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.
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.