Aerie (19 page)

TEN

THE
sun had just touched the horizon. The eastern sky had grown dark. And Kiron noticed now that even the smell of this town was wrong. The air was almost like that of the empty desert, with just a touch of musky goat to it. It should have smelled of unwashed bodies coming home from a day of hard work, of incense from the temples, of cooking food, of beer, of the cheap perfumed cones that flute girls used and the expensive ones that the well-to-do sported.

Everything conspired to make his skin crawl. This was different from Sanctuary and Aerie. There, the towns had been abandoned for so long that they had ceased to be places where you could imagine that in the next moment, someone would come around a corner. Here . . . this was like being in a nightmare. You just knew that at any moment you would wake up and the streets would be full again. Except that didn’t happen.

Avatre whined unhappily behind him. The dragons had been trailing them all through the town as if they, too, were uneasy about this place. Now Avatre came up behind him and bumped his shoulder with her nose, wanting comfort. Absently, he cupped her snout against his face.

“People just don’t vanish into thin air,” Pe-atep said suddenly, looking up, and raking his sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes with one hand. “They leave a trail. Assuming they
all
went to the same place, that would be a pretty wide track. I’m going to find where they went before it gets too dark to see their traces.”

With that, he stalked off, leaving the rest of them to scramble to catch up. Kiron was the first to move, motioning to the others to follow, and the dragons straggled along behind. Once, they startled a little herd of goats, which tried to run toward the desert; as if they were coordinating their attack, each of the dragons pounced on a different victim. All that hunting practice made it absurdly easy for them; they caught and gulped down their prey in nothing flat, and were shortly following close on the Jousters’ heels again.

They’d made a circuit of about a third of the ragged periphery of the town in the gray twilight when they discovered that Pe-atep was right in all of his assumptions. The people that were gone had gone
somewhere,
with some appearance of purpose. They had all gone in the same direction, it looked as if they had all gone at the same time, and they had left a trail.

Under normal circumstances the hard-baked desert ground would never have retained enough impression of feet for any of them to read; they were not, after all, skilled hunters or trackers. Pe-atep was the closest in that regard; he had trained the great hunting cats for the nobles of Alta, and thus had some minimal hunting skills himself. But the rest of them—Kiron had been a farmer ’s son and then a serf for most of his life, big Huras was the child of bakers, and Oset-re the protected child of nobles. What they knew of tracking could have been written on a fingernail with room left over.

But this was not a “few” people. Clearly, the entire town had passed this way, funneling through the streets and between the houses until they were channeled here to this spot. The scuffs and kicked-up dirt of an entire town’s worth of people, all condensing into a kind of army, and all heading in the same direction left a path as wide as an avenue in Mefis and as easy to see. The only reason they hadn’t spotted it before, from the air, was because they had approached low, and from the opposite side of the town. By the time they were near enough to see it, they had been concentrating on the empty streets, and thinking more of possible ambush or horrors to come than of what might lie on the eastern outskirts of town.

For this trail was headed east, without a shadow of a doubt. Men, women, children, children too small to walk on their own—all had come this way and gone off with no known reason. Across the border into lands the Altans knew nothing about.

“East?” Kiron said out loud. “What’s east?”

Could
there have been plague, or at least sickness? Was there some famous healer in that direction that everyone had decided to go to? Had there been a prophecy, some utterance from one of the gods ordering everyone out? Kaleth wasn’t the only Mouth of the Gods in the world. . . .

And there were also plenty of people who would claim that title without having any right to it, too. Could someone like that be entrancing enough that people would do whatever he told them to do?

All four of the young men looked to Them-noh-thet, who was stroking his unshaven chin and frowning at a sky growing rapidly black. “This . . . is odd,” he said slowly. “Very odd. There’s nothing for them to go to. There is supposed to be nothing to the east of Tia, nothing at all, save a few wandering tribes of herders. No tradesmen, no merchants have ever bothered to go there. Not even the Bedu go there; it is wilderness . . . but . . .”

His voice trailed off.

“But?” Kiron prompted sharply. There was something about the priest’s expression that he did not like. “If we are to solve this, we must know even your speculations.”

“But this is where the Nameless Ones came from,” the priest said slowly and reluctantly. “They came marching across the border at a place very near here, according to the old records. That is why there was a border garrison here in the first place, to watch for them should they come again.” He rubbed his eyes with one hand. “There is no reason for anyone to go marching off in that direction, much less all of the people in the town. Something is very wrong here.”

Kiron snorted. That much was blindingly obvious.

The priest glanced aside at him. “I mean, something more than the obvious is wrong. I was sure I would find traces of magic here, that whatever had happened would be obvious to the trained Sight and the kinds of things I have with me. But—no. There is nothing other than the absence of the people and this track. None of my talismans are telling me of the presence of the kind of dark powers that the Altan Magi used,” the priest continued, peering uneasily down at the ground as the darkness of full night quickly descended. “In fact, I sense . . . nothing even of what I can see with my eyes. No more than did the Sighted among us from Sanctuary. I can see the buildings. I can see the signs of ordinary life everywhere. But what I see does not correspond to what I See. It is as if there never was a town here, that nothing has ever lived here but wild things. People leave echoes of themselves anywhere they have lived, and those echoes take years, not days, to fade. Yet those echoes are not here.”

Silence answered his words, and Kiron shivered. He knew nothing of magic except that it did follow rules—and the priest was talking as if all those rules had been completely violated.
He sounds like I would, if Avatre suddenly turned on me with no warning.

“I am going to hunt while there is still a little light left,” Pe-atep said abruptly into that silence. “The dragons have fed, but we have not. We were counting on people to be here, on the garrison to take care of our needs when we got here.”

Kiron nodded slowly. “Yes, we were. But who could have thought—”

“No one,” Pe-atep said immediately. “This is not something you could have anticipated, Kiron, but it isn’t going to stop our hunger from making us weak if we don’t take care of ourselves. I will kill one of those wandering goats. That will be meat enough for us all, if nothing else.”

“I will see if there are stores of flour or the like,” Huras said slowly. “The scavengers can’t have gotten into everything. There plainly is nothing in this town to fear, not even ghosts—” He faltered to a halt. Kiron could empathize. When a place was this deserted, even a ghost would have been welcome, in a way.

And at least this was something constructive they could all do. Kiron took command of the situation. “Pe-atep, that is a good plan. We must sleep, and we must eat. Going to bed with our stomachs aching will not let us sleep. We cannot do much, even to return to Sanctuary, without food and rest. So let us divide ourselves—but carefully.”

He pondered for a moment. “Pe-atep and I will take the dragons to the courtyard of the Temple of Haras, then hunt. Them-noh-thet, go you to the Temple of Haras with us, and light the fires and the torches and see what you may find there. We will make that place our refuge; the wings of the God will surely shelter us.”

A pious statement that the priest nodded at, but which Kiron himself was not entirely sure he believed. After all, the priests were all gone, too . . . the wings of the God hadn’t done them much good.

But right now he preferred they didn’t think about that. They all needed some place that would at least feel a little safe. “Huras and Oset-re, see what you can find of foodstuffs that animals haven’t pillaged, get us water, and we will all meet back at the temple.”

The priest nodded; it was clear he was not loath to take himself back to familiar confines. Kiron couldn’t blame him, a temple must feel to him as a fortress felt to a soldier.

And perhaps, since he was Sighted and Gifted, he might be able to turn the temple into a truly protected spot. A border garrison town was hardly going to attract priests of any kind of power. In fact, it would have been surprising if even the Healer here could do more than pray and offer herbs and the knife.

“I think that the homes of the wealthier here might yet yield something we can eat,” Huras said. “Once we find torches, I will make a fire and kindle them, and then we will be on better footing.” The big man led Oset-re confidently off back into the town. They looked almost like a father and child, Huras towered so much over Oset-re.

“Let us seek the temple then, while we can still unharness the dragons without stumbling over straps,” Kiron said, catching up the reins of Wastet and Tathulan before they could follow their masters. There was a moment of resistance, a little tugging, and then the two yielded to Kiron’s insistence. They had been well trained, but more than that, they accepted Kiron and the other riders of Kiron’s wing as substitutes for their true masters.

“And while I can find the stores of torches and lamp oil,” the priest said and sighed. “At least I need not concern myself with being frugal. Clearly, no one is going to object if I burn a sennight’s worth in a single night.”

“Hardly,” Kiron said dryly. “Rather we are more apt to ask you to make more lights, not fewer.”

Treading carefully, the priest walking alongside them, Kiron and Pe-atep took all four of the dragons, which were beginning to make anxious sounds again, off to that courtyard. As were many temples, this one was set up to play host to dragons if need be. It would catch and hold the sun all day, and at night, the stone would radiate back that stored heat. There were stone basins that could be filled with fuel-bricks made of straw and dung to provide more warmth if the dragons got too cold. There was ample room for the four, and they all stopped whining and began to relax as they realized they were soon going to be allowed to sleep. Pe-atep and Kiron set about getting them out of their gear and stowing it off to the side, each set going to a different corner and stacked neatly. The priest greatly aided their efforts by bringing four torches as soon as he could find them and get them lit. The moment that saddles and harness were off, the four curled up together to share warmth and immediately went to sleep.

By this time it was fully dark, but the moon was already rising, and this turned out to be all to the good. It was a full moon and as Kiron and Pe-atep knew from experience, a full moon provided almost as much light to dark-accustomed eyes as any number of torches.

Leaving the temple to the priest, they stepped out into the street, and waited for their eyes to adjust. Kiron wished Aket-ten was with them. She would have known where the goats were . . . she could probably have lured one right into their hands.

On second thought, that was probably a bad idea. Maybe if they were actually starving to death, it would be different. But luring a goat with your thoughts just so you could kill it . . . no, there was something profoundly wrong with that idea. He made a mental resolution at that moment never even to suggest such a thing to her.

Better just to use what scant intelligence he had. How to think like a goat . . . ?

“If I were a goat, where would I go to escape jackals and lions for the night?” Kiron mused aloud.

Pe-atep chuckled, the first pleasant sound he’d made since they arrived here. “Have you forgotten already that goat we saw on a roof? He was not stupid, Kiron, he was quite clever. Lions and jackals can’t manage steep staircases very well, they wouldn’t be able to actually see goats on the roof, and it’s possible that they might even be so confused about where the scent was coming from, they’d never think to go up. If I was a goat, I would head for the rooftops, too, and I think I remember where he was.”

Pe-atep led the way quietly and carefully up the street. Carefully, with weapons in hand, because they had seen jackals, and there was the very real possibility of lions. With all the easier prey about, a lion or even a pack would probably not trouble themselves with humans, but why take the chance?

But they encountered nothing worse than dogs going feral, and Pe-atep’s memory was quite correct.

As they approached the house in question, they could actually hear the sound of hooves clicking a little on the stone of the roof, and heard a bleat of complaint. It sounded as if the first goat had been joined by several more. Well . . . on the one hand, goats did like to herd up. And if a lion
did
figure out it had to go up to find them, having several more goats up there would mean that the lion would have more than one target.

But on the other hand . . . having more goats up there meant more noise and more chance that a lion
would
figure out it had to go up.

“Hmm,” Pe-atep whispered, and scratched his head. “I had rather not go up there, try to take one, and frighten them. Being in the middle of a herd of frightened, kicking goats in the dark—”