The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  Everyone worked quickly—down to the youngest children, who took charge of bundles once they’d been brought into the garden-space. The path back to the door was marked with stones that Harrier had cast Coldfire upon—it had taken Tiercel hours of work to quench the Magelight upon the walls of the top level again once he’d accidentally illuminated it, but Shaiara had been as close to upset as Harrier had seen her yet at the thought that they might leave some visible trace of their presence for some outsider to see.

  Not “some outsider.” Bisochim, who’d wanted the Nalzindar to join the other Isvaieni—and if they had, they would have been outside the walls of Tarnatha’Iteru just like the ones who followed Zanattar … or they would have been dead.

  They’d barely emptied the first tent of all it contained—as much as a large shipping-crate, Harrier estimated, and a miracle that none of the jugs had broken—and dragged the folds of fabric down into the tunnel, out of sight, when Ancaladar was back with the second bundle.

  “No more,” Shaiara said sharply, as Ancaladar turned to take off again. “The sun comes.”

  Tiercel had looked puzzled (and well he might; it was still dark), but: “She’s right, Tyr,” Harrier said. He spoke as softly as Shaiara did; it had only taken him a day or so to learn the knack of pitching his voice so it didn’t carry across the desert. “It’s only an hour before dawn. This is the time of day that the desertfolk are out hunting, and you might be seen coming back.”

  Tiercel had sighed, shaking his head, but he’d nodded, and unbuckled the riding-strap, and Ancaladar had laid down, and Tiercel had slipped from his back. Ancaladar had launched himself into the sky (he would hunt, far from here, and return to Abi’Abadshar after dark), and Tiercel helped Harrier and the Nalzindar carry the second load inside.

  There, Tiercel illuminated the garden with balls of Coldfire, for it was still many hours before the sun would shine down into it, and there was much work to be done. To the surprise of both of them, the first thing the Nalzindar did—even before inspecting all the things Tiercel and Ancaladar had brought—was to pitch the two new tents here in their little campsite, and then to add the extra tent-poles they’d been missing (abandoned at Kannanatha Well in order to save weight in their crossing of the Barahileth) to the one tent they’d managed to keep. Next they unrolled all of the rugs, covering the ground beneath the tents, and taking up the woven mats and animal skins from beneath the original tent to replace them with what they obviously considered to be far more suitable and civilized floor coverings. Only then was the rest of what had been brought surveyed and put into its places, along with everything they had saved in their original crossing and made since they had come here—shotor saddles and harness, woven baskets, and cups and bowls of glass and metal that Shaiara had said had come from chambers within Abi’Abadshar.

  Though the Nalzindar were a silent folk—and now was no exception—both Tiercel and Harrier saw expressions of joy on every face as warm cloaks and thick blankets and proper heavy quilted sleeping-mats were unpacked. Marap forgot herself so far as to utter a soft cry of delight when the store of kaffeyah was revealed, along with its proper cooking-pan and brazier, and other Nalzindar women had greeted the stores of flour and oil—and cook-stones—with equal joy and relief. Long before the last of the items from the campsite at Tarnatha’Iteru had been inspected and carefully repacked, the garden was filled with savory cook-smells and the scent of brewing kaffeyah.

  “Ancaladar told me what I ought to bring,” Tiercel said to Harrier. “I had no idea.” The two of them were standing off to one side, having figured out very quickly that the most useful thing they could do now was stay out of the way of the people who knew what they were doing.

  “Looks like he did a good job,” Harrier said.

  “There’s more stuff there,” Tiercel said. He didn’t sound as if he knew whether to be happy that there was still most of a campsite’s worth of stuff available for the taking, or upset that it was there and abandoned.

  Shaiara walked over to them, carrying two small wooden cups in her hands. She held them out, and Harrier caught the flat bitter scent of kaffeyah. He didn’t like the stuff, and he knew that by now Tiercel never wanted to see another cup of kaffeyah as long as he lived, but it was good manners, so they both accepted the cups.

  “This day you have done the Nalzindar a great service,” she said in her soft voice. She smiled slightly, and her eyes flashed with humor. “And you have done me one as well, for now the day is far off when I shall have to learn to spin and weave, and so I thank you.” Then her expression sobered and her face grew stern, and her gaze rested steadily upon Tiercel’s face. “But you must go no more to Tarnatha’Iteru. It is too dangerous.”

  “But I’m sure there are more things there that you could use,” Tiercel said. “And they’re just going to rot if we don’t take them. And nobody will know.”

  Shaiara’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Indeed, you have named yourself a Mage—do you also claim for yourself the power to see the future? What if Zanattar should turn back in his flight to reclaim his lost possessions, and see more of them gone than even the largest caravan of shotors could bear away? I will not accept such a risk to my people.”

  Tiercel opened his mouth again, and Harrier kicked him. “You’re right,” he said. “It isn’t worth the risk. Tiercel won’t go there again.”

  Shaiara nodded, and after a moment she walked away. When they were sure she wasn’t looking, both of them poured out their cups of kaffeyah into the roots of the nearest tree.

  “I still think—” Tiercel said.

  “No,” Harrier said quietly. “You aren’t. What if Zanattar did go back? What if someone else did? What if they went back to Bisochim? What if he started looking for their stuff? He’s a Wildmage. Any Seeking Spell could find it—oh, not all of it, I don’t think a Seeking Spell can be cast except to find a specific object—but what if you happened to take away something that somebody could describe? He could follow it right here.”

  Tiercel sighed and ran a hand over his hair. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Let’s just hope nobody goes back and looks until the rest of the campsite has been completely torn up by predators.”

  “Let’s,” Harrier agreed.

  OVER THE NEXT days, their lives settled into a quiet predictable routine. Tiercel explored the city beneath the earth, and when Harrier wasn’t trekking down into the bowels of the earth with Tiercel, he stayed with the tribe and did useful things, like explaining to Ciniran and the others that the “stone-fruit” was mushrooms, the “fur-mice” were squirrels, the “great-doves” were chickens, the “terraces” were steps, and the mysterious “barriers” blocking so many of the “chambers” were doors to rooms. To Harrier’s surprise and faint discomfort, the fact that the Nalzindar knew he was a Wildmage meant that they relied on him. Not in the way they would rely upon one of their own people, but they expected certain things from him, and despite his misgivings, he did his best to provide them. They thought his ability to tell them so much about what was safe to eat in the gardens of Abi’Abadshar was Wildmage wisdom, and after the first couple of days, he’d stopped trying to explain that he knew these things not because of Wildmage wisdom, but because these plants and animals were common where he came from in the North, and simply stuck with saying that he knew.

  Because he did know, even when he shouldn’t.

  They’d been in Abi’Abadshar a few days more than a sennight when Marap brought him a basket of berries. Marap was the Nalzindar healer. She’d told Harrier that she was no true Healer—not like a Wildmage—but she had herb-skill, and she was grateful for his presence for as long as he was willing to grace the tents of the Nalzindar, because she’d long feared another happening that would lie beyond her skills. One of the ikulas had been poisoned by the stone-fruit before they had properly understood what they were, and so she hoped he would call upon the Wild Magic now. The Nalzindar had long wondered if these berries might be safe to eat; th
ey had seen the birds and many of the animals eating them, and they looked very fine….

  The berries did look fine: large and red and almost like cherries, so succulent Harrier’s mouth watered just to look at them. “Sure,” he’d said. “I’ll try one.” What’s the worst that can happen?

  He’d picked out a large one and raised it to his lips. It smelled a little like cherries and a little like roses and a little like something he couldn’t quite identify. And as he’d opened his mouth, the warning voice in his mind sounded clear and strong.

  No.

  He obeyed without question, dropping the berry back into the basket. Hunch or intuition or just paranoia? He didn’t know. But he knew it was important to listen.

  “Don’t eat them,” he said, and Marap had nodded and taken the basket away.

  And that hadn’t been the strangest thing to happen to him in the past year—if he’d been making lists, Harrier would have run out of numbers a long time ago—but it was kind of strange. He wondered if you got to be a Wildmage—okay, a good Wildmage—by just assuming you knew what you were doing.

  Meanwhile, if he’d been trying to stop Tiercel from ever going to the Lake of Fire to do whatever he could against Bisochim, Abi’Abadshar would have been a good way to do it. Tiercel kept talking about there being so much to learn here and so much to find out, and about all the ancient races that the Endarkened had destroyed, and about how they’d all always known that the Endarkened had destroyed so many of the races of the Light in the ancient wars (the things that Tiercel insisted that “everybody had always known” never ceased to amaze Harrier). Down here in the depths of Abi’Abadshar there was proof not only of that, but of the existence of even more of them. The ancient world, Harrier decided, had been very crowded.

  And no matter how many times when Tiercel came back at the end of a day’s explorations to tell Harrier what he’d learned and Harrier said, “Yes, but where does it say how Vielly Whatsername got rid of them that time?” Tiercel would shake his head and say, “It isn’t that easy.”

  At least they were getting some useful things done in addition to all of Tiercel’s exploring. While Tiercel and Harrier supervised, Ancaladar had dug out some of the other terraces—what normal people called stairs—to clear other entrances to the underground city. Shaiara worried about piles of sand building up on the surface—though Harrier was pretty sure that if Bisochim showed up to see the piles of sand they were already in deep trouble—but Tiercel simply turned the sand into water. He did it at midday, and here in the Barahileth, the water simply turned to steam immediately. Even though Harrier figured that if this Bisochim were even looking in their direction they were already in trouble, he was glad to see that the steam didn’t make a beacon for anyone to see—he already had a very clear idea of how far away you could see things in the desert. But the clouds disappeared instantly, sucked away by the moisture-starved air. Shaiara fretted constantly about so much water added to the air being an insult to the desert’s Balance, but Harrier couldn’t see it. Even all the water Tiercel’d made by turning Tarnatha’Iteru to water wouldn’t make a dent in the dryness of this place.

  And the more excavating Tiercel and Ancaladar did between them, the clearer it became that Abi’Abadshar had been built for dragons as well as, well, Elves. It had only taken a day or two after they’d located it for Ancaladar to clear out one of the staircases, and after that, he was able to get into Abi’Abadshar. The outer section—where Shaiara and her people were camped—was relatively small—and the entire top level was built to a human scale, but the further down you went, the larger everything became. The staircase at the very back of the top level was enormous and once they’d excavated it and started going down—all the staircases were huge—and reached the fifth level below the surface, they reached passages where Ancaladar could move around in complete comfort.

  “WHY BUILD SO deep? And why does it get bigger as we go down? Why put the dragons on the bottom instead of the top?” Harrier asked.

  “They had magic,” Tiercel answered absently. He ran his hand over a wall. Harrier found the fact that every single surface—the floor included—glowed bright moon-blue almost as disconcerting as the fact that this place was bigger than the biggest cavern in the Caves of Imrathalion. Except that the walls and floor and ceiling Caves of Imrathalion hadn’t all been as smooth and level and squared-off as the rooms of his house. And they hadn’t all been covered with … weird stuff.

  “So was it useful magic?” Harrier asked. He thought he was being reasonably patient, because they’d been here a fortnight already, and all they really seemed to be doing was finding out how a bunch of Elves who were older than rocks had lived.

  “Useful to them,” Tiercel said, sounding amused. “They defeated the Endarkened, which allowed us to happen. And created the Wild Magic as we know it.”

  “Which is creepy to think about. You know that, right?”

  “Maybe,” Tiercel said. “But, Harrier, don’t you see? This is the very beginning of the relationship between dragons and people. The beginning of dragons sharing their magic.”

  “The beginning of dragons dying,” Harrier muttered. He hadn’t meant for the other two to hear that, but he’d forgotten how much the stone magnified every sound.

  “Yes, well,” Tiercel said uncomfortably. “Ancaladar, you want to give me a hand here? I can’t see the carvings at the top of the wall.”

  Considering that the carvings at the top of the wall were at least a hundred feet above Tiercel’s head, that was an amazing—and typically Tiercel—understatement.

  “Now I am a ladder,” the dragon sighed. “Of course.” The great black dragon lowered his head, and Tiercel stepped onto it as if he were stepping onto a log. Harrier resisted the temptation to tell the two of them to be careful as Ancaladar slowly raised his head until Tiercel’s head nearly brushed the ceiling.

  “See?” Tiercel said, leaning in to peer at the wall.

  “See what?” Harrier demanded from his position far below both of them. “And don’t expect me to catch you if you fall.”

  “It says here—” Tiercel began.

  “You can read that?” Harrier demanded.

  “I’m looking at the pictures. And guessing. A lot. What’s weird is that the letters look like the High Magick glyphs, only the glyphs are just glyphs, they aren’t an alphabet, so even though—”

  “Light and Darkness, Tyr, don’t make me come up there and hit you!”

  “Okay, okay! I’m guessing that what this says here is that the Elves of Great Queen Vieliessar Farcarinon’s time weren’t worrying about their Bonded dragons dying—except by accident. And the dragons weren’t worried about dying either.”

  “It says all that up there?”

  “This is the fifth level we’ve been on and there have been carvings and writings that were clear enough to read on levels three, four, and five, so, no. It doesn’t say all of this right up here. Would you like to come up here and look at this section of the carvings for yourself?”

  “Um … no. How come they put that stuff up there where nobody could read it, if it’s so important?”

  Even all the way down on the floor Harrier could hear Tiercel sigh. “Oh, I don’t know, Harrier. Maybe because this was just decoration and they had the same stuff written down in a much more useful and accessible way in books.”

  “Okay. Right. So what does it say?”

  “You know that—”

  “Bonded, it is not that I am becoming tired of standing here …” Ancaladar said meaningfully.

  Tiercel cleared his throat. “It says that the dragons’ Bond was supposed to be a temporary condition. I’m not sure I’ve got that right, but… there’s something about the Bond, and something about time, and something about a Mageprice being fulfilled, and I can’t figure it out. But what I can figure out—and I’m sure about this—is this: when the Bond is paid, the dragons will stop dying.”

  “Yeah, well that time obviously is
n’t yet,” Harrier said before he could stop himself.

  “No,” Tiercel said, sounding wistful. “I guess it isn’t the Time of the Three Becoming One’ yet.”

  “I’m not even going to ask what that means,” Harrier said as Ancaladar gently lowered Tiercel to the floor again.

  “Good,” Tiercel said, sighing, “because I don’t know. Which three, or how they become one, or what that has to do with … anything. Does it mean there won’t be any more Elven Mages?”

  “You’re asking me?” Harrier wanted to know.

  “No,” Tiercel said, stepping from Ancaladar’s head to the floor. “I’m just asking.”

  “Fine. Now do you—”

  “Oh, I really don’t think you’re going to like this,” Tiercel said.

  “Look, Tyr, we know they won,” Harrier said, caught halfway between irritation and worry.

  “Yeah. But I’m starting to think they didn’t do it here—as in, they weren’t in Abi’Abadshar—um, the name means something like either ‘; glorious rightful rule’ or ‘; city of the red bones’ if you’re interested—when the Endarkened were cast out in Vieliessar Farcarinon’s time. Okay, you know about the Firesprites, right?”

  “No.”

  “Ancient race the Endarkened killed. But not until a long time after Abi’Abadshar was built. And abandoned, because this was where the Firesprites lived. Here. In the Barahileth, and the Elves made an alliance with them, and one of the provisions was that they would leave.”

  “And you know this because of the …?”

  “Pictures.”

  “Right. Which they put on the walls because …?”

  “They liked putting things on walls? I don’t know. The point is that the Elves built this city as part of their war against the Endarkened. They made an alliance with the Firesprites, and turned the war in this area over to them. I think. After which they withdrew from this city.”

  Tiercel began moving around picking up his gear—which was scattered all over the place—and packing it up. Harrier wondered if what Tiercel had been hoping to find on this level was the same thing they’d both been hoping to find somewhere here in Abi’Abadshar all along: an answer, directions, some clear instruction on what exactly it was they were supposed to do in order to do …