The Enduring Flame Trilogy 003 - The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  “Trust a Barantar to think first of theft!” Anipha spat.

  Harrier sat down beside Liapha, because if he didn’t, he was going to hit somebody, and Anipha was closer than Sathan was. One of the ikulas moved over to rest its chin on his knee. He stroked its silky head absently.

  “How shall any steal the shotors of Ummara Sathan here upon the Forge of the Sun?” Zanattar asked. “This plan is a good plan. The Lanzanur shall place their shotors where Harrier Blue Robe desires.” He smiled at Sathan, a flash of white teeth in a black beard. “And so shall many of the Barantar.”

  Harrier was fairly sure that Sathan didn’t want to hear that his people would take orders from somebody else, even though the Isvaieni didn’t exactly take orders from their Ummarai either. He was still trying to decide whether Zanattar’s announcement did more harm than good when Liapha spoke again.

  “Anyone so foolish that he cannot find his own shotors in a herd does not deserve to have any,” she announced, as if stating the obvious.

  “The Kamazan will have no difficulty in doing so,” Anipha said disdainfully.

  “Then all is settled!” Liapha said brightly.

  At that point, Sathan could hardly say it wasn’t.

  “STOP trying to drag her,” Tiercel said. “She’s stronger than you are and almost as stubborn.”

  “You’re alive. I looked for you but I couldn’t find you.” Harrier tossed him the cow-shotor’s lead-rope. “You make her move, then, because until she does, none of the rest of them will.”

  “That’s because she’s the leader,” Tiercel said, answering the last comment first. “Yeah. I was trying to dispel the Coldfire, but it didn’t work out. By the time I was steady on my feet again there were a bunch of people telling me not to go to the eastern side of the camp, and then I started helping Hadozir gather the shotors as Bisochim Called them in off the desert.” He watched Harrier sort through his remarks and discard most of them as random noise, just as Harrier usually did. He wondered which of them Harrier would think was important.

  “The next time you decide to dispel something of mine while I’m trying to gather it together, tell me first so I can hit you. I thought the trouble I was having with it meant that Ahairan was nearby,” Harrier said.

  “Uh—” Oh. That one. It hadn’t occurred to Tiercel that he wouldn’t be doing Harrier a favor. “It’s, uh, going to be dawn soon,” he said. He patted the cow-shotor reassuringly on the shoulder, telling her that no, of course they weren’t expecting her to go anywhere at this time of day, just a few yards across the camp and then she and all her shotor-friends could lie down again, really. She uttered a deep groan of surrender and took a long lurching step forward.

  “Finally,” Harrier said with a sigh. He walked beside Tiercel as Tiercel led the string of shotors to their new resting place. “Well, we can’t run, and Light knows we can’t fight. We’ve lost almost fifty people in the last two nights. I don’t even want to try to count the number of sheep, goats, shotors, khalbes, ikulas, and falcons that are dead. And there are probably things we haven’t seen yet just waiting to attack us. Although Ahairan hasn’t been very efficient so far. If I were leading the Armies of the Dark, we’d all be dead by now.”

  Tiercel shuddered. “Don’t say that.” He’d told Bisochim that Harrier would never serve Ahairan willingly and go over to the Dark. He’d told Bisochim that he was the only one who wanted something so much that he could be tempted to bargain with the Dark, but that wasn’t really true, was it? Harrier had family in Armethalieh. “Although maybe not,” he said, distracted by a new thought.

  “I would too,” Harrier insisted.

  “No, I mean . . . Look, you know I read a lot about the, uh, the last Endarkened War,” Tiercel said tentatively. They’d reached the place where Harrier had decided to gather the shotors, and seeing all the other shotors already lying down, the cow-shotor shook her lead-rope loose from Tiercel’s hand with an irritated grunt and trotted off to find a place to lie down. The others behind her followed.

  “And I know I said I didn’t care, Tyr, but that was when I wasn’t going to be fighting the next Endarkened war, and don’t tell me that Ahairan isn’t an Endarkened, because trust me, this is not the time,” Harrier said in a rush before Tiercel could say anything else.

  Tiercel shook his head. Ahairan was an entirely different kind of Demon, but he didn’t want to start an argument about language with Harrier in the middle of explaining something else important. “It’s just that the—Yeah, okay, all right, the Endarkened had a lot of what the histories call ‘client races’ fighting for them. But just about all of those client races—Stone Giants and Frost Giants and Ice-Trolls and Coldwargs and Deathwings and, oh, a lot more—were creatures of dark, or cold, or dark and cold.”

  “ ‘Dark’ as in—?” Harrier asked slowly.

  “When the sun goes down, Har,” Tiercel said patiently.

  “Yeah, well, it does that here every night,” Harrier said, sounding irritated.

  “Yes,” Tiercel said. “But it’s also hot here, at least during the day—and they were Frost Giants and Ice-Trolls and Coldwargs and I don’t think that even in the, um, the Great War—the one before Kellen’s War—there were a lot of battles fought down here.”

  “Don’t you know?” Harrier demanded in exasperation.

  “No,” Tiercel said quietly. “There really wasn’t a lot of time for me to read those books in Karahelanderialigor. And I don’t think anything much older than the Flowering War is written about in any way I could read it.”

  “Sorry,” Harrier said wearily. “I’m sorry. It’s been . . . a long night. And I think we’re out of time. We need to decide what we’re going to do.” It was almost sunrise. The wind was rising, and the sky was shading from black to the darkest possible shade of blue.

  “You want to decide right now?” Tiercel asked. He didn’t want to complain, but he was exhausted, and he’d been awake since dawn yesterday, and he hadn’t known what to do about Ahairan then.

  “No,” Harrier said. “Right now I want to pretend tonight never happened.” They turned and began to walk back in the direction of the tent. “You know,” Harrier said, “I used to think, back when we were on the road looking for the Lake of Fire, that everything would be so much easier for us if only we had an army just like Kellen and Jermayan did. And just look at us now.”

  He gestured and Tiercel looked. All around them the Isvaieni were rolling up carpets and making sure that cookfires were thoroughly out and folding down their tents against the coming day. “Yeah,” Tiercel said.

  “There are times I wish the Light wasn’t so hasty in granting wishes,” Harrier said.

  Nine

  Bitter Harvest

  ON THE SANDS of the Isvai, Ahairan played her games of flesh and form. In the days since she had come to the World of Form, she had discovered its limitations . . . and hers. If her flesh-prison was not to exist in a bespelled sleep, it must be constantly tended, and flesh required grosser food than spirit did. Pain and death nourished her magic, but not her body. She would not die if it did—for an Elemental Spirit could not die—but she would be trapped within the husk as it rotted away, and once she slipped free of it, she would be diminished in power. Greatly diminished.

  It should have been the task of He-Who-Had-Called-Her to tend this body. He had crafted it in an image that—Ahairan knew—he found pleasing. Yet he had spurned it. And her.

  Once he bowed down to her, she would grant him immortality so that he might spend a thousand centuries regretting that lapse in judgment.

  But he must swear fealty to her first, so that she could fully claim this world. For herself, for her children—and for her kindred, whom she would liberate from the cold dark place from which she had been released once her power was great enough. They could sweep across the face of the land, bodiless, feeding upon the offerings her slaves would render up—or they might choose instead to take forms of flesh such as Ahairan and her ch
ildren would be able to create through their power. But they would be free.

  But before all these things might take place, Ahairan must win that which should have been hers by right, and so she needed minions to do her will. He-Who-Is was the wellspring of all Darkness, and He-Who-Is would never return to the World of Form, but the creatures Darkness had fashioned had not all passed away when their masters and makers had been destroyed. Some slept, waiting only to be awakened. Some had lost their physical reality but their possibility remained, and so they could be evoked anew. Most of them were creatures of northern darkness and northern cold, but she had Summoned them forth nevertheless—the Deathwings from their sleep in caverns in the depths of the most remote mountains—the Coldwargs from their ancient ice-bound hunting grounds far from the lands of Men or Elves—the duergar, cousins to the long-vanished Ice-Trolls, from the bowels of the earth where few creatures Dark or Light ventured—only to see these last remnants of the glory of Shadow Mountain fail and die as they attempted to answer her call. Of all the creatures of the Darkness from the ancient days of Shadow Mountain, none but the Goblins, the Balwarta, the Salaawah were yet hers to command. She must have more—others—to do her will here in the hot brightness of the southern lands.

  Her power was great enough to compel the will of every creature that made its home upon the sand, to twist their forms into vessels of Darkness just as He-Who-Is had once remade the firstborn of the Light’s children in His own image. She had found that the Isvai was filled with Life waiting to be rendered atish’ban at her touch—that was good, for Life was a fragile thing, and to craft atish’ban creatures able to survive more than a short period was time-consuming and delicate work. She destroyed far more Life than she managed to re-create in the image of Darkness, and though their deaths fed her—for Life’s suffering fed Ahairan’s insatiable hunger in a far more satisfying way than the physical substance she must now also ingest—the fact she was both forced to work and that she constantly failed at these necessary tasks also fed her frustration and her rage. This work should have been the duty of He-Who-Had-Called-Her—he should have been her servant already, his magic at her disposal, enabling her to breed up the first of a new race of Demons while he, her humble consort-prince, consolidated her empire and saw to her comfort and entertainment.

  The more she was forced to toil, the greater grew Ahairan’s anger at how badly she had been treated. He whom she would have made King of Men had been willful, and mad, and had spurned her, leaving her to make her way alone as best she could, turning her vast powers to these most menial of tasks. Yet they were labors that must be performed, for in their fall, the children of He-Who-Is had left Ahairan few servants capable of aiding her to claim her dominion—and force alone could not gain Ahairan what she must have.

  Yet within only a few sennights, Ahairan had set such events into motion that the capitulation of He-Who-Had-Called-Her could be a matter of only a few days more at most. She had trapped him—and she had baited that trap in a way that he would find impossible to resist, for had not his desire to preserve his dragon from death been the means by which she had secured her escape into the Time-Bound realm initially? She had prepared atish’ban to harry those others whom he might also wish to protect, proving to him her power. She had prepared for herself a stronghold in the depths of the desert, both to shelter her flesh-form and wherein she could preserve those of her creatures she did not wish to use up until she had need of them. All she need do now was claim victory and collect the last of her servants.

  “Come to me!” Ahairan shouted into the desert wind. “The day of my victory is at hand, and I claim your fealty!”

  She stood upon the roof of a tower that rose hundreds of feet above the desert floor. It was made of glass, but not by magic: she had taken the tiehaan, a tiny creature of the desert verge that built structures to its own purpose, and rendered uncounted hordes of them atish’ban. So changed, they made edifices not of mud, but of glass, and died by the incalculable thousands of their work. The sand around the foot of the crystal tower was heaped with their glittering ebony corpses. Their bodies made a faint clicking sound as the wind stirred them.

  Suddenly the Firecrown was there. “You are not yet victorious,” it answered. The glass beneath its feet crackled with heat and the wind that blew at this great height struck flames from its pale red hair.

  “I shall be!” Ahairan said defiantly, tossing her head. “I shall scour the people of He-Who-Has-Called-Me from the face of the desert as the Sandwind scours lichen from the rock. Each night as they set forth he will know that when the sun rises they will be fewer. I shall wring their lives from his grasp no matter how hungrily he clutches at them, and all the spells of He-Who-Has-Called-Me will not prevail against my power. Who can he turn to for their salvation but me?”

  “You are not yet victorious,” the Firecrown repeated.

  “I do not need him!” Ahairan cried, angry now. She tossed her head, and the wind blew the long strands of her cherry-black hair across her shoulder. She brushed them back impatiently. “I do not need any of them! You said to me that I could not journey northward to find Wildmages garbed in robes of blue—but you lied to me, for I have gone north to Akazidas’Iteru and passed within its gates, and there I found a Wildmage in a robe of blue, and I have brought him here!”

  “And will he serve you?” the Firecrown asked calmly.

  “If he does not, I will slay all those who share his blood. He will not refuse me,” Ahairan answered, her anger fading into triumph. “Come forth, Blue Robe!”

  She stretched out her hand. There was a sound of struggle and muffled groans, then a young man in the blue robes of a southern Wildmage came staggering up the steps to the tower roof, moving as if he struggled against compulsion. His blue robes were torn and filthy, and his face was bloody and battered. He strained to hurl himself over the edge of the tower, and when he could not, he glared defiantly at Ahairan.

  “Darkspawn! You threaten my kin, and your words are as the clamor of a barking dog. My mother is of the Binrazan—My father a trader of Sedullu’Iteru. More than a wheel of seasons ago the Wild Magic said to me that I must seek them out and go with them to Armethalieh to see them settled there, and so I did. And did they all stand here with me down to my sister’s youngest child, you might slay them all before my eyes and still I would not serve a Demon of the Dark!”

  “Sedullu’Iteru is dust and ash,” Ahairan said callously. “Kanash, will you see the tents of the Binrazan suffer the same fate?”

  Kanash smiled, and spat bloodily at her feet. “If you can, Demon. If you cannot force me to kneel to you, your power is not great.”

  Suddenly Kanash screamed in agony and fell to the floor. He clutched at his thighs, writhing against the sun-hot crystal roof, and where his hands pressed the fabric of his robes against his flesh, blood seeped through and stained the blue fabric dark.

  “Oh, I can force you to kneel, Kanash,” Ahairan said triumphantly. “To crawl, and to grovel, and to pray to me for death. And all I ask is that you serve me. It is such a small thing. Do this, and I will grant you great gifts—the lives of the Binrazan and any others you ask. I promise you this.”

  “You speak in the tongue of lies,” Kanash gasped, though his voice was hoarse and shaking with pain. “Never shall I serve you—never!”

  He howled in anguish as she attempted to force him to stand. Again and again he floundered convulsively as his body attempted to obey her commands and the splintered bone of his legs would not support him. As Ahairan continued to force his limbs to make the effort, blood began to pool on the roof beneath him.

  “Do as I command!” she screamed in frustration. Bisochim had defied and humiliated her as the Firecrown watched, and now a second Wildmage was resisting her commands as the Firecrown looked on. It infuriated her. “Do as I command!”

  Beyond speech now, Kanash could only shake his head. No. Never.

  With a last shriek of fury, Ahairan swept out he
r arm. Kanash’s body gave a convulsive shudder. If it was Ahairan’s intention to force him to throw himself off the tower, no compulsion was required—freed of her control, Kanash dragged himself swiftly to the edge of the tower, sliding through his own blood, and pulled himself quickly over the edge. He fell to his death in utter silence.

  “You are not yet victorious,” the Firecrown said for the third time, its voice still maddeningly calm and dispassionate. “You have held two wielders of the Wild Magic in your thrall, and you could not corrupt them, either through rich prizes or by duress. Shall I believe that you are powerful enough to claim this world?”

  “Yes!” Ahairan hissed furiously. “For I shall enthrall not only He-Who-Has-Called-Me, but the Fire-Crowned Boy and his companion as well! All three will serve me! Look to yourself, Firecrown, lest when that day comes—as it shall—I no longer desire our alliance.”

  “It would be foolish of me indeed not to seek alliance with the power that will hold the future of this land in its grasp,” the Firecrown answered. “Nor should I wish to place my power in the service of any purpose that did not hasten that supremacy. Truly, there is no creature who would doubt that your passions burn as ardently as the flame from which you sprang. And my own nature is fire.”

  “It is true that you can claim no kinship with the race whose battles caused the death of your worshipers,” Ahairan answered grandly. “When I summon you again, you must be prepared to give to me all that you have promised.”

  “I accept the terms you now propose, and in token of that gift I tell you this: upon the day that our bargain is fulfilled will come an end to many things,” the Firecrown said. “Yet if neither you nor I may die, the ending I speak of can be neither yours nor mine.”

  Before the last syllable of its words had faded to silence, the Firecrown had also vanished, as a flame of fire will vanish, blown to extinction by the desert wind.