The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  And still he climbed.

  At last Narbuc began to feel faint bursts of coolness upon his face—a sensation he was now familiar with—and knew them for welcome droplets of cool water, borne on the wind from fountains in the fortress above. His dry mouth ached with the desire to quench his thirst at such a fountain, and not so many more stairs would bring him to his goal.

  But when he reached the top of the pale sandstone stairs, instead of turning left to refresh himself at the fountain he could see beyond the low wall, Narbuc found his steps turning right, and leading him forward across the wide flat area at the top of the stair, toward a second staircase cut into the wall of the black cliff itself. His mind screamed with terror, but he could not give voice to his fear, any more than he could command his body to turn back. He was as helpless as the sheshu in the fenec’s jaws, and his limbs did not obey his will. Within his thoughts Narbuc wept and begged for whatever power that had taken possession of him to release him, but all he could do was climb higher along the face of the cliff. The heat he had felt before was nothing to this. That had been the heat of the sun. This was the heat of fire.

  When Narbuc had unwillingly reached the top of the second stair, he understood. This was no solid cliff as he had thought, but an open bowl filled with molten rock. Never had he thought to see such, nor did he wish to see it now, for the wind of it blew toward his face, causing his skin to tighten and ache with heat. Far below—perhaps nearly level with the desert floor—rock glowed orange and yellow with heat, and flames of fire danced over it as if it were burning charcoal. To touch it would be a death more horrible than death by burning.

  But even as his mind framed that thought, Narbuc found his hands clutching at the rock which lay before him, and found himself clambering up and over. To touch the rock was as if he laid his hands upon a cooking stone prepared for flat cakes, yet he could neither cry out nor draw back. The terror that he felt at having his body move without—against—his will nearly overwhelmed the pain of his injuries. First one leg swung itself over the lip of the caldera, then the other, and for one hideous moment Narbuc thought his traitorous body meant to leap into the lake of fire. But then it turned itself and began to lower itself carefully down the sloping inner wall.

  It was such a cliff as a man might indeed climb, were he careful and lucky. Narbuc had done such things himself many wheels of the seasons before, near the southernmost of the String of Pearls, Orinaisal’Iteru, where the desert was edged by tall cliffs. But those cliffs were smooth stone warmed only by the sun, not a crumbling slope of sparkling jagged shards that tore at his robes and at his seared and burning flesh. Narbuc’s hands were work-hardened, calloused from years working with loom and awl, yet they were cut and torn now by his descent as if they had been the soft hands of a child. He was bleeding from a hundred cuts when his hands and feet finally lost their purchase upon the wall and he tumbled the rest of the way to the bottom.

  Had he possessed voice, Narbuc would have screamed then, for the stone he fell upon was as hot as fire, searing him even through his robes, and the stone beneath him was . . . yielding. Though his volition had been plucked from him as easily as he might take a toy from a child, he retained all his ability to feel. Every breath he took seared his lungs with its heat and caused him to choke and gag, for the air was foul with the scent of strange burning. Then, as suddenly as the terrible compulsion had come upon him, it was lifted. His shriek of anguish burst from his throat even as Narbuc lunged to his feet to batter at his smoldering clothing with burned and bleeding hands. He scrambled backward to the narrow ledge at the very bottom of the cliff, where the stone was burning hot but at least it was solid.

  That was when he saw Her. A woman stood upon the surface of the boiling rock. She wore no clothing, and her skin was as pale as if it had never been touched by the sun. It shone with the reflections—orange and gold and white—of the fires she walked through untouched. Her hair was long enough that it might have fallen to her knees, unbound and uncovered as a young girl might go in her mother’s tent. It was of a color Narbuc had never seen, and in its golds and pale reds it made him think of metal and fire, though it lofted on the wind like a veil of softest finest linen upon the desert breeze.

  And though the rock beneath his feet seared him, though the agony of standing so close to the scorching cliff wall was only exceeded by the agony of moving away from it, still Narbuc must stop and see.

  The woman held her arms out to him, beckoning: Come.

  And Narbuc would not. For nearly a moonturn his ears had been fed upon tales of Demons who sought the lives of the Isvaieni, and he was no boy, too young to have heard every tale from The Book of the Light told over by the storysinger of the tribe. Narbuc was a man grown, and more than grown, and had heard every word of The Book of the Light spoken out not once, but three times: the great tales and the small ones. And he knew well what creature it was that could steal a man’s will with a spell, that could take the shape of a woman yet stand upon the surface of burning stone as though she tarried in a garden of fountains and flowers.

  And despite the knowing that he looked upon that which his grandsires uncounted generations removed had fought to send from the world forever, Narbuc still felt within himself the yearning to do that which the Demon desired: to walk out into that lake of death to gain the touch of her hand. He pressed himself against the wall behind him until the pain of burning threatened to overwhelm his senses, but at least that pain was enough to scour the other compulsion from his heart.

  Seeing that he would not come to her, the Demon-woman lowered her arms and began to walk slowly toward him. Small puffs of flame flashed up from the burning stone each time she set her foot upon it, and as she walked, she smiled upon Narbuc—fondly, as a mother might smile upon an errant child.

  His tears dried in his eyes just as the sweat had dried upon his skin, leaving behind only a stinging pain. Narbuc could not flee: the walls of the caldera were too steep to climb quickly—if they could be climbed at all—and the heat and the foul air leached more strength from him with each heartbeat. In a hundred heartbeats—no more—she would be able to reach out and lay her fingers upon his skin, and Narbuc knew not what would happen then. There was only one thing he might do to save himself.

  With shaking fingers from which thick drying blood oozed, Narbuc scrabbled at his waist-sash. There, tied and knotted and folded into its wrappings, was his geschak in its sheath of leather and bone. Its brass-and-bone hilt seared his hand as he drew it, as if he clutched a bar of forging iron, but Narbuc did not care.

  She was barely a dozen paces away when he pressed the sharpness of the blade against his neck and jerked the knife sharply across his own throat.

  IN the years that had passed since he first came here to the Lake of Fire, Bisochim had cast many spells. Spells to bring an inexhaustible supply of sweet water up from the deep rock, spells to transform the ungiving clay of Telinchechitl into fertile earth upon which he could set thousands of hectares of garden and orchard, spells to gather grains of sand from the wind and transform it to stone, and turn that stone into the vast fortress of his home. Within his fortress there were workrooms for his study and chambers for his meditation, places in which he had formed his stone servants and then enchanted them into life. To live the life of perfect ease his hours of arduous study demanded required spell upon spell to wrest paradise from the hostile furnace of the Barahileth. Many of those spells Bisochim had cast wherever he had happened to be standing, for—possessed of Saravasse’s inexhaustible store of magic to draw upon—Bisochim’s spellcraft was limited only by the focus of his will.

  Yet even with all the power of a dragon at his command, there were some operations so delicate that even in the midst of such isolation, they required a place of extraordinary seclusion and quiet. For such workings as these, Bisochim retreated to the black glass chamber.

  Even Bisochim did not know how deep beneath the desert sands it lay. It was not a place he had cra
fted, but a place he had found—a perfect dome of black glass trapped within long-cooled rock. It had, he thought, been ancient when all the Barahileth was as molten as the Lake of Fire was now. He had made only three changes to fit it for his work. He had opened the passage that led, by a long narrow stair, to the lowest chamber of his fortress. He had smoothed the floor of the chamber into evenness. And he had called up a spring of water from the deep earth. The water of the spring was still and black and colder than the wind of the high skies at desert midnight, and it served no purpose but his magic. When he came here, the chamber was lit by a ball of Coldfire, its burning blue radiance making the deep cracks within the glass walls glint and shine. It was as cold as the sands above were hot. Its temperature never changed.

  It was in this place that Bisochim listened for the voices in the fire, those faint whispering intimations of intelligence that had goaded him and guided him for so many long years. It was here that Bisochim sought, in dream-visions and scrying-spells, a way to avert the future he saw so clearly, the future that ended in death for the Isvaieni upon the blades of an invading army. It was his desire to protect his people that had led him to go among them to propose the Great Ingathering, but knowing that his brethren were a people both strong and proud, Bisochim had known that speaking to them of safety and retreat would not gain him their cooperation. Thus it was that he had spun them his tale of an invasion of the Isvai that was scant moonturns away, and of his desire, not to protect them, but to forge them into an army to destroy those who believed the lies told for so many years, that the Balance of all things was the Balance in truth, and need not be corrected.

  In his heart Bisochim had always hoped it would not come to war. If he could only complete the work of his life, and set the Balance to rights, no one could undo what he had done. But he had found that a people who had roamed the trackless desert sands in utter freedom could not be peacefully gathered into one place to loiter in idleness, and so Bisochim set the young hunters of all the tribes to search for the Nalzindar, the only tribe which had not joined in the Great Ingathering. He had hoped by this means to accustom them by degrees to a quiet life living close beside one another. It would not have to endure for long. His work was nearly done.

  But when the young hunters whom he had sent forth returned half a year later, having left thousands of their number dead behind them upon the sand, Bisochim knew two things, and the knowledge bound his heart like iron bands. The first thing he knew was that he had woven his tale too well: he had made Zanattar and the other young hunters greedy for war. They had seized upon a chance pretext to craft themselves into an army which fell upon the Iteru-cities like a starving pack of fenerec upon a fat flock of sheep.

  And the second thing Bisochim knew was that what he had thought and hoped was merely a tale to serve his ends was not. He had long known that the Light would seek to stop him from turning the Balance from False to True, for he meant to return Darkness to the world. What was Light without Darkness, or a Balance without that which it balanced? It was nothing more than an empty mockery of that which it once had been. Yet any creature—any force—would seek to defend itself when it was threatened, and so Bisochim had known that the closer he came to the day of his victory, the closer would come the day that the Light would set huntsmen upon his tracks.

  But six sennights ago the first of his Isvaieni returned, and the tales that came with them were terrible enough. Nine cities did Zanattar and his army shatter with their might as a thrown stone might shatter a clay pot. Upon the tenth they were nearly broken themselves before they rose up to seize their bloody victory. Those who returned to Telinchechitl spoke of a city defended by magic and of a child who fought as a Demon in a fashion no man had ever seen before a hail of slingstones brought him down. A moonturn later Zanattar returned, to tell of the spoils of war snatched from their grasp, and the rear guard of the army routed, when a dragon came to the rescue of his Mage.

  Where there was one Dragonbond Mage, there would be more. Bisochim’s power was great, but it could not stand against the power of all the Armies of the Light. Bisochim knew his only hope now to complete his work was to do so before those armies discovered Telinchechitl. For many years he had known what that work must be. To call Darkness back into the world into a form of flesh that he would craft to house it—and then to trap that fleshly form in spells of stasis and stone. Thus Darkness would be returned to the world—but safely. Powerless.

  There might be a moonturn at best to accomplish a work for which he had hoped to have another full wheel of the seasons.

  The spells that he must cast if his plan were to succeed were complex and delicate. First the flesh-form must be created—a body identical in every way to one birthed by any woman and raised to adulthood through many wheels of seasons. Next he must summon the Elemental Spirit of Darkness to inhabit it and bind the spirit to its fleshy form. Either spell alone would be the masterwork of an Elven Mage, the capstone of a lifetime of study. Bisochim must not only prepare and cast both, but he must cast them as closely together as two heartbeats, for he could only leave the flesh-form untenanted for the space of half a hundred heartbeats before it would be unfit for habitation. And having cast those two spells, he must cast a third, and a fourth, or else he would have done nothing more than released Darkness into the world again, unchained.

  “Are you prepared to do all I shall command of you?” he asked his companion.

  Until he had brought the Isvaieni across the Barahileth’s desolation, no mortal eyes but Bisochim’s had gazed upon Telinchechitl in uncounted millennia. And it was no man who stood beside him now. Though the creature bore mortal seeming, its form was as changeable as fire, for the Cliffs of Telinchechitl sheltered one of the ancient Places of Power, one of the last that had not been lost or Tainted through the centuries. Once it had been one of the Nine Shrines sacred to the Firesprites, and because of that, Bisochim had conjured up the Firecrown from the ancient echo of the Great Power which had held the Firesprites in its keeping. Though this creature was merely a shadow of the true Firecrown, even the shadow of a god could wield power sufficient to destroy nearly every enemy who walked beneath the sun. That it had failed to destroy his enemies when Bisochim had set it against them was explained now, for the power of a Dragonbond Mage would allow him to avoid the battle he might well lose.

  “You summoned me up from the darkness and sent me forth into the world. Now you have summoned me home as attendant and witness to that which is your great purpose. Be certain that I stand ready to do all that is needed,” the Firecrown replied.

  “Then that is sufficient,” Bisochim said, nodding.

  The creature he meant to summon was no Dragonbond Mage, and he was confident of the Firecrown’s ability to withstand it, should there be need. But in the first moments after its enchantment into its prison of flesh, it should be pliable, amenable to his commands. It would grant him the boon for which he had toiled. And should it prove recalcitrant, the Firecrown’s power would bring it quickly to heel. But Bisochim was certain there would be no difficulty. The voices in the fire to which he had listened for so long had promised him both that this was the way to restore the true rightness of the Balance, and to gain life for Saravasse, for a dragon’s years were bound to those of its Mage, and it was cruelly unfair that his dearest beloved should end her life in a brief span of decades merely because Isvaieni years were brief. The Darkness he would summon and bind would grant him immortality to match its own, and then he would chain it forever.

  He began, as he had for so many years, by attuning himself to the voices in the fire. Once Bisochim had needed to strain to hear them, wondering all the while if his mind deceived him. Later he had needed to guard himself against their subtle trickery. At last he had won mastery over them, and they had become his guides.

  He was not certain whether it was his own fear that the time he had to complete his work had grown impossibly short, or that the voices wished to communicate some warning of
their own, but today he sensed an urgency in them which had never been present before. The chorus of ethereal voices filled his mind until he could no longer hear his own breath, his own heartbeat, saying in a thousand different ways: hurry, hurry, hurry . . .

  The danger was great. If he called the Spirit of Darkness to a form into which he could not bind it—one that was too weak to hold it, or that had ceased to live before the spirit came to tenant it—he would merely have loosed the creature upon the world in its Elemental form, and he would be unable to Bind it. It would go free to wander the land like some terrible plague, unable to truly claim a body for its own, but destroying hundreds—thousands—in its attempts to try. Yet if his work remained undone when his enemies reached Telinchechitl, the long labor of years would all be for nothing, and centuries of destruction and error might pass before another was called, as he had been, to this holy purpose.

  Bisochim did not let himself think of that possibility further. To imagine a thing was to call it into being: this was a lesson he had learned long before the Three Books had come into his hands.

  One more test.

  He spread his hands wide, palms down, above the black glass floor. He concentrated, summoning the intricate pattern of the spell within his mind, drawing upon Saravasse’s power as he did so. Any Wildmage could Call Fire out of nothingness, Coldfire out of darkness, water from the desert sands, winds from the sky. With the power of a dragon to call upon, Bisochim could do far more. A pale fog began to shimmer over the black stone, as if he merely summoned a ball of Coldfire. But it did not begin to glow, or to rise from the stone. Instead it became thicker and more opaque, and as it did, it coalesced from an amorphous blob of mist into something vaguely man-shaped.