The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  As for everything else . . . the first day they were here, Ahairan sent a swarm of atish’ban-khazdara (which were unable to fly in) followed by atish’banjarrari and atish’ban-kintibaz—neither of which were able to crawl in through the wards on the gates. When the sun had gone down, she’d sent a Goblin pack, and they hadn’t been able to get in either.

  The second day had been unnerving. They’d been attacked by Balwarta three different times. But the creatures had simply . . . bounced off the wards over the top of the oasis. They’d been attacked by Sandwalkers too. Bisochim’s wards kept them from tunneling up under the walls, and they kept them from coming in through the gates, too, but apparently the things could see well enough to see that there was an opening there, so they kept trying to get in through it. And when one of the Balwarta attacked at the same time as one of the Sandwalkers, they’d end up attacking each other.

  Harrier thought it was funny.

  Harrier would.

  On the third day, the walls and even the shield above them was swarmed by atish’ban insects. Saravasse had said they were coming at dawn and he’d gone to look (along with half the camp) and it had just been a glittering tide of black, as if somebody’d spilled ink on the sand and the ink could move. Saravasse said not to worry, because the wards would kill something that small if it stayed in contact with them for very long, and he remembered that the sentries on the gates (because of course Harrier still posted sentries) had said in the evening’s committee meeting that the atish’ban-jarrari and the atish’ban-kintibaz had backed off quickly.

  This time, the atish’ban insects didn’t. There were too many of them to count. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Tiercel hadn’t thought there were that many insects in the entire world. They came to Sapthiruk, and they pressed themselves up against Bisochim’s wards, and they died, and the ones behind them just climbed up over their bodies and kept coming. First the bodies blocked the gateways, like horrible Demonic snow, and then, as the drifts of bodies rose higher and higher, they began to cover the wards above.

  And there was nothing Bisochim could do about it. You couldn’t cast a spell through a ward without destroying the ward. Eventually the bodies blocked the light.

  Zanattar was the one who led a shotor, blindfolded, up to the ward at one of the gates, and then lit the torch he was carrying and burned it on the haunches so it would run forward. It was dead before it reached the open sand, but its panicked exit had let it burrow through most of the mass of dead insects, and it was like starting a sandspill. The tiny black bodies—dead, dying, about to die—cascaded down the sides of the wall, and so the ones above them fell, and every one that fell knocked others loose, and in moments sunlight was streaming in again.

  The ones that were still alive started climbing up the wall again, which was the most horrible part of it. But there weren’t enough of them left to be able to use their own dead as insulation this time, even though the drift of dead atish’ban bodies around the walls was almost six feet deep and stretched across the desert for yards.

  That was yesterday. When Tiercel’d gotten up this morning, they were all gone. Harrier told him that Saravasse had watched them until about the Sixth Hour of Night—Midnight Bells—then jumped down into the middle of them and dug a clear path through them so Bisochim could walk out. Once he’d been on the other side of his own wards, he’d just called up a Sandwind to scour them all away.

  “He could have been killed,” Tiercel protested. “They both could have.”

  “And that was why she watched the bugs for seven hours before she decided to jump on them,” Harrier said patiently.

  Tiercel still didn’t like it.

  Of course, he didn’t like a lot of things at the moment. The air hummed with magic—Wild Magic—to the point that he was constantly suffering from nagging headaches and painful nausea, and even though his misery meant food and safety for everyone who’d managed to make it this far, he was still miserable. The fact that—according to Liapha—you could make some kind of beer from palm tree sap didn’t really comfort him, since he’d never drunk beer before in his life.

  He felt like an outsider.

  Everyone seemed so happy.

  Even Harrier seemed happy.

  For the first time in moonturns, the Isvaieni were able to spend their days in rest and their nights in sleep. If there still wasn’t quite enough food, there was more every day. The animals were all gorging until they nearly burst, there was fresh fruit, there were sugar-sweet dates, the olive grove meant that the arrow-smiths were talking about replenishing the tribe’s long-vanished store of arrows, and if there were no feathers available to fletch them, an adequate substitute could be made from scraped and shaped leather.

  That would take sennights, if not moonturns, and Harrier had said they’d only be here a sennight at most. But they couldn’t harvest and dry enough grain and fruit for the next stage of the journey in a sennight, or fatten the sheep and goats for the slaughter in that length of time either. And there wasn’t a lot of point in slaughtering a skinny goat when you could slaughter a fat one. Tiercel knew Harrier was thinking of spending at least a few sennights here. It would give all of them time to rest and recover.

  It would give Harrier time to decide who was going with them, and who was remaining behind.

  Tiercel didn’t have to talk to Harrier to know this was something he’d thought about. If Sapthiruk Oasis could be turned into a real fortress—even beyond what it was now—then it would be a place that the Isvaieni could wait in safety. And if that was true, then Bisochim and Saravasse—and Harrier, Tiercel suspected he was thinking—could make a run for Pelashia’s Veil by themselves. It wouldn’t matter if Bisochim and Saravasse couldn’t get through the Veil. Harrier could.

  Tiercel knew that it really didn’t matter what Harrier was planning. Ahairan wouldn’t let them get there this time any more than she had when he and Bisochim had tried to fly there almost three moonturns ago. And whether she did or not, the Elves wouldn’t send the help Harrier was expecting. They’d still be worrying about doing the wrong thing in the wrong way, still wanting Tiercel to come up with some perfect solution, not willing to admit that their “Prophesied Champion of the Light” just didn’t have one.

  And so, four days after they arrived at Sapthiruk Oasis, Tiercel went to summon the only answer he had left.

  IT wasn’t difficult to go outside the wall. Everyone in the camp knew Tiercel, and if Tiercel wanted to go outside the wall in the middle of the night, no one would see the least reason to stop him. If danger were coming from anywhere across the desert, Saravasse would warn the sentries and the rest of the camp.

  He carried a couple of bundles of tightly-woven straw with him. Normally to make a torch, the Isvaieni would take a bundles of straw and a plug of pitch, wrap the pitch in rags, and poke it down into the looser-woven end of the straw, then dip that whole end into tar to seal it, then wrap the other end in strips of green hide and let them dry in place. But they didn’t have either pitch or tar right now, so it hardly seemed worth wasting the rags or green hides on something that would burn only for a minute or two. Despite that, no one underestimated the value of having that moment of flame, and the woven straw-bundles had a number of uses, from bedding to fodder, and they were easy to make as well. Tiercel intended to use them for something close to their original purpose.

  It was dark inside the wall. The thickness of it made the opening more of a tunnel than a gateway. Tiercel wondered who’d decided on the dimensions of the fortress, Harrier or Bisochim or Saravasse. But once he got outside, he had no trouble seeing. The moon was full again, and beneath its light, the sand looked like snow. The tracks they’d all made as they’d arrived had been swept away by the wind, just as the bodies of the atish’ban insects had—it didn’t look now as if anybody had ever walked across this desert, and of course there weren’t animal tracks.

  As the thought passed through his mind, he shuddered. Would this be what the worl
d would be like if the Demons ruled—empty, lifeless? Or would Ahairan and her children have some use for his kind? Tiercel wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to find out.

  Getting away from Sapthiruk was a relief, as if a constant high-pitched whine had stopped, and he sighed in relief. If the High Magick came from the Wild Magic it made no sense for the two forms to be so at odds. And why, for that matter, had Harrier never gotten sick when Tiercel cast his spells, if it was simply that the two forms of magic were incompatible?

  Tiercel walked as far away from the wall around Sapthiruk as he could bring himself to go. Even knowing that Saravasse was on watch, even knowing that of all the people here, he was one of the three that Ahairan wanted to capture alive, even the relief he felt at being away from the constant background hum of Wild Magic, wasn’t enough to destroy the dread of stepping on one of Ahairan’s Shadow-twisted jarrari, of finding himself suddenly face-to-face with Shamblers, or Goblins, or Black Dogs, or Sandwalkers, or—

  Or just admit it. You don’t really want to do this, do you?

  He almost laughed out loud. He would have, if he hadn’t known that laughter carried even farther across the sand—through the air—than speech. Of course he didn’t want to do this! Summon up the monster that had haunted his nightmares—waking and sleeping—for almost as long as he’d been having them? Who would?

  He’d run out of choices though. They all had.

  Before he could become any more of a coward, Tiercel bent down and stuck the bundles of braided straw narrow-end-first into the soft sand at his feet. It wasn’t nearly enough in the way of preparation—there should be either more or none—but Tiercel was too much of a High Mage to do this without any ritual at all. With the sideways twist inside his mind where the magick still lived, he Summoned Fire, and all five of them burst into flames at once.

  “I know you’re out here and I know you’re following us and I want you to come out where I can see you,” he whispered fiercely under his breath.

  The words came out all in a rush. His hands were shaking and his stomach twisted with tension. The bundles of straw crackled and fizzled, smoking fiercely as they burned. Nothing happened, and Tiercel’s sense of disappointment—of failure—was so acute that he wanted to scream. He blinked hard against the bright yellow glare, realizing he was staring at the flames and he shouldn’t, it would destroy his night vision, and when he forced himself to look away, there was a man strolling casually toward him across the sand.

  Not a man, Tiercel reminded himself. Not even regular Otherfolk.

  It looked like a man—but in a strange insistent way it also looked like the Red Bear that had attacked him north of Kellen’s Bridge, and it looked like—and unlike—the man with the hounds he’d seen on the Great Plains, and the seneschal he’d seen in Ysterialpoerin, and the man that both he and Harrier had seen in Tarnatha’Iteru. It wasn’t a man, and it never had been. It was the creature that Bisochim had sent to kill him, and despite having so many opportunities, it had never taken advantage of any of them.

  It walked up to the edge of the circle he’d defined with the straw bundles and stopped. “You have done well in all the tests I have set you, and passed them all,” the Firecrown said.

  For a moment Tiercel couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “Tests?” he demanded, his voice rising. “I—This—This was all a test? Which part of it was a test, exactly? The part where Ciniran died? The part where Simera died? The part where everybody in all the Border Cities died? Or all the Isvaieni? Or where Ancaladar vanished? Which part?”

  “I chose no deaths,” the Firecrown answered, unmoved. “Nor did I choose to be recalled to the world and set to walk it once more, nor did I choose to be made the measure of your worth. Yet having been recalled and sent into the living world, thereafter my choices are mine to make until the game is run.”

  “Game—The—You—You aren’t a—A creature. A construct,” Tiercel said. He knew he was half-babbling, shock and fury and indignation and terrified realization all mixed up inside him so completely that he could hardly breathe. “You’re the Firecrown. The Firesprites’ Firecrown.”

  The realization was so terrifying that Tiercel could barely breathe. This wasn’t an Elemental Creature that Bisochim had conjured up to do his bidding. This wasn’t anybody’s servant. This was something as much greater in power than the most powerful Dragonbond Mage who’d ever lived as . . . As Ahairan was greater in power than the youngest ikulas puppy currently chewing its way through an old pair of boots back in Sapthiruk Oasis. One of the Histories Tiercel had read in Armethalieh said that the Ancient Races worshiped the Light in the form of the Great Powers, but if the Firecrown was the Eternal Light in any form at all, Tiercel would march right back to the Great Library at Armethalieh and eat that book right now. He didn’t think that the Firecrown had very much to do with either the Light or the Dark.

  The Firecrown said nothing, staring at him. Tiercel realized that what he’d thought was the reflection of the flames of the torches in its eyes wasn’t: the torches had all burnt out to curling wisps of ash while he wasn’t paying attention.

  “Bisochim told you to kill me, and you didn’t,” Tiercel said, taking a deep breath. “He told you to kill Ahairan, and you didn’t. Do you even care who wins?”

  “Once my people fought for the Light,” the Firecrown answered. It wasn’t much of an answer, but Tiercel couldn’t afford to care.

  “Then help us. You’ve been watching us. You know we’ve been losing more people each day. Ahairan is going to kill all of us. I don’t know why she’s even bothered to wait as long as she has except that she’s entertaining herself, but when she’s done, everybody else—everyone everywhere—will be next. Look. I know your people were the Firesprites and they’re all dead—they’ve been dead for thousands of years—and I’m sorry for everything that ever happened to them that I don’t know about, and I know, I know, that you aren’t our Great Power, but the Endarkened killed the Firesprites, and Ahairan’s a Demon too, and there isn’t anybody else left we can ask for help, so please, please, help us.” Tiercel stopped abruptly. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. The silence stretched. He realized he couldn’t hear anything. There wasn’t any wind, and walls of Sapthiruk muffled any sounds from the camp. He wondered if he’d offended it—if he should say something else. Finally it spoke.

  “I would require proof of your commitment to this cause,” the Firecrown said mildly.

  Tiercel began to laugh uncontrollably, clapping both hands over his mouth to stifle his hysterical giggling when he realized that the Firecrown was still talking.

  “To constrain the Elemental Spirit of Shadow will require more magic than just my own. If you can entice Ahairan back to my Place of Power—which I shall make ready to receive her—and once there, if a Dragonbond Mage gives up his life at My Shrine entirely of his own free will, then shall Ahairan be dealt with in a fashion pleasing to you,” the Firecrown said.

  “But will she be destroyed?” Tiercel demanded desperately.

  The Firecrown regarded him gravely. “Who may destroy a piece of the Elemental Darkness?” it asked. “But I am able to bind her for as long as Telinchechitl burns, and that should fulfill your desire.”

  “Look, how—?” Tiercel began. He blinked, realizing that he was talking to empty air.

  He didn’t know how long he stood there, staring out over the empty desert and trying to make what had just happened make sense inside his head. It didn’t matter how much magic he’d seen or done, and he didn’t think it would have mattered if he’d lived out the rest of his life as a Dragonbond Mage before seeing this—discovering you’d managed to summon up a Great Power, and then seeing (or not seeing) it vanish right before your eyes was something that Tiercel didn’t think he’d ever have been able to think about intelligently.

  Finally he realized he’d better get moving. The desert might be fairly safe at the moment, but that didn’t mean it was actually safe. Reflex carried him
back to the wall surrounding Sapthiruk, but when he got there, Tiercel just sat down against it and stared off into the desert, shaking with reaction. Eventually tremors of shock were replaced with tremors of cold, but he still didn’t want to go back inside the walls. Somebody was sure to be awake, and ask him where he’d been, and what he’d been doing, and . . .

  It was at that point that what the Firecrown had told him really began to sink in. To destroy Ahairan, they had to go back to Telinchechitl.

  The thought of having to turn around and go back the way he’d come made Tiercel want to throw himself down on the sand and cry. They’d barely made it this far. They’d lost something like three thousand people just getting here. They’d lost most of the livestock, all of the hunting falcons, all of the flockguards, most of the ikulas hounds, just about everything they owned, just to fight their way to this halfway point. And now Tiercel was going to go to Harrier and say: let’s turn around and go back the other way.

  At least they wouldn’t have to look far for a Dragonbond Mage to give up his life freely at the Firesprite Shrine.

  He knew that Bisochim would be willing to do it. Wanted desperately to do it in fact—or at least wanted to die (because Bisochim didn’t know yet about Tiercel’s bargain or its terms). Better than anyone else, Tiercel knew how miserable Bisochim’s life was, watching Saravasse’s suffering day after day.

  But Bisochim couldn’t be the one.

  If he died, Saravasse would die too. And if it didn’t work—even if it did work, really—they couldn’t afford to lose Bisochim’s Dragonbond magic. But everybody had been telling Tiercel, almost from the moment Ancaladar vanished, that his Bond was still intact—even if he couldn’t Sense it—and that he was still a Dragonbond Mage—even if he couldn’t cast a single spell requiring a dragon’s power.

  He was still a Dragonbond Mage. And he could seal the bargain with the Firecrown. And nobody would have to die but him. It was what he’d been meant to do all along, and he wasn’t sure whether he was remembering it or realizing all over again. Die. Exchange his life for the destruction of the Dark. Maybe that was the real reason Idalia and Jermayan hadn’t told him what he needed to do.