The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  Worst possible time of day, Harrier thought absently, watching the figures in the distance shimmer and dance through the veil of heat-haze. For a moment, the view became clearer, and Harrier blinked in surprise. Now that’s impressive, he said to himself. There must be about nine or ten thousand Shamblers there. Of course the Shamblers moved at a slow walk—or shamble—nobody had ever seen one run—and they were still a couple of miles away, so the caravan was pretty safe. Harrier always wondered how Ahairan moved them around, though. They had to walk everywhere, didn’t they? “Does she think we’re crazy?” he demanded of nobody in particular. “She thinks—what? That I’ve decided that what I want to do with my night is fight with her enormous army of dead people in the middle of nowhere? No! That’s it. I’m done for today. I’ve dealt with Demon barghusi. That’s enough. I quit! Come on—let’s go somewhere else. Saravasse, Bisochim—if you’d please erase this army of Demonic Shamblers from the face of the Isvai, that’d be great.”

  Tiercel actually snickered. Bisochim stared at him as if Harrier had just done something so utterly extraordinary that Bisochim couldn’t imagine how to respond to it. Shaiara had her “ignoring” face on, and simply blew the series of whistles that meant they were all going back the other way. By now, the Isvaieni had actually gotten more practice than they wanted to have at that: while the column couldn’t exactly turn in place, it could come pretty close. They’d backtrack for an hour or so, then turn west again as soon as Bisochim’s Sandwind dropped, so as to not lose too much ground.

  “I quit!” Harrier shouted in the direction of the advancing Shamblers. “Shift’s done! Going home! Not leading any more armies today! You might as well give up! Come back to—”

  “Harrier,” Saravasse said, interrupting his rant.

  Harrier slid back down onto his saddle with a thump. “What?”

  “Those Shamblers. They’re all fresh dead.”

  “All of them?” Tiercel demanded, sounding horrified. “How many of them are there?”

  “About ten thousand,” Harrier answered, his voice flat. Even if there’d been more than one thousand eighty-nine people in the Barantar, Binrazan, and Thanduli tribes put together, they’d already accounted for at least two-thirds of them in the last fortnight. Without thinking twice, he tapped his shotor on the shoulder, urging it forward.

  “Wait! What—Where are you going?” Tiercel shouted after him.

  “To see what they’re wearing!” Harrier shouted back.

  He had no intention of getting close enough to the Shambler horde to get into trouble. All the Shamblers did was . . . shamble. At least until they got within arms’ reach, and then they’d attack with a sword or a spear or a knife or a chunk of wood or their bare (decaying) hands. But Harrier could think of only two places in the south where Ahairan could find ten thousand people to kill—and one of them would be any army that Chief Magistrate Vaunnel sent to quell the “Isvaieni Uprising.” So he wanted to get close enough to get a good look at them. About a mile away would do.

  “You are an idiot,” Saravasse announced, arriving to pace him. She didn’t even have to exert herself; she was walking slowly while his shotor trotted and she seemed to be prepared to grouse about his stupidity the whole way. Bisochim wasn’t with her. He rode a shotor most of the time; Harrier suspected that Saravasse was simply too hot to ride bareback during the day, because even if a dragon’s scales only looked like metal, they were still as hot as metal.

  “You aren’t the first person to realize that,” Harrier answered.

  Following along about a quarter-mile behind the two of them were Zanattar and two dozen of Zanattar’s Young Hunters. It wasn’t worth the trouble to turn around and shoo them back to the caravan, and Harrier doubted they’d go, anyway. He hated having to worry about Zanattar, but Zanattar was an ongoing problem. Not just for himself, but because at least a good third of the Isvaieni would follow him before they’d follow their own Ummarai. And a good number of them were what Liapha called “disordered in spirit” and Kamar called “sun-touched” and Harrier just thought were so crazy that maybe even Zanattar couldn’t control them.

  “What can this display of childish bravado possibly gain you?” Saravasse scoffed.

  “Information,” Harrier said briefly. “Unless you happen to be an authority on the uniforms of the Armethaliehan Militia and the levies of the Nine Cities . . .” The leading edge of the Shambler army was in plain sight now. Harrier signaled his shotor to halt.

  The walking dead had no more humanity or aliveness about them than stone statues might. He’d seen a lot of Shamblers by now—far too many of them the bodies of people he’d known well—and he never had the sense, even for an instant, that they were even as alive as the Goblins or the Sandwalkers. He didn’t pity them, because there was nothing there to pity. But staring at the slow shuffling progress of the army of bodies across the sand, Harrier felt a raw surge of anger mixed with horror.

  In the first rank of the Shamblers, the body of a young girl walked. Its long tunic had been pink, he thought, before sun and dust had turned it a dun no-color, and the sun still sparkled on the gold threads woven through the cloth of the sash that held its striped overtunic in place. Its long black hair hung loose, tangled and clotted with dust. Beside it, walking in perfect unison, was the body of a man in the short tunic and trousers Harrier had seen the shop keep ers wearing in Tarnatha’Iteru. Its hands swung loosely at its sides as it walked, and the blade of the knife it carried flashed with monotonous regularity as the light hit it. Harrier’s gaze skipped onward, along the long row of bodies in the first rank. The Shamblers all had a horrible sort of similarity to each other—as if Death and Demonic magic had made them all kin—but that didn’t mean they were all identical now. It would, he thought, be so much less disturbing if they were. He saw the bodies of two men in ragged and unfamiliar uniforms. One had a knife stuck through its throat. Further on were the bodies of three women walking side by side. The throat of the one in the middle had been cut from ear to ear, and its clothes were covered with long-dried blood. One of the other two was wearing the short lightweight hooded cloak that everyone in the Iteru-cities wore instead of the chadar. Young, old, tall, short, men, women, children . . .

  “Light deliver us,” Harrier said quietly. The other place Ahairan could get her hands on this many fresh durable hard-to-burn Shamblers besides an army sent by Chief Magistrate Vaunnel was . . . Akazidas’Iteru.

  And she had.

  Moving mechanically, Harrier turned his shotor and urged it back toward the column, goading it to a fast trot. He paid no attention to Zanattar’s Young Hunters when he reached them: they could get out of his way, or he could run them down. It was their choice.

  The column was still in the process of getting the riderless animals and the livestock tucked safely back into the center of the column before moving. In any sane world, they could use those animals as a buffer against attack and keep the people safe. Safer. In this one, if the animals died, so did they.

  Tiercel, Shaiara, Ciniran, and Bisochim were waiting for him a few hundred yards behind the new back of the column. Harrier had a sudden intense desire to just whip up his shotor and keep going. Instead he brought it to a halt in front of them. “Ahairan’s turned everyone in Akazidas’Iteru into Shamblers,” he said bluntly. “I don’t think there can be anybody left alive in the city. Not from the number of bodies out there.”

  If it hadn’t been the end of a bad day—although there weren’t any good ones anymore—Harrier supposed he would have at least thought about finding some way to give them this unwelcome news more gently. None of them had expected to reach Akazidas’Iteru, but it was the city at the foot of the Trade Road. Anybody coming south—unless they came by dragon—would be taking that road. If Ahairan had taken Akazidas’Iteru, she’d made it into her first trap for anybody coming south—or her last way to guarantee that someone in the south didn’t escape to the north.

  Shaiara and Ciniran looked
grim. Tiercel looked stunned. Bisochim . . . looked the way he usually did, as if he hadn’t quite heard what Harrier had said and was too well-mannered or timid or just too distracted to want to say so. There were times that Harrier thought that most of Bisochim’s energy was going into just not . . . doing something. Harrier wasn’t quite sure what it was, except that whatever it was, it would be a bad thing if Bisochim ever actually did it.

  “It is not an unexpected thing,” Shaiara replied slowly. “The Creature of Shadow may be mad, but she is not so dull-witted as to let us draw near to such a great store of allies and supplies unchallenged. She knows well that in another moonturn’s travel Bisochim might have Called away their flocks and herds over the sand—aye, and perhaps the beasts would even have reached us! Now, if you have seen all that you wished to, may we depart?”

  Having Bisochim Call their livestock wasn’t something Harrier had even thought of. It would certainly have gotten the Consul’s attention. He wondered if Ahairan would have considered that as much of a threat as a spell-message. They’d never know now. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m done here. Let’s go. If you wouldn’t mind summoning up that nice big Sandwind now, Bisochim?”

  Bisochim nodded, and urged his shotor forward. Harrier had watched Bisochim Call a Sandwind often enough to know that Bisochim would be frowning in concentration now, studying the desert as if he were choosing individual grains of sand for his storm, although what he had to Summon for a Sandwind wasn’t sand, but wind. Being near the spell always made the hair on the back of Harrier’s neck prickle, though the rest of the Isvaieni said they didn’t notice anything at all. And—as long as he was at least half a mile away—neither did Tiercel.

  “Going now,” Tiercel said in a stifled voice. “See you later.”

  “Yeah,” Harrier said, waving him off. At least, Tiercel usually didn’t notice Bisochim’s Sandwind Callings. Being near two Wild Magic spells in one day was probably pushing it, though—Tiercel still looked drained from the spell he’d caught at midday. But none of them had any reserves left to burn.

  The caravan was finally moving south, and Tiercel headed his shotor toward its head at a brisk trot. Shaiara and Ciniran rode after Tiercel, and Zanattar and his warriors followed them. Harrier hesitated, glancing over his shoulder, even though the wind was already starting to rise. The Shamblers were visibly closer, and while there wasn’t any possibility that they could catch the caravan even at its usual leisurely pace, there was something creepy about their relentless progress. He frowned faintly. Saravasse was still standing out there in the middle of the desert, staring toward the Shamblers. She hadn’t moved at all. He really didn’t want to know that the deployment of this Shambler host had just been part of an elaborate trick to cast an additional spell on Saravasse to trap her.

  “Yeah,” Harrier repeated to himself. “Time to go. Bisochim! Whistle your girlfriend back, all right?”

  Suddenly Saravasse’s head whipped up and she turned back toward them. “Wait!” she shouted. “Some of them aren’t dead!”

  “How many?” Harrier demanded the moment Saravasse reached them. He refused to think about the idea that Ahairan had simply bespelled everyone in Akazidas’Iteru to start marching south while they were still alive, letting them die on the way and turn into Shamblers.

  “Not many,” Saravasse said unhappily. “Less than ten. Perhaps . . . five ranks back in the army. At the center.”

  “Damn, damn, damn . . . Bisochim, that Sandwind you’re Calling . . . can you just . . . hold it?” Harrier asked.

  “Hold it?” The Isvaieni Wildmage stared at Harrier and then down at his hands. Harrier groaned inwardly. This was the worst possible time for Bisochim to have one of his attacks of vagueness.

  “Hold it back for a while. There are live people being held prisoner by the Shamblers. I’m going to rescue them first. When I have . . . then hit them with the Sandwind.”

  “Oh.” Bisochim considered this for what seemed like an eternity. “I cannot hold back the Sandwind for long.”

  “It had better not take long,” Harrier answered grimly.

  DESPITE what he’d said, Harrier had no intention of riding all by himself into the middle of ten thousand Shamblers to try to bring out some unknown number of people “less than ten.” He rode back along the retreating caravan until he found Zanattar. “I need sixty of your Young Hunters. I want fifty who think the idea of attacking that Shambler army would be a lot of fun, and ten with sense. I need ten extra shotors with saddles. And I need it all right now.”

  “You know such men and women ride with us,” Zanattar said, nodding. “Harrier, you cannot—”

  “Saravasse says there are people—alive—with the Shamblers. We’re going to rescue them to find out what happened to Akazidas’Iteru. I’m going along to make sure they aren’t some Tainted trap of Ahairan’s. Hurry up—Bisochim can’t hold back that Sandwind forever.”

  He had what he needed inside of a chime. Zanattar came, and so did Shaiara—but both of them intended to wait with the sensible warriors and the ten extra shotors. It wasn’t a matter of bravery or cowardice. If Harrier died today, Zanattar and Shaiara—and Tiercel—would have to figure out what to do next.

  The fifty warriors Zanattar had chosen to follow Harrier in his assault on the Shambler army were all that Harrier could have asked for, assuming he’d actually wanted to do this. The highest losses the Isvaieni suffered any time they actually had to fight were among the particular group of Young Hunters (crazy—sun-touched—disordered—take your pick) who’d followed Zanattar in his original crusade against the String of Pearls and apparently decided they liked that kind of life. It wasn’t so much that that group of Young Hunters wanted to die—they were just looking for any opportunity to kill. But going into a fight with that attitude meant that they often didn’t come out of it. As they rode toward the Shamblers, they were actually laughing and joking and happy about the chance to attack an army that outnumbered them approximately two hundred to one. Even though Harrier had told them that all they were doing was fighting their way in to the live people, dragging them out, and running, he didn’t get the feeling that many of the Young Hunters really cared. More people were probably going to die this afternoon than they were going to save—even if they saved any—which made this rescue attempt . . . even stupider. But Harrier couldn’t talk himself into believing that the Shamblers’ hostages would be just as happy dead, or excuse killing them on the grounds that it was too great a risk to rescue them, or even think about the fact that they didn’t have enough food to feed themselves right now without adding more people who’d need to be fed. If the hostages were Shadow-Touched, he’d know as soon as he reached them—it was why he was going. If they weren’t, they deserved to be rescued.

  Over time, the shotors had become inured to the presence of the Shamblers—as much as that was possible—and the wind was still blowing mostly north, carrying the Shamblers’ scent away from the animals. What the beasts would do when they found themselves in the middle of an entire army of Shamblers was anybody’s guess, but they didn’t dare try to fight their way into the Shambler army on foot.

  When they were within a bowshot of the Shambler line, Hamazan—the Young Hunter band’s unofficial leader—drew his awardan and gave voice to a weird ululating wail. Harrier felt a flash of reflexive dread at the sound. It was the Isvaieni army’s battle cry. He’d heard it outside the walls of Tarnatha’Iteru the night the city fell, and no matter how many times he’d heard it since, it never failed to make his hackles rise. Harrier drew his own awardan—the heavy southern blade would be more use against Shamblers than his Selken swords. Within heartbeats, the rest of the Young Hunters had taken up the wailing howl, and Hamazan goaded his shotor into a run. The things could gallop, but their stiff-legged pacing trot, while bone-jarring, was also about as fast as anybody usually needed to go. Not today. Today they needed speed, because they needed the impact that came with speed.

  So quickly that i
t took only a few heartbeats, Harrier saw—perceived—and assessed the location of the Isvaieni caravan—still moving southward—the location of Bisochim and Saravasse—still where he’d left them, two miles away—the location of Zanattar, Shaiara, eight Isvaieni Young Hunters, and ten shotors awaiting riders—half a mile behind the line. All around him he could see-without-seeing the men and women he rode among—

  And ahead—like a vast wrongness—the Shamblers.

  It was as if each body had a hair-fine thread of Shadow leading away from it, a dark crack in the fabric of the world. Even now, Harrier didn’t sense Taint coming from the Shamblers—only living things could be Tainted, and the Shamblers were nothing more than bodies. But in the middle of that peculiar sea of lifelessness, there were eight figures that were more than bodies. Harrier could see where they’d been, where they were going, and—more than that—where they intended to go. His MageSight presented them to him in a blurred kaleidoscope of color: dizzying and useless except for the fact that now he knew where they were and how many of them there were.

  And that they weren’t Tainted.

  Harrier was riding just behind the first line of Young Hunters, a position he’d taken without thinking about it. It was only in the last seconds before they struck the Shambler line that his brain caught up to what his instincts had done. His Knight-Mage intuition expected the first line of Young Hunters to break the Shambler line—paving his way in to where the hostages were—and die. For an instant he felt anger—regret—a churning welter of emotions too complex to decipher—then he set them all aside. It was done.

  In that instant, Hamazan and the leading edge of the Young Hunters struck the Shambler line at full speed.

  It shouldn’t have been possible. No shotor would willingly throw itself at an obstacle if it had a chance to stop. But they were also herd animals, and between their riders’ yelling at them and flogging them, and the fact that they were running flat out, the lead animals couldn’t stop and the ones behind them couldn’t see the obstruction.