caught them up, and carried them to the next group with children or infants. He never gave the impromptu guardians a chance to object either. “We are all Altans,” he would say bluntly. “We will care for our own. Tend to this little one.”
No one refused. Maybe they were afraid to. In any event, when he checked back with groups with which he had left children, they were caring for the foundlings as well as their own. In a couple of cases, he found a woman in the party cradling the child possessively, and he wondered, had he united a bereft mother with a replacement for the child she had lost?
Ari was the first to return. Kiron spotted him coming in from the south, and went to meet him. By then, Aket-ten was in the air, had presumably dealt with the people at the harbor, and was working the interior of the First Ring, guiding people through the maze of broken buildings and toppled statues to the one causeway still intact—a floating footbridge made of raft sections lashed together, a replacement for a causeway that had collapsed in an earlier shake.
He didn’t even need to say anything, he just pointed at Re-eth-ke hovering in the middle distance, and Ari practically went limp with relief. He straightened immediately, though. “We saw Re-eth-ke rise from the Healers’ Court!” he called. “I thought I was having a vision at first. But Seft’s own chaos was breaking loose, so we landed and each took a sick or wounded Healer out.”
“It’s getting w—” Kiron began, when another shake interrupted him.
By now, there wasn’t much left of the Central Island, and with this shake, buildings were beginning to sink on First Ring as well. Ari took in the damage with widened eyes.
“By Hamun’s horns!” he exclaimed. “What is happening here?”
“We’re evacuating the city, sending them south, getting as many into boats as we can,” Kiron called. “The rest—we’re finding safe paths to that causeway and guiding them from the air, and I don’t know why things are sinking. Maybe it’s a different sort of shake than we’ve ever had before. I want you to intercept the others and tell them that’s what they’re to do. Then you go to the others, the ones with the Tian army, Great King. The Magi here are dead or running, the Queens and most of the nobles, if they were on Central Island, are dead, too. You are Great King and commander of the Armies of Alta, which are about to close in on the Tian forces. The greater need for you is there, not here.”
He’d thought about that, as well, in the time since he and Aket-ten had begun this evacuation. There was no doubt of it in his mind; under the heading of “greatest good,” Ari could help to save a few thousand, of which most could save themselves so long as they knew where a clear path was, or he could take his place as the ruler of Alta, and save—perhaps—hundreds of thousands.
And, Ari being Ari and very far from stupid, saw that for himself right away. So he just saluted, with no sense of irony or mocking at all, and turned Kashet’s head south without another word.
Oset-re was the next back, and he took immediately to working directly across First Ring from where Aket-ten was. By the time Huras arrived, they had most of First Ring cleared, or at least, as much as it was going to be cleared without help to extricate people who were trapped past bare hands getting them out. Those who hadn’t already gotten across the causeway at least knew where the clear path to it was. Aket-ten had gotten the brilliant notion of having the survivors splash paint, or mud, or use anything else that would make a mark on the way, to show where the safe route was. That sped up the evacuation of those behind the first out immeasurably.
The Second Ring had begun to evacuate itself, warned by the collapse of Central Island and the First Ring, and by those escaping across the causeway. Boats were already fleeing, and people streaming across the two floating-raft causeways linking the Second Ring to the Third.
And on the Third Ring—now there was help. The Third Ring was home to the army. There were fewer buildings as such; fewer places for people to get trapped in wre
ckage. But even more important, the soldiers of Alta were used to helping in the wake of shakes, and now they, under the direction of their officers, were organizing the evacuation as refugees poured over the causeways.
It was to these officers that Kiron now gave a different piece of news.
“The False Kings are dead,” he said grimly, “and their foolish or deluded Queens with them. But Alta has a Great Queen and a King; Queen Nofret-te-en, once betrothed of Toreth-aket. She was wedded by the Mouth of the Gods, Kaleth-aket, to Ari-en-anethet, rider of the dragon Kashet; he who was chosen to be Great King by birth, marriage to the Lady Nofret, and the will of the gods. And,” he would add with a significant lift of an eyebrow, “He is no friend of the Magi.”
Of course, this was news to them, but it was clearly welcome news. It put heart in them, gave impetus to their effort.
But the one thing they asked that he couldn’t answer was, “How far are we to evacuate?”
To which he could only answer “Judge by what you would do yourself. How far would you?”
Because he wanted to say that the Third Ring was far enough . . . but as another shake hit, and he got up into the air, he saw that half of First Ring was gone, the same sand-and-water geysers were spouting on Second, and buildings there were sinking.
“The shakes are getting worse,” said one grizzled Captain of Hundreds grimly, when it was over. “It’s not natural. You get a big shake, then you get your smaller after-shakes. You don’t get shakes that are bigger with each one that hits! It’s all the fault of those cursed Magi!”
Kiron nodded. By now, his half of the wing was back; Aket-ten, Kiron himself, Huras, Oset-re and Pe-atep had divided Third Ring into quarters. Aket-ten, Huras, Oset-re and Pe-atep were working the sections, while Kiron made contact with the officers. Some of those officers had, to his immense relief, sent rescue parties back to Second Ring to try and dig out the trapped.
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