The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  “Maybe,” Harrier said absently, his mind already elsewhere. “Maybe several someones. I’m sure he can get more than one set of volunteers.”

  “Don’t do it,” Tiercel said quietly. “It won’t work. You know it won’t work. Even if it could work—how can anyone possibly make it even as far as Akazidas’Iteru with only what they can carry? You know you said it was probably at least two moonturns, even three, in a straight line to get there. You know Bisochim said he’d probably destroyed all the other wells and oases in the Isvai and even if he didn’t they can’t find them anyway. You know that a shotor has to drink at least twice a moonturn—and if it drinks that rarely, it drinks more than fifty gallons at a time. You know they’ll never—”

  “Stop telling me what I know,” Harrier said brusquely. “I know it.”

  “I know,” Tiercel said. “But . . . look. I’ve been thinking. I didn’t want to bring it up in front of everybody—and I’d need to talk to Saravasse probably to work out the details and see if it was something she was all right with before I asked him about it—but . . . couldn’t Bisochim do some kind of spell to reach another Wildmage directly? He cast a spell all the way to Sentarshadeen before, and there were some spells like that in First Magistrate Cilarnen’s books—to Speak over a distance as well as to See over a distance. I know he can’t reach the Veiled Lands directly, because of Pelashia’s Veil—but he could do something to—”

  “Keep your voice down,” Harrier said urgently, his own voice suddenly dropping to a bare murmur.

  Tiercel broke off and stared at him, blinking in confusion. Harrier took his arm and led him as far away from the tents as would still be safe—and wouldn’t arouse curiosity.

  “Yes,” Harrier said, his voice still so quiet Tiercel had to lean in close to hear him at all. “Bisochim probably could do some kind of spell designed to get a message to somebody in the north. He spent most of a year trying to kill us from Telinchechitl, and it wasn’t all by summoning up whatever he summoned up and sending it to kill us. And if he tries, I’m guessing that Ahairan will not only notice, but stop it.”

  “She might stop what we’re doing at any time anyway,” Tiercel pointed out. “And she might not notice—or stop it. Sending a message isn’t any different than going to Armethalieh ourselves. It’s just faster, Har. Maybe even better. He could warn every single Wildmage in the north at the same time.”

  “Maybe he could. That would be good. I’m sure there are some. We don’t know how many. Say there are a thousand. Say ten percent get the message in some way they understand. That’s a hundred. Say ten percent of them aren’t paying MagePrices that keep them from going to Vairindiel Elvenqueen with the message immediately. That’s ten. And say that ten percent of them aren’t killed on the journey by Ahairan’s creatures. That’s—”

  “One. Yes. I’m still better at Maths than you are. But we only need one person to get the message through to Queen Vairindiel,” Tiercel said.

  “Really?” Harrier answered. “How do we know it was received in full and understood completely? But—all right—say it was. It still takes that single Wildmage anywhere from one to six Moonturns to get to the Veiled Lands—even if you assume that all they need to do is get to the Caves of Imrathalion and use the MageDoor there. Meanwhile, say that Ahairan also knows it was sent.”

  “All right,” Tiercel agreed cautiously.

  “Bisochim sending that message—trying, succeeding—will probably make Ahairan take him seriously enough that she comes here and takes him and Saravasse prisoner. Then she’ll kill the rest of us.”

  “No,” Tiercel blurted out before he could stop himself. “She wants you and me alive too.” He stared at Harrier, his mind filled with a collection of conflicting shocks. Realizing that he—still—knew more about Ahairan and her plans than he suspected. Realizing that Harrier had thought of this idea already—maybe sennights ago—and had ruled it out so completely he hadn’t even discussed it with anyone. Realizing that . . .

  “You don’t think we’re getting out of . . . You . . . You’ve been telling everyone for moonturns that we have to warn Armethalieh, that it’s so important that hundreds and hundreds of people have died for it. You’ve kept promising that we’re going to—that at least some of us are going to—get there and warn them. But you’re throwing away the best chance of actually warning them. You lied to everyone.”

  “I said to keep your voice down,” Harrier hissed. “We do have to warn Armethalieh—or warn someone. I didn’t lie to anybody,” he added, shaking his head in denial. “Everything I’ve said has been true—you know that. What we’re doing right now is still our best chance, and I have no intention of throwing it away. If Bisochim tries what you suggest—if Ahairan knows—she’ll see it as an attack. If we attack her, she’ll attack us. Even if the message you want him to send gets out, she has moonturns to make her own plans—hiding, Tainting one of us, even going to Armethalieh and taking ship for the Selken Isles.”

  “More Knight-Mage wisdom,” Tiercel said bitterly. Despite his sense of betrayal, he was keeping his voice as low as Harrier’s.

  “If you call it ‘Knight-Mage wisdom’ to play for time and hope somebody figures out what having Goblins and Kraken and all the rest of it reappearing all over the place really means,” Harrier answered. “If you do: yes. It’s our best hope: keep her here and keep her attention on us for as long as possible. You remember what—oh, what was his name? Innkeeper back on the War Road east of Armethalieh—said.”

  “At the Three Trees? Master Artylas,” Tiercel supplied automatically.

  “Right,” Harrier said. “He said then that—fourteen, fifteen moonturns ago now?—they’d already been seeing Darkspawn incursions for half a year and more. I’m betting—hoping—that they’ve gotten worse since. Bad enough that somebody else is going to notice. I know that the Elves had this crackbrained idea that not telling you what was going on would let you fix things, Tyr. Maybe it did. Maybe you did your part when you made sure that Bisochim wouldn’t go along with anything Ahairan came up with.”

  “I don’t think that’s actually what Jermayan was thinking of,” Tiercel said slowly.

  “Well, Elves don’t have to be right all the time,” Harrier said. “So stop blaming yourself for all of this.”

  “Say I don’t,” Tiercel said, turning Harrier’s own argument back on him. “How does that make what you’re doing now right?”

  “All right. I don’t think we’ll get to Armethalieh. We could. It’s not impossible. I don’t even think we’ll get to Akazidas’Iteru, though, if you want the real truth. But if I told everyone I didn’t think we could, that we’d all die right here in the Isvai, that we didn’t have a chance of warning anybody, what do you think would happen?” Harrier’s voice was quietly, coldly angry, but the anger was turned inward, and the combination of rage and despair and panic made Tiercel feel all of them twice as sharply because he knew that Harrier couldn’t let himself feel any of them. Why did we have to grow up so fast? he thought. He should be at University right now. Harrier should be on the docks.

  “They’d panic,” Tiercel admitted reluctantly.

  “And head off to do Light knows what, because why would they stay here with us when Ahairan is attacking us constantly? And then they’d die right now, immediately, just like the Binrazan and the Barantar and the Thanduli died,” Harrier finished.

  There wasn’t much more to be said after that. “I’m tired,” Tiercel said. “I’m going back.” They were both right—at least partly—and whether they followed Harrier’s plan or Tiercel’s, it was almost certain that everyone was going to die either way, and “fast” or “slow” didn’t really matter a lot. What it all came down to was whether or not you believed that any spell-message Bisochim tried to send would get through.

  Say it was. It still takes that single Wildmage anywhere from one to six Moonturns to get to the Veiled Lands . . . And Tiercel wasn’t completely sure which side of the argument he wa
s on any longer.

  “I’M hoping when we reach Sapthiruk we’ll find out that we can fortify it enough so it can be a permanent camp.”

  Tiercel had never managed to figure out how Harrier could be cheerful and alert in the mornings even before they’d been being hunted by a Demon. And he could understand Harrier being alert now. The cheerful—whether it was actual or just putting up a good front—was just a little disturbing. Especially when you added in the fact that Harrier apparently wanted to have intelligent conversations before the sun was up.

  “Shamblers can come through spell-shields,” Tiercel said.

  The morning routine was a lot brisker now that breakfast consisted of a liter or so of heavily-salted dilute broth, served cold. They’d started stewing desert grass along with it a few days ago, and the broth had a bitter greenish flavor now, but at least it was different. And without a morning fire to light and tend, the tents were struck and everyone’s possessions ready to load in little more than an hour. After the time they’d been attacked by Shamblers at dawn, half the camp stood sentry duty now—a ring of mounted Isvaieni around the perimeter—while the other half struck the tents, loaded the pack animals, and dug out the buried roots around the nightspring at the center of the camp and packed them between layers of wet sand in carrying baskets. By now it was all a familiar routine.

  “Yeah, but they can’t come through walls,” Harrier answered, just as if he’d been thinking about this for a while. “Bisochim built walls out of sand once. He can do it again. I don’t know. We’ll see.” He and Tiercel left the folding of the tent—a complex process—to the Nalzindar and to Bisochim while the two of them took care of the simpler tasks of folding and rolling the blankets and mats and carpets for loading.

  Tiercel got to his feet with an armful of mats and walked over to the waiting shotor. Last night Harrier had said that he expected all of them to die here in the Isvai. This morning he was talking about building a permanent fort at Sapthiruk Oasis. These days so many of Harrier’s answers ended in “maybe” and “I don’t know” and “we’ll see,” and Tiercel wasn’t sure which was worse: thinking that Harrier’s assessment of the situation was right—or thinking that his plans to defend all of them were built upon a foundation of sand.

  Twelve

  The Quick and the Dead

  GOING TO SAPTHIRUK Oasis instead of striking straight north through the spine of the Middle Desert wasn’t the most direct route to Akazidas’Iteru, but everyone agreed that nothing had ever grown in most of the Middle Desert even before Ahairan, and while by now they were carrying enough salvaged plants with them that they could plant their own meadow wherever they went, if nothing had ever grown there before, there was no guarantee that even Wildmagery could make something grow there now. Harrier supposed it was a pretty good joke that he was now taking a more obsessive interest in making things grow than even Lady Rolfort. Every summer she and his Ma . . .

  No.

  Harrier wouldn’t think about Ma, or home, or any of those things. Or if he had to, at least he’d be able to remember having once pulled Ma’s flowers for Bellari and Branyar because they’d wanted them and were afraid of the thorns, and not of having teased them or refused. And Ma had howled like a boiled cat when she’d seen the damned rosebush—how was he supposed to know they were something special; it wasn’t like he paid attention to the Dark-damned things—and then about the time Ma was getting around to saying she was going to have Da ship him off to the Selken Isles, the twins came tromping into the kitchen demanding Ma put the flowers in their hair. So he hadn’t been shipped off to the Selken Isles after all.

  Harrier hated thinking about a home he’d never see again. Whenever he did, what he ended up thinking about was how likely it was that it was going to be destroyed. And the worst wouldn’t be if he never knew. The worst would be if he did. The worst would be if he found himself standing face-to-face with Ahairan on his family’s doorstep in Grindon Road, and she said to him: Do just one thing for me, Harrier Gillain, and I won’t go inside . . .

  That was why he was willing to keep going, day after day, taking this second-best chance of victory, doing everything he could think of to keep Ahairan’s attention focused on them—keeping her here—for as long as possible. The time Ahairan was using up wearing them down was time for Saravasse to heal (not to be able to fly again—he knew that her wing regrowing on its own would probably take years—but just to heal enough so that she might have the stamina—if the worst happened—to make the run north). Time for one of the Wildmages somewhere in the Nine Cities to notice what was going on. Time for one of the Elven Mages to realize Ahairan was already loose. Time for another Knight-Mage to appear, or another High Mage to be summoned by the Light. Even time for them to figure out some way to stop Ahairan themselves, although Harrier wasn’t counting on that. Bisochim had tried and failed, and if a Dragonbond Mage couldn’t do it . . . well, it wasn’t likely that a Knight-Mage who wasn’t all that good at spells in the first place and a High Mage who couldn’t really cast spells at all would have any better luck.

  So they were playing a game of rat-and-dog, and trying to stay out of the dog’s jaws while keeping her attention. To keep Ahairan’s attention, they had to stay alive—at least some of them did, Harrier corrected himself morbidly. And Tiercel was right—any volunteers Zanattar could get couldn’t possibly carry enough water for a journey north. It didn’t matter if the volunteers were the crazy ones that even the other Isvaieni sort of avoided—sending people off into the desert to do nothing but die would just depress everybody else. The thought made Harrier want to laugh. How could anyone be more miserable than this? The only reason he could imagine for the tribes not having simply left was that he’d told them what had happened to the Barantar and the Binrazan and the Thanduli, and they’d seen proof for themselves when their bodies had come after them as Shamblers.

  But everyone was exhausted. Near starvation. They were all looking forward to reaching Sapthiruk and just being able to stop, if only for a few days. Harrier hoped more than he could say that the apples they were carrying could be turned into apple trees—not to mention the limuns, naranjes, and figs. They’d slaughter the last of the sheep and goats there, he thought. They’d get a decent meal out of it, and they’d travel faster without having to chase goats all over the desert. They could winnow the shotors too. Let Saravasse gorge herself stupid on the smelly beasts, the poor thing certainly deserved it.

  Harrier suddenly realized he was thinking of Sapthiruk as if none of them would be moving on from there. He didn’t want to imagine what was making him think that, but if they had to make their last stand against Ahairan at Sapthiruk Oasis, at least they could do it from inside a damned big walled fort—and if any of the seeds they had would sprout into trees, they could make new arrows.

  And if it looked as if they were going to be overrun, he’d give Shaiara his swords, let Zanattar slip a garrote around his neck, and try to Heal Saravasse by himself. Or they could go with Tiercel’s plan and have Bisochim try to send a spell message to anyone who could hear it.

  He wasn’t willing to try that except as a last resort.

  Harrier wondered just when Tiercel would realize what Harrier was thinking about these days. Harrier hadn’t discussed his strategy with Tiercel, and he hadn’t discussed it with Bisochim. It was bad enough for him to suspect that Bisochim was going crazy and taking Saravasse with him—it meant that not only couldn’t Harrier trust Bisochim (not because he was Tainted, but because he was going mad), it meant Harrier couldn’t trust Saravasse either, because they had a whole desert’s worth of proof that Saravasse had to do what Bisochim wanted her to do no matter whether she wanted to do it or not. Harrier was sorry for Saravasse, but he couldn’t work up a lot of sympathy for Bisochim—everybody knew better than to mess with Demons. But Tiercel was Harrier’s friend, and Harrier did care about Tiercel. And he was afraid that Tiercel was going just as crazy as Bisochim was. Because of that, he couldn’t
trust any of Tiercel’s opinions not to be colored by what Ahairan wanted, and he wasn’t even really sure that Ahairan couldn’t somehow collect information from Tiercel’s mind without revealing her presence.

  And when Tiercel figured out that was what Harrier was actually thinking . . . Harrier winced inwardly.

  Of course, there was always the other possibility. If he thought that everybody was going crazy but him, that might be the only proof he needed that he was the only one actually going crazy.

  LATE afternoon was the worst time of day for visibility. The sun was heading toward the horizon, it was the last gasp of heat before the plunge into the cold of night, and at the moment the convoy was actually bearing slightly west, which made conditions even worse.

  “What kind of self-respecting Spirit of Shadow attacks people with bugs smaller than my thumbnail?” Harrier muttered crossly, pulling the top of his chadar further forward in hopes it would cut more of the sun-glare.

  Midday camp had been disrupted by an attack of atish’ban-barghusi—swarms of little black hopping biting vermin coming out of nowhere—the same ones they’d all hated so much in the Barahileth and not gotten to like any better since. Bisochim had swept the camp with magic to kill them, Tiercel had spent hours puking from having a Wild Magic spell cast directly on him, and everyone else had spent almost as long trying to find all the little dead bodies before they rotted.

  “The same one that’s been doing it for the last three moonturns,” Tiercel snapped. “Get used to it.”

  “Oh, I—” Harrier began.

  “Someone comes!” Saravasse announced. “From the north!”

  Shotor saddles didn’t have stirrups you could stand in, but by now Harrier had developed both the habit and the knack of kneeling on his saddle to gain a moment’s extra height to inspect something in the distance. The instant he signaled his shotor to stop, Shaiara sounded her signal whistle, and Harrier heard the shrill ululation of bone signal whistles traveling back all the way up the caravan.