The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  He’d miss his family. But more than that, he’d miss knowing what was going to happen to them during all the years he should have been able to share with them—seeing his little sisters and his baby brother grow up. Not getting to know was like having to put down a book in the middle and knowing you were never going to get to finish it.

  He’d miss Harrier. He’d miss Harrier-and-Shaiara. He’d watched them fall in love, but he would have liked to watch them be in love. At least the fact that they’d found each other meant that Harrier wouldn’t have to be all alone . . . after. Maybe the Wild Magic would keep Harrier from feeling lonely. Tiercel didn’t know. But he was sure Shaiara would take care of him.

  There were a lot of things he regretted leaving behind because of what he was going to do tomorrow. But at least—and Light forgive him for the thought—it meant he’d be able to stop missing Ancaladar.

  TIERCEL didn’t know how much time had passed when he was jarred out of an uneasy doze by people shouting. Harrier—Bisochim—Saravasse. No. Not shouting. Roaring. Even Bisochim. Roaring in fury. He staggered to his feet and pushed his way out of the tent.

  It had stopped raining.

  “Harrier?” he asked in bewilderment.

  Harrier was standing in front of the tent in his undertunic and boots, his Selken blades bare in his hands. Shaiara stood with her back to him, an awardan in one hand, a cluster of throwing-spears in the other.

  All around them were people shouting questions, running out of tents half-dressed but fully armed, slipping in mud and swearing. Several of them were carrying the bespelled cups that Harrier and Bisochim had made to light the tents, because Coldfire burned brightest and stayed longest on stone or metal and there were thousands of gold and silver goblets in Abi’Abadshar. Saravasse bellowed one last furious challenge and fell silent.

  “Get back in the damned tent!” Harrier snapped, his face twisted with pain. “She’s here!”

  Tiercel barely stopped himself from asking “Who?” because who else would it be? Ahairan, whose presence a Wildmage could sense and a High Mage couldn’t. It was why the War Mages had been created in the first place, so very long ago. He took one cautious step backward, then another. When he was sure the doorway of his tent was clear, he turned and staggered back inside, wondering why Ahairan hadn’t attacked yet.

  The camp was quiet now, except for the low sounds of Isvaieni voices. Tiercel wiped the mud from his feet, and found his boots, and put them on, and as he did, even the voices fell silent. He got dressed and went outside again. When he glanced up, he could already see night sky and stars. The rainclouds Bisochim had Summoned and held for so long were melting away.

  “She only waits, Beloved,” he heard Saravasse say, in a high angry voice. “She and her creatures.”

  “For what?” Harrier demanded, his voice thick with pain.

  “For us,” Tiercel heard himself say. “She wants us to go to Telinchechitl. She thinks she’ll win there.”

  From out of the darkness he heard a sound he couldn’t immediately identify. All at once it resolved itself—like an illusion becoming reality, or a riddle that you solved—into the sound of laughter from a creature that had never been meant to laugh. Ahairan. He shuddered as not-quite memories tried to force themselves into his mind. Harrier moaned in anguish and he heard Bisochim sob.

  “Go away!” Saravasse screamed. “Go away! Go away! Go away!”

  When the sound of Saravasse’s cries died away there was nothing but silence. No one in the camp moved, nobody even dared to speak. The bespelled cups glowed brightly where they’d been dropped in the mud, looking like bizarre out-of-place garden ornaments. The longer they all stood there, the colder it got, and Tiercel began to shiver. Toward the west he could see a faint glow on the horizon: Telinchechitl.

  “All right,” Harrier finally said, his voice unnaturally even. “Let’s go. Saddle the shotors. Food, water, weapons. Don’t bother with the tents. We’ll be back later—or we won’t.”

  When Tiercel moved, the mud around his feet crackled with frost.

  ALL along the column behind him, Tiercel heard the murmured words of the Litany of the Light. He didn’t think it would be much help now. He’d worried during this entire journey that Ahairan might not show up. But she had. All he could hope for now was that this would end the way the Firecrown had promised him it would.

  Ahairan was mounted on a coal-black shotor, and she led an army of monsters. A pack of Black Dogs loped behind and around her atish’ban-shotor as if they were hunting hounds. Behind the Black Dogs followed rank after rank of Shamblers. They were the desiccated kind that she called up from the Iteru-cities and it was chillingly obvious that Ahairan had completed their failing and mutilated bodies with pieces of Isvaieni dead dug up from the sand. The surface of their bodies swarmed with the glittering forms of atish’ban insects. Behind the Shamblers scuttled Sandwalkers (a herd? a flock? a pack?) looking like gigantic malformed jarrari. Five or ten would have been enough to kill most of the Isvaieni before Bisochim could destroy them. There were at least thirty here. In the sky above, Balwarta soared over Ahairan’s line of march. They looked like a hideous mixture of wasp, jarrari, and bat enlarged to dragon size.

  If she’d wanted to, Ahairan could have obliterated everyone in the column instantly. The Shamblers wouldn’t even have had a chance to reach them before her other creatures wiped them out. But she didn’t. She merely rode in parallel to them about a mile away, matching her speed to theirs. Tiercel could barely imagine what animals that hadn’t been through this entire journey with them—through Shamblers and Sandwalkers and Black Dogs and Balwarta and Goblins—would have done during their morning’s ride, but their shotors were a little more skittish than usual.

  If that terrible processional had gone on for too long, Tiercel thought that someone—maybe even Harrier—might simply have charged Ahairan’s army. Tiercel wondered if that was what she was hoping for. He wondered what made her so confident that she was willing to mass such an enormous force and not use it. She could take the entire war-band prisoner—alive, even—and then she’d have what she’d wanted from the beginning. Him, Harrier, Bisochim—and a hundred hostages.

  But Ahairan did nothing. And four hours after they’d set out, the war-band arrived at the foot of Telinchechitl.

  They reached another ring of demarcation an hour before they reached the tehuko itself. This one hadn’t been caused by any spell, but by the force of the tehuko’s creation and the rain that followed. Inside it there were no boulders, no thick scurf of stones and cinders, only pools of smoke-blackened water, glittering and steaming in the heat of the morning sun, and black mud cracking as it dried.

  Beyond the mud, there was stone. It lay dark and smooth in the sun, sloping upward toward the immense height of the tehuko itself. The shapes it made in the regh gave the illusion that the tehuko was the trunk of some enormous stone tree, and in the curves and ridges of the stone over which they rode, Tiercel could see that the stone had run out across the desert like molten wax, slowing and spreading as it cooled and hardened.

  At last, they reached the base of Telinchechitl itself. Its sides were as smooth as the trunk of the tree it so oddly resembled, and Tiercel could see no way to get to the top. He had no doubt that he had to get there. The bottom of Telinchechitl wouldn’t be the Shrine of a race of creatures made of living fire.

  “Now what?” Harrier asked, looking up.

  “Now I have to get to the top,” Tiercel said steadily. He saw Harrier’s eyes flicker, and he realized that somewhere deep inside Harrier must know what he was about to do. But all Harrier said was: “How?”

  The hundred Isvaieni—would they call them The Hundred someday; would they tell impossible stories about them?—were all crowded around the base of Telinchechitl on their shotors, unconsciously trying to put as much distance between themselves and Ahairan as they could. She and her army had stopped at the edge of the stone at the mountain’s base. She seemed cont
ent simply to wait.

  “Saravasse, can you—?” Tiercel asked.

  “Climb that?” Saravasse asked in disbelief. “Or were you thinking I could just fly to the top?” she added caustically. She banged the bandaged stump of her shredded wing against her side in irritation.

  Tiercel sighed. It had been worth a try. He would have preferred it, since it would have meant he could have gone up with only Saravasse as company. “Can you make a staircase?” he asked next, turning to Bisochim.

  “It shall be done,” Bisochim answered grimly.

  Bisochim dismounted from his shotor. When Bisochim dismounted, Tiercel did too, and—as he noticed with a mixture of resignation and disquiet—Harrier and Shaiara did too. Harrier and Shaiara began arguing with each other in low voices. Tiercel turned away and watched the side of the mountain. His heart was beating fast now, and despite the heat—from the sun in the sky, from the stone beneath his boots—he felt cold. He was glad he hadn’t eaten anything before starting out—no one had—but he was suddenly terribly thirsty. It seemed like too much trouble to get his waterskin off his saddle, though.

  At first there was nothing to see, though Bisochim was standing in a pose of fierce concentration. Then suddenly a wave of nausea struck him, forcing him to his knees as he gasped in surprise. Tiercel was so exhausted, so focused on what he was about to do, that it actually took him a moment to realize that this was normal. Wild Magic and High Magick just didn’t get along.

  The rock was hot enough to burn his hands. Not because it hadn’t cooled from its liquid state, but because rock in the Barahileth got this hot.

  “Idiot,” Harrier said fondly, pulling him to his feet. “How are you going to talk to the Firecrown if you can’t even stand up?”

  I’m not going to talk to it, Har, Tiercel thought. He clutched at Harrier’s arm, gasping for breath, too dizzy and sick to stand under his own power. Waves of chill and fever wracked him, and all he wanted to do was just lie down . . . But when he heard the rattling cascade of pebbles bouncing down the mountainside and felt a stone ricochet off his leg, Tiercel opened his eyes and looked up. Part of the edge of the mountain’s top was crumbling away. As Tiercel watched, suddenly a bright golden spill of rock came flowing down the side of the mountain.

  Bisochim didn’t move, and Tiercel couldn’t. Glowing rock poured down the side of Telinchechitl like syrup out of a jar, and only when Tiercel opened his mouth to shout a warning—though everyone else was watching, just as he was—did he realize that he didn’t feel any heat at all.

  The stream spread and thickened as it flowed downward, and now Tiercel could see that the rock wasn’t simply flowing down through the crack in the top of the mountain, but actually streaming up over the lip above, as if Bisochim’s spell was somehow pumping the liquid rock out of the Lake of Fire. When the torrent of rock reached the bottom, there was so much of it, glowing so brightly, that he had to look away. But there was still no heat.

  “Nice,” Harrier said. Tiercel couldn’t tell whether he was impressed or disapproving.

  As the light from the rock began to dim, Tiercel realized his nausea and dizziness were fading with it. When he felt steady enough to stand on his own, Tiercel stepped away from Harrier and opened his eyes. In place of the smooth face of Telinchechitl, there was a staircase leading up the side of the mountain. It was a perfectly ordinary stone staircase—except for the fact that it glowed red-orange with heat. Whatever Bisochim had done to keep them from being fried by the molten stone had ended when his magic had—the staircase was hot enough that all of them but Saravasse moved back.

  “A few moments more, and it will be cool enough that you may walk upon it,” Bisochim said.

  “How did you do that?” Harrier demanded.

  Bisochim smiled faintly. “Magic,” he answered.

  Harrier glanced over his shoulder. Tiercel followed his gaze. Ahairan still hadn’t moved. The Black Dogs were all lying down now, panting in the heat. The fact that they could behave so much like real dogs made Tiercel want to cry, and he didn’t know why. He thought of Pangan, of how the ikulas had been a distant cousin of these creatures, only Pangan was a Child of the Light just as the Isvaieni themselves were, and Ahairan’s creatures had been tainted and twisted in the moment of their creation. He wondered if—deep inside—the Black Dogs remembered what they’d been meant to be.

  Behind the Dogs, the Shamblers stood motionless. They glittered in the sunlight as the insects they carried crawled over them. The only movement on the desert was the Balwartas soaring in lazy circles high above.

  “I want you to stay here with Zanattar,” Harrier said, and for a moment, Tiercel thought Harrier was talking to him.

  “Then ‘want’ must be your master, Harrier, for I shall not,” Shaiara answered.

  “If you’d just—”

  “If I would just listen to your excellent reasons to do as I am bid? The Blue-Robes counsel. They do not command,” Shaiara informed Harrier.

  “Just because I’m going up the side of this stupid tehuko doesn’t mean you have to!” Harrier snarled. “Ahairan’s out there!”

  “So it will be much safer if I am as far away from her as possible,” Shaiara answered inarguably.

  “Wait,” Tiercel said, turning back to face them. “You aren’t planning to come to the top with me, are you?”

  “Sure I am,” Harrier said blandly. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Well . . . because you shouldn’t, that’s why,” Tiercel said. He looked hopefully at Shaiara, but she shook her head, refusing to argue for him. “This is something I—”

  “I lied to you,” Harrier said quietly.

  “I—What?” Tiercel said.

  “I lied to you,” Harrier repeated patiently. “Remember Kareta?”

  “She’s a unicorn,” Tiercel said. He glanced toward Ahairan’s army—no movement—and toward the staircase. Bisochim shook his head; it wasn’t cool enough to climb yet.

  “Yes,” Harrier agreed patiently. “Our friend Kareta, the unicorn I Called to ask about Ancaladar. There was MagePrice for that. I told you it was a light one. I lied to you.”

  He’d always known that Harried had lied about something. But if it was this—

  “I, well, you—what was it?” Tiercel stammered.

  “A heavy one. I haven’t paid it yet. I’m going to the top with you,” Harrier answered.

  “I will go as well,” Bisochim said. He placed a foot on the lowest step experimentally, then nodded in satisfaction and began to climb.

  Harrier sighed in resignation. “I thought you would.”

  IT was a long climb to the top, and when Tiercel had imagined it, he’d imagined being alone. He hadn’t thought it would be all five of them, because Saravasse was following Bisochim up the staircase as well. The stairs were cool enough to walk on, but they were still hotter than the ordinary rock, and that had been hot enough that he could feel it through the soles of his boots. Tiercel tried not to imagine what was coming, but he was terrified. The Firecrown had said he had to give up his life “of his own free will,” and Tiercel wanted to be willing, but what if being afraid of how much it would hurt meant that he wasn’t? How could he know? He could die and it could all be for nothing.

  Stop it, he told himself fiercely. If you’re thinking like that, you’re thinking what Ahairan wants you to think. The Demons are the ones who care whether or not you’re scared. The Firecrown doesn’t understand feelings at all. It won’t even notice.

  He felt a little better after that.

  “You think I don’t know what you’re planning to do,” Harrier said, when they were more than halfway up. “But I do. And I’m saying you haven’t thought it through. What if it doesn’t work? What if you’re wrong? And what if it does work?”

  Tiercel clenched his hands into fists and ducked his head. If he hadn’t, he might have tried to push Harrier off the staircase. Now? You’re bringing this up now?

  “That would be a good thing, righ
t? Not that I know what you’re talking about,” Tiercel answered, when he had his voice under control again. He knew what Harrier was doing. Harrier was doing what Harrier had done for as long as the they’d known each other: poking him, prodding him, trying to get him to lose his temper, lose his head, react.

  The stakes were too high for that this time.

  “Sure it would—if Ahairan’s the only Demon out there. How do we know what she’s been up to? How do we know the Firecrown isn’t going to cheat? How do we know that binding her is really going to bind her? She wasn’t even here when she caused all the original trouble—and with you and Bisochim gone, all the things she’s called up will still be out there, and I’d just like to point out that after they wipe all of us out, they’re going to go looking for other things to wipe out,” Harrier said, using his most irritating “being-reasonable” voice.

  “Not Bisochim.” The two of them had reached the top. The heat was nearly intolerable, and Tiercel knew he and Harrier couldn’t spend much time here. Well, they’d both be leaving soon. Just not by the same path. “Just me.”

  The staircase ended in a flat platform. It was as wide as the staircase itself, and perfectly square. Shaiara and Bisochim had stopped several steps below, taking as much shelter from the heat as they could. Tiercel looked out across the Firecrown Shrine. A lake of liquid rock bubbled and boiled perhaps a hundred feet below the platform. A furnace-hot wind blew over him and Harrier, pushing them back from the edge of the platform. This wasn’t the Lake of Fire from Tiercel’s visions, but seeing it gave him a shock of recognition just the same. It was here it had all begun. Here was where it would end. He didn’t see the Firecrown anywhere. Maybe it was down there. In the lake.

  “Just you.” Harrier’s voice was flat. “Really.”

  They stood on the platform, facing each other. The height was almost like seeing the world from the back of a dragon, but Harrier was focused too intensely on him to take advantage of it. Tiercel had seen, though. His winning argument. And Ahairan had given it to him.