Mercedes Lackey - Alta

It could well be, then, that the Magi were to blame for Aket-ten’s apparent sloth—but such idle speculations were not getting Aket-ten up.

He tried shaking her so hard he rattled the cot, with just about the same result. The harder he shook her, the tighter she curled up. Short of bringing a wall down on her, he didn’t think merely shaking her was going to do any good.

So with a sigh, he finally decided that he would have to resort to the unthinkably rude. Even serfs who had been worked to exhaustion and were more dead than asleep responded to what he was about to do.

He went out, got a pot full of cold water, came back to her chamber, pulled back the covers over her head, and dumped the contents of the pot over her face.

Then he jumped back and a good thing, too, because she came up with a yell, swinging wildly at the darkness around her. She was awake now, all right, angry, and spitting fury. And it was a good thing that she was still tangled up in her blanket, because she probably would have given him a bloody nose for his little trick.

But she was tangled up in her blanket, and the time it took her to struggle free was enough for him to protest and try to explain, with all the sincerity he could muster and from the other side of the chamber, “Aket-ten! I’m sorry! I swear I am sorry, and I will make it up to you! It was the only way I could wake you up, I swear to you, and I tried, I really tried!”

She stood there in the semidarkness, kicking free of the blanket, and he was terribly glad that it was semidarkness that filled the chamber because she wasn’t wearing anything at all beneath that blanket. All that wool suddenly felt very hot, and very prickly, as he flushed. Not that what she usually wore was much less revealing, but still—

She stood panting with anger, but it was anger that was cooling as she listened to him babble out his explanation. Finally, she tossed her wet hair over her shoulder and said, with great suspicion, “You swear on your father’s ghost? You swear that my brother didn’t put you up to this?”

“I swear!” he said immediately. “And there’s something very odd going on. There’s not a single other person awake, and I bet if you were to lie down, you’d be asleep in a moment. What’s more, I bet if we tried to go wake any of the others up, they’d be as hard to stir as you were. It was just like this at the start of the rains last year. I was the only one awake. It was—” he shook his head “—it was disturbing.”

“The Magi,” she said instantly, confirming his suspicion. “There must be something that they don’t want anyone to see about the start of the rains.” He couldn’t see her face, but he could hear the frown in her voice. “I’m not sure I want to know what it is, or why.”

He swallowed. He wasn’t either, now that he came to think about it. If the Magi were not at all reticent about people knowing they were interfering with the Winged Ones, what was it they felt they had to hide—and felt it so strongly they had to put the entire city to sleep?

His mouth tasted sour. I can’t do everything, he reminded himself. All I can do is try to follow Toreth’s plan, and hope that once we take the Jousters out of the mix—it will weaken the Magi. Only then can we try to come up with the next plan.

“Whatever it is, it’s nothing we can do anything about,” she said flatly, echoing his own thoughts. “We take the Jousters out of the war and free the Winged Ones. They have more authority than we.”

She moved over to the wall, into the complete darkness, and he heard her fumbling about, then the sounds of someone putting on unfamiliar garments. Then she came back into the dim light from the doorway, pausing only to tie her wool foot bags in place. “If there’s something that the Magi don’t want people to watch, I want to see it. Come on!”

Together, carrying their sheepskin capes, they padded down the corridor to the landing courtyard. And there, just as last year, they watched the spectacular lighting and thunder show that centered on the Tower of Wisdom. Kiron was not altogether certain, but it seemed to him that it was more violent than it had been last year. Then again, the Magi were using the Winged Ones now, and not the Fledglings. He felt sick, wondering just what it was that was happening inside that tower.

Aket-ten frowned with concentration as she watched it, braiding up her hair as she did. “I wish I knew what to look for,” she mumbled, staring fixedly at the point in the sky that was just above the tower, around which all of the storm clouds seemed to be rotating. “Gods take them! What could be so important that they need to keep the whole city asleep? I wish I had thought to ask Heklatis to watch this. Is it too late to try and wake him, do you think?”

“Maybe. If everything happens the way it did last year, the whole storm is going to break soon. How long has that been going on?” he asked.

She shook her head, and tossed the end of her braid over her shoulder. “I don’t know. I mean, everyone always sleeps on the first day of the rains, it’s a holiday even for slaves. There’s not a lot of point in getting up early, the downpour is too heavy, and it’s too dark to do anything until later in the day. I always looked forward to it and never thought about it, not really, and I suppose that’s how everyone else feels. It’s been this way for years, anyway.”

Finally the show ended in that tremendous crack of lightning and peal of thunder that he remembered from the previous year, and the skies opened up. They stood there, staring at the waterfalls of rain pouring from the sky, then finally she shook her head.

“Let’s go get the dust,” she said. “Heklatis said he was fixing rainproof bags for us last night.”

They made their way to Heklatis’ quarters. Aket-ten pulled her cape over her head and made a dash across his courtyard to the first door, which led into a room Heklatis used as a workshop. She came back a moment later with four bulging, heavy-looking bags, made of leather, shiny with beeswax rubbed on the outside.

“Here they are,” she said, putting two of them down at his feet. “And he rigged them that way to release the dust for us, like he promised! He must have found a way to make it work.”

Kiron picked up one of the bags to examine it with interest. Heklatis had pledged that he was going to try to find a way for them to trickle the dust out gradually without having to cut a hole in the bottom of the bag while flying. He couldn’t test it without losing the dust, of course, but it looked as if the clever Akkadian had been as good as his word. There was a sturdy wooden handle attached to a stout leather cord, which in turn was attached to a patch on the bottom of the bag that looked as if it was meant to rip free with a good hard tug. He put the bag down again.

“I hope you brought a knife anyway,” he said. Aket-ten fumbled at the front of her tunic and pulled up a cord, which was attached to a small knife in a leather sheath hung around her neck. Kiron’s was strapped over his woolen leg coverings on his right calf. He nodded.

“The day isn’t getting longer,” he said, and led the way to Vash’s pen.

It took some doing to get the swamp dragon up out of her wallow. It was cold out of the water, and dark, and she didn’t want to leave. He didn’t blame her; if he’d had any choice, he would be in bed at this moment himself. Aket-ten spent a great deal of time nose-to-nose with the dull green dragon before she emerged from the water with a groan, and grumbled her way over to the saddle stand so that he could put her rig on her.

Once Aket-ten judged it was safe to leave the two of them alone, she went back out into the corridor to deal with Letoth herself.