The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  He didn’t know precisely how old the great black dragon was, and he doubted that Tiercel did either. He knew that Ancaladar was at least a thousand years old, because he wasn’t just any black dragon named Ancaladar, he was the Ancaladar: Ancaladar Star-Crowned, who had fought against the Endarkened. But Ancaladar had said once that he’d seen the start of the war that had come before that one, and Tiercel said that war had been a thousand years before the Great Flowering, so Ancaladar was … older than anything Harrier could easily imagine. Older, even, than Armethalieh, and Harrier had grown up knowing that he lived in the oldest and most famous of the Nine Cities.

  He walked over and sat down, using Ancaladar’s shoulder for a backrest. Ancaladar might be an ancient creature of magic, but in the short time he’d known him, Ancaladar had also become Harrier’s friend. He glanced over at Tiercel, who still had the vague look on his face that meant he wasn’t paying attention to anything in particular. Harrier stretched out a hand and snapped his fingers in front of Tiercel’s face.

  Tiercel jumped, and his eyes focused. He looked around for Kareta (who was standing facing them, and if she’d been human Harrier was pretty sure she’d have her arms folded over her chest and be tapping her foot) and then looked at Harrier.

  “You’re going to be a Wildmage,” he said in tones of disbelief.

  “A Knight-Mage,” Kareta said. “And he can still refuse, you know. People have refused to become Wildmages.”

  Harrier wondered how she knew.

  “But this is different,” Tiercel said slowly. “A Knight-Mage isn’t just any ordinary Wildmage. They’re special. They do things no ordinary Wildmage can do. Wildmages keep the Great Balance, and do the work of the Wild Magic, but Knight-Mages … make things happen.”

  “Will you stop talking about this as if it were something interesting that didn’t really matter?” Harrier demanded. “This is me! And I can’t be a Knight-Mage!”

  “Why not?” Ancaladar asked, before either Kareta could argue or Tiercel could ask the same question.

  “Well,” Harrier said slowly, “Knight-Mages have to be able to fight, don’t they? That’s why they’re called Knight-Mages. And I don’t know anything about fighting.”

  But Roneida—the Wildmage that they’d met on the Great Plains, the one who had told them to go to the Elves—had given him a sword. She’d brought gifts for all of them, but she’d brought only Harrier a sword. He wondered if she’d known, all that time ago, if this might happen.

  “Foo! That’s simple!” Kareta said. “Cast a spell and summon yourself up a teacher! The Mageprice shouldn’t be too great for that!”

  Harrier did his best not to recoil in horror. Cast a spell? Okay, that’s what Wildmages did (and there must be some kind of directions on how to do it in the Three Books), but… he still hadn’t agreed to any of this.

  And that wasn’t the only problem he had with becoming a Knight-Mage.

  This morning, he’d known what his place in the scheme of things was. Take care of Tiercel. Take care of Ancaladar, too (as much as he needed taking care of). How was he supposed to do that if he had magical things to do too? He was thinking back to all the stories he’d ever heard about Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy—Kellen who’d had his own unicorn (and Shalkan had probably been much nicer than Kareta was, Harrier thought darkly); Kellen who’d been the greatest warrior—human or Elven—the world had ever seen; Kellen who had slain hordes of monsters with an Elven-forged sword that only he could wield; Kellen who’d gathered together a great army and led it against the Endarkened.

  If anybody’s safety depended on Harrier’s ability to do anything even remotely like any of those things, the world was doomed.

  “WELL, HE DOESN’T have to do that right this minute, does he?” Tiercel asked hesitantly.

  The golden unicorn was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen—well, next to Ancaladar, of course—and that made it slightly hard to concentrate while he was staring at her. But she did seem just a little bit … pushy.

  And he’d gotten a good look at Harrier’s face as he’d stomped off into the wagon to change clothes. He’d known Harrier almost all their lives, and that was quite long enough for Tiercel to know when Harrier was scared to death about something and would rather die than admit it. And Tiercel knew how Harrier felt about him having magic. He’d barely gotten used to the idea in half a year, and it still made him nervous.

  “Of course not!” Kareta said sarcastically, tossing her head. “He can just stand around and dither—even though he’s the first Knight-Mage chosen by the Wild Magic since the time of Kellen Tavadon!”

  Harrier sighed. “Well, can’t it just choose someone else?” he asked hopefully. He sighed again, more deeply. “Only … I don’t know of anyone who’s ever refused the Three Books. Do you?”

  He stared firmly at Kareta, so Tiercel did too. He wasn’t sure what made him think so, but Tiercel almost got the feeling she looked … embarrassed. Finally she looked away.

  “Not … forever,” she finally admitted.

  “Well, there you are,” Harrier said gloomily. He looked at Tiercel. “We both know—the Light teaches—that the Wild Magic never gives you a gift if you aren’t going to really need it. Which is why you’ve got that High Mage magick. But there were High Mages a lot more recently than there were Knight-Mages, weren’t there?”

  According to everything Tiercel had read back in Karahelanderialigor, High Magick had just sort of … died out slowly in the centuries following the Great Flowering. He’d told Harrier that, of course, but he hadn’t thought his friend had been listening.

  “I told you! You’re the first one chosen since Kellen! You should be pleased!” Kareta said brightly.

  “Yeah,” Harrier said, sounding anything but. “Okay. Fine. But I’m not going to go around casting a bunch of spells just because you think I ought to. And I might change my mind. But… come on. We should probably get a move on. We’ve wasted enough of the day already.”

  He got to his feet and walked over to where the horses were waiting, hitched on a loose rope to the side of the wagon. He began harnessing them for the day’s journey. In Harrier’s mind, obviously, the discussion was over.

  BUT TIERCEL KNEW that even if his friend didn’t want to talk about it anymore, the matter was far from settled, and for that reason, Tiercel continued to brood about the morning’s strange turn of events, even after they’d finally started down the road at last.

  The world was a strange and beautiful place as seen from the back of a dragon. Tiercel had always been terrified of heights—even climbing a ladder would make him nervous, and as for climbing into a ship’s rigging (something Harrier had often urged him to do, back in the days when, as children, they’d been able to amuse themselves by running around the Port of Armethalieh, not quite getting into trouble), well, that was something he’d found completely impossible. So logically, riding on the back of a dragon, hundreds of feet higher than the tallest ship or the tallest tower in Armethalieh, should have terrified him.

  But it didn’t.

  He could feel Ancaladar’s amusement through the Bond that they shared. Ancaladar could always tell what he was thinking, though he’d said (quite matter-of-factly) that Tiercel wouldn’t live long enough for the opposite to ever become true. It was one more reminder that from Ancaladar’s point of view, their relationship, even though it would last the rest of Tiercel’s life, would be a brief one. And it would end in Ancaladar’s death, for both halves of a Bonding died at the same moment. Without the Great Spell cast by Sandalon Elvenking, Ancaladar would be dead now.

  “Do not think of such things, Tiercel,” Ancaladar said aloud. “It is the nature of the Great Bargain struck on behalf of my kind by Tannetarie the White with Great Queen Vieliessar Farcarinon in the morning of the world. I do not regret the opportunity to know you. And you are more worried about another matter, I think, than this one, which is something we have discussed before,” he added reprovingly.
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br />   “Harrier,” Tiercel said, and Ancaladar snorted in understanding.

  Tiercel glanced over Ancaladar’s shoulder, down at the ground below. The road they were following was a pale tracery against the green of the landscape around. Through the trees, Tiercel could see the sparkle of the stream; the road paralleled it. In the distance, he could see a plume of smoke rising into the sky; Ancaladar said it was another Elven settlement—a farm—and that they should reach it tomorrow or the next day.

  Almost directly below them (Ancaladar flew in great sweeping circles in order to pace himself to the wagon’s slower rate of travel) Tiercel could see the wagon that contained all of his and Harrier’s possessions, and, moving along beside it, the golden spark that must be Kareta. Harrier had done his best to convince her to go away, since she’d already delivered the Three Books, and Kareta had insisted (she was just as stubborn as Harrier was, Tiercel thought) that he was much too entertaining to leave behind just yet. So now they were traveling with a unicorn as well as with a dragon. He wondered how long that would go on. Did all Knight-Mages have unicorns? It wasn’t really as if there were anyone he could ask. Ancaladar had been alive in a world filled with both Knight-Mages and unicorns—during the Great War—but he’d spent that war in hiding in order to keep from Bonding. Because in the Great War, dragons and their Bonded had died—quickly—in the fight against the Endarkened.

  “And those who were not Bonded died as well,” Ancaladar said. Even after two thousand years, his voice still held sadness. “I should have stayed to fight instead of hiding.”

  “If you had, you wouldn’t have been there when Jermayan needed you,” Tiercel said. It felt so strange to be talking about ancient legends as if they were ordinary people—and Elves—but of course they had been once.

  “They were always ordinary people,” Ancaladar admonished, changing the subject. “It is you who have made them into legends and wondertale heroes. Kellen was much like Harrier. At the beginning and at the end.”

  “What?” Tiercel said. “He refused to become a Knight-Mage? Or do magick?”

  “He doubted his ability to be what the Wild Magic wished him to be,” Ancaladar said simply.

  But Tiercel knew that there was much more behind Harrier’s reluctance than just doubt in his own abilities and distrust of magic. He knew that Harrier had “decided” that his purpose was to take care of everything in the way of day-to-day chores—and everything else he could manage to do—so that Tiercel “only” had to worry about turning himself into a High Mage.

  And that was another part of the problem.

  Tiercel knew he couldn’t do that. Yes, he had Ancaladar, he had the Magegift, but what he didn’t have was time: the decades to spend in study and meditation to make himself into someone who completely understood the complicated system of the High Magick; someone who not only had committed hundreds of spells to memory, but all the complicated details of how and when and why to cast each one.

  Harrier didn’t know this, of course, but Tiercel was pretty sure that he sensed it at some level, and that was why (Tiercel knew) Harrier hadn’t argued longer or louder or harder against becoming a Knight-Mage. He wanted to be able to help Tiercel, and protect him, too. And because of that, Harrier was going to take on something he didn’t want, and didn’t feel ready for, and still try to do everything else as well.

  Tiercel didn’t have the faintest idea of what you needed to do to become a Knight-Mage, but what he did know was that Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy hadn’t been trying to take care of a bunch of other people while he did it. He’d had a bunch of other people taking care of him.

  Which is exactly what we need, and don’t have, Tiercel thought with an exasperated huff. An army.

  He knew Ancaladar could hear him, but the great black dragon said nothing at all.

  Two

  A Journey into Legend

  THE MADIRAN DESERT stretched across the lands far to the south of the Nine Cities. Upon its border—deep within the lands that those in the Cold North would already name as “desert”—were the Iteru-cities, the walled Border Cities where most of those people who called the desert “home” lived. In the language of the South, “iteru” meant “well,” for here in the south, one might live a round handful of years without ever seeing rain fall upon the land, and the Iteru-cities could only exist in places where wells had been sunk deep into the living rock to provide the ample amount of water that so many people living so close together required.

  Yet the Iteru-cities did not hold all the desert’s inhabitants. Further south, the Madiran turned to a trackless landscape of erg and dune-sea, a place known as the Isvai Quarter, a harsh and trackless sea of sand. To the people of the Isvai, the Iteru-cities and the land immediately around them seemed lush and water-fat paradises, for in the Isvai Quarter, the only sources of water were tiny desert wells and a few—a very few—oases. These sources of water were not only few and far between, but they might go dry at any moment. Not only skill, but luck was needed to survive in the Isvai, and both skill and luck were bound up in the Isvaieni’s relationship to kin—not only the members of their own tribes, but to all the tribes that called the Isvai “home.” For the first lesson any child of the Isvaieni learned was that there was no charity given or received between Sand and Star, for the lives the tribes led were too harsh and uncertain to allow them to expend food or water or shelter on any who did nothing to earn those things. But if there was no charity tendered upon the sands of the Isvai, then—equally—no person who lived between Sand and Star did anything to make another’s burden harder.

  Or so it had been once.

  Now tribe was set against tribe, something that had never been so in all the days of the Isvaieni. And—worse, because somehow more unthinkable—the nightmare of war had come to the sands of the Isvai, and there had been no war anywhere in the world, from the Great Heat to the Great Cold, since the time of the Great Flowering, in that centuries-ago time when the army of the Light had smashed and sundered all the forces of Darkness—so the world had thought then—forever.

  Shaiara, leader of the Nalzindar Isvaieni, knew otherwise, and she thanked the Gods of the Wild Magic for the forewarning she had been given. If she had not gone to Sapthiruk Oasis less than a moonturn ago upon what should have been a simple trading mission, she would never have seen something she had never imagined could exist: the tribes gathered out-of-season at the behest of the most powerful Wildmage to have been born among the Isvaieni in uncounted generations—Bisochim Bluerobe, who had been born to the tents of the Adanate Isvaieni, though he had left them long ago. The elders of many of the largest tribes had gathered at Sapthiruk Oasis to hear him speak, and that itself was odd, for the blue-robed Wildmages of the Isvai did not use the power that the Gods of the Wild Magic had given them to take for themselves a place of authority among the Isvaieni. Alone of all the desert peoples they claimed no tribe, wandering where the Wild Magic sent them, using its power for the good of all.

  But when she heard him speak, Shaiara knew that Bisochim had stepped beyond the bounds set for all those who took up the Three Books and their teachings, for Bisochim spoke of the Balance being out of true; of armies coming down out of the Great Cold to destroy the Isvaieni. He named the Isvaieni as the last peoples who kept the True Balance, and said that only through Bisochim could they—and the Light—be saved.

  At first Shaiara had thought that all who listened must know Bisochim’s words for the dangerous madness that they were, for Shaiara knew the men gathered at Sapthiruk, knew them for cautious, prudent, sensible elders who had guided their tribes across the desert sands for many turns of the year. But to her horror, the tribal leaders into whose ears Bisochim spoke his tainted words merely nodded and smiled as if what they heard Bisochim speak were words of sweetest reason and sense.

  And in that moment Shaiara knew that the greatest horror that anyone who lived between Sand and Star—who lived in all the world—could imagine had come to pass.

/>   Bisochim was Shadow-touched.

  She had not waited to hear the full details of Bisochim’s purpose that day, lest she fall beneath the same spell that she had sensed Bisochim wove with unclean magic over the minds of the other Isvaieni. The Nalzindar Isvaieni had always walked a path apart from the other tribes, keeping no flocks or herds, living entirely by hunting, constantly upon the move over the face of the Isvai. For that reason, when the tribes were numbered, the Nalzindar were often counted as the last and the least.

  And that, Shaiara hoped, would save them now. It was clear to her from what she had heard that Bisochim intended to gather up all the tribes—”I have prepared a place for you, where we all may go, to await the day when we may scour them from the desert sands as the Sandwind scours”—he had said, and certainly any who refused to accede to his madness and fall in with his plans would be counted among his enemies. The Nalzindar could not stand alone against his purpose; Shaiara’s hope was merely to preserve her people, taking them into hiding before Bisochim and the rest of the Isvaieni thought to seek them out.

  But where?

  As she had ridden from Sapthiruk back to the tents of the Nalzindar, she had known this was a decision she must make immediately. Her people must be away and on the move at once. Every moment not spent in flight was a moment that could be woven into a snare to trap them, and the Nalzindar valued their freedom nearly as much as they revered the Balance.

  For that reason, it did not even occur to Shaiara to seek refuge for her people in the Iteru-cities. The Thanduli and the Hinturi and the Aduzza and the Khulbana and half-a-dozen of the other tribes of the Isvai might go to the edge of the Madiran, to Radnatucca Oasis or even into one of the Iteru-cities themselves to trade their wares for that which the desert could not provide. The Nalzindar did not. And if Bisochim were naming all but the Isvaieni his enemy, surely the city-dwellers would be first among them.