The Phoenix Transformed

by James Mallory

  “I must,” Bisochim said after a long moment. “I will.” He got to his feet and walked from the tent without another word.

  “We’ll fix it,” Harrier said a little helplessly, looking at Shaiara as she sat beside him. “Someone—”

  She took his hand between hers and carried it into her lap. “Harrier, if we do not prevail here and now, there will be no Isvaieni left to know or care whether there is an Isvai left,” she said gently.

  THOUGH Bisochim said he’d make it rain, the rest of the day passed without any change in the weather. They made camp at dusk, and as usual, Bisochim set the wards and built them a wall of ice. He no longer summoned up the Sandwind each evening—the wind that would have borne the sand upon it would also have raised clouds of choking ash, pulverized it into powder, and filled the air with it. Without the sheep and goats who needed water daily and who were difficult to control in their thirst, the travelers had quickly fallen into the practical habit of asking Bisochim to Call water at midday. They used up a great deal of water on the march, so it was easiest to resupply at the halfway point. And that meant there was nothing to do when they stopped at night save set the tents and the watches and fall into an exhausted sleep.

  Tiercel was awakened by a faint rhythmic patter. It took him a while to identify the sound, but then he connected it with cold, and damp, and the smell of wet goat—because the tent was mainly made out of goat-hair. He sat up and looked out the tent-opening.

  In the wan blue light of Coldfire, he could see pools of water on the ground.

  Rain.

  “ ’Time is it?” he asked, sitting up.

  “Tenth hour,” Harrier said.

  Just before dawn, then. They wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. Kave had said in the council meeting that no matter how much they needed to make distance, they should wait out the first several hours of the rain in the tents. Harrier, of course, had never listened to good advice in his life. He’d already gotten to his feet and was poking his head out of the tent. An instant later he ducked back inside with a wordless snarl that seemed to indicate that Kave had been right.

  “We’re supposed to drink that?” he demanded in disbelief. “It’s sludge.” He waved his hand around before wiping it on his undertunic. It was visibly black, even in the dim light cast by the bespelled lantern.

  “The rain’s washing the smoke and ash out of the air. It should be better soon,” Kave said, yawning as he sat up and stretched.

  Eugens went to the doorway of the tent and peered out, holding his hands out beyond the edge of the canopy exactly the way Harrier had. He filled his cupped hands with rainwater and brought the liquid to his nose. “Smells almost like tar,” he said, sounding curious. “And it’s greasy. But . . . Sure. Tar. You’re too young to remember the winter the warehouses Dockside burned, Har, but the East’ing Blow kept the smoke—and the ships—in the harbor. And then it rained, and half the cloth and wool merchants in the City wanted Da’s ears. He was about ready to toss their damned shipments into the harbor; said it was their own lazy fault for not getting them off his dock and into their own warehouses.”

  “I was not too young to remember that. You’re talking about the Fire of ‘Forty-eight. And even if I had been, Da and Cargomaster Tamaricans never let a moonturn go by without talking about it,” Harrier said. He sighed, shaking his head silently, and Tiercel knew exactly what he was thinking. It would be hard on Antarans Gillain to lose both his oldest and his youngest son and never know what had happened to either of them. “But nobody had to ride those bales several hundred miles—or drink the rain. So I’d like to know when it’s going to be rain—and not mud.”

  Nobody had an answer for him.

  The one advantage to the rain that both Harrier and Eugens agreed on was that it would put an end to the drifts of ash flying everywhere, but—as they found out when the Isvaieni finally emerged from their tents around the Third Hour of Day—when rain soaked down a moonturn’s worth of ash-fall, the ash became a grease-slick overlay on the regh. Worse, the rain softened the hardpan so that the sharp tent-pegs slipped loose, and nearly all the tents were sagging and half-collapsed before it was time to strike them. And that was only the beginning of their newest problems.

  Saravasse—who hadn’t had a tent to shelter in—was a muddy brown instead of her usual brilliant red. She snarled at everyone, including Bisochim. The shotors hated the uncertain footing. The debris on the sand varied from a grease-slick slurry of ash and rain to deep pockets of accumulated ash that were only wet at the top—so that when a shotor stepped into one, the dry ash swirled up from beneath and caked on its legs—to places that were now bare wet sand.

  And all the time, the warm, gritty, black-stained rain dripped down and the desert steamed.

  BY the end of a sennight the rain was gray-tinged instead of black, and the fallen ash had all been soaked down and compacted. The combination of rain and ash seemed to protect them from attacks by both Balwarta and Ahairan’s atish’ban insects—few creatures were willing to fly through rain, and to reach them, the atish’ban insects would, as far as anyone knew, have to crawl across miles of ash-mud. But Bisochim’s conjured storm clouds made the days darker and the nights longer, and while he was holding the spells in place that made it rain, Bisochim couldn’t spare the energy to Summon a Sandwind to scour the desert—even if a Sandwind would have been anything more than wet sand.

  There were a thousand minor annoyances—the tents weren’t waterproof, the fires wouldn’t stay lit, the desert robes weren’t designed to keep their wearers warm and dry when it was raining—and all of them paled in comparison to the fact that Ahairan took advantage of the fact that they were blind at night and hobbled during the day to attack them with Shamblers, Black Dogs, more Goblins, and Sandwalkers.

  They lost nearly five hundred people that sennight.

  “OKAY,” Harrier said. “So far, I think Tyr’s plan is working.”

  “You have got to be kidding, Har,” Eugens said in disbelief.

  “No.” Harrier looked down at the carpet between his feet and leaned over and ran his thumbnail over its surface. You couldn’t see the pattern or the colors anymore—just grayish black—and its nap was stiff with black rain and tracked-in ash. He couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d had a bath, but he’d never really felt dirty until it had started to rain.

  Everybody had taken to digging up as much clean sand as they could at the midday halts to scrub down the shotors and the ikulas and themselves, but there wasn’t much to be done about cloth. It was annoying that all the filth raining down out of the sky couldn’t do something useful like waterproof the tents, but it wasn’t as much a problem of the fabric itself leaking, as of all the on-purpose openings in it. Isvaieni tents had never been designed to keep rain out. He sat back and sighed.

  “Bisochim is making it rain,” he said, stating the obvious to his assembled listeners. “I’m taking us directly to Abi’Abadshar—not to Kannatha Well, not to the Dove Road—which might confuse Ahairan, and will certainly get us there faster than we’d get there if we followed the Dove Road and then jogged west.”

  “I—I’m sorry, Harrier, I know we’ve covered this before, but . . . If you go straight to this Abi’Abadshar, don’t you lead Ahairan straight there?” Helafin Perizel asked uncertainly.

  “Leading her there isn’t the problem, Helafin,” Harrier answered. He knew that Tiercel twitched every time he addressed a Magistrate of the Nine Cities by her first name, but Harrier had good reasons for doing it and he was going to keep on doing it. “She probably knows it’s there—I think we talked about it in front of Vianse Pallocons. What we’re counting on is that she can’t get in and can’t send her Darkspawn in either.”

  “Yeah, and there aren’t going to be a lot of us left to get in, either, if this keeps up,” Eugens muttered.

  “We’d be taking these losses either way, Gens,” Harrier said. “This way, we have a hope that the rain will be falling
clear by the time we really need to rely on it. And the longer it rains, the more of the ash—here and in the Barahileth—gets washed away. And the faster we can go when we really need to.”

  “So we have been dawdling thus far? How reassuring,” Liapha said, her voice a dry croak. “Do tell me when we begin to move quickly. I should hate to miss the excitement.”

  Liapha was the oldest surviving Isvaieni. She was at least two decades older than the next oldest person in the camp, as far as Harrier could guess from what everyone had said about her family and children. The moonturns of exhaustion and hardship had taken their toll, and Liapha was a skeletal figure. Her cheeks were sunken, the skin stretched tight over her bones, and she could no longer mount her shotor without help, something everyone pretended not to see. Harrier dreaded the day that she would announce that the time had come to lay her bones on the sand almost as much as he dreaded the thought of what he would have to do afterward.

  “It shall be done, Ummara Liapha,” Shaiara said solicitously. “I promise that I shall wake you myself, lest you sleep through it.”

  Liapha’s answering bark of laughter was a welcome sound. It was nice to know they could still manage to laugh about things. Today they numbered five thousand three hundred and twenty-four, and they’d only been on the road five sennights.

  NO one stood upon the formality of the carpet anymore, because nobody wanted to be out in the rain for one moment longer than they had to be. Harrier and Shaiara went down the line of tents from awning to awning. In the fortnight since it had started raining, Harrier had made up his mind: if he got to choose between raining and hot and not-raining and hot, he’d choose the not-raining alternative every time. By now the entire Isvai was nothing but one big pile of wet sand. Hot wet sand, and he felt a thousand times worse than he had on the hottest day he’d spent in the Barahileth.

  But if he was miserable, it was nothing to how the Isvaieni suffered in the abruptly-changed climate. At least he was used to rain, if not to hot rain. They weren’t. They bore it with the same stoic patience with which they’d suffered every other hardship since they’d set out from Telinchechitl the first time. Usually he didn’t think about whether the people around him were comfortable or not.

  It was different when it was Shaiara.

  He’d never meant to fall in love with her. He’d never meant to fall in love at all—at least not for a really long time. He still wasn’t quite sure he had—or how he had. What he felt for Shaiara didn’t seem much like what Eugens or Carault or Brelt had described—when Eugens arranged to marry Naneida Corolen after walking out with her for two whole years, or when Carault started seeing Pegorin Karedana seven years ago, or when Brelt offered for Meroine Dyonnet and nobody’d even known he liked her.

  But at least Nan and Peg and Mero were all Grindon Road girls. Shaiara . . . Shaiara was Ummara of the Nalzindar, an Isvaieni tribe that lived halfway to the Horn. Harrier could no more imagine bringing Shaiara home to Grindon Road than he could imagine flapping his arms and flying.

  Of course, Harrier wouldn’t be going home to Grindon Road himself. He’d met Shaiara at least partly because he was a Wildmage, and Wildmages just didn’t live on Grindon Road.

  He remembered a time when the thought of paying MagePrices terrified him. Since then, he’d paid out more of them than he could fairly remember. Small ones—like slaughtering the goat for the ikulas’s dinner one night and chopping up the meat all by himself. Strange ones—like not entering any tent where Fannas was for eight days and not saying why. Bizarre ones—like walking all of one day, sun-up to sun-down, instead of riding. They’d become an ordinary part of his life, just a thing he did, and he swore and snarled at the Wild Magic the way the Isvaieni swore and snarled at their shotors, and he complained (to it and about it) the way Ma complained at Da, while all the while the Wild Magic had been becoming a part of him, like his hands or his sight, and it was hard to remember not being a part of it.

  But there was still one unpaid MagePrice hanging over his head. He remembered what Kareta’d said very clearly. “But since you cast so non-specific a spell, and let me choose whether or not to answer, you get to choose your Price. Either come away with me now, tonight, before sunrise, or later, at a time not of your choosing, you must give up the thing you most value in the world.”

  Of course he hadn’t gone with her. He’d still been afraid of the Wild Magic then. He wondered—now—what would have happened if he had. But he’d made the choice he’d made. And that meant that sometime soon he’d have to give up the thing he most valued in the world. It had never been his life. Not since he’d known what the stakes were. He’d wondered—for a while—if what he was going to have to give up was Tiercel’s life, but that had never really made sense. He couldn’t give up something that wasn’t his.

  For the last couple of moonturns Harrier’d started to worry that what he had to give up was Shaiara, and again he’d wondered how you could give up something that wasn’t actually yours. But from the moment he’d stood on top of the wall at Sapthiruk and looked south to see the fires of Telinchechitl glowing against the night sky, he’d known that no matter how crazy Tiercel’s plan was, he needed to go along with it. Because in the back of his mind, he’d become aware that Kareta’s MagePrice would be the last one he would ever pay, and a small voice whispered: soon, soon . . .

  “You have become as silent as a Nalzindar,” Shaiara said gently.

  “Just thinking,” Harrier said absently. “You know, if we were going to have the final showdown with Ahairan at the Lake of Fire anyway, we could have just stayed there in the first place. Everything would have been a lot easier on everybody. But hey. It looks like most of Bisochim’s vision is going to turn out to be true after all.” At least the part about the Lake of Fire being there. And him, and Saravasse, and some Isvaieni.

  “So does that mean that the Star-Crowned will return?” Shaiara asked.

  Harrier tried not to wince, because of course there’d been two dragons in Bisochim’s vision. He stopped under somebody’s awning and Shaiara stopped with him. There was no point in trying to get any more privacy than this. The only person he didn’t actually want overhearing his next words was Tiercel, and Tiercel spent a lot of time with Saravasse these days, even if that meant being out in the rain.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “When I asked her before we left Abi’Abadshar, Kareta told me Ancaladar wasn’t dead. Tyr says he can’t sense the Bond. I can’t imagine Ancaladar being alive anywhere and not having come back after this long, even if he couldn’t fly. I’m just worried that . . . Shaiara, I know Tyr’s lying to me. I just don’t know about what.”

  Shaiara considered for a moment, her head tilted to one side. “Perhaps the Star-Crowned has returned from wherever he vanished to. And Tiercel does not wish to tell you,” she said simply.

  Harrier stared at her, knowing he looked stunned. It made a terrible kind of sense: Bisochim was a Dragonbond Wildmage, and Bisochim hadn’t been able to hurt Ahairan. Tiercel had been trained—by Ancaladar—to fight Demons, but without the Dragonbond, Tiercel couldn’t manage to hold any of the spells he knew in place for more than an eyeblink. But with Ancaladar? Tiercel and Ancaladar and Bisochim and Saravasse could probably obliterate her. That was how Mages had destroyed the Endarkened—High Magick and Wild Magic working together. What Harrier didn’t want to believe was that Tiercel had access to Ancaladar’s power and wasn’t telling anyone—because they’d lost fifteen hundred and sixty-five people to Darkspawn who hadn’t had to die if Tiercel could have saved them.

  “I really hope not,” Harrier said.

  But he wasn’t sure.

  Nineteen

  To the Throat of the Crucible

  ONCE THE CLIFFS of Telinchechitl had been invisible due to Bisochim’s spells. On the Isvaieni’s southern flight the great black cone of Telinchechitl was visible when they were still sennights away. Clouds veiled its peak—rain, smoke, steam, it was hard to tell. In the m
iddle of the next sennight’s travel, they began to see black stones studding the sand. The stones had been cast out by the tehuko. They were small at first—the size of a thumb-knuckle—but the further south the caravan traveled, the larger the stones lying in the sand became: stones the size of dates, the size of naranjes, of melons, of heads, of goats . . .

  Before they’d left Sapthiruk Oasis, they’d protected their food supplies from everything they could, but they couldn’t protect them from the rain. It was bad enough when the barley and oats began to sprout from the constant damp. It was worse when it began to turn black. The Isvaieni had experience with food spoiling, but their experience was limited to fresh foods. When the grain began to sprout, they’d shrugged and used it anyway. When it turned black, they assumed that the dirty rain had just made its way into the storage baskets. The five Armethaliehans would have recognized the difference between dirt and blight—if they’d seen the uncooked grain—but none of them was directly involved in preparing meals. Even Harrier wasn’t really suspicious when he was even more miserable after the first meal of badly-spoiled grain, since by then everyone was miserable from the constant wet, but by morning all the ikulas weren’t just sick, but desperately ill—too ill to be loaded up and ride.

  Bisochim Healed them, and Harrier said no one was to feed them, but everyone could see that the animals were fine, and in the tents of the Tunag, nobody had wanted to eat the morning grain porridge. They fed it to their ikulas.

  Both animals died before Bisochim could be summoned, and now it was obvious what the cause was. The grain was spoiled—all the oats, all the barley. At Kave’s suggestion, Harrier tried feeding it to one of the shotors. It took longer—three days—but the animal died just as the ikulas had. They kept what was left to plant—if it would sprout—because the rootstocks they’d carried with them weren’t growing as well as they had before. There was too much water in the sand.