The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  “The War Magick,” Harrier supplied helpfully.

  “Right. Which was invented because the Wildmages were being corrupted by the Endarkened. Through their magic, apparently, which is about the scariest thing I’ve heard about the Endarkened yet. And—at the same time—the Endarkened couldn’t get at the High Mages in the same way.”

  “Just kill them,” Harrier interjected.

  “As far as I know, the Endarkened could just kill everybody,” Tiercel said grimly.

  “And now you’re going to tell me what something that happened about a million years before the Great Flowering has to do with us,” Harrier prodded.

  “You won’t like it,” Tiercel warned.

  “Get to the point.”

  “Well, in the first place, when I started having the visions, you weren’t a Wildmage—Knight-Mage—yet. And Kareta couldn’t exactly come walking into Armethalieh carrying the Three Books of the Wild Magic to hand them to you. Besides, even if she could have, you wouldn’t have taken them.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Harrier muttered.

  “In the second place, from everything I know—and I could still be wrong—you can refuse to become a Wildmage, but you can’t refuse to be, well, born with the Magegift. So you’re pretty much born a High Mage, and the only difference is whether or not you’re trained.”

  “Of course, if you aren’t trained—or don’t run into the right kind of Wildmage—you kind of die,” Harrier said. Tiercel looked at him in surprise. As often as Harrier demonstrated that he did think—and think well—and listened—despite his constant complaints whenever people started explaining things to him—it was always a surprise to Tiercel when he came out with a comment like this. Not so much because Tiercel didn’t think Harrier knew these things, but because Tiercel knew Harrier didn’t want people to know he knew them. “Is there a third thing?”

  “Yeah.” Tiercel hesitated for just an instant. “It has to be me having the visions instead of you because I’m a High Mage and not a Wildmage.”

  “It is never not going to sound ridiculous hearing that,” Harrier complained with a reasonable amount of good-nature under the circumstances. He shook his head.

  And Tiercel was grateful that he didn’t ask any more questions just then, because he hadn’t quite figured out a way to explain to Harrier that just in case he was wrong about Dark magic not being able to corrupt a High Mage, it was going to be up to Harrier to try to see this through.

  Whatever the cost.

  Eleven

  The City on the Edge of Forever

  TEN DAYS AFTER that they reached the gates of Tarnatha’Iteru. It was the northernmost-but-one of the Border cities, and—according to the Telchi—one of the largest Iteru-cities in the Madiran. The Iteru-cities—“Iteru” meant “well” in the Old Tongue of the desert-peoples—were the cities that lay along the edge of the Madiran.

  What the Telchi called the true desert lay farther south and west of here, a place called the Isvai, a barren and inhospitable wilderness that was home to nothing but a few nomadic tribes. Some of the Isvaieni came to the Iteru-cities to trade their crafts and the harvest of the deep desert—gold and gems, furs and resins, even salt—for the products of the Iteru-cities. Others never ventured out of the Isvai itself.

  In Tiercel’s opinion, if the Telchi thought this wasn’t an inhospitable wilderness, he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to see something that was. He thought this place must look a lot the way the whole world had before the Great Flowering. Only—probably—worse. But he’d listened closely to everything the Telchi had told them as they’d headed here, and so he already knew a little about the Isvaieni. He knew, for example, that the merchants from all the various Iteru-cities would trade with the Isvaieni throughout the desert winter, and then when spring came, would send their caravans of trade-goods from both city and desert to Akazidas’Iteru, a city north and west of here. Caravans would gather in Akazidas’Iteru to follow the Trade Road north to Armethalieh the Golden, reaching the city moonturns later with their cargoes of rugs and spices and exotic trade-goods. And caravans from Armethalieh would venture south, throughout the moonturns of fair traveling weather, with everything that Armethalieh and the lands across Great Ocean could offer in exchange.

  The city itself, Tiercel thought, looked very much like Armethalieh must have looked a thousand years ago. It was entirely surrounded by high walls—the Telchi said they were made of bricks of unfired clay that had been layered over with sheets of wet clay to give them a smooth appearance. Tiercel really wished he could have been here to see it built, because the wall on this side stretched for nearly a mile, and he remembered, years ago, dragging Harrier all through Armethalieh trying to trace the boundaries of the ancient City Walls. He didn’t think Tarnatha’Iteru was quite as large as ancient Armethalieh had been, but it was pretty big. And the walls, the Telchi had said, were so wide that three men could walk side-by-side upon their tops. There was an enormous set of bronze gates in the wall. The Telchi said this was the main entrance to the city: each wall had a gate, but the others were smaller.

  “Those look as big as the ones back home,” Harrier said, peering up at them. “They’ve gotta be heavy.” He glanced up at the noonday sun. “And hot, too.”

  “Not solid bronze, young Harrier,” the Telchi said, amused. “Such would tax the strength of the men who must open them each time someone wished to come or go. Bronze-covered wood, merely—but good solid oak from the Tereymil Hills. And they are not in direct sunlight for nearly all the day—nor from inside the town at all—so your fears are groundless.”

  “Why do they keep closing them?” Tiercel asked curiously. “If they’re just going to have to open them again every time somebody wants to come in?”

  “Were they to leave them open, anyone might enter or leave Tarnatha’Iteru just as they chose. Petty thieves, Isvaieni, even strangers unknown to the Consul.”

  “Like us,” Harrier said.

  “Indeed,” the Telchi answered. “But I am perhaps not unknown to the Consul, or to those he sets to guard the walls of his city, and I believe we may be granted entry.”

  “I still think—” Tiercel said mutinously.

  “It is also necessary to keep the gates barred to provide protection to the city from the winds of the desert,” the Telchi continued smoothly. “Small winds on most occasions—though the dust they carry is unwelcome. But should a Sandwind come up out of the Deep Desert, it is as well that the gates be closed in advance of its arrival.”

  “What’s a Sandwind?” Tiercel asked, but Harrier had already pulled the wagon to a halt beneath the walls, far enough back so that he could see the men standing above the gate. They didn’t have any weapons that either of them could see, but they hardly needed them—they didn’t have to open the gates if they didn’t want to. They wore armor like the Telchi’s—it had looked odd to Tiercel the first time he’d gotten a good look at it, but now that he was actually in the Madiran, he saw the point of it. Armor like the kind he’d seen the Elves wearing—or even the Armethaliehan City Guard—would leave someone roasting alive here.

  The Telchi climbed down from the seat of the wagon and walked forward, removing his helmet so that his face was clearly visible.

  “Telchi! We thought you’d left your bones for the wolves in the Tereymil Hills,” one of the men called down.

  “Come, now, Batho, have you ever known me to misuse an animal? I would make a poor dinner for even a starving wolf. No, by the grace of the Sword-Giver and the Lady of Battles, the enemies of our city have received proper payment for their deeds, and I have received my life from these travelers, whose kindness I am now eager to repay.”

  Batho stepped away from the edge of the wall—vanishing entirely from sight—and shouted down to someone inside. A few moments later, the gates began to open inward.

  “They ought to open out,” Harrier said meditatively. “If you were actually being attacked, someone could force them easily.” />
  Both Tiercel and Macenor Telchi regarded Harrier with the expressions of faint surprise—Tiercel, because it was the last thing he’d expected Harrier to say, and the Telchi, because …

  “Who would make war upon us, young Harrier? No Iteru-city would force the gates of another. There has been peace in the land for a thousand years. Even the Darkness you seek was stripped of its great armies long ago.”

  Neither of them answered. Tiercel because he didn’t know how, Harrier because the gates were now standing open, and he’d started the wagon moving forward.

  Just inside the gates there was a long passage that ran the depth of the wall itself. The horses’ hooves clopped sharply, for the floor of the passage was stone. The wicker hampers had been removed from the sides of the wagon long ago—dismantled, and used as fuel—but even if they had not been, there would have been plenty of space for the wagon to pass through the short tunnel. It was high enough that there was no danger of any of them bumping their heads on its curved ceiling, but even so, Tiercel felt the urge to duck. As soon as the wagon was all the way inside, the gates were closed and barred behind them.

  Just the other side there was a large open space, also flagged in stone. Not the cobbles that Tiercel would have expected to see on Armethaliehan streets, or even the large flat slates or blocks of granite that ornamented the public plazas in the Golden City. Here the courtyard was floored in large octagonal pieces of sandstone. At the far side of the square, he caught sight of the first buildings of the city: one- and two-story buildings, flat-roofed and wood-shuttered. There were awnings stretched before them—not solid cloth, but an open weave—and more of the same, hung between the houses across all the streets he could see.

  There was a watering-trough just inside the wall. The horses pulled toward it eagerly, and Harrier swung down from the wagon bench, going to their heads and pulling them away before they drank too much. Tiercel and Macenor Telchi climbed down as well—Tiercel, because he wanted to see everything at once, and the Telchi to go to speak to the guards. After a few moments, he returned.

  “We will go, first, to the stables, where you may leave your horses and your wagon. Then we will go to my house. Tiercel must be my guest for as long as you both remain in the city. And certainly my student would live nowhere else, though any house in Tarnatha’Iteru would be honored to host one of the Blue Robes.”

  “Don’t say that,” Harrier begged.

  “What about our things?” Tiercel said. “Can’t we just—”

  “We will bring them,” the Telchi said. “But as you will find, the streets of the city are not as broad as those of the cities of the North. Your wagon would not… fit.”

  THEY LED THE wagon across the square—although to be perfectly accurate, the Telchi led the horses, and Harrier led Tiercel, who showed a strong tendency to stop or wander off whenever he glimpsed something new and interesting. Harrier had a certain amount of sympathy—there was so much to see, and all of it was exotic, in a slightly-more-familiar way than Karahelanderialigor had been. He wanted to explore almost as much as Tiercel did.

  As they moved across the city, Harrier realized the Telchi had been right about the wagon just not fitting through most of the streets of Tarnatha’Iteru. To reach the stables, they took a long roundabout way along wide streets that were obviously in the “public buildings” part of town, and even so, when there was anything else on the street, whatever it was needed to turn down a side-street or back up and huddle against a wall until they could inch by with their wagon. Along the way, they saw not only the familiar horses and mules—some with riders, some with packs—but a strange new beast that Macenor Telchi called a “shotor,” a creature particularly well-adapted to the arid heat of the south. Harrier thought they were the ugliest things he’d ever seen.

  As they walked, the Telchi told them what they were seeing. Here was the Consul’s Palace—the Palace was a residence, but it also held the city’s Law Courts, where cases were heard just as they were heard back home (though there it was done in a separate building). The official moneychangers for the city were in the Consul’s Palace, too, but northern coins and precious metal could be exchanged for the coinage of the Madiran in the city markets as well.

  “We’ll need to pay for our horses’ keep,” Harrier said uneasily at the mention of money. “And for storing the wagon.”

  “It is not a matter with which you need to concern yourself,” the Telchi said. “You are my student. These expenses are mine to assume.”

  “No,” Harrier said firmly. “That’s not right.”

  “Or you could simply tell the Stablemaster that you are a Wildmage, and receive the stabling of your horses and the storage of your possessions as a gift,” the Telchi added.

  “And that isn’t right either,” Harrier said. “People shouldn’t give you things just because of what you are.”

  “Very well,” the Telchi said. “We will discuss it later, when you have had time to know Tarnatha’Iteru better. For the customs of the south are not those you know.”

  “He’s right, Har,” Tiercel said.

  “I do not need to hear from you just now,” Harrier snapped. But he gave in—temporarily—because he could always find out how much things cost and pay for them later. They still had almost all the money Tiercel’d withdrawn from the bank back in Ysterialpoerin, after all, and the Telchi said they could change it here. Knowing the customs of other places was all very well and good in Harrier’s opinion—and he knew perfectly well that it was silly to expect Selkens (or for that matter, Elves) to behave like Armethaliehans. But there was a difference between hospitality and charity.

  At last they reached what the Telchi had simply called “the stables”—an enormous two-story building with another sweeping open plaza in front of it. A deep colonnade provided the entrance with shelter from the sun—Harrier would already have found it unusual to see a building here that was not designed to provide such protection—and beneath its shade, grooms curried horses, and walked them to cool them down after exercise, and simply sat and gossiped. After the stables at House Malkirinath, the grandeur of Tarnatha’Iteru’s “stables” didn’t impress Harrier, but their size did: this was a building larger than the Great Library at Armethalieh.

  “Uh,” Tiercel said intelligently.

  “The animals of the Consul, of the City Guard, of the merchants, of the nobles, of all travelers to the city are housed here,” the Telchi said. “Where else?”

  “They don’t just keep them locked up all day?” Harrier asked. Nethiel and Dulion were used to regular exercise, and any animal left stalled day after day became fat and weak and ill.

  “No,” the Telchi reassured him. “Those which are here for more than a day or two are exercised by the stablemen, if they are not ridden by their owners. Your beasts cannot be ridden of course, but I shall leave orders. They will not be neglected.”

  Everyone who was not otherwise occupied came out to stare when the wagon drew up before the stables. After a short discussion with the Telchi, one of the grooms—at least, Harrier supposed they were grooms, since they would have been back home—stepped forward.

  “I am Castuca. It is my honor to conduct your … conveyance to the place where it may be kept until you have need of it again.” From the disbelieving look Castuca was giving the wagon, it suddenly occurred to Harrier that no one here had probably ever seen anything even remotely similar.

  “There are some things inside that we need to take away with us,” Tiercel said. He sounded a little worried.

  “Of course,” Castuca said cheerily. “Porters will be arranged.”

  “I don’t—” Tiercel said, and that was when Harrier kicked him.

  “Shut up,” he said, when Tiercel looked at him. “We’ll make it work.” He knew Tiercel didn’t want people getting their hands on his precious High Magick “junk” any more than—than—well, than Harrier wanted to be given things he hadn’t earned. This wasn’t the time for that argument, th
ough. Fortunately, Tiercel seemed to agree, because he didn’t say another word about it as Castuca led them all the way to the end of the colonnade and then around the end of the stable block. Now they were in a second, smaller, court. The doors at the end already stood open, and Harrier could see a large room containing a number of odd things—small two-wheeled carts, and several somethings without any wheels at all that looked as if they were meant to be carried—but nothing that looked very much at all like the Elven wagon.

  Castuca wanted to unharness the horses in the courtyard and move the wagon into the storage room by hand, but Harrier was pretty sure the man had no actual idea of how heavy the wagon was. Instead, Harrier turned the team and used them to back the wagon into the storage area before unharnessing the horses (something he did himself since it was obvious Castuca wasn’t familiar with their tack). They stood quietly while he put their halters and lead-ropes on and led them out again. More grooms arrived to lead them away, and Harrier took particular pains to assure them that both Nethiel and Dulion were gentle, well-mannered, and used to strangers.

  And then it was time to unload the wagon. If Castuca was unfamiliar with the wagon itself, he had a good eye for calculating just how much might be packed into a volume of space, for the number of porters he summoned was nicely judged.

  In Armethalieh, a “porter” carried his load upon his back. Here, apparently, his cargo was conveyed in a small three-wheeled cart, similar to the ones the gardeners used at home to shift heaps of dirt from someplace to someplace else. They stood patiently for nearly an hour as Tiercel and Harrier emptied the wagon to the walls—clothes, chests, bedding, books, Ancaladar’s saddle, all of Tiercel’s High Magick junk, and all the other odds and ends they’d collected, accumulated, and forgotten about since they’d left Karahelanderialigor.