Sanctuary Read Free Page A

Kashet remembered her.
    He remembered Kiron, too, and with quite evident affection. The huge dragon snorted again when Kiron came near, and craned his emerald-and-blue neck over Avatre to blow his hot breath into Kiron’s hair.
    Whereupon Avatre bristled with jealousy and shoved his head aside, claiming her rider for herself. Kiron had to laugh as she tried to puff herself up and interpose herself between him and her rival for his affections. Kashet could bowl her over without even taking thought for it, even now. She had a hot temper to match her fiery colors when she was irritated.
    Fortunately, Kashet was a good-natured soul, and—well, it was possible that there was some instinctive behavior involved, too. Most male animals would put up with things from females that they would never tolerate in another male.
    “Peace, little one!” he told her, as she shoved him a little off balance and tried to look up at him in adoration with one eye while she glared at Kashet out of the other. “You are first in my heart, always—and Ari will be here any moment and Kashet will cease to remember that I live.”
    “Ari is here now,” called a voice from above, and Kashet reared up to his full height at the sound of that voice, which put his head well above the level of the roof. Ari looked down over the parapet of the building next to the one that Kiron, Orest, and the other members of Kiron’s wing (except Aket-ten) shared, waved to his protégé, then reached up to scratch the bony eye ridges of his own dragon as Kashet rested his chin on the parapet and sighed gustily. As Kiron had predicted, Kashet was now quite oblivious to the fact that the younger man even existed, which made Avatre perfectly pleased.
    Ari alone stood out from among the Altan inhabitants of Sanctuary as noticeably different. He was much darker, to begin with; here in the desert, he had tanned to the color of old leather, while the Altans had gone the same golden brown as a properly baked loaf of barley bread. His face was broader than the Altan “type,” his chin stronger, his eyes a shade of brown that was very near to black.
    Kiron would have liked to remain there, giving Avatre the caresses and affection she lived for, but there was no leisure for that this morning. The cramped quarters of the sand pit made it necessary for almost everyone to leave in order to get saddled, which would mean another delay in taking to the air, and this was a day when no one could afford much in the way of a delay.
    Kashet was the first to get out—by virtue of his size and strength, he simply hooked his front talons into the parapet and climbed out over the roof. The first time he’d done that, Kiron hadn’t been the only one who’d gasped and shrunk back, expecting the wall to come down. But either they were all very lucky, or Kashet was a shrewd judge of construction; he hadn’t left more than a scratch or two on the top of the wall. Kiron still didn’t know what the walls of Sanctuary were made of. It looked like hard-packed sand, or sandstone, but it wasn’t, and it was tougher and stronger than anything Kiron had ever seen before. The walls weren’t made of stone blocks either; the entire city could have been carved from single pieces of stone. There were no signs of seams or block lines, and although the corners and edges were all rounded as if scoured that way, at a guess Kiron would have said that they had been carved or sculpted that way on purpose from the beginning, given that nothing much seemed to mark them. Whatever material those walls were made of, it was something that stood up to the abuse of dragons climbing all over them.
    Nor could Kiron have put an original purpose to this courtyard that now served as the dragons’ sand wallow. When the wing had come to Sanctuary, the space had been filled with sand still, left that way on purpose for the dragons’ use, and the doors and windows that had once looked into the yard had been blocked up at