"Mercedes Lackey - Dragon Jousters 4 - Aerie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

KIRON, Wingleader of First Wing of the Jousters of Sanctuary, woke from a dream that his lover
Aket-ten was nuzzling his ear to find that his ear was being nuzzled, but not by Aket-ten.
 He sat up with a yell, startling the half-grown kitten that had been trying to nurse on his earlobe into
instant flight. He felt its sharp claws dig momentarily into his shoulder as it leaped away into the darkness,
and though he had certainly felt worse pain in his life, he bit back a curse.

With a growl, he turned over on his pallet and tried to get back to sleep. Below him, channeled up
through the stair cut into the living stone of his dwelling, he heard Avatre snoring gently, or at least, as
gentle in snoring as a dragon ever got. He couldn't actually see anything, because it was pitch-dark in this
room. He wondered how the cat could see.

Avatre was below him, not just beyond the door of the little room he'd been calling "home" for the last
several months, because ready or not, the Jousters had been forced to make the move to the desert city
they had initially dubbed "Dragon Court" and now called Aerie. The city they called Sanctuary, the place
they had all thought would serve for years, was filling up with people, and fast. Priests, acolytes, the army
of servants and slaves required to tend to themтАФthose had come from Alta and Tia alike. The press of
priests and their followers alone had shoved the Jousters out of quarters they had only just gotten used
to. And that didn't even begin to deal with the visitorsтАж all eager to see the first Voice of the Gods of
both Alta and Tia ever. And the first Voice of the Gods, period, in a very, very long time.

The presence of Kaleth, the Voice, gave legitimacy to Sanctuary; turned Kaleth's plans to make it into a
city of priests, for the training of priests, into something more than someone's odd ambition.

Kiron stared into the absolute darkness of his new home. It was still a bit unnerving to wake up in the
middle of the night here and see that. Or rather, not see that. Even on moonless nights during the rains
back in Alta there had beensome light, but here there was nothing, because he was, for all intents and
purposes, inside a man-carved cave. There was a window hewn through the rock to the outside, but the
shutters he had gotten made and refitted to the places where original shutters had clearly been were
closed to keep the bats out. Not because he didn't like bats; he actually liked them quite a bit. Because
the cat persisted in thinking of them as mice with wings and chasing them. It never caught one, but it
never stopped trying either. This meant a night full of the sound of running and jumping, and occasionally
of having his body used as a launching platform. But having the shutters on made it literally as dark as a
cave in here at night. For someone who had spent the best part of his life sleeping unsheltered under the
moon and stars, such darkness took some getting used to.

As for why he and the rest of the Jousters found themselves being all but ordered to leave, well, the
reasons were complicated. And because those reasons fed right into Kaleth's actual plans for Sanctuary,
that made it exceedingly difficult to say "no," and, frankly, Kiron hadn't had the heart to do so.

To begin with, Sanctuary was living up to its name. The priests of both Alta and Tia had had a bellyful of
finding themselves victims. In both lands, the manipulative Magi, working through the rulers, had been
able to decimate the priestly population of those who had even a hint of magic about them. The Altans
had managed to save the greater part of their Winged Ones, thanks to warning by Aket-ten and a rescue
by the Jousters, but the priests of Tia would be several years, perhaps even a generation, in recovering.
In a city of their own, where priests ruled, this would beтАФnot impossible, perhaps, but far less likely.

And most of the priests of both lands agreed, in principle at least, that if the peoples of Alta and Tia
were to become one, it was time for the temples to merge. This was going to take some very creative