Mercedes Lackey - Aerie

So the interiors of buildings were dark, except where there were lamps. But lamps made heat, so for the most part people preferred the dark.

He took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the darkness before walking across the cool stone floor of the sanctuary to the curtained doorway at the rear.

Pushing aside the curtain, he found Aket-ten, Rakaten-te, Kaleth, Marit, and two priests he did not know sharing a somber meal. Rakaten-te turned his bandaged eyes toward the doorway, detecting Kiron’s presence before anyone else did.

“Ah,” he said. “The last of our group.”

Kaleth looked up and nodded at him somberly. “Kiron, come eat, and you will hear what we have been doing here in your absence. It bears directly on what we will be asking you to do.”

With a certain amount of trepidation, Kiron folded his legs beneath him and helped himself to food. One thing was certain, they were eating better in Sanctuary than they were in Aerie.

I am very tired of desert, he thought suddenly. He thought with sudden longing about Alta, the estate of Aket-ten’s aunt. Streams and ponds, and the river running alongside it. Not like Sanctuary, where the air was so dry it sucked water out of you.

He pulled his wandering attention back to the conversation, which had started up without him.

“. . . Heyksin,” one of the two stranger priests was saying somberly.

That got his attention.

“How sure of this are you?” Kaleth asked sharply. His head was up and he frowned, and well he might. This was not good hearing.

The priest shrugged. “We have but a few words from the written tongue of the Nameless Ones, copied down centuries ago, recopied over and over without the scribe that made the copies knowing what the words were supposed to mean. And we have the words on this amulet. Some of the characters are identical. Some are a mismatch. Does that mean that these Magi are of the Nameless Ones? We think so. Our written tongue looks nothing like this, the Bedu have no written language, and Heklatis tells us it looks like no language he knows.”

All fell silent at that point. Kiron felt chilled as a stone in winter. If there was one thing that the people of Tia and Alta feared equally, it was the Nameless Ones. And if they were the ones responsible for the disappearance of a town full of people . . .

“Then I must tell you still another unpleasant thing,” Rakaten-te said slowly, fingering the carvings on his staff. “You know that we of Seft are accustomed to keeping our own counsel and hold many secrets.”

Everyone nodded at that, but none more emphatically than Kaleth. The Mouth of the Gods raised an eyebrow but held his peace.

The Chosen of Seft coughed lightly. “Some seasons back, one of our . . . agents . . . got his hands on a book of spells of the Magi of Alta.”

He could not have secured their attention more fully if he had stood up, smashed Kaleth over the head with his staff, and proclaimed himself the Mouth of the Gods. Every eye in the room was riveted on him, as he sat there with the hint of a sardonic smile playing about his lips.

For that matter, Kiron felt rather as he had right after the Chosen had smashed him in the head with his staff.

It was Kaleth who finally spoke first. “But—how—”

“It was when those so-called advisers to the Great King first turned up, and we of Seft got whiffs of darkest magic about them,” Rakaten-te said and shrugged. “Caution bid us work in silence and in secret, as we are wont to do anyway. These men were respected, and not all dark magic is turned to evil ends. It was early days, the would-be adviser was living in a house he had rented, and our agent caught the fellow at something unsavory. Trust me, you would rather not know the details. There are some things that even one who lives in the shadows will not tolerate, and the Magus met with an—accident.”

“And the crocodiles with an offering?” asked one of the strangers.

The Chosen of Seft tilted his head to one side. “It is true that we of Seft have an understanding with the spawn of Sobekesh. And from time to time we offer them tribute. It might have been that the Magus fell into a pool where they were accustomed to be fed. Of course, we did not know he was one of the Magi then, nor did we have any clue of this until very recently. To avoid difficulties, our agent took all of the man’s personal belongings, making it look as if the fellow had run off on his own. He brought the belongings to his master, the master brought them to the temple, and an underpriest, not knowing what to do with them, took them to the Chief Scribe of Seft who ordered them put away in a chest. Recently a number of such storage chests were being gone through, and that was when we uncovered the book.” One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Our scribes are very thorough. The antecedents of the contents of that chest were tallied in a scroll on top of everything in it. Knowing now that this adviser must have been an Altan Magus, the contents were searched and the book found. It was no bigger than my hand, and I am told, written in such small characters that a man was like to have his eyes cross trying to read it.”

Kiron was waiting for the other sandal to fall. Rakaten-te had certainly been dangling it in one finger long enough. He took pity on them then and let it go. “When we realized it was written neither in Tian nor in the Altan variant script, we began trying to find someone who could read it. When that was fruitless, we began a search of the library for scrolls in obscure tongues. To shorten this tale, it appears that the book of magic is written in the tongue of the Heyksin.”

The silence was like a shout.

“The Magi of Alta were really Nameless Ones?” It was Marit who asked this, in an oddly calm voice. But Kaleth’s beloved moved to take his hand, and he to hold hers. Her slightly slanted eyes were wide with alarm that she otherwise did not show.

“Let us say that we think that the Magi of Alta were—perhaps I should say ‘are’— descended from the Nameless Ones.” Rakaten-te shrugged. “It is difficult to say whether they still had any connection with their former peoples.”

Kiron was still trying to get his mind to work. He thought it might be some time before he got his mouth to do so.

It was one thing to have his worst and yet most nebulous fear confirmed, that the shadowy attackers were in fact the Heyksin. At least he had anticipated that much.

But that the Magi were Heyksin—this smacked of a plan, a conspiracy, that must have been going on ever since the Nameless Ones were expelled from the Two Kingdoms.

“This . . . explains something,” Kaleth said slowly. “I may be the Mouth of the Gods of Alta and Tia but . . . there are other gods. . . .”

The stranger priests now turned to stare at him as if he was speaking nonsense. But Rakaten-te nodded, his lips compressed into a thin, hard line. “There are other gods. And mine is the god of difficult choices. When gods war, it is often we mortals who serve as the armies.”

The two stranger priests blanched.

Rakaten-te ignored them. “Go and commune, Mouth of the Gods of Tia and Alta. Ask them if it is war in heaven we face. And I hope you will return to me with an answer.”

The quietest and coolest place in all of Sanctuary was the cavern beneath the city where a tributary of the Great Mother River ran hidden beneath the sand and rock of the desert. At the downstream end, past where people were pulling out their water for drinking and cooking, the current inhabitants had made a kind of area for swimming and bathing. Lit by a few lanterns whose light was reflected in the placid, deep waters, when there was no one else present, it was a place of deep peace and very, very quiet. This was where Kiron took his dazed and aching head, to immerse himself in the slowly-moving water and try not to think.