The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  He knew it was just one city. He knew there were eleven Iteru, and he knew for sure that two had been destroyed and he didn’t know how many of them were still left. He knew that there were nine cities in the north as well as a bunch of towns and villages and farms scattered around, and there were nine Elven cities in the Veiled Lands, and villages and farms there too, and probably a lot of other places he hadn’t even heard of. And he knew that if the Dark wasn’t stopped, and the Endarkened came back, they were all going to be destroyed. And that because of that, the smartest thing for him and Harrier to do would be to leave here right now, while they could still do so safely, and start looking for the Lake of Fire.

  And he just couldn’t bring himself to do that.

  “I think we’ll stay,” Tiercel said.

  “Yes,” Harrier said.

  Twelve

  The Gathering Storm

  FOR THE NEXT several sennights, things almost seemed to return to normal in Tarnatha’Iteru. When no army showed up immediately, those who had not fled in the first day or two divided themselves into two factions: those who believed there was no threat at all—or if there was, it was something that could be easily defeated by the city’s own resources—and the other group, who believed that the threat was something that certainly must be run from the moment it appeared, but who also believed that they would receive plenty of advance warning of its arrival.

  “They’re all idiots,” Harrier groaned, throwing himself down on one of the cushions in the Telchi’s living room.

  “Ugh. You stink,” Tiercel told him helpfully.

  “I’ve been drilling the new City Militia all morning,” Harrier said, pulling himself into a sitting position and reaching for the carafe of cold mint tea that was set out on the table. “You’d stink too. What have you been doing?”

  “Inventories. Since the Consul took possession of all the food supplies, he’s ordered a complete inventory of the warehouses so that—he says—he can properly recompense the merchants for their losses. Really it’s so none of it goes, urn, missing from the warehouses because of the rationing.” Tiercel sighed. “Rumor has it that he’s going to start searching houses and confiscating stockpiles next.”

  “Except if you have two or more household members in the City Militia,” Harrier said, grinning. “And we have four, just to begin with. Ophare and Latar aren’t that good, but at least they’re there.”

  Consul Aldarnas was a wise man. Whether or not he actually believed that an enemy army was coming to attack his city, or that it would be possible to defend against them, he knew that believing there was something they could do to defend themselves against the danger would keep panic from spreading. Before sunset on the day that the news of Laganda’Iteru’s destruction had reached him, he’d ordered a City Militia to be formed, to be trained by those who already had some experience with weapons: the City Watch and the Caravan Guards. As one of the Telchi’s students, Harrier found himself in the odd position of becoming a teacher when he had barely begun being a student.

  “But how’d you get stuck doing that, anyway? Inventory is clerk’s work,” Harrier added, frowning thoughtfully.

  “The Telchi told Consul Aldarnas’s Court Chamberlain I could read and write. And I’m not from here, so I’m harder to bribe.”

  “He didn’t tell him about the whole, um…?”

  “Me being a High Mage? No. Better off not. And probably just as well that you didn’t let him tell anybody you were a Wildmage when we came into the city, you know, because everybody’d be expecting you to do something now.”

  Harrier sighed. “It would be nice to know what. Considering that apparently there are dozens of them down here for every square foot of sand and they didn’t do a Light-blessed thing.”

  “Except disappear,” Tiercel said.

  “I hope that worries you,” Harrier said.

  “A lot,” Tiercel assured him. “But I don’t know what I can do about it.”

  “Find them?” Harrier suggested.

  Tiercel just shrugged. Unfortunately, when they’d found out about the army, he’d taken another careful look at the spells for “seeing at a distance” in his spellbooks just in case he might have missed something the first time and found out that no, he hadn’t. They were just about the most useless magic he’d never heard of: either what he looked at needed to be a place he’d been before, or there needed to be some individual there that he already knew, and neither thing was true of any place in the Madiran but here. In fact, Tiercel couldn’t see a lot of point for a spell that would only let you see a place you’d already been, but a lot of the High Magick was oddly confusing that way.

  The Wild Magic, of course, didn’t have the same sort of limitations, and Scrying didn’t carry a Mageprice. Harrier pointed out first, that there were no guarantees that it would be useful, since the last time the Wild Magic had decided to do something for him, it had involved slaughtering a bandit army and all of the Telchi’s men, and next, that according to the spell, the Wildmage would be shown what the Wild Magic felt he needed to see, rather than what he felt he needed to see. Last, he pointed out that they didn’t have any of the ingredients and couldn’t meet any of the proper conditions. But just when Tiercel was about to completely lose his temper and call Harrier a coward, he’d agreed to try.

  “Trying” had begun with a visit to the local herbalist, since there weren’t any ferns in the Madiran and no possibility of getting any. Harrier had been absolutely certain that something called “desert lily” would work as well, and he didn’t look happy about knowing it. Then one morning instead of going off to drill the Militia he’d locked himself into their bedroom with the largest glass bowl Tiercel had ever seen (bought new for the spell) and the bottle of dried desert lily and a jug of date wine and a larger jug of water to fill the bowl.

  It was dusk by the time he’d come out. He’d looked shocked and tired and sick, and he’d refused to tell Tiercel what he’d seen, only that it wasn’t anything that would do them any good.

  Tiercel hadn’t asked him to do magic again.

  “Are they any good?” Tiercel asked now, returning to the subject of the City Militia.

  Harrier sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. It was so wet with sweat that it was nearly black. “No. If they weren’t practicing with wooden weapons they’d all have killed each other already. There’s worse, though.”

  Tiercel looked up at the note of disquiet in Harrier’s voice. He sounded worried, and Harrier didn’t exactly worry most of the time, or at least he hadn’t used to. Before all this had started, all the way back in Armethalieh, Harrier had pretty much assumed that no matter what the two of them were doing, it was going to go spectacularly wrong, and had complained accordingly. Tiercel had used to think it was funny.

  “Caldab and Garam are two men Macenor Telchi knows. Caravan guards, like him. They have families here, so they didn’t take jobs the way a lot of the other guards did when everybody was hiring people about a moonturn ago. And… when nothing happened after a few days, the Consul decided to send them on a scouting mission to see, I guess, whether or not the stories were true.”

  “He can’t have thought they weren’t,” Tiercel protested.

  “How do I know what he thought?” Harrier grumbled. “I know what Niranda said, that Piaca wouldn’t have lied, but… rich merchants? I can think of a dozen reasons merchants would leave a place and lie their heads off about it. And… yes. Twenty or thirty regular people followed them, and they said they saw an army, and they said they saw the city burn. And I can think of half a dozen ways to fake that. No, I don’t think they were lying. But what they said they saw doesn’t have to have been true.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Tiercel protested.

  “Not for a minute,” Harrier said. “But if I were the Consul, that would be the way I’d have to think. So he sent scouts to go see if the story was true, three sennights ago. And they haven’t come back.”

  “That�
�s not enough time to… you didn’t tell me,” Tiercel said, feeling oddly betrayed.

  “Macenor Telchi only told me an hour ago,” Harrier replied. “The Consul swore them to secrecy, and slipped them out of the city by the South Gate in the dead of night so nobody would know. But they told the Telchi, so that he’d take care of their families if they didn’t come back. He said the Consul gave them racing shotors from his own personal stable, and no matter how ugly those things are, they’re fast. They can go for almost a sennight without food and water, longer without food if there’s water, and the refugees said the wells along the road were still good.”

  “So in three sennights, they could have gotten there and back again,” Tiercel said, working it out.

  “At least one of them,” Harrier agreed grimly.

  It wasn’t anything they hadn’t known, or at least hadn’t suspected. But being this much more certain was worse somehow.

  Harrier poured himself another glass of tea. “Look, Tyr,” he said, and his voice was as serious as Tiercel had ever heard it. “We both know that when this Darkspawn army shows up it’s going to be up to you and Ancaladar. What are you going to do?”

  “Me?” To his vast irritation, Tiercel heard his voice squeak in alarm.

  Harrier smiled grimly. “You. Please don’t tell me I’m a Knight-Mage. I… know it.” He closed his eyes, as if he were remembering things he wished he’d never known. “I can tell you the walls won’t hold. I can tell you they can be scaled, inside and out. I can tell you how to take them down. And—I guess, maybe—I could do a fair job of defending this place. For a while. If anybody would listen to me. They won’t, though. I’m not Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy, and I don’t have an army. Or a magic sword. And since this is not the time to expect me to start figuring out how to cast major Wild Magic spells—just leaving aside the fact that I’d need to get a bunch of people to lend power to any really big spells, which would mean telling them I’m a Wildmage, which could get really ugly really fast—it’s up to you.”

  Unfortunately, even though Tiercel knew that Harrier didn’t want to cast spells at all, he also knew that Harrier would do it if he had to. But Harrier was telling the honest truth. He’d barely managed to Heal the Telchi at all. For anything more significant, he’d need a lot of people to share the cost of the spell.

  “I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Tiercel said in a low voice. It was what it all came down to. He’d been thinking about what he might have to do to defend the city ever since the first refugees had arrived in Tarnatha’Iteru, and all he could think of, every time he closed his eyes, was the road outside Windy Meadows, and summoning Fire to burn the Goblins, and how they’d screamed as they’d burned.

  “I know,” Harrier said, and he didn’t sound very happy either. With good reason: his Gift didn’t really have any other use: High Magick could be used for a lot of different things, but as Harrier had said from the very beginning, there was only one thing a Knight-Mage—or the spells he could cast—was really for.

  “So I’ve been thinking,” Tiercel said. “We aren’t sure of why they’re after the Iteru-cities, but if there’s one thing I do know from listening to Father talk about the kinds of cases that are heard in the Magistrates Courts, I know that if it’s too difficult to get at Tarnatha’Iteru, they’ll just go and try something else, somewhere else.”

  “You think you can scare them off?” Harrier said dubiously.

  “Maybe,” Tiercel said. “And Akazidas’Iteru has been warned by now, and its Consul will almost certainly send a dispatch rider to the Chief Magistrate. I’m not sure what she can do though, because…”

  “The Nine Cities don’t have an army any more than the Iteru-cities do. And the last time anybody tried to call up the Treaty Levies was during the last war, and it didn’t work then,” Harrier agreed. “Don’t stare at me like that: the provisions for the Treaty Levies are still on the books, and the Portmaster of Armethalieh Port is supposed to have ten heavy warships provisioned and ready to launch at all times in support of the King of the Elves. Drives Da half-mad—he’s always petitioning to get the law struck, because it was ancient in First Magistrate Cilarnen’s time, and we aren’t even sure what kind of ships they’re supposed to be any more. But First Magistrate Cilarnen decreed that the treaty provisions should stand as long as the City walls did, and First Magistrate Vaunnel says that part of the City wall is still standing so the Treaty and all its provisions does too, so we pretty much ignore it.”

  Tiercel laughed. “I’m always surprised at the things you know.”

  “Been listening to you all these years, haven’t I?” Harrier got to his feet. “I’m going to go take a bath. Don’t know why I bother, since I’m going to be out drilling those lazy idiots as soon as the hot part of the day passes.”

  “To keep from stinking me out of the house for the next few hours,” Tiercel pointed out, “since I’m not going to be back to reckoning up measures of grain and barrels of oil for at least that long.”

  Harrier laughed. “I guess when the army gets here and sees Ancaladar sitting on the wall, it’ll make them think twice, though.”

  “It would,” Tiercel agreed, “but I’m not going to call him.”

  Harrier had been halfway out of the room; he stopped. “I’m sure you’re going to explain that.”

  “We know he’s harmless. But he’d scare everybody in the city as much as he’d scare an approaching army. So they’d unbolt the gates and go rushing right out to escape. I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

  “Maybe not.”

  THE NEXT SENNIGHT went very much as the previous three had gone, with a few small differences.

  There was a renewed exodus of people heading northward. Whether it was because rumors of the true reason for Caldab and Garam’s unexplained absence had spread, or because the fact that the Consul continued to prepare for misfortune had caused those who were undecided about leaving to make up their minds, or whether Tiercel’s quiet persistence in insisting that people should leave the city while they could convinced people, it wasn’t really possible to tell. From the very beginning, Tiercel had done his best to persuade everyone he spoke to that leaving the city would be the best course of action. In the sennights he’d spent searching Tarnatha’Iteru for any information that might reveal the location of the Lake of Fire, he’d made the acquaintance of a very large number of people, and he drew upon that familiarity now, urging everyone he knew even slightly to leave while there was still time. But without having hard facts to present—which he couldn’t do—it was difficult to convince people to leave who weren’t of a mind to leave anyway. And the more time that passed without anything happening, the harder it was to convince people that there was any real danger at all. To leave the city, for nearly everyone who lived here, meant to abandon everything they owned, and few people were willing to do that except if they were panicking, or if the threat was actually in sight. There were very few who were willing to do something that would cost them so much on the basis of warnings they considered vague. If the army had not come yet—so the common wisdom ran—perhaps it would not come at all. And the city walls were high.

  But some did heed the warnings, and just as before, the Consul did not hinder anyone who wished to leave the city, though now anyone wishing to leave had to depart at the times customarily assigned to such departures: between two hours after sunrise, when the city gates were unbarred for the day, and one hour before sunset, when the gates were barred for the night. The Telchi told Harrier and Tiercel that he suspected that the Consul had sent more scouts out to see the location and disposition of the enemy army, since by now he must be nearly certain it existed. But if he had, all of them were fairly certain that the scouts hadn’t reported back—though none of them had any definite information. There were dozens of different stories making the rounds of the city, none of which made very much sense. Consul Aldarnas had taken to appearing on the balcony of his Palace twice a day, just so that
anyone who cared to could see that he had not fled to safety. Even though there was no enemy anywhere in sight, without rationing and fixed prices, half the people in the city would have starved a fortnight ago—anything in the markets that didn’t have a price fixed by the Consul was either completely unavailable, or selling for ten times what it had gone for a moonturn ago.

  And despite this—despite the fact that the city lived under constantly increasing fear—nearly three-quarters of the inhabitants firmly refused to leave. Tiercel wasn’t sure that even the Consul could order them all to leave, and Harrier said there weren’t enough men in the City Watch—even if you counted in the Caravan Guards and the new Militia for good measure—to force them to. And it didn’t matter one way or the other, really, Harrier added, because there weren’t enough supplies, even if they stripped the entire city, to get them all to Akazidas’Iteru safely, because in the north Windrack was a cool month—early spring—but here in the Madiran, it was already brutally hot. Some of the people in Tarnatha’Iteru could still leave—but not all of them.

  And in a few moonturns, Tiercel realized, it would be an entire year since he’d left home.

  Meanwhile, Harrier continued to try to convince Tiercel to rouse Ancaladar from hibernation. He’d agreed that probably bringing Ancaladar to the city wouldn’t be a good idea, but he didn’t see why Tiercel shouldn’t wake Ancaladar up and just hide him somewhere. Tiercel hadn’t even bothered to point out that hiding someone about the size of one of those heavy warships Harrier’s Da didn’t keep around the Port would be difficult at the best of times, much less with Ancaladar waking up hungry and needing to hunt. He didn’t want to think about the fact that what Harrier kept referring to with ghoulish good humor as “the Darkspawn army” was probably something that might actually be capable of hurting Ancaladar, and that they didn’t really know where it was. For all they knew, it had decided to bypass Tarnatha’Iteru completely and head straight for Akazidas’Iteru.