The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  Even here the Isvaieni grouped themselves as they had in the encampments, and so Harrier, Tiercel, Bisochim, and the Armethaliehans, had joined Marap and the surviving Nalzindar in the campsite Marap had made three stories below the garden level. Every time Tiercel looked around, it only served to underscore what a horrible toll Ahairan had taken on all the people of the desert. When he and Harrier had first come to Abi’Abadshar, there’d been thirty Nalzindar. Now there were thirteen, eight of whom were children under the age of nine. None of their parents had survived.

  A brace of sheshu roasted slowly on the spit. Two of the children watched over them carefully.

  Fannas had been one of the people who’d won a place in Harrier’s war-band, despite Harrier’s rule that no Ummarai could seek one. Harrier had rejected his argument that the Kareggi would prosper beneath Adare’s leadership as effectively as his, as she’d been a fine chaharum to him over the past several moonturns, adding that the Kareggi were no longer so large a tribe as to require a great Ummara like Fannas son of Rabbatin to lead them. Tiercel didn’t need Harrier to do the math: when the Barantar, the Binrazan, and the Thanduli had left the caravan, the Kareggi had numbered over fifteen hundred people. By the time they’d arrived at Abi’Abadshar, they were less than a third of that number.

  Harrier had still refused.

  “I still think I should go with you, Har,” Eugens said stubbornly. “And you know I’m right.” He hadn’t been allowed to participate in the lottery, but Eugens had assumed he’d be one of Harrier’s choices. But Harrier hadn’t picked him yet, and Harrier’d told him earlier today that he wouldn’t.

  “I won’t choose you, Gens. You aren’t going. End of story,” Harrier said firmly.

  “I can fight as well as anyone here,” Eugens said stubbornly.

  Harrier sighed harshly. “You aren’t going, Kave isn’t going, Helafin isn’t going.”

  “I wasn’t actually intending to ask to go, Harrier,” Magistrate Perizel said politely. “But it would be nice to know your reasons.”

  “There’s a chance we’ll win,” Harrier said, staring into the flames of the cookfire. “I want you to be around to talk to Chief Magistrate Vaunnel and tell her that none of the Isvaieni are to be punished for destroying the Iteru-cities,” Harrier said.

  “That sounds as if it’s an order,” Magistrate Perizel commented.

  “I won’t be around to enforce it,” Harrier said. “So it can’t be an order. Even if I were, I still couldn’t. But it’s the right thing to do.”

  “I . . . Wait. Har, why can’t you talk to the Chief Magistrate yourself? Where are you going to be? And, you said there’s a ‘chance’ you’ll win? I thought this Firecrown promised Tyr he—it—whatever—would lock her up,” Eugens said. His voice went from confusion to outrage as he went from question to question.

  “We think it will,” Harrier said, his voice low. “Even if it does . . . Tyr and Bisochim and I are the bait in the trap. We’re the ones she’s wanted from the beginning.”

  “You aren’t saying you’re going to die. You’re my baby brother. I’m not going to let you die. If Ahairan wants somebody, she can take me,” Eugens said. When he spoke, he sounded just like Harrier had used to, hostile and angry and looking for a fight.

  Harrier laughed, and for a moment Tiercel thought he sounded almost carefree. “She’s probably going to take all of us, Gens. That’s why I want you here instead of there. Go back to Armethalieh and—” He stopped and looked away. “You know.”

  “Tell our parents where we were, and what we were doing,” Tiercel finished for him. “Tell them we’re sorry.”

  IT was midday. Here in the garden at the top level of Abi’Abadshar’s underground world it was warm and wet. After the killing journey to reach this safe harbor, most of the Isvaieni preferred to be warm and dry, so he and Shaiara had the garden to themselves. It was why Harrier had chosen it. He’d given all his refusals—and made all his choices but one—when he asked Shaiara to walk with him.

  He was glad to see that the forest had survived the change in the weather. In fact, everything was thriving—the goats, the squirrels, the monkeys, the doves, the chickens, and probably several other kinds of animal he couldn’t see. He hoped so. Even using the shotors as food, the people at Abi’Abadshar were going to reach the point—soon—when they’d have to rely so heavily on the underground forest and the animals who lived here that they’d simply use them up. But that was next moonturn’s problem, and he probably wouldn’t live to see next moonturn.

  “We leave tomorrow,” Harrier said.

  “You do,” Shaiara agreed. “The drawing of lots is complete.”

  “Kamar won. I refused him.” It had been his last chance to refuse someone a place in the hundred, and Harrier was glad he’d held back so many until the last minute.

  “That is a good thing,” Shaiara said gravely. “It would be well for the Nalzindar to have their chaharum’s wisdom to guide them.”

  “Liapha won, too. I’m pretty sure she cheated. Anyway, I reminded her that I said no Ummarai should draw or dice for a place.”

  “And so I have not,” Shaiara said.

  “I know,” Harrier said.

  They walked on in silence for a while, in the direction of the waterfall and the pool. In the open areas, the light was soft and diffuse, but it was dark under the trees without the hot bright sun of the desert day forcing itself through every crack in the stone, so Harrier conjured a ball of Coldfire to show them the way. He remembered the evenings when the four of them—him, Tiercel, Shaiara, Ciniran—would walk down there. He remembered that he’d thought—then—that he was living a life of danger and privation. He hadn’t minded, but he’d still thought it.

  “And I know—as all know—that you said you would choose twenty-five warriors to ride at your right hand to do battle with the demon Ahairan, and you have as yet chosen but twenty-four. I ask you now: who is to be the last?” Shaiara asked.

  They’d reached the pool, and Harrier stopped. Little here had changed. The ancient willow trees still bent low over the water, the carpet of thick moss was still ridiculously soft under foot. The only difference was that the waterfall wasn’t a gentle trickle cascading down from above, but a forceful jet of water that spewed straight out of the wall before plashing down just inside the very edge of the pool.

  Shaiara stopped beside him, and Harrier turned to face her. “If I choose someone else—and we ride out—will you stay here?” he asked.

  She looked up into his face, her dark eyes calm. “No,” she said.

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “Then I choose you.”

  “And I choose you, Harrier, for as long as it pleases Sand and Star to grant us,” Shaiara answered.

  THE war-band left Abi’Abadshar two hours before dawn. Harrier led them eastward, directly away from the Dove Road, only turning south once the sky began to lighten. Despite himself, Tiercel was fascinated at what the daylight revealed as they traveled through the bones of the immense city. Here, the rain-washed outline of long stone roads leading from nowhere to nowhere, edged and sometimes crossed with enormous time-worn columns of stone. There, the regular and precise outline of what must once have been buildings, though only the foundations remained. Tiercel couldn’t reconcile what he saw with what he knew of the gentle Elves who lived in harmony with Nature. Harrier had told him once that Abi’Abadshar was larger than Armethalieh. Tiercel couldn’t imagine the Elves building something so vast, even to accommodate dragons, but Bisochim had implied that the Elves had been very different once. This was the city that Great Queen Vieliessar Farcarinon built for her war with the Endarkened, and that war had been ten thousand years before the second one, which was a thousand years before the third, which was a thousand years before . . .

  This one. Because that’s what this is. A war. Even if we don’t have armies and we aren’t exactly fighting the Endarkened and nobody’s going to call it “the Fourth” anything.

 
THE desert as far north as Sapthiruk Oasis had been covered with ash. When Tiercel hadn’t seen it at Abi’Abadshar, he’d assumed the wind had carried the ash farther north, or else that the rain had washed it away. But when they passed the last of the ruins and got a sight of the open desert, even in the haziness of rain and mist and hot water-filled air, Tiercel could see that it wasn’t dun-colored, but black and glittering. The blackness began as precisely as if it had been deliberately placed. On one side of the line there was the rest of the Barahileth—all black—and on the other, there was the ruins of Abi’Abadshar. If they all hadn’t been familiar with the debris the tehuko had flung skyward at the moment of its birth, they might have been tempted to think that Ahairan had managed to find a way to turn the regh itself atish’ban. Even so, the sight was enough to make all the Isvaieni—even Zanattar (who’d been the first of Harrier’s choices to ride south with them, to Tiercel’s surprise)—mutter uneasily.

  “Well,” Harrier said, “I guess we know where the city boundaries are now.”

  He’d halted the column just inside the boundary line, inside what must be the edge of the city. They’d taken a hundred extra shotors, though they didn’t need that many for pack animals, and Tiercel knew Harrier intended the surplus to serve both as food for Saravasse and as a sacrifice to Ahairan’s creatures, if that became necessary. But so many riderless animals could be difficult to control under extraordinary circumstances.

  They hadn’t had any ordinary circumstances in over half a year. Tiercel stared at the impossible line of demarcation.

  “Why didn’t we see that as we came in?” he demanded after a moment. He heard his own voice coming out high and tight with tension, and that was ridiculous. This was only magic. He’d done spells himself. But the even line of blackness had an inhumanity to it that chilled him, as if he were riding through the dead bones of an ancient machine that nobody had ever bothered to turn off. Which is pretty much the case, he thought, and shuddered.

  “Whatever sort of shield this is, it probably doesn’t go much farther north than this,” Harrier said. “We’re about a league and a half south of the entrance to the underground city now, and about two leagues east. We wouldn’t have seen this stuff coming in. Not with visibility as bad as it is in the rain.” Harrier made an irritated face. If it hadn’t been raining, they could’ve seen from here to Telinchechitl without any trouble. As it was, they could barely see a few hundred yards at high noon.

  “So what do we do?” Tiercel asked.

  “Rest here for a few minutes,” Harrier said. “If the city’s spells are strong enough to keep chunks of rock out, they might keep other things out, too. Either way, we’ve been riding since the Tenth Hour of Night, so that’s five hours now, and one thing we need to know before we go any farther is whether the shotors can make it across that stuff without getting too cut up, because I’m pretty sure our boots won’t fit them.”

  THE black material was a mixture of ash, stones, and cinders, but nothing that was likely to penetrate the hornlike calluses of the shotors’ feet. It crunched loudly beneath them, and the stone fragments mixed with the mud combined the worst features of both mud and gravel. The shotors didn’t balk, and no one complained.

  They quickly found it was impossible to travel by night: black sand and lightless overcast sky made the nights so dark that the shotors were unwilling to move, and globes of Coldfire would only make them a potential target without illuminating the ground. It was just as well not only that it was raining, but that it had been raining for three moonturns: the days were brutally hot, but you couldn’t die of dehydration when you were trying to keep from drowning.

  It took them a fortnight to reach Telinchechitl—four days longer than it had taken just the four of them the first time—because Harrier brought the war-band south by a long curving route that angled south and east for a sennight before it began to angle south and west. His intention was to reach the western face of Telinchechitl, not the northern one, and stay far from the Dove Road the entire time. Harrier needn’t have bothered with his precautions.

  A hundred warriors, Harrier, Tiercel, Bisochim, and Saravasse left Abi’Abadshar.

  A hundred warriors, Harrier, Tiercel, Bisochim, and Saravasse reached Telinchechitl.

  Ahairan didn’t attack them once.

  Tiercel was grateful for that, because he couldn’t bear to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he could hear Ahairan’s voice inside his mind—whispering, gloating, laughing in triumph—and he couldn’t tell anymore whether it was a true vision, or a dream, or whether he was just going crazy (finally crazy a helpful part of his mind supplied; and who wouldn’t go crazy if they had the opportunity after the past year-and-more that he’d had?)

  Tiercel didn’t tell anybody. Who could he tell, even if he could get the privacy to tell just one person and not everybody he was riding with? Bisochim was having enough problems just holding the unnatural weather steady. He’d told Tiercel that the longer he forced the weather out of its proper patterns, the harder it tried to return to them, and the more energy he needed to use to maintain the spell. And not only energy, but attention: when he’d begun, he’d only needed to reinforce the spell once a day or so to keep the weather patterns in place. By the time they’d left Abi’Abadshar, it had been every couple of hours. So Bisochim wasn’t doing much sleeping either, and Tiercel still remembered what it was like to go without sleep until your entire body ached for it and you’d do anything to be allowed a few hours rest.

  So he didn’t tell Bisochim.

  And he didn’t tell Harrier. He already knew that Harrier didn’t trust him, didn’t trust this. He actually had no idea at all why Harrier had gone along with it, but down deep inside Tiercel was certain that there were things Harrier wasn’t telling him either. Important things. Dangerous things. And if he told Harrier about his visions, dreams, nightmares, whatever they were . . . he no longer really knew what Harrier would do. Harrier might leave him in the middle of the Barahileth with the Isvaieni, trusting to his presence to keep Ahairan from slaughtering them, and go on to Telinchechitl with just Bisochim and Saravasse. And Tiercel couldn’t let that happen. If they did, the Firecrown would tell them the terms of the bargain Tiercel had made with it. And Bisochim would fulfill it. And Saravasse would die.

  When he fulfilled the bargain, Ancaladar would die. Ancaladar wasn’t dead. Tiercel finally believed that. Ancaladar had fallen through a MageDoor built more than twelve thousand years ago by Great Queen Vieliessar Farcarinon to save her Dragonbond Mages from the Endarkened, a door that led across space and through time. And when and wherever Ancaladar came out again, the fact that Tiercel was dead would kill him.

  And he had no choice. They’d both been marked for death from the moment they Bonded.

  And so Tiercel said nothing to anyone.

  THE closer they came to the Lake of Fire, the thicker the fog got, and the larger the rocks were that studded the desert around them. On the evening of the day that the front of the column couldn’t be seen from the rear and the ground was strewn with boulders larger than full-grown sheep, Harrier told them they’d reach Telinchechitl the following day.

  They had the chance to eat well that last night. They slaughtered a couple of the shotors for fresh meat, and there was even kaffeyah—probably the last of it anywhere in the entire south—but nobody had much appetite. Zanattar announced that he would see to setting the Night Guards, as Harrier was going to die tomorrow and needed his rest. There’d been a time, Tiercel remembered, when Zanattar wouldn’t have dared to joke with Harrier. There’d been a time when Harrier wouldn’t have laughed and clapped Zanattar on the shoulder in response, and told Zanattar he was only hoping Harrier died so Harrier didn’t go back to Abi’Abadshar to tell Karufhad about all of Zanattar’s shortcomings.

  Usually after the camp was quiet Tiercel spent hours standing out with Bisochim and Saravasse. If he’d been keeping himself awake as much as he’d been keeping Bisochim company, nobody
’d said anything. But tonight Tiercel went off to his tent when everyone else did. Let the two of them have what privacy they could have tonight. He curled up in a far corner of the tent, his knees drawn up under his chin, and wrapped his arms around his shins, and tried not to sleep. I’m going to die tomorrow, Tiercel thought, and tried to care. He was really thinking: I hope I’m going to die tomorrow. Because if he didn’t, the plan had failed, and he didn’t know what they’d do then.

  Now that Harrier couldn’t stop him from reaching the Lake of Fire if he tried—because Tiercel could walk there by himself if he had to—Tiercel finally let himself think about what was going to happen. In one way, he’d been preparing himself to die ever since he’d accepted his destiny—such an utterly ridiculous phrase!—in Karahelanderialigor. In another way, it had kept not-happening for so long that it was hard to believe it was actually going to happen tomorrow. He knew that the Preceptors of the Light said that you didn’t miss anything after you were dead, because the Eternal Light didn’t work that way. But what if they were wrong? What if being dead was just like being sent somewhere very far away and never being able to come back?

  No. It couldn’t. The Light was good. It wouldn’t make you be unhappy forever.

  Even though he was ready to think about dying now, Tiercel tried not to think about how he was going to die, because he was pretty sure that “gives up his life at My Shrine entirely of his own free will” translated into “throws himself into the Lake of Fire while still alive,” and he only prayed he’d have the strength to do it when the moment came. Thinking about Ahairan—what she’d already done, what she still meant to do—he thought he could. But just because he was willing to give up his life didn’t mean there weren’t things he regretted leaving behind.