The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  “Tell us something we don’t know yet, Harrier of the Cold North!” Sathan called to him.

  “I’m not done yet,” Harrier said quietly. “We’ve faced Balwarta and Sandwalkers and Black Dogs and Goblins and atish’ban-bugs and now Shamblers. The thing is—I know you know this—Ahairan doesn’t care about any of you. Not really. She’ll torture you and kill you because she’s a Demon and that’s what she does. But she’s doing this so Bisochim—or Tiercel—or I—will bow down to her and worship her to make it stop. And we won’t. We’ll die first.”

  There was utter silence in the tent now. Even the crowd outside, which had been relaying the words of those inside the tent to those further back, was silent.

  “Nothing that I told you back in Telinchechitl has changed. None of the three of us can destroy Ahairan. We need to get word to Vairindiel Elvenqueen. Her Elven Mages can—I hope—Bind Ahairan until someone can destroy her. But whether they can or not, just warning people about her is just as important. If no one knows that Ahairan is loose, she wins, because she can do whatever she wants to, and . . . And it will be just like The Tale of Anigrel the Black. No one knew what he was, and he nearly destroyed everything.” Harrier stopped, staring up at the canopy of the tent for a long moment before he went on. “The Elven Lands are a long way away, and Pelashia’s Veil is meant to keep people out, not let them in. I think I could pass the Veil—but even so, Karahelanderialigor is sennights away, and Tiercel’s the one the Elves will listen to, not me. Our best chance of warning someone and getting the help we need is to get to Armethalieh. But you need to know: even if we can reach Sapthiruk Oasis and resupply, Akazidas’Iteru is two, maybe three, moonturns north of that. We’ll probably still run out of food before we get there even if we eat the shotors, but most of you won’t have to worry about that because you’ll already be dead. If any of you survive to reach Akazidas’Iteru, Ahairan will probably kill you rather than let any of us leave the Madiran. So . . . I can’t ask any of you to come with us.”

  “The Hinturi will not turn aside from the path you have chosen, Harrier,” Bakhudun said.

  At Bakhudun’s words, others shifted, preparing to speak. Once again Harrier held up his hands for silence. “This is not some kind of stupid game to see who’s braver,” he said, and for the first time there was anger in his voice. “Look at the people beside you. All of you. There’s someone on your left. There’s someone on your right. If you reach Akazidas’Iteru, neither of them will. That’s how many—at least how many—of you are going to die. You can’t live in the Isvai. But Ahairan may not have stripped the Tereymils. Anyone who heads east might have a chance. I give you fair warning: Ahairan may simply kill anyone who leaves us here. But I know—and so do you—that in the end she’ll kill everyone who stays.” Harrier stared down at the carpet for a long moment. “In the Barahileth you all promised to come to Armethalieh with me. I’m giving you back that promise now—all of you. You don’t have to.”

  This time the silence that followed his words stretched unbroken for long moments, as no Ummara wished to be the first either to follow Bakhudun’s pledge to remain—or to be the first to say that they would go. In the last moment before the charged silence would have been broken by the voices of others, Liapha spoke. “Surely this is not all you wished to say to us, Harrier?” she asked brightly,

  “No, that’s . . . If anybody decides to come with us, they have to behave like an actual army. Watches and herd-guards and camp patrols. Supplies—everything we’d have—held in common and shared equally, because I don’t want to hear about tribes, and I don’t want to hear about the Time of the Breaking of Tribes. I’m sick of both.” He scrubbed his hand over his hair, pushing his chadar back to lie around his shoulders, and looked around at the men and women sitting in the tent. “You wouldn’t like it, Liapha. None of you would.”

  Liapha’s eyes flashed dangerously, and she pulled herself to her feet with an effort, leaning heavily upon her Ummara’s staff. “And I say to you, Harrier Blue Robe, that there is little at all to ‘like’ in any of this. I raised up my heir since he took his first steps, and his body is ash upon the wind. Where are my daughters and my sons and their children, my brothers and sisters and their children, and their children? All dead—save one who is not Kadyastar! And so I say to you: the Kadyastar will not seek to save an empty name and lives that such a choice would leach of meaning! We ride with you, even though all that we are should be scoured from the Isvai as if by the Sandwind itself. Others must find their own truth.”

  “ARE you sure you’re . . .” Tiercel asked hesitantly.

  “All right? Not crazy? Got any idea of what I’m doing?” Harrier asked. “Wait until Liapha finds out I want her to cut all those Dark-damned bells off the Kadyastar saddles.”

  “Be serious,” Tiercel said, sitting down beside him on the carpet in front of their tent.

  The “midday halt” had stretched on into the afternoon and on toward the evening as the Ummarai and chaharums argued. Tiercel hadn’t known what Harrier had wanted to talk about to everyone this afternoon. He’d just assumed it was something about arrows, since everyone was running low by now and if the Shamblers could be killed—well, stopped—with fire, they needed to be able to make fire arrows. He’d been stunned to find out that apparently Harrier had intended to tell the Isvaieni they were all going to die and to suggest that this would be a good time for everyone to take off in the opposite direction from wherever he, Harrier, and Bisochim and Saravasse were going, despite the fact that Ahairan would kill them if they did.

  He hadn’t gotten the chance last night to tell Harrier about his suspicion that he was still having visions of Ahairan. Now he was glad he hadn’t, since Harrier had apparently gone crazy.

  “I am serious,” Harrier said. “It’s not so much that they make it impossible to hear anything—although they do—as that they make it easy—easier—for anything to hear us.”

  “You didn’t—did you—mean, I mean . . . everything you said . . .” Tiercel said, stumbling over the words.

  “Is true,” Harrier said. “I’m sorry, Tyr.”

  “But how can you know? Har, I’ve had to help you with your Maths lessons for as long as I can remember.” Yet in the meeting tent, Harrier had reeled off odds and percentages and amounts and probabilities in a way that would have made Master Jorvens Berian stare in amazement. It seemed utterly insane to be bringing up Armethalieh Normal School here and now, but Tiercel couldn’t stop thinking about it, as if thinking about the past would let him open a door and go there. He imagined a Windrack two years ago, when he and Harrier were sitting in the back of the classroom (because Harrier always refused to sit at the front, and so Tiercel sat with him in the back) as Master Berian was lecturing them on Maths. The windows would have been open, and the soft spring breeze would have been blowing through the window, and Harrier would be paying far more attention to whatever was going on outside than what was happening at the front of the room—at least until Master Berian noticed.

  “And then after Old Berian finished yelling at me, I’d go down to the Docks and spend a couple of bells calculating how many tons of cargo could fit into how many square feet of hull without sending the ship to the bottom of Armethalieh Harbor,” Harrier said patiently. “I got it right, too—because Cargomaster Tamaricans would skin me when I didn’t. I was just never any good with stupid books full of made-up problems about things that weren’t real.”

  “This is real,” Tiercel said unhappily.

  “It is,” Harrier agreed.

  “They’re still arguing,” Tiercel added.

  “Yeah,” Harrier said. He looked up at the evening sky. “I’ll give them another hour, then I’m leaving with whoever wants to come along.”

  TIERCEL hadn’t believed he’d do it. No matter how stubborn Harrier got when he got mad, there were some things too important to lose your temper over, and Harrier had been saying from the beginning—he’d even told them again today—that th
e only value the Isvaieni had to Ahairan was as hostages. If Harrier let anyone who wanted to just leave—and Tiercel thought that Sathan would be taking the Barantar away even if no one else left—then he was just abandoning them to Ahairan. But an hour later, the Nalzindar campsite was packed and ready to load, and Harrier was going down to the shotor grounds to get their shotors, just as if it were any evening.

  There were four fewer Nalzindar than there’d been yesterday at this time, and one of the dead—Tanjel—had been twelve. Tiercel wondered if that was part of the reason Harrier had said what he had today.

  “You can’t do this,” he said to Harrier.

  “Watch me,” Harrier said. He didn’t slow down, but he didn’t speed up either. He just kept walking.

  “Oh, for Light’s sake! Be reasonable, Har! Will you—most of the tents aren’t even struck yet!” Some of the tents that had been put up for midday shelter were down. But not many.

  “They might be staying here. Or heading east,” Harrier said, still calmly. “The Tereymils are east. I told them there might be game and water there.”

  Tiercel speeded up until he could jump in front of Harrier and force him to stop. “Look, I—Look. You can’t do this. You know that anyone who goes off by themselves is just going to be killed by Ahairan. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Everything’s changed,” Harrier said, still in that too-calm voice. “You know, Tyr, I didn’t plan on leading the Isvaieni anywhere. Telinchechitl was drying up, you didn’t come back, Shaiara, Ciniran, and I couldn’t just go back to Abi’Abadshar because we thought Zanattar might follow us there and kill everybody. So I said I’d take the Isvaieni back into the Isvai and hey, maybe by then you’d show up again with Elven Mages and you and I could go home. But when you came back you told me that you hadn’t warned anybody and Saravasse couldn’t fly. And Ahairan was hitting the caravans and people were dying. And we got back to the Isvai and found out that nobody could live here now. And Ahairan keeps killing people, and she’s going to keep on killing people, and you know what? Not only do I have no idea of why she’s bothering with us instead of going north, I can think of three ways right now that she could get exactly what she wants.”

  “And letting everybody die? That’s the answer?” Tiercel asked, angry and confused.

  “No. What’s the difference between High Magick and the Wild Magic? The most basic difference? The one that underlays everything?” Harrier asked.

  “I, uh . . . You—You want me to tell you?” Tiercel stammered in disbelief. He couldn’t figure out where Harrier was leading with this abrupt change of subject.

  That got him a tight unhappy smile from Harrier. “I know. Do you?”

  “Um, well, the Wild Magic came first, and . . . A lot of the spells are different, and . . . High Magick involves a lot more equipment, the results are exactly the same every time you do a spell, and, um, you have to study—for years, actually—to learn the High Magick, and then you need a source of spell-energy . . .” his voice trailed off and he tried not to think about Ancaladar.

  “Not those,” Harrier said after a moment’s pause, and Tiercel knew that Harrier was thinking of Ancaladar too. “Something else. And I know this is going to sound really stupid—especially coming from me—but . . . With the Wild Magic, you have to ask.”

  “ ‘Ask?’ ” Tiercel repeated blankly.

  “Ask,” Harrier said. “Permission. From someone even if you want to Heal them—if you possibly can—from anybody you want to have share in the spell-cost of a spell—no matter what. Even if it’s something they’d want, even if you think they’d say ‘yes’ later. You have to ask. That’s the difference between Wild Magic and High Magick.”

  “I always asked,” Tiercel said defensively.

  “I know,” Harrier said quietly. “But you didn’t have to. And I think a Dragonbond has to be different anyway, because Saravasse didn’t want to help Bisochim call up Ahairan, but because of the Bond, he could still use her. But he’s still a Wildmage. He should have asked,” Harrier added softly.

  “So—It’s—But—You’re sending them off to be killed because you’re a Wildmage?” Tiercel demanded, keeping his voice down with an effort. But the more he thought about it, he knew that couldn’t be right. “You’re giving them a choice,” he finally said.

  “Yeah,” Harrier answered.

  WHEN Harrier, Tiercel, and Bisochim and Saravasse left the encampment, only the Nalzindar, the Kadyastar, the Hinturi, and the remains of the Adanate rode with them. The Adanate hadn’t chosen a new Ummara, but they’d agreed that Karufhad would speak for them until they chose one or were agreed that they couldn’t choose. Karufhad herself—so she told Harrier when she came to tell him that the Adanate would ride with him—didn’t want to become Ummara of the Adanate.

  “You might as well,” Harrier answered dismissively. “I meant what I said back there. No more tribes. No more fighting with each other.”

  “So said Bisochim,” Karufhad said. “And then—so spoke my son when he returned to me—Zanattar said the Young Hunters must become an army.”

  Harrier just laughed. It shocked Tiercel—he’d been expecting anything else. Anger. Argument. Defensiveness. “And Bisochim lied to you and called up a Demon—because the Demon had lied to him. And Zanattar turned the Young Hunters into an army and they murdered thousands of innocent people. And we’re all probably going to be dead a moonturn from now. And meanwhile we’re going to be an army,” Harrier said.

  Karufhad nodded—just as if what Harrier said had actually made sense to her—and turned her shotor back to rejoin the other Adanate. And either Tiercel could go with them, or he could fling himself down from his shotor and say he wouldn’t go anywhere until Harrier came to his senses. And deep inside, he was a little afraid that Harrier wouldn’t let him do that. So he rode along with everyone else, unable to decide whether he was being a coward or not.

  A couple of hours later, Saravasse announced that she heard something behind them. When Harrier and the Nalzindar circled around to the back of the little caravan, Tiercel went too. In the distance, very faintly, he could hear the sound of saddle-bells, and the disgruntled bleating of goats.

  BY the time they moved on again, the desert where they’d stopped was littered with bells, and nearly all the Isvaieni had rejoined Harrier. The Kareggi were among those who’d come, which surprised Tiercel, since apparently Fannas had complained up one street and down the next about Harrier’s behavior from before they’d all left Telinchechitl. The Thanduli had stayed behind, but Ummara Ogmazad of the Tabingana said that Ummara Calazir of the Thanduli was still making up his mind what to do.

  Most of the delay in the departure of the rest of the tribes had been caused by arguments about the allotment of the remaining livestock. When Harrier’s party had left, Harrier had simply seized what he considered a fair number of the herd animals, choosing a number by the number of people going with him, but Sathan seemed to be arguing ownership rights to specific sheep and goats and shotors. It hadn’t—quite—come to violence, but Sathan certainly hadn’t been let to keep even a fraction of the animals he’d claimed.

  “How should he?” Ogmazad said reasonably. “In a moonturn the Barantar will reach good hunting. Or they will be dead.”

  The Barantar and the Binrazan were the only two tribes determined to stay behind, and Ummara Phulda of the Binrazan had spoken of heading east. Some of the Barantar and the Binrazan, from what Tiercel could figure out from the brief conversation he’d overheard between Harrier and Zanattar before the caravan moved on, had become Lanzanur really quickly in order to follow Zanattar, because Zanattar—and Ummara Kataduk of the Lanzanur, whom Zanattar had stayed behind to escort—were following Harrier.

  Tiercel wanted to say they should go back and try again to reason with the holdouts. He knew that Sathan wouldn’t listen, but now that Ummara Calazir and Ummara Phulda had seen that almost everyone else intended to keep going north, surely they’d want the Thanduli and th
e Binrazan to go too. Even if Harrier didn’t want to turn back and lose a whole night’s travel, Tiercel and Bisochim and Saravasse could get back to the last campsite in less than an hour. Tiercel was sure he could persuade the Binrazan and the Thanduli to come along if he reminded them that the Isvaieni were Ahairan’s hostages, and that if she couldn’t kill them—slowly—in front of Bisochim, she’d have no reason to let them live at all.

  Tiercel wondered, thinking that, if Harrier had thought this puzzle out to its logical end. Why should Ahairan let him—or Bisochim, or any of the Isvaieni—escape to warn someone? Why should she leave anyone alive at all?

  It isn’t just my own life I have to be willing to give up, Tiercel realized with a thrill of revulsion. If they were all going to die anyway, shouldn’t they make their plans on that assumption? In shamat, you sacrificed the lesser pieces to defend the greater ones, and people weren’t playing pieces, but . . .

  Were they all trying to stay alive? Or were they trying to save the Light from the Dark? They weren’t the same goals. They couldn’t be accomplished in the same ways. In fact . . . they probably weren’t both things you could try to accomplish at the same time.

  Does Harrier know that? Tiercel wondered. This had been supposed to be his fight, Tiercel thought. Since the first time he’d had a vision of Ahairan and Telinchechitl—before he’d been able to put names to them—he’d known it was his fight, but all he’d done was wander around in circles as if he had all the time in the world, because he was too afraid to do what had to be done. He’d had sennights to think of a proper defense for Tarnatha’Iteru—or to leave—because Tarnatha’Iteru was one city, and stopping Ahairan before she could destroy all cities was more important. And he hadn’t. He got to Abi’Abadshar, and he’d had a trail leading right to Telinchechitl, and he hadn’t taken it. He’d delayed—out of fear—and lost Ancaladar, and gave Bisochim time to release Ahairan, and the fact that they were all going to die now wasn’t even the worst part.