The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  She met his eyes in triumph, and Bisochim did not look away. He raised his hand, as if plucking a naranje from its tree, and instead he plucked lightning from the cloudless sky. Three times it struck the outer wall of the caldera, and when the brightness of the last bolt had faded from the air, the upper staircase was gone.

  The stone glowed with heat. It creaked and groaned as it cooled, for the force of the lightning bolts Bisochim had unleashed against the stone had cracked and weakened it where it was already fragile, and as he watched, the upper edge of the rim crumbled inward and the stone began to crack. But he had expected that, and he was far from finished. Once more he reached into the sky.

  The spells he had cast scant hours ago had required utmost delicacy. This one required nothing but force and power—but those things a Dragonbond Wildmage had to the last beat of his heart. For long moments, as the cliffs of Telinchechitl moaned and keened above him, nothing happened. Then—softly at first, then with increasing force—a wind rose, cold as no wind in the furnace of the Barahileth ever was. The sky began to boil with dark clouds scudding westward, southward, eastward, until in moments the bright day turned dim. There was a dangerous rumble of thunder, a bright flash of light in the sky, and then came something that had never been seen in the Barahileth in all its tens of thousands of years of existence.

  Rain.

  Two

  Between Sand and Star

  THE SOUTHERN STARS were far brighter than the stars of home, but Harrier missed the familiar constellations: the Steersman, and the Dragon’s Tail, and the Three Wildmages. At least Pelashia’s Veil was still visible, though it was in the wrong place in the sky and the wrong color: too bright and too white. He remembered years ago, when Tiercel had told him that a long time ago Pelashia’s Veil had been called The Unicorn’s Road and Harrier had hit him because he’d been nine and Tiercel had been seven and a half and Harrier had known even then that unicorns ran on the ground, not up in the sky.

  He’d never thought he’d ever see one. But now he’d not only seen a unicorn, he’d talked to one, yelled at one, and now was preparing to summon her here by magic.

  Calling Kareta and demanding answers from her was the only thing Harrier could think of to try. It had been four days since Ancaladar had vanished, and while Harrier was incredibly grateful that Tiercel was still alive—since everything either of them knew about the Dragonbond said that severing it meant instant death for both dragon and Mage—the fact remained that Tiercel’s survival made no sense. Either Ancaladar was dead—which meant Tiercel should be dead too—or Ancaladar was alive, which meant Tiercel should know where he was and be able to call on his magic.

  Harrier shivered, wrapping his arms tightly around himself. It was freezing out here. Deserts, in his opinion, were one of the stupidest places the Eternal Light had ever created, and the idea of putting a city right in the middle of the most desert-y part of the desert was even stupider. Why would anybody—even ancient Elves—want to build a city in a place that was hot enough to boil water at noon and cold enough to turn it to ice at midnight on the same day? But they had, and according to Tiercel, this part of the Isvai had always been a desert. It had been one before the Great Flowering, after the Great Flowering . . . in fact, Abi’Abadshar had been built back when all there’d been was Elves and their dragons.

  And the Endarkened, of course. Which were not supposed to be a problem any more, because the Blessed Saint Idalia had killed the Queen of the Endarkened and Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy had killed the Prince of the Endarkened and the Shadow was supposed to be gone for good. Only it wasn’t, and now Tiercel was supposed to stop it, only he couldn’t do that without being able to cast any spells, could he?

  And that was why Harrier was out here freezing his ass off, because at least if they could figure out where Ancaladar was, maybe they could go and get him before Tiercel had to go off to the Lake of Fire and . . .

  Even in his mind Harrier refused to finish that sentence, because he knew damned well how it ended. With a sigh, he opened his rucksack, spread a cloth on the ground, and began assembling what he’d need to cast his spell. Summoning and Binding (there was a spell for that in The Book of Sun) because he knew Kareta, and he knew she wasn’t going to want to be helpful, so wherever she was, he was going to drag her here by the glowing scruff of her pretty little unicorn neck and make her be useful for once in her empty-headed life.

  One of the things in his bag was his Three Books—the Three Books every Wildmage received at the moment the Wild Magic chose them. Kareta was the one who’d brought Harrier his, and she’d never said where she’d gotten them, or how she’d known to bring them to him, or how she’d found him at all. He hesitated over them for a moment, then left them in the bag. He didn’t need them to perform the spell. He’d already memorized what he needed to do.

  When Harrier was growing up in Armethalieh, Wildmages had been the stuff of Flowering Festival plays. Real Wildmages kept themselves hidden, and you might go your whole life without meeting one, or at least without knowing that you had. Certainly some of his and Tiercel’s age-mates had mooned over the possibility of being granted the Three Books, but Harrier had never wanted to be a Wildmage. He hadn’t even wanted to be one at the moment he was holding the Three Books in his hands and Kareta was telling him he wasn’t just a Wildmage, but a Knight-Mage, that rarest of Wildmages, only called by the Wild Magic in times of great danger and peril.

  Yeah, right, Harrier muttered to himself. That’s one honor I could do without. Because the more he found out about magic, the creepier it was.

  Take the Three Books. The first time he’d looked into them, the ingredients for the Scrying Spell had been simple: fern leaf and red wine, and a silly little rhyme that reminded him of the fortunes baked into Flowering Festival luck-sweets. But when Tiercel had talked him into doing the Scrying Spell in Tarnatha’Iteru, and he’d checked the spell, the rhyme hadn’t changed, but the ingredients had: now the Book called for desert lily and date wine. The thought of the Books rewriting themselves to adapt to wherever he happened to be somehow bothered Harrier more than the fact that he could do spells at all. He wondered—if he’d happened to have fern leaf and red wine with him in Tarnatha’Iteru—if the spell wouldn’t have changed, or if the spells changed automatically depending on where you were, the way a compass-needle always pointed North. He probably wasn’t ever going to get a chance to find out.

  There was really no point in delaying any longer. He set out his makeshift brazier, drew his geschak—it was the knife all the Isvaieni carried—and scratched two circles in the sun-hardened clay: one for himself, one for Kareta. Once he’d set his spell, once she’d come and been forced inside the circle, she wouldn’t be able to leave until he’d given her permission.

  With a flick of his fingers, he Called Fire and lit the charcoal in the bowl. The bowl was solid gold, worth more than a new Deep Ocean Trader, and older than all the Nine Cities stacked on top of each other. The Nalzindar had no particular use for gold, and Shaiara had told him that something that heavy was useless if you were making up a pack for desert travel. The catacombs beneath Abi’Abadshar were full of things like this, and at least something this heavy wouldn’t tip over or be blown away, so Harrier found it useful.

  All there was to do now was set the spell. Mandrake and mushroom (the Nalzindar called them stonefruit, and they were poisonous, so Harrier handled them with care), some of the bright red cherrylike berries that neither he nor Marap had a name for (but which were also poisonous), a few other plants, a lock of his hair, a few drops of wine, a few drops of his blood, and his intent, and Kareta would be both Summoned and Bound until she’d done his will.

  He picked up the first item, hesitated, and sighed. He couldn’t do it. Not even if it was the only way to help Tiercel. Kareta was his friend. She was incredibly annoying, but she’d never done him any actual harm, and she was a unicorn. A creature of the Light. If he did something like this to her . . .

>   . . . well, he guessed he’d be just as bad as that Tainted Wildmage they were trying to kill. Only then they’d have to call him the other Tainted Wildmage, because Harrier guessed it would only be a matter of time before he’d be sending armies of crazy people to go kill cities full of innocent bystanders too.

  He dropped the mandrake root back on the cloth he’d spread out and thought for several minutes. He still needed help—Tiercel needed help—and he couldn’t think of anyone else he could ask who might have the answers. So he wouldn’t force Kareta to come to talk to him. But it wouldn’t hurt to ask her if she would.

  A Summoning Spell was easy—oilbark, naranje rind, and leaf of desert oak (Harrier thought he remembered that it had used to be three leaves: oak, ash, and thorn, and quickly put the thought out of his mind)—three drops of his blood, and intent. It was actually easy enough to change the spell from an outright summons to more of a request that Kareta could ignore if she wanted to, because so much of the Wild Magic was about intent (and whenever he tried to explain that to Tiercel, Tiercel just kept getting frustrated, because apparently nothing about the High Magick was about intent, any more than who Harrier’s Ma intended to serve dinner to made a difference to how hot the oven ran). Of course, High Mages didn’t have to spend all their time stabbing themselves either, and Harrier’d lost the good knife he’d had for doing only that and hadn’t been able to replace it yet. The geschak was sharp enough, but awkward to use. Still, he managed to make a small nick in his forearm without cutting off his whole hand, blotted the cut with the leaf, rind, and bark, tossed the stuff into the brazier, formed his intent—Kareta, if you can hear me, if you want to come, I’d like to talk to you. It’s important to me, but I’m only asking—and released the spell.

  Then he scribbled over both circles with his boot—he wasn’t sure whether that mattered or not, but it wouldn’t hurt to do it—stuffed everything but the brazier back into his bag, wrapped a length of cloth around the cut in his arm, pulled his cloak tightly around him, and went over to sit on a nearby toppled-over ancient stone pillar.

  He wasn’t sure how long this was going to take.

  THE Preceptors of the Light who’d conducted Harrier’s religious education had mentioned the Wild Magic, of course, but they’d never indicated that it had any kind of a sense of humor, and Harrier thought that was a real lapse on their parts. Obviously, if the Wild Magic had decided to make him a Knight-Mage, it did. And there were a lot of things that really bothered him—a lot—about being a Wildmage, but there were a couple he liked. He’d always had a good sense of time even before he’d become a Knight-Mage, but now it was better than the most accurate clock. He could tell how much time had passed down to the tenth-chime—and exactly what time it was, even when he couldn’t see the sun or the stars—just as he could tell exactly where he was, and where he’d been, and which way North was. Right now, sitting here, he could accurately point to the direction where the Mage City of Karahelanderialigor was, where Armethalieh was, and where Tarnatha’Iteru . . . used to be.

  He could also tell that it had been at least four hours—two bells—since he’d cast his spell. After the first hour, he’d finally gotten cold enough just sitting to go searching around the ruins until he found some mounds of shotor dung. The Nalzindar who lived in the city’s underground warrens let their animals come up to the surface at dusk and dawn to forage, and the merciless desert sun baked the droppings to the dry hard consistency of wood. And like wood, they burned, with a low smokeless flame. It was the primary fuel used for cooking in the desert where there were no trees, and (therefore) no charcoal.

  He knew Shaiara wouldn’t like the thought of him lighting a fire here in the open. She’d been unhappy enough about his plan to spend several hours outside in the first place. Of course Harrier knew as well as she did that even the tiniest flame could be seen for miles in flat open country like this, and no matter how hard she tried to conceal it, he knew she was terrified of her tribe’s hiding place being discovered by Bisochim and the rest of the Isvaieni. But unless they were searching by magic, they couldn’t travel in the dark, and if they weren’t using magic, he’d see their lights sooner than they’d see his.

  And it had been more than half a year since what Shaiara called The Great Ingathering, and Harrier was fairly sure that the rest of the Isvaieni had stopped looking for the Nalzindar by now. Still, it didn’t hurt to be cautious, so when he built his fire, he made sure to shelter it in a place where two fallen pillars formed a V, and to block its small light with his body on the third side. There was no wind. The wind in the desert wouldn’t rise until dawn, and whether Kareta had come or not, when the sun rose, Harrier would have to seek shelter then—so he was warm enough.

  Every half hour he rose and stretched and loosened his muscles, and when he did so at the end of the fourth hour (eight hours after he’d cast his spell), he saw a spark of light in the distance. He hesitated, his hands going automatically to the pair of swords he wore on his back, the swords of a Selken Warrior. He watched for a second or two, then released them, tucking his hands back beneath his cloak again. The light was in the northeast, not the direction from which he was expecting trouble. He didn’t look away again, though.

  In the space of a chime, the light was close enough to have taken on color and shape—the golden figure of a running unicorn. Kareta. Harrier kicked and scrubbed at his little fire until the embers were quenched and buried in sand, then shrugged his rucksack up onto his shoulder and walked back to where he’d drawn his circles. The golden bowl was cold now, its contents burned to ash. He emptied it into a nearby stand of grass and dropped it into his bag, then walked across the desert to meet Kareta.

  Even when she was close enough to make out every detail of her body—the gleaming spiral horn, the delicate cloven hooves, the soft golden fluff that covered her body—a unicorn’s coat was more like a cat’s fur than a horse’s hide—the long lion-like tufted tail streaming out behind—he couldn’t hear the sound of a single hoofbeat. She brought herself to a stop a few feet away and tossed her head, sides heaving.

  “I hope you’re going to offer me a drink?” she said.

  Same old Kareta. “Right this way,” Harrier answered.

  When the Nalzindar had come to Abi’Abadshar, the first thing they’d discovered was an enormous spring-cistern at the entrance to the underground city, but that wasn’t the only place in the city ruins where there was surface water. A couple of hundred yards from the steps that led down into the city (there had almost certainly been a building on top of it once, about a zillion kabillion years ago) there was the stump of a stone pillar set in a stone basin. The pillar had a hole in the center, and was always wet, and seeing that, the Nalzindar had dug away the sand at its base to discover and expose the stone bowl. No matter how much they feared discovery, it was deeply ingrained in Shaiara and all her people that water was more than precious. It was nearly sacred, and when you found a water source, you did all that you could to leave it better than you found it. While the water the small fountain produced evaporated completely over the course of each day, by twilight water was already beginning to gather in the basin again, and by each midnight it was full.

  Kareta lowered her head and drank thirstily, then raised her muzzle and shook herself, spraying Harrier with icy droplets. “There!” she said brightly. “That’s better!”

  “Not for me,” Harrier grumbled, scrubbing his face with the back of his arm. He sighed. “Thank you for coming.”

  “You asked,” Kareta pointed out. She stretched out her neck and sniffed eloquently at his rucksack, then recoiled and sneezed violently. Harrier didn’t know if unicorns’ noses were as sharp as their ears, but if they were, he was certain Kareta could smell the ingredients for the Summoning and Binding Spell. “This is a very disagreeable place—although it is nicely free of the wrong sort of people. You should leave.”

  “Right. Disagreeable how?” Harrier asked.

  “Well, it�
��s flat, and it’s hot—during the day—and there’s nothing much growing here anywhere, and there aren’t any trees . . .” Kareta looked as if she were thinking the matter over carefully as she gazed up at him. Unicorns were much smaller than horses, so Harrier was actually taller than Kareta was. “But it isn’t full of Taint, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I didn’t think it was, but it’s nice to have it confirmed,” Harrier said.

  “We unicorns know these things,” Kareta said archly.

  He glanced up toward the sky. The circle of faint stars that Ciniran had named to him as The Oasis was gone, and the morning star that the Nalzindar called abcha-awardan—Sheathed Sword—was as bright as fire. The sun would rise soon, but right now it was still dark, and he hadn’t brought a lantern with him—or, as had become close to second nature for him these days, conjured a ball of Coldfire. He already knew where all the large rocks out here were, and any light would just have interfered with his night-sight. But Kareta had been glowing from the first moment he’d seen her and she still was. It made her look more like she belonged in the sky than like she belonged down here. So maybe those ancient guys who called Pelashia’s Veil “The Unicorn’s Road” weren’t so stupid after all.

  “That’s really terrific,” Harrier said, “but that’s not exactly what I want to know right now.”

  “You’re carrying swords. Did—”

  “Yes, I am, and yes, he did.” From the moment Kareta had dropped the Three Books in his lap, she’d had exactly one thing on her mind: Harrier should find someone to train him in the warrior arts a Knight-Mage needed to master. Too bad when the Wild Magic had found him a teacher, nobody had specified anything about Harrier finishing his training or his teacher surviving to do it.