The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  “I don’t like it either,” Harrier said helpfully.

  “If either of you has a better idea, I’m open to suggestions,” Tiercel said stubbornly.

  Harrier was the one who made the leather strap. At least that way—so he said—he could be sure that the rivets wouldn’t pop free at a critical moment. He made a belt for Tiercel, too. At least that way he’d have something to hold on to. After some consideration, he made one for himself, as well. It would help hold his sword-harness in place as they flew, and give him some place to put Roneida’s sword.

  A few days later, Ancaladar came and told them that the first group of Isvaieni were now heading directly south.

  “And I think they follow a trail, for the land they now pass through is so barren as to make the Isvai look like a garden—and the starkness of the Isvai makes the place where you now stand look verdant. Further, they follow a track beaten into the earth by the passage of many feet. I do not think that this is a place that they would ordinarily go.”

  “Is it time to go, then?” Tiercel said.

  He actually managed to sound hopeful, Harrier thought. All the time they’d been waiting here, they hadn’t talked about what they were waiting for, or what was going to happen when the waiting was over. He’d almost managed to forget about it.

  “Another day,” Ancaladar said. “So I may be sure.”

  THE LAST DAY—and night—of waiting was the hardest. Harrier couldn’t think of anything to say. If they actually found the Lake of Fire after they’d searched for it for so long, what then? They’d be facing the Endarkened, in whatever form they were appearing now, and he wasn’t sure what Tiercel was supposed to be able to do about it. He didn’t know if Tiercel could set them on fire, although he guessed he probably would if he could. Harrier only hoped he could be of some help, but now that he was actually studying the spells of the Wild Magic as hard as he could, he wasn’t sure how. One person couldn’t defeat an army, and from what Ancaladar had said, anybody they could possibly have looked to as allies was dead.

  He didn’t say any of this to Tiercel. There wasn’t any point. They couldn’t go back. They had to go on. If Tiercel hadn’t thought of these things, he didn’t need to be told them now. And all Harrier could do was what he’d done from the very beginning: follow Tiercel. Whether he was trusting the Wild Magic to help him make everything right, or just trying to be there to do whatever he could the way he always had, it didn’t matter. The result was the same.

  They managed to sleep that night, though not very well.

  IN THE MORNING when Ancaladar landed he said that the Isvaieni were continuing directly south along the well-marked path.

  “There are wells at the side of the road they follow. They are unnatural—for they are spaced exactly a day’s journey apart—and new, for they exactly parallel the path that has been beaten into the desert, and I think, from the markings on the ground, that they were made after it, not before.”

  “We can follow them right to where we need to go,” Tiercel said excitedly.

  “Yes,” Ancaladar said. “It is time to leave, Bonded.”

  “Get water,” Harrier said. “And pack up a bag of food. And don’t tell me we aren’t going to need it. Something always happens.”

  Tiercel smiled at him—the same expression he always wore when he was indulging one of Harrier’s stupid ideas—and went off to the provision tent.

  “You fear to die,” Ancaladar said when Tiercel was out of earshot. There wasn’t any judgment in his voice. Not even, really, a question.

  Harrier laughed, a little startled, because Ancaladar had it so wrong. He’d already been afraid to die, and he hadn’t died, and he didn’t think he could ever have been that afraid again. He shook his head. “I’m afraid to fail,” he said. “You were there. You saw.”

  Ancaladar had been there when the Endarkened had nearly won. That was more terrifying than anything else could ever possibly be.

  “Yes,” the black dragon said, and now there was something like approval in its voice.

  WHEN THEY WERE both settled on Ancaladar’s back, Harrier had a bag of food slung across one shoulder and a waterskin slung across the other, and Roneida’s sword carefully tucked through his belt in front. Tiercel complained that it dug into his back, and Harrier pointed out that he had no intention of falling off just to make Tiercel more comfortable.

  Then Ancaladar took off.

  In the last several moonturns, Harrier had seen Ancaladar take off and land so many times he’d lost count. In the last fortnight, he’d seen him take off and land from the plain outside the orchard twice a day.

  It was different when you were sitting on his back. In the first place, he ran. Fast. And there were no stirrups, and no real way to hold on. They were both straddling Ancaladar’s neck, and his scales were slippery, and Tiercel was clutching at the neck-strap, and Harrier was holding on to Tiercel as hard as he could as the landscape blurred past.

  Then suddenly Ancaladar snapped his wings open, and lunged upward, like a cat after a butterfly, and then he was beating his wings frantically and Harrier had his eyes tightly shut and Tiercel was complaining that he couldn’t breathe and Harrier had a terrifying sense of gliding and falling and he could feel the hot wind rushing against his face.

  Then after a long time—minutes—nothing happened. Harrier opened his eyes warily.

  For long moments he couldn’t tell what he was seeing at all. Ahead of him was Ancaladar’s neck, stretched out as straight as the neck of a swan in flight and gleaming iridescently in the sunlight. Below there was nothing but a vast expanse of dun. He couldn’t actually tell how far away the ground was; there were no landmarks to set anything into perspective. It was like every story he’d ever heard the mariners tell about being out in the middle of Great Ocean, with nothing in any direction but water. Except they, at least, had a ship under them and knew where “up” and “down” were.

  Then he looked westward, and he could see a sparkle of light; the sun on the sea.

  When he saw that, Harrier suddenly realized exactly how high up they had to be, and he clutched Tiercel tightly again.

  “Stop that,” Tiercel complained. He shifted around, turning sideways, and Harrier gripped Ancaladar’s neck with his thighs until the muscles ached. “Isn’t this great?” he said.

  “Terrific,” Harrier said. He remembered the days when Tiercel hadn’t even been willing to climb a tree that was barely twenty feet high—let alone up into the rigging of a ship to look out over the docks and the harbor—and suddenly longed for those days passionately. “Will you hold still?”

  “Relax,” Tiercel said. “We aren’t going to fall off.”

  Harrier wasn’t at all sure about that. He also thought, given Tiercel’s apparent newfound idiotic and suicidal recklessness, that he should have been the one sitting in front and holding on to the neck-strap.

  But after a few minutes of level flight he settled down and stopped worrying, because they weren’t falling off. And there was a lot to see.

  He wasn’t quite brave enough to turn around and look behind them, but what he could see ahead and to the sides was fascinating enough. They were so high in the sky that he could see for hundreds of miles, he thought. There was little to see on the ground—Ancaladar’s shadow provided most of the definition to what he was seeing, flickering over piled up hills of sand, stretching out flat and long and dark across hard plains of baked clay. Sometimes there’d be a red or gray outcropping of rock, or a little vegetation—darker patches against the gold—but mostly it was just… sand.

  When they passed over the first group of Isvaieni, it was a shock. They were something he knew the size of. And the men and shotors were barely a trail of specks on the land below, there and gone in a matter of heartbeats as Ancaladar swept past overhead.

  “What if somebody looks up and sees us?” Harrier finally thought to ask. He knew there wasn’t anything the people on the ground could possibly do about them, but he
still had the feeling that they shouldn’t be seen.

  “They won’t,” Tiercel said confidently. “They just… won’t think to.”

  Harrier decided he didn’t know what bothered him more: knowing that Tiercel could cast spells this easily, knowing he hadn’t noticed that Tiercel had cast one at all, or the fact that they were both probably going to be dead by sundown. He thought it would probably be best if he didn’t think about any of those things for as long as he possibly could.

  “NOW WE ENTER the Desolation,” Ancaladar said about an hour later. “We should soon reach our destination.”

  Looking down, Harrier could see what he meant. They’d just passed another group of Isvaieni on the desert below—even when Ancaladar’s shadow passed directly over them they didn’t look up, so he guessed Tiercel’s spell was working—and even Harrier could see that this part of the desert was somehow … bleaker … than the part they’d been flying over before. The ground was a paler color, and it seemed to be more of the flat baked terrain and less of the rolling sand.

  He also saw why Ancaladar was so confident that he knew where they were going, and no longer needed to wait for them to lead him there. Harrier could see a white scar across the face of the desert below. It ran as straight and true as an arrowshot, and after everything he’d heard from both Tiercel and Ancaladar about desert oases and Isvaieni methods of travel in the past fortnight, he had to agree: somebody had made this, and he was betting on recently.

  He forced himself to breathe evenly and not let Tiercel know how nervous he was. They were getting close now.

  But when they’d flown for another hour—covering hundreds of miles, they had to be, because it had taken Ancaladar less than two hours to cover the same distance that the Isvaieni had traversed in three sennights of travel—they began to realize that reaching their destination would be no simple matter.

  “Hey,” Tiercel said in an odd voice. “Is that a second group?”

  “It is not,” Ancaladar answered, sounding equally distressed.

  Harrier looked down. The Isvaieni caravan was below them again. “But you’ve been flying straight south the whole time,” he said.

  “So I had thought,” Ancaladar said grimly. He flew on.

  An hour later, they encountered the same group again.

  “This isn’t working,” Tiercel said.

  “What isn’t?” Harrier said. “What’s happening?”

  “Ancaladar’s turning,” Tiercel said. “He’s got to be. And none of us is noticing until we get back here.”

  “Okay,” Harrier said. “It’s magic. You know a lot of … defenses.”

  “I’ll try that,” Tiercel said unhappily. “But I don’t think it will work.”

  While they flew south—again—Tiercel explained that while a spell-shield might have some effect, what was keeping them away from their destination was probably another spell-shield.

  “In which case it won’t help?” Harrier said, guessing.

  “Right,” Tiercel answered.

  And it didn’t, because soon enough they were back where they’d started from again.

  Ancaladar tried everything any of them could think of—flying east and circling around, flying west and doing the same, everything he could think of to somehow go around whatever it was that blocked them, but nothing worked. The sun was climbing toward midheaven by now, and even though they were high above the desert heat, they were still hungry and thirsty. And both Harrier and Tiercel were worn down with the constant tension of waiting for something to happen. It was small consolation to know that they’d finally found the place Tiercel needed to go if they couldn’t get there.

  At last Ancaladar simply climbed high into the cool air and circled while Harrier, holding tightly to Tiercel’s belt with one hand, cautiously untangled the waterskin with the other so they could both drink. He thought Tiercel was far too casual about his precarious perch on Ancaladar’s back. It was all very well to say that Ancaladar would catch them if they fell. There was the problem of falling first.

  “We could probably be home in time for tea if we hurried,” he said, as one of Ancaladar’s wide sweeps over the Isvai let him look briefly northward. He couldn’t see Armethalieh, but he could imagine it.

  He wondered, suddenly, if that was actually the right thing to do. They’d have to believe Tiercel if he came home with Ancaladar beside him. High Magistrate Vaunnel could gather an army, and—

  And how long would that take? A year? At least. And suppose they came. There’s no water anywhere in this desert south of Tarnatha’Iteru for sure—and our army would have the same problem the Isvaieni army did: supply.

  They could fly back to Karahelanderialigor and ask the Elven Mages to come and help, but Harrier wasn’t sure they would. They’d sent Tiercel off alone in the first place, after all.

  “We could,” Tiercel said. He sounded wistful. “I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Probably not.” Harrier wished it were. He’d like it to be. But if all those Isvaieni had been convinced there was a True Balance and a False Balance … who else had been convinced? In ancient times, Anigrel the Black had first convinced everyone in Armethalieh to banish all the Wildmages from the City, and then had spent moonturns telling the citizens that there was no Endarkened threat and no war until it was nearly too late for them to rally their forces and turn its tide. What if someone was doing something like that now? What if—if they went home—all that happened was that Magistrate Vaunnel tried to have them both locked up? Ancaladar could rescue them, he was sure, but…

  Suddenly Harrier had a horrible blasphemous thought. He knew that the Blessed Saint Idalia had died to destroy the Queen of the Endarkened. He wondered if that was going to happen to Tiercel—if that was what was supposed to happen to Tiercel—and if Tiercel was going to be reborn as an Elf and grow up and become an Elven Mage and then solve the problem. He bit his lip very hard to keep from breaking into nervous laughter.

  “But what do we do?” he asked, when he thought he could manage to talk without sounding like a lunatic. “Fun as this is, we can’t just fly around up here forever. There has to be some way to get there. Otherwise all those Isvaieni couldn’t just be going home again, could they?”

  “They are not creatures of magic,” Ancaladar said, sounding about as irritated as Harrier had ever heard him sound.

  Ancaladar’s explanation—when he made it—sounded just about ridiculous enough to make sense to Harrier. Ancaladar said that the magical defense of what was might very well be the Lake of Fire would keep him away from it forever. If Tiercel tried to find it by magic—without Ancaladar—Tiercel wouldn’t be able to locate it either. But if Harrier and Tiercel simply walked along the road scarred into the desert down there and followed it to its end, nothing—nothing magical, at any rate—ought to stop them from making their way to its end.

  “That’s stupid,” Harrier said. But the more outrageous the explanation for something magical was, the more likely it was to be the truth. In the last year, Harrier had found out more about magic than he’d ever expected or wanted to, and he’d decided that all of it, even—Light forgive him, the Wild Magic—seemed to be pretty unlikely.

  “I am sorry, Harrier,” Ancaladar said. He sounded exasperated—whether with the circumstances or with him, Harrier wasn’t entirely sure. “I do not see how you could possibly do it, in any event.”

  “Yeah,” Harrier sighed. “We’re missing a few necessary things: food, tents, shotors—and there’s the fact that the Isvaieni would be sure to object if they saw us.”

  “Steal them,” Tiercel said.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Harrier asked politely, once he’d decided that Tiercel was talking about stealing shotors.

  “Ha. No. We know where we can get a tent and food. All we’d need to do is steal a couple of shotors. And we can conceal ourselves—I’ve got spells for that—and we can—sort of—sneak in behind them.”

  “‘All,’�
�� Harrier said, ignoring the second half of Tiercel’s idiotic idea.

  “Look, I know it won’t be easy. But we don’t need saddles, because there are saddles back at the camp. And Ancaladar can steal the shotors for us.”

  “I can,” Ancaladar said, sounding pleased. “I can swoop down upon them and carry them off.”

  “Oh,” Harrier said. Are you both out of your minds? “No swooping. Not while I’m here.”

  “Indeed not,” Ancaladar said firmly. “I shall first locate a suitable place for you to wait. Then I shall acquire some shotors.”

  IT DIDN’T MAKE sense for them to go all the way back to Tarnatha’Iteru and start again from there—for one thing, it would add nearly a moonturn to their travel time, and there wasn’t that much food at the camp. For another, it would increase their chances of running into one of the bands of Isvaieni if they had to cross the entire desert. Ancaladar was looking for someplace near the Scar Road where they could wait. He would go and raid a couple of different Isvaieni camps—picking ones a long way away—for shotors. (He and Tiercel both agreed that four was a good number; Harrier was too disgusted by the entire plan to comment.) Once he’d brought them back, one of them would stay with the animals to keep them from wandering off while the other flew back with Ancaladar to Tarnatha’Iteru to make up a bundle of supplies and tents (which Ancaladar would carry in his claws) and then return.

  “I well recall the days when I refused to be used as a beast of burden,” Ancaladar said mournfully.

  “It’s only once,” Tiercel said comfortingly.

  “It is always ‘; only once,’” Ancaladar answered reproachfully.

  “There don’t exactly look like a lot of places down there,” Harrier said, leaning over Tiercel’s shoulder and peering at the ground. “No, wait. What’s that?”

  “The place that I saw earlier,” Ancaladar said smugly. “There is even water.”