Mercedes Lackey - Sanctuary

Kiron nodded to himself, as he looked out over a city that seemed very strange to the eyes of one accustomed to the straight, clean lines of the buildings of Alta and Tia. Once, Kaleth (then Prince Kaleth) had been nothing more than the quiet, studious twin brother of the more charismatic Prince Toreth. True, he, with Toreth, was one of the four designated heirs to the Thrones of Alta, but until Toreth had been murdered, he had been something of a cipher to most.

Well, he certainly wasn’t a cipher now. A Winged One of Alta, in truth, and a Priest of Haras of Tia, he spoke for the gods of both peoples.

Gods, which were, Kiron was coming to understand, one and the same. Or at least, there was so little difference it mattered not at all.

Kaleth was accepted by the Veiled Ones, the Wanderers of the desert, the Blue People, as a Seer, a Hand of the gods and a Mouth of the People as well. And if Kiron only had an imperfect understanding of what that meant, well, he knew it was a position of great respect, and that was enough for him.

As the city slumbered under the clear, predawn sky, Sanctuary hardly looked like a city at all, more like a collection of squared-off mounds, very like wind-sculpted, sand-polished mastabas, nearly the same color as the sand around them. Hardly surprising no one had found it until Kaleth led the Veiled Ones to it; even if it had not been buried beneath the dunes, when Kiron thought of a city, he thought—well, he thought of nothing at all like this. To his mind, the word “city” called up the image of the tall, angular sandstone or granite edifices of Mefis, the capital of Tia, carved and painted with images of the gods and Great Kings, reaching five, six, ten times the height of a man. Or the “city” of his slave days, the mud-brick, two-storied, mathematically laid out buildings along the narrow streets where ordinary folk dwelled. Or, possibly, the white-columned, long, low buildings of Alta, reflected in the shining surfaces of her seven ring-shaped canals. He did not think of buildings the color of sand, with rounded corners and edges, walls as thick as a man’s arm was long, and scarcely an opening to be seen anywhere.

But that was because the buildings of Sanctuary were armored against the blistering desert heat by the thickness of their stone walls, and against the sandstorm by their curves. Not even the dragons, much as they reveled in heat, spent more time in the sun than they could help, once the great disk had reached past the point of midmorning. Some of the buildings, in fact, were mere antechambers into a labyrinth of rooms carved out of the rock bed beneath the sand, a network of man-made caves which all connected eventually to that most precious of desert treasures, the water source that lay at the heart of Sanctuary itself.

Water. Water was the reason for anything made by man in the desert. Men sought for it, fought over it, bartered what was most precious to them for it, killed and died for it and for lack of it. And yet here, through long years gone, and until the gods permitted it to be found again, was a kingdom’s ransom of the precious stuff.

Beneath the sand, beneath the rock that lay beneath the sand, there flowed a river of the purest water, a quiet, steady stream, clear and cool, that widened here into a channel as wide as Great Mother River, and deep enough that it took an effort to touch the bottom, before narrowing again and flowing onward toward the Altan delta. Kiron supposed it must come to the surface at some point, but no one had yet been able to pinpoint that spot, not even the wise desert dwellers, the Veiled Ones, who themselves had (until now) not even guessed that here was the life-giver that fed a great many of their oases. Here was the reason for Sanctuary existing at all, the reason it had been built in the far past. Here was the reason why Sanctuary was able to prosper now. Even the Veiled Ones required water, and in this part of the desert that they called the Furnace and the Anvil of the Gods, they deemed it more valuable than the caches of gold that the new owners of Sanctuary were still discovering when wind freed another building from the grip of the sand.

Which might happen today, actually. Kaleth had hinted as much, calling the storm the instrument of the gods, and saying that in the past, it had given what was needed when it was needed. And, certainly, Sanctuary was still surrounded on all sides by dunes and hard-packed sand. There was no telling what might lie beneath some of those mounds.

A voice behind him interrupted his thoughts. “What do you think the sandstorm will show us when it passes?”

“Sometimes, I wonder if it isn’t only the dragons’ thoughts you can read, Aket-ten,” Kiron laughed, turning to wrinkle his nose at the only female Jouster—to his knowledge—ever to fly a dragon.

Aket-ten, sister to his good friend Orest, dimpled at him, as awake and alert as if this was midday. Well, she always had been a lover of the morning, already up and doing while he and Orest were still shaking the sleep from their eyes. It was a small fault, that. She was in all other ways, to his mind anyway, anything that anyone could ask for in a companion.

Not perfect, but who wanted perfection? It would be far too tiring to have to live up to the perfection of another. A companion who had flaws, now, that meant that you could have an affectionate rivalry without feeling as if there was no chance that you could ever come up to the standards set by your friend.

She was not too tall, but Kiron himself was by no means overly tall. Besides, the best Jousters were light and lean, for the less of a burden they were to their mounts, the better. Light and lean, Aket-ten certainly was, reed-slim and shorter than he, and he was no giant. Her lively black eyes met his with a look of acceptance and candor, and her ready smile warmed them further with good humor. If she did not have the finely chiseled and perfectly regular features of one of the images of the goddesses, she had a face that was full of personality. Since coming to Sanctuary she had chosen to forsake wigs and wear her own blue-black hair cut in the short helmet style favored by the rest of the wing, which made her look superficially like one of them, but the gentle curves under her simple linen tunic made it clear with only a second glance that this was no boy.

She wasn’t beautiful, but truth to tell, Kiron found himself somewhat intimidated by beauty. The elegance of court ladies made him flush and feel tongue-tied, and that was when they had ignored him. When they had spoken to him or glanced at him or—worst of all—smiled, he found himself looking for someone to hide behind. But when Aket-ten smiled, which was far more often here than she had back in Alta, she always made him smile in return. What more could anyone ask?

Once one of the Fledglings of the Altan Temple of the Twins, one of her strongest Gifts was that of Silent Speech with animals. While in the past she had sometimes disparaged herself for having such a “minor” Gift, it had been worth more even than being god-touched on that black day when Kaleth’s twin brother, Toreth, had been murdered by the Magi, and his dragon had nearly thrown herself (and every other dragon in the compound) into suicidal hysterics with grief.

Until first Ari, the Tian Jouster, then Kiron, and then the eight other Altan boys had raised dragons themselves, from the egg, it had been unthinkable that a dragon should actually have a bond of affection with its Jouster. Dragons were, at best, controllable, and only when drugged with the dust made from a dried desert berry called tala. No one had ever thought that a bonded dragon, if it lost its Jouster, would choose to give its loyalty to another.

But that was exactly what had happened when Toreth died, and his midnight-blue-and-shaded-silver dragon Re-eth-katen had nearly died of her grief and loss. When Aket-ten “spoke” to Re-eth-katen and comforted her, that dragon had bonded again to the Fledgling Priestess, and had become her dragon, renamed Re-eth-ke, thus making Aket-ten the first ever female in the Jousters’ Compound as anything other than servant or couch companion. Just as well, since it had only been possible for her to hide from the increasingly imperious demands of the Magi in that one place in all of Alta. The dragons did not like the Magi, and not all the tala in the world could stop them from making that dislike evident.