“It might go back farther than that,” he pointed out, as Avatre sneezed, then pumped her wings to get a little more height. “Back to when they first made the Eye.”

“Oh, yes. The Eye.” He felt her shiver. “How could we ever have thought that was a good idea? It’s not like building walls; walls can’t be turned against your own people. We should have known then that they were on no one’s side but their own.”

Yes, you should have, he thought. For people who were supposedly Far-Sighted, you certainly kept looking in the wrong places.

His passenger didn’t know how many people were left in the temple, but when he returned for another trip, he saw something going on below that made him think they had even less time than he’d assumed.

The besiegers were building piles of wood against the doors. And he thought about what the man on the roof had said; “Better dead than in your hands.”

The doors were wood, not stone; set fires against them and the doors would burn through, the fire moving into the building through all that closely-packed furniture and debris. How long would the fires burn before they reached the roof? The rooms below were crammed full of all manner of flammable furnishings to prevent the besiegers from breaking in once the doors were broken down. Fire would block the exits as soon as the doors burned through. There would be no escape that way.

There was a crowd gathering on the edge of the temple grounds, watching. Would they do anything if they saw the Magi’s men were going to burn out the Winged Ones? Or were they, by this point, too afraid? Had the use of the Eye destroyed any spirit of rebellion that still lay within them? He was rather afraid that it had.

He landed, and took aboard his first physically injured passenger, a middle-aged man with a heavily bandaged head who seemed dizzy and partly disoriented. “When he saw what they were doing down there, he went to the edge of the roof and tried to reason with them,” said the man Kiron thought had once been a Winged One, and whose name he still didn’t know. “Somebody got him with a stone from a sling. Don’t let him fall asleep.”

“No fear of that,” Kiron replied, as the man climbed up behind him, clumsily. “It’s not exactly a smooth ride.”

“They’re coming!” called someone who was watching at the edge of the roof under cover of an improvised shield.

“Get out of here!” the man barked at Kiron, slapping at Avatre’s shoulder, startling her into rearing away from him, then leaping skyward, before he could ask who or what was coming.