Mercedes Lackey - Sanctuary

But this was Alta, where water was abundant, so after he saw Avatre fed, he allowed the servant to take him off to the baths, both hot and cold. And once re-clothed in a common tunic of the sort Aunt Re gave her upper servants, which was enough like what the Jousters wore these days that it made no difference, he helped himself from the food left out for all of them and made a hasty meal. Aket-ten was the last of the riders to wake, and he didn’t blame her for sleeping so long; she had been doing two jobs at once—guiding her own dragon, and keeping track of all of the rest of them.

She woke just as quickly as he had when she finally did break through her slumbers, and was just as impatient to be gone as the rest of them. She surely imparted that impatience to the dragons, all ten of them, for the moment she came awake, they began to fidget and look skyward. And at that moment, Kiron would have given all that he had or ever hoped to have for one flight—just one!—with all the wings that Alta had once had. With that many dragons, they could have left now, to arrive just after sunset, and it wouldn’t matter who saw them. The Magi couldn’t use the Eye at night, and they would have been able to pull out every last person all at once.

But dragons had no mystical ability to go back or forward in time, so the wing he had was all he was going to get. And as soon as Aket-ten had rejoined them, hair plastered flat to her skull from her bath, he called a meeting.

“Last night was the easy one,” he told them, and at Orest’s indignant stare, shook his head. “Yes, I know, from just the point of view of uncertainty about whether we’d get the dragons up at all, it was the hard one. But in terms of getting people out, it was the easy one.” He tilted his head to the side, then lifted his head and looked each of them in the eyes. “Think about it; we had it all our own way last night. The Magi were busy making sure of their own safety, and didn’t give a toss about anyone else. We got out the children, the old, and the sick, all of them lightweight, all of them tractable.”

“Or unconscious,” Gan said soberly, raking his fingers through his hair to help it dry. “You have a good point, though; easy to fly, and they didn’t make a fuss, or scream, or anything.”

“Tonight, we get the able-bodied and the heaviest, but there’s more to it than that,” he replied. “The people we will take out tonight are the senior Winged Ones, ruling priests, important priestesses. They’re used to giving orders and having them obeyed.”

“What possible orders could they give?” Pe-atep asked, incredulously. “ ‘Fly faster’? As if we could?”

Oset-re made a face and shook his head. “They’re Great Lords and Ladies in their own right. Who knows what they’ll demand when we are airborne?”

Kiron silently applauded Oset-re for seeing at once where the danger was. He was very aware of Aunt Re standing off to one side, listening, but not commenting. “We are very young men, all looking rather like servants—and one young woman with what is, by their standards, a minor power, who should by all rights rank just about Fledgling status. They won’t think when they see us. If they aren’t too sick and tired to do anything but hang on, there is no telling what they might try to order us to do.”

“Fly lower!” squeaked Gan in an imperious-old-lady voice, swatting at Pe-atep. Aunt Re hid a smile behind her hand.

He nodded. Now he had to remind them of what they were and that they had to disobey. “Or higher. Certainly faster or slower. And while you might be able to fob them off by telling them the dragons can’t do that, there’s other things they might want you to do. Stop, because I must get this or that treasure or sacred object. Land there to tell my mother I’m safe—” he shrugged. “There’s no telling. But they might well become real nuisances, some of them, when they’re in the air. They’ve been powerless a long time. They’ll want to command something, if only us.”

“Trouble.” Orest shook his head. “You don’t think they’ll go so far as to fight us, do you?”

For that, he had to look to Aket-ten and Orest.

Aket-ten shook her head. “I think they’ll still be torn between the excitement of escape and the fear of being captured. But they might start to shout, and—voices coming from the sky might not be a good idea.”

“Try telling them no matter what they want, it’s Lord Khumun’s orders,” Orest offered. “Most of them know they can half-bully Father, but nobody’s ever gotten around Lord Khumun, not even a Winged One.”

Well, if it came to that, Lord Khumun was going to end up with an earful when they finally all got to Sanctuary.

Lord Khumun can take care of himself, he decided.

“I just want you to keep those things in mind,” he went on. “First, heavier passengers. Second, passengers who want to make demands. And three—” he paused. “We don’t know what the Magi have done in our absence, nor what they might do after darkness falls. Maybe they’ll still be too concerned with their own safety and comfort after so big a shake that they won’t keep a magical eye on the temple. But I don’t think we can count on that. Do you?”

One by one, the others shook their heads. Overhead, vultures circled on the thermals their dragons would be using, if only they could, dared, fly by day. At least darkness would hide them in part. Until they came in to pick up the first escapees. Until they came into the light.

“So tonight we run the risk of being seen.” He chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t think there’s anything we can really do about that—not being overlooked by magic, anyway.”

“Uh—” Aket-ten flushed, and held up a fistful of leather thongs. “I think these might help.”

He peered at them, frowning. There were little faience medallions hanging from them. They looked familiar.

“Pashet’s teeth!” exclaimed Oset-re with delight. “Heklatis’ amulets!” He jumped to his feet, pulled Aket-ten up, whirled her around like a child, and kissed her on the top of the head before letting her drop back down again, flushed and laughing.

“Here,” she said, passing them out. “I collected them after we came to Sanctuary; you lot kept losing them or leaving them lying around, and there’s no point in discarding something magic, even if you don’t need it at the time. I thought they might be useful again. Heklatis knows I have them and I told him I was taking them along. He said it was a good thing, otherwise he’d have had to make a new batch and send them along, and I saved him the work.”

Kiron accepted the amulet with a rueful shrug; once in the safety of Sanctuary, he’d been one of the worst at forgetting to keep track of his amulet. Heklatis had made them to interfere with the Magi’s scrying, or seeing-at-a-distance, back when they were all in the Jousters’ Compound together. But although the protection had been priceless while they were scheming to destroy the tala and escape right under the Magi’s noses, they had seemed of little utility out in the middle of the trackless desert, where the distance and Kaleth’s god-assisted protections kept them from being overlooked by means of magic.

But Aket-ten never forgot anything, it seemed.

“All right, then,” he said, pulling the thong over his head. “We can keep them from seeing us with magic, but we can’t stop someone from spotting us just by looking up. So we have to assume they will have eyes in the city, especially eyes keeping watch on the temple, and those eyes will report whatever they see. Even if it’s dragons where no dragons should be.”

Oset-re snorted, and behind him, her neck arched so that her head was right above his, coppery Apetma snorted so exactly like him that, serious as the situation was, it startled a laugh out of all of them.