At least, for the moment, the earthshakes had stopped, and the Magi were not lashing the earth with the Eye, burning out nests of so-called traitors and the hidden strongholds of agents within the city (or so they said). So even though rain saturated the city every day, people were trying to rebuild their houses. Some of them were anyway. Some who had nowhere to go in the Altan countryside, like the ones who made their way across the desert with the help of the Bedu, had decided that terrible as the Tians must be, it was better to face them than huddle in terror in a wrecked house in Alta.

Kiron knew, or thought he knew, why the Magi weren’t using the Eye at the moment. He thought it rather likely that they simply couldn’t. The burning lance of the Eye used sunlight, somehow concentrating it into a weapon, and with the sky overcast constantly during the rains, there was no sunlight for it to use. And although earthshakes were perfectly normal occurrences in Alta, he had also noticed that every time they used the Eye, there was an earthshake, as if using it somehow disturbed the earth as well—which would be why the shakes had stopped.

And as he watched the faces of Aket-ten, Kaleth, and the Tian priests, he knew that they knew why those young children were being taken. These were the youngsters that would have been Nestlings, had there been anyone in Alta to train them. Those with arcane powers who had not fled were mostly comatose from being repeatedly drained to serve the uses of the Magi. So the Magi needed a new source of power—just as the “advisers” in Tia had needed a source of power.

It made him feel sick; sicker still that there was nothing, realistically speaking, that he could do about it.

Meanwhile, the Tian priests had found a way to call and direct the rare rains kamiseen, to enable it to uncover still more of Sanctuary. It didn’t look as if they would be running out of buildings any time soon. Or—so Kaleth confided to him—treasure. There was enough to pay the Bedu, enough to put some glory into the shrines of the gods and give the priests something in the way of regalia again. The gods were providing still, it seemed.

So the days lengthened, and the nights shortened, and the refugees came in, and what passed for the rains here in the desert ended.

And then, at long last—the hatches started.

The eggs in the hatching pen began cracking first, and that triggered the need to contact the Bedu to start raiding the Tian Sacred Herds. There was no way that Sanctuary could feed the growing population and the hungry dragonets on hunting alone. They needed meat, and a great deal of it.