The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  Harrier glanced toward Shaiara. If any of their plans had gone at all as they’d intended them to, they would all have been properly dressed, the encampment they were preparing to enter wouldn’t have been buzzing like a walloped wasp’s nest, and he would’ve had one last chance to try to talk Shaiara and Ciniran into staying behind. No chance of that now. He managed to slow Lightfoot a bit and turn her aside from the herd. He was grateful that the old cow-shotor was the mount he’d grabbed in the chaos. She was steady and reliable, even if she was foul-tempered and ugly. Shaiara, taking his cue, rode up beside him.

  “What do we do when we get there?” he asked her, keeping his voice to the barest murmur. “They’ll know Tyr and I aren’t Isvaieni, even if we are covered in mud. But we have to have water.”

  Shaiara nodded briefly, her teeth worrying her lower lip as she thought. “I think no one will look closely at you this day, and that is well. Once we have drunk, we will steal clothing, then seek out the Shadow-Touched and slay him. Then all shall be as Sand and Star wills.”

  “Yeah,” Harrier said with a sigh. “Right.”

  THE grass simply started. One moment there was regh, and the next moment there was grass, its bright greenness shocking in the no-color desert palette of brown and dun and tan. The dividing point was as sharp as if the desert had been cut by a knife. Harrier could see the air sparkling with rainbows from the water jetting into the air from fountains that were little more than pipes jutting out of the ground.

  Here, as in the fields outside the iteru-cities, everything was irrigated by canal; the fountains, Harrier quickly realized, were to lower the temperature of the air rather than to provide a water source for any of the growing things. But that meant that when the animals the Isvaieni were herding reached the first of the channels dug between the trees, they stopped and began to fan out along its length to drink. The Isvaieni immediately dismounted and began shouting orders to the khalbes. The flockguards, barking and snapping, worked to get the animals moving again, but for a few moments, all was confusion.

  “We must go now,” Shaiara said, gesturing because her words couldn’t really be heard. She tapped her shotor on its shoulder to make it kneel, and the rest of them followed suit.

  Harrier remembered Tarnatha’Iteru the night of the attack, and the sudden terror he’d felt knowing Consul Aldarnas’s plan had failed, and the moment the fear had just . . . stopped. That was how he felt now. “Where are we going?” he asked Shaiara. When he dismounted from his saddle, crusts of dried clay cracked and broke—his tunic was no longer the brown of undyed wool, but the light tan of mud. He hadn’t been able to hear the sound of his own voice over the noise all around them, and stepped closer to her to hear her reply.

  “The storm has struck here as well, yet if the tents have been set as they would be at a Gathering of the Tribes, I know which tents lie where. There is no charity between Sand and Star, as well you know, nor will I steal from those who cannot spare it. Tunag and Zarungad are people of the deep desert. They have little. But the Kareggi are numerous and wealthy, and will not be injured by this loss.” Shaiara stopped speaking then, and Harrier knew why. The next part of the plan was supposed to be theirs. And from the time Harrier and Tiercel had known there was an enemy, their plan had been insanely simple: go find that enemy and stop him. They’d always been going to work out the details later. Only “later” had become “now.”

  Harrier looked at Tiercel. Tiercel still looked more stunned than anything else, and Harrier realized that the fact that he wasn’t afraid wasn’t because of any gift of the Wild Magic, but was because he was angry. He and Tiercel weren’t ready for this. They never could have been. He saw Tiercel take a deep breath and shake himself, as if he were waking himself up.

  “We . . . We’ll find out where he is. And we’ll go talk to him,” Tiercel said shakily.

  “Right,” Harrier said. It was an effort to keep his voice even, but he managed.

  He turned and lifted the saddle from Lightfoot’s back—because unsaddled, the shotors would blend in better—and looped her lead-rope around her neck and through her halter. Shaiara and Ciniran did the same with their shotors, and then helped Tiercel with his animal. Nobody paid any attention to them as they walked up along and through the swirling mass of dogs and livestock in the direction of the tents.

  Grass and earth—very wet and muddy earth—felt strange under the soles of his boots, and he was grateful that Tiercel had been able to grab their cloaks in the first moments of the storm. He needed his cloak to conceal his swords; Tiercel needed his to hide as much of himself as he could. They all had their boots and their chadars, but Harrier was the only one wearing more than his undertunic, since he’d managed to drag on his outer tunic before they’d fled.

  All around them, the ground was covered with leaves and storm-downed branches. All the trees were in full leaf—Shaiara said it was summer, so that made sense—and the green glossy leaves and globes of ripening fruit just added another layer of unreality to a situation that was already unreal. This was the depths of the harshest desert anywhere. Harrier had gotten used to the way it looked. It didn’t look like this.

  He’d also gotten used to being alone, because there were only thirty people in Shaiara’s entire tribe, and he’d spent most of his days chasing Tiercel around Abi’Abadshar’s basement anyway. But here there were people everywhere you looked. Kids climbing the trees, trying to bring down the falcons roosting there (the falcons only hissed miserably at anyone who came near them and sometimes climbed higher), kids waving sticks, trying to chase chickens down out of other trees (the chickens were too busy watching the falcons to pay any attention to the sticks). It would all have been funny, if they weren’t here to kill a Darkspawn Mage who was almost certainly going to kill them instead.

  They stopped at the first fountain-jet they saw, cupping their hands around the spray to wash them and then to fill them with water. The water was icy cold as it left the short length of bronze pipe, and Harrier wondered how it was made to come up out of the ground with so much force. He’d probably never know. When they’d drunk as much as they had patience for, they walked on. He was relieved to see that the four of them weren’t any more badly dressed than a lot of the people they saw. And a lot of them were just as mud-covered.

  He’d first thought that the Isvaieni tents were pitched among the trees, but he’d been wrong. They were too large and too numerous for that. They were pitched beyond it, on another open expanse of grass. Just as if somebody picked up the Armen Plain and dropped it here . . .

  The storm had obviously hit the camp hard and fast. A third of the tents were still down—smashed flat by the storm—but people were moving to put them back up even as Harrier watched. Harrier tried not to worry at the number of tents he saw. There were more than there’d been outside Tarnatha’Iteru—maybe twice as many. Most of them were like Shaiara’s—a no-particular-color like wood-ash—because they were made of felted wool from the coats of sheep and goats and shotors, but he could see that a few of the tents were black. And a few of them were a different shape, as if two of the regular tents had been put together to make an extra-large one. Most of the carpets—every Isvaieni’s tent was floored with carpets—were laid out in the sun to dry, and the colors were brilliant: reds and dark blues and greens and yellows. In the Nine Cities, they called them Madiran rugs, and they fetched stunning prices in the marketplace. Here, they were as much a necessity as good cookstone or an iron skillet. Or a belt-knife. Harrier touched his waist uneasily. He didn’t have his waist-sash and over-robe, let alone his geschak. All he had was his Selken blades, and he was lucky to have grabbed them in the storm. And his Three Books, of course, but if he’d left them behind, he was sure they’d have found a way to turn up somehow. He frowned. There was something somehow wrong about the tents, as if they weren’t arranged properly. Harrier shook his head, feeling as if it were suddenly overfull, and sighed sharply with irritation. There was no possible way he
could know the right way for an Isvaieni camp to be set up. And whether it was right or wrong, it couldn’t make a lot of difference now. But . . .

  “So few?” Shaiara said, looking at the encampment. She sounded shaken.

  “I’m sorry,” Tiercel said quietly. “Uh . . . Har?” Tiercel added, reaching out to touch his arm.

  His voice and his touch wrenched Harrier’s attention away from the encampment, and the thing he’d been on the edge of figuring out vanished. There was an odd note in Tiercel’s voice—not danger, not panic, just sheer disbelief—and right now it just made Harrier want to smack him, because if it wasn’t something urgent enough or dangerous enough to actually upset him, Harrier didn’t want to know about it. But if he yelled, he’d only attract unwanted attention, so he took a very deep breath.

  “Yes, Tiercel, what is it?” he said evenly.

  “The cliffs, Har. They’re gone.”

  Harrier hadn’t actually been paying much attention to the cliffs, since he’d only seen them distantly and indistinctly before they’d vanished behind a bank of clouds. When they’d gotten closer to their destination, his attention had been on things close at hand: sheep, goats, people who might be about to kill them. Now he looked up. Beyond the far edge of the tents, perhaps two miles in the distance, there was still a shifting blanket of white. It looked like fog, or maybe steam. In Harrier’s opinion, it could be whatever it wanted to be. There were apple trees growing in the middle of the Barahileth. Anything was possible. But the mist-steam-fog wasn’t as thick now, and it was being blown by the wind that always rose an hour or two before sunset, and as gaps appeared in the mist, Harrier could see what Tiercel had seen. There was nothing behind it. No cliff. Just desert. He turned to Tiercel.

  “Considering the fact that we never saw this place at all until a couple of hours ago, the fact that a cliff has mysteriously vanished doesn’t worry me. Maybe it was never there.” For Light’s sake, think of why you’re here, Tyr! “Maybe it has vanished. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I guess. But I thought—”

  “Come! Come and eat!”

  The woman who hailed them sat on a carpet in the open doorway of her tent, beneath the shade of an awning. Unlike the Nalzindar—or the half-dressed, mud-covered Isvaieni Harrier had seen so far—her clothing was both bright and elaborate. Her chadar had a pattern of red stripes woven into the pale wool, and her long open vest was black. Her overtunic was a dark brown—it had to have been dyed, since shotor-wool was a lighter color—and the undertunic beneath it was so pale it had to have been bleached. There were two large waterjars beside her upon the carpet, and a younger woman sat beside her, tending a kaffeyah-brazier. She, too, was dressed brightly, in a brown vest and green tunic, though her chadar matched the older woman’s. Harrier remembered Shaiara telling him once that how the chadar was knotted and folded told anyone who saw it what tribe you belonged to. He wondered if that went for the colors as well.

  “Your pardon, Ummara Liapha. We are not Kadyastar,” Shaiara called back. She started to move on.

  “One of us is sun-touched, girl,” the woman Shaiara had called Liapha snapped, her voice clearly audible to the four of them. From the way Shaiara stopped and her back straightened, Harrier suspected that nobody had called her “girl” in that tone of voice for quite a while—if ever.

  “Now come. Sit. Eat. Rinurta, show them that they are welcome!”

  The girl sitting by Liapha’s side got to her feet and walked toward them, obviously intending to conduct them back to her relative’s side.

  “They are Kadyastar,” Ciniran said in soft tones of disbelief.

  “There is no charity between Sand and Star, as well you know.” Shaiara had said that—again only a few moments ago. That Isvaieni custom was alien to everything Harrier had grown up with, for the Gillain family—like all those in Armethalieh who lived by Great Ocean—also lived by the law of Great Ocean, whether on ship or on shore, and that law held that all who sailed upon Great Ocean were kin, never to be denied aid or succor. But the desert was even more unforgiving than Great Ocean. To give charity to another today might be to doom your own family tomorrow. No wonder Ciniran was shocked.

  “Maybe they know where Bisochim is,” Tiercel suggested, as if trying to make the best of a bad situation.

  “Sure they do,” Harrier said sourly. “We’ll ask them, they’ll tell us, we’ll go find him, we won’t have any more problems. For—” He stopped talking abruptly as Rinurta reached them. There was nothing to do but follow her back to Liapha’s tent.

  If Harrier and Tiercel had not been living among the Nalzindar for the last moonturn, the deception would have been doomed from the outset. But they knew where to sit on an Isvaieni carpet, and how to sit. They could see, now that they were close to her, that Liapha was old—the oldest Isvaieni either of them had ever seen. Her skin was as dark as polished maple, and seamed with a thousand tiny wrinkles. And the sash at her waist was not only brightly striped in a rainbow of colors, Harrier would have been willing to bet the four silver stars he’d given Carault two years ago to invest in cargo for him that it was silk. And not Dragon’s Tail silk either, but Selken Isles silk, shipped across Great Ocean at ruinous cost to its eventual buyer. Liapha was a wealthy woman, even setting aside the fact that the carpet Harrier was currently grinding mud into would change hands even at warehouse prices up north for enough to let Liapha dress herself from head to foot in Selken silk.

  Now who isn’t paying attention? he asked himself. He looked around as best he could without turning his head. The tent itself had been set up not as living space, but as a central kitchen designed to feed dozens, even scores, of people, and the good smells coming from inside it made Harrier’s stomach rumble.

  Rinurta served the four of them with large mugs of water from the covered clay jars, and then knelt on the rug to prepare kaffeyah. Harrier had spent enough time with the Nalzindar to know that preparing the kaffeyah was considered a mark of honor. Liapha might have been doing it herself if she were younger. Her chadar covered her hair, but her hands and face were withered and wrinkled with the passage of years. As the kaffeyah was simmering in the pan, several Isvaieni walked into the tent—nodding to Liapha as they passed—and received flatcakes and bowls of food. From the carefully-blank expressions on Ciniran’s and Shaiara’s faces, Harrier guessed there was something even stranger about that than about them having been invited to dinner by a Kadyastar. While he and Tiercel had managed to drink without unwrapping their chadars, Harrier was already trying to think about how they could get out of here without eating anything, because they’d certainly have to unwrap themselves to do that, and as soon as either he or Tiercel exposed their faces, it would be obvious that they weren’t Isvaieni.

  When the kaffeyah was ready, Rinurta poured it deftly from the flat pan into the carved bone cups waiting on the tray, then carried the tray around, serving Liapha first. Ciniran sat at Shaiara’s side, head bowed and still, looking as if she wanted to be anywhere but here. When they’d all been served, Liapha sent Rinurta into the tent, saying she must bring bread and dates for their guests.

  “Did you think I would not recognize you, Shaiara?” Liapha said, as soon as Rinurta was gone. “Only the Nalzindar do not know that the time of the Breaking of Tribes has come—and you have much the look of Ganima about you.”

  Harrier saw Ciniran raise her head abruptly, her mouth opening as if she wanted to argue with Liapha. But it was Shaiara who spoke.

  “Ganima went to lay her bones upon the sand before my eyes first opened upon the day,” Shaiara said sharply. “The Nalzindar look to no tents save our own.”

  Liapha nodded, as if Shaiara had said just what she’d expected. “That has always been the way of those who journey between Sand and Star—and so I thought it would always be. Ganima was always my favorite, you know. Indeed, it might have been that it was she who held the Kadyastar after me, and not Hadyan. But she would have what she would have. I see she has pas
sed that willfulness on to her daughter.”

  “I serve,” Shaiara answered, and there was steel in her voice.

  “Do you?” Liapha answered mildly. “What do you serve?”

  “I shall tell you what I do not serve, Liapha of the Kadyastar. I do not serve Shadow as its ikulas, as the Isvaieni did when they went forth at Bisochim’s order to destroy the String of Pearls.” There was nothing but contempt in Shaiara’s voice.

  Harrier concentrated on the cup of kaffeyah he held in his hands. He didn’t dare look at Tiercel, or Ciniran, or at anything else, for fear of giving too much away. They’d walked into the enemy’s stronghold, and right up to someone who not only recognized Shaiara as Nalzindar, but as Shaiara. And now Shaiara was arguing with her.

  Liapha blinked slowly, and sipped her kaffeyah. She did not answer immediately. “But Bisochim did not order it. He sent Zanattar and the rest of the young hunters out into the Isvai to search for you, for the Nalzindar were not to be found when an accounting was rendered of the tribes here beneath the cliffs of Telinchechitl. When the young hunters found the Blue Robes slain, they knew that Bisochim’s warnings that the False Balance sought all our lives were truth, and so they struck first to save us all. What else could they have done, seeing those murdered who could not have died except at the hands of enemies of the True Balance?”

  “There’s only one Balance.” Harrier really hadn’t meant to say anything. He’d meant to use his common sense, stay quiet, and hope Shaiara and maybe Ciniran could figure out something to say that would get them out of here. But enough was enough. There were limits to common sense. “I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what Bisochim’s told you, or why. There’s only one Balance, and it isn’t false, and it isn’t true, it just is. And if the Wildmage that Zanattar found was murdered, then he was murdered by Bisochim, because Bisochim’s the only one I know of who would use his power that way, and he’s been killing my friends for over a year now and I’m really tired of it.”