Kiron had wondered how they would explain the absence of so many priests. He’d been hoping that they wouldn’t be able to.
The Altan refugees reported with shudders that fear was the byword. Boys barely into their teens were being conscripted for the army, and the Magi were reputed to be examining and taking select children as young as six. They claimed these children were going to serve in the Palace. But no one ever saw them there, and who would want a child that young serving them?
But no one complained because there were always terrible things happening: murders, poisoned wells, other acts of sabotage, all blamed on Tian agents within the city. You couldn’t even trust your own neighbors, said the refugees. You never knew if they were Tian agents—or if they would denounce you as a Tian agent.
At least, for the moment, the earthshakes had stopped, and the Magi were not lashing the earth with the Eye, burning out nests of so-called traitors and the hidden strongholds of agents within the city (or so they said). So even though rain saturated the city every day, people were trying to rebuild their houses. Some of them were anyway. Some who had nowhere to go in the Altan countryside, like the ones who made their way across the desert with the help of the Bedu, had decided that terrible as the Tians must be, it was better to face them than huddle in terror in a wrecked house in Alta.
Kiron knew, or thought he knew, why the Magi weren’t using the Eye at the moment. He thought it rather likely that they simply couldn’t. The burning lance of the Eye used sunlight, somehow concentrating it into a weapon, and with the sky overcast constantly during the rains, there was no sunlight for it to use. And although earthshakes were perfectly normal occurrences in Alta, he had also noticed that every time they used the Eye, there was an earthshake, as if using it somehow disturbed the earth as well—which would be why the shakes had stopped.
And as he watched the faces of Aket-ten, Kaleth, and the Tian priests, he knew that they knew why those young children were being taken. These were the youngsters that would have been Nestlings, had there been anyone in Alta to train them. Those with arcane powers who had not fled were mostly comatose from being repeatedly drained to serve the uses of the Magi. So the Magi needed a new source of power—just as the “advisers” in Tia had needed a source of power.
It made him feel sick; sicker still that there was nothing, realistically speaking, that he could do about it.
Meanwhile, the Tian priests had found a way to call and direct the rare rains kamiseen, to enable it to uncover still more of Sanctuary. It didn’t look as if they would be running out of buildings any time soon. Or—so Kaleth confided to him—treasure. There was enough to pay the Bedu, enough to put some glory into the shrines of the gods and give the priests something in the way of regalia again. The gods were providing still, it seemed.
So the days lengthened, and the nights shortened, and the refugees came in, and what passed for the rains here in the desert ended.
And then, at long last—the hatches started.
The eggs in the hatching pen began cracking first, and that triggered the need to contact the Bedu to start raiding the Tian Sacred Herds. There was no way that Sanctuary could feed the growing population and the hungry dragonets on hunting alone. They needed meat, and a great deal of it.
By this point, the Herds themselves had been moved to make those raids possible without penetrating too far into Tian lands. Those priests that had not fled to Sanctuary were colluding with those who had, and had brought the herds to grazing grounds seldom used, right on the edge of the desert. The excuse was that the herds were looking thin and sickly, a bad omen, and something that could be easily remedied by taking them to fresh pastures. And why should the advisers care what happened to the herds? They played no part in the sacrifices, cared nothing for omens or portents or other priestly matters, and probably thought that they had more important things to worry about. With the few novices that they had managed to get their hands on used up and dead, they were forced to turn their attention to other sources of power. Rumors had come via the priestly caste that one of the advisers himself was making a tour of temples; only now, forewarned, the priests were making very sure he didn’t find the source of power he was looking for—those few priests that had not left their posts who were god-touched. They were moving one step ahead of him, from temple to temple.
And there were too few of those advisers to make a search among the Tian children for those who had not yet fully shown the hand of the gods on them. Kiron had a notion that the Tians, unlike the Altans, would not take tamely to having their children taken—not after those novices were found dead.
Then again, the Tians were not living in the shadow of the Eye either—nor under the baleful gaze of several hundred Magi.
Now that the season of rains and floods were over, the assault on the Altan border, however, had been renewed. Once again, there was a steady flow of casualties on both sides, to feed that unspeakable appetite for the magic and power of lost life.
It was maddening to know that there was nothing those in Sanctuary could do. . . .
The first of the sacred sacrificial animals began arriving in Sanctuary about the time that the little dragonets came into their full and voracious appetites.
These were beasts sacred to the gods, however, and it was Nofret who suggested that the Tian priests actually undertake the full ritual sacrifices they would ordinarily have done, rather than simply butcher the beasts or allow them to be butchered.
“I can’t see any reason why not,” she said, at the evening meeting after the first lot of cattle and goats was driven into the pens waiting for them, a meeting which Kiron was attending in his capacity of wingleader and strongly interested party. “And I can see every reason why you should. We have a much larger temple now—the one the Jousters were going to take and don’t need. It has an inner shrine and a proper sacrificial table. And I think it is a very bad idea to cheat the gods of what is, after all, rightfully theirs.”
“But—” The Thet priest looked at her askance. “They are not your gods, Lady.”
“Pah. Who was worshiped there before? It looked enough like Lord Haras as to make no difference, but it was probably called by a different name. And in a thousand years, the Falcon-headed One will probably have yet a third name. I do not think the gods care what names we use, so long as we do good and not evil. They are the gods of both Altans and Tians at this point, and it doesn’t matter a hair what name you call them by,” she replied instantly. “You have never consulted a woman about this, clearly. We women are pragmatic about such things; we call upon whoever we think might answer us, with no nonsense about whether it is your god or mine. I have even been known to invoke one of Heklatis’ Akkadian goddesses now and again.”
The Thet priest brightened at that. “It could be,” he said, with some deliberation, “that with the number of sacrifices from Tian altars growing fewer, and those from the Sanctuary altars growing more numerous, they might be inclined to actually remove their favor from Tia and bestow it here. The impression we are trying to create may become the actuality.”