The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  The Shamblers staggered backward, crashing into each other as the press of shotor bodies shoved them back and aside. Some stayed on their feet. Some fell. None of the Shamblers paid any attention to each other at all—their entire attention was fixed on the Isvaieni. Harrier felt as much as saw the ripple of intention pass through the entire mass of Shamblers, as if all the bodies shared one mind: the army ceased its mechanical forward movement to turn on them, and the rearward groups began moving out and to each side in an agonizingly slow flanking maneuver.

  Fire. Harrier reached out, setting the Shamblers outside their immediate vicinity aflame. Desert-dry fabric kindled quickly, and in the close-packed ranks the flames spread quickly from one body to the next, but there was no real chance that the fresh dead would burn away to ash, and nothing short of that would stop them. As the thin blackish smoke coiled up, whipping toward the northern horizon, Harrier realized he’d done it, not for the nonexistent advantage it would give them, but to provide him with an accurate gauge of the wind. It was stronger now than it had been even a few minutes ago.

  Their charge had gotten them through two ranks of Shamblers, and only speed would keep them from being encircled. The shotors were terrified, and only brutality kept them moving forward and outward, widening the wedge of their charge and allowing more Isvaieni to ride into the space thus opened.

  “They aren’t Tainted! We have to get them out!” he shouted to the others.

  The battle they were fighting was eerily silent. The Isvaieni were the only ones making noise, shouting and whooping and calling out to each other. There wasn’t even the clash of steel on steel, because the Shamblers didn’t parry any attacks. All they did was try to drag the riders on the outer edges of the wedge off their shotors. Hack off a head, and the body kept attacking. The only things that worked were hacking off a hand, or an arm, or knocking the Shambler off its feet. That didn’t kill or even harm it, but the others would walk right over it trying to get at them.

  Harrier saw one of the Young Hunters riding ahead of him—he thought her name was Sauta—leap down from her saddle directly into a knot of Shamblers. He saw her face as she launched her attack and wished he hadn’t. She was laughing—laughing as she kicked and shoved the Shamblers—not even trying to kill them, just trying to knock down as many as she could. Her shotor, freed of her control, tried to flee through a gap in the milling crowd of bodies. It staggered and stumbled, and when it did, Shamblers swarmed over it like kintibaz over a dropped honeycake. The shotor screamed as it died. Sauta didn’t. Her sacrifice gained them a few more precious yards of distance.

  Sauta wasn’t their first casualty, only the latest. Behind them, the Shamblers were trying to push through their line to get into the center of it. A couple of them—Harrier hoped it was only accident, and not that the things could actually learn something—had attacked the shotors instead of their riders, and the injured animals had gone down. Maybe the riders could’ve saved themselves if they’d tried—escaped to the center of the Isvaieni formation, ridden double with someone else—Harrier didn’t know. He hadn’t been there. He only knew they’d died. The worst of this was that there was no possibility the Isvaieni could kill all the Shamblers, and they couldn’t even frighten them. You might as well try to frighten a hurricane—or a Sandwind.

  Abruptly the direction of the wind changed, blowing foul-smelling smoke back over the mounted Isvaieni. Not good, Harrier thought automatically, squinting and trying not to cough. If the wind was changing direction like this, it meant the Sandwind was coming—soon.

  “Hamazan—left!” Even in the moment Harrier shouted the warning, it was too late. Hamazan was blinded by a gust of smoke for the critical moment that allowed a Shambler in City Guard uniform to reach him. It thrust upward with its spear into Hamazan’s stomach and used the weapon to drag him from his shotor’s back.

  Hemmed in by Shamblers and maddened by the smell of blood, Hamazan’s shotor lunged forward, spitting and snapping at everything in its path, bawling in terror. With Hamazan dead there wasn’t anyone between Harrier and the Shamblers. He swung his awardan down mechanically—

  And Hamazan’s shotor broke through the last rank of bodies between Harrier and the hostages.

  Harrier’s shotor, seeing a place that wasn’t filled with monsters, bolted forward eagerly. The prisoners were being held in a large open space—at least sixty feet square—surrounded by Shamblers. Right now Harrier couldn’t tell anything about them except that they were alive. Their clothes were in rags. Where he could see skin, it was sunburnt and cracked, even bleeding. “Come on!” he shouted, as much to the people behind him as to the people ahead.

  The people he’d come to rescue were lying on the ground as if they’d dropped in their tracks the moment the Shamblers had stopped moving forward—and the wind was still rising. “Damn it, come on, damn it—move!” Harrier shouted again. None of them did—but at least the Shamblers didn’t either. It was as if this square of space was somehow magic (of a different kind) and the creatures wouldn’t enter it. Harrier wasn’t sure he was confident enough of that to dismount and test his theory unless he absolutely had to: Hamazan’s shotor had run at the opposite wall of Shamblers in its panic, and knocked enough of them down to get through it before it had gotten jammed among the unmoving dead. He could hear it screaming now.

  The Isvaieni Young Hunters were following him into the space. There were twenty-seven left out of the original fifty, not as bad in terms of losses as Harrier had feared—the only trouble was, all of them had followed him. When the last rider came through the opening in the Shambler ranks, the bodies closed up behind her, leaving them . . . trapped in the middle of the Shambler army, with a Sandwind about to kill all of them. Harrier would figure out who to complain to about that later. If there was a later.

  “All right! We need to get these people mounted, then we need to get out of here!” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the rising wind. He waited until one of the other Isvaieni—Katyan? Kandyan?—grabbed his shotor’s lead rope, then slid down from the saddle—praying that he was right about this space being one that the Shamblers wouldn’t enter for any reason—and hurried over to the nearest of the captives. When he touched her, she howled in a cracked high voice and tried to scuttle away on all fours, hiding her head in her arms. At least he’d been right about this being a safe zone—but it wouldn’t be safe the moment the Sandwind hit.

  “Look!” Harrier shouted. “We’re here to rescue you and take you away from the Shamblers, but we have to do it fast or else we’re all going to die right here! So come on! Now!”

  He managed to haul the woman to her feet—she was filthy and hideously sunburned and covered in scabs—and handed her up to the nearest mounted Isvaieni. She didn’t struggle, but she didn’t shut up, either. Two of the other Young Hunters had also dismounted, and among the three of them, they handed the eight refugees up to others who were still mounted. Most of the refugees were moaning or whimpering and Harrier wanted to feel sorry for them but there just wasn’t time right now.

  “Riders carrying double in the middle! Everyone else, protect them! Let’s go!” Harrier hauled himself into his shotor’s saddle without even trying to get his mount to kneel, thinking irritably that this had been supposed to be the easy part—an open line of retreat being held for them by part of the attack wedge and nothing to do but point the shotors at it and let them run. It was just too bad that nobody but him had remembered that part of the plan. There was fine sand in the wind now. He pulled his chadar forward to cover his nose and mouth.

  They’d lost twenty-three Isvaieni coming in, at least one by something close to suicide. They’d all have died trying to get out—because they were starting from a stand, because the Shamblers were doing their sluggish best to mass directly in front of them, except for one thing: on the way out, the shotors could see they were heading through the Shamblers into the open desert, and they’d do nearly anything to reach it.

&nb
sp; Escape wasn’t as easy as just riding out while the shotors trampled everything in their paths. But again and again, Harrier saw the Shamblers just ignore the shotors in order to attack the Isvaieni, as if they’d been given some overriding command to do that. Or . . . no. He’d seen them kill shotors. It was as if they’d been given some kind of checklist, and if there were any people available, they had to try to kill them first. It was what saved them.

  Most of them.

  The sky had begun to turn the strange polished-brass color that meant the Sandwind was about to strike. It made the twilight even darker. They lost eight more Isvaieni on their retreat. (Thirty-one, Harrier’s mind supplied. Thirty-one dead to rescue eight.) But it didn’t matter what the Shamblers did short of actually killing one of them, the shotors absolutely refused to stop.

  Harrier was in the lead when they finally broke through. When his shotor saw the open desert ahead of it—with no Shambler between it and freedom—it broke into a run. He wanted to stop, slow it, turn, wait for the others. He would have had more success reasoning with the oncoming Sandwind. His shotor stretched out its neck and fled across the desert, and behind it, the nineteen survivors of the original fifty Young Hunters and the eight wounded they carried followed.

  The riders were all strung out in a long column across the desert now. They reached the place where Shaiara and Zanattar and the others waited with the shotors. There was no chance of stopping. Harrier concentrated on not falling off. As he and the others passed them, Shaiara and the rest turned to follow. The animals carrying double burdens were lagging behind those with only their rider’s weight to carry, the ones that had been waiting with Shaiara and Zanattar were behind them. Harrier just hoped the poor stupid terrified beasts would run themselves out before they ran themselves to death. He passed Bisochim and Saravasse.

  “Go!” he shouted, knowing that Saravasse would hear him even if Bisochim didn’t. From the look of the sky right now, it didn’t matter whether he told Bisochim to release the Sandwind or not—it was about to break free. He just hoped the Sandwind would stay where Bisochim told it to.

  Up ahead, Harrier saw the outriders at the back of the caravan. His shotor swept past them, laboring now as it fled along the side of the slowly-moving column. Their line of march was more than four miles long, and his shotor covered every foot of it at the same mad gallop.

  It passed the head of the column and kept running. He saw Tiercel’s head turn toward him in surprise, and sensed Tiercel urging his shotor to follow, but he knew that Tiercel wouldn’t be able to catch them. But now—at last—when Harrier tapped its shoulder to signal it to slow, his shotor finally did, staggering in an exhausted ungainly fashion from a gallop into an unsteady walk in a matter of paces. It walked on for another few minutes—as if it couldn’t believe it was still alive—and then sank to its knees with a reproachful moan.

  “Yeah,” Harrier said. “I think we’re stopping here for the night.”

  A few moments later, Tiercel’s shotor trotted up beside him. “Are you—Did you—Did they—Are—”

  Harrier was just dismounting. He straightened, trying to ease cramped muscles. Now that the battle was over, everything seemed too loud and too quiet at the same time.

  “We lost thirty-one people,” Harrier said, stopping Tiercel before he could say anything more. “But we rescued the living. Get down. I need your shotor.”

  “You aren’t going somewhere, are you?” Tiercel asked, managing to sound shocked.

  Harrier groaned, making insistent circling motions with his hand. Down, down. Tiercel sighed in aggravation and signaled to his shotor to kneel.

  “I’m not,” Harrier said, walking over to take the lead-rope and the goad from Tiercel. “And that poor thing really isn’t. But if we’re stopping here for the night—and we are—I have to ride over the area to make sure we aren’t making camp on top of a Sandwalker burrow.”

  “Can’t—” Tiercel began, and stopped. Can’t somebody else do that?

  Unfortunately, the answer to that was “no.” Harrier didn’t know if sensing Tainted creatures was a specifically Knight-Magely Gift, or if there was some other reason Bisochim couldn’t do it, or if he could do it and just wouldn’t. At least it was useful (unlike a lot of things that Knight-Magery did), even though it was maddeningly inconsistent. Why could he sense Sandwalkers but not Goblins, for example, and why were some of Ahairan’s creatures Tainted, but not others, like the Black Dogs? It was a question that only Ahairan—maybe—could answer. And Harrier really didn’t intend to ask her.

  He swung himself into the saddle of Tiercel’s shotor with a heartfelt groan and tapped it on the shoulder. As it lurched to its feet, he glanced back the way he’d come. Behind him, the desert was clear. All the shotors had reached the caravan. Beyond the caravan—where the Shambler army had been—there was nothing but a black wall of churning sand.

  FOR about a thousand hectares in front of the caravan the desert was clear of Sandwalkers and Sandwalker burrows, and Harrier didn’t feel the nagging sense of unease that would warn him that stopping here was a bad idea. That was good, because Harrier didn’t think any of the twenty shotors that had made it back alive could be moved from where they’d laid down. Once he gave the okay, the Isvaieni went about the business of setting up the camp with quiet efficiency. Bisochim wouldn’t be on hand to cast the spells to create the nightspring or make the grass grow until he’d finished with the evening’s Sandwinds. Harrier didn’t think that they’d get attacked by a second group of Shamblers tonight, but the army Bisochim was in the process of destroying (the way he killed all the Wildmages in the Isvai, Harrier remembered, and winced) could have been a feint on Ahairan’s part. It would be better to follow their usual routine and just have him scrub the desert around the camp the way he usually did, if he could.

  Harrier walked through the encampment as it was being set up until he found a few people he could trust to be sensible about things and explained that he wanted the people they’d rescued fed, clothed, sheltered, tended—and Healed as soon as possible. (Though only Bisochim could do that—at least without spell-price and spell-cost and MagePrice—Harrier’s pronouncements would ensure that Bisochim was told that there were people who required his spells.) He did his best to impress upon Kisrah and Marnet and Sumadar that the newcomers were to be treated as well as if they were Isvaieni—even if they weren’t—because the desertfolk were perfectly capable of rescuing people and then just letting them lie on the sand as far as Harrier could tell.

  After that, Harrier took one of the spare saddles and went out beyond the last row of tents, setting it down and sitting on it to stare out into the desert. He knew he should go to see the people they’d rescued—talk to them, reassure them. But he couldn’t do it yet. Maybe Tiercel would.

  Behind him, the noise of evening camp blended into a familiar mush of sound: the hammering of tent-pegs, the thrumming sound of a plucked tent-rope, the complaints of sheep and goats and shotors. Beyond that he heard—or imagined—the thin sound of the wind. The sky was darker than usual tonight—the sun had reached the horizon while he wasn’t paying attention—and after a moment he realized why. Absently, he began making globes of Coldfire, setting them free to drift over the camp. A year ago you couldn’t imagine doing this, Harrier thought vaguely, watching the glowing azure mist gather in his palms. He still didn’t know how he did it. He just . . . did it.

  He’d been sitting there for a bit over half an hour when Zanattar joined him. For a long time Zanattar stood beside him in silence, watching the globes of Coldfire rise up from Harrier’s hands.

  “I know that you believe that our war against the Border Cities was wrong,” Zanattar said at last.

  “It was,” Harrier said curtly.

  “We did not know that then,” Zanattar answered.

  “You killed—” Harrier forced himself to stop. “Did you have a reason for mentioning this now?” he said after a pause.

  “This only: it
was a wrongful war, and our feet were set upon its path by a Demon’s treachery. This much you know. Know this as well: until that day, never had I killed a man, nor entered into battle where any man might kill me. I do not tell you this to seek your sympathy nor your forgiveness—”

  “Good,” Harrier said.

  “—but only to say that I know what it is to ride into battle and come forth again. And to lead others into battle, and have them remain behind. It is a hard thing, to feel that gladness in your heart, knowing that your joy arises from the fact that you yet live, and feeling as if you rejoice over the death of your comrades as well.”

  “They weren’t my ‘comrades,’ Zanattar,” Harrier answered harshly. “They were people I asked you to choose so they could go and die. And you did. And they did.”

  “But it was you who led them, Harrier,” Zanattar said. “It was you who held the hope within your heart that all whom you led forth would ride back with you again. Do you think that I never chose men and women to die? I did: many times. Some knew it. Some did not. Those who died today gained the death they most wished to embrace, and the ease of knowing that their bodies would not survive to trouble us.”

  Another globe of Coldfire rose up into the sky. “Tell me why that’s supposed to make me feel better,” Harrier said.

  “I do not say that it does,” Zanattar answered simply. “Yet you know what I know as well: those who died today have long sought death, though they knew it not. I have done much harm in this past wheel of the seasons, seeking only to do good. Yet that which grieves me most is the injury I have done to those who live on. Once such disordered spirits as walk among my Young Hunters were rare. Sometimes the Blue Robes could Heal it. Sometimes such a one would choose, instead, to lay their bones upon the sand, for the good of all.”