Mercedes Lackey - Alta

It was unlikely in the extreme that anyone would even guess that he and Kiron had spent the better part of two days making a mold of his amulet, casting dozens of copies, firing them, and stringing them on cords, nor that it had been Heklatis, not some priest, who had put the spells on them. How supremely ironic it had been, that Kiron had used the skills he had picked up in the service of Khefti-the-Fat!

As for why Heklatis would have bestowed those amulets on the boys—the reason was simple. He, and they, would claim truthfully that they had asked for them, seeing the image of a winged solar disk on them, so like the same symbol of the Altan sun god.

Clever, clever Akkadian. How would they have managed without him?

He would have liked to ask Kaleth about a hundred questions, but Kaleth downed the last of his soup, drinking it straight from the bowl, and left the table. The rest of them exchanged glances after he left that varied from resignation to astonishment. Whatever was going on, it was Kaleth, above all of them, who had the most to lose, and knew how careful they must be. He would not have told them to do this unless there was a very, very good reason.

So, how to come up with a good excuse for the whole lot of them to descend on Heklatis. . . .

It seems as if I spend half my life now trying to come up with innocent reasons to do something in case someone is watching, he thought wearily. I am very tired of this.

He couldn’t help but wonder now—if he had known that this was what his life would come to, would he have returned to Alta at all?

Finally Kiron spoke aloud. “You all look like trampled barley,” he said. “And I feel like trampled barley. Finish your dinner, and as wingleader, I am ordering the entire wing to visit the Healer. I want him to look us over carefully, one and all. Potions at dinner are all very well, but I think we ought to get the Healer to check us completely. The last thing I want is for one or more of us to fall ill. A mistake in the air can be fatal.”

“Well,” said Gan, after a moment. “Since he mixed the last potion he gave me with distilled palm wine, I’m not going to object too strongly. I’m tired, but too nervy to sleep anyway; maybe he can give me something to make me relax and drop off.”

The rest nodded. “I want something for this eye,” Orest said ruefully—ruefully, because the eye was his own fault. He had actually smacked himself with the Jousting lance.

Kiron didn’t hurry them as they finished their meal. That would have looked odd, and the last thing he wanted was for anything to look odd at the moment.

Besides, no matter how urgent Kaleth thought the situation was, he was in no great hurry to hear it. Only when they were all through, Aket-ten included, did he nod and climb stiffly over the bench to lead them to Heklatis’ rooms.

They were able to walk under awnings most of the way, and only had to dash under the young waterfall pouring down over the awning at the break where the corridor met the entrance to the courtyard. By now it was dark, but the door of the main room was open and warm lantern light shone invitingly out at them.

The room was as inviting as the light had promised, and their host had laid out cushions and stools for all of them. Kaleth was already there, waiting for them and looking as tense as a strung harp, and so was Heklatis, of course. Once they were all inside, Heklatis shut the door after them, and made a peculiar, twisting little gesture on the surface of it.

Kaleth relaxed at once. “Now we can talk,” he said with gratitude. “Kiron, I have to leave.”

Kiron was more than a little startled. That was not what he had expected to hear! “All right,” he said cautiously. “So—”

“It’s not what you think,” Kaleth interrupted. “It’s not that the Magi are coming for me yet, and it’s not that I don’t feel as if I belong among you, because I do.”

“What is it, then?” Orest asked.

“I had a vision today while you were all at afternoon practice,” he said. “Heklatis was with me, and what made it different was that this is one I remembered afterward.” His expression took on a little of that far-away look it got when he was actually having a vision. “I spoke with one of the Bedu, the Blue People, and he said—I think it was a ‘he’—said you would remember him. He said he was the one who guided you to the edge of the delta marshes from the last oasis, and told you that you had to stop being Vetch and start being Kiron.”

Kiron blinked. He might have been skeptical about this “vision”—except that right there was the proof that it was a true one. There was no way that Kaleth could have known what that final Mouth of the Bedu had said to him about leaving his serf-self behind, because he had never told anyone. “All right,” he repeated. “So what else did you see?”

“It wasn’t so much what I saw as what I was shown,” Kaleth said, and now he looked at them each in turn, his expression sober and a little frightened. “I have to leave, and meet with this Bedu. He’s going to help me find a place where we can make a refuge, a secure hiding place, a sanctuary. He—the Bedu—said, and my vision showed me, that we’re going to need it. He said he and the other Bedu like him had been having the same vision as me, and he had been appointed to vision-speak me to make me understand, because I hadn’t been trained and otherwise I might not understand how important it was that I do this.”

“A refuge?” Gan said, skeptically. “For who?”

“You, at least at first,” Kaleth replied. “Because once the Jousters are no more because the tala fails and the dragons all escape, the Magi won’t let you nine live.”

Even though Kiron had more than half expected to hear something like this some day, it came as a jolt. He felt cold all over, and it wasn’t because of the rain, winds, and chill. It was an ugly thing to hear that someone intended your death.

Kiron turned his gaze on Aket-ten. “You’re in that nine. You need to understand that.”

“I already did,” Aket-ten said bitterly.

Kiron suspected that he wasn’t the only person to feel as if a line of ice-laced fire ran down his spine at that moment. But he believed Kaleth. Oh, my, yes.

He had seen what the Magi could and would do to those they considered threats, and the last remaining Jousters in Alta would be a threat to their continued aggrandizement of power, if nothing else.

“Me, too, of course—well, I’ll already be there. And after us, others will come,” Kaleth continued, “Mostly from Alta, though not all. You, too, Heklatis.”

“I suspected as much,” the Healer said dryly. “For one thing, I’m rather too closely linked with the lot of you, for another, if there are no Jousters, they won’t need a Healer now, will they?”

“But the thing is, I have to meet with the Bedu, and pay them to help me in the desert, and find the place. They don’t even know it exists, the one who spoke to me said that the Bedu think it’s only a legend.” He looked triumphant. “It’s Te-pa-ten-ke, the Lost City, and my visions are going to lead me to it.”

That held them frozen in their seats for a moment. Everyone knew about the Lost City, how it had been buried by a mammoth sandstorm in a single night. It had supposedly incurred the anger of the god Haras, because the inhabitants had turned into brigands, preying on their neighbors, and after they cast out their own priests for warning them, he had raised his hand against them. But no one had ever seen it, not even the Bedu whose home the desert was.

“I should say,” Kaleth continued, “that I’ll pay them for passage, and then when I find the city, I know where to find a store of gold to pay them to help me set it up for you. The Bedu with the visions trust me, of course, but they’re poor—”