The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  “Harrier,” Ancaladar said. “Hold still.”

  The sunlight went away—Ancaladar’s body was blocking it. Harrier froze where he was, imagining a very large black dragon peering at him. He felt a gust of hot breath as Ancaladar inspected him. “You are so small,” Ancaladar said unhappily.

  Harrier wanted to thrash, to somehow explain that Ancaladar needed to do something right now, because Tiercel might not even be here where they were. He held still with an effort, and felt the ground shake, and heard things go crunch as Ancaladar shifted around. Finally he felt a long dragon talon laid, with utmost delicacy, in the middle of his back.

  “Your hands are tied,” Ancaladar explained unnecessarily. “But my claws are very sharp. If you can scrape your bonds against my claw, you can sever them.”

  It took several minutes for Harrier to work himself free. He didn’t know how long his hands had been tied. He couldn’t really feel them. Ancaladar kept telling him to be careful, but he didn’t want to be careful. He wanted to get loose and go look for Tiercel. Finally whatever was holding his wrists broke. He felt a burning ache in his shoulders as his arms flopped to his sides, and as soon as he could, he rolled onto his back again and dragged the blindfold off.

  He immediately wished he hadn’t. The sunlight stabbed into his eyes like knives, making his headache flare into a constant drumbeat that made lights flash behind his eyes in time with his heartbeat. He dragged the gag out of his mouth and pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes. “Find Tiercel,” he croaked. “I’ll come when you find him.”

  Needles of returning circulation coursed through his hands and all the way to his elbows, as if his hands had been asleep for a very long time. After that they simply settled down to ache as if they were badly bruised, and Harrier thought they must be swollen, because when he tried to flex his fingers, they were so stiff he could hardly move them. But he knew he needed to untie his feet as soon as possible.

  Cautiously, he uncovered his eyes. The sunlight still made them ache, and he could barely force them open. They were watering so much that tears were trickling down his face, but if he squinted, he could see. He looked around. The contents of the tent had been reduced to ruin by Ancaladar, but there were several pieces of broken glass in the ruins. Harrier coughed and gagged as he caught the scent of the syrupy date wine that he’d been drugged with for Light knew how long. Better that than killed, though he couldn’t imagine why they’d bothered to keep him alive. He picked up a shard of glass—only then noticing that he had several deep scratches along his wrists from Ancaladar’s claw—and sawed clumsily through the rags that had been used to tie his ankles together.

  His feet were in better shape than his hands were, since he’d still been wearing his boots when they’d tied his ankles, and so the bonds weren’t as tight. But he still couldn’t quite manage to make it to his feet until he crawled to where one of the tent poles lay on the sand and used it as a makeshift walking stick.

  When he dragged himself to his feet, he got a good look at where he was for the first time. It was the orchard outside Tarnatha’Iteru. The canals were filled with water again, and the sight and smell of even muddy irrigation ditch water was enough to make Harrier’s mouth and throat ache with thirst. The last time he’d gotten a really good look at the orchard, when Tiercel had dropped the MageShield the first time—it had been filled with hundreds of Isvaieni tents. Now less than a dozen remained—if you included the ones that Ancaladar had obviously torn up by their roots looking for the two of them.

  “Here,” Ancaladar said, sounding unhappy. “He’s in here.” The dragon nosed at the opening of one of the tents that was still standing.

  “I hope—” Harrier’s mouth was so dry he had to start again. “I hope there’s water here other than what’s in those ditches, because I’m about ready to drink that.”

  “The goatskins hold water,” Ancaladar said gently.

  It took Harrier a long time to stagger across the space between the ruined tent he’d been in and the one Ancaladar was waiting outside of.

  “Drink first,” Ancaladar said. There was a waterskin hanging outside the tent. “You cannot help Tiercel if you are unconscious. And—Harrier—I cannot help him at all.”

  “You told me that once. I remember,” Harrier whispered hoarsely. He wrestled the goatskin down from its hook. The water was warm and tasted of leather, and nothing in Harrier’s life had ever tasted so sweet. He drank until his stomach ached, until he didn’t think he could hold another mouthful no matter how much he wanted to, and even though everything still hurt, he felt stronger. He went inside the tent. Tiercel was lying on the dusty carpet, blindfolded and bound and gagged just as Harrier had been. His head moved from side to side, and he was thrashing feebly.

  “Hang on,” Harrier said. “I’ll get you loose in just a second.”

  There was a tray of food—bread and cheese and dates—sitting out on a low metal table, as if somebody had been going to sit in here and have lunch and gloat over Tiercel. There was a knife on the tray—one of the same kind of knives that all the Isvaieni seemed to carry—and Harrier picked it up without thinking and then dropped it with a cry.

  He thought of the knife in the hand of the man he’d killed. The men he’d killed. He remembered that morning on the steps of the palace, and realized he didn’t even know how many men he’d killed that day, and realized it had all been for nothing, because they’d ended up here anyway. His hands began to shake, and he forced them to stop, and he forced himself to pick up the knife again. It was just a knife. A tool. It was what people did with tools that mattered.

  He cut the rags around Tiercel’s ankles first, then sat him up and cut the ones around his wrists. The center pole of the tent was sturdy enough to lean against; he checked before propping Tiercel against it. Then he cut through the gag and pulled it out.

  “Oh, Light deliver us,” Tiercel said. His voice was hoarse and slurred and his lips were dry and cracked.

  “I’d leave the blindfold on,” Harrier said. “Really.”

  He went back to the door of the tent to get the waterskin, but by the time he came back, Tiercel had pulled off the blindfold and was groaning and wincing at the light from the open side of the tent, bringing his swollen hands up to block as much of it as possible.

  “Told you,” Harrier said without sympathy. He held up the waterskin for Tiercel to drink, and once Tiercel had drunk his fill, washed his own hands and face to remove as much of the dust as he could and then squirted some of the rest of the water over Tiercel.

  “Hey,” Tiercel said weakly.

  “You could use a bath,” Harrier said unsympathetically.

  “Well, so could you,” Tiercel said. He took a deep breath. “I thought you were dead. I didn’t know what had happened. When I came to, I knew I’d been tied up. The first time I could manage to concentrate, I yelled for Ancaladar as loud as I could.”

  “And I came, Bonded,” Ancaladar said from the doorway, sounding agitated. “I woke, and came as fast as I could.”

  “You’re here, and we’re alive,” Harrier said soothingly, because Ancaladar seemed really upset. He went over to the table. Even the smell of the dates was nauseating, but he picked up the bread and the cheese and brought them back to where Tiercel was sitting. “Have some food,” he said, sitting down carefully. The floor of the tent was carpeted; he wondered if the carpets had come from the city, or whether the Isvaieni had carried them here with them. “I don’t know how long we’ve been held prisoner, but I know they didn’t feed us. Or give us any water.” He tore off a piece of the bread and chewed slowly. It was hard and stale, but it only served to make him aware of how hungry he was. After a couple of bites he handed the bread to Tiercel and accepted the cheese in return.

  “What happened?” Tiercel asked.

  “You passed out,” Harrier said, staring over Tiercel’s shoulder.

  “After that. Harrier, I already know the city fell,” Tiercel added, when
Harrier didn’t say anything.

  “Rial and I got you inside—we were on the roof, if you don’t remember. Everybody who was going to fight went out. There was an ambush. I guess. I think the Isvaieni heard the horns and knew the shield wasn’t going to come back up this time.” He shrugged. “It didn’t matter. They were supposed to be too weak to fight back. After six days without water, they should have been.”

  “They weren’t, though,” Tiercel said.

  “No. But you were right,” Harrier said, looking for something to distract Tiercel. “You said that the Red Man—you remember, he was following us all the way to Ysterialpoerin? You said he was here, and he was.”

  Tiercel frowned. “I said that? I don’t remember.”

  “You raved about him for three days.”

  “Yeah, well I probably said I was an enchanted Silver Eagle, too, I mean—wait. He was here?”

  “Yeah. We had a wonderful conversation, and he asked what I’d do—pretty much—to get you out of the city alive, and then I got captured by a bunch of Isvaieni and I guess you did, too.”

  Tiercel gave him an odd look. “That was all that happened?”

  “Does there have to be more? Oh, he said I was real now, which I found very, very comforting. Not.”

  “Because he could see you. And you could talk to him,” Tiercel said, guessing.

  “Something I’d rather avoid doing ever again,” Harrier said, reaching for the waterskin again.

  “And then they held us prisoner,” Tiercel said.

  Harrier groaned in exasperation. “Yes, Tyr. They held us prisoner. And I don’t know why. And most of them left, because there are only a few tents out there now. And I don’t know why they did that either—but most of their tents are gone, and you’ll have to ask Ancaladar for details, because he’s the one who saw the camp, and he might even have seen where they went.”

  He’d forgotten just how annoying Tiercel could be when he’d gotten fascinated by something and wanted to discuss it endlessly. It was bad enough when it was just something that bored Harrier. It was much, much worse when it was something where Harrier was afraid that Tiercel’s endless questions might uncover information Harrier didn’t want him to have.

  “There were only twelve tents here when I arrived,” Ancaladar said. “Seventy shotors. They’re all gone now,” he said, sounding rather pleased with himself.

  “Tell me you didn’t eat all of them,” Harrier muttered, throwing the block of cheese back at Tiercel. Tiercel tried to catch it, but his hands were still too clumsy; it hit him in the chest and bounced to the ground. Harrier suspected the two of them were done with it anyway. He was exhausted and wanted to sleep, ridiculous as that was after all the time he’d spent wine-drugged into unconsciousness.

  “I didn’t eat any of them,” Ancaladar said, sounding affronted. “Well, only one or two of the shotors. And only to encourage the people to flee. The shotors were far more sensible. They fled immediately.”

  “They won’t come back, will they?” Tiercel asked. Half curious and half worried, and it had always driven Harrier crazy—even more so now, knowing that Tiercel wasn’t ever going to change, not if he lived until the end of the world—that Tiercel could never make up his mind to be one way or the other about anything.

  “If they try, I will chase them away again,” Ancaladar said grimly.

  “Can you see where they are right now?” Harrier asked. “Because … I’d like to know they’re really gone. And I’d like to know where all the rest of them are. There were thousands of them here … before.”

  “The bodies in the city and on the plain outside it are less than a sennight dead,” Ancaladar said. “Five days. Perhaps six. Even though this is a desert, I have … some experience with battlefields.”

  Harrier winced inwardly. Yeah, I just bet you have. Until Ancaladar said something like that, it was easy to forget just how old the black dragon was, and how much he’d seen. A war he still wouldn’t tell them much at all about: the Great War. The war he’d tell them bits and pieces about: it didn’t even have a name in their history books, Harrier realized. They just called it The Great Flowering, as if there hadn’t been a war, just a victory.

  “But they didn’t burn the city,” Tiercel said, puzzled. “They didn’t, right?”

  “We’d have smelled that,” Harrier said. “And they didn’t. They wanted the water,” he said, realizing. “The irrigation canals are full, which means they opened the floodgates in the city. Probably to water their shotors. And they wouldn’t burn the city until the last minute—until they were ready to go. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to get at the Iteru.” He ran a hand through his hair. It was filthy, and matted with dust, and the back was clotted with dried blood—his. He winced when his hand touched a sore spot.

  “You really look awful,” Tiercel said.

  Harrier smiled, and felt his bruised lip split open all over again. “I guess you did think you were a Silver Eagle after all back there,” he said in retaliation. “You were definitely convinced you could fly.”

  Tiercel made a face, but Harrier was still thinking. “I have an idea about where the rest of the Isvaieni are, but I’d like Ancaladar to check for me, if he’s willing,” he said.

  “Of course,” Ancaladar said sympathetically. “I need to hunt, in any event.”

  “Be careful,” Tiercel said.

  “Very,” Ancaladar agreed. “What is your idea, Harrier?”

  “All along we’ve known that them traveling in such a large group was a problem for them,” Harrier said, speaking slowly because his head hurt, and his eyes hurt, and the better he started to feel, the more he realized that everything else hurt, too. “That large a group can’t find enough water, or food, or much of anything. So … now I think they’re going home. I don’t think they’re going to bother with Akazidas’Iteru, or anything north of here. Maybe we actually hurt them badly enough. Or scared them. So I think they split up into small groups to do that, and left over several days. And left the city intact, because it’s their best source of water. The last group was probably going to burn it before they went.”

  Harrier knew he ought to take comfort from the thought that they’d saved Akazidas’Iteru, because if they hadn’t been here, if they hadn’t done what they’d done, he knew that after the Isvaieni had destroyed Tarnatha’Iteru they would have gone right on to Akazidas’Iteru.

  He rubbed his eyes wearily. Had the Light, the Wild Magic, saved one city at the expense of another? He remembered that someone, once, had told him that the Balance was about all things, not just people: about animals and trees and that the Wild Magic wove its plans on so large a scale that the Wildmages who did its work often didn’t understand why they did what they did when they paid their Mageprices. But it hurt to think that the Wild Magic could care so little about the people of Tarnatha’Iteru that it had let them all die. It does care, he told himself. It just cares about something else more. And he didn’t know what that was. He knew it was the Great Balance, but that was just a phrase to him. It was too big for him to really imagine. But he tried, because if he didn’t, he’d have to think that Zanattar had been right: there was a False Balance and he was following it.

  No. He would never believe that. Never.

  “So … Follow them, and they’ll lead us right back to whoever filled their heads with all this ‘; False Balance’ nonsense,” Tiercel said, interrupting his thoughts.

  “If your Lake of Fire is here, whoever-it-is is probably camped out right on the shore,” Harrier agreed. “But I don’t want anything to happen to Ancaladar.”

  “And I do not wish anything to happen to Tiercel,” Ancaladar said in return. “I can fly so high that no eyes upon the ground can see me. And so I shall. I will go now, and first make certain that no enemies surround you, and then see all that lies on the face of the desert.”

  The dragon withdrew his head from the tent.

  “Oh, good,” Tiercel said to nobody in particula
r. “And I… I think I’m going to stand up.”

  By clinging to the center pole of the tent, Tiercel managed to get to his feet. He winced, sucking air between his teeth and hissing in pain, and wavering back and forth, but he didn’t fall over.

  “Now that you’re standing up, what are you planning to do?” Harrier demanded.

  “Explore,” Tiercel said simply. “I still feel… kind of sick.”

  “They were keeping us drunk,” Harrier said, trying not to sound indignant.

  “Why?” Tiercel said. “Me, they knew I was a Mage, okay, but why you? And if they meant to keep us as some kind of hostages, why not send us off with the first group that went back, instead of keeping us with the last?”

  “I … don’t… know,” Harrier repeated steadily. He dragged himself to his feet as well, because right now, the prospect of drowning Tiercel in one of the irrigation ditches was starting to seem really attractive.

  He didn’t drown Tiercel, but they both decided that the water in the ditches wasn’t that dirty, and if it was, it was good clean dirt. They found clean clothes in one of the tents—not pants and tunics and vests like the townsfolk wore, but the ankle-length robes and over-robes of the desert-dwellers. Neither of them cared at the moment, though, because they were clean. They carried them to the edge of the nearest ditch and stripped and used the filthy rags of their clothes to wash themselves. Maybe their own clothes could be salvaged later.

  “This has blood all over it,” Tiercel said, picking up Harrier’s tunic from where he’d dropped it in a sodden lump on the ground. Harrier had started to scrub himself with it, seen how soiled it was, and simply tossed it aside.

  “They hit me in the head. I bled,” Harrier said. He was holding up a wad of wet cloth to the back of his head. The cold felt good, and maybe he could soak the blood out of his hair eventually.

  “In the back,” Tiercel said. “Not the front. There’s blood on the front of your tunic.”

  “I said they hit me in the head,” Harrier said evenly.