The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  “It looks bigger now,” Tiercel said, staring into the empty space. All that was left inside the wagon now was the stove in the corner—something they could have used a time or two along the way, if only they’d been able to get at it.

  “Well, if you weren’t such a Light-blasted packrat, we might have seen the walls of this thing sometime before we got here,” Harrier grumbled.

  “Who insisted on filling up every available square foot of space we had?”

  “With food.”

  Tiercel didn’t argue further, which Harrier felt meant he’d won. He knew he’d only won technically, because Tiercel probably wouldn’t have noticed a lot if they’d run out of food two moonturns ago, as long as he still had his books or something interesting to poke at. Which was why Harrier needed to follow him around, especially if Tiercel was planning on going off somewhere nobody’d ever heard of before to do something completely crazy. Even if going there was a really good idea, he’d probably starve to death while he was doing it.

  Now they were finally ready to actually go somewhere, and it was a good thing that they didn’t have to do so without anybody noticing, because they and their baggage made up an embarrassingly large parade: first the Telchi, then Tiercel and Harrier, then a string of eight porters all pushing identical wheeled carts.

  It was all right at first—they all stayed together and didn’t have much difficulty in working their way through the people on the streets. Away from the public areas, the streets were paved with clay brick, not stone, and it had been done long enough ago that the surface had worn down in a gentle slope toward the center of the street. These streets were as narrow as the narrowest streets in the poorest, oldest quarters of Armethalieh, but glancing skyward toward the awnings stretched overhead, and looking all around at the brightly painted doors and walls, and the happy healthy people all around him, Harrier thought that might have more to do with a desire to protect themselves from the sun and the wind than it did with being poor. The Elven cities, after all, were nothing like the Nine Cities either.

  They’d arrived in Tarnatha’Iteru at midmorning, but the sun was rising toward midheaven now, and Harrier already had the idea that everything pretty much stopped here in the Madiran in the middle of the day. There were already fewer people on the streets than there had been when they’d arrived, and he suspected that in an hour or so, the streets would be completely deserted. Unfortunately, even though there were few pedestrians about, as soon as they’d moved a few streets away from the Tarnatha’Iteru stables, the line of porters began to stretch out so far behind them that Tiercel started twitching about something happening to some of his precious stuff, and ducked back to bring up the rear of the line. So of course Harrier had to drop back too, because no matter how intent Tiercel might be on watching the porters to make sure nothing fell out of one of the carts—or one of them didn’t get lost—Harrier knew good intentions wouldn’t last.

  Here and there a door stood open, and as they passed, both of them could catch glimpses of what was going on inside.

  “What do you think he’s—” Tiercel said, slowing down to peer into a house where a man sat bent over a table, working hard at something neither of them could see.

  “Later,” Harrier said, grabbing a fistful of Tiercel’s tunic and yanking him forward. “Unless you want them to toss your books into the nearest midden.”

  “You know they won’t do that,” Tiercel said. But he hurried after the line of carts anyway.

  They walked, Harrier estimated, about the same distance they would have from the Port to Tiercel’s house before the line of carts stopped, and when Tiercel and Harrier walked back up to its head, they found the Telchi standing outside a blue-painted door. On the first several streets they’d gone down they’d seen two- and three-story houses set side by side right at the street edge, but in this district all there was to see along the street was smooth wall with occasional doors. The walls only went up one story, but the streets were still too narrow for Harrier to see what lay beyond the tops of the walls.

  “This is my home,” the Telchi said. He pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  To Harrier’s surprise, on the other side of the door there was another courtyard. It was a small one, but he’d started to get the idea that there weren’t any private open areas like this here. It was a pleasant space, with an awning above and benches along the walls. The ground was laid with baked clay tiles, and in the center there was a large copper fire-dish, scrubbed to gleaming. As the porters began lining up their carts neatly along one wall, a man came rushing out of the house itself.

  “Master! By the fortune of Sand and Star and the grace of the Blessed Saint Idalia, you have returned!”

  The Telchi laughed. “And I do not doubt that you deafened her with your demands, Latar. Now bring my purse, for these men must be paid for their hire.”

  Harrier cleared his throat.

  “Did I imagine for a moment that you were as yet possessed of the copper adhmai of Tarnatha’Iteru instead of the demi-suns of Armethalieh, there would be no question that you would pay their hire. Instead, let it be my gift to you,” the Telchi said.

  Harrier opened his mouth to protest, and this time Tiercel kicked him.

  The Telchi told the porters to return for their carts in a few hours, and the men bowed and departed. It took far less time to empty the carts than it had to fill them, for the Telchi’s servants took charge of every item Tiercel would let them handle. In the end, all of Tiercel’s High Magick items—shuffled and reshuffled—fit into two of the carts—precariously overfull, but they fit—and Harrier stood guard over them while Tiercel made trip after trip to carry them into the house. He really couldn’t imagine what Tiercel thought was going to happen to them out here, and Tiercel had spent the entire journey from the Veiled Lands to here telling Harrier that all of them were completely harmless. Sometimes he didn’t understand his friend at all.

  He patted the bag on his hip with a certain feeling of smugness. Books, brazier, herbs, and all, and it was still something he could pick up, sling over his shoulder, and just go. Tiercel had enough stuff here to stagger a strong mule, and he said he still had less than a tenth of what a proper High Mage would have had.

  Harrier frowned, thinking. How could that be right, if the High Mages had been running around fighting wars? He wondered if maybe they didn’t need as much equipment later, once they’d finished learning everything. Or if maybe they’d all shared the big heavy things. It was too bad there wasn’t anyone to ask.

  He carried the last load—all books—in with Tiercel, who by now was looking both sweaty and excited. Harrier was looking forward to the chance to actually see this place, because Tiercel’s brief descriptions—in between trips—had involved not-very-useful remarks like “a lot of rugs” and “a lot of swords” and “there aren’t any chairs,” none of which gave Harrier a really clear picture of what lay beyond the door Tiercel kept going in and out through.

  He already knew that the Telchi was a wealthy man—by the standards of Armethalieh, at least, though he didn’t know if the Madiran’s standards were different. Just to begin with, he’d seen at least half-a-dozen servants, and that was about what Tiercel’s family had. When he was finally able to follow Tiercel inside, they went through the house-door and then down several steps. The air was immediately cooler, and smelled of growing things. They were in a small antechamber lined with large colorful jars with bushes in them.

  “These are naranjes,” Harrier said in surprise.

  “Well, sure,” Tiercel said. “Where did you think they came from?”

  “The Armen Plain,” Harrier said promptly. “It’s filled with farms, and with farmers who scream blue murder to Da the moment there’s the least hitch in shipping their precious cargoes across Great Ocean. I don’t know why everyone else doesn’t grow their own naranjes instead of making us ship them ours,” he finished darkly.

  “Maybe they can’t,” Tiercel said. “But
they came from here originally. Naranjes like heat. Come on.”

  Tiercel pushed open the inner door—carved and inlaid with an ornate pattern in colored stone—and they were in a much larger room. Finally Harrier understood what Tiercel had meant. The room’s floor was covered in carpets that, while not quite as exquisite as those of Elven weaving, were magnificent enough to fetch the highest prices in the markets of Armethalieh. The walls were hung with swords, and while none of them were of the type the Telchi carried, all looked well cared for, and Harrier suspected that the Telchi could use every weapon here.

  There wasn’t a chair—or even a couch—in sight. Instead, large colorful cushions were set on the floor around the walls.

  “We have to sit on those?” Harrier demanded.

  “Har, you’ve been sitting on the ground for most of a year,” Tiercel pointed out.

  “Hmph,” Harrier said. “Well, I’m not walking on those,” he said firmly, indicating the rugs.

  “I didn’t want to either,” Tiercel agreed. “Someday we’ll manage to be guests in a house where they don’t cover the floors with a Magistrate’s treasury of carpets. Come on. We can go around the edge and take off our boots in the back.”

  The two of them edged around the carpets, along the thin expanse of tiled floor and down the hall. The hall, fortunately, wasn’t covered in more priceless works of the rug-weaver’s art, but with plain woven grass-frond matting, which was nice enough, but Harrier’s Ma had it in the entryway, and it had to be replaced every couple of years, so Harrier wasn’t worried he was destroying something priceless and irreplaceable just by walking on it.

  “This is the room he gave us,” Tiercel said, opening another door. Harrier followed him in.

  “Yeah, and I see it’s already a mess.”

  “It’s not like anyone put anything away,” Tiercel said defensively.

  “Or that you’d let them,” Harrier answered promptly.

  Tiercel shrugged.

  The room had whitewashed walls—and, Harrier was relieved to see, no carpets in sight. The floor was covered with more matting, and there were two low—very low—cushioned objects that Harrier supposed must be the beds. There were round holes high in the walls on all sides, and a set of shutters folded back to expose one window. Harrier went over and looked out; he was looking out over another courtyard. This one was covered entirely in sand that someone had raked; he could see the marks of the rake clearly. He shrugged. After living with the Elves, he’d seen weirder things.

  He came back and sat down on the nearest chest and began pulling off his boots. It was just about the only clear surface in the room; the contents of the wagon were piled on both of the beds. Harrier frowned, wondering if he could possibly figure out what they’d need for the next part of their journey and what they could throw out or give away now. He decided he couldn’t. Not without some idea of where they were going.

  “Do you suppose we can get a bath?” he asked.

  “I’m pretty sure our host is going to insist on it,” Tiercel said, wrinkling his nose.

  A COUPLE OF later, Harrier reclined on his new bed in his new room, entirely content, watching as Tiercel fussed and fretted, sorting all his possessions into some kind of mysterious order. Their traveling gear—at least the parts they weren’t going to need right now—had been taken off to storage elsewhere once they’d been able to sort through it, and everything that could possibly be laundered had been taken off to be laundered. They’d also both been measured for clothing in the local style, since everything they owned was too heavy and hot.

  They’d bathed, and Harrier was cleanly close-shaven for the first time since Blackrowan Farm. He’d gotten his hair cut short again too, since he hated it when it got long and straggly.

  And they’d eaten.

  Food that he didn’t have to cook—didn’t have to catch—bread and vegetables and soup and none of the dishes was in the least familiar and he hadn’t cared. Traveling was all very well—and Harrier had developed a taste for it—but he also knew exactly how close they’d come to just plain starving to death or dying of thirst on the road during the last part of the journey. If they hadn’t run across the Telchi… if Harrier hadn’t been able to Heal him …

  The lid of the chest he was filling slipped and banged down on Tiercel’s fingers before he could snatch his hand away. He yelped, then swore.

  “You could get into so much trouble for language like that,” Harrier said.

  “From who? You?” Tiercel demanded. His words were a little muffled since he’d crammed his bruised fingers into his mouth. Harrier snickered.

  “Good point. Hey, Tyr?”

  “What?” Tiercel asked sulkily. He sat down on top of the chest—he’d filled it with his books; there weren’t really many other sorts of storage space here—and glared at Harrier as if banging his hand had been Harrier’s fault. Harrier could have told him that the lids of the chests wouldn’t stay up by themselves and needed to be held in place, but Tiercel didn’t pay attention to things like that.

  “It ever occur to you that us finding the Telchi was lucky?”

  “For him?” Tiercel asked.

  “For us.”

  Harrier waited while Tiercel thought about it, though he wasn’t quite sure Tiercel would reach the same conclusion he had. The fact that they’d had to lose Kareta because the Telchi had joined them still hurt—not the way Simera’s death hurt, but in a sort of nagging unfinished way—and possibly with Kareta but without the Telchi they could have made it to Tarnatha’Iteru, since Kareta could have located water for as long as she could have safely traveled with them, but Harrier wasn’t sure they could have gotten into the city without the Telchi. Certainly not as easily, anyway.

  “Yes,” Tiercel said, frowning. “I guess it doesn’t happen the way it does in the wondertales, does it? I mean, when the Gods of the Wild Magic help someone.”

  That wasn’t exactly what Harrier had been thinking. “You mean the Gods of the Wild Magic killed off all the Telchi’s men and nearly killed him just to make things easy for us?”

  Tiercel made a face. “Idiot. No. It’s like a … puzzle. And all the pieces interlock. The Telchi’s men died because they fought the hill bandits, and there were a lot of them, and they needed to be stopped. I think the Telchi survived because we needed him.”

  Thinking about it that way bothered Harrier just a little. More than a little, really. It seemed so … large. And while it was silly to think that the Wild Magic and the Light Itself would be anything small, he’d never had to think about what that really meant before. It bothered him more than he had words for to have to trust something he couldn’t see or touch, something he couldn’t have a conversation with, the way he could talk to Tiercel or his Da or one of his brothers. And if he could—he remembered the not-quite-voice in his mind when his Mageprice had been set—that idea bothered him even more.

  “Yeah, right, okay,” he muttered.

  OVER THE EVENING meal, the Telchi discussed his plans for Harrier’s immediate future. Now that they had arrived in Tarnatha’Iteru, Harrier’s training could begin in earnest.

  “What about him?” Harrier demanded, pointing at Tiercel.

  “I am going to be trying to figure out if anybody knows anything at all about any place that looks like the place I’ve been seeing,” Tiercel said, just a little huffily. “And trying to figure out how to get there.”

  “If it is indeed somewhere in the deep desert, you will need to hire Isvaieni guides,” the Telchi said, scooping a large portion of some kind of pickled vegetable onto a piece of soft flatbread. Harrier had discovered that while the main dish at a meal was usually hot, nearly all the side-dishes were cold. He supposed that made sense if you lived in a desert.

  “We ought to figure out where we’re going first,” he said, trying the idea on for size. “I mean, otherwise, we won’t even have any idea of what supplies to buy.”

  “Indeed, that is so,” the Telchi said. “Your h
orses will certainly fetch a good price, for they are very fine animals, and a buyer can undoubtedly even be found for your wagon.”

  “Sell them?” Tiercel said, and Harrier said: “Why?”

  The Telchi smiled slightly. “To journey deeper into the Madiran—and especially into the Isvai—you will need shotors, not horses. And while wheeled carts may make the journey between the Iteru, and upon the Trade Road, your wheels will be useless in sand.”

  “Sand?” Tiercel said.

  “You’ve heard of it, Tyr. It’s like mud, only dry.” Harrier frowned. It hadn’t occurred to him that they wouldn’t be able to take the wagon with them wherever they went. He sighed, and thought about the fact that the wagon would come in handy for their trip north again, and realized that if Tiercel found what he was looking for, they probably wouldn’t be heading north again. “We can sell the horses now, but let’s wait to sell the wagon until we’re ready to go.” He’d seen mules here, after all, and if it turned out that what they were looking for wasn’t out there in the desert, they could buy some to draw the wagon and go somewhere else.

  Tiercel nodded, frowning faintly.

  IN THE COOL of the morning and the cool of the evening, Harrier practiced with the Telchi in the sand-covered courtyard at the back of the house. Both of them used only wooden swords—the Telchi promised that proper swords would be ready for Harrier when the time came, for Harrier was learning the Selken two-sword style.

  It was a little frightening to him—when he let himself think about it at all—how fast he was learning. He knew he was tired all the time, and the Telchi said he must not worry about that, for he was retraining his muscles so that he no longer staggered through life like a drunken shotor—a remark that Harrier thought was enormously unfair (not that he’d ever seen a drunken shotor), because no one had ever called him “clumsy” before, even by indirection. But the Telchi also told him that once his muscles caught up with his skill, he would perhaps be nearly formidable, since after even a handful of days, his skills surpassed those of students whom the Telchi had had in his teaching for many years.