Alta

“By the Great Ram’s horns!” said a shaking voice just on the other side of the wall, “That was a nasty one! Bethlan’s fine—is everyone all right?”

It was Menet-ka. So at least one of his wing was fine.

The dragon keening began again, starting with one of the babies—not Bethlan, it was farther away than that. A ragged chorus answered him. Kiron tried to speak but found he couldn’t. His throat seemed paralyzed. All of his fear seemed to have filled his throat and choked it.

“Kiron?” Menet-ka called, then, more urgently, “Kiron?”

“Kiron!” Toreth shouted. “Wingleader! Are you all right?”

It’s over. It’s over, he told himself. He uttered a strangled croak, coughed, and managed, “Here—here—”

Then he got a little better control of himself. He was the wingleader—the trainer—as he cradled Avatre’s head against his chest, he managed to suck enough air into his lungs—air still strangely full of dust—to call out, “Dragons all right? No one hurt? No one trapped?”

This time the ragged chorus answered him instead of Toreth, all in the affirmative. He tried to think of what they should do next—except that there was nothing they could do, because they must all be as disoriented as he was. “All right,” he said. “Don’t move. Not until there’s light and we can see—” because all of the lanterns were gone, smashed, he supposed, and without the moon it was as dark as a cave. “Don’t crawl around; there’s no telling what’s fallen over and what’s broken, and if you slash yourself open on a broken jar, nobody’s going to be able to come to help you.”

The keening from the Nursery eased, then stopped, as the boys got their dragonets quieted. Outside the Nursery, dragons were still complaining; he could only hope that darkness and tala would keep them calmer than they might have been were they not drugged.

“Well,” said Toreth’s voice, sounding far more philosophical than he was feeling, “I suppose you’re right. The sand is soft enough.”

The others agreed. “I’m going back to sleep,” said Huras, his voice sounding muffled in the distance. “It’s not as if I haven’t slept in the pit before this.”

He heard nothing more than whines and murmurs then, as the rest of them soothed their dragonets. He stroke Avatre’s snout, and wondered—though it was hard describe a thought so fearful as his as mere “wondering”—just what had happened. Had it been some evil spirit that had attacked them? Was it the anger of a god? How could the ground move like that? Had it only been the Jouster’s Compound, or had the whole city been rattled like this? If so—he’d heard the stones groaning, how could any building stand under something like that? The soldiery here on Third Ring were probably all right; they lived most of the time in tents anyway. But what about the temples? What about the manors and palaces?

What about all the mud-brick buildings on Fourth and Fifth rings? The mud-brick farmhouses on Sixth and beyond? He began feeling sick; mud brick was only stacked with more mud between in lieu of mortar. It surely couldn’t have held. And at night, in the dark—if he’d had trouble getting out of a single room, how hard would it be to get out of a house?

Avatre whimpered and shook, and he held her, talking soothingly until she stopped shaking, then stopped whimpering, then, impossibly, fell asleep again. And he felt the heat of the sand soaking into him, so at least whatever had happened hadn’t broken the magic on the sand pit. Her head was in his lap, but she was big enough now that he could lean over sideways and rest against her chest and just shut his gritty eyes for a moment and let the heat soothe his bruises.

He woke for the second time with a yell—

And blinked in the soft, monochrome light of predawn at Aket-ten, who was crouched in the sand beside him, one hand on his shoulder. It hadn’t been the earth moving that had awakened him this time, it had been her, shaking him.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Nothing worse than bruises?” She looked disheveled; hadn’t bothered with even eye makeup, and looked as if she had just thrown on the first shift that came to her hand.

“I’m fine,” he managed, willing his heart to stop racing. “What—was that?” He didn’t specify what “that” was, but he didn’t exactly have to.

“Earthshake,” she said matter-of-factly. “We get them all the time, though usually not as bad as the one last night. But, of course—you were born and raised far enough down the Great Mother River that even when your family was still part of Alta, you never felt them, did you? Some people claim it is the anger of Seft that does it, but the Winged Ones know it isn’t.” She hesitated a moment. “Or at least, if it is, no Winged One has ever seen the actual hand of the God doing it. Besides that, we’ve always been able to warn people well in advance of when one was going to happen, so if it was the anger of a God, you’d think He would have stopped us from telling people.”