The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  But he could still scream.

  BOTH Razinda and Tagora had ridden forth from Telinchechitl among the Young Hunters, and so when Harrier of the Two Swords led them forth from Telinchechitl again, Razinda held close to her heart the hope that once they returned to the Isvai, the long moonturns of battle and killing could become no more than an evil dream. But the shame of the Isvaieni’s folly could only be washed clean in vows that set their feet upon a New War Road, though it was a war that both the Blue Robes said no man or woman could win. For that cause, there had been joy in the hearts of all the Barantar to be given their vow back again, that they might come away from that dark path and seek instead a path of peace.

  Razinda knew now that peace was not to be. But the Barantar might yet hope for life. When Sathan had ordered them to abandon all their chattels and possessions and flee, neither Razinda nor Tagora had questioned his word, for as much as one of them might say that a goat in twilight was white only to have the other swear it was black, neither lacked for wisdom. Razinda knew that whatever manner of beast harried them—wolf or pakh or even Black Dog—it could be slain by spear and arrow, and Ummara Sathan had made sure that their reserves of both were ample. When the fleeing shotors wearied enough to be governed, then would be the time for the Barantar to arm themselves and attack.

  There was no orderly column of shotors now. The animals ran in a long ragged line as wide-spread as the wings of a soaring falcon. At its point ran the fastest animals, and at the trailing ends of the wings ran the slowest. Both Razinda and Tagora were near the center, and they darted quick glances from side to side, watching for shotors who might stumble, Barantar who might fall, for the sight of their pursuers closing in to pick off stragglers. Razinda’s mind was so filled with awaiting the moment when she might regain control of her shotor that she nearly missed the moment when something else did that which she could not do.

  Moving as if they were one beast, all the fleeing shotors began to wheel in a great circle, turning back in the direction of their pursuers. There was nothing any of their riders could do to stop them; the shotors moved as if they ran free and riderless upon the desert. Even the sight of that from which they had been fleeing from so desperately only moments before did not break the terrible spell which held them. When the shotors had turned, Razinda saw a pack of Black Dogs trotting toward them across the desert. The Black Dogs were identical in seeming to those which had attacked the Isvaieni while they were yet in the Barahileth, but this time they did not come in a pack numbering in the hundreds. There were but seven of the Dogs, and forty Barantar for each of them.

  For the first time Razinda felt a surge of hope. Their losses would be heavy. But there was a chance for life.

  “Loose your arrows!” Tagora shouted. “We know they can be killed!”

  Razinda raised her bow and fired.

  As the shotors had wheeled, their headlong flight had slowed, and now—still moving as one—they halted. For a moment Razinda was grateful, and then she realized her shotor could not be made to move again by any encouragement. Nor was a black animal as easy to see at night when there were not globes of Coldfire to illuminate the desert. Razinda did not know whether she struck what she was aiming at.

  Moving with deceptive slowness, one of the Black Dogs reached her shotor and sprang up to seize the animal at the base of its throat. The abrupt impact of the attack staggered the shotor and took Razinda by surprise. All she could think of to do was to grasp a handful of her arrows and attempt to drive them into the Black Dog’s eyes, but at the moment her shotor was savaged, the eerie spell of calm and silence that had held it was shattered, and it roared and stumbled, attempting to flee and to strike out at its attacker at one and the same time. Razinda was forced to drop her handful of arrows in order to keep from falling from her saddle into the jaws of the Black Dog. In the same moment that the first Dog yanked its bloody mouthful of flesh free, a second darted in, delivering a crushing bite to one of her shotor’s forelegs. An instant later, both Black Dogs loped away, leaving Razinda’s crippled and dying shotor to stagger a few steps before it collapsed. When it did, Razinda fell heavily from her saddle, sprawling breathlessly upon the sand, but none of the Black Dogs took any interest in her at all. With hands shaking with both fear and rage, Razinda reclaimed her arrows and her bow. She stood and shot at the enemy until her quiver was empty.

  Some of the Barantar did as she did. Some leaped down from the backs of their shotors before they were attacked and simply ran. Some lay trapped beneath their dead or dying animals. Some attempted to slay the Black Dogs with awardans—but one could not slay or even harm a beast that did not stand and fight and was far fleeter of foot than its attacker.

  Score after score of the Barantar shotors fell to the merciless brutality of a predator that did not even stop to feed, and at its end the Barantar became aware that they stood upon the desert in a lake of blood, surrounded by the bodies of dead and dying shotors. The whole slaughter had taken less time than it took for the sun to raise its whole disk from the horizon each dawn, and at the moment when the last shotor staggered and fell to the regh in its death agonies, the Black Dogs raced off into the night.

  “We shall walk together back to the place where the Thanduli still set their tents,” Razinda said boldly, though to speak boldly in this uncanny place nearly choked her. “We can reach it before the sun grows too hot. We shall think what to do then.”

  “We shall carry our injured with us,” Tagora added.

  With so many hands to help, it was quick work to free those who had been trapped beneath their mounts, and by the time they had done so, those who had fled had returned. Less than a score of the Barantar were too badly injured to walk, and it was Tagora’s word that they would be carried in slings made from their cloaks, those slings to be carried by two others, and when they tired, by two more, until they reached the camp of the Thanduli.

  “Let us begin,” Tagora said.

  “Look,” Hlingot Long-Sight said, pointing. His voice was troubled. “Someone comes. A rider.”

  Razinda peered into the distance, and at last saw what Hlingot had seen. She could not see the shotor at all, and knew then that its coat must be as dark as the hair of a black goat. ATISH’BAN, she thought in despair. Now even our own shotors become ATISH’BAN to plague us? The atish’ban-shotor had a rider, and she could see it clearly, for the rider’s robes were red.

  Eleven

  Shadow Queen’s Gambit

  TIERCEL STARTLED AWAKE with a gasp. “We stop soon,” Ciniran said comfortingly.

  “No, wait,” he said groggily. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  He started to move—to go back—and Ciniran reached out and squeezed his knee. Not hard, but hard enough to bring him further awake. He’d been awake for more than a day—most of them had, between the Shambler attack and Harrier’s stunning proclamation—and Tiercel had fallen asleep in the saddle. He realized that he was riding, that Ciniran was leading his shotor, that he wasn’t standing in the middle of the desert, with . . .

  “Where are the Barantar?” Tiercel asked, his voice becoming urgent as dream and waking sorted themselves out in his mind. He hoped it was a dream. Or maybe “wished” was the right word, because he already knew it wasn’t. Not really. “Ciniran, where are they?”

  Ciniran sighed, though Tiercel knew she didn’t mean him to notice. “With the Thanduli and the Binrazan, perhaps, for none of them is here. They have taken the freedom that Harrier gave to them and embraced folly. It is their right.”

  “You don’t understand,” Tiercel said tightly. He wanted to close his eyes—and he didn’t. He was afraid that if he did the screams that only he could hear would become too loud to ignore. “Where’s Harrier?”

  Ciniran pointed silently.

  HARRIER was at the front of the caravan. Tiercel had gotten so used to the constant soft clamor of saddle bells and the high sweet jingle of bridle bells over the past moonturns that their absence seemed
noisy. The only sounds he heard now were the faint complaints of the animals, the creaking of ropes and leather, and a few soft murmurs from nearby Isvaieni.

  “We have to go back,” Tiercel said without preamble.

  “To talk to Sathan and Phulda and Calazir again?” Harrier asked, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation. “Tyr, nothing’s changed.”

  “No! I mean, yes! It has! Sathan—the Barantar—they went south.”

  Harrier twisted himself sideways on his saddle to stare at him. “You had a vision,” he said flatly.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. I . . . Yes. No. But they went south, and now Ahairan has them—the Barantar—and we have to do something, Har, you know we do!”

  Harrier turned away and stared straight ahead, gazing out over the desert ahead. “We are,” he said at last. “We’re going north.”

  Tiercel gaped at him for several minutes, trying to make Harrier’s words mean something else. He had to swallow two or three times before his voice was steady enough to speak. “You don’t mean that. You can’t. There are almost three hundred of them!”

  “Two hundred and eighty-four Barantar after the Shambler attack—assuming a bunch of them didn’t suddenly become Kareggi since midday yesterday. And yes. I do mean that. How many people in Armethalieh? Among the Kareggi? I can’t give you the figures from the last Great Count in the City, but there are eleven hundred and twelve people in Fannas’s tents right now, and that’s just counting the ones who were Kareggi two days ago.”

  “That doesn’t—” Tiercel began. That doesn’t matter when three hundred people—two hundred and eighty-four people—are being tortured to death by a Demon. She feeds on blood and pain and death. I’m the one who told you that, remember?

  “I guess I missed the part where you told me we had a way of stopping her. Killing her. Fighting her,” Harrier’s voice was flat. “Just like you missed the part where it’s killing us just to run away from her. I wish it weren’t happening. And I hope they keep her occupied for a few days so she doesn’t send something else after us.”

  “So this is what a Knight-Mage is really like,” Tiercel said, his voice low and ugly. “Forget the Wild Magic, forget about the Balance, just make up your mind you’re going to do something and never change it no matter what happens. I guess I know why you hate doing spells so much now, don’t I? They all come with MagePrice—and you’d hate for the Gods of the Wild Magic to order you to do something that got in the way of you getting your own way.” Before Harrier could say anything, Tiercel turned his shotor and trotted it to the back of the caravan.

  A SHORT while later—long enough for Tiercel to decide he was completely awake, and nowhere near long enough for him to stop seething with rage over what Harrier was doing—the caravan stopped. Nobody dismounted—after the first time they’d almost pitched their camp on top of Sandwalkers, the Isvaieni waited now to find out if a place was safe before beginning to make camp.

  Which meant Harrier was deciding it was safe, because Bisochim wouldn’t even try to sense the creatures. He said he couldn’t.

  They’d all been doing what Harrier said, since . . . Tiercel couldn’t really remember. Since he and Shaiara and Ciniran had left Abi’Abadshar to go to Telinchechitl, Tiercel thought. And he couldn’t think of what he would have done differently if he’d had the chance to be the one making all their choices, but he knew he wouldn’t have let Sathan and the others just leave. Harrier had talked about giving all of them a “choice,” when the truth was that Sathan had been arguing with him and everybody else for as far back as Tiercel could remember. Calazir never made up his mind about anything—even Omuta was more decisive—and Phulda of the Binrazan had been so unrealistic about their situation that he’d brought the Binrazan’s looms and dyestuffs all the way across the Barahileth. Harrier was probably glad to be rid of all three of them. As for the rest of the Isvaieni, having been given and having refused one chance to abandon the attempt to reach Armethalieh, they’d be in a much worse position to complain about anything Harrier wanted to order them to do.

  And there was no doubt in Tiercel’s mind that Harrier intended to order them to do a lot of things from now on. Why shouldn’t he? Knight-Mages were soldiers, and the Isvaieni were going to become an army whether they wanted to or not. An army could only have one General.

  When the caravan finally started moving out of position to make camp, Tiercel received another unpleasant shock—or, rather, a series of them. In themselves—on some other day—none of them would have been bad or even particularly unsettling. As an indicator of how far Harrier intended to go to turn the Isvaieni into an army, they disturbed him beyond his ability even to put them into coherent thoughts.

  Always before—at least for as long as Tiercel had been traveling with them—the Isvaieni tents had been set in a haphazard fashion, with Bisochim’s nightspring and the animals’ herd-instinct enough to keep the livestock from straying. The nightspring that Bisochim would conjure would always be at one of the outer edges of the camp, the shotor-grounds at another.

  Not today.

  Today, by the time Tiercel had led his shotor to the area marked out as the stabling-field, he realized that the tents were being set in a square around almost six hectares of open space. The nightspring stood in the middle, and Bisochim was forcing grass to grow around it. Tiercel could see Harrier hurrying back and forth—obviously telling everybody exactly what he wanted them to do—and stopping every now and then to form a ball of Coldfire, as if he knew he ought to be doing that too and was just too busy.

  Tiercel didn’t want to watch anymore—and he didn’t want to hear about how he was just as useless as the people they’d left to die, either. He went back to the shotor field and concentrated on making enough balls of Mage-Light to thoroughly illuminate it.

  He should have been able to escape from Harrier’s changes there, but he couldn’t. The tents were still going up—set in nice neat rows, with spaces and rows between them, just the way Harrier had been unsuccessfully begging them to arrange them since Tiercel could remember. The organization of the tents made sense—because when the camp was attacked in the middle of the night by whatever Ahairan had come up with this time, that was not the time to be tripping over a tent-rope—but it still infuriated him. And while Tiercel was trying to ignore that, a group of Isvaieni—at least thirty—came down to the shotor ground.

  There’d always been Night Herd Guards. But to Tiercel’s surprise, more than half of the arrivals had saddles and bridles with them, and several of them went through the herd, seeking out shotors and urging them to their feet.

  “What’s going on?” Tiercel asked, walking up to one of the Isvaieni coaxing a shotor to its feet. It was someone he recognized: Kuram of the Tunag tribe. Kuram had lost his right hand and most of his forearm when the Black Dogs attacked. Tiercel remembered how shocked he’d been when Ciniran had said, with perfect seriousness, that in another time than this, Kuram would have laid his bones upon the sand if he could not earn his place among the Tunag after such an injury.

  “The Wildmage has spoken: we are to ride through the night to watch for the enemy,” Kuram said. He lifted a small cylinder on a leather cord that hung about his throat. “Few can hear this, but I will sound it at need. And soon whistles will be crafted that all can hear.”

  “I suppose that was Harrier’s idea too?” Tiercel said bitterly. He had no doubt at all which “Wildmage” it was who had spoken.

  Kuram looked surprised at his anger. “No, Tiercel. Ciniran of the Nalzindar is one who can hear the hunting-whistle. It was her word that others should be made, and a good one.”

  At last the shotor, grunting, condescended to rise, and Tiercel followed Kuram as he led her to the edge of the field. Tiercel realized, looking around, that everyone here—the herd guards, and the men and women who were saddling shotors and preparing to ride—were all among the permanently injured. Biara was missing an eye and three fingers from her left hand. Zin
had lost both legs and got around on crutches made from parts of a tentpole. Jekin had lost his entire arm. Aduni most of one leg. Through the power of the Dragonbond, Bisochim could Heal nearly any injury in ways that were little short of miraculous, but what was gone was gone forever.

  “You don’t have to be out there all night?” Tiercel asked, still trying to come to terms with the idea that Harrier was making their injured do this dangerous work on top of a long hard day of riding.

  “A handspan or two, then off to our beds.” Kuram grinned at him and swung himself into the saddle, looping the rein over his stump and taking the shotor-goad into his hand. “If you don’t step lively, Zin, you lazy half-man, I’ll be back and in bed with your wife before you are!”

  Zin made a rude gesture toward Kuram and flung his crutches away, setting himself down with practiced ease in his shotor’s saddle and drawing up the shortened hem of his robe so that he could tuck the stump of his leg through the leather loop sewn to the forward edge of his saddle. Once his seat was secure, he gathered up reins and goad and clucked to his shotor until it rose to its feet. “Half of a good man is better than all of a poor one!” he jeered toward Kuram’s retreating back. “Balbat knows that if you don’t!”

  The other sentries were already riding out two by two. In only a few moments, all of them were gone. Tiercel bent down and picked up the crutches that Zin had dropped. Biara stepped forward, holding out her hand. “I will keep them for him until he comes back,” she said. “You should seek your bed, Tiercel. Morning will come too soon.”