The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  The fun thing about his great new life was that no matter what problems he had, there were always new ones to ensure he didn’t have time to brood. Apparently, in the few hours he’d been asleep, everybody in the entire encampment had gone crazy, giving him an even better reason to come to see Liapha than just a little entertainment. “I have been asked where it is that we go, and I had thought this a matter settled long since.”

  “Such a pity that the Blue Robes are of no tribe,” Liapha said pensively, patting his knee. “We go to Armethalieh, as we have sworn ourselves to do. But by what way shall we go? The Isvai holds many roads—and none—and best, so I think, if we know where we mean to go before we begin.”

  Some careful questioning gained Harrier the information first, that they couldn’t go anywhere at all, since there were only two or three oases in the Isvai capable of providing water for the number of people and animals currently gathered here, and second, that all of them were too far away to reach them before the goats and sheep died of thirst.

  “And though surely that is of no matter, since with Bisochim Blue Robe among us, any oasis or none is of no concern at all. And since the herds will starve once the last of the dry forage is gone,” Liapha said cheerfully. “Unless it should happen that we travel a route where they can graze, and what path can feed all of them? And that does not matter, since we—and that great red termagant—will soon devour all of them ourselves, and then the shotors, and then we will all die.”

  “Great,” Harrier muttered under his breath. “Well, in that case, we’ve got nothing to worry about, right?” he said more loudly. He set down his empty cup and got to his feet. “I thank you once again for the kaffeyah, and for your wise counsel, Ummara Liapha. I learn so much every time I talk to you.”

  Liapha laughed up at him. “You are the joy of my old age, Harrier of the Cold North. Only think—once I feared I would die in the comfort of my tent, or be forced to decide what day was most auspicious for the laying of my bones upon the sand. You have lifted a great burden from my mind, and I am grateful.”

  LIAPHA’S words turned out to be a grimmer prophecy than she could have known. The Isvaieni had expected to be able to hunt once they reached the Isvai. But as they moved north from Kannatha Well, they discovered that the desert had been mysteriously scoured clean of life. If it had not occurred to Tiercel to ask about the behavior of the desert insects a few days later—guessing first that Ahairan had used her atish’ban insects to accomplish that task—and then guessing that atish’ban-khazdara might behave in much the same fashion as normal khazdara, the animals would have starved. But khazdara didn’t eat the roots of the desert plants when they swarmed, and neither did atish’ban-khazdara. Where roots remained, Bisochim could bespell desert plants into life and instant luxurious growth. But that was only a temporary solution to a larger problem. The Isvaieni now faced the prospect of a journey of moonturns with no source of food beyond their rapidly-diminishing flocks.

  Nor was Ahairan’s ingenuity exhausted.

  HARRIER was doing mental arithmetic as he rode, trying to figure out how long they’d gone without being attacked and not liking the answer he got.

  They’d gotten out of the Barahileth and reached Kannatha Well, where they’d spent the rest of that day, that night, and the following day, without incident. Two. They’d broken camp that evening and continued north. They’d stopped for the night, and an hour before dawn, something had attacked the camp and disappeared with twenty-two shotors before anyone could see what it was. So that counted: two days without attack, and an attack late on the third day. That day Bisochim had made grass grow, and again they’d stayed put through the day, only moving on at twilight. That was the day that Ummara Luthurm of the Adanate asked Bisochim to do a Foretelling to tell him if there was any game at all in the whole Dark-damned desert, and Bisochim said there wasn’t. They hadn’t been attacked again that day, or that evening when they moved on, or that night when they stopped, or yet this morning. So this was the middle of the second day without being attacked, and maybe that meant they had until tomorrow before they had to expect an attack, and maybe he shouldn’t be expecting Ahairan to keep to a schedule.

  Either way, by scrubbing the Isvai clean of life, Ahairan had effectively shackled all of them together: without Bisochim to make the grass grow, the flocks would starve. Without the flocks, they’d starve. With this many animals traveling together, they needed Bisochim to create enough water for them. The Isvaieni couldn’t separate into their usual tribes . . . because there wasn’t anything to feed their animals.

  And aside from that, Ahairan hadn’t really begun attacking the Isvaieni until Bisochim had come back. Ahairan had wanted to kill all the Isvaieni at Telinchechitl as Bisochim watched. Apparently, she still wanted him to watch. Harrier wasn’t sure whether that meant she’d kill anyone who left the group Bisochim traveled with, or that she wouldn’t let them leave, or that they’d be perfectly safe while they starved to death. He really didn’t want to find out.

  “Here is a good place to stop to rest through the midday heat,” Sathan said, breaking into Harrier’s thoughts. He gestured toward an area off to the side of their line of march. It looked like soft sand. Sand was easier to set the tents in than regh was.

  The Ummara of the Barantar was riding beside Harrier at the front of the caravan. Each tribe’s position in the line was set by ancient tribal precedence, but positions were gambled and traded among the Ummarai and chaharums, so a large tribe like the Kareggi might find itself split up in half-a-dozen places along the column, and a lucky one like the Kadyastar might find itself riding at the head for a sennight or more. Today the Barantar had won the coveted lead position. Normally Harrier would ride with the Nalzindar no matter where they rode, but today he’d been too edgy to take a place where he couldn’t see the desert ahead.

  “No,” Harrier said curtly. He wasn’t sure why he said it. He didn’t like Sathan—he actually liked Zanattar better than he liked Sathan—but that wasn’t the reason he’d dismissed Sathan’s suggestion.

  “The sun climbs toward midheaven, Harrier,” Sathan said. His tone was respectful, but Harrier had been told off by experts, and he knew what disrespect sounded like. Sathan was already flicking his whip at the side of his shotor’s neck to bring it to a stop.

  “I said we shouldn’t stop here,” Harrier repeated, more forcefully.

  “Does the Wild Magic counsel you to this, Blue Robe?” Sathan asked, and now there was unconcealed scorn in his voice.

  Harrier ignored him. Flick-flick-flick went the whip in his hands, and his shotor paced forward quickly, moving out a dozen yards ahead of Sathan’s. He didn’t know exactly when he’d developed the ability to stay constantly aware of everything around him even when he wasn’t looking at it. But right now he could tell even without turning to see that the caravan was stopping and spreading out, and that he had five minutes, maybe eight, before the order to stop made its way all the way to the back of the line. Another five beyond that—maybe—before the first shotor began to kneel. When that happened, the caravan would be paralyzed, unable to move quickly even if it wanted to.

  He brought his shotor to a stop and simply swung himself sideways and dropped to the ground without asking it to kneel. It was a jarring landing, and he crouched for a moment, absorbing the impact. The shotor swung its head around to look at him, its large brown eyes regarding him with mild surprise.

  He straightened and turned to look behind him, one hand on the lead-rope, the other on the hilt of his awardan. He’d worn one ever since the night they’d been attacked by the Black Dogs. There were some things he wouldn’t use his Selken blades on, and an awardan was easily replaced. He turned back, pointing the shotor’s head in the direction he wanted it to go. He wouldn’t think about what he was about to do.

  He drew his geschak, shouting as he slashed the blade down over the shotor’s flank as hard as he could. Its head came up and it bolted forward, bawling in shock and p
ain. Behind him, Harrier heard Sathan laugh.

  “Come to my tent once we have set it!” Sathan called to him. “And I will—”

  Harrier never did find out how that sentence would have ended. When the shotor reached the soft sand, the desert exploded upward and outward, and something that looked like the biggest jarrari that Harrier had ever seen shot out from its hidden burrow. The creature was about twice the size of the shotor. It was black like glass, like something that had been burnt until it glittered. That’s what killed almost two dozen of our shotors three nights ago . . .

  It cut the shotor into pieces before the animal had time to scream. Harrier had begun running toward it before the shotor was dead. It wasn’t the safest thing to do, but it was safer than staying where he was. The moment the thing had come up out of its burrow, every single animal in the caravan—sheep, goats, shotors—had launched into a dead run, and if he didn’t want to be trampled, he needed to get out of their way. Fast.

  He barely made it. But as ground trembled beneath his boots, it occurred to him it might have been better to be trampled than to become a giant atish’ban-jarrari’s dessert.

  “Harrier! Here!” Saravasse shouted.

  The thing had stopped its scuttling rush toward him at the dragon’s arrival. Harrier ran toward her, never taking his eyes off it, until he collided with her side. She dropped her chest to the ground and cocked her elbow outward, giving him all the help she could to mount. “Touch my wing and I will kill you myself,” Saravasse growled.

  Harrier didn’t answer. He couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t horribly rude or brutally honest or just plain stupid, and he was too busy scrambling onto her back anyway. Saravasse’s scales were slick, except at the very edges where they were as sharp as broken glass, and his hands were bleeding in a hundred places by the time he could grab Bisochim’s hand. Bisochim yanked him onto Saravasse’s neck, and she immediately started to run. Harrier had a sudden jarring sense-memory of the last time he’d been on a dragon’s back. Then it had been Tiercel in front of him, and the dragon had been Ancaladar, and they’d been convinced they were heading off to their last battle, and victory.

  “You know that thing’s just going to come after you now?” he shouted to Saravasse. Hot wind whipped past his face.

  “I can outrun it,” she answered confidently.

  He glanced behind them. Light glittered off the monster’s carapace. It held its barbed tail high as it skittered along behind them just like a jarrari. It didn’t drop behind as he counted heartbeats in his head. “No, you can’t. You really can’t,” he said when he’d reached ten.

  “She will not need to,” Bisochim said grimly. He half-turned and stretched out his hand. Harrier dug his heels into Saravasse’s neck as hard as he could to keep from falling off and looked too. He thought Bisochim was going to call down a lightning bolt to blast the nightmare thing into nothing, but Bisochim didn’t. Instead, its shell began to turn milky gray, and its movements became jerky and uncontrolled. Saravasse slowed to a stop as it started to run in circles, and the three of them watched as it stopped and flailed weakly and finally fell onto its back, curling inward on itself. Tiercel said that was why people thought that jarrari stung themselves to death, although they really didn’t. Harrier didn’t care, as long as it meant this thing was dead. The sand beneath its body was dark with melted moisture, and the air above it shimmered with evaporating water.

  “You froze it,” Harrier said in realization.

  “Cold is the most terrible death I know,” Bisochim answered quietly, and Harrier thought of a roadside inn on the Delfier Road between Armethalieh and Sentarshadeen, of a summer night more than a year ago.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

  THEY’D been out of the Barahileth for a fortnight now. Aside from three more encounters with the giant shotor-eating atish’ban-jarrari (Tiercel had named them “Sandwalkers,” pointing out that “Sandwalker” was shorter than “giant shotor-eating atish’ban-jarrari”), Ahairan had left them alone. Harrier had a hunch that Ahairan had just created the Sandwalkers and turned them loose, which meant that Ahairan hadn’t actually attacked them since they’d left the Barahileth. Tiercel said the Sandwalkers were probably starving and Ciniran said that true jarrari could hibernate when there was no food and Harrier refused to feel sorry for atish’ban anything.

  For now, they were . . . surviving. At each midday halt, Bisochim Called up a spring and then made the desert flourish as best he could. His success depended on whether or not there were roots buried under the sand or in the clay: when there were, he could make them grow. They’d been able to stop feeding the animals off stored supplies, and Harrier had insisted that they hold the rest of the feed-grain in reserve. Just as Bisochim could turn buried roots into mature plants in hours, he could turn seeds into harvestable crop in the same length of time, doubling or tripling their supply of grain. He’d have to.

  Harrier didn’t want to know any of the things he knew now, but nobody—least of all the Wild Magic—had given him a choice about knowing them. And none of them were good.

  He talked to Tiercel a lot these days—about everything but their current problems—and by now Harrier knew his Ancient History a lot better than he ever had back in Armethalieh Normal School. From the Medath Mountains north of the City to the Armen Plains in the south was about five hundred miles. From Armethalieh to the far end of the Delfier Valley was about a hundred and fifty miles. Back in the Time of Mages those had been the boundaries of the City lands, and that meant those had been the boundaries of the world. And you could drop The City all the way out to the edges of its ancient boundary lands into the middle of the Isvai and not even raise a puff of dust anywhere near the edges of the desert.

  And that was why they had something larger than a problem, but just a little slower than any disaster Harrier had ever heard of. Bisochim could feed the sheep and the goats and the shotors, and Harrier was thankful for that. But Bisochim couldn’t multiply them. In the way that Harrier had once learned to estimate cargoes and capacities and tonnages, he now estimated how much longer their livestock could feed all of them.

  Two moonturns. No more.

  When the sheep and goats were gone they could eat the shotors, of course, because apparently the Isvaieni saw nothing wrong with eating shotors, but they needed to have enough left alive to ride, and they needed them as pack animals, because if they didn’t have tents for shelter, they’d die. Eating the shotors would only delay the inevitable by another moonturn, maybe two. And when the last shotor was gone, they’d still be somewhere in the middle of this damned desert, with no way to carry shelter or supplies with them. And no supplies, anyway.

  The Isvaieni calculated their routes by time, and never went from here to there by the most direct route anyway, but the Binrazan had used to travel along the String of Pearls from Orinaisal’Iteru to Akazidas’Iteru. To go from one end to the other of the Border Cities had taken them roughly eighteen moonturns, but they hadn’t traveled every day. Based on what he’d learned from Ummara Phulda, Harrier figured he could get the Isvaieni from where they were now to Akazidas’Iteru in about . . . five moonturns. Of course, they’d have to figure out how to survive without eating for three of them.

  Since that wasn’t possible, they were going to Sapthiruk Oasis, assuming they could find it. It was where the Isvaieni held their Gathering of the Tribes. Shaiara said it was six sennights north of Kannatha Well, which meant less than another moonturn. Best of all, the oasis was large enough to water all their animals. Because just when Harrier got used to the idea of starving to death, it turned out that water was a problem after all.

  Bisochim was happy—as happy as he ever seemed to be about anything—to tell anyone who asked that it might soon be impossible for him to Call water at all, which didn’t really help morale a lot. It wasn’t because his magic was failing, but—as far as Harrier could tell—because he’d yanked the Balance around so much in the last year th
at there just wasn’t water near the surface to Call anymore. Because of what Ahairan had done to the Isvai, they were still as dependent on Bisochim for survival as they’d been in the Barahileth, and despite what Tiercel said about Ahairan wanting Bisochim to become her personal Dark-Tainted Dragonbond Mage, Harrier was constantly aware that Bisochim could die at any moment. If he did, so would every single one of them.

  Even if the wells and oases in the Isvai all hadn’t gone dry because of Bisochim’s meddling—something they wouldn’t know until they looked, if they even could—the Isvaieni couldn’t dependably find them anymore. With all the desert plants gone, the landmarks they’d relied on all their lives had shifted so much that Tiercel was as likely to know where something in the Isvai was now as someone who’d been “born between Sand and Star.”

  Harrier hadn’t gotten a look at Kannatha Well before Bisochim had turned it into a lake. He wished now that he had. He would have liked to have known whether or not it had been dry, because Kannatha had been supposed to be an unfailing iteru, and if it had been dry, well . . . Shaiara said: when there are two roads to an oasis, “bad” and “worse,” take the bad one. Harrier supposed that meant you should take the best choice available, but they didn’t have any good ones. Ahairan kept taking them all away.

  They needed a water source that wasn’t created by magic one day and gone the next. They needed a food source that Bisochim could renew. And it needed to be a place they could reach within two moonturns at most.

  All of that meant Sapthiruk Oasis.

  If they could even find Sapthiruk Oasis.

  “HOW much of an emergency is this?” Harrier asked. Tiercel looked at him as if he’d suddenly gone crazy.