The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  The only area of the city Tiercel was careful not to touch was the space around the Iteru.

  The more that the city was erased, as if it were being un-built, piece by piece, the more horrible a sight the remains of Tarnatha’Iteru became. Harrier was grateful that they were both so far away, but it didn’t really blunt the impact of what they were seeing. The successive waves of water created as the buildings dissolved piled the rotting bodies and the household debris up against each other like a horrible shoal. Harrier put his arm around Tiercel’s shoulders, because he’d begun to sway a little—with shock as much as with exhaustion.

  “We’ll sleep for a sennight,” he promised, and Tiercel smiled faintly.

  At last only the Consul’s Palace remained.

  “I think you’d better, you know, first, because—” Harrier said.

  “Yeah,” Tiercel said. The wave of water from the transmutation of the Consul’s Palace might be enough to break up the bulwarks of debris and sweep the rest of the bodies all the way down to the orchard, and if that happened, Harrier didn’t think he’d ever feel clean again.

  By now the sun was fully up, and the wet ground was steaming as if it boiled. It didn’t matter how wet everything was. Tiercel stretched out his hand, and the bodies burst into flame.

  They didn’t burn like meat or wood. There was a white flare of flame, as if some cloudwit had flung an oil-filled lantern into the depths of a raging bonfire, and then the bodies were ash. The heat of their burning had caused some of the things around them to catch fire, and the wood and fabric burned with honest orange flame.

  Tiercel looked around. There were other bodies in the city that hadn’t been washed into the largest group. They burned as quickly as the others. In seconds, the heat of the fires had baked the earth dry, and the wind began to blow the ash away. Tiercel began to look farther away, searching the plain in the distance, and Harrier saw white flares of fire blossom on the horizon. A cold knot of fear tightened in his chest. He’d known—before—that Tiercel’s spells were powerful, and certainly seeing MageShield had been impressive. But until today he’d never really grasped how powerful—and how different—Tiercel’s magic was from the Wild Magic. All he’d ever heard was Tiercel saying that he didn’t know very much, couldn’t learn very much, wasn’t very good. But this, this was what Tiercel meant by “calling Fire.”

  If this was what “not very good” was, what in the name of the Light would Tiercel be like when he was good?

  If he got the chance to get that way.

  Harrier tried not to shudder.

  “Now the Palace,” Tiercel said.

  No matter how disturbed Harrier was by seeing Tiercel truly use the powers of a dragon-Bonded High Mage, it was still fascinating to watch the Palace simply turn to water and collapse. There were no bodies inside it—Harrier was relieved to see—but there were hundreds and hundreds of rugs, vases, and pieces of furniture, all of which suddenly appeared suspended in air and then were swept along on a foaming tide of water. When the wave had passed—quenching the small fires that were burning within the space that had once been the city bounds—the only sign that there had ever been a city there at all was a lot of furniture lying around in the mud and a pair of bronze gates, also lying in the mud. And now that Tiercel could see the battlefield beyond the gates, he burned the few bodies left there, too.

  It occurred to Harrier that Tiercel could have left the Palace intact. There weren’t that many bodies beyond it—not enough to be a problem. And all their stuff had been in the Palace. It might even have still been there. They might have been able to use it.

  But he knew why Tiercel had done what he had. When they left here they still wouldn’t be able to carry anything with them, much less six trunks of books. Harrier didn’t want to walk back into the Palace any more than Tiercel did. And unmaking it that way seemed like a fitting memorial somehow to all the people who’d died here, no matter who they were and what they’d believed.

  “I hope you’ve got a plan for us getting water out of the Iteru now that you’ve managed to dissolve the watering trough,” Harrier said.

  “The pump system’s still in place,” Tiercel said. “I’m pretty sure we don’t want to drink out of the irrigation ditches—”

  “No,” Harrier said firmly. “But we can either go into the—We can go to the pump itself, or, if we have to, dig down to the pipes that feed the canals.”

  “Or Ancaladar can uncap the Iteru,” Tiercel said. “Later.”

  THE TENT STILL reeked of gonduruj, but both of them were too tired to care. They flung themselves back down on their looted sleeping mats.

  “You don’t mind, do you, Har?” Tiercel asked sleepily.

  “What? That you turned a whole city into water? Should have done it sooner. Go to sleep,” Harrier said.

  WHEN THEY WOKE again, the sky was orange with sunset. The two of them staggered out of the tent, blinking and rubbing their eyes. It was strange, Harrier thought, even though he hadn’t seen the city from outside all that much, to look northward and not see it at all. There was nothing there now but a plain of sun-baked mud and a jumble of furniture. Some of the pieces were half-charred. Others were intact, but now just weirdly sitting out in the middle of nowhere.

  “We need water,” Harrier said. He looked at the sky. “There isn’t much light left.”

  “I can make light,” Tiercel said. He looked at Harrier. “So can you.”

  Harrier sighed, and scratched the back of his head, and hit a lump, and winced. “I know.” He wondered where his Books were right now. Maybe buried somewhere out there in the mud. “You’re better at it, though.”

  “Um,” Tiercel looked as if he would have preferred that Harrier hadn’t mentioned that fact. “I guess I’m going to have to make a new Wand,” he said randomly.

  “I guess you are,” Harrier said. He sighed again. “You light us up. Then we’ll eat. Then we’ll go get water.”

  “And now that you have finally awakened, I will hunt,” Ancaladar said. “And see where the Isvaieni are.”

  “Probably only about a day farther along to wherever they’re going than they were the last time you looked,” Harrier said. He glanced at Ancaladar, then back at Tiercel. “How big is this desert, really?”

  Tiercel shrugged. “You’re the one who knows the coast. I told you nobody’s ever really mapped the desert. For all anybody knows, it goes all the way down to World’s End.”

  “Not down to the Horn,” Harrier said. “It’s jungle down there. But that’s … almost half a year’s sailing. And you just have to turn back, even if you can get there—nobody’s ever been able to round the Horn. The storms are too bad.”

  “So … I don’t know,” Tiercel said. He frowned. “But it can’t be that far—where they’re going. Because they were seen—here—half a year ago. Then they disappeared. Then they came back to Tarnatha’Iteru.”

  “So?” Harrier said.

  “So,” Tiercel said, “in that time they’d gone away, been told we were evil, come back, and destroyed at least two other cities, and from Laganda’Iteru to Tarnatha’Iteru was between six and eight sennights’ journey for them.”

  “So wherever this place is they’re going, it has to be fairly close,” Harrier finished.

  “Yes,” Tiercel said.

  BY NOW IT was starting to get dark. Tiercel created several globes of Coldfire, making the campsite as bright as day, and went to build up the fire while Harrier went to find something for dinner. The idea of dates in any form was still revolting, but there were naranjes, and cheese, and enough flour and onions and garlic and vegetables that he was even willing to try to make a stew.

  As he dug through a basket of something that might be turnips, or potatoes, or even flower bulbs, his fingers encountered something at the bottom of the basket that was definitely neither a turnip nor a flower bulb. He pulled them out and held them up, peering at them in the light of the ball of Coldfire that hovered over his left shoul
der.

  His Books.

  “This is … weird,” he said aloud. Kareta had said they couldn’t be taken away from him, but he hadn’t thought that meant they’d show up in the bottom of a basket of turnips. That was just…

  No weirder than any other piece of magic, I guess.

  He tucked them into his sash, folding the fabric carefully over them so they wouldn’t fall out, and went back to selecting items for the stew.

  Soon the stew had been assembled—it would probably actually be ready to eat tomorrow and not tonight, but it wouldn’t even be ready tomorrow if he didn’t start cooking it now—and they’d toasted a lot of bread and cheese and eaten it with olives and pickled vegetables from a crock that Harrier had found. Tiercel had gathered together all the waterskins he could find from everywhere in the camp. More of them were full—or half-full—than Harrier had thought, so they could probably go another day without getting water, but he wanted to know what their options were for filling them. If they had to use the water out of the ditches, they’d have to boil it, because it had probably been contaminated by runoff from the city.

  There were more than fifty of the waterskins—too many to carry empty, and far too many to carry full. Harrier figured they could carry back two or three each once they’d filled them.

  To his relief, filling them wasn’t difficult at all. Tiercel had left the entire plaza around the Iteru intact: it was the only patch of stone left in what had once been a city with a number of cobblestoned plazas. Standing around the Iteru were several troughs, and a pump to fill them. It needed to be worked by hand, but it was still there.

  “This will help, too,” Tiercel said.

  While Harrier was working the pump—it took a while to finally start to spew water—and then filling the waterskins, Tiercel had wandered off as usual. Under other circumstances it would have annoyed him, but right now Harrier was just as glad that Tiercel was acting just like his normal self.

  “What?” he said, before he looked up.

  “This,” Tiercel said, sounding annoyed, and Harrier finally looked. Tiercel had found one of the little wheeled carts.

  It was in good shape, even if it had been soaked down pretty thoroughly and then baked dry. It was wood and metal and leather, and all of those things were intact everywhere in the city, Light knew why. “Yeah,” he said. They could probably carry twice as many waterskins back and forth, too. “Go find another one,” he said.

  Tiercel made an annoyed noise and stomped off, and Harrier finished filling the waterskins.

  “Tomorrow we can bring both the carts back and fill more of them,” Harrier said as they wheeled the two carts back to the tents.

  “Great,” Tiercel said. “Then we’ll have a lot of goatskins full of water. Warm, yucky, bad-tasting water.”

  “And what if the pump mechanism fails, idiot? Or the Iteru goes dry for Light knows what reason? Or something happens that I can’t even think of right now? We’ll at least have enough water to be able to think things over for a day or two.”

  Tiercel looked at the sky. “Maybe I could make it rain,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Maybe you couldn’t,” Harrier said firmly. “Because I don’t think the desert would like that very much, Tyr. If it was supposed to rain down here, it would.”

  WHEN ANCALADAR RETURNED much later, Harrier was practicing calling Fire.

  Doing magic like this—the kind where he had a choice about doing it or not—always left him feeling as if he was trying to put his foot on a step that wasn’t there, no matter how many times it worked. He was starting to wonder if maybe the only thing that Wildmages really had to practice was the whole idea of flinging themselves into the Wild Magic, just as if they were jumping over the side of a ship in the midst of Great Ocean, and not caring what happened next because it would be whatever the Wild Magic wanted. If that was what it took to be a good Wildmage, Harrier thought, he was always going to suck at it.

  But after what he’d seen this morning, no matter how much his mind insisted that making something burst into flames just by pointing his finger at it and thinking wasn’t normal, there was something soothing about seeing sticks of wood blossom into the same honest orange flames he could make with flint and steel, and he hadn’t been able to practice any spells at all for the whole time they’d been in Tarnatha’Iteru. Of course, the moment he announced his intention to practice, Tiercel announced his intention to go for a walk—somewhere out of range of whatever-it-was that Harrier did that affected him and his power—so Harrier was just as glad when Ancaladar returned so he could stop practicing without having it look as if he was stopping because the idea that what he was doing was hurting Tiercel freaked him out.

  WHEN ANCALADAR REJOINED them, he told them that after hunting and checking on the progress of the Isvaieni, he’d flown down the eastern edge of the Madiran, along what the Madirani called the String of Pearls—the chain of Iteru-cities.

  “All are gone,” Ancaladar said sadly. “All destroyed, their inhabitants slaughtered, their wells poisoned.”

  “All of them?” Tiercel asked, sounding dumbfounded.

  “They must have been wrong,” Harrier said. “About the last time they saw anyone from any of the tribes. There are—what?”

  “Eleven cities,” Tiercel said.

  “And if all but Akazidas’Iteru is gone, that’s ten of them gone. I don’t know exactly where they are, but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t even get an army from Orinaisal’Iteru to Tarnatha’Iteru in six moonturns.”

  “You could,” Ancaladar said. “If they moved quickly. The two southernmost cities are very close together.”

  “And obviously they did,” Tiercel said.

  “And maybe everybody didn’t disappear at the same time,” Harrier said, sighing in frustration. “Any idea where they’re going, Ancaladar?”

  “They do not travel in a straight line through the desert,” the dragon said reprovingly. “They move from water source to water source. We shall not know their ultimate destination for some time.”

  “Too bad we don’t have a map of all the water in the desert,” Harrier said unwarily.

  “I can’t draw a complete map,” Tiercel said, sounding surprised. “But I can draw a fairly good one—of the Isvai, at least.”

  By the time Tiercel was done, Harrier had a confused picture of a large hostile desert with oases just close enough together that a determined traveler with a shotor could manage to get from one to the next without dying. To get anywhere in the Isvai involved taking a route that wove like the path of a drunken sailor from one dockside tavern to the next—only not quite as straight.

  “It is hotter there than it is here,” Ancaladar said helpfully.

  “And nobody knows their way around it—or where all the water is—but the Isvaieni,” Tiercel said. He didn’t say this as if it was something he knew. More as if it was something he was just now figuring out. They’d been supposed to hire Isvaieni guides, Harrier remembered, if they’d thought they were going to need to go into the Isvai on their search. He guessed, in a manner of speaking, they had them now.

  “When we do follow them,” Harrier said, “how are we going to do it? Because we’re going to have to ride Ancaladar, and as far as I know, he doesn’t have a saddle any more. Unless it’s out there somewhere, and you can find it,” he added, pointing toward where the city had been.

  “I’ll think of something,” Tiercel said.

  “You do that,” Harrier answered.

  FOR THE NEXT fortnight, the two of them lived a strange quiet existence on the outskirts of a city that was no longer there. They combed through the Isvaieni camp for things they might be able to use, and so Harrier found not only the swords that had been his gift from the Telchi, but the sword that Roneida had given him. He wasn’t really sure what to do with Roneida’s sword, but it had been the gift of a Wildmage, so he was determined to find some way to take it with them when they went.

  Ancaladar spent his night
s hunting, and each morning he would report on the progress of the Isvaieni. The bands of raiders were all moving southward, though none of them was moving in a direct line and few of them were taking the same path.

  After the first few days, Tiercel started trying to make a new wand from a branch of one of the naranje trees. The first four exploded when he tried to use them, but the fifth one survived. After that, he spent his days wandering through the ruins of the city, picking through the debris. He didn’t find Ancaladar’s saddle—possibly it was one of the many items that had been smashed and then burned—in fact, after a while, Tiercel and Harrier simply started making piles of furniture and setting fire to them. It was practice on Harrier’s part, and, he guessed, boredom on Tiercel’s.

  But Tiercel did find—in the area where the stables had been—a long roll of leather strap, a small barrel of brass buckles, some rivets, and even a couple of hammers. Everything necessary to mend harness.

  “You can’t make a saddle out of that,” Harrier said, looking at what Tiercel had found.

  “No,” Tiercel said. “But I can make a—a kind of belt to go around Ancaladar’s neck. And I can hold onto that when he flies. And you can hold onto me.”

  Harrier stared at him in disbelief. “That’s it? That’s your plan? He’s going to fly all the way up there and you’re going to hold onto a string around his neck and just hope you don’t fall off?” He stared up at the sky. It looked … high.

  “He’ll catch me if I do,” Tiercel said confidently. “He’ll catch you, too. It’s all I can think of, Har.”

  Harrier looked at Tiercel, then up at the sky again. “This had better work,” he muttered.

  “I DO NOT like it, Bonded,” Ancaladar said when Tiercel explained. Harrier had made Tiercel do all the explaining—not only was it his plan, it was a stupid plan, and Tiercel was better at making stupid plans sound reasonable. Harrier wasn’t sure whether it made things better or not to know that Ancaladar was as unhappy with the idea as he was—but as Tiercel pointed out, if they were going to ride him, they needed some way to hold on, and the saddle was gone.