The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  Reaching the well ought to have been a triumph of sorts, but thirsty horses would have pulled toward water as soon as they’d scented it, and the thirsty shotors weren’t doing that. Harrier tried not to think that this meant that the well was dry. Automatically he tapped his mount’s shoulder to make it kneel and uncoiled his bent leg from around the saddle-peg. While it made for a secure seat—with one leg flexed between the saddle-peg and the high front of the saddle it would take real work to fall off—Harrier still found it an awkward and unfamiliar way to ride. He took a few moments to stretch before walking the few yards to the cistern, conjuring a naranje-sized ball of Coldfire into his hand. If an enemy was out here, they’d been seen already. And he needed light to see by.

  The wellhead was a ring of dark stone about six feet across, its true color difficult to see in the dark. It was sealed, just as the larger one in Tarnatha’Iteru had been. The lip of the well was about six inches wide, and that left a five-foot disk of stone for them to somehow move in order to open the well. Harrier knelt, bringing the tiny globe of Coldfire close to the stone. It looked like granite. There were two holes carved into its center. He walked back to the others.

  “Shaiara, I need a rope. And . . . can you tie it to one of the saddles? And get one of the shotors to pull? I think I know how to get the cover off the well.”

  Once the rope was passed through the holes in the stone and knotted to the saddle, Shaiara coaxed the shotor backward while Harrier lifted and pulled. Even with the shotor pulling, he had to lift straight up. He had the rope over his shoulder to give him enough of an angle, and the doubled length of rope dug in and burned and nearly forced him to his knees. But finally the heavy disk of stone grated upward, dragged over the lip of the cistern, and slid into the dust beside it. The moment the well was exposed, Harrier was nearly trampled by thirsty shotors jostling forward to get at the water. They kicked and snapped at each other, and he, Shaiara, and Ciniran did as much as they could to keep order among the thirsty beasts.

  “If it is—” poisoned, Shaiara began, but Harrier stopped her.

  “It isn’t,” Harrier said. He didn’t know how he knew. Just as he had in Abi’Abadshar—when he’d told Marap that some delectable-looking berries were poisonous—he just did.

  “There are times I forget you are a Blue Robe,” Shaiara said in relief.

  Harrier laughed—mostly in surprise. “I just wish I knew what one of your ‘Blue Robes’ was supposed to be like,” he answered, and Shaiara simply shook her head.

  By the time all the shotors had drunk their fill the sun was up. They’d managed to lead the shotors aside one by one to unload them, and so they’d been able to put the tent up while they were waiting for the animals to finish drinking—a shotor, Ciniran had explained, could drink three hundred pounds of water at a time, which was why they could go so long without drinking at all. Harrier had made the conversion from pounds to gallons—for the Isvaieni reckoned water by weight, and in the Nine Cities it was measured by volume—and still came up with a figure that made him blink. But today they could all drink as much water as they liked, and they emptied every last waterskin. When Harrier had made Tiercel drink as much water as he could manage, Tiercel actually seemed more alert than he had been . . . well, since before Ancaladar had disappeared.

  “The level of the well hasn’t dropped at all,” Ciniran said, marveling, when the last of the shotors, round-bellied with water, had settled itself, grunting, to the ground.

  “It’s cold, too,” Harrier said, dipping a hand into it. He pulled off his chadar—the sun wasn’t very high yet—and spilled water over the back of his neck, just because he could. “It’s like the iteru back in Abi’Abadshar. I think the water comes from way underground.”

  He went into the tent and stripped town to his undertunic and boots, then came back, took one of the waterskins and plunged it deep into the cistern to fill it. And then, with a sense of indulging in unimaginable luxury, sprayed its contents all over himself, washing days of salt and ishnain from his skin. “Come on,” he urged the two Nalzindar, holding out the waterskin. “You’ll feel better.”

  “By getting wet?” Shaiara said in disbelief, wrinkling her nose. “Fill the waterskins and then cover the cistern again. It is time to sleep before the sun is too high.” Shaiara went into the tent and Ciniran followed her.

  Harrier looked at Tiercel. “Well, come on,” he said. “The waterskins won’t fill themselves.”

  Fortunately the work went quickly, even though Harrier ended up doing nearly all of it. It was only a matter of carrying the filled waterskins one by one a few steps to the doorway of the tent and tucking them just inside after he’d filled them. Shaiara and Ciniran helped them with the first few, moving them further inside—partly because Ciniran wanted water to prepare the evening meal, and partly so they wouldn’t all be clustered in one place. After that, the two women disappeared, and once Harrier was sure that Shaiara wasn’t there to see and disapprove, he used one of the waterskins to soak himself and Tiercel thoroughly.

  It meant he had to fill it twice, but he didn’t mind.

  THAT day, Tiercel Dreamed.

  He knew even while it was happening that this was one of the Lake of Fire visions. For the last year he’d dreamed of a lake of fire and a beautiful—horrible—naked woman standing in the middle of it, calling someone—not him—to come to her.

  He knew now that the woman was a Demon, and that the person she was calling was Bisochim. Why she was still calling him—since from what Shaiara had said, Bisochim had already been Tainted—Tiercel didn’t know. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that this vision was different from all the ones that had come before it. In the first instants, he thought that what the change meant was that they were too late. But then he realized: No. It means something else.

  He was conscious and aware—just as he always was for these dreams—but this time he could neither see nor feel. He simply was: aware and present. And somehow it was natural to have none of his normal senses—as if either he didn’t possess those abilities, or as if there were nothing here to see or hear or feel. Tiercel wasn’t sure which it was, but . . . surely, if whatever he was normally lacked such senses, he wouldn’t possess knowledge and memory of them? But he did. And so he could tell that he was not simply blind and deaf. There was nothing to see and nothing to hear, and nothing—anywhere—to feel. It wasn’t possible. But it was true.

  But if he lacked normal senses of perception, he had . . . something . . . to take their place. And with these other senses, he could tell that he was not alone. Surrounded by others like him (like the thing he was dreaming he was), others possessed of boundless inhuman appetites, and Tiercel was trying as hard as he could not to know what they thought and what they wanted, but that only meant his thoughts focused more on where he was. And the thing about that was that it didn’t seem to exist except in relation to someplace else, someplace the others wanted to get to, a place they’d either never been, or hadn’t been for a very long time.

  They wanted out so very much.

  Suddenly he could no longer hold back from knowing—what the others around him were, where he was . . .

  He began to thrash and scream, only realizing, as he awoke fully, that Harrier was lying on top of him with his hand clamped over Tiercel’s mouth. “No more water for you,” Harrier said, his voice raw with worry despite his light words. “Obviously you can’t handle the stuff.”

  “Katona,” Tiercel gasped out when Harrier took his hand away. He sat up with a groan, gritting his teeth before it turned into a whimper—or another scream.

  “You dreamed about Katona?” Harrier asked, sitting up beside him.

  Tiercel shook his head irritably. If he’d been dreaming about his sister, he wouldn’t have woken up screaming, would he? The tent was oven-hot, and he knew he’d only slept a few hours. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep again. If this was how his visions were going to go now, he didn’t want to.
In fact, he didn’t think he ever wanted to sleep again. But in the last instants of his vision, something had come almost clear. He struggled to hold the details of it in his mind: unlike the Lake of Fire visions—that he couldn’t forget no matter how hard he tried—this one was sliding out of his mind already. Not like a dream. Like it was a kind of knowledge a mortal mind simply couldn’t retain. If Ancaladar—he thought, and forced his thoughts away. He made himself use the discipline of the High Magick to retain as much as he could. This is like that is like the other, and you can remember the other with ease, therefore you can use it to help you recall this . . .

  His half-awake mind had given him the hint, and he seized upon it in haste, terrified that he would forget everything. Tiercel had four younger sisters. The second-oldest, Katona, was four years younger than he was, and obsessed with puzzle-boxes. She spent every silver unicorn and copper demi-sun of her allowance on them. Some of them were so elaborate that they didn’t open at all. If you lined up all the pieces of them properly, you could drop a small glass bead into a hole in the surface and have it fall all the way down to the center and rattle around. Tiercel had never seen the point.

  This is like that is like the other . . .

  “Did you ever wonder where the Endarkened come from, Har?” he asked hoarsely.

  “No,” Harrier said flatly.

  “You remember Kat’s puzzles?” Tiercel asked next.

  “Sure. We bought her a Selken one for her Naming Day last year. A silver pendant that came apart into a bunch of rings, remember? It cost so much we had to pool our allowance to afford it.” Harrier had been having conversations with him for years. He wasn’t confused at what might have seemed like a sudden random question. Tiercel hadn’t thought he would be.

  “Yeah.” Tiercel sighed. “And Doreses fed it to the neighbor’s dog, and so Kat broke Dorrie’s favorite set of hair-combs, and Mama said she was going to run off and join the Selkens herself. I miss them all so much, Har.”

  He hadn’t meant to add that. He knew Harrier missed his family and his brothers and his nieces and nephews and his cousins and his whole life. But Harrier just sighed. “You did not wake me up to talk about your appalling sisters, Tyr. Please tell me you didn’t.”

  His tone of voice was almost enough to make Tiercel laugh. “No. It’s just . . . Most of Kat’s favorite puzzles were—are—boxes. Boxes inside boxes. That was—kind of—what I . . . had a vision about.” As best he could, Tiercel explained what he’d just Seen. When he was finished, Harrier handed him the nearest waterskin. Tiercel drank thirstily.

  “So you think the Endarkened are in . . . a puzzle box?” Harrier asked, his voice flat with bafflement.

  Tiercel groaned in frustration. He really didn’t want to talk about this, but he thought it was important to make Harrier understand. “I think there are a lot of worlds, not just this one. I think they’re all . . . inside each other somehow. I think the Endarkened want to get from theirs to ours because they like it better here. And I think they need someone—Bisochim, maybe—to line all the worlds up together right before they can.”

  Harrier snorted. “Oh. Well. If that’s all, we can all go home now.”

  Tiercel actually managed to force himself to smile at Harrier’s black joke. They both knew that no matter how bizarre and incredible the thing was he’d just described, if it wasn’t also possible, neither of them would be here.

  “I care not if you go home or go on,” Shaiara said crossly from her side of the tent. “But what you must do now is sleep.”

  TEN days later, none of them—even the two Nalzindar—had energy to spare for arguing in the heat of the day. If not for the fact that there were wells along the road, they would have died by now. They all drank water constantly. Water was strength, and they needed all their strength simply to reach the next source of water. If the next well on the road was dry—or foul—then they might have the strength to retrace their path to the last one. But to retreat would mean that the Shadow could claim victory.

  As if the “puzzle-box” vision had wrenched Tiercel’s mind open even farther than it had been before, every night brought another vision, another dream. None of them were the clear terrible visions of the Lake of Fire: unless he struggled hard to hold onto them, they faded quickly, leaving him feeling bruised and soiled. He wondered if he was having them because Ancaladar was gone. He wondered if Ancaladar had protected him from them. He missed Ancaladar’s presence so much that sometimes it was hard simply to breathe.

  Tiercel knew his constant wakeful muttering through the day made it hard for the others to sleep. He tried staying awake, but the crushing heat and the constant exhaustion shoved him down into unconsciousness without keeping him there. He told Harrier he didn’t remember anything when he woke up. It was close enough to true that it wasn’t really lying. Once Ciniran offered him a sleeping tea—they had the ingredients with them—and Tiercel nearly burst into tears. As desperate as he was for sleep, he was terrified of being trapped in the darkness of his own mind.

  HARRIER knew they had to do something. To arrive at the Lake of Fire exhausted and staggering from lack of sleep would be almost like not having come at all. Just because he couldn’t see how they could possibly win a fight against Bisochim didn’t mean they should just show up and fall down unconscious at his feet. He was just too exhausted to think of any way of not doing that.

  They’d begun their journey at the dark of the moon. Sixteen days later the moon was almost full, its light turning the desert white. Harrier knew that Shaiara thought the brightness meant they could be too easily seen by their enemies. Harrier was resigned to knowing they weren’t going to be able to sneak up on anybody. The Barahileth was as flat as a tabletop. The road they were on was the only one leading to the Lake of Fire. Tiercel no longer had the ability to cast spells to make people look the other way. They were going to be seen. It could only be a matter of time. The Isvaieni who’d attacked the String of Pearls had to be nearby, and Shaiara said that all the tribes were with Bisochim, so that meant a pretty large camp. He knew from Shaiara when it had been that Bisochim had been talking to the tribes, and he had some idea of how long it would have taken Zanattar’s army to move through the Madiran to destroy the Border cities, so he knew that the camp—and the Lake of Fire—couldn’t be far into the Barahileth, because otherwise the times—for all of the Isvaieni to go off with Bisochim to wherever they’d gone, and then for Zanattar to come out again with his army—wouldn’t work out. The desert was as flat as Great Ocean, and whenever Harrier raised his eyes to the horizon, it seemed to go on forever. If there were tents, cookfires, anything out here, they should be visible.

  And they weren’t. And he didn’t know why.

  He was too tired to think clearly, and Tiercel was in even worse shape. Harrier decided that he’d tell Shaiara they needed to take tomorrow night just to rest. Tiercel had refused Ciniran’s offers of sleeping tea, but Harrier wasn’t going to ask. He’d just make sure Tiercel drank some as soon as Ciniran could get it ready. He knew the dreams bothered Tiercel, but if they arrived at the Lake of Fire in the state they were in now, they’d do something so stupid they’d be executed on the spot.

  But by the time they reached the iteru and completed the exhausting process of making camp for the day, Harrier was so tired that he’d forgotten about talking to Shaiara.

  TIERCEL stumbled into the tent as soon as the carpets were laid down and collapsed onto his sleeping mat. He knew he was leaving the other three to do all the work of setting up the camp, but he was too worn out to do anything else. He thought one of the reasons Harrier and the other two were sparing him as much as they were was because they still hoped he’d be able to do . . . something . . . about Bisochim. Or maybe they just felt sorry for him. Tiercel didn’t have the strength to figure out which it was, let alone to argue about it.

  He always tried to stay awake as long as he could, even though the combination of morning heat and his constant wearines
s bludgeoned him into unconsciousness eventually, because once he was asleep, the visions began. His constant attempts to escape from them would keep him struggling toward wakefulness for the rest of the day. But today not even the heat kept him awake, because the itchy, uncomfortable, frightening, knowing in the back of his mind was gone, as if his skull were a house that he had unwillingly shared for over a year, and the other tenant had suddenly decided to pack up and leave. Oh, that can’t be good, Tiercel thought vaguely, but the mixture of relief and exhaustion was so great that it dragged him down into true sleep before he could manage to rouse himself to give an alarm.

  SHOUTING and brightness jarred Tiercel awake. Harrier had stumbled over him—kicking him in his haste—and by the time Tiercel managed to drag himself fully out of the first deep sleep he’d had in more than a fortnight he could see that the other three were already outside and the flap of the tent was open. “Get the shotors—get them!” he could hear Harrier shouting.

  “Can you ride without saddles?” he heard Shaiara ask, and Harrier simply laughed.

  As he struggled up onto one elbow, Tiercel saw Ciniran, wearing nothing more than her chadar, undertunic, and boots, run back inside. She grabbed one of the heavy riding saddles—their shape and their weight kept them on the shotors’ backs, since they didn’t rely on cinches—and began hauling it out of the tent. As she reached the doorway, Harrier burst back into the tent.