The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  Harrier was grateful to see that his instructions had been followed so exactly. He’d always tried to be careful not to give orders to the Isvaieni, because Shaiara had told him over and over that the desertfolk didn’t even take orders from their own Ummarai. When Zanattar had led an army against the Iteru-cities, he’d only given orders during the actual battles. Everything between those battles—including whether or not to continue having them—had been a matter of common agreement. But more and more, since the day Harrier had given the tribes the choice of whether or not to continue north with him, he’d known that his “suggestions” were sinking to the level of flat out demands: do this. And most of the time it was things that he could justify as being for everyone’s good. But today, the orders he’d given had been anything but that. The Isvaieni had followed them anyway, and he felt a little uneasy about it. More than a little uneasy. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He couldn’t talk about his fears to Shaiara or Zanattar or Saravasse—and Light knew he couldn’t mention them to Tiercel. If he was falling in with Ahairan’s plans by turning the Isvaieni into an actual army, he’d just have to hope that somebody would stop him before it was too late.

  Harrier walked further into the tent and squatted down by the head of Eugens’s sleeping-mat. Until this moment, Harrier had held out a hope he hadn’t quite recognized that Tiercel might somehow be wrong, even knowing that Tiercel had spent almost as much time in the Gillain household growing up as Harrier had. He smoothed his brother’s hair away from his forehead. All four of the Gillain boys had inherited their mother’s red hair; even in the MageLight, Harrier could tell that Eugens’s was bleached out almost to the color of new copper, the result of too much time bareheaded under the desert sun. Eugens’s face looked strange with its thick unkempt growth of beard. The beard could be combed, and even trimmed, but Isvaieni men didn’t shave. Shaving required the luxury of water to waste. He was sennights overdue for a haircut, too. Harrier wondered when his last one had been.

  “Boots are going to be a problem,” Harrier said quietly, withdrawing his hand. “I know we’re carrying a couple of dozen spare pairs by now, but . . . they’ll have to fit.”

  “We can find something for them in the morning,” Tiercel said. He hadn’t moved from his place in the doorway. “You should come to bed now, Har.”

  “Yeah,” Harrier said absently. “I think I’ll just sit up here a little while first. You go on.”

  A FEW minutes after Tiercel left, Ciniran and Natha came into the tent. Ciniran brought Harrier’s heavy desertcloak and two filled waterskins, Natha carried an armload of blankets.

  “They are charity,” Natha said, with a wicked smile as she tasted the unfamiliar word. “From the Kareggi.”

  “I am pleased that Fannas has seen fit to walk in the Light,” Harrier answered automatically. It was only after the words left his mouth that he realized why they sounded so familiar: the Preceptor of the Portside Light-temple had said them often enough, whenever one side or the other of Armethalieh Port’s many feuding factions had finally decided to see reason.

  Ciniran snorted rudely. “It is a bribe,” she said, as Natha went to lay blankets over each of the sleeping figures. “Fannas fears to be cast out.”

  “By me?” Harrier asked blankly. “Only if he tries to steal food.” It was the one rule he’d been willing to absolutely enforce as soon as he’d realized how bad things were: there would be no food hoarding or theft.

  Ciniran shook her head at that absurdity. “By the Kareggi, Harrier, for being such a sunstruck fool. Do they cast him from their tents, he must find another’s to take him in—or he must go to lay his bones upon the sand.”

  Harrier would like to think Ciniran was joking, but by now he knew she wasn’t. Whatever the Kareggi did or didn’t do about Fannas, though, they weren’t going to do it before morning. He shrugged into his cloak gratefully and settled down cross-legged on the carpet. “Thank you, Ciniran. I’ll rest so much easier knowing that Fannas will be spending tonight worrying,” Harrier said dryly.

  Ciniran smiled, slightly puzzled, and turned to go. “Rest well, Harrier.”

  Of course he would.

  What was more restful than having your family come to visit when you were being persecuted by a Demon?

  IT was about a chime before First Dawn Bells, the hour at which the Gillain household had awakened since long before Harrier had been born. The camp was at its quietest—here at the edge, Harrier could hear the faint crump of the shotors’ pads on the sand as the sentries rode their patrols around its border, and even the goats were silent.

  Now and then one of the eight sleepers would stir slightly, but none of them had really moved. Harrier had been catnapping, rousing every half-chime or so only to see that nothing had changed. He knew he’d pay for this mostly-sleepless night later, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to leave, and the longer he’d spent here, the less point there’d seemed to be in going back to his own sleeping-mat just to catch an hour or two—at best—of fitful sleep. When the caravan moved out today he’d take a place somewhere in the middle and sleep then.

  Suddenly Eugens thrashed violently—as if he were having a bad dream—and sat bolt upright, clawing at his skin and at the blanket that covered him as if he didn’t know what they were. Harrier quickly got to his knees at Eugens’s side, grabbing his wrists.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re safe. Gens, it’s me.”

  Eugens stopped struggling after a moment, but he stared at Harrier with no trace of recognition at all. “Who are you?” he finally said, licking dry lips.

  “It’s me,” Harrier repeated. “Harrier. Your brother.”

  For a moment he was afraid that whatever had happened to Eugens at Ahairan’s hands—and in the hands of the Shamblers—had done something to his mind, but after a long moment, confusion was replaced by disbelief. “Harrier?” Eugens said. “Light deliver us! We thought you were dead!”

  “WE got your last letter at the beginning of Ice—last year—you must have paid for Courier Post, because you said you’d written it from Ysterialpoerin at the beginning of Vintage,” Eugens said.

  “I think so. It’s hard to remember,” Harrier answered.

  He’d gotten Eugens on his feet and helped him dress in the clothes that had been left for him. When he’d gone to help Eugens fold his chadar into place, Eugens had waved it aside. Harrier hadn’t pressed the matter. It was still dark. When Eugens had walked outside, Harrier hadn’t stopped him. They hadn’t seen any normal jarrari since they’d gotten to the Isvai, and if they were attacked by another infestation of atish’ban-jarrari, it wouldn’t matter whether Eugens had boots on or not.

  “And since then—nothing! Harrier, it’s been almost sixteen moonturns since you wrote that letter! Where have you been?” Eugens demanded.

  “That long?” Harrier asked in surprise. He tried to remember. They’d sent their letters just before going to the Caves of Imrathalion—how long had they spent in Karahelanderialigor? A moonturn? More? Two moonturns in Tarnatha’Iteru—no, two and a half—and he had to work backward from there—

  “Is that all you have to say?” Eugens said angrily. “Ma’s been weeping her eyes out, Da’s been in a temper—he and Lord Rolfort are cross as two sticks—you can’t even imagine what kind of nonsense Tyr talked in his last letter—”

  Harrier winced, just a little, at the sheer volume of Eugens’s voice. If everyone along this line of tents wasn’t awake already, they would be soon. “I didn’t ask him what he wrote,” he said wearily, “but whatever it was, it wasn’t nonsense. Isn’t the way you got here proof of that?”

  In the dim light of the lanterns hanging on the front of the tent, he saw Eugens scrub his hand over his face. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. But for Light’s sake, Har—he’s Lord Rolfort’s oldest son, not Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy! Look, if the two of you will just come home—if you can come home . . .”

  “We’re trying
, Gens,” Harrier said. “You might have noticed you’re a little far from normal shipping lanes here.”

  Eugens stared around for a moment, then shook his head again. “I don’t know . . .” he said. “Did they take you prisoner too?” he asked suddenly.

  “What?” Harrier asked. “The Shamblers? Oh, no, Gens. Everybody here’s alive.”

  His brother stared at him in shock, and it occurred to Harrier that he hadn’t answered whatever question his brother had actually asked.

  “Look,” Harrier said. “Maybe you should start from the beginning. Because when I left Armethalieh”—almost two years ago—“you were safe in the Customs House, not . . . in the middle of the Isvai.”

  “You were only supposed to be gone a moonturn and a half,” Eugens said. “Up to Sentarshadeen with Tiercel and back, and then Brelt would join me in the Customs House.” Eugens sighed. “The Isvai. Is that what they call this Dark-damned hellhole?” Another sigh. “You didn’t come back. Tiercel didn’t come back. We started getting . . . letters. So did the Rolforts. It all sounded like . . . we knew he’d been sick. We didn’t know what to think. After your last letters came, Lord Rolfort sent to his bankers in Ysterialpoerin—as soon as the passes were clear—to search for you there. There’d been no sign of either of you in the city in moonturns. We gave up then. What else could we do?” Eugens was pacing back and forth now, up and down the line of tents, not paying any attention at all to whose carpets he walked on.

  “Nothing,” Harrier said in a low voice. He paced Eugens, on the sand at the edge of the carpets. “Nothing but what you did.”

  “The Madiran caravans were late this year—well, actually, they didn’t come at all. Around the end of Seedtime we started getting people coming up from the Border Cities—hundreds of them—saying the desert tribes were attacking them. So Chief Magistrate Vaunnel appointed a commission to come down and investigate.”

  Now it was Harrier’s turn to stare in disbelief. “Vaunnel heard that the Isvaieni were sacking the Iteru-cities and she sent you? Why didn’t she call up the levies?”

  Eugens stopped his pacing and stared at him. “Chief Magistrate Vaunnel didn’t just send me,” he said irritatedly, emphasizing her title. “She sent a full Commission of Inquiry. Sixteen people. Why should she call up the levies on the basis of something that might be a misunderstanding—or not true—or Light and Darkness, Har, she sent us down here to find out whether or not she should call up the levies, and because it was faster than exchanging dispatches with the Iteru-Consuls all season! We were supposed to, well, inquire. She asked Da to send someone from the family because she thought he’d listen better to one of us if she had to ask him for a fleet to carry troops down the coast, and Carault’s indentured and—for some odd reason—Brelt is now Da’s apprentice, and that left me.”

  Harrier winced. Brelt was second-oldest, and of course he would have taken Harrier’s place as Apprentice Harbormaster. It still hurt to have Eugens throw it in his face like that. “So did you? Inquire?”

  “We got to Akazidas’Iteru. That’s—”

  “I know what it is, Gens, I’ve been here for half a year,” Harrier said sharply.

  Eugens gave him another suspicious glance, but was willing to continue with his story instead of stopping to scold Harrier again. “The city was packed with refugees just like the ones who’d come to Armethalieh—but a lot more of them. Consul Tacanin lodged the Commission in the Consular Palace, and helped us interrogate some of them. It was useless.”

  “Really?” Harrier said earnestly.

  Eugens shrugged. “None of them had seen this so-called ‘Desert Army’—all they’d done was decided one was coming and fled. Lord Felocan thought it might be some kind of mass hysteria, and Magistrate Perizel didn’t find any evidence in the depositions of an actual tribal uprising.”

  “Consul Aldarnas didn’t think it was ‘mass hysteria.’ He sent his family to Armethalieh a moonturn before Tarnatha’Iteru was destroyed. Or didn’t anybody talk to them before you left Armethalieh?” Harrier asked scornfully. Would you like me to introduce you to the head of the “tribal uprising,” Gens? Would that help? He didn’t know why he was trying so hard to convince his brother that there had been a tribal uprising. It was going to be hard enough to explain the current situation without adding in the fact that the Isvaieni who had destroyed ten of the eleven Iteru-cities were on their side now.

  “I . . . don’t . . . know,” Eugens said evenly. “Consul Tacanin was concerned by the fact that there hadn’t been any trade caravans, because they start gathering at Akazidas’Iteru in Rains, waiting for the northern end of the road to be passable. I wanted to go and look, because some of the refugees were from Tarnatha’Iteru, and if Tarnatha’Iteru had been attacked, that would be enough proof that the other cities had been attacked, too.”

  “That would have been in . . .?” Harrier asked.

  Eugens shrugged. “Beginning of Meadowbloom, I think.”

  As best Harrier could make out, working backward and forward, and not being sure precisely when anything was—since he suspected he’d lost more than a moonturn or two on the road from Karahelanderialigor—the beginning of Meadowbloom would have been only a sennight or two after the destruction of Tarnatha’Iteru. If Eugens had gone to see the city when he’d wanted to, he probably would have gotten there while Ancaladar and both of them were still camping out in the ruins of Zanattar’s tents trying to decide what to do next. How much of everything that followed would have been different if that had happened?

  “But you didn’t go,” Harrier prompted.

  “No.” Eugens half-groaned. “None of the rest of the Commission thought it was a good idea—especially if there were bandits running around the Border Cities—and Consul Tacanin said I’d need guides and horses—and supplies—and a whole manifest of things that weren’t available in order to make the trip. So I stayed in Akazidas’Iteru and tried to find out what I could from there. It was enough to convince me that something bad was going on. Plague, bandit gangs, tainted wells—there were a lot of different explanations. I didn’t know what Magistrate Perizel or Lord Felocan were going to say, but I was going to recommend a relief expedition large enough to bypass Akazidas’Iteru and . . .” Eugens stopped, staring off into the desert. “They’ve all been destroyed, haven’t they?”

  “Yes,” Harrier said quietly. “They’re gone.”

  “Akazidas’Iteru is gone,” Eugens said, as if it had just occurred to him. “We were going to leave. It was the middle of Sunkindle, and we were going to leave because the weather was getting too hot to stay . . .” All the animation and anger had drained from Eugens’s voice and body, as if he was only now becoming aware of where he was and the things that had happened to bring him here. He swayed on his feet, and Harrier took him by the arm and led him back toward his tent.

  Of all the unfairnesses that Harrier had experienced since he’d set out with Tiercel on the road to Sentarshadeen, he thought this was the worst. Eugens was his oldest brother—an adult Harrier’s entire life—and seeing him lost and afraid was almost as bad as seeing Da lost and afraid. “Come on,” he said gently, urging Eugens to sit down on the carpet outside the tent. “Sit down. Here, have a drink.” He took down the waterskin hanging on the tent-pole and handed it to Eugens.

  “It’s water,” Eugens said in surprise, after squirting a little of the contents into his mouth.

  “Of course it is,” Harrier answered, baffled. “What did you think it would be?” He sat down beside his brother and put a hand on his arm. Looking upward toward the sky, Harrier could see that it was starting to lighten, and he could feel the camp coming to life around them. Soon the illusion of privacy would be gone. “Gens, I need to know what happened at Akazidas’Iteru.”

  “No,” Eugens said. “Nobody should have to know those things.” He tried to smile. It was painful to watch. “Not my little brother. I’ll take you home, and, oh, Da will yell for a while, but it will be all right
. You’ll see.”

  Harrier wasn’t sure whether he wanted to cry or scream or go find something to hit. Gens, you said you were going to leave Akazidas’Iteru in the middle of Sunkindle, and I think it’s at least the end of Harvest now and that’s two and a half moonturns and as well as I can figure it you’re a thousand miles south of Akazidas’Iteru now and I need to know what happened to you and what happened to it. And don’t tell me what I don’t need to know when I’ve spent the past moonturn chopping up the bodies of people I’ve spent two moonturns before that getting to know . . .

  “Look,” he said, instead of saying all the things he wanted to say. “I need to go find you a pair of boots. You’d better stay right here, okay? Wandering around barefoot isn’t a really good idea. There are jarrari. And . . . things.”

  Eugens shook his head slightly—whether he was agreeing, or just being amused by his little brother’s foolishness, Harrier didn’t know. Harrier got to his feet and turned to go when Eugens called him back. “Harrier? You have swords strapped to your back.”

  Harrier turned around. “I, uh, yeah. I, um, I learned to use a sword while I’ve been away.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Eugens said very seriously. “You might need it.”

  TIERCEL hadn’t wanted to leave Harrier alone to keep watch over Eugens. Harrier had looked more than tired. He’d looked haggard. But Tiercel had also known—especially after the stunning ultimatum Harrier had delivered to Fannas at the evening meeting—that any attempt to tell Harrier anything he didn’t want to hear right now would just trigger another argument, if not an exchange of blows. And he didn’t want that.