Alta

As in Tia, runners had been sent around the compound last night to warn of the coming rains, and everyone had dutifully pulled the canvas covers over their dragon’s sand pits—except for those who had swamp dragons, who would be perfectly happy to have rain pouring down into the pools of warm, sulfurous water. They’d have been even happier with mud, but wet dragons were hard enough to harness; muddy ones would have been impossible. Once in a great while they were allowed a mud wallow, but it wasn’t often, and they were cleaned off almost immediately afterward. Last night, they had all gone to bed feeling the weather bearing down on them. The wind had changed direction, coming from the sea and the north, rather than the desert and the west. It was a slow, heavy wind, bringing yet more humidity to this city surrounded by marshes, and it carried a chill with it. Kiron was happy to roll up in a woolen blanket tonight, and Avatre, born amid the rain, was so buried in the sand she was nothing more than a hummock in her pit.

The sound of thunder rolling continuously overhead was what woke Kiron. He waited for it to stop—and waited—and waited—and still nothing happened.

He opened his eyes and rolled over with a groan. There was light out there in Avatre’s pen, but it wasn’t very bright. Either the clouds were thicker than he thought, or it was just dawn. Both, perhaps. It was cold, a penetrating cold, and he knew he was going to need a woolen tunic today beneath his rain cape.

The thunder continued to growl overhead, yet there wasn’t any rain pounding down on the canvas awning. That struck him as very odd, and it roused his curiosity enough that he decided to get up and have a look around. Besides, he was awake now. Until the rain started, he wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep. There was such heavy tension in the air, waiting for the storm to break, that dozing was impossible.

He pulled on a kilt and a tunic and tiptoed past Avatre, who was still sleeping. In fact, given how cool the air was, he doubted she’d be very happy about being awakened.

Not that he blamed her in the least; if he hadn’t been so curious, he would be back in his cot, under his warm woolen blanket, thank you.

Once he got out from under the canvas and into the corridor, he still couldn’t see anything, because the Altans sensibly had the same canvas roofs over the corridors that they strung over the dragon pens. He would have to get somewhere that was open to the sky, like the landing court.

No one else was awake and moving, though, which made him think that the continuous thunder was considered perfectly normal by the Altans. That was a bit of a comfort, anyway. He padded his way along the stone of the corridor, barefoot, until he came to the entrance into the landing court—and as he approached it, he saw, in the sky above the walls—

Lightning. Not striking the ground, but crawling across the base of the clouds, like veins of fire across charcoal-colored flesh. It wasn’t like any lightning he’d ever seen before; this was reddish, and didn’t seem at all inclined to strike the earth. Gingerly, he eased himself out from under the scant protection offered by the canvas and looked up to see that the reason why the thunder didn’t stop was that there was never so much as a heartbeat of time when there wasn’t any lightning crawling across some part of the sky.

Well, that certainly explained the thunder.

He moved out into the courtyard so he could see the whole sky, including the tops of the buildings on the central island. After a moment of watching it with the same fascination of a bird watching a snake, he noticed that it was all emanating from a central point. That point was just above the tip of the Tower of Wisdom. The clouds there were darker, much darker, completely black, in fact, and they swirled around that center point in a slow, somehow ominous, vortex. And even as he watched, a single lightning bolt, not just red-tinted but as red as blood, cracked upward from the tip of the tower into the center of that vortex. When it vanished, it seemed to Kiron that the clouds were spinning just a little faster.

There was one thing he was not mistaken about; there was a heaviness to the air, a drowsiness, warring with his sense that something was going to break loose at any moment. He had thought he could not possibly get back to sleep, but now—now he felt as if all he wanted to do was to get back into his bed.

This storm—it’s just strange, he thought, and he wondered if there was anyone else but the Magi awake at the moment to watch this. Or was it just so commonplace for the Magi to control the storms of the rainy season that no one even thought about it?