Phoenix Rising

by Ryk E. Spoor

  A line of fire scorched its way along his side, and Tobimar realized it wasn’t just a matter of sensation—that wasn’t a blade. One of the mazakh was a spellcaster—maybe a priest, even, and that would be very bad. He charged forward, channeling his will into his body, his legs, leapt over the warriors that tried to intercept him with a bound that almost cracked his head open on the wooden beams above, barely kept hold of his weapons and will as dark-blue lightning sparked around him and the scaly priest stumbled backwards, throwing up his arms; it was futile as the razor-sharp swords first took one arm and then half-severed his head. Three so far, maybe four.

  Impact from the side, sensed too late to block, only roll with it a bit, come up, cut at the legs, back them up, block again, arms hurting, can’t stop, turn, disarming spin, jab, he’s down, another two on me, stab backwards, missed but they’ve moved away, jump up, by the Sand there’s the statue, hope it’s not Manifesting right now, land on the outstretched arm, that will make it harder on them . . . Oh dust and drought they’ve all got missiles, spears, Zachass, think some of the ones I scattered weren’t broken, got to get down!

  Even moving as fast as he could, Tobimar tried to block two bladed discs, only managed to get one, the other scoring a long cut down his right arm. It wasn’t all that serious, but instantly the arm began to simultaneously go numb—and to burn like icy fire. Poison!

  The Inner Will could disperse a poison, even heal wounds—but if he used that much focus, they’d have him in an instant. All he could do was try to slow it a bit. And keep fighting. Swinging. Cutting.

  Finally he realized there was a pause, a gap. He stared around, seeing that he must have killed eight, nine of them already . . . but there were at least eighteen remaining. Reinforcements.

  The mazakhar stepped slightly forward, hissing. “A good fight, boy, and brave speech. But you slow, you tire, and we are many. Nearly all in this house have come. What, then, should we fear?”

  And in that moment, when he searched for some words that would mean something, another voice spoke. A voice strange and hollow, echoing around the room, seeming to come from no clear source above or below.

  “Fear me.”

  And the huge mazakhar bellowed in agony, clutching futilely at its back as though something had impaled it there. The other mazakh whirled, seeking the source of that voice and that pain.

  Tobimar didn’t know what was going on, but he knew a chance when he saw one. He lunged forward, both swords drawn back, and with all his strength made a double cut; a second, gurgling scream and the leader went down, hands scrabbling grotesquely at his own innards in a useless attempt to keep them where they belonged.

  Now there was consternation on the reptilian faces, for as Tobimar forced all of his strength into a final whirlwind of cuts, it seemed as though some invisible force protected him, hindering every attempt to hem in the exiled Prince. A spear was levelled at his back, and the wielder suddenly pitched to the ground, clutching at an ankle that was fountaining blood. A blurred, tiny motion, impossible to follow in the shadows and deadly dance of combat, streaked away, and a moment later as Tobimar exchanged blows with a veteran warrior, scales thick and glossy with age, whose skill threatened to disarm the young man at any moment, something tiny dropped from above (or, perhaps, leaped from the floor?) and a silvery flicker of motion jabbed from one side to the other; the veteran’s sword clattered unheeded to the floor as the clawed hands were clapped to the throat, impotent to stem the tide of red and the half-seen something bounded away. A murmur of uncertainty began now, and the twin swords spun and danced in lethal rhythm, weariness held at bay with sheer will and rising hope, punctuated now by a pair of chiming twangs, and two mazakh fell with steam-whistle shrieks as something entered their eyes and began to burn with white-fire agony.

  That was enough; the remaining creatures fled, unwilling to face the unyielding Tobimar and whatever unknown and terrible force had allied itself with him, even here within their own temple.

  In the sudden silence, Tobimar could hear his own ragged breathing, and he glanced around, feeling the poison still trying to work its way through him, dizziness warring with fear and confusion. “Wh-what are you? Where are you? Show yourself!”

  “No need to shout.” The voice from down near his feet was the same, but somehow less frightening, almost comical.

  Nonetheless, he jumped back, startled, and looked down.

  A small brown Toad—with, admittedly, a fair overlayer of red gore—looked up at him and waved. “Hello!”

  And Tobimar Silverun, Seventh of Seven, Seeker of Skysand, found himself utterly without words.

  12

  Tobimar set down the crystal-carved draftglass and signaled for a refill, shaking his head in amazement. “That’s quite a story.”

  The little Toad waved a hand dismissively. “A little luck goes a long way. I’m just a lucky Toad.” He lifted his own cup and poured a trickle of a black drink—nearly as thick as honey and with a taste Tobimar unfortunately could still recall—onto his tongue, making the Prince wince with the memory. Poplock had told him, just as he tasted it, that it was brewed from locusts and flame-ants. “Your story was much more interesting. But you didn’t really finish yours; you didn’t explain what you’re still doing here. I mean to say, you’re on a quest; shouldn’t you be doing the questing?”

  Tobimar laughed, then thanked the server as he refilled Tobimar’s glass. “Well . . . you know, I thought about that a lot. I came here looking for clues to our lost heritage, and I found some. But not really enough to give me an idea of how this connected to what my teacher Khoros said in his parting message.” The Toad gave a nodding bob of his body, showing he was listening. “I realized that with dozens of my family, maybe hundreds, having gone on this journey before, they must have come here at some point.”

  “And your family doesn’t really have many clues to the past.” Poplock nodded again. “You don’t even know how you came to Skysand, really.”

  “Exactly. We fled there from somewhere, but even the direction isn’t clear, just that wherever it was there were many mountains.”

  “Oh, that’s helpful.” The ironic tone of the little Toad’s voice brought a wry smile to Tobimar’s lips.

  Mountains were not something in short supply. The entire continent was bisected by the Khalals—something like three to four thousand miles long and a few hundred miles wide, with the Archmage Idinus ruling his empire from the sixty-thousand-foot peak of Mount Scimitar. Then to the south of the Khalals, forming the main border and barricade between the Empire of the Mountain and the State of the Dragon King, were the Ice Peaks, themselves another two thousand miles of mountains, sometimes reaching six miles in height. To the far west and just south of the end of the Khalals, the ramparts of Hell’s Rim stood grim and impassible save through the pass at Hell’s Edge, while much farther south the Krellin Mountains formed a circle said to house the Father and King of Dragons himself. In the Southeast, the Wyrmscrest was a smaller but still notable range on the way to Elyvias, which was surrounded itself by the Cataclysm Ridge. North of the Khalals, Tobimar’s own Skysand was bracketed by the Flamewalls, the White Blade Mountains surrounded the similarly named country . . . there were, simply put, a lot of possibilities.

  “Very helpful indeed,” he agreed. “But I’ve found a few reasonable possibilities. Still, what bothered me was that I might be retracing my forefathers’ steps; Master Khoros once said ‘whenever it seems clear to you what needs to be done to solve some ancient riddle, remember that many others may have thought it clear as well.’”

  “Hmmmm. I see. I think. Your old teacher’s saying that if it really was that simple, why then, does it still need to be done?”

  “Exactly. So I spent, oh, I don’t know, weeks trying to be clever and think of some new approach.” He took a drink of the deep-blue, slightly bubbly Artanian wine and tried one of the baked tineroot chips. “Plus I was trying to figure out what direction I needed to take t
o follow his awfully cryptic advice.”

  Poplock’s tongue snapped out, snaring a fly that had started an ill-fated investigation of Tobimar’s plates. “Mmm. Crunchy. Yes, that did sound vague. Wizards are always like that, though. Follow lies and find truth, go south to reach the north, stand on your head to see things right-side up. I think working magic messes with their heads.”

  “It’d be easier if I believed that, O Sage of Toads. Master Khoros was far too clear-headed, alas.” The tineroots were spicy, with an earthy undertone, and dusted with salt. “There’s a lot of gods that promise justice or vengeance and no few that promise both; hard to sort them out. Chromaias is one of the obvious ones, the Three Beards, Myrionar, Odin, the Triad . . . But we’re followers of Terian, always have been, so I went to the Hall of Light here.”

  “Main temple of Terian? That’s a big building. Pretty, too. Liked that big statue, but that fuzzy light around the head makes your god hard to see.”

  Tobimar laughed. “You’re not supposed to be able to see his face, silly Toad. Anyway, I prayed and then asked the Lurali there for guidance. She meditated and then said that my path could not be guided, for I must make the path my own.”

  “Oh, ouch, that was useless.”

  “Not actually.” He grinned as he saw Poplock squint one eye shut and warp his face in an expression of incomprehension. “It took a little bit, but I looked at it again from Khoros’ point of view. I had to make the path my own. That meant not following the same path the others took.”

  “But,” the little Toad said, still puzzled, “they took all kinds of paths, from what you said.”

  “Right. So that meant I had to figure out what they all had in common. What were they all doing at the same time?

  “So I went out for a walk, to clear my head, after a while—and as soon as I got ten steps out the door, it struck me like the very light of dawn: that was the answer.”

  Poplock gazed at him with a dour expression for a moment. “What was the answer?”

  “They were all looking. They were all searching. Trying to find something on this huge world by chasing around after it.”

  The Toad blinked, then bounced suddenly. “Oh! Oh! So you had to start your search by stopping the search!”

  “Exactly! Just like when you’re trying to think of the answer to something, and it’s almost there but you just can’t quite get it, so you stop thinking about it . . . and then suddenly it comes.”

  Poplock grabbed a fried beetle-grub from his own miniature plate and chewed on it thoughtfully. “Still, you couldn’t just sit down and wait for the answers; the truth of your people’s origins never came to your country, and Skysand hasn’t been moving much.”

  “Right.” Tobimar leaned back. “So the question was . . . how could I work the angles of Khoros’ advice? How could I not seek, yet also make sure I was still seeking?” He looked at Poplock to see what he might come up with.

  The Toad sat still for a few moments, still chewing. Then he bobbed slowly. “By doing some kind of job that would keep you on the edges of everything strange and dangerous, yet make you respected enough to get access to records that aren’t easy for ordinary people to reach.”

  “And that job would be . . . ?”

  Now the Toad grinned. “You followed those hints of justice and vengeance. Bounty hunter with a code, of course. Adjudicator in training, or adventurer looking for steady work in a city. And I guess that brought you to that mazakh stronghold.”

  “You’ve seen it clearly, Poplock. There aren’t all that many Lords Adjudicator, and with the law in the State being mostly composed of ‘Don’t cause trouble’ in different ways, people usually try to settle problems more directly. Oh, anyone can go in and see the King himself, but the cost could be high, depending on what the King decides must be done. There’s always a market for a trustworthy independent investigator who’s good with blades and able to deal with magic too.”

  “Oh, no doubt, no doubt,” the Toad agreed, with a comically raised eye-ridge, “but how exactly do you convince people you’re trustworthy to begin with? That’s how any good faceturner makes his living, you know—looking trustworthy. But anyone with the money and resources to hire a good Adventurer or investigator usually isn’t going to be that easy to run the turn on.” He spoke with the air of someone who—having spent the last couple of years unseen and underfoot throughout the City—had come by this knowledge with experience.

  Tobimar grinned, pushing an errant strand of his black hair back into place. “True, but most of them won’t put a Starheart on deposit with the Nomdas of Terian, or offer to pay for a truthsaying with anyone the client names. I will.”

  Poplock blinked in surprise. “No . . . no, I don’t suppose many others would. Especially not that last bit about the client getting to name the truthsayer. So what about the mazakh?”

  Tobimar shook his head. “That one was supposed to be pretty simple. One of the khallit—Maridras is her name—came to me and asked me to find her eggs; two had been stolen and she and her mate had a clutch of only three. I really only had to find them and, if they were still viable, they’d take care of the rest. If the eggs were . . . unrecoverable, well, they might have had some more work for me, or maybe they’d just have gone straight to the real Adjudicators then.

  “Well, even in the First City there’s friction between all types; out-and-out prejudice and so on is forbidden, but behind-the-scenes infighting, that kind of thing, goes on all the time. And there’s at least two of the races I know of that have a real taste for mazakh eggs.”

  “Ooo! Ooo! I know those too. The Iriistik and the . . . oh, what do they call them . . . the Rohila, the Artan-that-aren’t-Artan?”

  “The White Elves?” Tobimar blinked at that. “I hadn’t heard that one. No, I was talking about bilarel.”

  “Ogres or trolls . . . yeah, heard that. But the White Elves do too.”

  “I’ll have to remember that. Anyway, I thought I had a strong lead; there’s a small Iriistik nest here that’s a colony for the Gold Mother up north, and I picked up some rumors they’d been asking around for eggs. Some mazakh will sell their eggs if they’re not fertilized, or even if they are and more hatchlings would be a problem, though you almost never see that with the khallit—there’s too few of them to afford to shrink the population much. I narrowed it down to a Gray Warrior who was seen in the area, and I cornered him last week and after I proved I could probably beat him, he recognized his nest-value lay in survival, not in maintaining secrets.

  “So you can imagine how puzzled I was when he said he’d arranged to steal the eggs, but not for him. For some other mazakh.”

  Poplock shook his head slightly. “Right, that makes no sense. Khallit stick together, and the True People—the regular mazakh—wouldn’t keep eggs of khallit at all, they’d destroy them on the spot. Figure they’re cursed or something.”

  “That’s what I thought. But the Gray was very certain of what he said, so I started some really careful investigations of the local mazakh, and sure enough I found a couple people who remembered hearing something about mazakh seeking khallit eggs.”

  Poplock finished his drink and used his rear foot to scratch behind his head. “Hmmmm. Well, you know, there were some pretty nasty necromancers securing that place, and unborn souls . . .”

  “Exactly what I began to guess after a while, especially after I talked to people in the area and managed to find a common thread in the whole affair. The queries and contacts all started with one particular mazakh and I was able to pinpoint which one when this old Dwarf—”

  “Better not let Odin’s Children hear you use that word!”

  “I’ve heard what they call us. They can handle the word ‘Dwarf.’ Anyway, this old graybeard fighter had seen ‘that sneaky hissing lizard,’ as he put it, and remembered a mark on his upper arm, three very thin lines like scars. With that hint, I managed to track that mazakh down, found out that he was acting as a sort of fixer or arrang
er for his group, tracked them down, and . . . well, that’s how I got into that mess.”

  Poplock looked thoughtful, almost as though he was trying to think of something. “Something about that . . . well, it’ll come back. Anyway, now what are you going to do, Prince Tobimar?”

  Tobimar gave a slight smile. “First I’m going to have to go to my clients and tell them what I’ve found out. I don’t have too much hope their eggs are still viable; if they’re using them for what I’d guess, they probably would use them right away. Then . . .” He looked at Poplock. “We need to do something about your problem, actually. That’s more important than my quest. After all, mine’s been waiting twelve thousand years.”

  “With that logic, you’ll never finish it,” Poplock pointed out with a mocking bounce. “But you’re probably right. I’m really feeling uneasy about that old demon; he’s had a lot of time. But what can we do? No one listens to me.”

  Tobimar Silverun sat up a little straighter. “Maybe not, Poplock. But I’ve made quite a few important connections since I’ve been here. If we take them the results of this investigation, combined with the importance of what you’ve got to tell them . . . I think it just might get us in to see Adjudicator T’Oroning himself, and I’ve been wanting to talk to him ever since I got here!”