Alta

by Mercedes Lackey

  Nor was that all, for thanks to Toreth’s family, there was a set of two tutors, one of them a noted scholar of history, who arrived every day to teach all the boys. As what they were learning was the history of the war with Tia, plain and unvarnished, and the history of mankind’s use of dragons, none of them objected, not even Orest.

  Two things, however, had sorely puzzled Kiron since he had begun to move about the city and get to know these people who were his own. Both puzzles seemed such an accepted part of Altan life that he was not entirely sure how to ask about them.

  The first was not so much a puzzle as a non-sequitur. When he first realized it, it had been something so entirely alien to his way of thinking that it had come as a shock.

  And yet, it was a simple fact. The Priests of the Gods were not the ultimate authority in Alta. They did not even rank as a close second. The very notion seemed blasphemous, and yet everyone here took it for granted.

  In Tia, even the Great King consulted with the Priests of the Gods on every occasion, and woe betide him if he failed to heed their words! Terrible things could, and did, happen to one who went against the will of the temples. Kings had been toppled from their thrones in the past, and it was not always the hand of a god that did the pushing.

  Of course, the Great King himself was a priest, and a High Priest at that, but so far as Kiron been aware, he was a magicless man, and that made all the difference. The priests controlled all magic, for all those born with magic were swiftly taken into one temple or another as soon as their talents became evident. That included Healers, who were, in Tia, Priests and Priestesses of Te- oth, or rather, his Tian equivalent.

  In Alta, Healers were a separate class that included those who Healed with herbs, with the knife, and with prayer, as well as those who Healed with their own special magic.

  Things were very different here.

  The only “magicians” who were not among the priestly caste in Tia were charlatans, street performers, who accomplished their “wonders” with trickery and sleight-of-hand. Male and female, young or old, whether or not they or their families were willing, once someone showed the signs or was detected by another magician, into a temple he went. So, although the priests seldom overtly exercised their power, they, and not the Great King, were the ultimate authority in Tia.

  But here, it seemed, things were very different. There were those who went into the temples who had certain Gifts and Callings—the ability to see the future or what was happening at a distance, to hear the thoughts of beasts (like Aket-ten) or even the thoughts of men. There were rumors of those who were able to speak with the dead who went into the Temple of the Twins. And that was the end of priestly magicians. All the rest of the priests were entirely without magic, either devoted by reason of avocation, or having more in common with the scribes than the magicians.

  As for the Healers, they stood apart from all and served no one god, but served all of them, collectively. Their enclaves, something like temples, but with less than a tenth of their space devoted to a sanctuary filled with images of every god and goddess in Alta, were distributed all across the city. And that was a shock all by itself; it was hardly to be thought of that one didn’t run to the Temple of Te-oth when one needed a Healer!

  But there was a greater shock as far as Kiron was concerned, because not only did the practitioners of magic not belong to the priests, they had their very own caste. And in its way, this caste was even more exalted than that of the rulers of Alta.

  They were the Magi, those Tians called “sea witches” since so much of what the Magi had once done involved the sea and water-magic. That was no longer the case, it seemed.

  A Magus was one who worked—well—magic. The Magi used spells to work their will upon the world, to channel strange powers; spells that were chanted over incense, sung from the tops of towers, or murmured in hidden chambers in the bowels of the earth. Spells that did things—like the spells that called up the fierce storms and flung them down the Great Mother River to drive the dragons and Jousters of Tia to earth and ravage the countryside.

  There were rumors of other spells that they had not yet unleashed. Spells to call up fire from the earth or down from the sky. Spells that not only repelled the hungry dead, but compelled them to serve or to haunt those the Magus indicated. The curse of a priest was potent—but in Alta the curse of a Magus was doubly so and doubly feared, for the curse of a priest relied on whether or not his god was moved to implement the curse, but the curse of a Magus depended only on his own power and his own will.

  It was the Magi, and not the priests, that the Great Ones of Alta listened to in Council. Oh, there was a High Priest sitting on the Council as well, taken by lot from among the priests of all of the temples once a season, but he was one, and the Magi were many. Unless he had a Foretelling from one of the Winged Ones, he might as well keep his mouth sewed shut when the Magi spoke. And according to Aket-ten, there had not been a Winged One with a truly powerful ability to Foretell the future in a very long time.

  This revelation rocked his world to the foundations; he understood it, but it still came as a shock. Perhaps his village had been so remote, and so provincial, that none of this had reached him as a child.

  Or, perhaps everyone had known this, and he had simply been too young to understand. After all, to a child, all figures of authority are equally powerful, and anyway, the Magi never left the safety of Alta City, so there never were any Magi to rival the priests for power in his old village. Then again, how would such a thing concern simple farmers near the border? Even if they had known, it would scarcely have affected any of them. No matter who ruled or made the decrees, the seasons would come and go, and some humorless official would arrive after harvest to collect the taxes, and it really didn’t matter to a farmer where those taxes went after he turned them over. The Great Ones could have been a family of goats on the thrones for all he cared.

  But for Kiron, steeped as he had been in the Tian hierarchy, it made no sense at all. And the more he learned from the scholar, the less sense it made, for in the past, the Great Ones had bowed to the will of the priests, just as in Tia. And all those who had any pretense to power had been within the temples. How had this come about? It was such an accepted part of life now that there seemed no way—and more importantly, no one—to ask.

  But that was only a puzzle. And although it sometimes kept him lying in bed, trying to understand it, the situation affected him no more now than it had when he had been a serf called Vetch. The Jousters had nothing to do with the Magi, except on the rare occasion when they were asked to perform some magic like warming the sand pits. Otherwise—the Jousters were as far removed from the Magi as the sea from Tia.

  But the second thing that sorely puzzled Kiron was an attitude. And that affected him.

  Now, Alta had been losing land and villages to the Tians steadily, for as long as he had been alive, and yet although there was outrage, and every Altan in the city wanted revenge and “their” land back, there was absolutely no fear that the Tians would ever come here. It was as if every Altan knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Tian army could not approach any nearer than the outermost canal.

  Surely they weren’t expecting the canals to hold their enemies at bay! They knew how many Jousters the Tians had! All it took was for the Jousters to command the air, and no matter how the Altans tried to prevent it, the Tian forces could, and would, bridge the canals, one by one. All it took was time and boats and you had a floating bridge that could carry armed men straight into the heart of Alta City. How could they not be afraid?

  Was it simple, blind arrogance, a false sense of surety that they could not be conquered on their home ground?

  Or was there something that they knew that he did not?

  He never got an answer to the question of why the priests and the Magi were two different castes, but he finally got the first clue to his second question one day when he was listening to the historian scholar. For once, the subject
was not the current state of the war, but the beginning of it.

  Although it was interesting to hear the story from the Altan perspective, as he had already gotten the tale from Ari from the Tian point of view, it was nothing new—until the moment that the scholar said, “. . . and then, of course, the Magi created the Eye of Light, and the direct threat against Alta City was ended and . . .”

  That was when he woke up. The Eye of Light? What in the name of all that is holy is the Eye of Light? He couldn’t imagine—was it some sort of Far-Seeing Eye that any Magus could use that allowed them to keep the land around Alta City under constant watch? But what good would that do? But by the time he gathered his wits, the scholar had finished his lecture, and it was time to feed Avatre. She was putting on another growth spurt of her own and was constantly hungry, and he knew that he didn’t dare delay her dinner for even a single question.

  So he hurried off, his curiosity a fire within his belly, his thoughts circling around that tantalizing bit of information. At least now he had a name for the reason why the Altans did not fear invasion of their city, even if he did not know what that name meant.

  However, he was, by the gods, going to find out.

  “The Eye of Light?” Orest said, and blinked. “Um—actually, I don’t know what it is. I mean, I know what it does, but I don’t know what it is. No one knows what it is, except the Magi. It’s up in the Tower of Wisdom, and no one is allowed up there except the really powerful Magi.”

  Kiron sighed. “All right, what does it do, then?” he asked.

  Orest licked his lips. “Mind you, I’ve never seen it myself. The Magi don’t show it off all that often—by the gods, they don’t have to! But Father has, and—you know that stretch of slag glass, right by the Haaras Bridge over the Fourth Canal?”

  Kiron nodded; it was a strange feature, following the line of the canal itself, a slab of black vitrified earth about as wide as a chariot and as long as three dragons, nose to tail. He’d wondered if it was the remains of some terrible fire.

  “The Eye made that,” Orest said, with lowered voice and a sidelong glance, as if he feared being overheard. “Father said this beam of light came down out of the top of the Tower of Wisdom—that’s the high tower in the middle of the Palace of the Magi—and just burned it there. They say it can reach all the way to the other side of the Seventh Canal and do the same thing there. There’s supposed to be the burned footings of a ruined bridge they took down out there; I don’t know, I haven’t gone to look.”

  Kiron stared blankly at his friend; if he hadn’t known that Orest wasn’t any good at deception, he would have expected this to be some sort of joke. “Nothing can do that!” he objected. “I’ve never heard of anything that can do that!”

  “Well, then, nothing melted the earth right where you can go and look at it yourself,” Orest snapped, nettled. “I can tell you this—it’s the reason why no one crosses a Magus! Once every few years, they decide to put on a show with the Eye, just to make sure that everyone remembers it, and let everyone know it still works. And that’s why, when you deal with a Magus, you are very, very polite. If they can do that, what else can they do?”

  Kiron licked his lips, picturing to himself a beam of light moving across the earth, burning everything in its path—or across the sky—“Can it be moved up?”

  “Can it cut a dragon and a Jouster out of the sky, you mean?” Orest asked. “If they don’t get out of its way, I should think so!”

  Kiron thought about the dragons, ranked in their wings, and a light beam sweeping across the sky. Well. No wonder no one in Alta City was afraid of invasion. And no wonder the Magi were, in their way, the silent rulers of this land. He had to wonder if anyone in Tia knew about this thing. Surely they did—with all the spies and agents they had, with the Altans demonstrating it very publicly every few years, surely they knew about it!

  It was very strange, though, that in all of the time he had been in Tia, he had not heard even a rumor of such a thing. So—why not? Why was it that the thing that had terrified people most was only that the Magi could send storms down on them?

  Maybe because the Great King and his advisers know that as long as they stay on the other side of the Seventh Canal, the Eye can’t reach them—so unless they find a way to get rid of the Eye, or the Magi, they won’t march on Alta City. And maybe the reason the storms scared them was that if the Magi could send storms, maybe they could reach past the Seventh Canal after all?

  Not that it mattered what they thought; at least, not to him. Except that he had a very uneasy sensation in the pit of his stomach, knowing that the Eye could reach anywhere inside Alta City. . . .

  “They’ve been trying to make another Eye for years, one they could put on a wagon or something and carry around,” Orest went on, “Or the Great Ones have asked them to, so they say. I mean, obviously, if we could put another Eye out there, maybe even with the army, it would change things completely. But for some reason they haven’t been able to.” He shrugged. “You should ask Aket-ten; she’ll know ten times more about it than I do. I should think there isn’t a scroll in that temple she hasn’t read twice, and she’s not shy about asking to read any piece of papyrus that crosses her path. Besides that, she’s very good at not being noticed; she’s sat in the same room with dozens of important people around, listening to things she had no business listening to, and no one ever noticed she was there even though she was in plain sight.” He sounded rather cross about that; Kiron guessed, with some amusement, that his little sister had more than once been listening in on him in that way. And of course, she had also found her secret listening post as well, not that Orest was doing any lounging about these days! Still, this business of the Eye . . . he got the feeling that Orest went through life not listening to much, where as Aket-ten listened to everything. So she might well be the person to ask.

  “Perhaps I will,” he said slowly. He still found the mere idea hard to believe—and yet there was physical proof that the thing existed, and what it could do.

  It gave him cold chills to think about; this was like one of the weapons of the gods! And there were plenty of tales about what happened when ordinary men got their hands on those . . . most of those tales ended badly.

  Even more chilling was the thought that the Magi had made sure to demonstrate the thing within the limits of the Seven Canals, proving it could be used on chosen targets inside the city as well as against invaders. A potent means of silencing troublemakers who might want to know why the Magi had so much influence . . . a reminder that such a thing was possible.

  Yes, he rather thought he would have a word or two with Aket-ten as soon as he got the chance.

  The chance came sooner than he thought.

  It was the beginning of the season of the rains; the welcome relief from the kamiseen.

  As in Tia, runners had been sent around the compound last night to warn of the coming rains, and everyone had dutifully pulled the canvas covers over their dragon’s sand pits—except for those who had swamp dragons, who would be perfectly happy to have rain pouring down into the pools of warm, sulfurous water. They’d have been even happier with mud, but wet dragons were hard enough to harness; muddy ones would have been impossible. Once in a great while they were allowed a mud wallow, but it wasn’t often, and they were cleaned off almost immediately afterward. Last night, they had all gone to bed feeling the weather bearing down on them. The wind had changed direction, coming from the sea and the north, rather than the desert and the west. It was a slow, heavy wind, bringing yet more humidity to this city surrounded by marshes, and it carried a chill with it. Kiron was happy to roll up in a woolen blanket tonight, and Avatre, born amid the rain, was so buried in the sand she was nothing more than a hummock in her pit.

  The sound of thunder rolling continuously overhead was what woke Kiron. He waited for it to stop—and waited—and waited—and still nothing happened.

  He opened his eyes and rolled over with a groan. There was light
out there in Avatre’s pen, but it wasn’t very bright. Either the clouds were thicker than he thought, or it was just dawn. Both, perhaps. It was cold, a penetrating cold, and he knew he was going to need a woolen tunic today beneath his rain cape.

  The thunder continued to growl overhead, yet there wasn’t any rain pounding down on the canvas awning. That struck him as very odd, and it roused his curiosity enough that he decided to get up and have a look around. Besides, he was awake now. Until the rain started, he wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep. There was such heavy tension in the air, waiting for the storm to break, that dozing was impossible.

  He pulled on a kilt and a tunic and tiptoed past Avatre, who was still sleeping. In fact, given how cool the air was, he doubted she’d be very happy about being awakened.

  Not that he blamed her in the least; if he hadn’t been so curious, he would be back in his cot, under his warm woolen blanket, thank you.

  Once he got out from under the canvas and into the corridor, he still couldn’t see anything, because the Altans sensibly had the same canvas roofs over the corridors that they strung over the dragon pens. He would have to get somewhere that was open to the sky, like the landing court.

  No one else was awake and moving, though, which made him think that the continuous thunder was considered perfectly normal by the Altans. That was a bit of a comfort, anyway. He padded his way along the stone of the corridor, barefoot, until he came to the entrance into the landing court—and as he approached it, he saw, in the sky above the walls—

  Lightning. Not striking the ground, but crawling across the base of the clouds, like veins of fire across charcoal-colored flesh. It wasn’t like any lightning he’d ever seen before; this was reddish, and didn’t seem at all inclined to strike the earth. Gingerly, he eased himself out from under the scant protection offered by the canvas and looked up to see that the reason why the thunder didn’t stop was that there was never so much as a heartbeat of time when there wasn’t any lightning crawling across some part of the sky.