The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  And so he stretched forth his hands. Bisochim was no Elven Mage, nor yet a High Mage from the Time of Mages, who could with a gesture command stone to burst into flame. His power was vast—perhaps incomprehensible to any who walked now between Sand and Star—but it was a magic of what could be, not of what fancies a man might hold in his mind to make an evening’s watch at a fireside go more quickly. Did he possess spells such as those, he would have obliterated the Cliffs of Telinchechitl with no more than a wave of his hand, or turned the Lake of Fire to nothing more baneful than water. That Bisochim could not do. But in the morning of the world, the Firesprites had called up Fire from the belly of the world to house their shrine, and every Isvaieni child knew that fire and water were enemies. To bring water to Telinchechitl for his dwelling-place, Bisochim had needed to call it from its slumber far below the sands. There, as far beneath the hard stony regh as a dragon might fly above it, mighty rivers rushed through the darkness beneath slabs of stone, their waters coursing for miles before rising to the surface at oasis and iteru. In crafting the thousand fountains that cooled and slaked his fields and gardens and stronghold, Bisochim had made himself sensitive to every trayas of sand and stone between the surface of the Barahileth and the water that flowed beneath, and that knowledge stood him in good stead now.

  Where before he had cooled the rock with water called down from the sky, now Bisochim summoned Fire to heat rock at its very roots. At last—abruptly—a wall of rock deep beneath the earth gave way. Water as black and chill as midnight poured in upon rock heated as white-hot as the noonday sun. The ground upon which he stood rumbled, but Bisochim’s weaving was not yet complete. Again and again he battered at the hidden weakness of the Cliffs of Telinchechitl, until at last the rain-soaked regh began to buckle and shift. Bisochim’s magic was powerful enough to widen the ancient pathways the Firesprites had made to bring Fire up out of the deep earth, and to tear asunder the careful cautious network of conduits he himself had crafted to bring the hidden rivers forth for his use. And these things together were enough to cause the cracked and glistening ramparts of the place of his shame to begin to sink beneath the desert’s surface like a coin tossed into a bowl of griddle-cake batter.

  On any day but this, people would have taken notice.

  This magic, once set in motion, would work onward by itself. At last Bisochim could rest. All the contents of his fortress now lay discarded upon and half buried in a bed of still-sodden sand. With an exhausted sigh, Bisochim dropped down upon a folded carpet.

  Water from pipes meant to feed the fountains of his fortress flowed wastefully forth over sand and rich loam and mutilated regh and alien grass already beginning to wilt in the punishing heat. Bisochim trembled with exhaustion—just as the earth, as it engulfed the Cliffs of Telinchechitl, trembled beneath his limbs—but neither his mind nor his heart would grant him rest. This day, both mind and heart had led him to commit the ultimate abomination.

  He rubbed his eyes wearily. It is not so, he reminded himself. This day was merely the culmination of a life of searching and seeking and study that had begun upon the day the Three Books came to his hand. Yes, he had yearned to gain immortality for Saravasse—but even before he had first seen her, he had been goaded and tormented by the sense that the Wild Magic had called him to a great task, a task he must discover and fulfill. Not only for the good of all those who walked between Sand and Star, but for all those who walked with the Light . . .

  To hear himself speak of the Light, even within his own thoughts, made Bisochim cringe. Yet in his heart he had always served the Balance of which the Light was the visible aspect given to Men to follow, and even now—in this moment of disaster and sorrow—he could not believe that his instincts had led him so terribly astray. He thought of Ahairan’s mockery, of the Firecrown’s cool disdain, and his breath caught in his throat. He had been a child when the Three Books came to his hand—a child! He had gone to the Wild Magic as eagerly as a bridegroom to his bride, intent only upon serving it joyfully and with honor.

  Have I never served the Wild Magic? Have I been nothing more than a pawn of the Shadow from the moment I first drew breath?

  How could that be? If it were true, then the Wild Magic had known, and seen, and done nothing. Had granted Bisochim the Three Books, knowing what use he would make of them. Worse, had let Saravasse come to him, granting him the power to do all that he had done afterward. And yet . . . if it were not so, then when had he ceased to hear the silent urging he had followed from boyhood and listened instead to the tongueless whispers of monsters? Bisochim looked back across a sea of years and could not say: On this day I served the Gods of the Wild Magic, and upon the day that followed I was the servant of the Shadow.

  And not knowing was like the teeth of dogs tearing his flesh.

  Perhaps . . . and—oh! how bitter it was to contemplate—perhaps the Balance had never been out of true at all. Even as that thought formed itself in Bisochim’s mind, he longed to cast it out. How could it be right, when it was the Balance itself—the Balance that he had believed until this very day that he served—that had tortured his senses with knowledge of a great wrongness that must be repaired from the very beginning? He had sought that wrongness so long, and so carefully, testing, always testing, lest he fall into error and fault.

  If there were no wrongness, he had always been the pawn of Demons, and the Wild Magic had allowed it to be so.

  If the wrongness existed, then where—where—lay his error? He had sought the source of the wrongness so long and so carefully, testing, always testing, lest he fall into error and fault.

  And into Darkness.

  You see to what end your care has brought you, son of Nedjed. The blood of thousands is upon your hands, and you have clothed Darkness in robes of flesh and set it free to walk the sands of the world.

  He could not think what he might do now.

  “WHERE’D the cliff go?” Tiercel asked.

  Harrier didn’t care. If he got a vote, he hoped it had fallen on some of these Dark-damned goats, because you’d think that after having been scared out of their wits by a rainstorm and then running for miles through mud and rain, they’d be a little easier to herd, but no. One look at Harrier and Light-foot, and they made up their minds that they wanted to go scattering off in all possible directions—except, of course, in the one he wanted them to go. All Harrier wanted to do was chase them toward the nearest khalbe—or set of khalbes, since the flockguards tended to work in pairs. The goats (and the sheep, and the chickens, and everything else with fur and legs out here in the mud) were more interested in simply running off and courting sunstroke.

  He wished he wasn’t doing what he was doing. If it were left to him, Harrier would just as soon see the Isvaieni livestock keep running until it reached the gates of Armethalieh, leaving all its owners to fry in the desert sun chasing it. He knew that Tiercel would say that Bisochim had tricked them and they weren’t to blame for anything they’d done, but Tiercel hadn’t seen Tarnatha’Iteru on the morning Zanattar’s warriors had entered the city. But it wasn’t up to Tiercel, and it wasn’t exactly up to Harrier. His MagePrice was a constant faint itch in the back of his mind, urging him onward the way he urged Lightfoot onward. It wasn’t quite a compulsion, but Harrier suspected that was only because he was doing exactly what the Wild Magic wanted him to be doing. All spells of the Wild Magic came with a price beyond the energy it cost to cast them, and if he was guessing at all right from what Ancaladar had said a few moonturns back, all MagePrices did something to help the Balance, even if it didn’t seem to be anything particularly sensible (or comprehensible) at the time. So if the Wild Magic wanted him to herd the livestock of a bunch of murderous lunatics, Harrier would do it, and just hope that the crazy people were so crazy they didn’t happen to kill him on sight. At least his herdsman duties were getting easier. The closer they got to the ridge, the more animals he encountered, and most of them were herdbeasts that wanted to stay with other herdbeast
s.

  “Perhaps the ridge is hidden in the fog,” Ciniran said, answering Tiercel.

  She didn’t sound certain about that, and Harrier glanced up—away from the latest pair of suicidal goats—toward the horizon. The black ridge they’d glimpsed just after the rain had stopped was gone, but Ciniran was right: there was what looked like a fogbank there now, and mountains didn’t just vanish. What worried Harrier more than the fact that he couldn’t see the cliff was the fact that the feeling that everything in the world was wrong had gone away sometime during the storm, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on when. He knew it was stupid to keep his mouth shut about it, but he couldn’t begin to figure out how to explain to the other three that Darkness had just gone away without him being sure exactly when.

  “Let’s worry about the riders,” he said wearily. “No matter what the cliff’s doing, it isn’t likely to kill us.”

  Shaiara had spotted the first mounted Isvaieni nearly an hour before. Her immediate impulse had been to assume that they were the ones being pursued, but they passed within a bowshot of the first Isvaieni riding toward them without drawing any particular attention to themselves. Certainly the four of them had been seen. It was just that in the aftermath of the disaster, nobody particularly cared.

  “Thank the Light,” Tiercel said quietly.

  Harrier stifled a derisive noise—more from a desire not to shock Shaiara and Ciniran than from any particular piety. He thought the Light had less to do with it than the fact that right now the tribesmen had more important things on their minds than saying “hello,” and also because it simply didn’t occur to them that the four of them weren’t other herders.

  On any day but today, Tiercel and Harrier wouldn’t have looked much like Isvaieni, but in the aftermath of the storm they were covered with dun-colored clay over nearly every inch of their skins. Besides, it was clear that nobody was paying much attention to anything besides rounding up the animals. Here in the south, flocks and herds meant survival. The pools of rain were drying quickly, and there wasn’t any other open water out here. While goats were smart enough to go back to where they could find water and shelter, Harrier had never heard anyone praise the intellect of a sheep.

  A few minutes later, they passed a second group of Isvaieni, and as the four of them rode past this second band of herdsmen, Harrier felt as if he heard a deep thrumming sound. The weird thing was that even though he could never convince himself that it wasn’t a sound, Harrier also knew it wasn’t something anyone else could hear. It was both like and unlike the moment when he’d known his MagePrice had come due, and it meant that a MagePrice he was carrying—or in this case, MagePrices—was paid. He was grateful for that, since if he’d had to herd every single sheep, goat, and chicken back to the Lake of Fire (and possibly into it) in order to satisfy the Wild Magic, he didn’t think either he or Lightfoot would have survived.

  “Come on,” Harrier said to the others. “We’re done. Well, I am, anyway.”

  THEIR herding duties had brought them in a long roundabout arc back toward the Dove Road again. When the storm had struck, they’d been camped at the edge of the road. The only reason they hadn’t set their tent in the center of it each day was that its surface had been hammered to iron hardness by the passage of the Isvaieni army, and it had been difficult enough to conceal the marks of their tent-spikes in the regh each evening by filling them in with water from each iteru. Harrier only hoped that nobody found whatever the storm had left of their tent and gear while they were chasing mud-encrusted sheep. Then he wondered why he was worrying. None of them was going to survive to see today’s sunset.

  The Dove Road was the path down which the Isvaieni were driving most of the animals they managed to round up. The four of them attached themselves to the outer edge of a filthy, exhausted, and loudly complaining herd of sheep that were wandering as slowly as possible up the road. There were as many tribesmen herding animals up the road toward the greenness ahead as there were riders heading out into the desert waste, and among all the men and women coming and going it wasn’t that difficult for the four of them to remain inconspicuous. It occurred to Harrier, looking at the faces of the Isvaieni drovers that they passed, that they looked just as upset as Shaiara and Ciniran did, and that didn’t make sense. Before today, Shaiara and Ciniran had never seen rain in their lives—and they’d also had no idea why the storm had struck. But these other Isvaieni followed Bisochim, and whatever else Harrier could guess about why the storm had happened, he had to include the strong suspicion that it had been raised by the Dark, not the Light. So shouldn’t the people who followed Bisochim—and the Dark—know that the storm was on their side instead of acting like it was another threat? It was too bad Harrier couldn’t either just ask them, or mention his guess to any of his friends. But at the moment, the less talking they did, the better.

  “What do we do when we get there?” Tiercel asked in a low voice.

  Harrier stared at him incredulously. Apparently Tiercel—as usual—cared less about self-preservation than about getting his questions answered. “I was thinking you’d defeat the Dark and we’d all go home,” he answered shortly.

  It seemed like a lifetime ago that Harrier had amused himself by teasing Tiercel to produce precisely this expression on his face. This time the joke hadn’t been quite as lighthearted—Tiercel was the Champion of the Light; he was the one supposed to have a plan once they got here. But the gaping, open-mouthed look of utter astonishment was still one Harrier might have gotten in response to a comment any time in the past decade.

  “You’ve still got a few minutes to come up with a plan,” he added.

  “Oh,” Tiercel said, very quietly.

  Neither Ciniran nor Shaiara said anything at all, but Harrier could practically feel disgust radiating from both women as they got closer to their destination. You didn’t have to be a Wildmage to know that the Nalzindar revered the Balance the way he and Tiercel had been taught to revere the Eternal Light—and not just the Balance, but balance—making everything come out right, never being too greedy, never spoiling a place by taking too much from it or trying to make it into something it wasn’t supposed to be. He and Tiercel were worried for another reason. They’d been in the Madiran for three moonturns, and in the Barahileth for the last moonturn and a half, and if there was one thing that both of them had gotten drummed into their northerner heads over and over, it was that water was scarce and the land was harsh.

  But what the Dove Road led into could have been dropped down anywhere in the Armen Plains and looked perfectly normal. In fact, it looked as if it had been picked up from the Armen Plains—or even the Delfier Valley—and dropped down here. Hectare upon hectare of lush green grass—some grazed down by the sheep and goats, some fenced off with stone walls. Beyond the walls was what looked like oats, or maybe barley. Lots of oats—or barley. Hectares of it.

  There were trees, laid out in neat plantations. Naranjes, limuns, and he thought he saw apple trees as well. It was at least another mile to what Harrier still had to call the oasis—since he didn’t have anything else to call it—and the belt of green (trees, crops, grass) stretched out along both sides of the Dove Road and seemed to go on for several miles. In the distance, scattered among the trees, he could see the tents of the enemy, far more of them than had been set outside the walls of Tarnatha’Iteru. He didn’t want to think about the amount of sheer power the existence of this place represented. He couldn’t imagine making something like this himself. Not just because magic still seemed to him like cheating, but because he didn’t think this was the kind of thing the Wild Magic was supposed to do. When Tiercel had turned Tarnatha’Iteru into water, he’d thought Tiercel’d had more power than he could imagine. But he couldn’t imagine even Tiercel making something like this. He glanced sideways, and one look at Tiercel’s face told Harrier everything he needed to know. Tiercel had come to pretty much the same conclusions. They were riding into the Dark’s stronghold, and the Dark had
so much power that even with Ancaladar’s magic for Tiercel to draw on Tiercel wouldn’t have had as much power as it did.

  As they rode closer, the quality of the air around them began to change. It wasn’t the temporary humidity of a parched desert after a rainstorm. The air here smelled more like the underground gardens at Abi’Abadshar, and Harrier realized it must always be wet. Grass like this didn’t grow overnight. And even if it had—because a Mage who could make a place like this could probably do anything he wanted to—this place couldn’t have just been created yesterday. The grass was here to feed the goats and the sheep, so that meant it had been here . . . at least as long as the goats and sheep had. Most of a year.

  Harrier wondered if this place had been here even longer. He wondered if it had been here even before they’d left Karahelanderialigor. He wondered if the Elves had known that everything he and Tiercel were going to do—their journey, coming to try to destroy the Dark—was going to be useless before they began. He wondered if that was the real reason Ancaladar had vanished. He wondered if Kareta had known that, and about this, and if he’d just asked her the wrong questions. Thinking about Kareta made Harrier think of the MagePrice he still owed for Summoning her: “at a time not of your choosing, you must give up the thing you most value in the world,” she’d said. He wondered what the Wild Magic thought was the thing he valued most in the world. Light knew it couldn’t be his life, since he’d been doing his best to throw it away at least once a sennight for the last year.

  THE shotors began moving more eagerly the closer they got to the oasis. They could smell water and forage, and what that meant to the exhausted creatures was the opportunity to lie down and rest. Though they didn’t need to drink, they would if they got the chance. For their riders, the need for water was more urgent.