The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  Tiercel had known all the way back in Karahelanderialigor that Wildmages didn’t stand a good chance against the Dark in the first place. The Dark was the mirror-image of the Wild Magic. It could twist it too easily. Only the High Magick, a magic that was neither Dark nor Light, that was only what its wielder made it, could stand against the Dark to destroy its instruments. High Magick to shield Wild Magic, and together they could destroy the Dark itself. All along the road that had brought them here they’d been hearing about balances—true and false and ancient. Now they didn’t have any balance at all.

  He even opened his mouth to say so—to say that Harrier might as well make all the decisions about what they did, since he was the one who talked to the Wild Magic on a regular basis—but his angry words were drowned beneath Ciniran’s cry of surprise.

  “Look! The sun!”

  It wasn’t exactly the sun, but it was a bright spot behind the clouds, and a quarter of a chime later the rain had stopped and the unnatural clouds began to roll away as quickly as they’d gathered.

  “There,” Harrier said, pointing, and his voice held a mixture of weariness and disgust.

  Tiercel looked.

  For the last ten days they’d been heading straight south, along a road beaten into the desert by the pads of thousands of shotors and marked by the unnatural wells sunk by a Wildmage who—somehow—had the power not only to do that, but to convince thousands of Isvaieni that their city-dwelling brethren were monsters who needed to be exterminated. They hadn’t known that this was happening when there was anyone they could ask how that was possible. Shaiara said Bisochim was Shadow-Touched. Tiercel had believed—until today—that there was still time to reach the Lake of Fire before Bisochim could summon the Darkness back. If Bisochim wasn’t already Shadow-Touched, Tiercel hadn’t thought it mattered how he could have accomplished those things, and Harrier, Knight-Mage or not, didn’t know enough about magic to ask the right questions.

  They should have cared. Tiercel realized that now. He should have cared about a lot of things while he still had Ancaladar to help him. (Before you killed Ancaladar out of arrogance and cowardice, a part of his mind insisted.) The wells in the Barahileth—the Isvaieni being turned into an army—the wards that kept Ancaladar from reaching the Lake of Fire—even Harrier being called to the Wild Magic. They were all warnings. And he’d missed every one.

  The air was shimmering with water, but Tiercel could see the bright band of green in the distance, and above it, the black ridge of cliff. A tall plume of white billowed up from the top of the cliff, as brilliant and substantial-looking as the summer thunderheads high in the sky back home. But there was never any green in the Barahileth, nor had that ridge been there when they’d stopped this morning.

  “Sorcery,” Shaiara growled.

  Harrier laughed, and the sound held so much despair that Tiercel instantly forgot his anger. He knows, Tiercel thought. He knows what this means. “No,” Tiercel said quietly, before Harrier had to say anything. “The end of sorcery. That—what we see—it was always there. We just couldn’t see it until now.”

  Four

  In the End Is the Beginning

  I HAVE TO GO,” Harrier said abruptly, looking toward the cliff. He sounded half alarmed and half irritated, and his voice made the hackles stand up on the back of Tiercel’s neck even while he found the frustration in it almost reassuring. “I have to go,” Harrier repeated. He clucked to his shotor and flicked it on the shoulder with a loop of the still-sodden lead-rope, and the beast grunted and began walking south. Harrier continued tapping—each shoulder in turn—and the shotor moved from a slow walk to a fast one. South. Toward the newly-revealed cliffs.

  “Where are you going?” Tiercel demanded, although it was perfectly obvious where Harrier was going. Tiercel was scrabbling for his shotor’s lead-rope, trying to emulate Harrier, but even though the day was now hot and bright—and humid—Tiercel’s fingers were still numb and clumsy.

  “I don’t know!” Harrier called back over his shoulder. He sounded more exasperated than anything else.

  Quickly, Shaiara turned her and Ciniran’s shotor to follow his. Despite its double burden, the beast moved in pursuit willingly enough, and rather than be left behind, Tiercel’s shotor followed the other two. He pulled the top of his still-wet chadar as far down over his forehead as he could, and pulled up the hood of his cloak and pulled that as far forward as it would go. The water-covered surface of the desert shone as brightly as a mirror in the sunlight, and its brightness hurt his eyes. It wasn’t the only thing that was in full sunlight, either. Harrier had his overtunic, and Tiercel had a cloak, but none of the four of them was fully dressed. They didn’t have food, or water, or shelter . . .

  . . . and Harrier was just running off.

  No. Not running off. Being Summoned. And he wasn’t frightened or angered by the summons, either—at least not as frightened or angry as Tiercel knew he’d be if there were something all-out Dark involved. That left only one thing that Tiercel could imagine: the MagePrice for either one or both of those Finding spells.

  Tiercel had realized, just as his shotor started after Harrier’s, that there was sound (and the Barahileth was always so silent), a background mush of noise that had tricked his mind and ears into thinking it was rain, or ocean, but the rain had already stopped and the ocean was far away. The sound rose and fell, and then, in one of the troughs of noise, there rang out, clear and sharp, the bark of a dog.

  The Nalzindar kept ikulas for hunting, and so both Tiercel and Harrier were familiar with the swift lean desert hound. But a hunting dog was not a flockguard, with the instincts to watch over herds of sheep and goats to guard them from the attacks of pakh and feneric and desert lion. For that, all the people of the south relied on a dog that looked as if it might be more than half-pahk itself—the khalbe.

  Khalbes were not beautiful dogs. They were small and fierce and dun-colored, with a stiff black ridge of fur down their spines. But they were intelligent and hardy, and fierce in the defense of their charges.

  This particular khalbe was so mud-covered that it looked like a dog of clay, rather than a dog of flesh and blood. It had been barking for so long that its voice was a hoarse rasp. But it was obviously grimly-determined to herd its charges—two goats, a shotor, and a sheep—back the way it had come, and none of the animals was willing to move.

  “I don’t believe this,” Tiercel heard Harrier say to nobody in particular when they saw it. “Here! Hey! You! Dog!”

  At the sound of Harrier’s voice, the khalbe advanced, belly to the mud and growling menacingly, and Harrier’s shotor backed up nervously. “I am trying to do you a favor!” Harrier snarled, regaining control of his mount easily. Tiercel wondered when Harrier had learned to ride so well. He didn’t remember—but then, he didn’t remember much about the last fortnight.

  “Harrier?” Shaiara asked in disbelief. Her tone conveyed her unspoken question plainly. What are we doing here?

  “Herding!” Harrier answered. “Herding—things! At least I am!” He circled around behind the tiny herd, with the khalbe in hoarse but noisy pursuit. Tiercel was pretty certain that Harrier’s muttered curses and the khalbe’s strangled barks meant about the same thing. It was all so weirdly anticlimactic and utterly irrational that Tiercel wondered if he’d fallen from his shotor’s back and was lying unconscious somewhere in the desert right now. They were supposed to be heading for the Lake of Fire as fast as they could—not watching Harrier try to herd goats.

  But the goats weren’t the only animals here in the desert, only the ones Harrier had happened to reach first. The wash of sound suddenly resolved itself—as if Tiercel’s mind had solved a puzzle—into the distressed cries of hundreds—thousands—of animals, all bleating, baaing, bellowing, barking, and in every possible way expressing their fright and displeasure. Tiercel’s stomach churned as he thought of the army that had destroyed Tarnatha’Iteru, but that army hadn’t been composed of whole tribes. Th
e young and the old, their flocks and herds and all their possessions, all had been left behind.

  Left behind—here. And when the storm had struck, those flocks and herds had taken flight just as their own shotors had done, scattering over the face of the desert, fleeing the wrath of a storm such as none of them had ever experienced.

  He was on the verge of figuring it out—figuring something out, anyway, something about what had happened to the Isvaieni, what Bisochim had done to them—when Harrier, waving and shouting as he circled the four animals on his shotor, finally got them moving. Once they were in motion, the khalbe darted in, snapping at their heels, moving them in the direction it wanted them to go. But the Wild Magic wasn’t finished with Harrier yet. With a groan of irritation, he turned his shotor away from the tiny herd, and struck out across the muddy plain again.

  “I do not see why the Wild Magic wishes us to aid our enemies!” Shaiara called after him, her voice wavering between anger and uncertainty.

  “Shaiara, I don’t see why the Wild Magic wishes me to do anything—but I still do it!” Harrier shouted back. “You should—You should go! Go!”

  “No!” Shaiara said firmly—or shouted, rather. It was difficult to have any kind of conversation across the distance between two moving shotors and over the background noise of squelching mud and bawling livestock, but they were doing their best. “If the Wild Magic wishes you to herd the beasts of those whom Bisochim has bespelled, then we will aid you!”

  MOST of the Isvaieni livestock had simply run until they were exhausted, scattering under the lash of the wind and the rain. Those that had been tethered had broken those tethers—Tiercel was surprised to see even horses here upon the Barahileth, standing splay-legged and winded.

  Wherever Harrier encountered an animal—or a group of animals—he moved his shotor in close, doing everything short of dismounting and kicking the animal or animals to get it (or them) heading back in the direction of the black cliff. Tiercel wondered exactly what the terms of Harrier’s MagePrice was this time. Was it something as specific as it had been last time, when he’d been supposed to take swordsmanship lessons as the MagePrice for doing a Healing spell? Were there a specific number of animals he had to herd to pay his MagePrice-or-Prices? Or did he have to herd all of them? It didn’t seem to matter. Tiercel recognized the stubborn set of his friend’s jaw, and he could tell that paying his MagePrice was no longer the point. Harrier had made up his mind to finish the job he’d started, no matter why he’d started it. He rode his shotor back and forth parallel to the black cliffs, searching for the animals that were farthest from it. Except for the two goats, the lone sheep, and the khalbe that had been with them, most of what the four of them encountered this far out was what had been able to run farthest and fastest: shotors and horses.

  What Harrier accomplished by means of brute force, Shaiara and Ciniran accomplished more ingeniously. The two Nalzindar coaxed where Harrier bullied, tricked where he threatened, but the results were the same—the animals, singly and in groups, turned and headed back the way they had come.

  Soon the four of them reached the outermost stragglers of the sheep and the goats. Clinging to the backs of a few of the sheep were chickens—wet, furious, and unwilling to move. Whether they’d been blown here by the force of the storm, or flown this far under their own power and chosen the only perches they could find that weren’t muddy ground, Tiercel didn’t know, but they spread their wings and flapped each time any of the riders came near and made the kind of noises Tiercel hadn’t thought chickens could make.

  By now the sky had been clear long enough for their clothing to be dry, and for every inch of exposed flesh to redden and sting. It didn’t matter that the air was still wet, or even that there were still pools of standing water here and there on the face of the desert. If they couldn’t find shelter soon, they’d die. And there wasn’t any shelter to be found. In the distance, Tiercel could see the Dove Road. It was just barely lower than the dun-colored mud of the regh around it, and water from everywhere else had trickled down onto it, turning it into a long brilliant ribbon of sun-flamed fire leading off into the distance. If Tiercel hadn’t been absolutely certain they were going to be dead in just a few hours, it would have seemed like a very bad omen.

  “They come,” Ciniran said, pointing—over Shaiara’s shoulder—into the distance.

  “That’s too damned bad,” Harrier answered steadily.

  Tiercel raised his eyes to the horizon-line and swallowed hard at what he saw. Isvaieni. On shotors. A lot of them.

  Even after Ancaladar was . . . lost . . . after he’d known it was the four of them—alone—going to the Lake of Fire, Tiercel had expected the moment when they reached it to be different. To happen at night. To happen without the Isvaieni army riding out at them. And now it was here—they were here—and he had no idea what to do. Run? Fight? They couldn’t do either one. Tiercel realized that if he’d known exactly what this moment would be like back in Karahelanderialigor, he would have refused the Bond. Refused to come. Told Jermayan and Idalia and Sandalon and whoever wanted to listen that he just couldn’t do this because he wasn’t good enough and he didn’t know how and it would be better for them to get someone else—or no one—than to send him off to fight the Dark and assume that he could do anything useful.

  Then Harrier was urging his shotor forward after another clump of shivering livestock, and Shaiara (Ciniran seated behind her) rode after, and Tiercel automatically followed.

  BISOCHIM could look across the long stretch of green grass that lay between the Cliffs of Telinchechitl and the fields and orchards around which the Isvaieni had set their tents to see the frenzied labor of those who toiled among the tents. Men and women struggled to salvage sodden possessions and to set tents upright once more—for those which had not been flattened by the wind had been trampled by terrified animals. Fortunately, even at the height of the storm, some of the riding animals, horses and shotors alike, had been either too frightened to flee, or tethered too securely to free themselves, and the moment the rain stopped had been saddled and used to recapture more. No one cared this day whose possession a beast might be, for all were united in one task: to gather up the scattered flocks and return them to the Plains of Telinchechitl before all the riches of the Isvaieni perished within the furnace of the Barahileth.

  The moment the storm had struck, Bisochim had felt Ahairan’s power over the Isvaieni break like a flawed tether of green hide. His heart had ached to hear grown men scream with terror, for none of the desertfolk had known anything of their actions from the moment Ahairan stole their wills to the moment they found themselves standing in the midst of the open space near the Cliffs of Telinchechitl, far from their tents, lashed by wind and water. But he had dared not lift the storm, or even divert his concentration from it by so much as would allow him to reassure his people, for this storm he had called was an unnatural thing in a place not meant for even natural rain, and it took constant mindfulness to hold it in place.

  Still less could Bisochim shield his people from it, for the place in which they stood was the place in which he needed its full fury to strike. And so his people had fled, uncomforted, back to the only safety they knew, only to find it laid waste by wind and by their own possessions.

  Bisochim had not summoned the storm to break Ahairan’s spell or even to harm her—the first was a surprise and he did not believe the second was possible, for how could a storm harm her when his own spells could not? But the molten stone contained within the caldera of the Lake of Fire could harm his people, and Bisochim’s storm had been meant to make that impossible. Even at the height of the storm’s power, the hiss and squeal of boiling rock being quenched by chill rain was loud enough to be heard above the howl of the wind, and steam had poured from the surface of the Lake of Fire so profusely that not even the storm could sweep it all away. White clouds had flowed down over the side of the cliff like strange odorless smoke, wrapping Bisochim in a veil of blinding white
ness that was no sooner whipped away by the stormwind than it was renewed.

  When stormwater had begun to spill down over the lip of the caldera, Bisochim released his hold upon the forces in the sky. The rain had ceased immediately, and—far more quickly than they had gathered—the clouds began to roll away. Now the Isvaieni labored to salvage their belongings, little realizing that they themselves were the greatest salvage of the day.

  During the storm, the heat and cold, like alternating blows of a hammer, had cracked the cliff wall further, and gobbets of barely-cooled rock, like drips of tallow, had forced their way through the cracks. A pillar of steam rose skyward through the now-quiet air, mute testimony to the fires that still raged within Telinchechitl. But even with the immediate danger averted, Bisochim feared that Ahairan would return and attempt once more to feed herself upon the Isvaieni. Perhaps they could not ascend the cliff face now, but if she shattered the cliff wall entirely, the burning rock would be liquid enough to roll forth and consume them. He must do more to safeguard their lives.

  And yet, even as Bisochim rallied his strength for another spell, he wondered if there were any purpose to his labors. Ahairan was Darkness Itself imprisoned in flesh. If she chose, she could return to and slay the Isvaieni with a sweep of her hand.

  It will not gain her the power she craves, he realized. Just as the Endarkened had done centuries before, Ahairan drew power from blood and pain and death. She would not kill cleanly—not when there were those who could nourish her by deaths of drawn-out suffering.