The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  “Where are you going?” Eugens asked. He looked as brightly-awake as Harrier did.

  “For a walk,” Harrier said, answering Eugens. “You can earn your keep until we get back by teaching this useless ball of fluff manners, Gens.”

  Eugens smiled faintly. The “useless ball of fluff” was already larger than many full-grown dogs Tiercel knew, even if it was still mostly legs. But he made encouraging noises, and the ikulas puppy bounded over to him, panting happily.

  SOON enough Tiercel and Harrier were dressed and walking through the camp. Every tent was stirring to life, and Tiercel could see the blue glow of Coldfire lanterns, the warm red glow of banked coals being kindled to life. He could hear the creak of tent-ropes, smell wood-smoke and goats, hear the clink and rattle of copper water-cans as they were carried down to the oasis to be filled. These were all things that had grown familiar over sennights and moonturns. Though it was still dark, the stars overhead were growing pale with the approach of dawn.

  Tiercel was surprised to find that Harrier was leading them toward the northern gateway. They passed the inner set of guards (there to turn back inquisitive livestock), walked down the long lightless tunnel, then out past the outer set of guards (there to give warning of whatever might be out there, since Saravasse couldn’t watch in every direction at once). “Don’t stay out too long, boys,” Saravasse called down from her perch atop the wall.

  “I promise we’ll be back for breakfast, Auntie,” Harrier called back.

  Outside the walls there was more light. The smooth pale sand swept off into the distance. Harrier strode along as if he had a definite destination in mind, giving Tiercel the impression that he was intent on walking all the way to Armethalieh—or maybe Telinchechitl.

  “That way’s east, so this way’s north,” Harrier said without looking at him. “You really are hopeless outside a city, Tyr.”

  “I knew that. I know which is the north gate and which is the east one,” Tiercel answered, trying not to be annoyed. “I’m just wondering what we do if something attacks us out here, that’s all.”

  “Throw up our hands, scream, and run, what do you think?” Harrier answered good-naturedly. “I just wanted to be able to talk to you without too many people listening.”

  “And you thought that this was the answer?” Tiercel said in disbelief.

  Harrier made a rude noise. “Yes: because they’ll know we’re talking, but they won’t know about what, and right now I’ll settle for that. You know that if—just suppose—I believed that everything you told me yesterday was Vouched-at-the-Shrine-of-the-Eternal-Light-true it couldn’t be just you—or you and me—going. We’d all have to go. Every one of us.”

  “I know,” Tiercel said. He wasn’t surprised that Harrier’d come to the same conclusions he had.

  “And the—” Harrier began.

  Suddenly there was a rumbling sound in the distance and the ground beneath their feet shook. Before Tiercel could even begin to frame the question—What is it what is it what—Harrier grabbed him by the arm and took off at a dead run, dragging Tiercel behind him. The ground shook again as they were running, but by then Tiercel had gotten his feet under him and was managing to keep up with Harrier without any prompting.

  They ran back through the North Gate passage without slowing down, their feet skidding on the sand that blew in over the smooth stone and collected there despite everyone’s constant sweeping. Inside the walls, the ikulas were barking madly and racing in circles, and the goats had scattered in every direction. Harrier barely dodged one as he came through the inner archway; Tiercel wasn’t so lucky, and the goat butted him so hard he sat down. Tiercel relieved his feelings by aiming an exasperated swat at the creature, but it bounded out of the way, glaring at him reproachfully and blaating as if this whole thing his fault.

  The ground shook once more—not as violently as it had the last two times, but the shaking went on longer. Harrier was spinning out globes of Coldfire because there still wasn’t much light.

  “What was that?” Saravasse demanded, from the wall above their heads.

  “The ground shook,” Tiercel said unnecessarily as he got to his feet.

  “It doesn’t do that in the desert,” Harrier said in exasperation. “Yeah, well, that’s what you said the last time it did this, and it was doing it that time too,” Tiercel said waspishly.

  “Clear as mud,” Harrier muttered. “The last time it did this, Bisochim was making a lake. Bisochim’s here, and he isn’t making a lake. Saravasse, can you see anything?”

  “I am a creature of magic, yes, but, as you may trouble yourself to recall, Harrier, I am no Mage,” Saravasse snapped. “What I see is a great deal of empty desert for hundreds of miles in every direction. What I can smell, on the other hand . . .” there was a long pause, while both Harrier and Tiercel waited impatiently and Harrier continued absently making balls of Coldfire “. . .I’m not sure. Odd smells such as I have only smelled before—very faintly—deep in the deep rock. They are faint here as well. Distant.”

  “Well, let someone know if you see—or smell—anything else, will you?” Harrier said.

  “No, Harrier. If I notice something that represents possible danger to my Bonded and to all of you I thought I might just take a long refreshing nap,” Saravasse answered tartly.

  Harrier snorted. “Come on, Tyr. Let’s go see what’s for breakfast.”

  “I . . . What? I mean, we just . . .”

  “Have no idea of what’s going on, or what we can do about it,” Harrier finished for him. “It’s either going to go away, or it’s going to get worse, and we might as well have something to eat before we go help put up the tents that the shotors knocked over. Come on.”

  SHAIARA didn’t ask them any questions over the morning meal, and none of the three Armethaliehans—oh, Light, just when had he started thinking of people from the city he’d been born in and grown up in as “the Armethaliehans?”—knew enough about the Isvai to know how unnatural the ground tremors were. Isvaieni manners wouldn’t allow anyone to disturb them during mealtime, but afterward, Harrier had barely gotten five steps off his own carpet before Karufhad came to him to ask him why the ground had shaken and what it meant.

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow, Ummara Karufhad,” Harrier said, smiling.

  Karufhad made a disgusted face. “I am no Ummara, Harrier. I merely speak for the Adanate, until we choose our path.”

  “And what I say, Karufhad, is that sometimes we get to choose our path, and sometimes we just have to give up and admit that our path has chosen us. You’re here and alive. That makes you both lucky and strong. You don’t want to be Ummara. That makes you smart. Who’s better to be Ummara of the Adanate than someone who’s lucky and strong and smart?” He walked on toward the side of the encampment where the shotors were kept, leaving Karufhad looking thoughtful.

  “Spoken like a true Apprentice Harbormaster,” Eugens said. He and Tiercel had both followed Harrier.

  “I’ve told you, Gens. Even if we were going to survive this, I wouldn’t be going back to Armethalieh to apprentice to Da,” Harrier said over his shoulder.

  “I . . . are you sure you ought to be saying things like that out loud?” Eugens said, sounding baffled and frustrated and more than a little frightened.

  Harrier laughed but there was no bitterness in the sound. “Which part? I think everyone here knows I have no intention of becoming Harbormaster of Armethalieh.” He stopped and turned around to face his brother. “They all know we’re going to die here, Gens. They’ve known for sennights. We’re fighting a Demon. All we’re trying to do is to keep her attention fixed on us here . . . for a while,” Harrier finished, as if he’d forgotten what he’d meant to say.

  “And you have to die to do that?” Gens asked. There wasn’t any heat to the question. Tiercel thought he already knew the answer.

  “Wish we didn’t,” Harrier answered lightly. “Come on.”

  KARUFHAD was the first person to ask Ha
rrier about the ground tremors, but she wasn’t the last. As the three of them crossed the camp, Tiercel lost count of the number of times the question was asked, but Harrier’s answer never changed.

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  IT turned out that Harrier had been right about the tents. The entire row of them nearest to the shotors had been knocked down when the shotors reacted to the ground tremors. The shotors hadn’t been distressed enough to bolt, but they’d been startled, and a shotor wasn’t a small animal. There was no lack of helping hands to raise the tents again, or to tidy the wreckage, to keep opportunistic goats from browsing through the fallen tents, or to trim and splice broken tent-ropes, but Tiercel knew that it was important for Harrier to show himself this way. And if Eugens Gillain knew nothing at all about putting up an Isvaieni tent, there was nothing at all a son of the Harbormaster of Armethalieh didn’t know about rope, no matter what form it came in. Eugens was soon seated on one of the saddles with a geschak and two lengths of broken rope, unweaving the ends in order to splice them together. Several of the older Isvaieni were sitting with him, discussing the differing virtues of leather ropes versus shotor-hair ropes versus braided wool ropes versus flax ropes versus palm-fiber ropes and more besides. Tiercel had never dreamed there were so many different kinds of rope in the world. He had a distinct suspicion that another reason for Harrier’s coming over here was to show the Isvaieni how useful Eugens could be—or if not useful, at least willing to try to be.

  The work of setting the eastern end of the camp to rights lasted well into the morning. When they were finished, he and Harrier took their leave of them, but Eugens was apparently now involved in talking about something complicated involving straw and palm fronds, and just waved when Harrier said they were going.

  IT was the hottest part of the day. To Tiercel’s relief there’d been no further ground tremors. Midday was too hot for the strenuous work of harvesting the barley and the oats, but he and Harrier each had a basket, and the two of them were back among the trees. Shaiara had quickly learned it was perilous and wasteful to ask Harrier to pick figs, as he had little idea of how to tell a ripe fig from a green one, and date harvesting was a specialized skill that both of them lacked. But it was easy enough for either of them to tell when an apple was red, a naranje was orange, or a limun was yellow, and so they were generally given the task of gathering fruit from those trees. Picking fruit was a popular job, but one that many of the Isvaieni approached so enthusiastically that in dealing with these unfamiliar trees they would strip from their branches anything even remotely fruit-like whether it was ripe or not, and due to Bisochim’s magic, a tree held fruit in every stage of ripeness, from just-budding to fully mature. After a couple of days of learning experiences, there were a few hundred Isvaieni who were permitted to tend to the slowly-growing orchard—and Harrier, Tiercel, Kave, and Eugens.

  Most people still preferred to rest in their tents during the hottest part of the day, and Harrier had seized the pretext of useful work to escape to this place of relative privacy. In theory they were both picking fruit. In actuality, Harrier was leaning against the wall in the cool of the shade while Tiercel leaned against the silvery bark of the apple tree and desultorily picked apples.

  “What did you mean: you’ll tell them tomorrow?” Tiercel challenged. It was a question he’d been waiting several hours to ask.

  “I don’t know. Shut up,” Harrier answered tightly.

  Tiercel opened his mouth to continue the argument, then took a good look at Harrier’s expression. Harrier didn’t look angry. He looked as if he were in pain—or at least in distress.

  “Har, are you—?”

  “I said, shut up. I’ll talk about this tomorrow,” Harrier said.

  Tiercel wondered if talking about this tomorrow was Harrier’s idea. It didn’t look as if it was. He imagined what Eugens would say if he were here—that Harrier was putting everybody off until he could figure out what he was going to say—and he felt a chill of unease, because he knew that when he was hearing Harrier say “I’ll talk about this tomorrow” he wasn’t really hearing Harrier at all. He was hearing the voice of the Wild Magic speaking through Harrier, and Harrier had no more understanding of why he was saying this than Tiercel did.

  “Do you like being a Wildmage?” he asked impulsively.

  He wasn’t sure why he asked. He already knew the answer had to be “no.” Harrier wouldn’t be a Wildmage at all if he hadn’t followed Tiercel from Sentarshadeen to Karahelanderialigor and then accepted the Three Books after Karahelanderialigor because he’d known how dangerous the next part of the journey would be. But to Tiercel’s surprise, Harrier looked thoughtful and didn’t answer immediately, and what he said wasn’t what Tiercel expected to hear at all.

  “You know how it is when there’s something you’ve got to do that you never thought of doing—and it’s something hard—but it’s good—and maybe you’re not any good at it, but you know you have to try?”

  Tiercel just laughed—because that sentence summed up his whole life since Harrier’s last Naming Day in Armethalieh—and Harrier grinned at him in perfect understanding. “Yeah,” Harrier said. “It’s like that.”

  BY the time the two of them settled on their sleeping-mats that night, not only Tiercel, but Eugens, Kave, and even Kamar had joined the chorus of “I’ll tell you tomorrow” whenever someone asked Harrier to explain the rumblings of the ground. There’d been a couple small ground tremors in the late afternoon, and Saravasse said that the strange smells were back stronger than before. But that didn’t mean a lot, considering how acute a dragon’s sense of smell was. She said the scent came from the south, and that it was carried on the wind, and that it was a deep-rock-place smell, Harrier, and perhaps if Bisochim could turn him into a dragon she could describe it better.

  “If he can’t turn you into a sweet-natured little butterfly I don’t think we should hold our breaths waiting for him to turn me into anything useful,” had been Harrier’s reply. At least it had made Saravasse laugh.

  IN the middle of the night Tiercel woke as abruptly as if somebody was calling his name. There was a warm weight on his chest, and another warm weight coiled up against his back: the ikulas that had attached itself to him a few days ago had brought a friend.

  It wasn’t Isvaieni custom to name ikulas until they began to train them, allowing some aspect of the animal’s personality to suggest a name, and all the puppies were too young to train, even if there’d been the leisure and safety to do so. But Eugens had said that if they were underfoot he wasn’t calling them “dog” or “sweetheart” or any of the score of milk-names the Isvaieni used for puppies, and so he’d named the white one Pangan and the fawn-colored one Sormiede. (“Pangan” and “Sormiede” had both been—as Harrier reminded him—names of old girlfriends of Eugens back in Armethalieh, and well, Tiercel supposed it didn’t matter that Pangan wasn’t a girl).

  Suddenly the one sleeping on Tiercel’s chest scrambled off and the one on his back jerked awake and then both of them began to howl. A second later, every ikulas in the camp was howling—and a second after that, Tiercel could hear the distant sound of the shotors.

  They’re going to bolt this time, he thought in horror.

  “Get up,” he said over the sound of the howling, but the others in the tent were already moving. In the distance, he could hear the night guards’ whistles blowing, a flurry of alarm.

  “Boots,” Harrier said, grabbing his own. “No time for anything else.”

  Someone uncovered the lantern and Tiercel could see that both the ikulas had retreated to the farthest corner of the tent, hackles raised, ears flat, tails tucked, still howling. As he stared at them in horror, Pangan broke off to squat and piddle on the carpet, then threw back his head to howl again.

  “Bisochim—what does Saravasse see?” Harrier demanded tersely.

  “There’s nothing,” Bisochim answered, confused.

  “Then have her block one of the ent
rances. Come on.”

  “SARAVASSE says the smell is worse, Harrier!” Bisochim shouted as they ran toward the open gateway. The sound of his voice was nearly lost in the alarm whistles, the nerve-wracking howling, and the sound of every single animal in the camp bellowing at once.

  “Well since she can’t tell us what it is or what it means, that really isn’t very—”

  Tiercel didn’t know whether he finished his sentence or not.

  There was a sound like the flat hard clap of thunder when it happened directly above you—only the sky was clear, and this was a thousand times louder. He didn’t even get the chance to get used to the idea that the sound had happened when the ground shook hard enough to knock him off his feet. And not just him—when he fell, Harrier fell on top of him. He clung to Harrier because the ground didn’t stop shaking. It vibrated as if it were a thin piece of wood and there were people beneath it hitting it with clubs. The thunderclap-sound had lasted only seconds, but there was still sound—a roaring like wind, or like rushing water, or nothing like either.

  He heard Saravasse scream. It was a cry half of defiance, half of disbelief, and it only made things worse, because it caught up all the other screams—of pain, of fear—and blended them all together, and all Tiercel could think was that Ahairan was attacking them here, and he’d prepared himself to die, and he was used to being attacked, and this shouldn’t hurt so much . . .

  The roaring stopped first, and the shaking got less and less, until Tiercel realized that none of it was coming from outside. It was just him. The camp was dreadfully silent—not one of the animals was making a sound—and in that terrible absence of noise he could hear a sound he’d never heard in the encampment before, no matter how many times Ahairan had attacked them.

  He could hear the Isvaieni sobbing with fear.