Mercedes Lackey - Sanctuary

Time had just run out.

He wanted to turn back and take on another passenger, but Avatre was not having any of that idea, and at any rate, she was burdened with as much as she could bear right now. So Kiron and his passenger flapped off into the darkness, both of them looking over their shoulders in white-lipped silence, until the temple, with its rising fires, was out of sight.

In fact, it was a rougher ride than before, as Avatre dodged and snapped at arrows as she rose, and continued to fly evasively even when there were no missiles speeding toward them. His passenger hung on grimly, arms wrapped around Kiron’s chest, sucking in his breath in pain whenever Avatre jolted sideways.

Despite his orders to everyone else, he urged Avatre to greater speed. This was only the fourth trip. How many more would they be able to manage before fire consumed the temple? One? Two at most? There was no point in saving her strength now. . . .

Mercifully, his passenger was silent except for the occasional whimper of pain. Kiron wondered what he had been to the Winged Ones, since he was not wearing their emblem, but evidently felt enough authority to try to reason with the Magi’s men. Was he the Overseer of the Temple Servants? Merely someone of rank caught in the temple when the siege started?

The flight took far, far longer than he wanted it to, even though Avatre had caught his urgency and was flying faster than she’d ever dared do in darkness before. He landed Avatre hard, and hurried to untie himself from his passenger, but because of the man’s head injury, the helpers had tied him on far more securely than the last, and the knots resisted his clawing fingers. Orest landed while he was still trying to get the ropes undone—

—and then, with the edges of his passenger’s cloak still smoldering, Ari landed—and behind him, in a cluster, all the rest. Including Aket-ten.

And no one had a passenger except Orest and Ari.

He felt a sick numbness wash over him as his hands went cold. He caught Ari’s eyes as Ari handed down a middle-aged woman who was still coughing, and Ari shook his head.

His mind wouldn’t encompass it. Surely the fires couldn’t have moved that fast! Surely there was time for another round of rescues—

But Aket-ten was weeping silently, tears making black tracks through the soot and ash on her face.

“I don’t understand it,” Gan said, his voice flat and expressionless. “It all burned like everything was soaked in oil. Even the stone was burning! It makes no sense!”

“Some mischief of the Magi, I’ve no doubt,” replied Aunt Re grimly, as two of her servants cut the last man free from Kiron and handed him down. “Some way to make stone burn like wood, and wood like oil-soaked papyrus.” She said nothing more then, only went to Aket-ten, who slid down from Re-eth-ke’s back and into her aunt’s comforting arms.

Kiron felt cold all over. He thought about the men he’d last seen on that rooftop, about the servants that might have been still waiting just below, and wanted to vomit. He glanced up in the direction of the city, and saw an ugly red glare on the horizon.

When he looked back down again, one of Re’s servants was handing him a bundle: a waterskin and food. “What—” he began.

The High Priestess moved out of the shadows like a ghost, startling him. “New orders, Wingleader,” she said gravely. “Orders sent through me to you, from the Mouth of the Gods who is called Kaleth. There is no reason to stay, and your presence will bring danger to Re-keron as the Magi seek for your dragons. Come home, he says. We will scatter, and come to Sanctuary safe.”

Kiron swallowed down his nausea and looked at the others. “Can you all make the flight?” he asked.

One by one, they nodded as Re’s servants handed them identical bundles to his. Even Aket-ten looked up, face smeared with tears and soot, and nodded. And he felt, at that moment, a terrible, aching need for the desert, for a place that was clean, where people did not put each other to the flame because they could not be controlled.

And where other people did not stand by and watch them do so. He had thought the Tians were cruel. What the Magi had turned his own people into was something far worse—people who now were so afraid for themselves that they had lost every vestige of morality.

“Right,” he said harshly. “Let’s get out of here.”

And that was what haunted him, the entire flight back. The priestess had called it a “rot.” If so, it was a rot that killed the conscience, and maybe the soul along with it. Those people had watched the Magi drag the Winged Ones away, day after day, and had done nothing. They had watched the Magi’s men lay siege to the temple for weeks, and had done nothing. The mob that had finally gathered to protest had done very little, and had scattered quickly when the Eye was used. And it should have been possible to save the Winged Ones; why had the army not rebelled at their treatment? No point in saying they were under orders either; since when was it right to follow orders you knew were immoral?

And tonight, they had watched while the Magi’s men prepared to burn the temple to the ground, and had done nothing.

And it had all begun long before this. Hadn’t they been spending these last moons simply looking the other way while friends and relations were denounced and hauled away? Hadn’t many of them been willing to make accusations of their own to prove their “loyalty” and turn suspicious eyes away from themselves?

And why? Because they were too attached to possessions, to the city itself, to flee? Because it was easy to look away when the Magi were only hurting the foreigners, or the nobles, or the people in the next Ring that you didn’t know, and because when you looked the other way once, it was easy to keep doing so?

Or because it was easier to believe the lies that the Magi told? Easier not to think for one’s own self? Easier to accept at face value everything that was told to you?

It gnawed at him all the way back, and when he and Avatre finally landed in the gray light of dawn, he felt as if he could not sleep until he had cleaned his body of the stench of burning. He went down into the cavern, and took a rare bath, scrubbing himself until his skin felt raw to be rid of the smell.

He went to find Aket-ten, but she was nowhere to be seen. Maybe that was just as well. He wasn’t sure he could offer her any kind of comfort, when she had just seen a place where she knew people burning to the ground.

When he staggered off to his bed, Avatre was already asleep, and as he gazed on her, he felt a moment of envy to see her, so calm and peaceful, with no nightmares to trouble her sleep.

They certainly troubled his, that night, and for many nights to come.

And yet, sooner than he would have thought, things got back to normal, or mostly normal.

Perhaps it was because he had not actually seen the temple burning. Only Ari had endured that particular sight, and maybe his experience in fighting had hardened him somewhat to such things. Maybe it was because, once the last of the Winged Ones arrived, there was another shrine made to the memories and spirits of those who had been lost.

Maybe it was nothing more than time—time which was, of a certainty, filled.

It would have been far worse had Aket-ten actually witnessed the horror of the burning temple, but the others had turned her back at the halfway point, and all she knew was that it had burned, and those who were left, with it. She sought Kiron out the night after their return to Sanctuary, and spent all of it weeping herself sick in his arms. It was a very long night; perhaps the longest in his life, save only one. He would have spared her that distress if he could have.