The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  One of the things the three of them had discussed in one of their private councils of war was going to the Consul and revealing who they were—or who Tiercel and Harrier were, anyway. Harrier could prove he was a Wildmage simply by showing that he held the Three Books, if he had to—and Tiercel knew enough spells to impress most people. They hadn’t suggested the idea because they thought it was a good one, but simply because every idea had to be suggested.

  The Telchi had hesitated for a long moment, regarding them both somberly.

  “Did I think that it would be… entirely useful… I would say that this would be a thing worth doing,” he said at last. “Harrier’s skills would be of great worth did he have the support of the Consul behind him, so that his advice could be followed. And you, Tiercel. Your power is great, and if you did not have to work in secret, perhaps there would be less apprehension among the people.”

  “But?” Harrier said.

  “But there would be a great temptation, I think, either to ask of you what you could not do, or to blame you for that which is not of your doing.”

  “HE THINKS CONSUL Aldarnas would blame us for the existence of the people who are destroying the Iteru-cities?” Tiercel asked later.

  “Well, once you finished explaining to him about how they were all Dark-tainted, and about your visions of the Lake of Fire, yes,” Harrier said. “Now tell me that explanation wouldn’t come into things somewhere along the way.”

  Tiercel didn’t answer, mostly because he couldn’t imagine any explanation of their presence in the city—and his abilities—that didn’t involve his visions and the rebirth of the Endarkened. And Harrier and the Telchi were right: he really couldn’t see that going over well. “What do you think he’d do?” Tiercel asked.

  “Depends on how fast you could get Ancaladar here. So why don’t we just skip the whole thing?” Harrier said. “And why don’t you come up with a nice plan that doesn’t involve us having to explain anything to the Consul—or me actually having to turn the Militia into anything like an army?”

  Tiercel picked up the nearest object—a pillow—and tossed it at Harrier, who caught it easily. At least—based on the maps Tiercel had studied, and all of their best guesses at the size of the enemy army—they had at least another fortnight to get as many people as possible to leave the city and to try to come up with a definite idea of how to defend it. And at least they’d have a little warning when the enemy approached.

  BUT THEY WOULD have had no advance notice at all if not for the flocks that sheltered within sight of the city walls by night, for when the Isvaieni army approached Tarnatha’Iteru, it did not beat drums to announce itself. And it came by night, not by day.

  The first indication Tiercel had that anything was happening was when he found himself being roughly shaken awake from a sound sleep.

  “Get up,” Harrier said urgently. “Get dressed.” Tiercel barely managed to get his eyes open, but the sight of Harrier in full armor, wearing swords crossed on his back, jolted him fully awake. He knew that the Telchi had given Harrier his own set of swords recently, but he’d never seen Harrier actually wear them. In the distance—now that he was awake—he could hear the sound of horns blowing—the same horns that blew at dawn and sunset when the city gates were opened for the day and closed for the last time. But it was the middle of the night.

  “They’re here,” Harrier said as Tiercel scrambled into his clothes. “Ten minutes ago Caldab heard the flock guards barking—all of them at once. He ordered the torches lit along the wall, and the herders ran out and lit the northern emergency beacons that we set up. The army’s a couple of miles out.”

  “Come on,” Tiercel said.

  The two of them shoved their way through the crowds milling about on the streets. From the snatches of conversation Tiercel overheard, no one was quite certain of what was going on. Some thought it was a fire, others that they were being warned of the approach of a Sandwind. A few moments later, the horns fell silent, and the silence seemed as ominous as the sound had. Soon he saw Militia members, easily distinguished by their green armbands and green sashes, going along the streets ordering people to go back inside. Some of them did as they were told, some of them argued.

  When Tiercel and Harrier arrived at the South Gate, a work party was already bringing wagons full of bricks to block it. Not the small three-wheeled carts that Tiercel was used to seeing, but full-sized wagons that took a dozen men to shift.

  “The gate’s been barred, and it opens in anyway,” Harrier said as they climbed the staircase. “Once the cart’s in place, they’ll pull the axel-pins. The East and West Gates are being blocked the same way. Nobody’s going to be able to open them.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little…?” Tiercel began, but Harrier simply pointed toward the wall. The top of the wall could only be reached by steep narrow staircases that ran beside the gates. Access to the steps was guarded by several men, some of whom wore Militia green, others of whom wore the familiar armor of the City Guards. They allowed Tiercel and Harrier to pass without challenge, though several of them gave Tiercel questioning looks.

  The steps were narrow and worn with age, since the steps over the lesser gates were rarely used, and consequently not kept in good repair. When Tiercel got to the top, he glanced back across the city. Parts of it were still dark, but most of it was brightly lit, and the Consul’s Palace was ablaze with light. This was the first time he’d actually been up on the city walls, and he was surprised at how far he could see.

  Harrier tugged at his sleeve, and he turned away from the city and walked toward the edge of the wall. There were several Guardsmen standing there, gazing out into the darkness, and to Tiercel’s faint surprise, the Telchi was there with them. They moved aside as Tiercel and Harrier approached, making room for them, and Tiercel got his first sight of the enemy.

  “Don’t you think that’s a little stupid?” he’d been about to say to Harrier before they’d come up here, meaning the idea of blocking every exit from the city but one. But now, looking out over the plain below, he understood. The walls were their only defense, and they would only be a defense as long as the gates could be kept closed. The City Guards could be trusted to follow orders where City Militia could not, so for all their sakes, having only one set of gates to defend against panicked citizens was probably one of the smartest choices anyone could make. He wondered if the decision had been Harrier’s.

  He stared out at the approaching enemy. Harrier had said that the presence of the enemy had only been discovered by the barking of the dogs. In that case, they must have approached in total darkness, but now that they’d been discovered, there was no more need for concealment. Torches sparkled among their ranks. Between the torches they carried, and the row of warning beacons burning on the ground about a mile away, Tiercel could see them clearly.

  They were mounted on shotors. The animals moved forward at a slow walk. They didn’t advance in columns, nor did they beat drums and shout, as the refugees from Laganda’Iteru had said they did. There were far too many of them to count—so many that the line of silent marchers stretched so far into the distance that the flames of their torches were barely visible sparks.

  “It is very odd,” the Telchi said quietly. “I see Adanate Isvaieni, and Lanzanur, and Fadaryama, and Hinturi, and Kadyastar all here together. Yet the tribes do not band together for any reason. And many of those tribes do not approach the Iteru-cities at all.”

  “We cannot possibly hold the city,” Harrier said.

  He didn’t sound either happy or upset about it, Tiercel realized. He sounded as if he was stating a fact that was so obvious that there was no point in having feelings about it. “The sun is going to rise today,” or “it’s raining and you’re going to get wet if you go outside,” or “if you drop that dish it’s going to break.”

  “We cannot possibly hold the city.”

  When Tiercel stopped staring out at the approaching army, awareness of the world arou
nd him rushed in like the ocean rushing in at high tide. He could hear the shouts and screams from the streets below as the city awoke to its peril; feel the rising wind that told him—after so many moonturns spent on the road—that it was an hour or so before dawn.

  “I need to go out and talk to them,” Tiercel said, turning away from the wall.

  Harrier grabbed for him and he dodged, evading his friend’s lunge with years of practice. The fastest way to the only gate that still opened was along the top of the wall. Tiercel ran.

  The top of the city wall was as wide as the widest city street below, and the guards along the top of the wall were gathered near the outer edge, hands braced on the low wall that edged the top, peering out into the darkness. There was plenty of room for Tiercel to run, and he did. He could hear Harrier’s footsteps pounding along behind him, but he’d always been faster than Harrier was, even now. Harrier was gaining on him, but he hadn’t caught up.

  The steps down to the ground from the North Gate were wider than the others, wide enough to take at a run. There were City Guards standing around at the bottom, and Tiercel was moving too fast to dodge all of them. A couple of them grabbed him—startled and worried and frightened—and by then Harrier had jumped down the last five steps and pounced on him.

  “Wait—wait—wait—” Harrier gasped. “If we’re going to do this incredibly stupid thing, we’ll need horses.”

  “You’re going with me?” Tiercel asked in disbelief.

  Harrier simply smacked him.

  A FEW MINUTES later they rode out through the gates on a pair of horses from the Consul’s private stables. They hadn’t had to go far at all to get them; half-a-dozen horses and the same number of shotors were being held right at the gate, standing saddled and bridled and ready to go behind a line of City Guard. Tiercel wasn’t sure what their purpose was: last-minute escape? Bribes for the enemy army? He didn’t think they’d work for either purpose. Despite that, he wasn’t quite sure how Harrier had managed to talk the Captain of the City Guard into giving them two of the horses and opening the gate. Saying “my friend has something he wants to try,” really didn’t seem to Tiercel as if it was a really persuasive argument.

  “I don’t quite see…” he said, as they rode out through the gate.

  “Oh, come on, Tyr. You remember Batho.”

  “No.”

  “He was on the wall the day we came. He wasn’t the Captain of the Guard then, but Gurilas deserted when the refugees arrived, and he was promoted.”

  “Clear as mud.”

  “So, he’s a friend of the Telchi’s, and I’ve been training beside him for almost a month, and he knows I’m the Telchi’s apprentice, and he probably actually thinks we want to make a run for it, and won’t he be surprised?”

  Tiercel would have laughed—Harrier’s bizarre sense of humor surfaced at the oddest moments—but he happened to glance up. Even on the northern side of the city, they could still see the column of the advancing army. It was getting close. “Come on,” he said. “We need to hurry.”

  They spurred their horses into a gallop.

  IF THE ADVANCING Isvaieni were surprised to see their path barred by two lone riders, their leaders gave no sign of it. To Harrier’s ill-concealed astonishment (he did his best not to show how stunned he was, but the Telchi had said that every thought he had was displayed on his face for the world to see, and Harrier had no reason to doubt it), when they brought their horses to the front of the advancing horde (calling them “the Darkspawn army,” accurate or not, had seemed a lot funnier when he couldn’t see them), the line of shotors slowed, then stopped. If they hadn’t been moving at the slowest of slow walks, they all would have started banging into each other immediately, but all that happened was that a sort of ripple of stillness spread through the army, as rider after rider brought his shotor to a halt.

  One of the many lessons the Telchi had been teaching him that wasn’t immediately involved with hitting someone or avoiding being hit was in learning to estimate, at a glance and at a distance, the number of people in a group. Harrier hadn’t quite been sure what purpose learning something that arcane could have. Now he knew. It was so that he knew that there were between four and five thousand people out here. Nearly as many as there were still inside the city. And all of these were prepared to fight.

  “We want to talk,” Tiercel said quickly, before the other man could say anything. “My name is Tiercel Rolfort. I’m from Armethalieh. It’s a city in the north. I want to know… what you want.”

  The leader of the army stared at Tiercel for a long moment. A shotor was a good bit taller than a horse, so he was looking down. Harrier had a desperate urge to reach for his swords, but the man was armed, and so were the men on both sides of him. Harrier wasn’t sure how quickly Tiercel could cast a spell, but he wasn’t sure it was fast enough to keep them from getting killed if Harrier did something that blatantly provocative.

  “Once Golden Armethalieh was the last defense against the Darkness,” the man said slowly. “I, Zanattar of the Lanzanur Isvaieni, say this. Now Armethalieh is a crucible of error and Taint, just as the Iteru-cities are. Its day for Cleansing will come.”

  “You’re wrong,” Tiercel said firmly. “Armethalieh isn’t Tainted. And neither is Tarnatha’Iteru. But—”

  “You follow the False Balance. Since the time of the Great Flowering, the Balance of the World has been out of true, for the Light destroyed the great evil that beset the world in that time—as was only right—but those who kept the Light in those days did not stop where they should have, and so ever since that day, the Great Balance has been tipping more and more away from what the Wild Magic means it to be. Generation after generation has followed this False Balance, upholding it for their own purposes. They have taught that Light is always good. But the children of the desert know better. Light scours. Light blinds. Light kills. It is Darkness that is the friend and ally of the desertborn, and the True Balance contains both Darkness and Light. This is the Balance as it was kept in ancient times, the Balance that will be restored to the land.”

  You’ve got to be joking. Harrier didn’t need to see Tiercel’s face to know he was as stunned as Harrier was. You didn’t need to be a Wildmage to know that this was crazy talk. Anybody who’d ever gone to Light-Day services knew it.

  “No,” Tiercel said urgently. “Zanattar, you have to listen to me. The Light sent me here because—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish. Harrier saw Zanattar reach for his sword, and he cried out and spurred his horse forward, reaching back to draw his swords, and Tiercel raised his hands, and a wall of purple light appeared between him and the Isvaieni army.

  Fortunately Harrier hadn’t drawn his swords before Tiercel cast MageShield, because the sudden appearance of the glowing wall of light made his mount plunge and rear, and he needed both hands to control it. Tiercel was having the same problem.

  It took the two of them several minutes to calm the animals. The horses would have been happy to simply bolt, but in one direction there was the wall of Mageshield, and in the other there was the wall of the city. Frankly, Harrier would have been happy to simply get off and walk, if his mount would cooperate by holding still for long enough.

  When it finally did, he looked up to see that the wall of MageShield extended as far as he could see. He looked up. It went as high as he could see, too, arcing over the city.

  “Tiercel?” he said.

  “The Light sent me here because there’s Darkness somewhere out there in the desert,” Tiercel said quietly. After a moment, Harrier realized he was finishing the sentence Zanattar hadn’t let him say.

  “You’ve cast MageShield all around the city,” Harrier said.

  “I had to,” Tiercel said. “Anything less, and they’d just have come around it.”

  Like the flames of a fire, the shield wasn’t quite opaque. Through the barrier, Harrier could see—dimly—the Isvaieni army. They weren’t approaching closely—in fact, they
’d retreated—but they were spreading out all along the front of it in an ominous mass.

  MageShield didn’t block sound at all. He could hear the sounds of shouting, voices mingled and blending until the only thing he could really make out was that they were all angry. It was a bone-chilling sound.

  “We need to get back inside,” Harrier said. If they’ll let us in. He turned his sweating, trembling mount and forced himself to look up at the city walls. The entire wall above them was crowded with bodies. Everyone looking down at them was white-faced and silent, but Harrier could already hear the sound of screams and wailing from within the city.

  “WHO TOLD HIM that, do you think?” Tiercel asked. “About the Light, and the Balance?” They were riding slowly back toward the gate, and Tiercel sounded as if he’d suddenly decided that knowing the source of Zanattar’s ravings was of vital importance.

  The wall of MageShield fire gave everything an eerie brightness—far brighter than even the full moon, bright enough to cast their shadows on the wall beside them, dark purple against bright purple. In this strange light—bright yet unclear—Tiercel’s hair was vivid pale purple, his skin a darker unnatural shade of violet, their chestnut horses indistinct black blobs.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he made it up,” Harrier said. “Maybe he’s been talking to your Fire Woman. Do you think it matters? It’s not like he’s going to tell you now.”

  “No. But I’d still like to know…” Tiercel stopped.

  “Why they told him that? Oh, come on, Tyr. So he’d come here with all his friends and destroy the Iteru-cities, why else?”

  “Okay,” Tiercel answered. “Why did they want him to do that?”

  “Supply,” Harrier answered. It hadn’t occurred to him until Tiercel asked, but suddenly it made sense to him, unfolding in his mind as if someone had unfurled a map upon a table. He saw Armethalieh and Sentarshadeen, the closest northern cities to the Madiran, saw the Armen Plain and the Trade Road. “If anybody wants to enter the Madiran—for trade or any other purpose—they need to supply at the Iteru-cities before they head farther south. I bet they’ve destroyed the wells when they’ve destroyed the cities, too. They can retreat into the desert, and nobody can follow them. It makes sense.”