The Enduring Flame Trilogy 003 - The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  At the same time they realized they’d lost most of their supply of food, Ahairan’s attacks tapered off. First one sennight passed without attack by Goblins or Shamblers—and only a few encounters with Sandwalkers during the days—then two, and then they stopped even seeing Sandwalkers. Three, five, ten days passed without any attack at all. But no one was celebrating. They didn’t know whether Ahairan had withdrawn her creatures, or if she’d finally found an enemy they couldn’t successfully fight.

  One too small to see.

  Sickness was spreading through the tents. Fever, and racking cough, and it might be easy enough to cure in Armethalieh, but they didn’t have any medicine here. All they had was magic, and not enough of that.

  It wasn’t that Harrier wasn’t willing to do Healing spells. But if he did them, he needed people to share the spell-cost, and to ask that of anyone here was to ask them for more than they had to give. That meant Bisochim was the only one who could Heal, and there were hundreds of the sick. And they wouldn’t ask to be Healed, not while they knew how much of Bisochim’s energy had to go into forcing the rain to fall where no rain had ever fallen.

  And so people died.

  TEN days after they entered the Barahileth, the surviving Isvaieni reached Abi’Abadshar.

  When Bisochim had sent the Young Hunters out into the Isvai on the pretense of searching for the Nalzindar, the tribes had numbered among their tents more than fourteen thousand people.

  When Harrier had led the Isvaieni away from Telinchechitl almost half a year ago, he’d led ten thousand one hundred and eighty-three people.

  Three thousand nine Isvaieni reached Abi’Abadshar.

  IT was midday when they arrived. The ruined city looked strange to Tiercel, and for a moment he couldn’t quite figure out why.

  There are plants everywhere. And they’re in bloom.

  He had a hazy memory of what Abi’Abadshar had looked like before—tumbled ruins, a few scruffy tufts of grass. Now there was grass everywhere, and vines twining up over chunks of rain-washed ruin, and the wiry brush with long pale dagger-like thorns that Shaiara had said was called (reasonably enough) thornbush. Its bark was black in the rain and between the thorns it was covered in tiny yellow flowers.

  “Doesn’t look like she’s been here,” Harrier said, with a combination of exhaustion and triumph. “Get down, you. You can go eat this place bare once I get my feet on the ground.” Once he’d dismounted, Harrier pulled the saddle from his shotor’s back and stripped off its bridle. With an irritated grunt, the animal wallowed to its feet and trotted off. “You should go down first,” Harrier said, turning to Shaiara, whose shotor was kneeling as well. “So they don’t—you know—try to kill all of us.” He held out his hand to help her off her shotor.

  “We will go together,” she said firmly, placing her hand in his. “There is room for all.”

  The shotors were eager to get at the feast they saw all around them, and even though they were exhausted and half-starved, it was difficult for the Isvaieni to control them long enough to unsaddle and unload them. Once Bisochim would simply have been able to bespell them to docility. Now all his magic was bound into the single spell that kept rain falling where no rain had ever fallen.

  When Marap finally came up the steps to greet them, her expression of horror made Tiercel sharply aware of what they all must look like. Not just filthy, but starved.

  “Ummara Shaiara,” Marap said, her voice uncertain.

  “I am happy to be able to return here,” Shaiara answered simply. “And once more Abi’Abadshar becomes a sanctuary—this time, for the last of the Isvaieni. I admit, we will be grateful for the chance to be dry.”

  “Dry?” Marap answered wryly. “Water has fallen from the sky these past ten sennights. I do not think there is any dry place anywhere in either the Isvai or the Barahileth. We have moved to the Fourth Descent so that we might remain dry below. In the chambers of this Descent, there are many ‘doors’ to burn for warmth, but with so many . . .”

  “And are there not many Descents, and many doors?” Shaiara answered.

  IT took nearly three hours just to get everyone and what items that could be salvaged down into the underground city. When everyone else had gone, Tiercel and Bisochim lingered on the surface. Tiercel was a little surprised at how much he didn’t want to go into Abi’Abadshar. It was the last place he’d seen Ancaladar, and he felt a terrible revulsion at the thought of being here at all.

  “You can come inside,” Tiercel said to Saravasse, as the three of them stood outside in the rain. Her scales had long since been washed clean by the constant rain, and she was brilliantly scarlet once more. “This city was built for dragons. Dragons and Elves. Just . . . you have to be careful. I know the levels get wider and more open the farther down you go, so you might want to go all the way down, but you can’t. You mustn’t. Don’t go all the way down to the bottom because it’s dangerous, it’s too dangerous, if you do that—If you do that—” Abruptly he realized he was crying, his tears mixing with the rain. He tried to stop, but the effort only made him start coughing. He yanked the edge of his chadar loose and scrubbed at his face. Not that it did a lot of good. It was filthy. Wet and filthy, just like everything else he was wearing.

  “You must not fear for her,” Bisochim said, placing a hand on Tiercel’s shoulder.

  Tiercel shook his head—angrily, wordlessly—still coughing as he breathed in ragged half-hitching sobs. He couldn’t remember if he’d even cried when Ancaladar . . . left. Why was he crying now? There wasn’t any point. Tears wouldn’t banish Ahairan. Only dying would. A particular death. His. Because any Dragonbond Mage would do for the Firecrown’s sacrifice, but if it worked, they’d need Bisochim’s magic afterward to fix everything Ahairan had wrecked.

  “I promise I will be careful, Tiercel,” Saravasse said gently. “You must remember, I have been here before. And right now the city is so very crowded that I would worry about stepping on someone if I went inside. I don’t mind the rain, you know, but you and my Bonded must go inside and make yourselves warm and dry. Should anything happen to you, Harrier would become extremely annoying, you know.”

  “I know,” Tiercel said hoarsely. He rubbed at his eyes. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “I don’t want anything to happen to me either,” Saravasse said gravely. “Now go.”

  TIERCEL was actually surprised that all ten floors of Abi’Abadshar weren’t underwater after two and a half sennights of nonstop rain, but apparently the city had been built with excellent drainage, because even the outer courtyard wasn’t filled with water, just wet.

  The walls still glowed.

  The fact that they did was fortunate, because Abi’Abadshar’s newest refugees had to go somewhere, and most of them were unhappy enough about going down flight after flight of stairs without having to go down them in the dark. They filled the rest of the fourth level, and the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh. The two “safe” levels below that—so cavernous that full-sized dragons could be dwarfed by their immensity—were filled with their possessions. Spread out on the clean stone of the lower levels, they might—eventually—dry.

  The only ones who really seemed happy with their new accommodations were the ikulas puppies. They romped through the garden level trying to get the older ikulas to play with them and charged after the goats with barks of wild abandon.

  Tiercel was too keyed-up to rest; he followed Marap as she, the older children, and the Isvaieni women who had stayed behind went from one task to the next. Most of the Isvaieni who’d just arrived were already lying, exhausted, on damp sleeping-mats spread on stone floors, and the sound of coughing echoed from one end of each corridor to the other.

  The most heartbreaking thing Tiercel saw—through the long hours of that day—was the sight of women and children looking, not even for their husbands and parents and families, but just for their tribes.

  Kamazan. Barantar. Binrazan. Thanduli. Gone. There
were only a handful of Adanate left. Most of the Kareggi were dead. Most of the Lanzanur. Most of the Kadyastar. Most of everyone—there’d been more people just in the Kareggi Isvaieni a year ago than there were Isvaieni in all of the tribes put together now.

  He wished he’d never had to see this. He wished he’d never come here.

  He wished he’d never been born.

  “ARE you saying you can read this?” Tiercel asked.

  “It is as I have said before,” Bisochim said distantly. “For many turns of the seasons I walked the Spirit Roads seeking knowledge, and in the doing I saw much of the ancient times.”

  They’d been in Abi’Abadshar a sennight now.

  Harrier had wanted to leave for Telinchechitl immediately, but Shaiara had argued that all of them needed time to regain their strength before the last desperate push to reach the Lake of Fire. When Harrier unwarily said he planned to take only a few people with him—enough to be able to defend against whatever Ahairan might throw at them, but few enough that they could travel quickly—Shaiara had smiled in victory and asked him who he would choose.

  The arguments had raged for days, because—to Harrier’s utter disgust and bafflement—every single person here wanted to go. The Ummarai had finally agreed upon a lottery system, with Harrier reserving the right to pick outright twenty-five of the hundred people who would go, and to reject twenty-five of the lottery winners outright, requiring a substitute to go in their place.

  Tiercel didn’t have any interest in either the discussion or the lottery—he and Bisochim were going no matter who else went—so he’d taken Bisochim into the deepest levels of the underground city. He hadn’t been willing to admit to himself that he was hoping Bisochim could tell him what had happened to Ancaladar.

  And how to get him back.

  Tiercel drew a deep shuddering breath at Bisochim’s words. “You can read the walls. You know what this is.”

  “It speaks of the time of the Three Becoming One,” Bisochim said, running his fingers over the carving on the wall. “Of a time to come when the dragons will no longer have to die. I have been a fool, to unchain a Demon when safety for my Saravasse was here all along.” For a moment he looked so devastated that Tiercel couldn’t bring himself to say anything.

  “But we don’t know when this time is going to be, do we?” Tiercel finally asked.

  “No,” Bisochim said, sighing. “Great Queen Vieliessar Farcarinon—who was both the destruction and the deliverance of the Elder Kindred—and Tannetarie the White—Great Mother of all Dragons—foresaw the time when the MagePrice would at last have been paid for the spells Queen Vieliessar cast so that Mages could Bond with Dragons and use their magic, but they also saw that its fulfillment would require a magic not yet in the world.” He moved farther down the wall, his fingers tracing the shapes that looked so much like the glyphs of the High Magick. “The transfer of the Bond . . . once it was a thing done always, for the Elder Kin would ever meddle and mock at any yoke set to bind them. Though there was but one generation of Elven Mages who could claim the Dragonbond, for Great Queen Vieliessar Farcarinon vowed in the name of generations unborn to renounce her peoples’ magic for the sake of victory and the Long Peace, until the last child of the Sanctuary of Leaf and Star was dead, the Dragonbonds of the Warhunt Mages could be transferred from Mage to Mage, and so the time of the ancient Dragonbond—before Men, before the Wildmages—endured for nearly two thousand wheels of the seasons.”

  Two thousand years, Tiercel thought, stunned. “But how could it—? How could they—?”

  “In that age—as in this—each Dragonbond Elven Mage was given to wield a single Great Spell, to be used for but one purpose,” Bisochim said, his face turned toward the wall.

  “To transfer the Dragonbond to a new Mage,” Tiercel said slowly.

  “Lost, very long ago,” Bisochim said quietly, speaking of the knowledge of Elven Magery. “The Elder Kin did not wish to remember that time. And Men did not know to seek the knowledge. Even I know not if such a spell would be mine to cast,” Bisochim said.

  “Even if you could—even if they could have—Wildmages didn’t Bond to dragons until the Great War, did they?” Tiercel said. “I don’t think anybody would have had time to find somebody a dragon could Bond to, and cast their Great Spell, before they died.”

  “Perhaps it is as you say,” Bisochim said.

  No matter how desperately he wanted answers, Tiercel wished now that he’d never brought Bisochim here and showed him the walls. Ahairan had been able to trick him into bringing her into the world because he’d wanted Saravasse to survive after he died. Now Bisochim knew that if he’d only found this place and solved the riddle of the wall carvings, the answer would have been here. Tiercel was about to say something—try to find words to apologize—when Bisochim turned to face him.

  “But this is not where your Bonded left you,” he said, and his voice was soft but resolute. “Take me to that place.”

  BISOCHIM had spoken so rarely in the half-dozen moonturns since the three of them—he and Saravasse and Tiercel—had rejoined the Isvaieni that Tiercel was always startled when he did. In these few hours they’d been alone together here on the eighth and ninth Descents, Tiercel thought Bisochim had spoken more words than he had in that whole time and in the whole moonturn and a half before that. He’d used to wish Bisochim would talk more. He’d always thought if he’d share his knowledge with them, it might help.

  He was sorry now he’d ever wished for such a stupid thing.

  The walls and floor and ceiling of the Tenth Descent glowed moonbright with cerulean MageLight. The walls were smooth and uncarved, and the floor was as ridged as the windswept desert, so if you let your eyes unfocus a little you could trick yourself into thinking you were outside on the desert at night. The space was so large there was no sense of being enclosed at all.

  “No one who has not witnessed those events can understand how savage the first war of Dark against Light was,” Bisochim said quietly. He knelt upon the floor, brushing his fingers across its ridges. “The Dark expected utter victory. The Light was only righteous and worthy in comparison to that which it faced, for even the Elder Kin had many lessons to learn before they could become estimable custodians of the True—of the Balance. And in that ancient day they were powerful and proud. Pride nearly destroyed the Light in them before it could be well-kindled. Power was all that saved them, and all the Peoples of the Light.”

  “You know what this is,” Tiercel said slowly.

  “Yes.” Bisochim got to his feet. “A door. A way for dragons and their Bondeds to escape. Should a city be attacked by the Endarkened, the Dragonbond would defend it until the last, then make their way to such a place as this.”

  “No,” Tiercel said, shaking his head in denial. “I’m sorry. You’re wrong. If that was just some kind of—Of MageDoor, I’d know. I’d still sense Ancaladar. And he would have come back! He—”

  “Yes.” Bisochim’s voice was barely above a whisper, but his expression held so much pity that it choked the words in Tiercel’s throat.

  “He’s dead,” Tiercel said. “That’s what you’re going to say, isn’t it? The magic is old, and it sucked him in anyway because he’s a dragon, and now he’s dead.”

  “Not yet,” Bisochim said, and there was still that terrible pity on his face and in his voice. “Did the Dragonbond Mages merely flee across the land, they would but bring the enemy upon another fortress unready to repulse them. The Dragonbonds fled also across sennights. Moonturns. Leaving behind no trail that even the magic of the Endarkened could find.”

  Tiercel shook his head, trying to make Bisochim’s words make sense. Across moonturns? By magic? The Wild Magic had spells to show what could be—that was what Scrying did. The High Magick had spells to show what had been: To Know and Recollect were two of them; he’d read their descriptions even if he couldn’t cast them. Bisochim said he’d looked at the past, so Tiercel supposed the Wild Magic could do that to
o. But that wasn’t the same as going there.

  “But—If he went into the past—” Then wouldn’t there have been two of him there? And wouldn’t he still be here?

  “To the past—or to a time not yet,” Bisochim said. “I cannot say where this door goes, Tiercel. Nor was it ever meant that the two halves of a Dragonbond should be separated by a door such as this. Even with all my Saravasse’s power to call upon, I cannot open it to allow you passage—yet my Beloved could open it with the lightest touch. Dragon and Bonded were meant to pass through together.”

  Tiercel knew he ought to say something. Anything. If he could think of something to say, maybe he could come up with the right questions to ask, the questions that would get him the answers that would let him figure out a way to fix this. He only realized he was swaying on his feet, about to fall, when Bisochim grasped his arm.

  “I am sorry, Tiercel,” Bisochim repeated.

  And Tiercel knew then that he couldn’t fix it. If there even was a way, there wasn’t time—their whole plan to have the Firecrown trap Ahairan relied on keeping the attention and interest of a Great Power and a Demon. And if Tiercel did fix it, and got Ancaladar back, he’d just have to choose between killing Bisochim and Saravasse, or killing Ancaladar and himself.

  I’m doing that anyway, Tiercel realized bleakly. And I’ve made my choice. This way, I just won’t have to look Ancaladar in the face when I do it. “I know,” he forced himself to say. “It’s not your fault. It isn’t anybody’s fault really.” That’s really the worst part of all.