The Heart of the Phoenix

by Brian Knight

  Erasmus stood before the uncovered table, which was not a table at all but a door, old and splintered, set into a frame and elevated above the floor on four crooked legs. He dug through his pockets while his enemies closed in from all sides and above, cautious at first, then aggressively when he didn’t repeat his trick with the black box.

  “Where is it?” Erasmus rifled through the many pockets of his long coat. Objects hit the ground at his feet as he turned out his pockets; a telescoping looking glass, a set of chattering teeth that began to march in circles around him, braying laughter as it walked, an old iPod, its screen blank, powered down, a red silk bowtie.

  “Give up, Monk!” The tattooed man limped at the head of a small contingent of ground troops, humans and humanoids, mercenaries and desert scum. He bared his pointed teeth at Erasmus in a feral grin, dodged a spell that Erasmus sent his way with casual grace. The spell hit a wild looking human behind the tattooed man and sent him flying into a tight packed group behind them.

  The tattooed man’s grin became a grimace as he advanced on his wounded leg. He produced another wand from a holster on his belt and fired at the distracted Monk.

  Erasmus’s twirling spear splintered and flew in all directions. A moment later the first avian dropped through the shattered ceiling, and Erasmus was too slow to avoid it. It crashed into him, and they sprawled on the floor. The avian threw a fist, and Erasmus dodged it. He heard the birdman’s fist break against the brick floor. The avian’s moan of pain became a howl as Erasmus darted his head forward and bit his neck. It lashed out, its beak closing over one of Erasmus’s wands, and yanked it free of the living dreadlock’s grip.

  A second avian landed next to them and clamped his long, clawed toes around Erasmus’s throat. A third landed, then a fourth, and he fired wildly at them before they seized his last wand.

  A moment later they stood around him in a tight circle, avians, humans, and others. The Cardinal dove down and perched above them on one of the remaining shack walls.

  “On second thought, I don’t think anyone will mind if we damage him a little.” The fat red avian clicked his beak and chuckled.

  “Let him go,” the tattooed man said, and the others did, backing away to stand against the walls, giving their savage leader the room he required.

  “Is this to be a physical contest?” Erasmus asked. “Because I should warn you that I’m…”

  The tattooed man flourished his wand like a sword, then pointed it at Erasmus.

  The chubby monk flew from the floor like a marionette under the control of an unskilled puppeteer and hung in the air, the tips of his toes scraping through the rubble.

  “Feeling a little weak at the moment,” Erasmus finished.

  Erasmus braced himself for an attack, but the tattooed man returned his wand to its holster and paced. He seemed to consider the little monk, looking him up and down, grinning and cracking his knuckles. He turned briefly to consider his audience, then spun, launching a foot up into Erasmus’s face.

  The monk cried out in surprise and pain, spinning in place where he was suspended. The top of his tall hat brushed the floor and fell off. The miniature Plumed King took squawking flight, then vanished in a puff of smoke and drifting feathers. A tarnished doorknob rolled out of it, coming to rest under the table.

  Laughter rang out above and below as Erasmus’s spin slowed and stopped with his toes brushing the floor again. His head sagged, his chin resting against his breastbone, blood dribbling from his mouth and nose. He sagged, semi-conscious for a moment, then shook his head and lifted his gaze to the tattooed man. His dark goggles had slipped down the bridge of his nose. One of his lively dreadlocks tugged at the adjustable strap that held them in place, loosening it.

  “How did such a weak-bodied worm like this survive so long?” the tattooed man asked in heavily accented Dingo, an antiquated native dialect long ago appropriated from the southern region’s lawless nomad communities.

  “If you really want to know that, you nomad scab, come a little closer and I’ll tell you,” Erasmus whispered, just loud enough for him to hear.

  The tattooed man’s face cramped with anger, flushing bright red, and for a moment Erasmus saw his hand dip back toward his wand. Then he mastered his emotions, favored the monk with a hard grin, and stepped forward. He stopped, nearly nose to nose with the suspended monk, and glared directly into the black circular lenses of Erasmus’s goggles.

  “Ya have something strong to say, island scum?”

  The animated dreadlock working unobtrusively on the strap holding the dark goggles in place gave a yank, and they fell free, exposing the monk’s wide black eyes.

  “Because I’m much smarter than you,” Erasmus said, and smiled so broadly that the corners of his mouth seemed to touch his ears.

  All expression left the tattooed man’s face, all tension fell from his body, and his pupils swelled as he stared into Erasmus’s exposed eyes. The force holding Erasmus broke, and he thumped unsteadily to his feet.

  The crowd of mercenaries and scum gathered behind the tattooed man regarded one another with confusion.

  Above them the scattered avians drew closer together to see what was holding up their show.

  “Don’t look into his eyes, you fool,” the Cardinal screamed above them, but too late.

  “Be a good fellow and help me out, will you,” Erasmus said.

  Without looking away, not even blinking, the tattooed man raised his wand and fired a volley into the group of fliers gathered above the shattered ceiling.

  The avians squawked and scattered into the sky. Two fell, landing just out of sight behind one of the adobe’s intact walls. The Cardinal cursed, then took panicked flight as the tattooed man fired a second volley at him.

  The foot soldiers attacked as one, rushing the tattooed man. They leapt at him, on him, trying to drag him down, disarm him, but they might as well have attacked a statue. He spun on the spot, wand firing and fist flying, and scattered them.

  Free from his magical bonds and the unwanted attention of a dozen or more unfriendly intruders, Erasmus decided the time had come for his exit. He bent low, scooped up his hat, and then dropped it again in favor of the tarnished old doorknob.

  “There you are!”

  He dropped to his knees in search of his wand, and settled on the old iPod when he couldn’t find it.

  He was rising again when he felt the point of a wand press into the small of his back, and heard the Cardinal’s voice behind him.

  “My orders were to bring you back alive,” the Cardinal said, “but I’ll take a scolding for the pleasure of seeing you dead.”

  Erasmus froze, doorknob in one hand, iPod in the other, and every dreadlock standing on end, as if raised in surrender.

  “I think alive is a pretty good idea myself.”

  “Don’t grovel, old friend.” A new and unexpected voice joined the conversation. A familiar voice, one Erasmus was mostly glad to hear. “It’s undignified.”

  The Cardinal gave a surprised squawk, and the wand tip pressing into Erasmus’s back vanished. There was a thump, a thud, and a drift of bright red feathers falling down before the monk’s wide, black eyes.

  “Ronan?” Erasmus spun to face the newcomer, and cheered at the sight.

  “Point those things somewhere else,” Ronan barked. “I’d rather not lose what’s left of my mind today.”

  Erasmus closed his eyes and wrestled the dark goggles back over them, tightened the strap that held them in place, then faced Ronan again with his wide, manic grin.

  Ronan stood nearly ten feet tall with a muscular humanoid frame covered in sleek red fur. He wore a loose and tattered poncho and loose fitting short pants, the garb of a desert dweller, though his home was far west of the heat-blasted desert sand-scape where they stood. His vulpine features were partly obscured by the hood of a sand-crusted cloak, but his snout was open in the familiar foxy grin, and his yellow eyes seemed to glow in the darkness under his hood.


  Erasmus fought the urge to rush his old friend and embrace him, remembering that he was still annoyed with the medaling old fox, but couldn’t quite kill the grin on his face.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “I’ve been close,” Ronan confessed. “And a little birdie told me you were in some distress.”

  The miniature Plumed King darted out from beneath Ronan’s hood and perched on the tip of his snout, glaring down at the monk.

  “You’re welcome,” it snapped, then flew back inside the upended top hat resting in the rubble of the disintegrated north wall.

  Erasmus grimaced down at the Cardinal’s prone form and gave it an irritable kick. “I’m running out of places to hide, old friend.”

  “You know what the solution is, old friend.” Ronan looked at the doorknob in Erasmus’s hand, then the horizontal door currently serving as a table. There was a hole in the wood near the locking tongue, but no knob.

  “I was desperate… it’s not an idea I embrace.” The monk regarded the scattered unconscious bodies lying around them, then the tattooed man standing docilely behind him, wand in hand and waiting for orders. “Why don’t you be a good fellow and run along. Make sure no one bothers us.”

  The tattooed man nodded and left them alone.

  “How long will he be working for you?”

  Erasmus took a moment to consider. “A few seconds of eye contact is usually good for a few minutes, but that one is so dumb he’s barely sentient. Could last for hours.”

  “Then may I suggest a hasty escape before the Cardinal’s lackeys regroup and make another attempt?”

  Erasmus shrugged, resigned, and fitted the spike at back of the doorknob into the hole in his horizontal door. “So where are we going then?”

  Ronan chuckled. “I’m heading west again. You’re going somewhere a little more… distant.”

  “I’d guessed that much,” Erasmus snapped.

  “Remember the avian that captured you and stole your collection of relics?”

  “How could I forget?” Erasmus hugged himself, as if trying to massage a sorely bruised ego.

  “You’re going to meet the girls who defeated him and took all those dangerous toys away.”

  “The Phoenix Girls?” Erasmus sounded almost curious.

  Ronan nodded.

  “I haven’t been to Dogwood in years.” The smile returned, but wilted quickly. “What new trouble are you about to get me into?”

  Ronan only smiled and gestured toward the door.

  Beneath them, the Cardinal began to groan.

  “I suppose we should kill this one,” Erasmus said, but without any real enthusiasm.

  “We should, but we won’t,” Ronan said. “The King might do it for us when he fails to bring you back.”

  “The King?” Erasmus had not expected that. “I thought the avians were looking for me.”

  “They are,” Ronan said. “But King Tynan is the one who hired the Vulture to find you.”

  The Vulture was the name of a large gang of outlaw nomads that called this desert home, though if there was an actual Vulture no one outside of the gang had ever seen him. The fat red avian currently snoozing on the ground behind them seemed to be the one in charge.

  “Help me drag them outside. If I’m leaving I’ll need to cover my exit, and it will look better if these fools survive.”

  Ronan was apprehensive. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  Erasmus held up the old iPod and grinned his ear-to-ear grin. He could have tried to explain, again, what happens when Old Earth electrical gadgets encountered this world’s much stronger electro-magnetic field, but Ronan didn’t have a mind for science.

  “I’m going to make a great big hole in the ground, and hope everyone thinks I was blown to dust along with my home.”

  A few minutes later they stood in the open air, sand blowing around them, unconscious bodies scattered, the tattooed man standing in the far distance keeping guard. The avians who had escaped could be back with reinforcements at any moment. It was time to part.

  “Be safe, and don’t call too much attention to yourself over there,” Ronan said.

  “I know how to keep a low profile, Ronan,” Erasmus said, twiddling his recovered wand in one hand while his living dreadlocks straightened and snugged his tall black hat more securely on his head. One by one they slithered back under the cover, the last pausing for a moment to wave goodbye at Ronan. “Can I expect to see you on the other side?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Ronan said, flashing his vulpine smile. He turned away, then back to Erasmus. “Tell your bird goodbye for me. I like him.”

  Erasmus scowled at Ronan’s retreating back, then scurried back down the recessed entrance to his half demolished home.

  He hesitated only a moment, looked around, then shrugged. No matter how much he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to miss the place.

  He turned the knob, one of the old relics stolen by that bounty hunter avian and returned by Ronan only a few months before, and then opened the door and lifted himself up and into the frame of the door that led to another world. He removed the doorknob and dropped it in a pocket, pushed the power button on the old iPod, and dropped it onto the rubble-covered floor.

  Erasmus vanished through the doorway, and it slammed shut behind him, once more just a table.

  On the floor, the iPod began to play several songs at once. The screen glowed brighter and brighter, then began to shiver and smoke. Then it exploded.

  When Erasmus’s would-be kidnappers awoke, the adobe was indeed nothing but a crater, a hole at the center of a debris field.

  One of the senior avians, a crow so old his feathers were beginning to gray, regarded the Cardinal gravely.

  “Weren’t we supposed to bring him back alive?”

  The Cardinal clutched and twisted at the chain hanging from his neck as if he wished it was Erasmus’s throat. Then he pointed at the tattooed man, standing at the edge of perception and looking very confused, and said, “I blame him.”

  The old crow nodded agreement. He liked that idea.

  Chapter 2

  Mirror Image

  Penny knew she’d changed a lot over the past summer. She’d grown taller, nothing like Zoe, but seemed at least to be catching up to her other non-amazon friends. She had also slimmed down, shedding what Susan called baby fat from her legs, stomach, and waist, while filling out in other areas. She was a bit of a late bloomer in that regard, but was neither excited nor dismayed that her body seemed to be making so many changes without her permission. The bigger changes had happened a few years before when she was still in California, and she had too many things on her mind to obsess over her new feminine curviness. The outside of her body was finally catching up with the inside. That was all.

  Even her face seemed to be changing, the slightly pudgy face of the child that was slimming into the more angular face of the woman she would become.

  The new figure mostly changed nothing, because she was still just Penny, but the new way the town boys looked at her whenever she made it into town was just creepy. She caught them staring sometimes and had to fight an urge to jab their eyes out.

  Then there was the thing with Trey, that boy who had chased Zoe for so long but who had finally given up on her. Penny had been slightly jealous of the attention he’d always shown Zoe, and pleasantly surprised when, after Zoe’s departure that summer, he’d started noticing her.

  The kiss had also been a surprise, more like an ambush, but the biggest shock had been her first response. Though she’d never kissed a boy, she found herself kissing back. She’d ended it then, and in a hurry, and had avoided Trey ever since. She had tried to avoid thinking about him too but had been less successful. After a lot of agonizing she had decided to wait until Zoe had returned, to make sure she would be okay with Penny and Trey, before there was a Penny and Trey.

  She had told no one else, not Katie, Ellen, or Susan. It would be bad enough having to talk to
Zoe about him.

  If all of this new insecurity was another symptom of her changing, then she would rather just skip it.

  Penny knew she had changed, but seeing that change standing right in front of her, a perfect doppelganger standing only a few feet away and speaking to her, was uncanny.

  * * *

  Is it a dream?

  It didn’t feel like a dream, but it didn’t feel real either.

  She was in a cave, small distant sounds echoing endlessly around her. Dripping water, the skittering of small claws on stone, a dislodged pebble. The light was low, but there was enough to see the girl standing a few feet away, facing her with the same curiosity. A face Penny knew well from her own mirror.

  “Is this a dream?” Penny and her lookalike spoke at the same time, then smiled and laughed in unison. They took hesitant steps toward each other, paused.

  “Who are you?” Penny reached a shaking hand toward the other. The doppelganger flinched back, then held her ground as Penny touched her cheek and ran a finger through the thick red hair falling over her shoulder. She was real enough, no phantom.

  “Who do you think I am?” The girl relaxed visibly as Penny withdrew her hand, but continued to regard her with an intensity that made Penny want to squirm.

  Penny bit back the first retort that came to mind, If I knew I wouldn’t have asked, and considered the question. She scrutinized the girl, a mirror image dressed in the same denim capris and tank top as herself, and Penny was again shocked by the changes she’d gone through in just a few months.

  “Are you me?” As soon as the question was out it seemed the obvious answer, and she decided it was a dream, or something very close to one.

  “You are me,” Penny rephrased the question as a statement of fact, then nodded to reinforce it. “This is a dream.”