The Enduring Flame Trilogy 002 - The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  “Someday I’d like to know how they knew that,” Harrier interjected irrepressibly. Kareta shoved him with her shoulder.

  “But there are many expressions of Darkness. Unfortunately, I now know which one you face.”

  “Get to the point,” Harrier muttered, but quietly now.

  “This magic, and its manifestation, is Demonic in nature,” Ancaladar finished. “I have seen the works of the Endarkened twice before, for though I would not Bond in the Great War, and spent most of its decades asleep and in hiding, still I knew much of what they did in that time. And I saw far more of their evil in the war that came after, the one which ended in the Great Flowering.”

  Harrier sighed. “Yeah. About that. Ancaladar, it can’t be the Endarkened. The Blessed Saint Idalia destroyed all of them forever. That’s why the Great Flowering happened at all. I mean, I’m no Preceptor of the Light or anything, but… everyone’s always said so. The Endarkened are all dead. And even, I mean, the real Idalia … when we met her. She said she killed the Queen of the Endarkened, so … it has to be true.”

  Tiercel looked down at his enormous friend, continuing to rub gently at the soft skin behind the eye socket. What Harrier said was nothing more nor less than what Tiercel had heard every Kindling when the story of the Great Flowering was retold: the Blessed Saint Idalia had destroyed all the Endarkened.

  Ancaladar blinked again, slowly. “There’s destroyed, and then there’s destroyed. Yes, all the offspring of Shadow Mountain that were placed into the world thousands of years ago by He Who Is were destroyed. If not at once, then soon thereafter. And no matter what the Endarkened themselves might have chosen to believe, they were never anything more than perversions of the Elves, as the Darkness cannot create, merely distort that which has been created. And yes, He Who Is was locked out of the world forever by Idalia’s willing sacrifice at the Place of Power and would never choose to meddle in the World of Form again even if he could: to have been defeated by time-bound creatures grates too heavily upon him. But so long as there is Life, it can be touched and twisted by the Elemental Quality of Darkness, because Darkness Itself is impossible to remove from the world. And that is what is happening here: the Darkness that is the essential nature of He Who Is and his creations touching Life once more to create a new race of Endarkened, identical to the original Endarkened only in intent.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Harrier complained, after thinking for a moment.

  “No,” Tiercel said. “It does. The original Endarkened were made from Elves by He Who Is. And he’s locked out of the world, but he still exists, right?”

  “Correct,” Ancaladar said.

  “And the Endarkened are all gone, but the way they were made … it can be done again, right?”

  “Nobody’s that stupid,” Harrier said. He thought for a moment. “And how could it be? Ancaladar said that He Who Is made the first set.”

  “Yes …” Tiercel said slowly. “I think that’s why it’s taking so long. I think a person is trying to do it. Being tricked, somehow. I don’t know. But the Fire Woman …”

  Despite himself he shuddered, and Harrier got up to drape an extra blanket around his shoulders. Even sitting next to Ancaladar’s radiant heat, Tiercel felt cold.

  “… she must be the, well, the piece of Darkness. The thing that’s going to bring the Endarkened back if she gets what she wants.”

  “But you said she wasn’t dark,” Harrier said plaintively.

  “It’s lying,” Kareta said, sounding exasperated and stamping her hoof. “Leaf and Star, Harrier Gillain! If the thing looked like Darkness Personified, do you think it could fool even you for a moment?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to want to call back the Endarkened,” Harrier snapped, sounding cross. “So … now that we know that, what do we do?”

  “I do not know,” Ancaladar said, sounding troubled. “My memory is long, and the histories of the Elves are longer, but this is something not contained in either. It is new, and so I cannot predict what you must do. It is why, you know, no one wished to tell you their thoughts and suspicions. You would have made plans to fight the old, and you do not face the old.”

  Harrier sighed, and stared up at the trees. “Fine. Great. So we’ve got a lot of new information that isn’t really useful right now. I’m going to make breakfast.”

  After they’d eaten, Harrier tried one last time to convince Kareta to return to the Elven Lands. He had as little success as he’d had the previous night. He gave up. If unicorns could go into battle against the Endarkened a thousand years ago, he supposed one unicorn could take care of herself now.

  Eight

  On the Shore of the Lake of Fire

  EVEN BEFORE THE Great War that had turned nearly all the world into a wasteland in which nothing grew, that part of the land which later became known as the Barahileth had been as it was now: hot, arid, and without any form of life that needed water to survive. But in those ancient days not all Life had required water, and millennia ago, the Barahileth had been home to a flourishing civilization: creatures whose form and nature was Fire.

  The Firesprites were only one of many races which had been destroyed utterly by the Endarkened because they had fought for the Light. The Barahileth had been their home, for water had been as destructive to them as fire was to those they named the Children of Water, and though rain might fall elsewhere in the Isvai—scantily, and at rare intervals—there was never rain in the Barahileth. Even the most powerful Wildmage could not coax water to the surface of its sands, and as hot as it was elsewhere in the desert, it was hotter here. This was a place over which hawks did not fly by day, for the heat was too punishing, and owls and bats did not fly through the air by night, for there was nothing in its skies, or upon its sands, to hunt.

  When the Isvaieni Wildmage Bisochim had begun his quest to restore the Balance, this was where he had come, for here, in the only Firesprite Shrine to survive the devastation wrought by the Endarkened, lay the knowledge he sought. The Shrine itself lay far beneath the surface of a lake of fire, and standing upon its shore, Bisochim drew upon his dragon’s power and created something the Barahileth had never seen in all its millennia of existence: a great fortress filled with fountains and gardens. With the inexhaustible power of Saravasse to draw upon, he had done what no other before him had ever been able to do, and called water up to the sands of the Barahileth from the deep rock beneath. Water to fill wells, water for irrigation canals to make the desert blossom, water for the fountains that cooled the air of the home he built for himself. Bisochim had first seen the light of day upon a rug in a tent of the Adanate Isvaieni, but with the power of his magic, on the cliff overlooking the Lake of Fire he had built a palace that would have dazzled the ancient Kings of Men.

  Its walls and terraces were of pale glistening stone fused together out of the desert sand, for the sand had once been rock and could easily be made to remember its former state. His stronghold was merged indissolubly with the black cliff, and many years before, though in those days Saravasse had spent more time at the palace than she did now, he had conjured a long curving staircase out of the stone to the land below in order to be able to leave his sanctuary without waiting for Saravasse to come and carry him forth.

  Though she was still subservient to his will by the magic that bound them both, were he to be dependent upon her to come and go from his fortress, there would be a long wait between his desire and its fulfillment, for Saravasse wandered far these days. But Bisochim did not leave it often. Long ago, the gold his magic had summoned from beneath the desert sands had allowed Bisochim to purchase everything his magic could not create. The palace was filled with everything he needed to survive: gardens, and animals, and spell-animated servants to tend them both, and as the years had passed, he had extended his gardens until the plain which had once been named Telinchechitl when its masters were creatures of living fire became filled with orchards and meadows brought forth from what had once
been lifeless desert sands. The air of these gardens was made sweet and cool by a hundred fountains—it was a profligate waste of water, but the power he commanded allowed Bisochim to summon an inexhaustible supply of water from the deep earth. Without it, nothing that grew could survive the heat of the Barahileth by day. Now he had reason to be grateful for so much foresight.

  For many years—since he had first come to the Firesprite Shrine to begin his studies on how to restore the True Balance—one vision had haunted him.

  He stands upon the ramparts of his fortress, looking out over the sand. Below him, two vast armies gallop toward each other, their weapons glittering in the sun. One is his. One belongs to the Enemy. He raises his hands, summoning up the Sandwind. It is their only hope: it will destroy the Enemy’s army.

  But it will also destroy his own.

  He hears Saravasse scream, and knows, in that terrible moment, that an army of merely human warriors is not the Enemy’s only weapon….

  No.

  While he lived, that day would not come to pass. Bisochim had done all that he could think of to do to prevent it: he had conjured up the shadow of the Great Power that the Firesprites had once worshipped here and sent the shade of the Firecrown forth to destroy his enemy while that enemy was still confused and weak. But just as the prudent hunter had more than one string to his bow, Bisochim knew that the Light had more than one huntsman.

  He knew that there were many who would name him foolish and even wicked for setting his will against the Light. Everyone was taught—he had been taught—that the Light was always good. But the children of the desert should know better. Light scoured. Light blinded. Light killed. It was Darkness that was the friend and ally of the desertborn, and the truth that all Wildmages should have understood without any need for Bisochim to teach it to them was that both Light and Darkness were vital to the Balance. It was for this reason first of all that he worked to restore the true Balance by bringing Darkness back into the world. The fact that he could save his Bonded from dying at the end of his brief life—because he would not die at all—only added urgency to his task. For Saravasse’s sake most of all, he must succeed.

  And to protect the Isvaieni from becoming the army that would face the Light in futile battle, he would hide them here, where they could not be found. To accomplish that task, Bisochim had once more donned the blue robes of an Isvaieni Wildmage and gone forth among the tribes, something he had not done in many years. He had spoken to the leaders of many of the tribes—urgently, persuasively. But not of their own safety. No. Desert life itself was a battle for survival; there was no battle from which the Isvaieni would run. Instead, he had spoken of war, had spoken of the sanctuary in the Barahileth as a place of only temporary retreat, a place where the tribes could gather and make themselves strong against the day when they would sweep the enemy from their desert home. It was the only way he could gather them together, the only way he could lead them to safety. And for the sake of what he had told them, they had agreed to follow where he led.

  If not for the numerous wells Bisochim had summoned up out of the sand, his people would have died upon the journey to the Lake of Fire, for never had so many Isvaieni—with all their flocks and herds—attempted to travel together. Survival in the desert meant not overtaxing the desert’s scant resources by gathering too many people in one place: the only time the tribes came together was for the yearly Gathering, when they spent a few short days at one of the largest oases to be found in the entire Isvai. For the rest of the year, each tribe followed its own path between Sand and Star, hunting, tending its flocks, and perhaps meeting occasionally to trade. Now they moved across the desert as if they were in fact the army of Bisochim’s vision, but this army journeyed not to war, but to a paradise such as none of them had ever imagined, a place where they might spend all their hours in idleness and play.

  Bisochim had dreamed, once he had settled his Isvaieni on the meadows and fields at Telinchechitl and returned to his fortress, of going back at once to his greater task, for the work of building the bridge, slowly and with infinite care, that would allow him to make that vital adjustment to the Great Balance. He must allow the possibility of Darkness to reenter the world without doing anything that might summon up the full hideous manifestation of it that had once nearly scoured the world bare of all life. Once he had accomplished that task, the waning power of magic would be revived and refreshed. He could bind his years to Saravasse’s. He would share in her immortality, not she in his mortality. The Wild Magic would be reborn, a proper measure of the world it shaped, as it had not been for centuries.

  This task had occupied him for years, and at last he was close enough to hope that another turn of the seasons, or two, or three—five at the most—might see his work completed. He begrudged every instant he spent away from that precious labor, even on the most necessary of tasks, but he had been resigned, even before he had arrived, to the knowledge that there would be one last problem to solve before returning to the work of setting the Balance back into true would be possible.

  In the Isvai, the tribes looked for aid in the ultimate problem of their survival to the Wildmages. Those who wore the blue robe were members of no tribe, and of all. In service to the Wild Magic, they went where they were needed: protecting the people from the ravages of the Sandwind, leading them to new wells when the old ones failed, finding the lost, healing the sick and the injured when they could, and providing counsel to help the Isvaieni live the lives the Balance asked of them. Between Sand and Star, no tribe trusted the lone traveler, for one who traveled alone might be a thief or an outcast. In the Isvai, tribe met only with tribe for the safety of all. Only those who wore the blue robes of the Wild Magic were exempt from this law; a Wildmage might travel with this tribe or that for a season, but all knew that those who held the Three Books walked alone upon the sand, listening always for the voice of the Wild Magic.

  For many years, Bisochim had hoped that others who bore the Three Books would see what he had seen. That he would gain allies. Bisochim had never approached any of his brethren openly, but he had watched them carefully. Should any of them even begin to question the insidious doctrines of the Light, he had vowed that he would seek them out to offer his friendship and support. But such a day had never come, and so he had realized that those who had once been his brothers would someday become his enemies. The other Wildmages did not understand, as he did, that the Balance was flawed.

  It had not surprised him that there had been no Wildmages among his Ingathering. He would have been more surprised if there had been: undoubtedly the False Light that they served had led them to keep themselves far from him, lest he show them the truth and gain powerful allies. He knew that once he took the tribes beyond their grasp, they would begin to move against him. They must. The Light would demand it. They would, in that moment, become his enemies as much as that unknown champion against whom he had sent the shadow of the Firecrown.

  He made one last bargain with himself. If the other Wildmages had merely fled the Isvai for the safety of the Iteru-cities, he would leave them in peace. The Wildmages of old had lived in harmony with a Balance that encompassed both Dark and Light. Surely—when his work was done—his brethren could strike such a balance as well.

  But this hope was disappointed as well.

  It took almost a fortnight after his return to the Barahileth before Bisochim could leave the tribes to their own devices. It took that much time for the Isvaieni to believe that a place so unlike anything most of them had ever seen could be real, and a place that they were meant to stay. And it took nearly all the days of those sennights for the tribes to settle the places where they would place their tents, for there must be places found for tents, and flocks, and cookfires among the fountains and the trees. But at last Bisochim was able to leave the Isvaieni to the care of their leaders, return to his stronghold, and descend to the deepest chamber within it.

  Even Bisochim was not certain of how far beneath the earth th
at chamber lay, for it was not a place he had made, but one he had found: a perfect bubble of black glass cast up by the Lake of Fire at some point in the distant past. He had made only two changes to what he had discovered here: he had smoothed the floor so that it was perfectly even, and in the center of the chamber, he had called a small pool of water from the deep earth. The pool was still and black, and he used its water for no purpose but his magic. Now he cast blood and powdered bone upon its surface, for he had spent a moonturn and more leading the tribes to this place, and sennights before that convincing them to come, and he must know what the other Wildmages had decided to do.

  The spell he cast did not show him the present. There were other, simpler, means of seeing that. And to see where a man or woman was in the world at the moment he looked upon them would not tell Bisochim what they meant to do. Only Time could tell him that. He gazed now into the pool, and saw the Wildmages of the Isvai gathered together, an army of grim purpose. They were mounted upon shotors, and led many more, and the shotors that they led were heavy-laden with waterskins. Enough, perhaps, to let them make their way across the Barahileth in pursuit of their people, if their magic was strong enough to permit them to sense the Isvaieni through the wards that Bisochim had set around his stronghold. And it would not even require magic—just now, and for sennights to come—to discover the way to the Lake of Fire. The passage of thousands of people and their herds across the desert had left a trail that it would not need magic to follow.

  But why and when and how they meant to follow did not matter. The intent was enough. Their plan must not be allowed to come to pass.

  And so Bisochim cast a second spell, a spell that would show him not What Would Be, but What Was. He saw the Blue-Robes as they sought one another across the sands of the Isvai. And he drew upon the power he had gained to send storm after storm across the Isvai, harrowing and scouring the desert with lethal Sandwinds until not one of them remained alive.