The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  For as Harrier quickly discovered, he was not the Telchi’s only student. During those seasons of the year in which caravans did not make their way between the Iteru, the Telchi taught sword skills to any who wished to learn, instructing them in the heavy curved southern awardan, and in the Southern fighting style—which involved, as far as Harrier could tell, hoping your enemy wasn’t armed.

  “Why do you teach them, if none of them are very good?” he asked one day, when they’d been in Tarnatha’Iteru for nearly a fortnight. Just as he’d said he would, Tiercel spent his days wandering around the city trying to find things out, but Harrier didn’t worry too much, as Tiercel was accompanied by a man named Ophare, who was one of the Telchi’s servants. On the first day the two of them had set out together, Harrier had heard the Telchi tell Ophare that if any sort of misfortune befell Tiercel as he wandered about the city, Ophare shouldn’t bother to return home.

  “It entertains me. It passes the time. It adds coin to my purse. Perhaps I looked for one I could make into an apprentice.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t,” Harrier said pleasantly, knowing that this last remark had not been made in true seriousness. None of the Telchi’s students was good enough—Harrier watched them when he wasn’t practicing himself. Not dedicated enough, or not capable enough, or just… not good enough. He wasn’t sure how he could tell just by looking at them, but he could. And he was also pretty sure that even armed with nothing but a pair of light wooden practice swords, he could disarm—and then hurt—any of the Telchi’s other students any time he wanted to. And thinking that was a little disturbing.

  “Perhaps I did not,” the Telchi agreed, his tone just as easy. “Undoubtedly I was waiting for the Lady of Battles and the Sword-Giver to lead you to my side.”

  Harrier shifted, a little uneasy now with the turn the conversation had taken. They were sitting on cushions in the main room of the Telchi’s home. It had become too hot to practice, but it was not yet time for the midday meal, which meant it was time for Harrier’s other lessons—lectures on what to do in every possible situation that might involve killing somebody. Since he didn’t want to kill anyone at all, he usually did his best to distract his teacher at this point, sometimes with more success than at other times.

  “You know we’ll be leaving, don’t you? As soon as Tiercel finds whatever he’s looking for?” He didn’t want the Telchi to think he’d be here forever, and he knew—now—that a normal apprenticeship to a Selken Master of Swords lasted years. Of course, it also began when the apprentice was a child, first presented to the Sword Temple as a promising acolyte.

  The Telchi picked up his cup and sipped. The drink was called kaffeyah—they had it in Armethalieh, but it wasn’t popular there—and Harrier had tried it and loathed it. Fortunately, the Telchi didn’t insist he drink it.

  “Yes. And I know—too—that no one to whom your friend has spoken, whether they be scholar or trader, recognizes this place he speaks of. But I know another thing that disturbs me more, that perhaps you should be mindful of.”

  Harrier sat up straighten “What?”

  “You know that this is the season for trading with the desertfolk.”

  “Yes. It’s winter. You trade with them all winter and when spring comes and the snow melts in the Delfier Valley, the caravans head north.”

  It wasn’t really winter. It was actually spring—it was already Rains, so he’d missed his Naming Day, and Flowering Fair, and everything else pretty thoroughly. In a sennight or two, the caravans would begin going north.

  “Not this year. Tiercel does not know how to weigh the information as he should, but I do. It has been almost three moonturns since any Isvaieni was seen here in the Madiran, or lit their signal fire at Radnatucca Oasis to say they wished to trade. Ophare brings me the household gossip, and so I have the gossip of the marketplace, and thus I am told that it is so elsewhere as well.”

  “So they’re all… gone?” Harrier asked, baffled.

  The Telchi shrugged. “They are not here, nor in Kabipha’Iteru, nor in Laganda’Iteru, nor, one must imagine, in any of the rest of the String of Pearls either. And so they will be difficult to hire as guides.”

  “WE COULD SEND letters home,” Tiercel said hesitantly one evening a few days later. Even without the goods usually provided by the Isvaieni, there were more than enough items to make up a payload, and the first caravans would be leaving Tarnatha’Iteru for Akazidas’Iteru in a sennight or so. The Telchi had already turned down several offers of employment as a caravan guard.

  “A caravan takes about a moonturn on the Trade Road, maybe a little more,” Harrier said meditatively, staring at the ceiling. “A dispatch rider showing the Magistrate’s Seal could cover the same distance heading the other way in a sennight—less, if he rode straight through and didn’t mind killing his horses under him. Do you want to bet the future on the idea that your father wouldn’t write to the Consul here to yank you home the moment he knew where you were? Or that we’ll be gone in that time, and far enough away that we can’t be followed?”

  Tiercel sat up and stared at him. “You don’t think …”

  “What I think is that first you were sick, then you vanished, and whatever letters home our families have actually gotten out of all the ones we’ve written—and there haven’t been all that many—haven’t been all that reassuring. And if your family got the last one, the one you wrote from the Elven Lands, well… I know what I’d think.” I’d think you’d written it while you were out of your head with fever somewhere, that’s what I’d think. Light knows that would be more comfortable than believing it’s all real.

  “But it’s all true! I can prove it! Well, I mean … there’s Ancaladar. And you’ve got the Three Books.” Tiercel sounded as upset as if Harrier had said that Harrier didn’t believe him.

  “Yeah, and if I have to choose between being eaten by the Endarkened and telling my Da I’m a Wildmage, I’m not sure which I’d pick. But what I’m saying is, having to try to prove anything is going to slow us down. A lot. And attract a lot of attention. And were you listening when Macenor Telchi said the other day that all the Isvaieni just upped and vanished a while ago?”

  “I was trying not to,” Tiercel answered simply. “Because I keep thinking of that … town.”

  Windy Meadows. Where the Goblins had come up out of the ground and devoured all of the inhabitants. Where Simera had died.

  “Maybe we should call Ancaladar back now,” Harrier said, frowning at the ceiling. Ancaladar’s saddle was built for two. He could carry both of them.

  “I don’t want to … wake him up … until I know where we need to go. Or until I’m sure we can’t possibly find it,” Tiercel said.

  “Okay. Fine.”

  TIERCEL HEARD HARRIER turn over, and a moment later, heard the not-quite-snoring that indicated he was already asleep. It was just as well that Tiercel had an entire city to occupy him, because all Harrier seemed to be doing these days was getting up before dawn, going off to spend several hours banging away at straw practice dummies (or at their host) with a pair of wooden swords, and then doing the same thing in the evening. As far as Tiercel could tell, Harrier wasn’t even practicing Fire or Coldfire any more—not that he really could without giving away the fact that he was a Wildmage, because (as Tiercel knew perfectly well) there was no privacy to be had in a house filled with servants.

  Tiercel wasn’t quite sure why they’d both come to the conclusion that it was so important to, well, hide what they were. The fact that he had the ancient Magegift, yes. That would be awfully hard to even begin to explain. But Wildmages were revered everywhere, and the Telchi said that they wandered around the Madiran, wearing blue robes that were practically a uniform and nobody bothered them because their magic was so necessary to everybody’s survival.

  Tiercel frowned, momentarily distracted. He hadn’t seen anybody at all wearing blue robes, and he’d walked up and down and through what he was willing to bet was every singl
e street and alley of this city.

  Anyway. The point was that Harrier wasn’t practicing his magic (which was kind of a sub-point of the fact that both of them were pretending that they didn’t have any magic at all, because Tiercel had been careful not to do any spells either, at least not where anyone could see him, at least not any spells that anybody would recognize as spells) and all he said when Tiercel asked him what he was doing was “nothing.” If Tiercel hadn’t known that Harrier was a Knight-Mage, and that the Telchi was teaching him everything he knew about fighting, Tiercel might actually have believed it.

  But he’d watched the two of them spar one evening. Harrier hadn’t known about it. But their bedroom window overlooked the practice area, and Tiercel had come in from another fruitless day trying to chase down some kind of clue to where they needed to go, and heard an odd clattering sound coming from outside the window. He’d gone over and looked out, and the two of them—Harrier and the Telchi—had been out there, training.

  While they’d still been on the road, Tiercel had seen Macenor Telchi practice by himself many times, doing the exercises that he called “sword-dances.” When he’d still been recovering, they’d been slow and stately, but later he’d moved through the forms with blinding speed.

  As he was now. Only now they weren’t forms. Now the dance had a partner, for outside, in the twilit courtyard, Harrier circled and moved and feinted with him. The wooden swords they both carried moved almost too fast to see, as the two fighters spun and turned and blocked. Tiercel didn’t know all that much about sword-fighting—he’d never even watched the Elves practice back in Karahelanderialigor—but it didn’t seem to him that Macenor Telchi was holding back much.

  And Harrier was fast. No matter what the Telchi tried, Harrier’s swords were there to block it, until at last Harrier stumbled, and the Telchi’s sword caught him a sharp “thwack” along the ribs. Harrier yelped, and the Telchi laughed, and that seemed to indicate the end of the match.

  Tiercel ducked back inside the room before either of them saw him. What he’d just seen troubled him more than he liked to admit even to himself. Harrier had only been doing this for a few sennights, and he was good enough to challenge a man who’d been a master of swords since before he’d been born. Somehow doing weird things himself seemed almost natural to Tiercel. He didn’t have to watch someone else doing them, after all. But watching Harrier turn from, well, Harrier—his best friend, someone who hadn’t even wanted to touch the sword Roneida had given him—into the person he’d just glimpsed in the courtyard was more unsettling than everything that had happened to Tiercel in the past year.

  Harrier has been Called by the Wild Magic to be a Knight-Mage. Just like Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy. This is what it means, Tiercel reminded himself. He thought, for the first time, that back when Kareta brought him the Three Books, Harrier might have had a better idea of what they would mean than Tiercel had, and maybe that was why he’d fought this so hard. Because Tiercel suspected, down deep inside, that becoming a Knight-Mage might be a greater change for Harrier than becoming a High Mage had been for him.

  It wasn’t something they talked about, because Harrier didn’t like to talk about things that made him as uneasy as the Wild Magic did. Tiercel really didn’t have any idea of whether or not Harrier was reading the Three Books he’d been given, or had any notion of how uncanny his sudden ability with the sword was, but he did know that Harrier wouldn’t thank the person who brought those things to his notice. And so Tiercel devoted his attention to other things.

  With Ophare’s help, he’d managed to make a pretty good start on searching every possible place in the city where possible information on The Lake of Fire might be found. To his surprise and his enormous disappointment, there were no public libraries in Tarnatha’Iteru of the sort he was used to finding in the Nine Cities, but Ophare had been able to direct him to other sources of information. There were scholars who were willing to share their knowledge of the past with him, especially when they discovered how much he already knew about pre-Flowering history. And while one of them—Master Arapha—was able to tell Tiercel of an ancient race of Otherfolk who had been made of and lived in fire, that information was interesting rather than immediately useful, since the Firesprites had been swept out of existence long before the founding of Armethalieh.

  For a while Tiercel held out hope that the archives of the merchant traders would be able to provide him with the information that he sought, for the records they kept stretched back for centuries, to the time when the String of Pearls, as the eleven Iteru-cities were called, had first been built and the first trade-routes had been mapped across the Madiran. If not for the fact that many of the rich merchants of Tarnatha’Iteru owed the Telchi favors, and the fact that the Telchi was willing to call upon that goodwill to gain Tiercel access to the records stored in the Merchants Guildhall of Tarnatha’Iteru, it would have been difficult for Tiercel to do that research. The merchant traders of each city guarded their secrets jealously for fear that their rivals from the other Iteru-cities might try to gain access to their information, whether of sources for rugs and spices, or of the fastest route from one place to another.

  Tiercel could have gotten into the Guildhall by himself—before he’d left Armethalieh (it seemed like a lifetime ago) his father had told him that he could call upon Chief Magistrate Vaunnel’s name in an emergency, and even Consul Aldarnas owed allegiance to Chief Magistrate Vaunnel. But if Tiercel did that, word that he’d done so would get back to Armethalieh, and he knew Harrier was right: they didn’t dare attract that kind of attention to themselves. He vowed to repay the Telchi—somehow, sometime—for all he was doing for them.

  It was more than disappointing that after all that work and trouble, Tiercel’s answers weren’t there either, though it took him more than a fortnight of daily visits to figure that out. By then, his head was stuffed with information about cities and wells and oases and camps and Isvaieni tribes and their affiliations and their chief products and what they should be offered in trade. He felt he could probably draw a map of the entire desert, from the Madiran to the Barahileth.

  But there was nothing, anywhere, about a Lake of Fire.

  “I THINK WE should go,” Tiercel said to Harrier.

  It was a bit over five sennights now since they’d arrived in Tarnatha’Iteru, and it was slightly entertaining to Tiercel that here in the depths of the desert they’d both managed to almost entirely lose the sun-darkening they’d picked up on the way here. But in the Madiran, nobody went out in the harsh desert sun without protection—or at all during the hottest part of the day—and Tiercel had gotten used to keeping the hood of his light desert robe pulled well up whenever he left the Telchi’s house.

  It had taken him a couple of days to plot out the best time to grab Harrier for a discussion of their future. It wasn’t—exactly—that he didn’t want the Telchi involved in it. It was just that he wanted to talk to Harrier privately first, because he knew that the Telchi wanted Harrier as his apprentice, and that Harrier was paying his Mageprice by being trained, and if they had to talk about that, he didn’t think Harrier would talk about it in front of somebody else. So Tiercel needed to find a time when he could catch Harrier alone. Mornings weren’t good, because that was when Harrier went off to practice. Evenings weren’t good either. The evening meal came late—it was served far later here than it was ever served in Armethalieh—and after it, all Harrier wanted to do was sleep. The middle of the day involved other lessons for Harrier, and Tiercel was usually out then anyway, since he was still asking a few last questions around the city.

  About Wildmages, for example. In the Madiran, they moved about freely and openly in both city and desert. But he hadn’t seen any in all the time he’d been here, and when he’d started asking questions he discovered that there hadn’t been one seen in Tarnatha’Iteru in over four moonturns. Nobody he’d talked to was willing to say whether that was unusual or not, but Tiercel needed to know.


  Meanwhile, if he actually wanted to talk to Harrier while Harrier was awake it had to be now. Early in the evening, after Harrier had finished his evening practice and come back to his room after his bath, but before the evening meal. He’d made sure to get back to the house extra early just to be sure to be here.

  “Go where?” Harrier said. He flopped down on his bed, still rubbing at his hair with a towel. “You’ve found something?”

  “No,” Tiercel admitted. “I’m not going to, either. But I still think what I’m looking for is here. In the desert, I mean. Somewhere.”

  “So, what? We just … go? We’d need guides, and there aren’t any.”

  “You can find water with the Wild Magic. Ophare says so. The Wildmages here find wells all the time.”

  “Do I look like one of the local Wildmages to you?” Harrier asked in long-suffering tones.

  “What they can do, you can do. If you have to.”

  “And why would I have to, if we stay here?”

  “Because we can’t stay here, and you know it. We got a good price for the horses. I changed out my money for the local currency, and I’ve been asking what things cost. We have enough to buy shotors and supplies. We’ll ride out into the desert—Radnatucca Oasis isn’t far from here. I’ll call Ancaladar. We’ll search from the air.”

  “And do what with the shotors?” Harrier asked.

  “He’ll be hungry when he wakes up.”

  “Great. Fine. So we ride lunch out to this oasis, and when Ancaladar gets there, we fly all over the desert looking for this place, and then what? Tyr, what about all your stuff? Ancaladar doesn’t exactly come with saddlebags, you know. And what about supplies? Okay, maybe I can find water without needing to sleep for three days afterwards—which I’m not promising. That doesn’t mean I can find dinner.”