The second time he went to visit Aket-ten, he had no news other than that, but she had enough information to make up for it.
“I’ve asked about,” she told him, “though I have tried to be—um—circumspect. And all I’ve gotten were hints as to the quarrel the Healers have with the Magi. Very mysterious hints, too, with a lot of anger in them. I did find out one thing, though. Partly it’s because the Magi are at least half responsible for the war with Tia, and you know how Healers feel about war.”
Actually, he didn’t know, but he could well guess. You could not be a Healer without feeling a desire to cure the sick and repair the injured so deep it often ran counter to self-preservation. So war must be entirely offensive to a Healer, at the same deep level.
Especially this war, which, the more he learned about it, seemed less understandable. As far as he could tell, it did not serve a purpose now for either side. The Tians could easily expand to the south, going up the Great Mother River instead of down, and the Altans did not seem to have any real interest in the land outside of that needed to support their city.
“How did you find that out?” he asked.
“I’ve been reading some of the personal commentaries and diaries that got stored in the library,” she replied. “I mean, at least they were more interesting than recipes for curing impotence and spots! I found an entire rack of them rolled up in jars at the back of the library, and it turned out that each jar held the personal accounts of each Chief Healer here for—oh, hundreds of years. And right in the middle of one of them was a long tirade against the Magi, because the Magi had managed to persuade the Great Ones to use some trivial border incident as an excuse for war!”
So—there it was. Part of the speculation that he and Toreth had made had been borne out. “Who was in the wrong?” he asked.
She shrugged. “There was no telling. It was in a border village, and by the time it was over, anybody who might have known was either dead or too frightened to talk. The Magi blew it up into a treacherous attack on one of our patrols, unprovoked of course, and the irony is that they must have been looking for an excuse, too, because their declaration of war was delivered to us about the same time as ours was to them. But it was quite clear from the tone of the scroll that the Chief Healer was certain that if the Magi hadn’t been egging on the Great Ones, it could all have been smoothed over.”
He rubbed his ear thoughtfully. “Are there other reasons?”
“I think there are,” she told him. “But no one will tell me. They hint at it—and it has something to do with something that the Magi are doing either with or for the Great Ones, but they won’t tell me. They act as if—well, partly I think it’s that they aren’t entirely sure that what they think is happening is what is really going on. And partly it’s that if what they think is happening is the truth, it’s so horrifying to them that they don’t want to think about it. If I’m making any sense.”
“Oh, you are,” he said, and paused. Should I tell her?
He stopped, tried to clear his mind of all of his notions of what Aket-ten was, and tried to look at her objectively. It didn’t take more than a moment to come to a resolution; he wasn’t going to help her by protecting her from things he “thought” she shouldn’t know. She had been growing fast in the time he had known her, and that had been accelerated by her recent experiences.
“Toreth and I have been talking about this,” he said, slowly, and outlined the whole nauseating scenario. The war, as an excuse to cut lives short—the stolen years from those who had died—
Aket-ten’s eyes got bigger and bigger as he went along, and her face grew paler and paler. When at last he finished, she was as white as a lily.
“That’s worse than necromancy,” she whispered. “But it makes a horrible kind of sense—”
“And if that is what the Healers suspect?” he persisted.
“It would explain a lot.” She blinked, as though her eyes were stinging, and now he knew she was trying not to cry. “This is really horrible, you know. I don’t think you have any idea how horrible this would be to a Winged One.”
“Or a Healer,” he agreed. “No, I don’t.” And really, he didn’t, perhaps because so much of his own life had been stolen from him that—well, stolen years, a stolen childhood, a life spent in bondage—they all seemed equally wretched. Men died in fighting all the time, whether it was in war, or in a fight over a woman. That someone would plan for so many deaths was sickening, but so were poisoned wells, burned fields, and jars of scorpions tipped into granaries.
“I suppose you couldn’t,” she said, swallowing. “It—well, it’s hard to describe. But—to someone like me, it seems like the most horrible and vicious sort of rape.”
He nodded. That made sense. To her it would be much worse than “theft,” he could see that. “There’s even more to it than that; I think there’s something else being stolen by the Magi. I think that they are getting the—the—whatever it is they put into their magic to send the storms against Tia, I think they’re stealing from the Fledglings. I think that is why the Fledglings come back drained and exhausted. I think that is why they wanted you so much—because whatever it is, you have a lot of it.”
Now she looked angry as well as sick. “Heklatis—the Akkadian—hinted as much,” she admitted. “Though he wouldn’t come out and say so. But why don’t they just ask?” That last came out of her in a kind of wail.
“However the war began, we’re loyal Altans, if they’d just ask, we’d do whatever was needed!”
“Probably because they aren’t the sort of people who ask. They’re too used to taking,” he said bitterly. Oh, yes. I know that type. “Anyway, taking is easier. Asking requires that you admit that you need something; taking means you’re the strong one and you can have whatever it is that you want.”
But this was getting him angry, and that was counterproductive at this moment. He forced himself to calm down. “Anyway, now you know. Or at least, you know the best guesses. You might want to see if you can’t get something more out of the Healers; letting them know that you have some idea of what’s going on might loosen their tongues. If the Healers have some proof that this is what’s going on—well, as the next in line to the Twin Thrones, I think Toreth has a right to know.”
“I intend to,” she said grimly. “ ‘It is better to have a scorpion out in the open than under the bed,’ ” she quoted one of the proverbs that he remembered his mother using.
“True,” he agreed. “But it’s better still to have it dead beneath your sandal.”
TEN
“KIRON! Kiron!” The frantic shout from the pen ‘next to his startled Kiron out of a sound sleep, and it was only thanks to his “training” at the hands of Khefti-the-Fat that he came awake all at once. “Kiron!” the shout came again, and this time, amid the startled replies and complaints all around him, he knew where it had come from and who it was that had called him.
And he grinned, in spite of the panicked tone of Menet-ka’s voice. There was only one reason for that level of panic at this particular time, coming from Menet-ka.
The first egg was hatching.
Kiron had actually been expecting this for the past couple of days, and had advised Menet-ka to move a pallet down into the sand next to the egg so that if it began to move, he would know immediately. Not that this would make a great deal of difference to the hatching egg, but it would to Menet-ka, whose hair had begun to stand on end from the shy boy’s new habit of constantly and nervously running his fingers through it. So, like Avatre, these babies would be born amid thunder and rain. He considered that a good omen.