Mercedes Lackey - Aerie

As if I have a choice? This was the final barrier. It needed to come down. Whatever lay on the other side of it, they needed and needed swiftly. “Yes,” Kiron replied, just as brusquely.

The priest grunted, then said, “Sit somewhere near me. And be silent. This is not a magic of brute force, but of planning and concentration.”

Kiron obeyed, throttling down his own impatience. From Aket-ten’s explanations, he had a good idea what the priest was asking for. The strength for a spell had to come from somewhere. Either it came from inside the magic worker himself—which was why those other priests had collapsed—or it came from some source outside. The Altan Magi had stolen their power, stripping it from the god-touched priests and acolytes of Alta, and from the premature deaths of the war. The Tian priests—the ones he’d seen so far, at any rate—were more ethical.

This one wanted to use Kiron as his source of strength.

Well, if it would get the job done . . . from Kiron’s perspective, this was certainly preferable to hauling stone.

So he sat where the priest directed and put his back against the wall. He had the feeling he was going to need the support before it was all over. Now there was nothing but silence, and the very occasional plashing of the spring running under that final blockage.

He knew when the priest was taking—whatever it was—too. It felt as if he was running, except that he wasn’t. It was just a steady drain of strength and energy. Not a lot, nor all at once, and not debilitating to the point where he was passing out, but there was no doubt that something was going on, that in some way, life energy was sapping from him and going somewhere else.

Even though all he could see from where he sat was the priest with his hands and forehead pressed up against the rock.

But then a new sound in the tunnel made him look more closely.

It was the sound of dripping water.

The departing workers had left all their lamps and torches stuck wherever they could be wedged or balanced, so there was plenty of light, and in addition, sheets of reflective, polished metal outside were sending bright patches of sunlight down here. And now, in that light, Kiron first noticed that the volume of water running through the channel at his feet had easily doubled.

The next thing that he noticed was that all around the edges of the bottom half of the stone jamming the bottleneck, there were little trickles, tiny streamlets that had not been there before. And even as he watched a spot that had been previously dry, he saw first a single drop of water well to the surface of the hairline crack, then a second and a third, then the drops became a trickle, then the trickle a thin stream down the face of the rock,

And he realized a moment later that somehow that crack, almost invisible to the eye, was widening.

He had to pull his feet up now, the water was getting so deep.

Then there was a wet pop, and the rock itself cracked across the middle from right to left, and water began to trickle from the crack.

That was the beginning of the end. The rock cracked, and cracked, and cracked again, but only the bottom half. Soon the bottom half of the rock shimmered with water, and even with his feet pulled up, Kiron was ankle-deep in the stream.

Then the priest pulled away from the stone, and the steady drain on Kiron ended.

“I think we need to leave here and let Tam-kalet do his work,” the priest—whose name Kiron still didn’t know—said hoarsely. “The water has undermined the entire bottom half of that blockage; that is why it was cracking. I do not know when it will succumb to the stress.”

Kiron didn’t need a second invitation. He shoved himself up off the rock and realized, as he staggered away, that he was as completely spent as he had ever been in his life.

And cold, cold. As he stumbled into the harsh sunlight, the warmth felt good on his numb skin. He sat down abruptly on the first place that looked comfortable, as the priest’s fellows came and assisted him away. Tam-kalet and two others went back inside the tunnel, after warning everyone else to stay back.

Just as Kiron was actually starting to feel warm again, they came running out, a grinding sound echoing from the tunnel behind them.

Tam-kalet jumped up onto the rocks stacked up to the right of the tunnel entrance. The other two scrambled over the ones to the left. And just in time, for a muddy wave of water and rocks tumbled together surged out hard on their heels with a roar.

When everything had settled again, the spring was back in its old bed. As near as Kiron could tell, the stream it fed was back at the highest level it had been in when Aerie was in its prime.

The priests that remained stared at the stream in satisfaction, but it was Rakaten-te who spoke, standing off to one side and leaning on his staff.

“Kaleth, Marit. It is our turn now.”

Kaleth gestured to two of the younger priests. One stepped forward to act as Rakaten-te’s guide, the other followed the trio. Kiron was curious, but his exhaustion overcame his curiosity. He knew he would find out what, if anything, was in there eventually, and for the moment, recovering his strength seemed more important than anything else.

It was not very much later that all five of them came out again. This time it was Kaleth who led the elder priest, while the two junior priests carried a small chest between them. It seemed very heavy for its size; after a moment, it occurred to him that it must be made of stone, and he wondered what could be so important that it required a stone chest to hold it.

Well, whatever it was, it seemed to be what Kaleth and Rakaten-te were looking for. They paused, as the two young priests went on with the chest, presumably to the Temple of Haras.

“We have found what we were sent to find,” Kaleth said into the waiting stillness. “The Great King and Queen have been sent for, because the enemy comes apace, and the time has come to end what was here begun.”

His words did not have the otherworldly ring about them that they had when he was speaking directly for the gods, but Kiron had no doubt that his words came from them anyway. As the rest of those waiting, Jousters, workers, priests and all, looked at one another in befuddlement and began to murmur, Rakaten-te rapped his staff three times on the stone to silence them.

“Prepare yourselves, people of Aerie, of the Two Kingdoms. The Heyksin come. And this time their Magi, and perhaps their gods, come with them.”

Outside the temple, even through stone walls as thick as his arm was long, Kiron could hear the murmur of voices. Not surprising since just about every living soul in Aerie was out there right now.

With that single word, “Heyksin,” every difference that had ever existed between the people, and the Jousters, of Tia and Alta had disappeared. It was what Ari and Nofret had wanted so badly—

Be careful what you wish for . . .

Kiron could not help thinking about those words, now so grimly prophetic. And yet, that wish had nothing to do with a plan that must have been a-building for tens of tens of years. Even if the Magi of Alta were not in league with their Heyksin cousins, it still must have been a-building for that long. It was just too well-plotted, too well-executed. Had not that one single man escaped . . . had he not gotten far enough and at the right time for his body to have been spotted by patrolling Jousters . . . then all of the border towns could have been removed and the way would have been clear for a Heyksin army led by Magi to strike straight at the heart of Tia. Alta was already weak and shaking. Tia’s troops were decimated even if the land itself and the majority of the people were still secure. It would have been the ideal time to strike. Heyksin forces could have taken Mefis with scarcely a battle. And even if Ari and Nofret had escaped by dragon, where could they have gone?