The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  Shaiara said nothing further.

  Harrier had to admit that a part of him felt that as long as Zanattar was thinking of Ahairan as something that could be fought with spears and swords, at least he wouldn’t be panicking. He’d already seen what happened when the Isvaieni turned into a panicky mob looking for the most convenient enemy, and he had no desire to see it twice.

  “In four nights more, Ciniran and I depart,” Shaiara said when she finished her braid.

  “At least if we’re near Abi’Abadshar that means only another ten days to Kannatha Well,” Harrier said. But that would mean it had taken the caravan eighteen days to cover a stretch of road it had taken the four of them ten days to travel, and they were moving slower every day. So twenty more days to Kannatha Well. At least.

  “All goes as the Wild Magic wills,” Shaiara answered as she settled herself for sleep. Harrier had heard that phrase from her more times than he could count since he’d first arrived at Abi’Abadshar, but tonight there was a note in her voice he’d never heard before.

  Irony.

  HARRIER glanced around at the Barahileth, wondering how Shaiara could be so certain she was four days from the place where she needed to leave the Dove Road to go to Abi’Abadshar. While the Wild Magic told him exactly where it was, there weren’t any landmarks to guide her. She wouldn’t even have the marks they’d left on the regh: because of Bisochim’s rainstorm, the regh wasn’t one vast sweep of easily-marred nothing anymore. Where it was clay, it was covered with deep cracks where slurry had formed and dried. Where it was ishnain flats or salt flats, the hard pale surface gleamed in sharp contrast in the moonlight.

  “It will be good to—” Shaiara began, raising her voice to be heard over the din of livestock and crying babies and shotor-bells.

  Suddenly all the khalbes began to bark at once—short sharp deep-throated sounds of threat and challenge. The herds stopped plodding along and began to bunch together. Some of the goats tried to flee into the desert. Harrier had barely turned Lightfoot toward the sounds of the first disturbance when he heard a terrible shriek. The shriek was cut off abruptly, but before its echoes had died away, there were more. Not one, but dozens—the sounds of sheep and goats being maimed and killed—and over and above it, the frantic barking of the khalbes, ending over and over in shrieks like the first.

  Harrier conjured a ball of Coldfire and sent it in the direction of the sounds. By its light, he could see the pale flashes of ikulas-hounds running in the direction of the screams, but he still couldn’t see what was attacking the herds. He urged Lightfoot toward the disturbance as the din from the caravan increased. Isvaieni from the back of the caravan were moving out from the road into the Barahileth as well.

  Wait, no—Harrier thought suddenly. But it was too late to call them back. In the pale deceptive light of the Coldfire he could see a vague shadowy shape crouched over the bloody carcass of a dead sheep. A khalbe approached it; Harrier could tell by looking that the flockguard was barking furiously, but he couldn’t hear the sound in the uproar of the caravan. At its approach, the creature raised its head and spat blackly. The thick dark liquid of its spittle struck the khalbe full in the face, and it began to howl in agony. In seconds it was convulsing and dying.

  Their attackers were Goblins.

  “Back! Get back!” Harrier shouted, but no one could hear him over the noise.

  Goblins were creatures of Shadow. Their bite was poisonous, and now Harrier knew that they could spit poison as well. He couldn’t think of anything they feared.

  Except fire.

  The first spell, the simplest spell, one he’d mastered long ago. He summoned up the image of Simera’s death-agonies within his mind—and cast Fire upon the Goblin as it moved toward the body of the khalbe. It burst instantly into flame, shrieking with a high-pitched howl that made all the dogs howl in sympathy. Its body burned with an oily black smoke. Harrier began looking about for more; he knew the creatures ran in packs. As he did, he conjured more Coldfire. Light was their most pressing need. He’d been a fool not to see to that sennights ago.

  Fear was a metallic taste in his throat, and his heart hammered with panic and fury. What good did his Knight-Mage gifts or his Selken swords do against an enemy he couldn’t even approach? He shouted at the Isvaieni to stay back, but only those closest to him could hear him. The Isvaieni understood poisonous creatures. The southern desert was full of them. But they’d never seen Goblins, and they didn’t know how to fight them.

  If the Goblins hadn’t stopped to eat no matter what was happening around them, the caravan would have been doomed. There weren’t just half-a-dozen of them as there’d been at Windy Meadows, there were hundreds. They rose up out of the regh as if it were water. They attacked the sheep and the goats, and when the khalbes and the herdsmen attempted to protect their charges, the Goblins killed them too.

  Everywhere the Goblins stopped to feed, Harrier set them on fire, shouting out warnings and explanations to the Isvaieni. By the time the Goblins began to approach the caravan itself, Harrier’s warnings had been understood. Each time a Goblin rose up out of the regh, it became the target of a dozen arrows. As it thrashed in its death-agonies, other Goblins would swarm to devour it, becoming the target of arrows in their turn. In that fashion, the Isvaieni built themselves protection from the bodies of their enemies, because the Goblins would stop to feed on their own dead, and when they did, the Isvaieni would kill more of them, and so more of them would be drawn to the feeding ground.

  But the battle did not go all their way.

  HARRIER scanned the desert, looking for Goblins. The dead animals and dead Goblins had all been devoured, and the living animals were now too widely scattered to provide tempting targets for the Goblin pack. He didn’t see any live Goblins, but it was too much to hope for that they’d all left. He turned Lightfoot back toward the Dove Road. What had been an orderly caravan only an hour before was now a disorderly mob that was both spread out over too much of the desert to organize and too clustered together for safety. There’s only one bunched-up group of prey left out here, he realized suddenly.

  “Spread out!” Harrier shouted, waving his arms. “They’re going to—”

  Instinct, paranoia, or Knight-Mage gifts made him jump from Lightfoot’s back a bare instant before the shotor bawled in pain and lunged forward, her long legs already trembling and unsteady. A swarm of Goblins clawed their way up over her body, devouring her alive. Harrier set them aflame, shouting in anger, knowing that Lightfoot had been dead from the moment the first of them had bitten her.

  “Harrier!” Ciniran was racing toward him on her own shotor, her hand held out to him. He grabbed her wrist and leaped upward as she swept past him, clinging to her waist as he sat awkwardly astride the shotor’s back.

  “Scatter!” he shouted to the Isvaieni, as Ciniran raced back toward the caravan. He could see Goblins on the ground in the middle of it now, and as he watched helplessly—unable to cast Fire effectively or safely into the midst of so many people—another shotor went down, flinging its rider into the midst of the monsters. He shouted the single word over and over and soon it was taken up by others, and the caravan fragmented like a glass bowl dropped on a stone floor.

  “Shaiara?” he asked when Ciniran had at last allowed her exhausted beast to drop to a walk. The desert was silent now—and that was good. The next segment of the caravan was almost a day behind them, but sound carried for miles in the desert. If Harrier didn’t hear anything, that meant they weren’t being attacked.

  Or it might mean they were all dead.

  “Alive, I think. She was when last I saw her. Harrier—those creatures—”

  “Goblins. I’ve seen them before.” He’d seen them almost a year ago, long before Ahairan had gotten free. But the Balance had been shifting even then, and the Dark had been gaining in power—enough so that the ancient creatures of Darkness could reappear. And now that Ahairan was actually here, there’d be more of them.


  AS soon as they set the tents for day, Harrier went to Liapha’s tent, summoning Zanattar, Shaiara, Anipha, and Sathan to join him. Anipha and Sathan were the Ummarai of the Kamazan and Barantar tribes, as Liapha was of the Kadyastar, Shaiara was of the Nalzindar, and Zanattar . . . well, Zanattar was mainly an annoying bully, in Harrier’s opinion, which meant he’d be a lot more trouble if he was being left out than if he was being left in. Harrier didn’t like including Zanattar in his council of war any more than he liked having a council of war in the first place, but he didn’t see any choice about either one. He was a Knight-Mage, and he could—he thought—hold a walled city against a siege, with enough soldiers and supplies. But he wasn’t sure what to do to defend nomads spread out over several hundred miles of road against attacks by Darkspawn monsters in the middle of a desert doing its best to kill all of them. For that, he needed expert advice.

  The tent was already stiflingly warm when Harrier—the last inside—entered. He barely noticed. The kaffeyah without which no gathering among the Isvaieni could apparently proceed had already been brewed. When he was served, he took a courtesy sip and set the cup aside.

  “I wanted to talk to all of you about what happened tonight,” he said. “I know it’s bad, and none of us was expecting it.”

  He wasn’t sure what was worse, really—that anyone had died at all, or how some of them had died. Even after he’d given the warning, and they knew what sort of enemy they faced, Harrier had seen some of the Isvaieni go running away from the caravan, toward the nearest pack of Goblins they could see. They’d died instantly. “I wanted to share what I know.”

  “And we will all hope that Sathan will spare us his speeches of how Barantar wisdom might have prevented all. I am an old woman and need my sleep.” Liapha reached down to fondle the ears of the ikulas whose head rested upon her knee. The hunting hound closed its eyes and sighed in pleasure.

  Sathan cleared his throat irritably, but didn’t take Liapha’s bait.

  “I know you’ve all gotten some of the story in the last several hours,” Harrier said quickly, before the Kadyastar Ummara could set another barb. “I don’t know whether we’ll be attacked again tonight or not. We’re safe during the day. Goblins can’t stand light. You need to tell your people not to waste their arrows, because they’re going to run out of them, and you can’t attack Goblins with awardans. It has to be arrows or spears—anything that will kill at a distance.”

  “Will a sling-stone kill one?” Zanattar asked.

  “I don’t know,” Harrier said. “Maybe. I know that fire will kill them—they burn like an oil-soaked rag.” He winced at the image, and changed the subject quickly. “How many died last night?”

  “We will not have the final tally until tonight,” Sathan said, refusing to look at Harrier. “A dozen. Perhaps more.”

  “But the flocks are gone—every goat and khalbe of the Kamazan, the sheep of the Barantar, the flocks of the Kadyastar—gone,” Anipha said bitterly, her voice jagged with anger. “Do we dare wander the Barahileth like homeless ghosts chasing after goats when the night is filled with Demons and their servants? I do not.”

  “No one does,” Shaiara said sharply. “One does not survive the Barahileth by lingering in it. If you are indeed all brothers—as Zanattar has claimed—then claim a brothers’ right from those who yet have sheep and goats and can spare them.”

  “Which nobody might by the time we reach the other side,” Harrier said quickly. “I don’t know a lot about Goblins. Tiercel’s the one who knows things like that. I don’t know a lot about ancient history, either. But I’m pretty sure that the Goblins were the servants of the Queen of the Endarkened. If they’re here, they were sent here. By Ahairan.” He waited a moment for that to sink in, then continued before any of them could say anything. “Not to wipe us out. Just to make it harder for us to survive.”

  Sathan laughed mockingly. “Northern Wildmage, have you not noticed where you are? This is the Barahileth—it is where the sun goes to get warm!”

  He yelped in surprise as Liapha raised her walking staff and struck him across the shoulders. “Show respect to your betters, Barantar whelp. Harrier has come down from the Cold North to die here on the Forge of the Sun with us for the sake of a prophecy.”

  “It cannot be much of a prophecy if he’s going to die,” Sathan muttered, half under his breath, but the others looked interested.

  Harrier sighed and shook his head, realizing that he wasn’t going to be let to get any farther with this spur-of-the-moment strategy meeting until he’d explained this mysterious “prophecy” to everyone’s satisfaction. Reasonable or not, the Isvaieni Ummarai felt they had a right to know about it for whatever bearing it might have on their futures and those of the people they led. “All right,” he said. “It isn’t my prophecy—and just so you know, I’m not planning on dying anyway. If I tell you about it, can we get back to planning what to do about the Goblins?”

  “By all means,” Liapha said smoothly. “But let us hear your words now, Harrier of the Two Swords. We have long lacked a talesinger in the tents of the Kadyastar.”

  Harrier took a deep breath and tried to think of the way Flowering Day stories were told, and the way all the stories in The Book of the Light were written, and how all the stories went whenever Shaiara or Ciniran explained something. “Long before Tiercel was born, the Elder Brothers knew that the Dark was going to come back. But they didn’t know how it would come, or where, or when, or how to fight it when it came. So they waited. And Tiercel was born, and when he was, the Wild Magic knew that he would be the Chosen Champion of the Light, because he’d been born with the power to become a High Mage, just as there had been a thousand years ago. So when he grew up, and discovered his MageGift, he went to the Veiled Lands, and the Elder Brothers told him about the prophecy . . .” And Tiercel had been completely horrified, but that didn’t make a good story. “And then we left the Elven Lands, and we came here.”

  “And while they two were in the Veiled Lands, for how should it be but that one who had shared Tiercel Northerner’s tent from the time they were boys would go with him, even knowing that his journey carried him to the ends of the world, and so did Harrier accompany his friend, a golden unicorn more beautiful than the dawn came before Harrier, and brought to him the Three Books. Kareta the Golden spoke these words to Harrier, son of the chaharum of the Ummara of Armethalieh: Harrier of the Cold North, I call upon you to become a Knight-Mage, first in the land since Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy. And then did Harrier bow down and weep, and said to Kareta the Golden: this is a destiny far too glorious for me, who am only the son of a chaharum; you must look elsewhere. Three times did Kareta offer him the Books of the Wild Magic, and three times did he refuse them in his humility, until at last did Kareta the Golden say to him that he must take up this great burden so that he might guard his friend through the many dangers that would certainly befall him, until the time of the prophecy was fulfilled,” Shaiara finished. She gazed at Harrier, frowning triumphantly, and he had no difficulty deciphering her expression. See? This is how a story is told.

  Harrier did his best not to glare at her, though he wasn’t very happy with the idea that you could tell a story that was more-or-less what had happened and have it end up sounding completely like a lie. He cleared his throat awkwardly.

  “So we’ve been attacked by Goblins once, and we need to expect it again. That means we have to warn everybody in the caravans behind us—if they haven’t been attacked already, they probably will be. They need to know what to do.” He ran his hand through his hair, dislodging his chadar. “We need to spread out even more than we have been when we travel. Anyone who has livestock needs to break it into smaller groups for droving. Who’s directly behind us? Does anyone know?”

  “It is the Lanzanur, Harrier,” Zanattar said quietly. “We travel with the Kareggi.”

  Harrier nodded. “I’m sure Ummara Fannas can spare some animals to replace what we’ve lost. And we’ll lea
ve the well uncapped when we reach it. It should attract all of our animals that have survived.” He held up a hand to forestall objections. “I know it wastes water. But those wells are tapping the bedrock water. They won’t go dry in a day or two. We can’t chase our livestock, so we have to lure it. We’ll seal them again in a day or two. Any of the animals we haven’t gotten back will be dead by then.”

  The others nodded slowly. No one was happy with the thought of leaving a well open to the desert sun, but they were less happy with the thought of losing valuable animals.

  “Now, we’re all safe during the day—Goblins don’t like light—and tonight when we break camp, I’ll ride back up the road and speak with Ummara Fannas and Ummara Kataduk, and give them the news. If they don’t already have it.”

  “And this you must not do, Harrier,” Liapha said quietly. “It is true that any man—even a Wildmage—may die. This is a bitter lesson that we have all learned in these past seasons. But it would be a hard thing for us if you should vanish upon the road and no man or woman of us could say truly what had happened to you. Better for all if my sister’s son Hadyan rides forth upon the swiftest shotor that the Kadyastar possess. Let these creatures—if they come again—attempt to bite the wind, for they will find that as easy a task as claiming Hadyan as their prey. He will say to Ummara Fannas and Ummara Kataduk all as you would say it yourself, and then let them send riders on to warn those who go behind, and when the message has been sent to all, the telling of that shall be sent forward again until it reaches us.”

  Harrier nodded absently, thinking. “I think we need to send riders up and down the whole caravan anyway. Constantly. Otherwise . . . how will we know if something happens to the people at the back?” The last of the Isvaieni had probably left Telinchechitl nine or ten days ago. But did any of them know for sure?