The Phoenix Endangered

by James Mallory

  The thing that the Elves and even the Wild Magic seemed to be so serenely confident that Tiercel could do: stop Bisochim from calling the Endarkened back into the world. Harrier wondered if it might be as simple as going to the Lake of Fire and finding Bisochim and saying: “Hey, we don’t know what it is you think you’re doing, but you really aren’t. And calling the Endarkened back into the world is a really bad thing, so please stop now, okay?” If it were that simple, probably somebody else would have done it already.

  “Which means that if there’s an answer it isn’t going to be here, because this is not only an old place, it’s an old place from, um, the middle of the war so even though the Elves not only probably wrote everything down and they definitely carved it into every flat surface they could find, these flat surfaces don’t have any information about how the war came out and particularly on how they managed to win it.” Harrier looked back up the corridor—he supposed he might as well still call it that, although it wasn’t exactly. A big enough space to make Ancaladar look reasonablesized. Enough room for two Ancaladars side-by-side.

  “Come on, Harrier. We never thought there’d be a real answer here. If there was a perfect solution available here, wouldn’t they have used it in the next war? And the next?”

  “And the next, and the next, and the next—just how many wars are there going to have to be?” Harrier demanded in frustration.

  “I don’t think the Dark stops trying, Har,” Tiercel said softly. Harrier wondered if Tiercel felt as frustrated by all this as he did. Or maybe even more frustrated—Tiercel was the one who knew all the history, the one who had all the details about all the times the Dark had tried to kill all of them. “I wonder what time it is?” he added.

  “Time to go.” When Tiercel looked at him in surprise and suspicion, Harrier said: “No, really. It’s almost time for the evening meal—I mean, considering how far down we are, we’ve just about got time to get back for it if we start now.”

  It had surprised both of them to find that no matter how deep below the surface of Abi’Abadshar they went, Harrier always knew exactly what time it was up above. Since Ancaladar did, too, they knew that Harrier was accurate. How and why he could be was something none of them really understood. More Wild Magic stuff, Harrier guessed.

  “Yeah, okay,” Tiercel said.

  “Because I’m not moving down here,” Harrier added belligerently.

  “I said I was coming,” Tiercel said, hefting his bag of gear over his shoulder.

  IT WAS ONLY a little odd to be sitting around a campfire underground, Tiercel decided. Odd-but-nice, because at least the Nalzindar and their garden-camp were a lot more normal-seeming than places so far underground it took him and Harrier almost two hours just to walk to them. Abi’Abadshar was so old that when he stopped and thought about it, Tiercel really couldn’t get his mind around the sheer age of it. Every time he tried to imagine something older than the World of Men his mind just … stopped. It was easier to imagine a world that didn’t have humans in it any more than one in which there hadn’t been humans yet. Thinking about it raised so many fascinating questions, and there was nobody to ask—he wasn’t sure even the Elves knew the answers. But… had they—human people—come from somewhere else? Had the Wild Magic made them out of some other creature, the way the Endarkened had been made from Elves? No matter how much he wanted to know, the answers wouldn’t be carved into the walls here, because this city was too old for that. It had been born—and died—long before there had been Men at all.

  Tiercel found that he liked the Nalzindar very much. It made him a little sad, thinking that he would have liked the other Isvaieni just as much, and now, because of what Bisochim had done to them, he’d never get to know them. Shaiara’s people were quiet and shy, and Tiercel had quickly learned that they would never look directly at him when he was speaking to them, and that it was hard to get most of them to say more than a word or two at a time, either. The most disturbing thing about the Nalzindar was something that wasn’t something they were, or something they did, and it had taken him an entire fortnight to think it through and realize what it was and why it was so disturbing.

  But Shaiara had told Harrier that this was all of the Nalzindar that there were, and there were only thirty of them, and that included three babies too young to walk and two kids that Tiercel thought were probably somewhere around the age of two and one who was maybe four and a couple who were seven or eight and a boy around twelve who spent all his time staring at Harrier and Tiercel as if he’d never seen anything like them before and hadn’t said a single word in their hearing the entire time they’d been here. So there were only twenty-one adult Nalzindar, and only seven or eight of them looked old enough to be about the age of Tiercel’s father.

  And Shaiara wasn’t anywhere near that old. She was around his and Harrier’s age. Tiercel had wondered at first if Bisochim had killed her parents and that was why she was the chief of the Nalzindar now, but Ciniran—who didn’t seem to be as shy as the others—had said that Shaiara had been leading the Nalzindar for years.

  Tiercel supposed that someone their age being what amounted to a First Magistrate made as much sense as Harrier being a Knight-Mage or him being the Light’s Fated Warrior intended to defeat the Endarkened. And there was nothing much he could do about either of those things, either. So he took each day as it came, doing his best to become used to the fact that the only sunlight he really saw came filtering down through cracks in the broken stone of the roof, and that if he wanted to see full day and open sky he had at least half an hour’s hike to one of the exits to the outside. He spent most of his time a mile underground looking at things nobody had seen for thousands of years, hoping that something he found there would tell him what he needed to know to stop the Dark from coming back this time.

  And at the end of each day he did his best to put all of that out of his mind and think about nothing more complicated than the things he’d used to think about when he’d been a student back in Armethalieh: dinner, and a quiet evening, and then going to bed.

  The evening meal among the Nalzindar consisted of roast meat, or stew, and fresh-cooked flatbread with spiced oil (now that there was oil; before this, it had been animal grease) and various fruits and vegetables. The Nalzindar were hunters, and when they’d roamed the Isvai, the evening meal had marked the time, several hours after sunset, when the hunters would return to the camp to share their news of the day’s success or failure. The Nalzindar, like most of the creatures of the desert, hunted at dusk or dawn, and kept as still as possible in the day’s greatest heat. Now—by their standards—they didn’t need to hunt at all, but the evening meal still marked the end of their day. There might be some talk of the days’ activities—though only, Tiercel had discovered, if they involved something the whole tribe needed to know. At meals, Harrier and Tiercel sat beside Shaiara—honored guests—with a half-dozen of what Tiercel thought of as “senior” Nalzindar gathered around them, although they weren’t much older than Harrier’s oldest brother. He knew most of their names by now: Marap and Kamar and Natha and Talmac and his brother Turan. Even Ciniran ate with them, although he didn’t get the impression she was one of the “senior” tribesmen. Actually, aside from Marap and Kamar and Shaiara herself, Tiercel wasn’t sure of the relative status of anyone here.

  Even though he was determined to be a good guest—and even though he knew how much worse his situation could be—Tiercel found his evenings among the Nalzindar more boring than he could once have imagined. After the meal they simply went off to sleep. And he couldn’t practice his spells. He really didn’t dare (considering that a simple spell of Magelight had made the walls light up so brightly, he had no idea what might happen if he cast the wrong spell), and besides, Ancaladar wasn’t there to work with him. Ancaladar wasn’t even there to talk to, most of the time in the evening, because Ancaladar spent most nights hunting. Desert game was small and sparse, and unless he wanted to leave the desert entirely a
nd fly to a place where he could take larger prey, he needed to hunt every night. And while Ancaladar could fly to such a place, none of them really liked the idea of him being so far away from Tiercel, considering what had happened the last couple of times.

  At least—in this land of what the Nalzindar called “peace and plenty”—some of them were willing to stay up after dinner just to keep “the strangers” company. (Tiercel got the idea that even if he and Harrier spent the next ten years here in Abi’Abadshar with the Nalzindar, they’d still be known as “the strangers”), because even after a long day spent hiking through the echoing caverns below, neither of the two of them was ever quite tired enough to sleep immediately. After dinner most evenings, Shaiara and Ciniran would walk with them through the gardens for an hour or so, accompanied by floating balls of Coldfire. About a half an hour’s walk away from the camp, there was a pool with a little waterfall. The two Nalzindar never grew tired of gazing at the falling water. There were even fish in the pool, though none of them could imagine how they’d gotten there. Harrier had assured the Nalzindar that fish were safe to eat, and had even offered to catch and cook some, but even though Harrier was a “Revered Wildmage” (and Tiercel would never get tired of teasing him about that, at least when they were safely out of earshot of any of the Nalzindar) so far none of the tribe had been willing to take him up on his offer.

  Sitting beside the waterfall, they would talk, though Harrier and Tiercel and Ciniran did most of the talking.

  “You couldn’t be planning to spend the rest of your lives here?” Tiercel asked one evening. “I mean, this is a beautiful place, but…”

  “Where else should we go?” Ciniran had asked simply. “The Isvai is not safe.”

  “But there are other places,” Tiercel said.

  Ciniran stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Um … north?” Tiercel suggested cautiously. “You could go north?”

  Shaiara had made a faintly amused noise. She was far-too-polite to ever tell them they were idiots, even when Tiercel suspected they were definitely being idiots, but she could convey her mirth at foolishness when it presented itself to her, and frequently did. “Into the Great Cold?” she said in disbelief.

  “You make it sound as if it’s like—I don’t know—thinking about packing up and going off to live in the Elven Lands,” Tiercel protested.

  “And why should I consider living in the Veiled Lands, when they belong to the Elder Brethren, who would surely not welcome my intrusion?” Shaiara asked. “Still less would I wish to go to live in a wasteland of frozen water.”

  “No, no, see, the north isn’t like that,” Tiercel said, wanting to make her understand. “Well not all the time. No, it isn’t even like that in winter—okay, there is frozen water—I mean, snow and ice—on the ground, well, snow falls out of the sky, but—”

  To his irritation he heard Harrier laugh out loud as he stumbled through his explanation, and even Ciniran gave a single soft chuff of amusement. But it became clear to both of them—to all of them—that the thought of the Nalzindar traveling to a land where they had no idea of how to survive was only a stopgap at best. It might offer temporary safety, but if Bisochim could not be stopped at the Lake of Fire, that safety would be very temporary indeed.

  Twenty One

  A Double-Edged Gift

  “IF WE HAVEN’T found anything in the last—oh, how many is this?—six?—eight?—levels, I don’t see why you want to keep going down,” Harrier complained.

  “It’s ten levels now. This will be the tenth. And among other things, don’t you want to see how far down this goes?” Tiercel answered.

  It was now a full moonturn since the two of them had arrived in Abi’Abadshar. There were whole stretches of time when Harrier could forget … things.

  The destruction of Tarnatha’Iteru. The thought that the man who’d given him his swords and taught him all that he knew about using them was certainly dead. The fact that this was only a waystation on their way to destroy the Fire Woman and stop Bisochim—and only when it was very late and he was completely alone did Harrier ever take out and look at the thought that stopping Bisochim was going to mean killing Bisochim.

  He’d killed a man whose name he didn’t even know. He’d killed, in fact, several men, and the fact that he didn’t know the exact number made him want to cry, if there’d been any place he could have done it without anyone knowing. And it didn’t matter why he’d done it, or what those men’s friends and families had done to Harrier’s friends (and would do to his family if they could get at them). Having killed had hurt something and changed something inside him, and Harrier would give nearly anything for those moments not to have happened—and to unknow the knowledge that if more such moments lay in his future, he would not turn aside from them.

  So he followed Tiercel as Tiercel looked for answers, and practiced with his swords down in the echoing stone depths where none of the Nalzindar could see him—because he couldn’t bear the thought that any of them might see what he was doing and praise him, or want him to teach them what he knew—and did what he could to help the Nalzindar in other peaceful ways, and read his Three Books, and hoped that some solution to their problem would present itself.

  But not if it meant that Tiercel intended to descend to the center of the world looking for it.

  “No,” Harrier said simply. “Either there are answers here, or there aren’t. And you have to make up your mind which it is. Because just the surface of this place is bigger than Armethalieh. And we do not have time to search every inch of the whole underneath of it, because you know what? I do not think the Endarkened are getting weaker while you are drawing pictures of ancient Elves on pieces of paper!”

  He hadn’t meant to lose his temper. He hadn’t meant to yell. But if anybody—or anything—had thought that turning him into a Knight-Mage was going to make him all calm and reasonable all the time like, say, Ancaladar, they were a lot stupider than they ought to be, was all Harrier had to say.

  “Do not yell, Harrier,” Ancaladar said gently. “We all are aware of the dangers that surround us.”

  “No,” Tiercel said reluctantly. “He’s right. You’re right. There’s a lot about the spells they used, but… Elven Magery and the High Magick and the Wild Magic are three different things, just to begin with. I can’t learn Elven Magery any more than I can learn the Wild Magic. It’s just… I thought… You know … I haven’t had one single vision since we got here,” he finished quietly.

  “I know.” And Harrier had wondered why that was, because Tiercel’d had them from the moment they’d come through Pelashia’s Veil and right up through when Tarnatha’Iteru fell. Never in any pattern. Never really changing.

  “So I think this place is shielded somehow against the Endarkened. Come on, Har. If Bisochim was looking for the Nalzindar, wouldn’t he have found them? You could—it’s a Seeking spell. Remember how you told me a couple of moonturns ago that I had to be careful about what I brought back from the Isvaieni camp at Tarnatha’Iteru in case I brought back something that Bisochim could Seek and use to find the Nalzindar? But he wouldn’t need something like that. To See something or somebody you know is a simple spell. I could—Shaiara’s said she’s met him, so Bisochim knows what she looks like, and I could find somebody if I knew what they looked like, and so could you, couldn’t you? So the only reason he hasn’t been able to find them is—”

  “Because they managed to hide in the one place within a couple of thousand square miles that’s full of shields against the Endarkened that still work after about a million years?” Harrier said.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Which means you think there might be some other magic here that still works?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And you didn’t mention this about a moonturn ago why?” Harrier asked with long-suffering patience. If not for the fact that Ancaladar’s head was between him and Tiercel, he would have contemplated smacking him. Yes, it was ver
y wrong to hit someone who was unarmed when you were armed—and Harrier never went anywhere without his swords, just as Tiercel couldn’t be persuaded to carry anything more threatening than his wand and his eating knife—but Harrier didn’t think those rules could ever have been meant to apply to Tiercel. The people who’d come up with those rules hadn’t known Tiercel.

  “We haven’t found any objects below the fifth level. And all we’ve found there and above have been furniture, household objects, a lot of gold and jewels. Things that would survive for thousands of years. And nothing remotely magical. The protective shields are probably built into the stone of the city, but…”

  “But something else might not be,” Harrier said, starting to get excited now, “and it doesn’t have to be something powerful enough to destroy He Who Is and an entire army of Endarkened, because that isn’t what we’re dealing with.”

  “And if there’s something here, there’s no point in doing a spell to try to find it, either your kind or mine, because the shield-spells will just soak up everything. How do you make a spell to look for something if you have no idea of what you’re looking for, anyway?”

  Harrier sighed in frustration, his momentary excitement evaporating. Tiercel was right. He leaned back against the wall. They’d have to search every inch of this place now and hope they’d recognize something useful—if there was something useful—when they saw it. He stared down into the opening for the steps leading from the Ninth Level to the Tenth. The top few steps weren’t dark, because the Ninth Level was full-moon bright, but after that, Harrier couldn’t see how far down the steps went, and each level tended to be just a little larger in scale than the last. “Is this the last one?” he asked hopefully.