The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  “Look,” Harrier said, very quietly, and it was as if he had looked into her thoughts. “I’ll never pass for one of your people. Tiercel might. He’s good at fitting in. If we get into trouble, say I’m your prisoner.”

  “Do not sell the calf before the cow is in foal,” Shaiara said tartly. “Come. It is time to depart. It is six days across the Barahileth to the Dove Road, and we do not know how far along that road the first well is.”

  They led the shotors along the passage, up the steps, and out onto the surface. Neither Tiercel nor Harrier had ever ridden a shotor—when Shaiara had discovered this she had set Kamar to giving them lessons, until they could mount and dismount and give their shotors the signals to kneel and rise, turn, and halt, but there had only been a handspan of time to devote to their schooling. If more than simple skill was needed, they would have to trust in Sand and Star that there would be time to learn it along the way.

  Shaiara rode first, with Harrier and Tiercel behind her, and Ciniran rode at the end of the pack-train. This close to Abi’Abadshar, the beasts might balk or attempt to turn back to what was safe and familiar. For that reason, until the shotors were well away from the scent of water, each of their lead-ropes was tied to the pack-saddle of the beast ahead, and Ciniran kept a close watch upon them all. Despite the danger of the journey itself, despite the near-certainty in Shaiara’s heart that each thing her eyes beheld they beheld for the last time, her spirit was lighter than it had been since she had first heard Bisochim’s words at Sapthiruk Oasis. First had come the terrible flight in search of Abi’Abadshar, with death ahead and death behind, and then—once sanctuary had been found—there had been moonturn upon moonturn of unnatural confinement. If her days were soon to end, at least they would end as Sand and Star meant them to, with her traveling free across the desert. Soon her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and by the faint brilliance of the starlight from above, she could make out the flat pale surface of the desert. The iteru-courtyard was at the very edge of Abi’Abadshar, and so they were already beyond the edge of the ruins of the ancient city. Having left it behind, there was no blade of grass, no animal track, no living thing at all. Only darkness and the Barahileth. The only sounds around her were the creaking of the shotors’ harnesses, the sounds of their footfalls, an occasional huff or grunt. Neither Tiercel nor Harrier spoke.

  They traveled eastward hour after hour. When the breeze that heralded dawn began to rise, Shaiara tapped her shotor’s shoulder sharply with her goad. There was no need to seek out a particular place to make their day’s camp. One place was like another in the Barahileth.

  The beast stopped, then knelt. At the back of the train, Ciniran urged her mount forward, clucking to the pack-shotors and urging them to kneel. Tiercel and Harrier’s shotors knelt as well—not, Shaiara saw, because they had given them the command, but simply because all the others were, and shotors were creatures of the herd.

  “Shaiara, why are we stopping?” Harrier asked. “It’s an hour at least until dawn—three until it’s really hot. We could keep going.”

  It was—so Shaiara reminded herself—a question born of ignorance: an ignorance of a kind she could barely imagine. But even though Harrier had spent the last moonturn in Abi’Abadshar, he had rarely been upon the desert’s face in daylight, and when he was, had always known he was only footsteps from shelter and water.

  “A shotor may go a sennight without drinking, ten days if it has wet forage. A fortnight without food or water and it will die. The Dove Road is six days from Abi’Abadshar. I know not when we will reach the first well. It is best to spare their strength. And ours,” she said.

  She heard Harrier sigh. “Don’t start,” he said, and she knew he was speaking to Tiercel, although Tiercel had not spoken.

  BY the time the tent was in place—ropes taut and wrapped around the long needle-sharp bronze pegs sheathed in tallow-boiled leather that the Isvaieni used to secure tent-ropes in regh, mats and rugs unrolled to protect the travelers against the harshness and heat of the desert floor—the sun was above the horizon and the cool of night was already long gone. Both Tiercel and Harrier seemed surprised to see her and Ciniran lowering every flap and tying them shut.

  “Isn’t it going to get, well, hot in here?” Tiercel asked tentatively.

  “If we do not close up the walls of the tent, the shotors will try to come inside, seeking shade,” Ciniran said kindly. “If they do not see an opening, they will not move from their places upon the ground—the spot which their body shelters is the coolest, and they will not wish to lose it.”

  “Let us drink—and eat—before it is too hot to sleep,” Shaiara said.

  In the heat of the day, when traveling, one did not light the cookfires if one could avoid it. They had brought cold food with them for that very reason, and tonight, before they broke camp, Shaiara and Ciniran would cook flatbread beyond their immediate need. Even now, dried meat was soaking in a little precious water so that it would be ready to cook and eat tonight. Now, by the light of the single lantern hanging from the tent’s center pole, they ate and drank sparingly, all stripped now to their thinnest and last underlayer of garments.

  Their meal complete, Ciniran took down the lantern and quenched its flame. Closed up as it was, filled with their saddles and harnesses and supplies, there was not much room left, but there was enough for the four of them to lie down upon their sleeping mats.

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Uh,” Tiercel said.

  “What?” Harrier answered irritably.

  “We’re outside of Abi’Abadshar.”

  “Did you miss the part where we all got on shotors and rode all night, Tyr?”

  “No. I mean we’re outside Abi’Abadshar.”

  “Oh. Oh. Damn,” Harrier said.

  Shaiara wondered if all northerners were like these two. They chattered like fur-mice—the creature that Harrier said was actually something called “squirrel”—or even more like the tiny destructive manlike tree-dweller of Abi’Abadshar that Harrier said was called “monkey”—and they never made any sense at all. She sighed, but neither of them seemed to understand the need for an explanation. “What?” she finally said in exasperation.

  There was the sound of a scuffle in the dimness, and then Harrier spoke. “We’re outside the wards here, Noble’dy. So Tiercel might start having visions again.”

  Shaiara waited.

  “It isn’t so bad,” Harrier went on, “other than the fact that sometimes he wakes up screaming. And the fact that we’ve never been really sure whether the Demon can see him the way he sees her.”

  It was folly, Shaiara reminded herself, to think of them as children, for all that they spoke as children and brawled as children. Each of them carried upon his shoulders the burdens of men grown—and if it had not been for so long as Shaiara had led the Nalzindar, it did not need to have been. Such burdens could age the young beyond their years in a moonturn. A sennight. A day. Folly, too, to ask why neither of them had spoken of this before. It would have made no difference. To them. To her. To her need to bring Ciniran with her upon this journey. But now that what was begun could not be undone, she was free to contemplate how necessity was also madness. In the desert, discipline was survival. They had no understanding of how to survive, and they had no freedom to make mistakes. Not here.

  But it was well-said: do not seize the lead-rope of the shotor before it is within your grasp. She would wait for trouble to come to her.

  “Huh,” Shaiara said, in response to Harrier’s words. She turned over, pillowed her head upon her arm, and closed her eyes for sleep.

  SHE was wakened long before she wished to be by the wakefulness of Tiercel and Harrier. The white rays of sunlight that forced their way through the tiny holes in the heavy brown felt seemed as solid as twisted strands of rope; from their color, Shaiara knew that there was much time yet before sunset. All that might be done in this time of terrible heat was lie as still as one could—and wait. Inde
ed, Tiercel and Harrier knew that much, for she had told them so. But they spoke now in low voices, too soft for her to make out their words.

  “Sleep,” she said in a hard whisper. “Be silent. Rest while you can.”

  In the desert, discipline was survival.

  IT had been—Tiercel was fairly sure—a fortnight since he’d actually gotten an actual full real four bells’ sleep. (He knew that no place in the Nine Cities but Armethalieh—except the Light Temples—used the old way of telling time, and of course he’d learned the modern one in school just like everyone else, but he still thought in “bells” and “chimes.”) It was fourteen days now since he’d taken Ancaladar down to the tenth level below the surface of Abi’Abadshar. It was six days since they’d left Abi’Abadshar.

  While he’d still been in the city, he’d only been miserable and suffering in every way that wasn’t physical. Now he was all of that, and miserable and suffering in every physical way besides. He was constantly thirsty because of how zealously they were rationing their water. When Marap had gone to harvest salt for the Nalzindar several moonturns ago and first found what Shaiara called the Dove Road (because it ran as straight as the flight of a dove pursued by a falcon), she’d said she’d seen wells beside it. Marap and Shaiara had guessed that there must be wells all along its length, and (Tiercel tried to stop his thought before it reached its conclusion, but it was impossible) Ancaladar had said he’d seen many wells from the sky. But whether the wells still contained water, and whether that water was drinkable, was something none of them could know until they reached them. If there was no water along the road, they might be able to make it back to Abi’Abadshar before all the shotors died . . . if they rationed their water carefully.

  He was sore from long nights spent riding through the freezing cold. A shotor was nothing like a horse and nothing like riding Ancaladar. (He wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t think about Ancaladar: his friend, his partner, someone he’d never thought to meet and who completed him in ways he’d never imagined and who was gone, gone, gone and there wasn’t anything Tiercel could do about it.) He could no longer use the spells he remembered for warmth and protection. He lacked the power now to use any of the spells of the High Magick, just as he had in the beginning.

  He was filthy, sweltering all day in the tent and then putting on the same clothes each night. Both Tiercel and Harrier had spent most of the last year sleeping on the ground, and it was hardly fair that six days of desert travel—mostly by night—should have burned every inch of their exposed skin red and raw and left their lips and the skin of their hands cracked and bleeding. Ciniran said it was because the air was very dry and ishnain dust carried far. Shaiara merely said it would get worse. Neither of the two women was in as bad shape as he and Harrier were.

  I don’t know why I thought I could do this. I don’t know how I thought I could do this. I have to do this and I don’t know how I can.

  And what made all his misery worse (if that was possible) was that Tiercel knew that Harrier was just as miserable as he was (almost as miserable, a treacherous inner voice insisted: Harrier hadn’t lost Ancaladar) but Harrier never said a word in complaint. That was part of what worried Tiercel, in the brief moments when he actually had the energy to worry. Harrier had actually stopped talking much at all around the third day of travel. If we’re being worn down this much before we even reach the Dove Road, what condition will we be in by the time we reach the Lake of Fire—if we even do?

  But at least Harrier slept through the heat of the day now, even though it was in a kind of stunned unconsciousness that wasn’t very restful. Tiercel knew that Harrier slept, because every time Tiercel awoke—which was frequently—Harrier hadn’t moved from the position he’d originally laid down in. It ought to be a kind of blessing not to sleep, to move through both days and nights in the same half-waking daze of exhaustion, because when he didn’t sleep, he didn’t dream, and when he didn’t dream, he didn’t see Her. It ought to be, but it wasn’t, for the simple reason that Tiercel was pretty sure that he had to sleep sometime, or he wasn’t going to be of any use to anybody. And he was the one who was supposed to be the Champion of the Light—or so everybody kept telling him. He was really tired of hearing it.

  He was tired.

  HARRIER couldn’t decide which part of the last sennight had been less fun: watching Tiercel fall back apart into the way he’d been before they’d left Armethalieh—a gaunt hollow-eyed sleepwalker who stumbled and shambled and had to be spoken to two or three times before he answered—or falling apart that way himself.

  He’d thought he’d known what the desert was like. He’d been wrong.

  Knowing they were going to make the journey across the Barahileth, he’d even gone out to the surface of Abi’Abadshar in full day. Midday. He’d stayed out there until the air swam black and purple before his eyes, until he’d known he was just this side of being an idiot, and he’d hurried down the steps of the iteru-courtyard and jumped into the well. The bright shock of cold had made him gasp with relief, but he’d still been in full sun, so he’d clambered out quickly and staggered, dripping and chastened, back into the shelter of the tunnel.

  So he’d known it was hot, and how hot, and having traveled down into the Madiran from the north, Harrier understood the idea of something being hot for a long time, and he’d figured he’d just put the two ideas together and have some idea of what their journey would be like. But he hadn’t really realized what it would mean to spend all night riding through the freezing cold—on the ugliest, smelliest, most foul-tempered animals the Light ever brought forth—and then to spend all day trying to sleep in a sweatbox, where the air inside was probably hotter than the air outside and you didn’t even sweat, just woke up with your tunic stuck to your body with a crust of dried salt. He longed for water—cold and pure, or even stale and rank—the way he’d used to dream of mutton pies and fresh-baked bread and crisp roast goose, and his head hurt all the time.

  Bleeding lips and bleeding hands didn’t help. There was something Shaiara called ishnain in the windborne dust, and she said it was caustic and poisonous. Once Harrier had wondered why the Isvaieni covered every inch of their skin they possibly could. Now he knew. Shaiara had packed a salve that the Nalzindar used to heal ishnain burns—he’d seen it in their supplies. But they couldn’t use it unless they had water to wash their skins clean first. And there was no point in putting anything on their lips when they’d just lick it off again. He wrapped a cloth around his hands when it was time to pull the tent-ropes taut each night. He wasn’t sure whether or not he was pleased to see that Shaiara and Ciniran needed to use the same trick. What he did know was that when they’d made camp on the first night he’d carried the saddles into the tent two at a time. Now carrying one by itself was an effort. And getting the tent up and the ropes set was harder each day.

  It surprised Harrier to realize he’d become enough of a Wildmage not to think—even now—that the Wild Magic was useless to him here. He might not know any useful spells, but the Wild Magic itself wasn’t useless, in a freaky way. As they rode through the night, Harrier could close his eyes and see the pages of his Three Books behind his eyes. They were about doing magic, yes. But Kareta had been wrong: Harrier could have been a Wildmage all his life and never done a single spell. The Wild Magic was about being. And he didn’t understand how that worked—Harrier didn’t really think he was the sort of person who understood things like that—but he understood that it was. And so, in a strange way, he understood that what he did was vital and the most important thing for the whole world and that he didn’t dare fail, and at the same time, he understood that the Wild Magic could take care of itself and of people, no matter what happened. So all he had to do was his very best, and not panic.

  He held on to that thought as hard as he could, because his “best” was getting less good each day. Shaiara had been right to bring Ciniran; Harrier knew that now. The desert was the Nalzindars’ home. They knew how to survi
ve here. Even in a place like this.

  “SEE.” Shaiara’s voice was quiet, but any speech was surprising in the night stillness.

  It was the seventh night of their travel. The shotors were thirsty—they’d balked at being harnessed and saddled this evening, and Ciniran had said they would only get harder to handle from now on until they began to weaken. They’d been traveling long enough for the moon to rise—a sennight’s worth of silver—and it lit the desert ahead.

  Harrier looked where she was pointing. In the distance he could see a faint straight line of pale silver against the dull paleness of the desert. “It’s the road,” he said. His voice was a hoarse croak.

  “Yes,” Shaiara answered, and Harrier could hear the relief in her voice.

  He tried not to think past the moment, to finding the well and finding out about the well. Finding the well wouldn’t solve everything, because then they’d have to find out about the next well, and what it would be like. He glanced behind him. Tiercel was riding slumped over: if not for the fact that you didn’t ride astride a shotor, Harrier was pretty sure that Tiercel would have been falling off days ago. Tiercel didn’t look either awake or asleep, and he was only with them because his shotor was.

  Harrier had gotten used to the idea that for some reason becoming a Wildmage (or maybe becoming a Knight-Mage) had given him an incredibly-accurate sense of time. He knew they’d been riding for three hours when Shaiara spotted the road and that it took them another hour to reach it and that it was half-an-hour till dawn when they reached the well. That was what the shape at the side of the road had to be: the round dark circle of stone ahead in the darkness, looking just like a smaller version of the iteru the Telchi had showed Harrier, moonturns ago, when he’d taken him to see the one at Tarnatha’Iteru. Thinking about his teacher hurt (just the way thinking about Ancaladar hurt Tiercel, he suspected) so Harrier tried not to. It didn’t matter that he knew that Macenor Telchi had died in the fashion he had hoped to die, because Harrier also knew that the Telchi had died without passing on all his training to his chosen apprentice . . . and Harrier wouldn’t live long enough to pass on even what little he’d learned to anyone else.