all right?” He couldn’t hear any more whimpering or keening; in fact, all he heard was the usual groans and complaints of dragons who hated to be roused in the morning.
“A few people were hurt by falling stone, all but one of them servants,” she said, “but not badly. This compound is built to handle shakes. The dragons are all fine. One of the pools cracked and drained, and the poor dragon in it spent a miserable and cold night so far as he was concerned, but there are spare pens, and we’ve already moved the dragon there. It’ll be worse in the city,” she added with resignation. “There will be people killed, I’m sure, several hundred, if not several thousand. And a lot more will be hurt and probably half of those will die, too, eventually.”
“Um—why?” he asked.
“Because they weren’t warned!” she snapped. “I told you, we know what to do when there is going to be a big shake! With warning, we all move out to sleep in our gardens! Even if you don’t have a garden, when there’s a shake warning, people sleep in the temple gardens, beside the canals, anywhere that there’s no walls to fall on them. Without warning—people are inside, their walls come down, their roofs collapse—” He heard the mounting anger in her voice, and she must have realized it too. She stopped for a moment, and closed her eyes. He could hear her breathing carefully, taking several slow, deep breaths before opening her eyes again, and continuing in a more controlled voice. She was still angry, though; he knew her well enough to understand that her stony expression meant that she was just controlling herself. He had first seen it when she was trying not to show how afraid she was of the Magi; now he doubted that she was hiding fear. “That’s the thing, you see. If we have warning, an earthshake doesn’t hurt anything but buildings, and buildings can be mended. It will be bad in the Second and Third Ring, but in the Fourth and Fifth—it will be horrible. The poorer the district is, the worse it will be. The wealthy have homes built to account for shaking, but the poor build of mud brick, on land that becomes like quicksand when there’s a shake. That’s why there must be a warning—”
Her voice trembled with rage, and her jaw was clenched. “The Magi,” she said, her facade cracking again. “The Magi did this.”
“If the Magi are to blame,” he ventured, “then surely the Great Ones will act?” He couldn’t imagine the Great Ones not acting. They were the guardians of their people. How could they ignore something as egregious as this?
“One hopes,” she replied, all the anger suddenly draining from her, as the water had drained from that cracked pool. “I’d better go. I’m the only one that can soothe the wild-caught dragons, and every time there is a little shake, or they even think there is a little shake, they are becoming hysterical. If we aren’t to have to drug them to sleep with tala, I’d better do that.”
She got up off her knees, brushed the sand off her sleeveless robe, and left. He stared after her. He had never seen her look so hopeless before. What did she know about the Winged Ones and the Magi that he didn’t?
Whatever it was, she was evidently certain that the Magi would never be taken to task for draining the power from those who were supposed to protect Alta from catastrophes such as this one. What was it that made her so certain?
Maybe it was nothing worse than her own fears speaking. After all, the Winged Ones had failed to protect her from the Magi; now she probably mistrusted everyone. And he couldn’t blame her either.
As the light strengthened, he looked around Avatre’s pen and assessed the damages. All the lanterns were smashed, fallen out of their niches or off their shelves, lying in broken pieces on the floor. There was a crack running up one wall of the pen, and there was another at the corner of his room. Gan and Toreth’s quarters hadn’t fared so well. In fact, had Toreth been in his cot, he probably would have been dead, because a huge block of stone had dislodged itself from his ceiling and flattened his cot. But in fact, Toreth had been sleeping outside his room since the Dry season began because of the heat, and that liking