Ugh, Pe-atep was right about that. Goats could do a great deal of damage with those sharp little hooves. Not to mention the horns.
“The first thing to do is see what things look like up there,” Kiron replied, after a moment. “It’s not as if they’re going to charge us or anything. The worst that will happen if they see us is that they’ll startle and try to run.”
“Huh. That might not be bad. If they jump off the roof—”
There was a thought. Surely there would be one out of the lot that would land wrong. “Keep that in mind. It’s not the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”
The two of them circled the building until they found the narrow, precarious stair that led up the outside to the roof. Feeling his way along the wall and taking great care not to trip, Kiron climbed up first and cautiously poked his head up over the low wall that rimmed the top.
There were about six goats there, most of them standing packed closely together with their heads hanging. Their even breathing told Kiron that five of the six felt secure enough here to doze. But one of them, a piebald, pricked its ears up at Kiron and craned its head forward, sniffing. It didn’t seem alarmed. In fact, after a moment, it took a step toward him, and then another.
Feeling a little like a traitor for getting it to trust him, Kiron made a
tsk
ing noise at it, as Pe-atep moved up beside him and went into a crouch. Switching its tail, the goat ambled over, looking as if it expected a treat.
It must have been somebody’s pet. Kiron tried not to think of the child that had probably made it into a pet . . . a child that without a doubt must have other things to worry about now than its pet goat. Assuming it was even in a condition to worry about anything.
Still, this was rather like—like Aket-ten using her Gift to lure a goat to doom. It made him a bit queasy.
He tried to remind himself that the poor goat was just as doomed. If not at their hands, a wild beast would surely get it before long. A goat that was a pet did not have many survival skills.
Kiron moved down the steps backward, still making little calling sounds. When the goat was about halfway down the steps, Pe-atep pounced, long knife in hand. And suddenly, this was a lot like helping Avatre make her first kills. He moved in to help.
It was over very quickly, without much in the way of noise or struggle to alarm the other goats of the herd.
“Should we try to frighten them?” he whispered. “See if we can get a second one?”
Pe-atep cleaned his knife and sheathed it, then paused to consider. “No,” he said finally. “We have enough to eat with this one, and without a cold room . . . no, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Besides, tomorrow we can start finding everything there is to eat left in this place, and we can make sure the dragons hunt for all of us. We won’t starve.”
Kiron nodded. With Pe-atep taking the front legs and Kiron the hind, they carried their prize back in the direction of the temple.
As soon as they rounded the corner, it was very clear that the priest had been very hard at work in their absence. The customary two torches burned on either side of the door, and light streamed out onto the street from that door. It was a welcome sight, and mitigated, a little, the undeniably disturbing effect of the otherwise silent and empty town. It was a sign of light and life.
Them-noh-thet himself greeted them by hurrying out from the back of the temple when their footsteps sounded on the stone. “Ah, good,” he said with relief. “I admit to you, this place is disturbing me.”
“It’s just too empty,” Pe-atep replied fervently.
“I am glad you were able to get this temple looking more lived in.”
The priest shrugged. “As much as a temple can. The rear part is better, the part where the priests and acolytes live. I have a fire going in the kitchen, and I have cleaned it up somewhat so we can work. I also found foodstuffs in storage jars, and herbs. We will not be eating half-raw, half-burned goat like barbarians; I have pickled onions and dates, and honey, and some other things, things the vermin and animals didn’t scent. Come, follow me.”
The temple kitchen was, as such things went, rather spacious. Open to the air, of course, though sheltered by a roof in case of rain. There were many storage jars in a room off to one side, a wide counter to prepare food on, a mortar for grinding grain into flour, troughs for kneading dough, two ovens for bread, flat stones one could build a fire on to heat for cooking, and three fire pits where things could be stewed in pots. And it looked as if they weren’t going to be starving any time soon. One waist-high storage jar alone held enough lentils to feed them all for a week, and there were several dozen such in that storeroom. Kiron was not unaccustomed to kitchen chores, but he had to admit to relief when Huras and Oset-re returned bearing the fruits of their own rummaging. He gladly stepped aside to let the son of a baker take over directing the rest of them. Huras was a big man, with correspondingly large hands, which performed startlingly deft work with the knives and other implements that Them-noh-thet had found. Once they had water from the well, the question of what they would eat in the morning was easily solved; lentil stew, which would use the scraps of goat that were left when they finished eating tonight.
The result was a surprisingly good meal, which they elected to eat right there in the kitchen area. It was, however, eaten in grim silence and with many glances over the shoulder toward the small open court behind the kitchen. The silence was intimidating, though at least here, they could pretend they were in the kitchen of a country house and not in the middle of a town.
At last Them-noh-thet cleared his throat awkwardly. “I intend to try to reach my fellow priests in Sanctuary tomorrow,” he said, “as well as attempt more magics that might tell us what has happened here. I think that we cannot return until we investigate this situation more—”
He looked at Kiron as if he expected Kiron to object, but the Jouster only nodded.
“As long as we have hunting for the dragons and food and water for ourselves, I don’t see any other course,” he agreed. “An entire
town
just walked off into the wilderness; we don’t know where they are, why they left, or who did this to them. We have to find out whatever we can, here.”
The other three nodded in agreement, and the priest looked relieved. “I don’t think we should sleep without a watch being set, though,” Kiron continued, “And I think we really ought to sleep with the dragons. It offers that much more safety.” He thought for a moment. “In fact, I—all right, this may sound strange, but I think we ought to sleep tethered to a dragon’s leg. That way, if something comes along and makes us want to go wandering in the desert, hopefully our dragons will wake us out of it.”
Huras scratched his head, looking relieved. “That’s a good idea. And I don’t think it sounds strange at all. Tathulan is very good about telling when there’s something wrong with me.”
“I think they’re all good at that,” Kiron agreed.
The priest looked from one to another of them, and finally asked, very quietly, “Would you mind if I joined you?”
It was not a restful night. But then, no one really expected it to be. Only the dragons slept soundly, and didn’t really seem to notice when their riders took heavy cords and tied themselves to a front foot. Then again, they’d had a hard several days getting here, and they were probably exhausted.
The Jousters should have been exhausted, too, but Kiron could tell that the others were sleeping fitfully if at all. Even Huras, who normally slept through everything, was tossing and turning. He took his turn at night watch, then settled down with Avatre again, and finally some time before dawn, did drop into an uneasy slumber.
It was a relief to do something normal and take the dragons out to hunt. They let all four of them kill and eat as much as they could; it would be no bad thing for them to doze most of the day and recover their strength.
They left the priest stripped down to his kilt, busily laying out all manner of things in the sanctuary of the temple. He looked up as Kiron passed. “It is a very good thing,” he said in measured tones, “both that all Temples of Haras are required to keep everything needed for the greater magical rituals, and that no one, so far as I can tell, has ever used these things here. I have pristine tools and materials.”
“Will you be needing anything from us?” Kiron asked, hoping that the answer would be “no.”
The priest shook his head. “I could do with a trained acolyte, but in matters this complicated, an untrained helper is worse than none at all.”
Kiron nodded. “In that case, during the morning we intend to consolidate everything useful here, and in the afternoon, we are going to follow the trail of the missing townsfolk for as long as we can.”
The priest’s mouth thinned. “I do not know what to hope for. It could be that ‘nothing’ is the best thing you can find.”
Kiron tried very hard not to think about that as he went out with Huras to scour the northern half of the town, including the garrison, for foodstuffs and water jars. After two trips with the latter, which were heavy, awkward, and bulky, he was feeling distinctly out of sorts. He really didn’t want to contemplate what it was going to be like to have to fill all the jars that Huras had lined up along the wall of the kitchen. The temple did have its own well, but it was still going to mean a lot of water carrying.
I thought I had done with toting water when I was no longer a serf.
Eventually, Huras deemed that they had enough jars, and he was able to go on to carrying—
Equally heavy things. Irksome. Exhausting. By midmorning he was sick of it. Fortunately, so was Huras. “Enough,” the young man said finally. “I am like to turn into a donkey at this rate. We have looted the best houses in this town; anything we find elsewhere will be inferior. We will look for gardens, I think.”
Kiron groaned but agreed.
But the gardens had long since been eaten up by the goats, which understandably preferred tender, well-nurtured plants to what they could find in the desert. The best that Huras could manage was to dig up some half-grown onions whose green parts had been eaten down to the ground.
Pe-atep and Oset-re fared no better, and the rest of the morning was spent filling water jars until their arms ached. Huras rewarded them, though, with a decent meal, and Kiron mentally congratulated himself that the big man was along, even though Huras had been picked for the size and strength of his dragon and not his culinary skills.
The priest came in as they were finishing their meal looking so bleak that Kiron put down, untasted, the honey-smeared flatbread he had been about to bite into. “What?” he asked apprehensively. “Your face is as long as Great Mother River—”
“I cannot speak with Sanctuary,” the priest replied. “Even though my powers find
nothing
in the way of dark magic here, or even any magic at all, I cannot sense them, nor, I suppose, can they sense me.”
All the dire things that Kiron could think of were quickly dismissed. The priest was an expert in his magic; he would surely have thought of everything Kiron could think of as the reason why he could not reach his fellows. Still. If magic was like water, could it be drained away? “No magic?” he said instead. “None? Isn’t there always some magic about? Amulets, charms, even if only half of those are genuine, shouldn’t you be able to sense them?”
Them-noh-thet gave him a sharp look. “What are you thinking?”
Kiron had to shrug. “I don’t really know. Is there something that drinks magic?”
The priest stroked his chin, which was now shaven again. “Huh. It is possible. I have never heard of such a thing—” He stared past Kiron for a moment, then abruptly turned and stalked back into the sanctuary.
Kiron and the others shared a look. “Priests,” Oset-re said dismissively. “Aket-ten is like that.”
“So she is,” Kiron replied, feeling both a touch of irritation and a touch of smugness, both overlaid by a profound wish that she was here. When she wasn’t being irritating, she had the ability to cut through to the heart of things, and to see them quite sensibly.
But—now. Bad enough that they were here themselves. That he was here. He didn’t want her in this place, this unhaunted place, where not even ghosts were lingering.
“Let’s get the dragons up,” he said, rather than saying anything more about Aket-ten. “We’ll follow where the people went for as far as we can.”
The track was easy to follow. And unnaturally straight. It looked for all the world as if the people had simply trudged over everything in their path, not stopping to go around obstacles and climbing down wadis and up the other side. There was no actual mark on where the border of Tia ended, of course; this was wilderness, who would care? The garrison had just been placed in a spot that seemed good for keeping an eye out to the east. But Kiron was fairly certain that they were well past that nebulous “border” by midafternoon. And the track showed no signs that the people who had made it were getting tired and needed to rest.
But then the dragons glided over the top of a rise—and the track abruptly ended in a muddle of footprints as if whatever had drawn those people out into the desert had stopped calling them, leaving them confused.
And on the other side of that muddle, another track began.
The four of them swooped in to land.
“Camel droppings,” said Pe-atep at once, pointing to the pile of dung. “And camel tracks.” He slid off his dragon’s back and began walking about, bent over, frowning. “Whoever was here, they weren’t here by accident. They camped here two, maybe three days—there’s a fire.” Now he pointed at a blackened smudge half covered with loose earth. “And look how the brush is browsed up. Whoever was here, came here expecting to intercept these people. They
knew
the townsfolk were coming.”
“They weren’t here to invite them to a feast either,” said Oset-re suddenly. He rose up from behind a bit of scrub with something in his hands, his face grim.