Mercedes Lackey - Sanctuary

Well, it’s not as if it’s going to make any difference.

Incredibly, no one on the ground saw the dragon landing on the roof. But then, Re-eth-ke was a flickering shadow in the smoke, indigo with a confusing touch of silver. When she rose again with her double burden, she was still barely visible among the shifting shadows in the smoke, and there was no outcry.

Not so for Avatre.

As she fanned her wings to land, he heard the cries from below, and ducked instinctively as arrows whistled through the night sky. As his helpers handed his next passenger up behind him, and tied them together with rope, he saw that they all had improvised wicker shields strapped to their backs. A moment later, he understood why, as a clatter of spent arrows bounced off the shields or the rooftop. One or two had a little more energy and stuck in the shields.

His young female passenger shook with fear; no older than Aket-ten, surely, and just as surely had never personally seen a shot fired in anger, much less had one directed at her. Those who helped tie her in place were made of sterner stuff.

“Clever story they’re putting out about you,” said one of those men he’d thought he’d recognized last night. “Evidently you’re Tians, come to steal us away.”

“Really?” He gave the rope a good hard tug to test it, and coughed as he breathed in a little too much smoke. “I don’t suppose they’ve got an explanation as to why you’re tying yourselves onto our dragons.”

“Not yet,” came the reply, and a sardonic sneer. “But I expect they’ll think of something soon. They’re shooting to kill us, you know. I overheard the Captain of Tens giving the orders. We’re better off dead than in your hands, according to him.”

A muffled wail behind his back made it very clear what his passenger thought of all this.

“Then we’ll just have to be where the arrows aren’t,” he said, keeping his tone confident. The helpers stepped away, and he sent Avatre up.

His passenger alternated distraught sobs with coughs the entire way back; he tried to get some answers out of her, but she replied with nothing but weeping. He tried not to be too irritated with her, but it was difficult; he desperately wanted to know how many people were left in that temple, and she was about as sensible as a terrified hare and just as articulate.

As he approached the temple the second time, he saw that there were archers not only on the ground, but on the roofs of nearby buildings, trying to keep up a steady barrage of arrows. Most fell short, but there were enough that were reaching the roof of the temple that he felt a thrill of alarm. But when he landed this time, instead of the clattering of falling shafts, or worse, the sound of arrows striking nearby, there was nothing, and he wondered why—

Wondered, until he heard the swish of arrows through air again and a thudding—but it was a thudding sound that was far off to the right, literally as far away as it was possible to get and still be on the rooftop. He looked to that side, and to his utter astonishment, saw a roll of straw matting standing on the edge of the roof, bristling with arrows, with more thudding into it with each moment.

“Magic,” said one of the helpers, following his glance. “Your current passenger’s idea.” He patted the middle-aged woman’s plump arm, and she smiled wanly. “Seems she’s been dabbling in Magus work; learned it from some Akkadian friend of hers. Now that straw roll somehow sucks all the arrows toward it. Damned useful, but now it’s time for you to get her out of here.”

Avatre launched herself skyward before he could reply; she didn’t want to be on that roof any more than he did. His passenger looked down at the besiegers as they passed overhead, and shivered.

“It’s a very difficult thing, seeing all those people and knowing they want to kill you,” she said forlornly, as they passed into darker, cleaner air and out over the canal.

“It’s what every soldier sees, when he looks at the enemy,” he offered, hoping to make her feel a little better, or at least, less vulnerable.

“You’re right, of course,” she said. “But it’s still a hard thing. No one ever wanted to kill me before.”

He thought about how cherished, how respected, admired, even loved the Winged Ones had been, and felt a certain sympathy for her distress.

“You’ve been very sheltered,” he said reluctantly.

She said nothing for a while. Then, “Too sheltered,” she replied, sounding a little less sorry for herself. “If we had been paying attention, instead of isolating ourselves in our own little world, we would have noticed that rot beginning. What’s happening now is partly our own fault. There were signs . . . when the Magi singled out certain Nestlings for extra training that somehow made them lose their powers, or sent them on errands during which there were . . . accidents. But when the Magi proposed making the storms stronger, it seemed like such a good idea at the time—”

“It might go back farther than that,” he pointed out, as Avatre sneezed, then pumped her wings to get a little more height. “Back to when they first made the Eye.”

“Oh, yes. The Eye.” He felt her shiver. “How could we ever have thought that was a good idea? It’s not like building walls; walls can’t be turned against your own people. We should have known then that they were on no one’s side but their own.”

Yes, you should have, he thought. For people who were supposedly Far-Sighted, you certainly kept looking in the wrong places.

His passenger didn’t know how many people were left in the temple, but when he returned for another trip, he saw something going on below that made him think they had even less time than he’d assumed.

The besiegers were building piles of wood against the doors. And he thought about what the man on the roof had said; “ Better dead than in your hands.”

The doors were wood, not stone; set fires against them and the doors would burn through, the fire moving into the building through all that closely-packed furniture and debris. How long would the fires burn before they reached the roof? The rooms below were crammed full of all manner of flammable furnishings to prevent the besiegers from breaking in once the doors were broken down. Fire would block the exits as soon as the doors burned through. There would be no escape that way.

There was a crowd gathering on the edge of the temple grounds, watching. Would they do anything if they saw the Magi’s men were going to burn out the Winged Ones? Or were they, by this point, too afraid? Had the use of the Eye destroyed any spirit of rebellion that still lay within them? He was rather afraid that it had.

He landed, and took aboard his first physically injured passenger, a middle-aged man with a heavily bandaged head who seemed dizzy and partly disoriented. “When he saw what they were doing down there, he went to the edge of the roof and tried to reason with them,” said the man Kiron thought had once been a Winged One, and whose name he still didn’t know. “Somebody got him with a stone from a sling. Don’t let him fall asleep.”

“No fear of that,” Kiron replied, as the man climbed up behind him, clumsily. “It’s not exactly a smooth ride.”

“They’re coming!” called someone who was watching at the edge of the roof under cover of an improvised shield.

“Get out of here!” the man barked at Kiron, slapping at Avatre’s shoulder, startling her into rearing away from him, then leaping skyward, before he could ask who or what was coming.

Not that it mattered; he saw what it was as soon as Avatre cleared the rooftop. “They” were more of the Magi’s men, and they were firing the wood stacked up against the doors of the Temple.