The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  “I have no idea,” Tiercel answered.

  Harrier sighed. “Go ahead.”

  “I don’t see why you never do this,” Tiercel grumbled, gesturing back at the glowing walls.

  “Because I don’t make the walls light up and glow for sennights or possibly forever, is why,” Harrier said inarguably. “Go on. We brought lunch but we didn’t bring dinner.” He really hated eating down here anyway. It didn’t matter how large the space was—and it was huge—or how well-lit it was (and it was actually more brightly lit than the underground gardens in which the Nalzindar were living); Harrier could still imagine the crushing weight of all the rock above him. Somehow it seemed to leech all the savor out of the air itself, and though for some reason the air wasn’t damp, it seemed as if it ought to be. At least higher up the passages had been dirty, but this far down the levels weren’t even that. There was just a lot of … nothing.

  He stepped away from the wall—though there really wasn’t any reason he needed to—as Tiercel reached out and touched two fingers to the wall. An icy white ring of brightness raced away from the place where Tiercel’s fingertips met the stone, expanding in all directions. No matter how many times Harrier had seen it happen, it still fascinated him to watch the bright circle of light as it raced over walls, ceiling, down over the steps, and to see the stone bloom slowly into the familiar blue-white radiance in its wake. It took the leading edge of the spell less than a score of heartbeats to reach the bottom of the stair and race outward, out of sight. It seemed as if it happened both fast and slow while he was watching, because watching an ordinary Coldfire spell (and Harrier realized that in the last year, he’d actually begun to think of some spells as “ordinary”) make all the stone in sight glow as brightly as a single object that the spell had been cast on (and the first corridors that Tiercel had illuminated showed no sign of going dark, even a moonturn later) was both weird and fascinating, no matter how many times Harrier got to see it happen.

  When the spell had finished its work, Harrier saw—with a sigh of resignation—that it was a really long way down, which meant it was a really long way up. As much as he hated the thought, if they were going to do much exploring below this, maybe they should start camping down here, because it had actually taken them more than a bell just to get this far.

  “Well that was odd,” Tiercel said, staring at his fingertips.

  “‘Odd’ is not good,” Harrier pointed out.

  “No, it’s … I haven’t felt anything when I cast a spell since I Bonded to Ancaladar. But I felt something this time,” Tiercel said thoughtfully.

  “I felt nothing, Bonded,” Ancaladar said, sounding puzzled.

  “It’s probably the, oh, complete lack of air to breathe down here. Or the fact that we’ve already hiked ten miles on a breakfast of, um, cold roast goat. You know. Food poisoning.” For just a moment—when Tiercel had spoken—Harrier had felt uneasy. But Ancaladar’s words chased away his half-formed fear. The dragon’s senses (especially for things of magic) were much stronger than his or Tiercel’s, and through the Bond he could feel everything Tiercel did. If there was something down here, and it wasn’t something that bothered Ancaladar, maybe it was what they were looking for.

  Maybe they’d have a weapon and a plan by dinnertime.

  “You’ve eaten exactly the same things I have,” Tiercel said, laughing, his momentary worry forgotten as well. “No, wait. Why do I even bother?”

  “Because you’re an idiot. Come on,” Harrier said.

  “I shall go first, Bonded, Harrier,” Ancaladar said firmly. “In case you have sensed something that I could not.”

  Without waiting for a reply from either of them, Ancaladar stretched out his neck and began slithering down the staircase.

  Like all the staircases on the higher levels, this one was curved, so that if you were standing at one end you couldn’t see the other. The staircase passages were enough narrower and lower than the open spaces of the lower levels themselves for Tiercel and Harrier not to want to share them with Ancaladar, even though there was actually enough room. The great black dragon slithered quickly down the wide shallow steps—Abi’Abadshar was a place definitely designed for dragons—and coiled his long sinuous body around the bend in the staircase.

  Harrier had just watched the tip of Ancaladar’s tail flick out of sight, thinking: he must be almost there, we can start down now, when Tiercel suddenly fell to his knees with a heart-wrenching scream.

  “He’s gone! He’s gone! He’s gone!”

  “What? Tyr—what?” Harrier couldn’t figure out whether to grab his swords or Tiercel. Tiercel was thrashing around on the floor as if he’d been stabbed, but when Harrier dropped to his knees beside him, he couldn’t find any trace of a wound. “Tiercel!” he shouted.

  “Ancaladar!” Tiercel screamed. His voice should have echoed off the walls, but nothing echoed down here. The sounds were all flattened and hushed the way sound was against a heavy snowfall.

  Harrier sprang to his feet and drew his swords. He didn’t know what good he could do against something that could hurt Ancaladar, but he had to try. He agonized for a long instant over leaving Tiercel behind, but he knew there was nothing either here or behind them, and every second might count. He ran down the glowing blue-lit staircase with his swords held out before him. The flat dull sound of his footsteps and the distorted sound of Tiercel’s ragged sobbing were the only sounds.

  Most of his mind was empty (to fight, to win, a Knight-Mage did not think, a Knight-Mage reacted) but a tiny part of it, locked away from the rest, was desperately bargaining with what had already happened. Ancaladar wasn’t dead. Ancaladar couldn’t be dead. If he was dead, Tiercel would be dead, too. They were Bonded: dragon and dragon-Bonded Mage, their lives linked by Ancaladar’s magic. When one died, the other would die. That had been true ever since that ancient Elf-lady had made the first bargain with the dragons, even before this city was built.

  Down and down and down, and he rounded the curve of the staircase, and now Harrier could see the corridor below. To call it a “corridor” was idiotic when you could drop the entire Main Temple of the Light in Armethalieh into the middle of it with room left over on both sides, but there wasn’t anything else to call it.

  Behind him he could still hear Tiercel screaming, and the sound brought back memories of Tarnatha’Iteru that made Harrier’s heart pound wildly. No. He could almost hear the Telchi’s voice in his mind. That will not help either of you now. He reached the last stair-step and skidded to a halt on it, looking both ways wildly. Ancaladar wasn’t here.

  “No, no, no,” Harrier whispered under his breath. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t have happened. Dragons do not just vanish, he told himself, a little desperately.

  But this level was different than all the other ones.

  The Nalzindar lived on what was pretty much the “ground” level of Abi’Abadshar—what would have been a cellar if there’d been houses, and the houses were still there, and the space the Nalzindar occupied was anything like a cellar at all. This space was nine levels below that.

  On all of the levels between where the Nalzindar lived and this one, the walls and even the ceiling had been carved: there were pictures like the ones in the Imrathalion Temple of the Light (but a lot more cryptic); there were rows and rows of things that might have been pictures and might not; still more rows of things that looked like Tiercel’s High Magick glyphs and that Tiercel said were writing. But the floor had always been smooth. Here the floor was carved. Except not. It was …

  Harrier took a backward step up the stairs cautiously, supremely grateful he had not taken that last step down to the floor of the level below. He didn’t know what he was seeing, but the floor was ridged and grained like a weathered piece of driftwood. The Magelight didn’t glow over its surface evenly, either: it collected more brightly in the grooves, somehow, even though Harrier was pretty sure Magelight wasn’t supposed to do that. The floor’s surface seem
ed to be moving, and he couldn’t quite tell whether it really was, or whether his eyes were playing tricks on him.

  He walked from one end of the stair-tread to the other in order to be sure he was seeing as much of this level as he could from the opening of the staircase. Since it was just one big long chamber, it was easy enough to see most of it. And they’d explored enough of these levels that he knew that the next staircase should open out and down from the opposite wall at the opposite end of the corridor—which meant he ought to be able to see the opening from here, especially with the walls glowing as bright as a midsummer moon.

  And he couldn’t see anything like that at all.

  Harrier rummaged around in his pockets. Tiercel had laughed at him when he’d picked up some of the coins from one of the treasure rooms, asking him what in the name of the Light he was going to spend them on here, but Harrier hadn’t collected them to spend them. They were ancient and strange and pretty and made out of metals he’d never seen before, and somehow they weren’t as disturbing as an entire vast underground city. He could hold them in his hands and look at them and wonder about the people who’d made them and used them and not feel as if he was about to be crushed by the weight of the entire history of the world since the beginning of Time.

  He found one and pulled it out—it was five-sided and sort of bluish, with a cat-headed snake on one side and a bunch of butterflies on the other—and tossed it out into the middle of the floor.

  Nothing happened. The coin simply bounced across the stone, making a dull chiming-clinking sound as it skittered, and then came to rest, a darker splotch against the glowing stone. It didn’t glow, it didn’t vanish, it didn’t burst into flames. Harrier shook his head. He still didn’t intend to step out there and risk sharing Ancaladar’s fate. Because wherever Ancaladar was, he wasn’t here.

  He turned around and ran back up the stairs. Tiercel was still lying on the floor at the top of the stairs, huddled into as small a ball as he could manage. He was breathing raggedly, but he’d stopped screaming. At least there was that. Harrier didn’t think he could have stood listening to Tiercel make those sounds for much longer and not be able to do anything about it. He knelt down beside his friend again and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Tell me what happened!” Harrier demanded urgently.

  “I don’t know,” Tiercel whispered hopelessly. “He’s gone. The Bond is broken.”

  “Yeah, well, it isn’t, or you’d be dead,” Harrier said brutally. Sympathy was the last thing Tiercel needed right now—he knew that instinctively. Tiercel already thought this was a disaster; the last thing he needed was somebody to agree with him. Harrier didn’t know whether he was telling the truth or not, but he did know that what he was saying was what Tiercel needed to hear right now. And at least some of it had to be true. He hadn’t known a lot about dragons until they got to the Veiled Lands, but he’d certainly learned a lot since. And it all boiled down to one thing: kill either half of a Bonded pair, and the other half died immediately.

  He pulled Tiercel into a sitting position. He had to admit that Tiercel looked half-dead. But that was a long way from being dead.

  “Is he—Where—” Tiercel said, looking around.

  “I looked. He isn’t down there. It doesn’t look like the other levels, either,” Harrier said.

  “I have to see,” Tiercel said desperately.

  He pulled himself to his feet—using Harrier for a prop—and staggered upright. Before Harrier could stop him, he lunged for the staircase and disappeared down the stairs. Harrier swore and followed.

  It would have been one thing if Tiercel was actually injured. But it was just shock—at whatever’d happened to the Bond between him and Ancaladar—and it wasn’t really slowing him down very much. By the time Harrier realized that, Tiercel had a good head start on him. Harrier redoubled his efforts to catch up, shouting for Tiercel to stop, to wait—

  He was just a few instants too slow to grab Tiercel’s arm as Tiercel reached the bottom of the staircase and ran out into the corridor.

  “Tiercel!” Harrier screamed.

  But nothing had happened.

  Tiercel stood in the middle of the strange ridged glowing floor, looking all around. “Ancaladar!” he shouted.

  Harrier ran out into the corridor after him—certain that at any moment whatever had happened to Ancaladar would happen to both of them. Tiercel turned and ran down the length of the corridor, shouting for Ancaladar as if he were refusing to believe the evidence of his own eyes.

  Harrier walked over to the coin he’d thrown and picked it up. There was nothing at all different about it than there would have been if he’d thrown it onto the floor on the level above. It wasn’t even glowing—not that it should have been, because Magelight (or Coldfire) wasn’t something that was contagious. He slipped the coin back into his pocket, then bent down again and ran his hand over the floor. It felt like stone, and it was ridged. The ridges were curved and smooth: just as if somebody—like, oh, say, the Elves who’d built this place—had reproduced the smoothly weathered grain of driftwood on a massive scale. He straightened up and took a careful look around from this new vantage point. There was nothing at all on the walls or the ceiling. They were as smooth and featureless as the floor normally was—if you defined “normal” as “the way the floor had been on the previous nine underground levels.”

  He stood up and walked after Tiercel.

  Tiercel had stopped calling for Ancaladar, but he hadn’t stopped looking for him. He was moving quickly down along the nearer wall, moving his hands over the surface as if he was checking for hidden doors.

  But it wouldn’t matter if Ancaladar was behind a hidden door, would it? Ancaladar had been hundreds of miles away—asleep—and he and Tiercel had still been linked in some way Harrier didn’t quite understand. Able to communicate in some way so that Tiercel had been able to call Ancaladar to come and rescue them. Because they were Bonded, and that was something Harrier had never really understood—not because he was jealous of the friendship Ancaladar and Tiercel shared, but because Tiercel couldn’t explain it and Ancaladar had never tried. The closest Tiercel had ever gotten to an explanation was telling Harrier that knowing Ancaladar was there was like knowing his foot was there, and Harrier had laughed so long and so hard at hearing Ancaladar compared to a foot that Tiercel had never tried explaining again.

  But what that meant now was that no matter where Ancaladar was, Tiercel should know he was there—if Ancaladar was alive. And if Ancaladar was dead, Tiercel should be dead, too. And Harrier didn’t want either one of them to be dead, and he really didn’t want Tiercel to be dead, and if Ancaladar was dead …

  What had killed him, and how, and where was his body?

  Harrier remembered that Petrivoch had vanished when he’d died—Sandalon Elvenking’s dragon, who’d given up his life back in Karahelanderialigor to the spell that had Bonded Ancaladar to Tiercel. And he didn’t want to think that, because that meant that Ancaladar could be dead, and there wouldn’t even be a body to find.

  But Tiercel should be dead too. That much Harrier was sure of, because Ancaladar had been sure of it. For a dragon to have a second Bondmate was apparently the next thing to completely unheard-of, but it wasn’t completely unheard-of, and if Ancaladar or any of the Elves who’d suggested it in the first place had thought it would work differently from a regular old Bonding, they would have said so. And if the Elves wouldn’t have, Ancaladar would.

  There weren’t any answers down here to the question of where Ancaladar was or how he’d vanished (Harrier was just going to assume he was alive for now: it was simpler), though it took Tiercel two hours to give up and admit it. By that time, Harrier had established to his own satisfaction that this level was nothing like the ones above: the corridor was less than half as long as the one on the level above, the walls and the ceiling were blank and smooth, the floor was covered with a random pattern of ridges and swirls, and there was no place for Ancala
dar to have vanished to.

  “Come on,” he said finally. “Let’s go.”

  “He’s gone,” Tiercel repeated numbly, running a hand through his hair. It had come out of its tie a while back and hung down around his face in lank strands. “I don’t understand what happened.”

  Harrier sighed. “Neither do I. Look. We’ll go back up, and … maybe there’s a spell, okay?”

  But if he’d been hoping to get Tiercel to focus on the long climb back up to the topmost level, his words had the opposite effect.

  “A spell?” Tiercel nearly shouted. “You really don’t get it, do you? Ancaladar is gone! The Bond is gone! I’m never going to be able to do another spell in my entire life! If you’re expecting me to go to the Lake of Fire and defeat Bisochim by magic, you’d better get used to the idea of living under the rule of the Endarkened! Or being dead! Because—”

  “We will worry about that later,” Harrier said, spacing out his words slowly and carefully. “You didn’t have Ancaladar when you started out, and—We’ll think of something. I didn’t have the Three Books, either. We’ll think of something. Come on.”

  He practically had to drag Tiercel over to the staircase, but once they were there Tiercel trudged up the steps under his own power.

  The climb back to the garden of the Nalzindar was a long one.

  ALL THE NALZINDAR seemed to know that something was horribly terribly wrong the moment Harrier and Tiercel arrived back in the garden. They’d never been the sort of people who gathered around and chattered whenever somebody came back, but the moment he and Tiercel arrived, Harrier saw that all of the ones in sight stopped what they were doing and followed the two of them with their gaze as Harrier led Tiercel across the clearing to Shaiara’s tent.

  Even though it didn’t matter here, the Nalzindar still started their day with the sun—which meant that Tiercel and Harrier did too—so it was only an hour or two past midday when they got back, and the tent was empty. Harrier led Tiercel to their communal sleeping mat and forced him to sit down.