The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  The four of them were sitting under the awning in front of Shaiara’s tent in the brief cool desert twilight. Tiercel’s clothes were clean now—although as Harrier had pointed out with cheerful gruesomeness, not even his Ma could get bloodstains that old out of wool and linen. Tiercel didn’t particularly care, as long as they were clean.

  It was the evening after the Balwarta attack. The Ummarai had agreed to stay here and await the rest of the Isvaieni before moving further north. Now that Bisochim had rejoined them, there was no reason for all the Isvaieni not to travel together, and even Harrier had to agree it would be safer if all of them had magical protection if Ahairan was going to start attacking them, but no one had made any decisions beyond that. In the distance, the four of them could hear Anipha and Sathan shouting about goats. Bisochim and Saravasse were . . . not exactly nowhere to be seen, but certainly nowhere nearby.

  Shaiara made an exasperated noise and Tiercel was startled into laughter. “Yeah, I can see now why you wanted us to come up with ideas for what to do next before you tried to get everybody else to go along with them,” he said. “Okay, what’s number one?”

  “We trap Ahairan here in the south and kill her,” Harrier said blandly. Tiercel shook his head wordlessly and gestured for Harrier to continue. “Two, you and I kill Bisochim and ourselves. You’ve said that according to Saravasse, Ahairan wants you or Bisochim or me to do stuff with. I don’t know about him—don’t look at me like that; I still think he’s crazy—but I’m pretty sure about you, and considering the fact that just being within a couple of miles of Ahairan makes me want to puke, that’s out. If we’re all dead, Ahairan will probably leave the Isvai—although she’ll probably kill all the Isvaieni before she goes. And that still doesn’t do much about stopping her, or warning anybody, or getting help from the Elves.”

  “Do you not have any sensible plans?” Shaiara demanded irritably.

  “No,” Harrier said simply. “My third plan is for all of us to head north and see how many of us get to Armethalieh alive.”

  Tiercel stared at Harrier for a very long time, willing him to say something else. He didn’t. “This—this is your plan?” he finally sputtered. “It took us a fortnight just to get back here—and I don’t even know where we were! The Isvai is—It’s—It’s big! And it’s dry! And it’s full of sand! And once you get across it, you still have a moonturn on the Trade Road before you reach Armethalieh!”

  “Somebody needs to trap Ahairan so somebody can kill her eventually. That means Elven Mages. I don’t know if Saravasse can even get through Pelashia’s Veil with Ahairan’s spell on her, and the Veiled Lands are a long way away. Armethalieh’s closer. If we warn them, Chief Magistrate Vaunnel can get a message to Vairindiel Elvenqueen,” Harrier said reasonably.

  “So you’re planning to walk there with ten thousand Isvaieni? That’s a really stupid plan,” Tiercel blurted out.

  “Well, I thought of taking them all to Karahelanderialigor, but that’s even farther away and they can’t get through Pelashia’s Veil either,” Harrier said. “Come on, Tyr. I know it’s a really stupid plan. I don’t have a better one. Your turn.”

  Tiercel got to his feet and began to pace. “We could—We could all just go to Abi’Abadshar and stay there. It’s warded—remember, Bisochim couldn’t find the Nalzindar there—and it’s big. We could—”

  “Wait to die,” Shaiara said, cutting him off sharply. “Think you that the resources of the Demon City are infinite? I tell you plainly: they are not. Nor is there forage for the herds and the flocks in the desert above. Have you not heeded the words of the Ummarai? Do you not remember why the String of Pearls fell?”

  “Bisochim sent the Young Hunters out into the desert to look for you,” Harrier said slowly. “Because the tribes were fighting with each other in Telinchechitl.”

  Shaiara didn’t say anything else. She didn’t have to. The Isvaieni would be packed more closely together in Abi’Abadshar than they’d been at Telinchechitl—and not even in a place they could see the sky, but underground, in a place utterly unnatural and even frightening.

  But if you went there it would only have to be for a few sennights—a moonturn at most—and then Bisochim and I would be back with help. Tiercel didn’t bother to say the words aloud. Sennights? Moonturns? The Isvaieni would starve—if they didn’t all kill each other first. “Well I—look. What if—what if someone other than Bisochim Heals Saravasse so she can fly to Karahelanderialigor—and we—and we kill them afterward before they do something Tainted?” he said desperately.

  Shaiara made a sound of pure exasperation.

  “Good plan,” Harrier said, after almost a minute of silence. “Of course, you don’t know any Healing spells and you couldn’t use them if you did, so . . . that would be me.”

  Tiercel turned toward Harrier, his mouth dropping open in horror. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. He hadn’t thought at all past wanting another choice, one that actually had a chance of success. Getting to Armethalieh would take moonturns. Ahairan wouldn’t just sit back and watch.

  Shaiara reached out and slapped Harrier across the back of the head. Hard. “This is a foolish plan!” she snapped. “Who among us can slay a Knight-Mage? And what of those who lend energy to the healing of such a great creature? Are they to live in thrall to the Demon as well?”

  “Yeah, all right—ow—we’ll think of something else,” Harrier said, rubbing the back of his head.

  BUT no matter how hard they’d tried, they couldn’t. Bisochim was their only real defense against Ahairan and the things she could send against them. If Bisochim left with Saravasse in order to carry a warning to Armethalieh, thousands of people would almost certainly die. Even if Harrier or Tiercel was willing to try to talk him into it, it was clear he wouldn’t listen. Bisochim felt he had betrayed the Isvaieni too utterly to be willing to abandon them again, especially when he could see that Ahairan had begun attacking them directly. From the night the Goblins attacked them, Ahairan’s attacks never stopped. Plagues of insects—barghusi and khazdara and kintibaz and jarrari—joined the attacks by Goblins and Balwarta. The common ones were bad enough—northern fleas and ants were pale imitations of southern barghusi and kintibaz, and there was nothing in the north like khazdara or jarrari at all. And now Ahairan had created atish’ban versions that were a thousand times worse. The atish’ban-jarrari were tiny, and despite that, could kill with a single sting; and the bites of the atish’ban-barghusi maddened humans and animals alike. Those atish’ban insects that didn’t simply eat their supplies, spoiled any they could reach.

  Her attacks never did more than kill a few people each time—but that was enough to let the Isvaieni know that she could kill far more if she chose. Soon it was clear to everyone—even Sathan—that the return to the Isvai could not be the return to the familiar home that the Isvaieni had yearned for during their time at Telinchechitl, but must be the start of a longer and even more perilous journey.

  Shaiara had meant to bring the Nalzindar from Abi’Abadshar in order to return to the Isvai—it was the reason the Isvaieni had chosen to leave Telinchechitl, after all. But by the time hundreds of Isvaieni had become thousands, and the vast exodus at last moved northward to reach her departure-point, the Ummarai had considered their situation and decided that Abi’Abadshar must become a refuge for at least some of the Isvaieni. If Ahairan meant to slaughter them ruthlessly, at least the most helpless of them could be protected.

  And so, as The Fortress Of The Crowned Horns had been for Elvenkind so very long ago, Abi’Abadshar became a refuge for both the children and the children-to-be of the Isvaieni.

  Through Tiercel’s intervention with Saravasse, Bisochim was convinced to escort the caravan there. But before it could depart, the tribes had to decide who would go, and that was a difficult process. In the Isvai, childhood was brief, and the years when an Isvaieni child played among the tents—free and heedless with no task to do—could be counted upon the fingers of one hand. Ha
rrier was horrified to discover that children as young as twelve were expected—and expecting—to stay. Anipha’s oldest son Bilbin had seen thirteen Gatherings of the Tribes (meaning, as Harrier figured out with only a little work, that Bilbin was thirteen), and she wasn’t sending him to Abi’Abadshar.

  “How should I?” Anipha said, “When every archer and spearman will be needed to defend the tents of the Kamazan. And Bilbin is favored of Sand and Star, Harrier, for he rode with Zanattar upon all his battles and took not a single wound.”

  After that, Harrier had nothing else to say to her. He’d simply walked away. There was nothing he could say.

  Tiercel tried, of course. He wanted to convince the Isvaieni to at least raise the age of “adulthood” to fifteen, since in Armethalieh, fifteen was still the age at which boys and girls were apprenticed in many crafts and professions. It was Shaiara who stopped him.

  “How many hundreds—thousands—would you add to the burden Abi’Abadshar must bear, Tiercel?” she asked him gently. “Marap has learned to make the hidden gardens feed us, but can you say how long it must feed . . . so many?”

  “No,” Tiercel said, hanging his head. “I can’t, Shaiara.”

  “Then leave us to do what we must,” she answered. “This parting is a hard one.”

  More quickly than Harrier actually expected, the division of children and pregnant women from those who would continue onward to the Isvai—and Armethalieh—was made. There were fewer pregnant women than he would have expected. At sunset the party gathered together to depart; nearly a tenth of the Isvaieni people. The shotors that they rode would remain with them in Abi’Abadshar, but there would be no difficulty in feeding them. The animals would be slaughtered almost immediately, their meat preserved in a dozen ways, in order to feed the new influx of the city’s inhabitants.

  It was six days to Abi’Abadshar and six days back. Shaiara and Ciniran accompanied Bisochim and Saravasse on the journey. Without Shaiara to speak for Bisochim, the Nalzindar in Abi’Abadshar would never believe he was not Bisochim Shadow-Touched. And Shaiara still meant to return with all the adult Nalzindar that the city held.

  It was a fortnight before Harrier saw Shaiara again. Upon her return, Shaiara said that the only thing that had gained them admittance to the city was Saravasse’s injury. Seeing it, Marap had been unable to convince herself that Bisochim could possibly be Shadow-Touched, for if he were, he would certainly have Healed Saravasse. Shaiara returned with twenty Nalzindar. She’d brought Tanjel with her. Tanjel was twelve. When Bisochim, Saravasse, and the Nalzindar rejoined them, they continued north.

  That all of them went and returned safely was a miracle. It was the last miracle the Isvaieni would receive.

  Bisochim’s spells could ward the caravan from Goblins, and his thunderbolts could slay Balwarta. But with each attack Bisochim thwarted, Ahairan learned. The Isvaieni were inured to death and even to hunger, for life in the desert was harsh. But one night, a few days after Bisochim’s return from Abi’Abadshar, Ahairan sent a pack of atish’ban dogs to attack them. The Black Dogs could not be turned by Bisochim’s spells of compulsion, and they were shielded against his wards. There were so many of them that Lightning could not kill them all. In the moment when every person in the caravan believed that their fate was to be either quick death in the jaws of the Black Dogs or slow death when the Black Dogs slaughtered all of their livestock, the ikulas flung themselves into battle against this new enemy.

  They killed hundreds of Ahairan’s creatures and saved thousands of Isvaieni lives—because they saved the shotors and the herds as well. But the only ikulas that survived the unequal battle were puppies still young enough to be traveling in carrying baskets.

  It took the Isvaieni sixty days to cross the Barahileth, and nine hundred and eighty-four Isvaieni had died by the time they reached Kannatha Well.

  “COME, sit,” Liapha said cheerfully. Harrier had rarely seen her less than pleased with her circumstances, no matter what they were. Attacks by Darkspawn creatures, budding famine, tribal feuds . . . Liapha behaved as if all of it was a Flowering Fair play being enacted for her personal entertainment. He didn’t know how she’d taken the news of the death of her beloved ikulas hounds. He only knew that the next time he saw her, she had one of the orphaned puppies tucked into a fold of her robe. No ikulas older than six moonturns had survived the Black Dog attack; Liapha’s puppy had been one of just sixty-four surviving animals, none of which had originally belonged to the Kadyastar.

  “There is kaffeyah. And by the great fortune of Sand and Star, the rekhattan remains unspoiled! I will have Rinurta prepare you a pipe!” Liapha puffed vigorously on her own.

  “Yes to the kaffeyah, no to the pipe,” Harrier said, settling himself on a cushion at her right side and waving his hand to dispel the cloud of smoke. “The reason the rekhattan hasn’t been touched is because it would poison even atish’ban bugs. If we had enough of it, we could probably kill Ahairan with it.” He only wished he could be as philosophical about things as Liapha was. He’d probably explode.

  “A terrible waste of thing that is not only comfort to the old, but medicine to all creatures,” Liapha said, unperturbed. “If there were no rekhattan, you could not do half the spells in your books, could you, now?”

  “I use a lot of things in my spells. I don’t put them in a pipe and breathe them,” Harrier answered. He waited until Rinurta had poured him a cup of kaffeyah—a generous cup, not the tiny cup given as a guest-mouthful for politeness’ sake—to do more than tease Liapha. It had taken him a long time to learn how to respond to her behavior, and he’d finally decided to deal with her as if she were a cross between Cargomaster Tamaricans and one of his more-eccentric aunts. It seemed to work well enough.

  It was the evening of the day they’d reached Kannatha Well. Bisochim had promptly turned it into Kannatha Lake—Kannatha Well was tiny, and they had thousands of thirsty animals—and that had apparently been the last straw for Shaiara.

  “Will you turn the Isvai into a wasteland?” she demanded. “Are you Shadow-Touched in truth, that you can set aside every law that runs between Sand and Star because it pleases you to do so? When the Isvai has drained this water as dry as a greedy drunkard drains a waterskin, what shall take its place? Shall the Isvaieni say to their children, and to their children’s children: ONCE A WELL LAY AT KANNATHA, BUT NO LONGER, AND ALL FOR ONE MAN’S ARROGANCE AND PRIDE?”

  Harrier might have been willing to concede Shaiara’s point, if not for the fact that he didn’t think that Ahairan cared that much about the Isvai, and he really didn’t either.

  “Okay, destroying wells might be—might be—a bad idea,” he said to Tiercel that evening, after Shaiara stalked out of the tent without a word to either of them. “But if Ahairan fills the world with Demons, the Isvaieni are going to be dead along with everybody else. If we can manage to lock Ahairan up somewhere . . . the Isvaieni can go live somewhere else. They didn’t always live here. Before the Great Flowering, nobody lived here.”

  Tiercel snickered rudely. “Oh, listen to Harrier the Great, who knows more history than the learned professors of Pre-Flowering History at Armethalieh University! As it happens, though, you’re right: before the Great Flowering, the desert went all the way north to the middle of the Armen Plains. According to The History of Reconciliation written by High Magistrate Cilarnen, there weren’t a lot of people anywhere. Just in the High Reaches—which is what they used to call those hills between Armethalieh and Sentarshadeen—and somewhere that High Magistrate Cilarnen called the Lost Lands, and nobody’s really sure of quite where that is now.”

  “Probably because it’s still lost,” Harrier sniped back absently. He wasn’t distracted by the lecture. He’d been ignoring Tiercel’s lectures since Tiercel had learned to walk. “Which is exactly my point. They didn’t used to live here. They don’t have to keep living here.”

  “Har, they’ve lived here for almost a thousand years,” Tiercel protested long-su
fferingly.

  “And I’m not going to lose sleep over whether or not they still can. They—one of them anyway—made this problem. They can all live with the consequences. I’m going to—”

  “Shouldn’t that be ‘one of you’?” Tiercel asked quietly.

  Harrier had been in the middle of reaching for his swords. He froze, straightened, turned around again. “What?”

  “ ‘One of you,’ ” Tiercel repeated. “Bisochim’s Isvaieni, sure, but Shaiara couldn’t have summoned up Ahairan. Bisochim could do it because he was a Wildmage. So are you.”

  “He could do it because he had a Dragon,” Harrier said flatly. “So this isn’t my problem. It’s yours.” He picked up his swords and walked out of the tent before Tiercel could say anything else.

  So since Shaiara wasn’t speaking to him, and now he and Tiercel weren’t speaking to each other, Harrier had gone off to find Liapha.

  “Well?” Liapha said, as soon as he’d taken his first sip. “I doubt you’ve come here to flirt. Or are you indeed looking for a wife?”

  “I do not dare to hope, Ummara Liapha, knowing I can never afford your bride-price,” Harrier answered promptly. Everyone else sitting on the Kadyastar carpet laughed, and Liapha pounded him soundly upon the thigh in appreciation.

  “Clever—and a Wildmage—ah, child, were things other than what they are, I would offer you the freedom of my tent and hope for the blessing of the Wild Magic! But ask what you would have of me, and we will see if I will give it.”

  “Your wisdom, to one who comes, as all know, from the Cold North,” Harrier answered. The Isvaieni way of talking didn’t come naturally to him—any more than the indirection of the Elvenspeech ever had, no matter how hard Elunyerin and her brother Rilphanifel had worked to beat its conventions into him—but there were times that it had its advantages (even though it never seemed to get to the point), because while you were talking around in circles it gave you time to think of what you wanted to say. “Today I have heard a thing that puzzles me.”