The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  “It can’t have been forever, though,” Harrier said logically. “Because there have been Elven Mages ever since the Great Flowering, right?”

  The Star-Crowned seemed to sigh. “Yes, Harrier. But that is how the legend goes. I do not know why it is that it isn’t true.”

  “The point is that the Demons were cast down,” Shaiara said firmly. In even so short an acquaintance with these travelers she had already learned that if she did not steer conversations with them firmly, they would degenerate into long and meaningless arguments. “And that what was done once may be done again. And perhaps—somewhere here within Abi’Abadshar—there is some record of that time? Many things from those days remain.”

  “Here?” Harrier asked in disbelief, looking around.

  Shaiara smiled. “There is more to Abi’Abadshar than sand and weathered stones. Do you think the Nalzindar could survive here if there were not?”

  Tiercel and Harrier looked at each other and shrugged.

  “There is a city beneath the surface,” Shaiara said. “I will show it to you. But I warn you, it is dark.”

  Harrier grinned. “It won’t be for long. Tiercel can fix that.” Tiercel kicked him. “Um, yeah. So can I.”

  Shaiara rose to her feet. The thought that the Wild Magic had chosen these boys to destroy the Shadow-Touched, and meant the Nalzindar to aid them, was a disturbing one, but what else could she believe? All that they had said was both true and logical: there was no one else for any of them to trust.

  “What about Ancaladar?” Harrier asked.

  “If this place was once meant for my kind, as I believe, then it will be possible for me to enter it,” Ancaladar said. “All that will be necessary is some … excavation.”

  “We must leave no trace on the surface for the Shadow-Touched to see, should his gaze fall upon Abi’Abadshar,” Shaiara warned.

  “Tiercel has a spell,” Harrier said.

  Twenty

  The World Beneath the World

  HARRIER SPENT THE next several days getting used to the idea that not only was he not going to be dead immediately, there was a chance he might not end up being dead at all. He’d also made up his mind that the way that the Wild Magic worked offended him in a way he really couldn’t articulate. He also wasn’t going to try now that he and Tiercel were living with the Nalzindar, because they felt about the Wild Magic the way that the people of the Nine Cities felt about the Light Itself. So it wasn’t exactly something Harrier was going to make fun of.

  And it wasn’t—really—that he wanted to make fun of it. And he certainly wasn’t going to say anything—anything at all—that would sound even remotely to anybody like this Bisochim’s doctrine of a “False Balance.” It was just that the Wild Magic’s way of tossing people around like ships in a gale, and hoping—or maybe not even caring—whether they came into their home ports with their sails intact…

  Well, actually, Harrier was pretty sure that the Wild Magic had meant him and Tiercel to end up at Abi’Abadshar all along. And half of him was annoyed at the method it had used to arrange that, while the other half of him felt a little guilty, because maybe there’d been something he could have done to get the two of them here faster and easier. Only—and his mind kept circling back around to this, no matter how hard Harrier tried not to think about it—if he’d done anything different, surely Zanattar’s Isvaieni would have done exactly the same things they’d done, except they’d have gone on to destroy Akazidas’Iteru next, and then maybe kept going north. So try as he might, Harrier couldn’t come up with any neat and simple answers. Which meant that the Wild Magic wasn’t neat and simple either. And that offended him. Even though it had brought him and Tiercel to a place where they might actually find something that would help.

  The first thing they’d found was information, of course. It wasn’t that Harrier didn’t trust and believe in Tiercel’s visions, but even Tiercel didn’t know exactly what they meant. Shaiara’s information made a little more sense to Harrier: it was made up of what she’d seen, and what she’d done, and what she knew, and what she thought about all of it. Harrier was able to prove to the Nalzindar that he was a Wildmage as simply as by lighting the evening’s cookfire, after which they trusted him implicitly.

  They were grateful for his presence, since he was the first Wildmage they’d seen in more than half a year (even if, in Harrier’s own opinion, he wasn’t that much of one). The Nalzindar had no more idea than anyone else Tiercel had talked to of where the rest of the Wildmages had gone, but considering everything Harrier and Tiercel now knew about what was going on in the Madiran, the Isvai, and the Barahileth, it probably wasn’t anywhere good.

  In his own way, Tiercel was always logical. Harrier admitted that, even while—half the time, more than half—he wanted to strangle his friend while he was being logical. It was Tiercel who’d listened to everything Shaiara told them, and then figured out that whatever Bisochim thought his plan was, it wasn’t the same plan as the Endarkened’s. Their plan was undoubtedly the same as it had been for as long as any race that walked beneath the Light could remember: destroy all that lived.

  But to do that, the Endarkened had to regain the foothold that the Blessed Saint Idalia had destroyed so completely, and somehow manage to return to the world—or at least communicate with it. And that was more difficult than it seemed, just offhand: if the Endarkened could talk to just anybody, they would have done so centuries ago. And if they could corrupt just any Wildmage, they would have done that, too.

  “So you’re saying this Bisochim guy is the first Wildmage in a thousand years that the Endarkened could Taint?” Harrier asked.

  It was the evening of their third day in Abi’Abadshar. They sat on one of the overturned stone pillars that lay a few dozen yards from the entrance to the subterranean city, waiting for Ancaladar to return from his evening’s hunt. Though the temperature dropped even more abruptly between day and night in the Barahileth than it did in the Isvai, the stones of the ruins stored the heat of the sun and radiated it back for hours. Tiercel had assured Shaiara that he had spells in plenty to keep either of them from being seen, should anyone be looking for them, and the Nalzindars’ underground home was odd enough that both of them wanted a little time out in the open air. And both of them the sense that this was the sort of conversation that was better conducted where the Nalzindar couldn’t hear it, because they still weren’t quite sure how the desertfolk felt about the whole idea that the Endarkened had managed to corrupt a Wildmage.

  Tiercel shook his head slowly, still reasoning it out in his own mind. “I know that Shaiara keeps talking about Bisochim as if he’s Tainted, Har, but I don’t know if he is—at least not the way the Light-Priests have always talked about Taint.”

  “Not that they ever really did,” Harrier editorialized, and Tiercel snorted ruefully in agreement.

  “And in the Elven Histories of the wars that I read in Karahelanderialigor—the ones that Jermayan wrote—he just assumed that anyone who read them would know exactly what ‘; Taint’ was, so they weren’t much help either. But Zanattar’s army weren’t Tainted. They’d just been tricked. I wonder, you know, if what the Dark has managed to do is to convince Bisochim to listen to them long enough so that they could trick him. They’d be lying to him, so that he’d be thinking he was doing something that was right, and they’d be doing … the same thing they always do. And he’d have no idea.”

  Harrier thought about that for a moment. “So exactly what difference does that make?”

  Tiercel shrugged. “Not much, I guess. It’ll be kind of hard to convince him that he’s wrong after who knows what has been telling him who knows what for who knows how long.”

  Harrier laughed. “Clear as mud.” He looked up at the sky. “Ancaladar’s coming.”

  Tiercel punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I know that, you idiot. He’s my Bonded.”

  LATER, THEY SHARED an edited version of their conversation with Shaiara. She was more convi
nced than they were that Bisochim was actually Shadow-Touched rather than simply being misled, and Harrier found himself in the odd position of being caught between Shaiara and Tiercel, not entirely willing to accept either’s belief. On the one hand, Tiercel was a High Mage, and his oldest friend. On the other hand, Shaiara had actually seen Bisochim. He decided to do his best to believe both of them at once: there was no harm done in doing that since Bisochim was currently nowhere in sight.

  Even Shaiara didn’t know where the Lake of Fire was, though—obviously—it was somewhere in the part of the Isvai she called the Barahileth. The three of them had decided this together, just as they’d agreed that Bisochim must be the man Tiercel saw in his visions, the one who stood upon the shore of the Lake of Fire, the one being blandished by the Fire Woman to do something that Tiercel wasn’t quite sure of but that must (logically) be meant to bring the Endarkened back. It made sense once you had all the pieces of the puzzle (the ones that Shaiara had and Tiercel had, anyway) and could fit them all together. Shaiara had said that Bisochim had gathered the tribes to him and taken them off into the Barahileth. And Ancaladar had managed to search all of the Isvai except the Barahileth—or the part of it that was being shielded by magic, anyway—so if they were looking for Bisochim (and they really couldn’t be looking for anyone else, because how could there be two maybe-Tainted Wildmages out here?) he had to be in the Barahileth, and the Barahileth had to be where the Lake of Fire was, and Bisochim had to be at the Lake of Fire. And it didn’t matter anymore whether or not they knew exactly where the Lake of Fire was, now that Bisochim’s raiders had blazed a trail that led directly to it. What Harrier and Tiercel couldn’t find by magic they could simply walk right to using the evidence of their own eyes.

  But not yet.

  There was an entire city under the ground here at Abi’Abadshar. Not just the entirely unlikely gardens that had managed to seed themselves and flourish over thousands of years, even through the Great Blight when the Endarkened had scoured all the world east of the Bazrahils—and south of the Armen Plains, for that matter—bare of life, but a city. Or the remains of it, built deep into the ground. Legacy of ancient Elven Mages and their dragons.

  The Nalzindar hadn’t been able to do much exploring. There wasn’t any light down there at all, once you got below the level where Shaiara’s people lived. Tiercel simply solved the problem by making the walls glow. The small balls of Coldfire that Harrier made tended to vanish after a few hours, which everyone was actually more comfortable with: the Wild Magic was something they knew and understood, though the things they told Harrier about as commonplaces astonished him. Find water and create wells? Turn aside a sandstorm? He wasn’t sure how he’d even begin to do those things. Fortunately Shaiara’s people weren’t asking him to do any of them, which meant that Harrier wasn’t having to explain anything about being a Knight-Mage. Meanwhile, having Tiercel try to explain that the walls remembered having been lit this way—which was why they lit up again now—was almost more than the Nalzindar could take.

  It was almost more than Harrier could take, when you came right down to it, because neither Ancaladar nor Tiercel could tell him exactly when this Vieliessar Farcarinon was supposed to have been. And Harrier had enough trouble wrapping his mind around the idea of things that had happened just as long ago as the Great Flowering. The idea of something happening so long ago that there hadn’t even been people (no matter how many times Tiercel told him Elves were people—and Harrier smacked him for being picky—Harrier knew exactly what he meant and wouldn’t change his words in the privacy of his own mind) was almost impossible to think about. The idea that things—cups and coins and wall carvings—had survived from then was impossible to think about, so Harrier didn’t. He just followed Tiercel around and helped him look at them and tried to figure out what they meant.

  At the same time, they did their best to not only fit in, but to reduce the burden their coming had placed on the tiny exiled desert tribe.

  HE HAD NO intention of ever telling Harrier this, but Tiercel was grateful that they’d found themselves in Abi’Abadshar, because that meant he wasn’t facing Bisochim at the Lake of Fire.

  He tried not to think about Tarnatha’Iteru, because he was ashamed of how much it upset him. It was even more humiliating to know that Ancaladar could see what he was thinking, because Tiercel knew that Ancaladar had seen far worse in his long life, and probably thought that Tiercel’s reaction was way out of proportion to what had happened.

  Now, with the benefit of hindsight, knowing everything that had happened, Tiercel wished desperately that he and Harrier had simply fled the city at the first sign of trouble. But every time he thought that, he thought of what Harrier had told him—that their defense of Tarnatha’Iteru, even though it had failed, had probably saved Akazidas’Iteru—and then he couldn’t want that.

  But then he thought of the people he’d killed, the Isvaieni who’d died as they’d crashed into his MageShield. And he thought of the fact that he’d only delayed the inevitable for less than a sennight. And he thought of the fact that Harrier had been forced to kill people with his swords to save their lives. And he thought of how the city had smelled the night after Ancaladar had rescued them. And he thought of Calling Fire to burn the dead in the morning. And he really wasn’t sure whether he could ever use his magic to kill anyone ever again, even if they were an actual real Endarkened, much less if they were only someone who’d been tricked by one.

  In order to distract himself, he spent his time trying to fit into the life of the Nalzindar, and exploring Abi’Abadshar. Whenever he’d start to go wandering off, Shaiara would insist on accompanying him—not because the tunnels were dark (because they weren’t, not any more; he’d meant merely to cast a temporary spell of Magelight on the walls—since the spell could be used to make objects glow as well as to simply form nebulous balls of light—and had ended up making walls, ceiling, and floor glow permanently with an eerie full-moon glow) but because she was convinced he’d get lost or into some other trouble. In a lot of ways, Shaiara reminded Tiercel of Harrier.

  “SO HOW MANY levels are there to this place?” Tiercel asked.

  “‘Levels.’” Shaiara tasted the unfamiliar word. “We know not. We have made three descents beyond this—but it is difficult without lamps or lanterns. Or proper torches.”

  Tiercel looked at her curiously and saw her shrug minutely. “One may not cross the Barahileth carrying aught but what one must to survive,” Shaiara said.

  “Is that why you …?” He stopped, not wishing to say something that might give offense. He and Harrier had already seen that the Nalzindar had very little in the way of material possessions—little more than the clothing upon their backs and the weapons with which they hunted, in fact.

  Shaiara smiled slightly. “We have our lives, by the grace of Sand and Star. In such an evil time, it would be foolish greed indeed to expect more.”

  Tiercel blinked. “I. Ah. But I know where there is more. A lot more. There’s a whole Isvaieni camp—tents, and gear, and rugs, and even food—well, you don’t need food, but there’s wine, and spices, and honey, and kaffeyah. We’d been going to take supplies from there to go deeper into the Barahileth once Ancaladar got us some shotors, so it’s not as if anyone else is going to be using it. He can bring it all here.” It took Tiercel quite some time to convince Shaiara that such an undertaking would be safe, and only Tiercel’s calm (and repeated) assurances that he could cloak himself and Ancaladar in veils of invisibility induced Shaiara to finally permit it. The two of them had gone in the dark of the night, after moonset, planning initially for two trips (to bring the most important items first), and using two of the Isvaieni tents themselves as carrying bags. They’d returned with a vast bounty—enough to provision the tiny Nalzindar tribe far more lavishly, in fact, than it had been at the beginning of its flight. In the enormous unwieldy bundles with which Ancaladar returned there was clothing, blankets, jugs of oil and honey and wi
ne, rugs, weapons, spices, herbs and medicines, kaffeyah and kaffeyah-services—and paper.

  This last item was for Tiercel’s own use. He’d found paper, writing-leads, and pens among the tents—for the Isvaieni had looted the city almost at random, probably intending to discard anything they found useless at the very last moment—and ink was easy enough to make. While the Nalzindar had little use for paper, Tiercel wanted to make a record of what he found on the walls of Abi’Abadshar so that he could use his notes to help himself decipher the mystery of the buried city.

  WHEN ANCALADAR HAD brought back two more tents from Tarnatha’Iteru, you would have thought he was bringing back something useful, but despite the fact that they had no possible need of them for shelter, Shaiara’s people were more delighted to have the tents than all the actually useful stuff they contained, Harrier thought.

  When Ancaladar arrived with his first load, depositing it gently upon the sand and then taking off again at once, the twenty or so adult Isvaieni who had been (along with Harrier) awaiting his arrival had all come swarming up the steps. They’d dragged the bundle back down the steps to lay it beside the Iteru without unfolding the heavy black cloth from around the bundle of long poles; that surprised Harrier a little, until he realized that they’d want to stay out of sight as much as possible. The sky was dark—Shaiara had forbidden Tiercel and Ancaladar to fly before moonset—and the only light there was came from a handful of stones upon which Harrier had cast Coldfire. As the folds of cloth were thrown back to expose the contents, Harrier saw the normally taciturn Nalzindar look at each other excitedly.

  “A tent, Shaiara. The Star-Crowned has brought a tent,” a girl about Harrier’s own age said. He was pretty sure her name was Ciniran.

  “Talk later,” Shaiara answered briefly. She picked up an armload of poles, and Harrier hurried to help her, because the poles were long, and no matter how much or how little they weighed, no one person could manage them easily alone.