The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  “Hey,” Harrier said quietly, sitting up. He heard Harrier’s voice shake; it was funny how knowing that Harrier was just as scared as he was actually made him less scared. “We need as much light as we can get. Can you make some?”

  “Yeah. I’ll see.” Tiercel closed his eyes and took a deep breath, shifting around so he was sitting on the ground. He rested his hands in his lap. His head hurt and he was dizzy, and he knew that trying to conjure MageLight in the middle of all this Wild Magic was going to give him a brutal headache. But he breathed out—hard—and sucked in a deep breath and held it, and concentrated, and the familiar blue fog began to form against his palms. The anticipated spike of pain between his eyes was almost a relief.

  “Good,” Harrier said, sounding relieved. “As much as you can.”

  All around them the noise of the camp was growing louder by degrees. The shocked near-silence of the first moments after . . . whatever-it-had-been . . . was replaced by cries for help, and shouts of assistance, the babble of a thousand (more) conversations, the squalling of livestock. The sounds grew louder with every passing moment, but by now Tiercel had survived too many battles to find them anything but reassuring.

  “Bonded! You must see this!” Saravasse said urgently from above their heads.

  “See what?” Tiercel heard Harrier say in exasperation. He kept his eyes closed. He didn’t need to see to conjure MageLight, and he’d rather not look at a ball of light right now.

  “South! In the south! Oh, come—please come!” Saravasse said, sounding almost panic-stricken.

  Tiercel heard footsteps hurry away, Then he heard Harrier swear quietly but sincerely. “Is Shaiara—?” Tiercel asked.

  “Gone with Kamar, Natha, Raffa, and Narkil to help Karufhad. Some of the Adanate were caught inside their tent. Light, we’re going to spend all day putting every single one up again,” Harrier answered.

  Tiercel sighed and opened his eyes, making sure to send the latest ball of MageLight skyward first. Harrier was standing beside him, making Coldfire. There were only about a dozen globes aloft right now, but that was enough to show him that every single tent in the entire oasis had gone flat.

  “What happened?” Tiercel demanded in shock.

  “The ground tremors must have jarred all the tent-pegs loose,” Harrier said, thinking about it. He sighed. “What I wouldn’t give right now for a telescope. And a ladder.”

  “We could build a ladder,” Tiercel suggested.

  “Not in the next half-chime,” Harrier said disgruntledly.

  “Pangan! Sormiede!” Tiercel said suddenly. “They were still in the tent when we left! If it came down on them—”

  THE two ikulas had been huddled near the back of the tent when it collapsed, but that meant they were easily rescued, since they’d only been pinned by the fabric at the edge—still a considerable-enough weight that they hadn’t been able to squirm free. By the time Harrier and Tiercel had freed them, Shaiara and Kave joined them.

  “The Nalzindar are safe,” she said. “Eugens is also safe, and has gone with Kamar and Thadnat to help those who are pinned within their tents. Helafin and Raffa have gone to gather people to make certain no beasts drown themselves in the oasis.”

  “Have a dog,” Harrier said, offering her Sormiede. Shaiara’s mouth quirked. Harrier set Sormiede down on the ground.

  “It is tomorrow, Harrier,” she said meaningfully.

  “Dawn,” Harrier said firmly.

  “Harrier, you really need to see this,” Saravasse said from the wall behind them. Bisochim stood on the wall beside her.

  “Yes, and that will be so easy,” Harrier said, “because if you ask half the people here, I can fly. However, I can’t.”

  “I will pick you up and set you on top of the wall. All of you. Step back,” Saravasse said.

  They got out of her way quickly—especially Kave, who was far less used to dragons than the others were. Tiercel wasn’t sure what he’d expected Saravasse to do, but in fact all she did was gather herself at the edge of the wall several yards from where they stood, both wings tucked tightly against her body, and spring down. Tiercel winced as the ground shook with the impact of her landing, but at least the shaking was over in seconds.

  “It is very wide. Do not worry. You will not fall off,” Saravasse said reassuringly.

  “I, ah, I think I’ll stay here, if that’s all right,” Kave said.

  “I’ll go first,” Tiercel said, stepping forward.

  No part of a dragon was small, though their forelimbs seemed like something of an afterthought in contrast with their enormous wings and huge haunches. Despite this, Saravasse’s front claw was large enough to wrap easily around Tiercel’s torso, and in fact, she could easily have held Tiercel and Harrier both in one claw without fear of dropping them. It was true that she had to grip the top of the wall with her other foreclaw for support, since to reach the top of the wall with him she had to stand on the draconic equivalent of tiptoe, but she gripped him carefully, rose up on her hind legs, stretched to her full height, and placed him delicately on the top of the wall without jarring him at all.

  Harrier was next, then Shaiara, then Saravasse moved a little farther down the wall and simply . . . jumped . . . landing on its top like a very large and improbably scaled cat.

  “Now what?” Harrier asked. “It’s dark. I don’t see anything.”

  “Look south,” Saravasse said, sounding troubled. “Even you should be able to see it.”

  “Yeah,” Harrier said after a moment. “Tyr, move your MageLights down below the edge of the wall.”

  Glancing back down inside the wall, Tiercel noticed that the globes of Coldfire were hovering barely a dozen feet above the ground. He quickly lowered his spheres of MageLight to match. Without the lights here at their level, it was darker. The flat top of the wall shone brighter than the sand had the last time Tiercel had walked out beneath the stars. On the desert side there was nothing but utter blackness. On the oasis side, a dim blue radiance.

  Harrier walked down the center of the wall as if he were just walking across the desert, striding along until he was about thirty feet ahead of the rest of them. “It’s burning,” Harrier said in a flat strange voice. “The south is burning.”

  Tiercel raised his gaze from the top of the wall and looked.

  In the distance there was the brightness of fire. He could see a tall ragged V-shape hanging in space. It glowed a dull yellow orange against the night, and at its base he could see the brighter yellow of honest fire. For a moment he couldn’t make out what it was he was seeing, then he understood.

  Of course. The trees and orchards and fields at Telinchechitl. Harrier said the Isvaieni took everything they could possibly use when they left, but there still must have been something left behind that could burn. And it is.

  “It’s the Firesprite Shrine,” he said aloud. “The Firecrown’s put it back.”

  “I guess it has. All right. It must be time to pay the price,” Harrier said.

  Eighteen

  A Stone of Flame

  GETTING OFF THE wall was the same as getting onto it, just in reverse. Somehow, it seemed more awkward, though, and Harrier snarled under his breath the entire time about ladders. What Tiercel wasn’t expecting was for Harrier to grab him the moment they got down—he’d insisted that Tiercel go first, and he’d come down second—and drag him off into the dark.

  “Hey—look—what are you—?”

  “Shut up,” Harrier hissed in his ear. “And keep your MageLights low.”

  With the MageLights hovering near the ground, most of the walled oasis was dark. It didn’t seem to matter to Harrier, who could apparently see exactly where he was going. Tiercel tripped and staggered—first over the uneven sand that was the pathway between tents, then through waist-high grain. He just hoped Harrier didn’t drag him into a tree.

  Eventually—when the globes of azure fire were only a distant radiance—Harrier stopped.

  “What ex
actly did it say?” he said.

  “Who? The Firecrown? It said if we got Ahairan back to Telinchechitl, it would bind her,” Tiercel answered.

  He could almost hear Harrier roll his eyes. “Exactly, Tyr. What did it say exactly?”

  Tiercel thought hard. “Entice Ahairan back to its Place of Power—it would make it ready to receive her—Ahairan would be dealt with in a fashion pleasing to us—well, it said “me,” but—and it said it could bind her for as long as Telinchechitl burns.” His recitation was necessarily choppy since he was editing what he remembered as he spoke to leave out all the parts about “Dragonbond Mage gives up his life.”

  “Nothing about who has to be there?” Harrier demanded.

  “Well, I’m guessing me, since I made the bargain. And you and Bisochim, since she wants you too, and the whole point is to, you know, lure her. But, no. The Firecrown wasn’t really specific. It doesn’t matter. Harrier, you know what will happen if—”

  “No it won’t. I won’t let it. Come on. We’ll go tell Shaiara. When we do, you have a very important task to perform, Anointed Champion of the Light.”

  “Me? What?” Tiercel asked suspiciously.

  “Keep her from killing me,” Harrier answered.

  “AND you believe this will work?” Shaiara demanded in disbelief less than an hour later.

  “I believe that Tyr says the Firecrown said it would do it,” Harrier answered. “Surprise,” he added in Bisochim’s direction. “You woke up a god.”

  “Great Power,” Tiercel amended.

  “Which explains why it never did anything you wanted it to, because Great Powers are like goats. And the Wild Magic,” Harrier added in an undertone.

  Harrier had asked that Shaiara’s tent be put back up immediately so they could have a private discussion. They’d done it, although across Sapthiruk, the rest of the Isvaieni were waiting for dawn to set their tents again. Tiercel was only grateful that everyone was still using Coldfire to light their tents, rather than actual fire, or the ground tremors would have been a disaster rather than just a huge inconvenience. But it was almost an hour since what he was pretty sure (now) had been an explosion, and there hadn’t been any injuries reported.

  It was true that only Shaiara, Harrier, Tiercel, Bisochim, and Kamar were supposedly present at this discussion. It was also true that privacy was only a polite fiction among the Isvaieni at the best of times. Raffa and Thadnat and the three Armethaliehans were sitting on the carpet at the front of the tent, less than twenty feet away, and the Nalzindar at least could probably hear every word.

  “I can’t believe you just compared the Wild Magic to a goat!” Tiercel whispered to Harrier in exasperation.

  “Try living with it. Any time you want your own set of Three Books, I’ll see what I can do,” Harrier muttered back.

  “But Abi’Abadshar is not Telinchechitl,” Shaiara pointed out, ignoring the byplay.

  “No,” Harrier said. “But it will hold all the people here, and it’s warded against all magic. Tyr and I could both cast spells when we were inside it, but it was built by this old Elf Queen who was fighting the Endarkened, so I bet Ahairan can’t, even if she finds it. And if she does find it and can cast spells, nobody’s much worse off than they’d be in a camp, because I’ll still bet she can’t get any of her creatures inside.”

  “A number of guesses and a number of risks, Harrier,” Shaiara said gently.

  “I know,” he answered. “But when you come down to it, we have three choices. One: we ignore the Firecrown’s offer and stay here, all of us. If we do that, sooner or later Ahairan gets bored, and I don’t think we’ll like that. Two: we ignore the Firecrown’s offer, some of us stay here, some of us try to carry a warning to the Elven Lands. I know I said we were going to Armethalieh, but that was before I talked to Helafin and Felocan and the others. I don’t think that will work either. Ahairan will kill anybody left behind.”

  “That is acceptable, Harrier, if the warning reaches the High Ummara of the Elves,” Shaiara answered softly.

  “I know, Shaiara. But it probably wouldn’t. And even if a warning got through, I’m not sure enough that Vairindiel Elvenqueen would send help to take that chance. So that leaves our third choice. Believe what the Firecrown told Tyr, which means we go back to Telinchechitl. But we don’t all go back to Telinchechitl. If everybody’s at Abi’Abadshar, they aren’t standing on the edge of the Lake of Fire waiting for Ahairan to push them in—assuming the Firecrown’s either lying or a little slow with this ‘binding’ thing. And it’s going to be hard enough just to get that far. The fewer people we travel with after that, the faster we’ll go.”

  “I suppose it must now be ‘tomorrow’ for you have told me all that I wished to know,” Shaiara said with a small sigh. “I thank you for giving this word to me as soon as you were able. When must we leave?”

  Harrier glanced at Tiercel. Tiercel shrugged. Harrier pulled off his chadar, looped it around his neck, and ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know. I think we have time to make all the preparations we can. You’re going to be better at knowing what needs to be done than I am. I’ll tell you one thing, though, I am not traveling with any more sheep and goats. We eat them here.”

  The ground shook again, and the lantern attached to the tent-pole rocked wildly. Kamar sighed. “Perhaps this part will end soon.”

  “Perhaps Harrier will go and explain to the people that it is the Firecrown preparing Ahairan’s cage,” Shaiara said resolutely.

  “Yeah,” Harrier said, getting to his feet. He glanced at Tiercel, and he didn’t need to speak aloud for Tiercel to know what he was thinking.

  We hope.

  MAGISTRATE Perizel pounced on Harrier the moment he walked out of the tent, saying that she couldn’t help but overhear his conversation and asking if what he’d said to Shaiara was true. Harrier just said that she should come along with him, and called down a globe of Coldfire to light their way, and went off to make the rounds of the encampment.

  So Tiercel suggested that Kave come with him, and Eugens came along with the two of them, and they went off in the opposite direction from Harrier and Magistrate Perizel. Tiercel told everyone who asked pretty much the same thing that Harrier was probably saying: “The ground tremors were made by an ancient Great Power that’s always lived in the Barahileth. It’s said it will bind Ahairan at Telinchechitl. It’s making a cage for her.”

  “That’s true, isn’t it?” Kave asked. “What you’re saying?”

  Tiercel felt a flash of irritation—not from being disbelieved, it wasn’t that—but from the fact that Kave was asking that question here, where anyone might hear, and because keeping people from doubting, from panicking, was important.

  “Yes,” he said briefly. “It’s all true. It’s strange, but you get used to it.”

  “I won’t,” Kave said fervently. “I can’t imagine ever . . . I mean . . . how can you?”

  Tiercel shrugged. “What choice do I have?”

  A little while after that, some of Eugens’s new friends from the day before offered Eugens the hospitality of their carpet, and Tiercel shooed him off to join them. None of the plants were available that the Isvaieni normally brewed as tea, and there wasn’t enough of the kaffeyah left to share out, but the desertfolk were brewing up something out of naranjes and dates that was actually pretty good. And it was nice and hot when the temperature dropped at night. He and Kave stopped for a token cup before moving on.

  “Let me guess: you don’t have any choice in this, either?” Kave said once they were walking again. This time it was a joke.

  “I’ve lived with the Isvaieni—among the tribes—for almost five moonturns now. In one of the Iteru-cities for two moonturns before that. The customs there are . . . were . . . different, but more like here than like Armethalieh. It’s just good manners to try to fit in.”

  “It’s hard to believe all of them are gone,” Kave said quietly.

  “Yeah. Just . . . don’t say
that around Harrier, okay? He lost a really good friend in Tarnatha’Iteru. It’s been hard for him to accept that no matter what anyone saw, Ahairan was the one who did the killing.”

  “But . . . isn’t he a Wildmage?” Kave asked, and now he sounded so confused that in spite of everything, Tiercel nearly laughed out loud.

  “Kave, Harrier says the Wild Magic is as annoying as a goat. And the only other Wildmage either of us has ever met kept hitting him with a wooden spoon. Wildmages aren’t like, oh—like Kellen and Idalia and Vestakia the Redeemed in The Book of the Light. They’re people.”

  BY the time Tiercel thought it ought to be dawn, he and Kave had worked their way most of the way around to the eastern side of the camp. Harrier had said that the Firecrown had done whatever it had done around Watch Bells—the Eighth Hour of Night. Dawn had been coming later and later as the year progressed, and now (according to Harrier, who was as reliable an authority as any of the tower-clocks back in Armethalieh) dawn began just before the Eleventh Hour of Night and was fully established by the Twelfth.

  Tiercel wasn’t good at telling time by the position of the stars—or at guessing the passage of time—but he was sure it had been at least three hours since he’d been jarred out of his sound sleep by Pangan and Sormiede howling. He frowned. No. He’d woken up just before they’d started. He shook his head. No way to solve all these mysteries; he’d try to remember to mention it to Harrier later. But regardless of how weird his life had gotten, eight and three was eleven, and he knew that when the stars dimmed and vanished overhead, the sun was about to appear. So when he glanced up and could only see the brightest stars, he assumed the sun would appear in a few minutes.

  But it didn’t. They got all the way to the edge of the tents, and nothing had changed, and Tiercel was starting to quietly panic, wondering if Ahairan suspected the Firecrown’s plans and had managed to cast some kind of spell over Sapthiruk that would—he didn’t know—stop time or something. About the time he was about to tell Kave they needed to drop everything and go find Harrier, Kave turned to him with an odd look on his face.