Aerie

by Mercedes Lackey

  Them-noh-thet said that he could find water. Kiron hoped that was true. That was the one concern he had for this journey. He knew that if they found an oasis or a well, it would probably be in the hands of the Bedu, and that was all right. He had tokens of friendship and right-of-passage and water-right with him; any of the Bedu would honor those, particularly after the way that he and his Jousters had cleaned out that lot of bandits for them.

  The real question was if they would be able to find the water in the first place. This was a part of the desert that Kiron knew nothing about, nor did the Bedu with which he normally dealt. They knew that there were tribes here, yes, but not exactly where their water sources were, nor if they would be on the line of flight. The dragons could probably get by on one day without water, but not two.

  The desert grew harsher the farther east they flew, until at last they were passing above stark sand dunes with no sign whatsoever of plant life or, indeed, any life whatsoever. The heat blasted up at them from this inhospitable zone, as the sun blazed down on them from above. Only the dragons seemed to thrive here, actually flying better than Kiron had ever seen them before. The Jousters all bent their heads beneath the scant shelter of their headcloths, and did their best to endure the uncomfortable journey.

  It was a good thing that they were carrying the dragons’ midday meal, because there was nothing larger than a beetle down there to hunt.

  It wasn’t a large meal; they didn’t want the dragons to be ready to drowse. It was furnace-hot down there on the sand, and while that might be perfect for the dragons, the humans would bake like flatbreads in a hot oven.

  Even up in the relatively cooler air, with the effective wind on them from the dragons’ flight, it was difficult. The sun felt like a hot pressing iron on them, flattening them against their saddles, and every place where flesh touched anything else, sweat oozed.

  This was the part of the desert called the Anvil of the Sun, and well-named it was, too.

  The Bedu crossed it, but few others. Most, if they had any sense at all, went north or south, to places of easier passage. But this was the shortest possible way . . . the fastest, if you could fly.

  If you could endure the furnace heat.

  Kiron tried not to think about it. He concentrated on the air moving over his skin, on shifting himself so that parts of him remained in shadow, on watching Avatre’s behavior. He had never yet heard of a dragon being overcome with heat . . . they reveled in it, soaked it up . . . but he’d never yet heard of anyone flying a Jousting dragon over the Anvil of the Sun. There’d been no reason, really. Jousting dragons had always gone North, to the border with Alta. Not East.

  There was, after all, no reason to go East; the East was quiet. There had been no trouble on that front for ages.

  From time to time, in the distance, tall pillars the color of smoke slowly drifted across the landscape. Sand demons, some called them, whirlwinds that were easily avoided, but which could strip the skin from anything that was unfortunate enough to be caught in their path. Those weren’t bad; it was the Midnight kamiseen, the huge sandstorms that could go on for a day and swallowed up the landscape. Those storms buried entire cities and—as in the case of Sanctuary—unburied them.

  Kiron thought that the dragons could probably fly above such a storm, but he didn’t really want to put that idea to the test. What would he do, if they saw such a storm on the horizon?

  Turn back, maybe. Hope that they could outrun it to shelter. Or try and see where the edge was and get there.

  So he watched Avatre for signs that she sensed anything of the sort, and watched the horizon for that thin, dark line, the sky above it for the hazing of flying sand in the distance.

  Slowly, the sun-disk traveled to the horizon so that it was at their backs. Slowly, the fierce heat eased a little.

  On the horizon, Kiron spotted a haze of color that was not sand, did not have dust in the sky above it, and was hard and unmoving. He looked over at Tathulan, and waved his hand until he got the attention of the priest, then pointed.

  The priest peered at the eastern horizon for a long time, then finally looked back over at Kiron. Water, he signed, using the signals they had all agreed on. Hunting.

  Kiron sighed with relief and bent over Avatre’s shoulder. They had crossed the Anvil of the Sun without incident. The worst of the journey was behind them now.

  He hoped.

  At least, it was the worst he could plan for.

  The dragons approached the area of the eastern border of the Two Lands in the last light of the fourth day of their journey. It would have taken a rider on a fast camel nearly a moon to make the same trip. The trek across the Anvil of the Sun, if it could be made at all, usually took days all by itself; traveling by day and night, knowing that getting across that hideous stretch of desert was more important than rest.

  This was still desert land, but it was the sort with which they were all familiar. There was water here, there was wildlife, plenty for the dragons to hunt. The eastern border could even be termed “grazing land” as there was enough there for goats and camels at least.

  But as they neared the outpost where they reckoned the dead man had come from, and the one that the priests most definitely wanted investigated, it rapidly became evident that there was something very wrong.

  There were goats, donkeys, and camels everywhere.

  “Everywhere,” being relative, of course; what he was actually seeing was the occasional little herd of goats drifting in the distance, a lone camel or so, a couple of donkeys. But there should not be goats roaming loose in little herds of three to a dozen so near a settled place. If they were wild, someone would have made a point of catching them and adding them to his herd. And if they were not wild . . . then what were they doing roaming loose, away from the watchful eye of their shepherd?

  As for the camels and donkeys, they were even more expensive, and therefore a hundred times more likely to have been caught and penned. The price of a good camel could easily feed a man and his family for several moons.

  The animals were fairly evenly spaced out as if they had been roaming loose for days. Herd animals did that, especially in sparse grazing areas.

  This was delightful for the dragons, of course. It was easy hunting, and they were quite happy with it. But Kiron had a queasy feeling in his stomach, and he knew he was not the only one wondering with dread what they would find.

  Behind them, the sun-disk drew near enough to the horizon that the light began to change, growing more golden, less white. Their own shadows stretched long on the ground beneath and ahead of them, as did the shadows of the scrubby trees and the occasional animal. Heat now radiated up at them from the ground, rather than burning down on them from above. And those passing shadows the dragons cast—they made the animals below them startle and flee, suggesting that other dragons had been coming here of late for the easy hunting.

  There was a bump, a group of irregularities on the horizon, the wrong shape for a natural formation.

  The town. Kiron gave the others the signal to drop down closer to the ground. He needed to be able to see what—if anything—was moving down there. The shapes disappeared for a while into the general landscape, then sharpened out again, now close enough to make out that they were buildings. And there was just nothing there besides those buildings. No sign of humans. No one on the road. There should have been people on the road, people coming into town from gathering deadfall, herdsmen bringing in the herds—

  There should have been smoke from cooking fires.

  Nothing.

  As they approached their goal, more than just the absence of people going toward it struck Kiron.

  It was silent.

  A border town should be a noisy place. After all, it had sprung up purely to serve a garrison of men far from home. “Two taverns for every temple,” was the saying about such places. At this time of day there should be men carousing in the beer shops. There should be people calling in families for dinner
. Flute girls and storytellers should be setting up near the beer shops. Children should be crying, goats bawling, donkeys braying.

  But the only sounds were the barking and growling of dogs in the street.

  Cautiously, they circled the dragons overhead, but the only things moving anywhere were animals, all running wild, mostly dogs and cats, with a donkey drowsing at the side of one of the town wells, and a goat incongruously on a rooftop.

  And a pack of jackals slinking down the street, that dropped their ears and ran at the sight of the dragons overhead.

  As they circled, Kiron glanced over at the priest, who was frowning in concentration as he gripped the straps that held him in the double saddle. But the priest finally shook his head and gave the hand sign for “land.”

  Kiron had to hope that the man hadn’t sensed anything hostile.

  He picked what seemed to be a logical spot, just at the outskirts of town and near one of the taverns, open and with plenty of room for the dragons to take off again if they had to. He was glad now they had all come armed. Five men and four dragons—that was formidable if they were up against humans. But if they weren’t—

  He’d never seen a demon, nor any other supernatural creature, and he really didn’t want to. He couldn’t doubt their existence, given that he had seen the Magi at work, and had heard Kaleth speaking as the Mouth of the Gods, but that was all. He didn’t know anyone who had, much less anyone who had fought one. There were legends, of course; the trouble was, unlike Ari, he was no scribe to remember them all.

  The dragons landed one at a time, Avatre first, as he gave her the signal to be wary. Armed with spears, bows and slings—and in the case of the priest, presumably magic—they moved cautiously into the town.

  The streets were as deserted from ground level as they had appeared from above. They approached the first building cautiously. It was a tavern, with two small tables and six overturned stools outside, and a bundle of barley painted crudely on the wall next to the door. Huras motioned to them to stop, moved forward a few paces, and sniffed.

  “Don’t smell anything rotting,” he said.

  “Jackals—” Pe-atep pointed out reluctantly. “Wild dogs—”

  Kiron shivered. That wasn’t anything he wanted to think about. If everyone was dead, that was almost unthinkable. But jackals . . . if jackals had gotten to the bodies here, this entire town would be haunted by hungry, unburied ghosts. And they would be very angry.

  “I don’t think we should stay here after dark,” Oset-re said, nervously.

  Huras squared his shoulders, and eyed the open door. The canvas door flap was down, so they couldn’t see inside. “I’m going into the tavern.”

  “We’re all going into the tavern,” Kiron said firmly. “And for right now, we’re all sticking together. No one is going wandering off by himself, no matter what. I don’t care what we see or hear, we all stay in a group. Let’s go.”

  They advanced on the building with no idea of what they were going to find when they pushed aside the door flap. Kiron felt sweat prickling all along his spine, and he gripped his spear tightly with both hands. The four dragons stirred and flipped the tips of their wings nervously, their eyes fixed on their riders.

  Kiron reached for the canvas flap, and shoved it over on its rod, letting the last of the light from the setting sun come streaming into the main room. And what they found was . . .

  Nothing.

  No bodies, no blood, no sign of an armed struggle. The room was in a shambles, of course, but it looked random. Not the sort of thing that would happen because of a fight. Plague had been Kiron’s first thought, that the people here had been sick. That didn’t explain the soldier they had found, but maybe his fate was unrelated. People could have just crawled inside to die, leaving the streets deserted.

  This had been a beer shop, as opposed to the sort of tavern that also sold food. They found overturned stools, opened jars of beer spilled on the two tables, and strangest of all, money on the counter, exactly as if someone had paid for beer and no one had collected his money. If there had been a fight, if some overwhelming force had come and taken the town, that money would not be there.

  And if it was plague—people in a plague town don’t keep going to beer shops.

  It looked almost as if something had gotten the attention of everyone here, something so startling they had all gone out into the street to look at it. But there was no sign of what had then happened to them. The back of the shop had been set up as living quarters, and there were no signs of anyone there either. The only thing that they did find that was an absolute indicator that something had happened very abruptly—the family oven had been full of bread, which was now burned to a cinder. So whatever had happened here, it had happened some time between when the shop opened and when the bread would have been taken out of the oven. Late morning or early afternoon.

  It was clear that scavengers had been in the kitchen, but also in the beer shop. Any foodstuffs had long since been run off with. Some enterprising creature had determined that he could break the beer jars by shoving them off the shelves; presumably he and his friends had lapped up what they could before it ran away, dried up, or sank into the dirt floor. The floor under the shelves was littered with broken pots.

  But that must have happened after the people had gone . . . and where did they go?

  Kiron’s stomach turned over. Surely the entire town wasn’t like this? All right, finding bodies would have been horrid, but this, in a way, was even worse.

  They made their way—with less and less caution—up the street, checking every building, and finding—nothing. No people. Shops and houses in disarray. It looked for all the world as if suddenly, in the middle of the day, everyone in this town had put down what they were doing and walked out.

  From the barracks—where they found neatly-made pallets, weapons stowed, and where the kitchen had been torn to pieces by animals hungrily devouring every scrap of bread and meat they could find—to the huts of the shepherds, it all looked the same. Everyone in the town was gone. They found piles of soft swaddling where infants had been picked up out of their corners. They found withered flowers and sticks and little clay dolls where toddlers had been taken away from their play in the dirt. The half dozen student scribes in one of the temples had put down their pens and their potsherds and walked out, along with their teacher.

  Everyone in this town had vanished without a trace.

  Well—

  Everyone but one; the lone soldier who had almost made it to safety. And not even his body had been able to tell them anything.

  Aket-ten was more than irritated with Kiron now; she was just about ready to remove his skin and salt him. Bad enough that he had only turned up when he had some bad news to deliver to an official, worse that he just vanished in the morning as soon as he could get Avatre in the air without even trying to see her. For that alone she had every right to feel slighted. But then to have gone out of his way to be charming to every Jouster here except her . . .

  The girls, in particular, were very annoying the next few days after he had left. They had been rather disgustingly impressed with his charm. And yes, he could be charming when he felt like it. It was rather too bad that he felt sure enough of her feelings that he didn’t bother to be charming to her anymore. But the girls certainly could have done without being so . . . . . . ugh.

  It was “Lord Kiron said this” and “Lord Kiron thinks that” until she was ready to scream, throw something, or both. The only one that was sensible was Peri, who, as usual, was quiet and spoke only about her dragon, and didn’t go on about “Lord Kiron” as if he was the God Haras come down to earth.

  Let them have to deal with him when he’s being excessively dense some time and see how they feel about him then.

  Maybe it was that the other girls had all been priestesses. Aket-ten remembered what it was like back when she had been a Nestling and a Fledgling. The other girls never seemed to tire of talking about young men.
Young priestesses all seemed to have more time on their hands than they should, though why that should be, she couldn’t imagine. She had always managed to find plenty of things to do with herself—studying for one. There were always new things to learn. Just because you didn’t have to learn them, that hardly meant you shouldn’t.

  She was pondering just that when she passed by the pens and saw all of the babies in the middle one, piled in a drowsy heap with Peri and two of the others watching them, and she wondered where the other five girls were. And even as she wondered that, shrieks of laughter made her compress her lips and follow her ears.

  She found them quickly enough. With three of the four couriers, who were taking them in turns on short little rides dragonback . . . they weren’t even wearing proper two-person saddles. The young men had the girls up in front of them, and were holding them in place with arms around their middles.

  She reined in her temper with an effort, and stood very visibly in the door, arms crossed over her chest until someone finally noticed her.

  It was one of the girls who wasn’t getting a ride who turned, saw her, and yelped.

  That got the attention of everyone except one of the couriers and his passenger, who rather quickly reacted when one of those on the ground blurted, “Wingleader Aket-ten! What are you doing here?”

  The three dragons dropped to the ground, and three girls slid down off of them wearing three very different expressions. One was defiant, one highly amused, and one simply looked bored. Of the other two, only one looked properly apprehensive, the other, the one that had yelped—

  Was she actually looking down her nose at Aket-ten, like one of those lazy, good-for nothing girls that did nothing but lounge around a Court all day, looking decorative? Who did she think she was anyway? Every one of these girls had been minor priestesses with the very minor Gift of understanding the thoughts of animals. In the ordinary way of things, they would all, every one of them, have been sent off to some minor temple—or else, if nobly born, been relegated to wafting incense about or holding an ostrich-feather fan for the rest of their lives.