Aerie

by Mercedes Lackey

  He found himself doing the same. Found himself unaccountably relaxing, and felt her going quiet and losing the tenseness in her muscles. And without a word, they fell into healing sleep.

  Breakfast, over bowls of lentil stew, came in the still cool light of dawn. They woke fitted together like the stones of a wall. He didn’t want to say anything, and he suspected Aket-ten didn’t either.

  They found the Chosen already awake. “You must be my ears and eyes, feet and hands,” said Rakaten-te. “Here is what you need to know. Some creatures are sensitive to magic; the presence of it, the lack of it, and even to specific kinds. The scarabus beetle, for instance: one can hardly keep the creatures away from any place where there is Healing magic present. Flies swarm to the rituals of blood and death, and to the practitioners of those magics.”

  They both nodded, Aket-ten knowingly, Kiron only because he did understand to this point, but frankly expected to become confused very shortly.

  “Whatever is consuming magic here must have a physical focus. There is probably more than one, in fact.” Rakaten-te pursed his lips. “I think that someone must have come here and planted these things. A stranger would not have been out of place in a town like this.”

  Kiron nodded. That was certainly true. A border town saw all manner of wanderers coming through at irregular intervals. There was no state of war here, no reason to be alert, really, and the men who were garrisoned out here in this least desirable of all postings did not tend to be highly motivated at the best of times.

  “Now as for the magic that caused you two to decide to take a sudden journey—I do not know if it had a physical focus and, alas, I may never know. Nor am I certain how it was able to work when all other magic was being drained.” He shrugged. “Whoever did all of this is a magician of great skill and subtlety.”

  Greater than you? But Kiron knew that was an unfair question. Rakaten-te had the unenviable task of trying to unravel what another mage had done without knowing anything about the magician or his magic. He hid his eyes and his unfair thoughts by looking down at his breakfast.

  “But before I can do anything, we must find and destroy the objects that are absorbing magic.” The Chosen set aside his empty bowl. “Now I do not know what creatures will react to these things, but I do know that some will. That is what you must look for. Some sort of live thing either avoiding a place or swarming to it.”

  Kiron felt very dubious, but decided it was better not to say anything. What could he say, after all? That this was a very thin clue, and not much in the way of direction? The Chosen surely was aware of that.

  “Failing this hunt working to uncover the foci, the only other expedient will be for me to walk every thumb-length of this town, and for some distance beyond,” Rakaten-te said rather grimly. “My god is not offering any sort of hint, which means that Seft sees that I can solve this myself. He is . . . a very challenging god to serve. But we can hope that the creatures of the earth will show us what we need to know.”

  “And if they do not, we will need to guide you across the town, back and forth until you find something” said Aket-ten. “But how is it you think you can find these things, if you cannot use magic to find them?”

  “Ah, but I can, just in a more roundabout way.” The Chosen shrugged. “If I do the search in this way, I will have to cast small magics and try to determine where their power is being drawn to.”

  “That could take weeks!” Aket-ten exclaimed, her eyes widening in open dismay. Kiron couldn’t blame her. The prospect of remaining here for more than a few days was not a pleasant one.

  Rakaten-te nodded. “Yes, it could. But it is another possible solution. I had rather not use it, but if I must, I will. Seeing if the animals react will be faster. You two will either notice something, or not. If this does not work, we will approach it the hard way. And if that fails—I shall think of something else.”

  The determination in Rakaten-te’s voice surprised Kiron. He was not used to hearing that sort of response from a priest. Like Kaleth, they tended to cultivate an aura of serenity. Kiron had the feeling that if this man had not been blind, he would have been a warrior. He had the “falcon look.” As Ari called it.

  “If we are going to look for things as small as flies,” Aket-ten mused, glancing at the open door and the growing light outside, “We had better go on foot.”

  Kiron groaned, but silently, only within his own mind. Aket-ten was right. They could not spot swarms of flies from dragonback.

  “Do we dare turn Avatre and Re-eth-ke loose to hunt for themselves?” he asked aloud instead. Aket-ten turned to smile a little at him.

  “You read my thoughts, I think. Yes, not only do I think we dare, I think they will be fine. There are plenty of goats about here, and goats are scarcely a challenge for those two. I shall put it in their minds what we want, and we can then go out and hunt for—well, I suppose I must say, hunt for unnatural nature.” She raked her hair with her fingers and stood up. At least this morning they were all fully and nicely fed. The lentil stew had improved with overnighting, rather than burning as he had feared it might.

  Avatre gave him the most comical look of astonishment he had ever seen on the face of a dragon when Aket-ten persuaded her that she was to go hunting in the town alone, without her Jouster. She blinked at him for several long moments, then, with a hard headshake, she launched herself into the air—

  Only to come down almost immediately, just on the other side of the wall around the temple. There was a bleat swiftly cut off with a crunch, and it was quite clear that Avatre was having an early success.

  Re-eth-ke lofted into the air going in the opposite direction, showing none of the signs of surprise that Avatre had.

  “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” he said, suddenly realizing the implications. “Let her hunt on her own—”

  “Not often, and only in the desert, but yes,” she admitted. “I thought it might be good practice for times, well, like this one. Where we don’t want to tie up time hunting with them.”

  He gave her a look. She flushed.

  “All right,” she said slowly, with a shrug. “I admit it. I was being lazy. But it is a good idea.”

  “And I’m jealous I didn’t think of it first,” he admitted. “You have a lot of good ideas, like getting all the babies to sleep in one pen, like they would in a nest, so that only one person has to look after them.”

  “That’s open to abuse, though,” she said, frowning, then shrugged. “You go in Avatre’s direction, I’ll follow Re-eth-ke. Let’s hope we see something.”

  The goats were acting like goats, tame or wild. The cats—the few that he saw—were rapidly going feral, slinking away from him when they saw him. The dogs had all packed, holding several territories, and were also going feral. The fowl had long since been killed and eaten. The camels had created herds and wandered off into the desert. The donkeys had created a herd that was wandering through the streets, eating whatever green things they could find, and were keeping a wary eye on him.

  None of them were acting in any way out of the ordinary that he could tell. The cats dozed in the sun or slunk away into the shadows, the dogs barked from a distance, and dozed in the shadows. The goats and donkeys wandered, looking for forage.

  Maybe the birds, he thought, and turned his attention from the animals to the sparrows, pigeons, and the few desert birds that had decided to investigate the now-silent town.

  But as the morning became afternoon, and he stopped long enough to eat the flatbread and dried meat he was carrying, he decided he was going to take a different tactic.

  The Chosen said he thought that someone had carried objects into the town; a stranger, in fact. So where would a stranger actually be able to go without drawing notice? He certainly couldn’t wander about the fortress and garrison, nor could he poke about in peoples’ private houses nor their shops.

  Taverns and inns, of course. The town square and market. Not the temples; if you were not from
Tia, you wouldn’t know the gods or the rituals, and you would stand out.

  Taverns and inns, though, that would be perfect. If the object was something small, you could pick one that wasn’t exactly clean, kick it into a corner, and it would probably stay there for a season. If it was something large, you could pick one that was honest, ask the tavernkeeper to hold it for you until you got back from a journey, and go off and leave it.

  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 sai
d. “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 ants. He hadn’t spent that much time hunched over since he had been a drudge of a serf.

  “What does that mean?” he asked, and shook his head. “I confess all this magic business leaves me baffled.”

  “It means that if the magus or magi who set this spell happens to be—for lack of a better word—‘watching’ it for interference, then it will be as obvious as a club to the side of the head that I am destroying it, where I am, and possibly even who and what I am.” The Chosen nodded, and so did Aket-ten. They apparently knew exactly what this entailed. Kiron could only guess.

  But it wasn’t difficult to imagine that if these unknown magicians could, they would probably attack Rakaten-te. The only real question was what form that attack would take.

  Since the Chosen himself probably couldn’t predict that, all Kiron could do was be ready and try to react quickly, whatever happened.

  “If you can try and find me two large flat stones that have never been carved or altered in any way—” the Chosen began.

  Aket-ten had revived from her earlier confusion, and now wore a look of triumph. “I already have, Chosen,” she said. “A half dozen of them, in fact. I also have fuel for a fire that are sticks that were broken and not cut, and I have been harvesting such herbs as I can find in what is left of the gardens. I think I can collect water without using a container that was made by man—”