Forgery of the Phoenix

by Michael Angel

With an earth-shattering KA-BANG, Korr’s body lay crunched between the plant floor and the heavy disk. The impact on the underside of the phoenix’s beak shoved the rebar the rest of the way home. Six inches of ribbed metal projected wetly out the back of Korr’s head.

  I found the crane switch marked RETRACT and flicked it. Pulleys and gears whined for more lubricating oil as the metallic disk pinning Korr’s body rose ten, twenty, thirty feet in the air. Shaw flew up and hovered before me.

  “‘Tis not yet time for mercy!” he shouted over to me. “Thy foe is not yet beaten!”

  And sure enough, even with a length of metal impaling his skull, Korr got up shakily from the floor. His fire had barely diminished. The raptor’s eyes looked up hatefully through a mass of broken and bent head plumes.

  “I’m not done with him yet!” I called back.

  Shaw had been puzzled as to how the crane could pick up scrap metal without ‘hands’. The answer was that, like most scrap yards, their crane setup used an electrical lifting magnet. I pressed the big green square labeled ACTIVATE, and the magnet hummed to life.

  Korr screeched a strangled cry as he was jerked into the air, coming to rest against the underside of the magnet with a clang. Good. It proved out my suspicion that all phoenix had a large metallic component to their bodies.

  Pain cascaded down my hands as I went back to the joysticks. I gritted my teeth and ignored it. Yanking on the controls, I swung the crane around as Korr continued his struggle to free himself. He’d pried the upper half of his body loose by the time I’d finished moving the crane. Too late for him. I’d positioned the magnet over the crimson-warmed depths of the crucible.

  I flicked the RELEASE switch again. The magnet plunged to earth again, smashing Korr against the bottom of the electrically-powered furnace with a hollow BOOM. And yet, the dazed Seraphine got up again as I both retracted the magnet and turned it off.

  Liam called over in a badly strained voice. “I can hold this for only a little longer. Thirty seconds at most!”

  “Count me down from there, then!” I turned, and shouted across the plant floor. “Galen, keep Korr pinned down! Shaw, shove as much scrap as you can into the crucible!”

  Shaw nodded and flew over to the mass of twisted, broken metal. The griffin set up a raucous din as he began rummaging around. Galen’s lips moved as he murmured his next incantation. A ball of shimmering blue energy winked into existence at the tips of his fingers, ready for action.

  “Thirty,” Liam said, as he began his countdown. “Twenty-nine.”

  “Come on, Shaw!” I raged. “Come on!”

  “Twenty-six. Twenty-five. Twenty-four.”

  The griffin came back into sight at the edge of the scrap heap. Using his broad leonine shoulder, he shoved a stacked pair of rusted-out automobile frames across the floor. Without wheels, the frames moved with nail-biting slowness. An ungodly skree echoed through the building.

  “Eighteen,” Liam continued. “Seventeen. Sixteen.”

  Korr had just begun his climb out when the cars tumbled into the crucible. He fell back as they pinned him under nearly a ton of rusty metal. And then he did exactly what I’d been hoping for.

  The Seraphine dialed his brilliance back to white-hot.

  I knew that if Korr couldn’t lift the metal we’d dumped on top of him, he’d melt his way through. And that would make him vulnerable to one final event. I carefully stepped away from the controls and reached for the panel inset with the four lollipop-colored buttons.

  “Twelve. Eleven. Ten.”

  The car frames sagged, turning to goop under the phoenix’s intense heat. In only a few seconds, the crucible was awash in a bubbling soup of metal. Suddenly, Korr’s head poked out from the molten lake. The rebar stuck in his skull had also melted away. Only a tiny hole amongst his ruined plumes gave any clue that he’d been wounded.

  “You pitiful sparks!” he raged. “You cannot kill that which shall rise again!”

  “Five...” Liam recited. His voice sounded as if it were on its last legs. “Four...three...”

  I couldn’t chance waiting any longer.

  Quickly, I looked for the red button that had been labeled by OSHA, the people assigned by the U.S. Department of Labor to ensure workplace safety. The button gleamed back at me as if daring me to press it.

  I hit it with my thumb, activating the plant’s fire-suppression system.

  Immediately, compressed halon gas hissed out of nozzles surrounding the crucible, forming a thick white cloudbank that obscured the view of the area. Though it was thinner on the second and third floors, the vapor’s awful, mildewed-socks smell made everyone cough. But it was worth it to listen to Korr’s cries of frustration as they turned to shrieks of fear.

  I’d done enough crime scene work at arson sites to know about the systems they installed in plants like this one. Halon, the most effective fire suppressant known, not only smothered oxygen, it chemically blocked combustion from even happening in the first place. Korr wouldn’t be able to reignite his flames, no matter how hard he tried.

  A series of smothered chuffing sounds emanated from the furnace. As the halon dissipated, Liam tottered over to my side to survey the scene below. Shaw and Galen followed suit from their vantage points, watching the Seraphine’s final moments.

  The halon blocked combustion, but it couldn’t snuff out the heat in a cauldron of liquid steel. Korr thrashed weakly as the last of his flames vanished. His remaining form, with its bulging eyes and hideously pointed beak, barely even resembled a bird.

  Those eyes finally winked out for good as Korr went still.

  I watched both in fascination and horror as the creature’s beak pulled loose from its head and melted away. Then the skull made a whistling sound, like a kettle left on the stove too long, until it finally cracked in two with a puff of steam.

  The rest of Korr’s body came apart, piece by piece, and dissipated into corpse-gray slag.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Vapor the color of freshly blossomed goldenrods huffed out of the vents along the edge of the two active caldera back at the Vale of the Seraphine. I paused to admire it, even as the dormant caldera I stood on vibrated with a subterranean rumble. It was as if the land itself slumbered uneasily.

  I stood before one of the Vale’s open caves, waiting. I rubbed my hands together gently, trying my best not to give in to the urge to scratch. Even with Galen’s healing gel, my badly singed skin was still tender, and I’d picked up a pair of nasty blisters on the back of each hand.

  The darkness deep within the cavern vanished as Jett’s fire illuminated it from within. Her flames, which had been a subdued yellow before, had grown even paler now. Even the smell of sulfur I associated with the phoenix had diminished in intensity. Instead of the sharp tang of a struck match, my nose picked up the sour reek of boiled cabbage and broccoli.

  Korr’s mate awkwardly made her way to the cavern entrance. She blinked, and then turned to preen at a stray flame-feather that stuck out from one of her wings. I found that interesting. No matter how alien the species, each one had a ‘tell’ that displayed their nervous state.

  I supposed that was fair enough. Jett had a lot to be nervous about.

  “I am surprised and elated to see you, Quester,” she said, in that same musical voice. “To what do I owe your visit at this time?”

  “Well, let’s take that one piece at a time,” I said bluntly. “To begin with, you’re not elated to see me. And you certainly weren’t surprised.”

  “Oh, but I was only down in the caverns–”

  “Given how low you are on fuel, I doubt you’d be wasting any of it on a futile search for sustenance. Especially someplace like the Vale, which has been stripped of anything a Seraphine could eat for hundreds, if not thousands of years. You were Inert.”

  “If I was, how could I have known of your arrival?”

  “That’s actually a good question,” I admitted, as I paced a couple of steps. “It took me a while t
o figure out how your mate knew we were present. So that he could ambush us.”

  Jett made as if to speak, but a glance from me closed her beak.

  “That was after his first attempt to kill us,” I went on. “My friends and I finally puzzled it together, though. When you Seraphine are Inert, your perception is drastically curtailed, even in regards to the passage of time. But you’re still able to sense magical spoors. Korr knew that in our search, we’d be relying most heavily upon Liam, who’s our best tracker. So he went Inert and simply waited until he sensed the spoor of a fayleene’s magic to attack.”

  “I sense that you harbor a misunderstanding about our glorious people,” Jett suggested, her head-plumes all aquiver. “Surely Korr would do no such thing.”

  “What you mean is, ‘surely he would not fail’,” I said. “And that’s why I’m here. To set the record straight, to balance out the books. And because I don’t like loose ends that could come around to bite me.”

  Jett fixed me in her gaze, apparently deciding that the game was up. Her proud posture slumped to one of resignation. “What do you want, vicious little spark? I know little of these ‘books’ that you wish to balance.”

  “Tell me the truth. What happened when you and Korr awoke and became Active again? Did you participate in Pirr’s murder? Did you forge the message on the cave wall, or the summons to bring me here?”

  She shook her head. “The Quondam was beyond revival when we woke. The message and the summons were in place, as we said. It was obvious to us that Pirr did not create either message, for we are her servants. We know her way of writing. But only two things mattered to us. Pirr had found a new source of energy, and someone had been kind enough to point us to a spark who could take us there.”

  “Kind enough?” I sputtered. Anger began to rise in me like flames of my own. “Did it occur to either of you, for even an instant, that whoever forged the messages might not have your best interests in mind? Korr was led on by a magically charged piece of ruby, which he thought might be part of your ‘Hearts of the Mother’. He died thinking that we had hidden it from him!”

  “And did you?”

  “No, we hadn’t! Whoever forged your messages placed a few slivers of that same type of ruby deep inside a human building, all to tempt Korr there.”

  I was understating things a bit. ‘Deep inside’ meant that we had to send Shaw down into one of the smokestack scrubbers to retrieve those slivers. Try as I might, there was no way I could think of for those pieces of ruby to get there naturally.

  “My mate and I felt that he was powerful enough to spring whatever trap was in the offing and triumph over it.” She threw a baleful glance my way. “Apparently, you are stronger than you appear, spark.”

  “The only trap was your people’s arrogance and pride,” I shot back. “You and I have been played, Jett. We were manipulated by a third party into fighting with each other!”

  That’s not quite true, my mind pointed out. The manipulation alone hadn’t made each of us fight. But it had forced the Seraphine to show their hand. To expose them as Creatures of the Dark.

  “We did everything for the good of our people!” Jett said righteously. “There is nothing more important than our revival. Korr did nothing wrong!”

  “Not even when he tried to kill us, on two separate occasions?”

  “What is the price of a few worthless sparks, those who die after a few short decades or centuries, compared to those who grace the world with its most glorious and beautiful beings?”

  I set my jaw. Our conversation had gone about as well as I’d anticipated. It was almost time to bring this to an end.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” I said. “So before I leave, I want information. Tell me about the Old War.”

  “No. If you want a piece of knowledge, then you must give one in turn. Tell me how Korr met his end. He was my mate, I deserve that.”

  “All right,” I conceded. “I trapped him in a container of molten steel. I found a way to shut down his flame and then let the liquid metal dissipate his remains. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t chance his revival in my world.”

  A sad nod. “It is no more and no less than I would expect. There are times when compromise is not possible. When only one can emerge as the victor.”

  I said nothing to that. Jett continued speaking.

  “I shall give you one piece of information in return. There was a reason that the Quondam was the first to wake this time, instead of myself and Korr. Someone else had been to the Vale. They had found Pirr and woken her, for I sensed their magical spoor.”

  “Liam would have sensed that spoor on her body,” I objected.

  “The spoor was not on her body. I found it in the hollow, where Pirr had stored her Inert form.”

  “Who was it?” I asked. “Who woke the Quondam?”

  The reply was curt. “The ancient captain of the dragons. You sparks call him ‘Sirrahon’.”

  I inclined my head slightly. “Thank you for honoring the deal, Jett. I wish that you and Korr had acted this way before. We might have found some way to help each other.”

  “And now you will try and end me, as well as my kind.” Jett let out a mirthless chuckle. “I see a long and arduous task ahead of you. You have seen how difficult it was to kill Korr, let alone an entire valley of Seraphine. You may have thwarted us, yes. But you cannot destroy all of us!”

  “I don’t want to destroy you,” I said softly. In my mind, I saw Nox’s dying owl face, right before I pulled the trigger of my gun. “I want to step away from killing, at least for a little while. The last time...that act took a piece of me with it.”

  I had to stop and take a breath before I went on.

  “I won’t kill any of your people. But I can’t risk your revival. You’re all powerful weapons in the wrong hands. The hands of those who want to refight the Old War. So, I’m going to remove you from this world for a long, long time.”

  “You don’t have the magic,” Jett scoffed. “You have no way to ‘remove’ us!”

  “Not personally, no,” I said. “But those bits of ruby certainly have a lot of magic potential. Explosive potential, in fact. That’s why I had Grimshaw plant a sliver of ruby at the top of each of the mountains that surround this Vale.”

  I raised my hand above my head. A series of barely audible pafs tickled my ears.

  “What was that?” Jett asked nervously.

  “That was Galen and Liam. If you recall, the centaur is also a wizard.”

  I paused as I heard a distant rumble, like the indigestion of a sleeping giant. The sound rapidly grew louder. The slashing hiss of snow and gravel, the deeper rumble of boulders uprooted from their resting places.

  “Galen found a way that he and Liam could magically detonate the ruby slivers. The rest is just physics. You have extremely steep slopes on the mountains surrounding your Vale. And those slopes have an awful lot of ice and rock just hanging there. Waiting for something to jar them loose in a massive avalanche.”

  Now the ground began to shake. One of the caldera’s vents belched more yellow smoke, as if in anticipation of what was about to happen. The rumbling turned into a full-fledged roar as the slopes around us began to vanish under the rush of a deadly white cloud. A cloud made up of untold tons of snow and stone.

  “We did nothing wrong!” Jett cried over the din. “We only wanted to survive!”

  “Yes, I know,” I agreed, as I took out the freshly charged transport-spelled medallion and held it between my fingers. “But I’m afraid that I took it kind of personally.”

  I squeezed the medallion and winked out of there. The last thing I saw before the eye-frying whiteness enveloped me was Jett’s pathetic attempt to fly before a tsunami of white engulfed her with a massive SWOOSH.

  Galen, now back in his centaur form, reached an arm out to steady me as I came out of transport. We stood at the summit of a nearby ridge line. Stretched out before us lay a glass-smooth expanse of mountains now stripp
ed of snow and soil. The Seraphine’s bowl-shaped Vale was now filled to the brim.

  Liam picked his way up the slope to join us. Shortly afterwards, as the distant cloud of icy dust began to settle, Shaw came in to land next to Galen. Both the drake and the fayleene Protector looked on with some satisfaction, while Galen’s expression was more thoughtful than anything.

  “It had to be done,” Liam stated firmly.

  “Aye,” Shaw agreed. “They were excellent foes. ‘Tis good news for us that they shan’t join the ranks of enemy.”

  “At least for now,” Galen mused. “That is a volcanic caldera down there. Given time, the snow shall melt. The rocks shall settle. Soil and gravel shall be subject to removal by erosion. Jett and her people may yet get a chance to return after several centuries have passed, or at most a couple millennia.”

  “They might,” I agreed. “But we’ll all be long gone by then. Speaking as a short-lived spark, that’s plenty good enough for me.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Tea came in three varieties for the Hoohan that made up the newly constituted Parliament. ‘Sage Water’, ‘House Mouse’ and ‘Owl Grey’. The first tasted like lawn clippings soaked in hot water. I didn’t get up the nerve to try the second. The last was a better-than-decent mix of black tea with something like red grapefruit thrown into the mix.

  I had sipped my way through two full cups during my private conference with Albess Thea. Partly because all the talk was leaving me parched, but also because of the weather. This particular December morning had come complete with a woolly blanket of gray clouds and fluffy white flurries of snow.

  We’d begun with light, social talk. The Albess seemed somehow ill-at-ease at my arrival, and I thought that asking about lighter subjects would smooth things out. I inquired about Xandra’s advancing pregnancy, and Thea asked about holiday gift giving once I told her about going out with Esteban to buy Christmas gifts for friends and family.

  “We too give gifts in Andeluvia,” Thea specified, “but only at the start of spring. Here, to present a gift so close to the ‘death’ of the old year, is seen as unlucky.”