The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

“Why?” Tiercel asked simply, regarding Harrier steadily.

  “Because they’re murderous Darkspawn. And I was trying to get us somewhere to hide until you could wake up and call Ancaladar.”

  “You killed one of them,” Tiercel said, and it was as if he’d suddenly figured out the answer to a question. “That’s why—”

  Harrier began to laugh. He didn’t know why hearing Tiercel say something that was only the truth hurt so much. “You always think you can do things so much better than I can,” he said, hating himself and unable to stop. “How many did you kill when you threw MageShield right up in front of them? Maybe I didn’t kill as many as you did, but at least I got my hands dirty! I got my hands dirty,” he repeated softly.

  “Harrier, no! I didn’t mean—” Tiercel blurted out.

  Harrier turned away and waded out of the canal. He picked up the bundle of clean clothes and walked back toward the tent.

  By the time he reached it he was dry, and he began to dress. There was supposed to be a sash worn with this. And something under it, too, he bet. Probably if he looked around some more he could find them.

  He saw a shadow stretch across the rug behind him. “Get out,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Tiercel said, but he didn’t leave. “I didn’t know.”

  “Now you do,” Harrier said evenly.

  “Do you think I—” Tiercel stopped. “Do you think I feel any differently about you than I did? You did something—”

  “I killed people,” Harrier said harshly.

  “So did I,” Tiercel answered.

  Harrier shook his head. He couldn’t tell Tiercel that was different. He didn’t want to tell Tiercel it was different—how it was different. Tiercel had stood on a wall a mile away and cast a spell. And he’d known he was responsible, and he’d seen the people die, and it was horrible, but he hadn’t stood inches away from another man with a sword in his hand and been sprayed with his blood and seen the light fade from the man’s eyes as he fell.

  “I know it was different,” Tiercel said, still quietly. “I couldn’t have done what you did. Not because I don’t know how to fight with a sword. It’s not that.”

  “What, then?” Harrier said, when Tiercel didn’t say anything else.

  “It must have been horrible. Having to kill somebody like that, and… having to keep doing it. You weren’t even doing it for yourself. I’m sorry.”

  “You can shut up now,” Harrier said. He wasn’t angry any more. He just wished he didn’t have to remember what he’d done. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he didn’t really know who he was saying it to. It didn’t seem fair to be sorry for the people he’d killed, when they’d killed so many other people, but he was. “They didn’t have any choice,” he said slowly.

  “No,” Tiercel said seriously. “Someone lied to them and told them we were Tainted. And they came to kill us, thinking they were doing the right thing. And when they got here, they had to get into the city, or else they’d all die. We tried to save the city. And you tried to save me. And we’re both still alive. And maybe we’ll never know why.” Harrier heard Tiercel take a deep breath. “And I guess we have to think of our being alive as a good thing. Because we still have a chance to find the Lake of Fire.”

  And maybe a better chance—now—than they would have had if Tarnatha’Iteru hadn’t been destroyed, because maybe Ancaladar could follow the retreating Isvaieni back to whoever had sent them. Harrier thought of a Balance so vast and terrible that it could sacrifice a city to show them the way to their goal. And he thought of all the cities—all the people—there were in the world, not only here, but beyond Great Ocean. For just a moment he could glimpse the scale of that Balance, but then he realized that wasn’t the point. For humans to think that way—to see the world on such a scale—meant that they’d say that anything that happened, anything they chose to do, was okay. And that wasn’t right. Only the Wild Magic itself could see the world that way. People had to trust in the Light, and care about each other, and Wildmages … well, Harrier guessed that Wildmages had to trust in the Wild Magic and pay their Mageprices.

  “Stop talking. Now. Really,” he said.

  “Okay. I’m done,” Tiercel said.

  WHEN ANCALADAR RETURNED a couple of hours later, the two of them were sitting in the doorway of one of the tents, roasting meat on a spit. They’d found a basket of freshly killed hares in one of the tents—the skinned and cleaned bodies were packed in oil; the tent was obviously meant to be a larder of sorts—and had put together a meal. All of the loaves were unappetizingly stale, but there was an entire barrel of uncooked dough, and Harrier had found a griddle-stone. They ate hot flatbread, and drank mint tea with honey, and waited for the meat to cook.

  Harrier could see the walls of the city in the distance. It looked fine on this side—untouched—except for the fact that there were tiny black specks moving along the top of the wall, and when one of them was jostled off and flapped awkwardly into space he realized that they were birds.

  When Ancaladar came back, he made a low pass over the city. As he did, suddenly the sky above it was black with birds, as thousands of them boiled up out of it squalling in fright. Harrier saw a flash of motion along the ground, too, as something came running along the city wall, but it was too far away to see exactly what it was.

  Ancaladar kindly landed far enough away so that the dust of his landing wouldn’t come anywhere near them and spoil what they were cooking. Harrier wondered how they were going to ride him when they left. Ancaladar’s saddle was in the storage room at the Telchi’s house, and … Harrier decided not to think about that.

  “This is our dinner,” Harrier said, when Ancaladar approached. To be fair, Ancaladar actually lay down quite a distance away and simply stretched out his neck in their direction.

  “I have already eaten,” Ancaladar said mildly, blinking slowly.

  “I hope you ate well?” Tiercel asked politely. He yawned. They were both exhausted, and still hungry despite all the bread they’d eaten, and both felt the aftereffects of so many days of captivity lying bound and half-starved.

  “Very well,” Ancaladar said smugly.

  “Are there any shotors left in the whole desert?” Harrier asked. He decided that the meat was done. Or done enough, anyway.

  “Antelope,” Ancaladar corrected. “And pig. More were required than if I’d eaten shotor. However, they were far tastier.”

  “You’re going to burn yourself,” Tiercel pointed out.

  Harrier snarled, sucking his burned fingers. He waved a leg of the hare around to cool it. “Did you see them?” he mumbled around his fingers.

  “Those whom I drove from this place continue to flee. They have managed to regain … nearly all of their lost mounts. I think they will seek out their brethren, and gain from them enough resources to be able to finish their journey homeward in safety. So they will see no need to return here.”

  “Yes,” Tiercel said, nodding. “But where are they going?”

  “The first of them to leave have been less than a sennight on their journey,” Ancaladar said. “I do not yet know.”

  “So what do we do?” Tiercel asked.

  “We wait for them to tell us,” Harrier said.

  THE SUN SET, and the two of them staggered off to sleep the moment the temperature began to drop. Ancaladar said he would stand guard—they were safe from the Isvaieni, but the ruin of the city had attracted many predators, and some of them would undoubtedly come to the orchard seeking water. Harrier knew that normally the irrigation canals were only filled for a few hours early in the morning, to keep the sun’s heat from stealing all the water, but without someone in the city to work the mechanisms, they just kept filling no matter how much water evaporated. He guessed you couldn’t really say it was a waste, either.

  But in the middle of the night the wind shifted, blowing south from the city. By the time the smell woke them, the stench was thick enough to make them gag.

  “Oh, Ligh
t—” Tiercel’s voice held nauseated misery. He sounded as if he was on the verge of asking what that smell was, but he knew better. They both did. Dead bodies, hundreds upon hundreds of them, left unburied for nearly a sennight in the desert sun.

  They had to do something.

  Harrier staggered to his feet. He’d thought of something that might help. Not that anything could completely.

  In the Madiran, they called it gonduruj—a pale-yellow resin that was harvested from the trees in the nearby hills. It was one of the ingredients in Light-incense, and also used in medicines and even some recipes. He’d seen a sack of it in the provisions tent. He staggered out of the sleeping tent, holding a fold of his robe over his nose.

  “What is wrong?” Ancaladar asked when he came reeling out into the open, and Harrier wanted to ask him if he had no sense of smell at all, but that would have involved talking, and that would have involved breathing, and he was trying not to.

  He staggered into the other tent, hoping he remembered where the gonduruj was, because he thought he’d pass out from the stench in the time it took to conjure up a ball of Coldfire. He knew the wind shifted every night about this time. In the morning the wind would shift back to blow north again, and after sunrise it would drop, but that didn’t help them right now. Fortunately the sack was the first thing his hand fell on—about five pounds of resin, and he didn’t want to think about what it would sell for in the Armethalieh markets. He staggered back out of the tent with it and over to their cook fire, still clutching the fold of fabric over his nose with his free hand. He could see the banked glowing coals. Good. He held his breath and wrenched the bag open with both hands, and spilled at least two pounds of the precious resin onto the hot coals.

  For a second—two—nothing happened. Then the golden globs of resin began to smoke and melt, and a billowing white cloud of fragrant smoke rose up, carried by the wind directly toward their sleeping tent. It was chokingly dense. But it also didn’t smell like anything but gonduruj. He leaned over the smoke and inhaled, driving the stench of rotting meat from his senses.

  “Are you trying to kill me?” Tiercel demanded, coughing wildly as he came staggering out of his tent. He glared around and summoned up his own—much larger—ball of Coldfire. It turned the wavering cloud of smoke an eerie shade of blue.

  “If you’d rather smell that, fine,” Harrier said. “Because, you know, it doesn’t seem to bother Ancaladar much.” “I hadn’t realized it would trouble you now,” the dragon said apologetically. “It didn’t earlier.”

  “We couldn’t smell it earlier,” Tiercel said, still coughing.

  “Build up the fire,” Harrier said. “Not too much. You don’t want to burn the gonduruj, just melt it.”

  While Tiercel did that, Harrier went off to get a couple of the pieces of cloth he’d seen—they were too short and sheer to use as sashes; he thought they might be head-scarves of some kind. He brought them back with another waterskin—tomorrow they were going to have to go to the watering trough at the base of the city walls to refill them, but at least they wouldn’t have to go inside—and the two of them wet the fabric down and tied it around their faces. That blocked the smoke—so it was easier to breathe—and if they ran out of gonduruj, it might cut some of the smell, too.

  Harrier glanced up at the sky. Quarter moon. He thought the moon had been dark when Tiercel’s shield had fallen and the Isvaieni had attacked. So it had been about a sennight since then, just as Ancaladar had said.

  “We can’t stay here,” Tiercel said.

  “I’ve got a whole list of reasons why it’s going to be really hard for us to leave. Want to hear them?” Harrier asked without heat. In the distance, he heard something bark and then yowl. It didn’t sound like either a dog or a wolf, but he couldn’t identify it.

  “Oh, sure,” Tiercel said, and so Harrier sat beside him and beside the fire, and listed every reason he’d thought of.

  They had no way to ride Ancaladar without his saddle. Even with the saddle, they had no way to carry supplies for an extended journey—they had to wait until they knew exactly where they were going, and then go there at once. The same problems applied if they simply wanted to move a little way away from here. This was the only source of water anywhere nearby, and they had no way to move the tents—their only form of shelter—and there was probably enough in the way of food here to last them a sennight or so, by which time they might know where they were going, but they couldn’t carry any of it with them.

  “Harrier,” Tiercel said. “We can’t stay here.”

  “If you’ve got any idea of how we can leave—and stay alive—and figure out where we’re going—I’m all for hearing it. I don’t like this any better than you do.”

  “A spell,” Ancaladar said.

  “What kind?” Tiercel asked, at the same time Harrier said: “Not MageShield, because—”

  “No,” Ancaladar said. “The flesh rots in the sun. In a moonturn, at most, insects and animals will have finished the work. You could hurry their work. Then we could stay.”

  “I know we’ve talked about that, Ancaladar, but I’m not sure I want to try a spell like that. I’m not an Elven Mage,” Tiercel said.

  Harrier gave him an odd look, but Tiercel didn’t seem to think he’d said anything peculiar. “Or, you know, you could just burn them. They’re dead!” he said indignantly, when Tiercel turned to stare at him. “And that’s what they do with people here when they die! I asked!”

  He thought Tiercel was going to get upset, but he didn’t. “I could,” he said thoughtfully. “I’d want to be able to see what I was doing, though. So I want to wait until the wind changes.”

  A couple of hours later, Harrier found out what he meant.

  Seventeen

  Unmade by Magic

  IT WAS DAWN, and the plume of smoke from the fire had shifted back in the direction of the city. Even though all either of them could smell was gonduruj, neither of them had been able to get back to sleep. When the rising sun began to whiten the sky, Tiercel got to his feet and walked through the orchard until he reached the edge. Harrier followed him, puzzled, because Tiercel hadn’t told him what he was going to do.

  “Har, do you know where the Iteru is?” Tiercel asked.

  “Near the south side of the city. The Telchi took me to see it one day. It really doesn’t look like much—it’s just a big round stone—I mean, it covers the well. If you move the stone, there are steps inside, but nobody ever goes down.”

  “It’s covered. Good.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you’re planning to do, but shouldn’t you get a little more rest first?”

  “Dragon,” Tiercel explained, gesturing toward where Ancaladar lay watching them. “I’ll sleep when I’m done. We both can.”

  “Okay,” Harrier said dubiously.

  Tiercel raised his hands.

  And the city wall nearest them … dissolved.

  It was already pale in the dawn light. Then it began to glitter in the sun, and just as Harrier was trying to make up his mind whether he was seeing what he thought he was, it collapsed with a crash.

  It had turned to water.

  The day was bright and the sky was clear, and he stood on a plain, in the midst of a lake, not a lake of fire, but a lake of water, and a quiet sad voice—it came from outside, but somehow it was his—spoke, saying: “This is Tarnatha’Iteru. This is all that remains.”

  With a sudden shock, Harrier realized that this, this, was what he had seen in the Scrying Bowl. Not exactly, not as it was, but… this.

  “I told you Transmutation was easy,” Tiercel said.

  The wave smashed down in all directions—back into the city, spraying up over the standing walls, foaming out over the earth toward them just as if it were an ocean breaker. The water raced toward them in a spreading fan, soaking into the thirsty soil. The last of it seeped into the ground over a mile away.

  “Ah … you want to tell me why you did that?” Harrier asked,
when he was certain the two of them weren’t going to drown in the middle of a desert. He didn’t know exactly how many thousands of gallons of water that once-brick wall had become, but… a lot.

  “I need to see what I’m doing,” Tiercel repeated. “And I wanted to do the walls one at a time to make sure I didn’t drown us. I think they have the most mass of anything I’ll be changing.”

  “Um, you’re going to …” Harrier said, and stopped as the east wall turned to water and fell. Again Tiercel waited until the water trickled away.

  The city looked strange and naked with two of its walls gone. Harrier could see the top of the Consul’s Palace in the distance, but none of the streets ran straight, and they weren’t standing in a direct line of sight with the South Gate anyway.

  Then the west wall fell. By now Harrier was used to the boom and crash of the water, and he didn’t even flinch. The air was moist, and everything smelled like mud, and there was enough water saturating the earth now that trickles were actually reaching them, but all the water did was go into the canals.

  “Finished?” Harrier asked, when Tiercel took down the north wall. He tried not to flinch at what the water swept before it as it spread across the plain—tangles of bone and pieces of sun-blackened bodies, distant, but recognizable. The water had scoured the streets of the city too, washing debris—including bodies—down through them and out into the plain beyond. Not many. The streets were narrow.

  “No,” Tiercel said. “I need to see what I’m doing,” he repeated. He took a deep breath.

  “You keep saying that,” Harrier said, and the sharpness of his tone was caused as much by worry as by irritation. “What do you mean?”

  “Burning the bodies is a good idea,” Tiercel said. “But I need to see them.”

  As Harrier watched—too stunned to be either horrified or amazed—Tiercel took down building after building, starting at the south end of the city and working northward. Wood and glass and metal and cloth—and the bodies of the dead—remained behind. Harrier wondered why, if Tiercel could turn the walls and the stone and clay of the buildings into water, he couldn’t just turn everything. He might ask later, but right now he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear any more explanations about High Magick. Ever.