The Enduring Flame Trilogy 001 - The Phoenix Unchained

by James Mallory

  He stepped down onto the dock again and handed the splinter to Tiercel. Tiercel examined it. The wood was soft.

  “It doesn’t look like any rock—or whale—damage I’ve ever seen,” Harrier said reluctantly. “But all the bondsman will care about is that the Marukate is a sloppy ship whose master has probably been sailing close to the wind for a long time. So he’s not likely to believe in . . . kraken.” Harrier shrugged, taking a last look over his shoulder at the ship. “It’s strange, though. The captain said he was just beyond the farthest of the Out Islands when it happened. Couldn’t have been much further out, or they’d never have made it to port, with their hull racked up the way it was. And there just aren’t any reefs out there that could do this to a ship.”

  BUT there aren’t any kraken.

  Second Night Bells had just rung, and the entire Rolfort family was safe in their beds.

  Except Tiercel.

  He was in his bedroom, true, but not in bed.

  The scrap of wood Harrier had carved from the hull of the Marukate sat on his bedside table, on top of the journal in which Tiercel had taken to using to keep his notes on the High Magick.

  Tomorrow the bondsman would meet with the ship’s master at the port to look over the damage, and decide what part—if any—of the repairs would be paid for out of the bond. It didn’t seem fair that the man should lose his ship. Harrier had said that was probably what would happen if the bond wasn’t paid. The ship would be sold up, probably as scrap timber, and the Marukate’s captain would have to go to work as a hired master on a ship he didn’t own. Not the worst fate in the world, but it would be better if there were some way to prove that he was telling the truth about there being something out there that had grabbed his ship. Tiercel wondered if there was anything he could do to help. Maybe there was.

  There were a lot of spells in the High Magick.

  TIERCEL had been stunned to discover, once he’d really started digging through the books in the Closed Collection in the Great Library, that instead of being lost, or even locked up, everything he wanted to know about the High Magick was right there on the shelves, mixed in with the Histories. Spellbooks and manuals, practical information, nearly everything he needed to know.

  It hadn’t seemed right somehow just to play around with it for fun, though, so even though he’d copied out several of the simplest spells—High Magick seemed to be very elaborate and complicated—he’d never actually tried to do any of it. But this would be for a good cause.

  There was a spell called Knowing. It didn’t seem to be very complicated, and didn’t require all of the elaborate tools that some of the other spells did, just some wine and candles and some Light-incense, and a few incantations. There were some other things—about shielding and fasting and ritual hours and proper preparation—but he didn’t really understand them, and they looked like things he could afford to skip. Besides, Mama would certainly notice if he tried to skip meals.

  The description of Knowing said that you would understand an object in its entirety once you had cast the spell upon it. If he cast Knowing on the piece of the hull of the Marukate, well, then, wouldn’t he know how it had come to be damaged? Then he could go and tell Portmaster Gillain what he’d learned.

  Assuming the High Magick was actually real, and the spell worked. Even Tiercel had to admit that sounded like a lot of “ifs” and assumptions.

  WHEN he was certain that everyone had settled in for the night, Tiercel made his way down to the household Light-shrine and removed a small handful of the Light-incense from its silver box. He also took one of the charcoal cakes to burn it on. Folding both items carefully into a handkerchief, he went from there to the kitchen and took five candles from the candlebox. That should be enough—the spell just said “candles,” and he wasn’t sure how many to use. Most of the spells he’d seen seemed to do things in multiples of four, though, so he figured that four should be enough. And one for the center.

  He went back to his room and made the rest of his preparations.

  He rolled away the rug in the center of the floor, and used a piece of blackboard chalk from his study to carefully draw the symbol he had copied out of one of the old books into the middle of the floor. Next, he placed four candles at the corners and one in the middle, and set the piece of wood from the Marukate next to the middle candle.

  Then he realized that he’d forgotten something to burn the incense in.

  A quick scavenger hunt through his study turned up an old pottery bowl. It was thick and heavy; a souvenir from a Flowering Fair a few years back. He used it to hold spare pen-points, and to hold down his papers when the windows were open. It would certainly do. He emptied it out, rubbed it clean with his sleeve, and carried it back into the bedroom, setting it down in the middle of the chalked diagram. There. Everything was ready.

  Tiercel admitted he’d never felt sillier in his life. He was much too old for games of “Let’s Pretend.” And deep in his heart, he was sure that was all that this could possibly be. Certainly he believed that the High Magick had worked once, centuries and centuries ago. But he also believed that if it still worked, people would still be using it. After all, wouldn’t everyone want to be a Mage if they had the chance?

  Still, he was committed to trying, so he sat down crosslegged beside the diagram, and opened his notebook, and carefully read out the spell for Knowing, slowly sounding out the unfamiliar syllables and making the strange gestures that had been depicted in the books. He knew he was supposed to have a wand for that, but doing the spell had been pretty much a spur-of-the-moment idea, so maybe it wouldn’t matter.

  He finished.

  Nothing happened.

  Well, what did you expect? Tiercel thought, feeling more than a little embarrassed. Even though he hadn’t expected anything to happen, he’d hoped, more than he wanted to admit even to himself, that something would. The Time of Mages is definitely over.

  Just then he started to feel sick.

  The room seemed to be getting darker.

  THE year before he’d met Harrier, Tiercel had been so sick that the Healers of Armethalieh—the best in the Nine Cities—had told his parents that his only hope for survival lay in the Wild Magic.

  In those days even Hevnade hadn’t been born yet. He’d been Lord and Lady Rolfort’s only child, and to save his life, they’d taken him immediately to the Temple of the Light in Sentarshadeen, hoping against hope that a Wildmage could be found to heal him. Fortunately one was there—waiting for them, in fact—and Tiercel had quickly been restored to health. He’d remembered nothing at all of his illness—supposedly you never remembered anything much about being a child, though Tiercel did—but he’d always remembered the strange dreams he’d had while he’d been ill, even though it had happened so very long ago. They’d been vividly real, yet impossible; he’d known that even then. And now, after so many years, he was having another one without even falling asleep. He was looking at a Lake of Fire.

  Instead of being blue like a proper lake, it was orange. The air above it shimmered with heat, and its entire surface danced with flames, as if somebody had taken an ordinary homely hearth-fire and just made a huge pool of it somehow. It was almost pretty. And standing at the middle of it was a woman.

  That was wrong, because if it was fire, she shouldn’t be able to stand on it, but she was. And she was utterly naked, but though he tried very hard, Tiercel couldn’t look away. And he couldn’t wake up.

  He’d seen statues of naked women in museums, and he tried to tell himself that that’s all this was, but her long hair moved in the heat of the flames below her, and the fire gleamed off her skin, so that he couldn’t really tell what color it was. Somehow she saw him watching her, and when she did, she raised her arms and held them out to him. Beckoning to him.

  He had to go to her, Tiercel knew he did, but as that excited, ashamed, half-formed thought worked its way toward the front of his mind, it was met by another reaction equally strong.

&nbs
p; Terror.

  No. More than terror. Revulsion.

  Because there was something horrible about the Fire Woman—something he could sense but couldn’t see—and the fact that he didn’t quite know what it was made it even more frightening, even though this was only a dream, and the things that frightened you—or didn’t—in dreams weren’t the same ones that scared you when you were awake.

  She was beautiful, but the longer Tiercel looked at her, the stronger his desire to run away became. Because he knew—he knew—that if he stayed here one moment more, something terrible would happen. Only he didn’t know what it was. And he didn’t know how to get away.

  “FIRE!” Henmon’s shout jarred Tiercel out of the dream-not-dream. The footman was pounding desperately on his locked door. He took a deep breath and began to cough wildly. Everything in his room was on fire and the room was rapidly filling with smoke. His bed—the curtains—even the rug that he’d pushed to one side—all were sheets of flame. With a yelp of dismay he snatched up his workbook and ran to unbolt his door. Fortunately, the area between the glyph and the door didn’t contain anything that could readily burn.

  Henmon took one step over the threshold, stared, and yanked Tiercel out of the room, shouting for servants and water buckets.

  FORTUNATELY, though everything in Tiercel’s bedroom that could possibly burn had caught fire, the fire hadn’t had time to take a really good hold before it had been discovered. By the time the Fire Watch arrived at the Rolfort townhouse, the flames had already been extinguished.

  “Do you have any idea what caused the fire, Lord Rolfort?” the Fire Warden asked.

  The family and most of the servants were gathered in the main parlor. It was after Midnight Bells. The room was chill, since the fires had been banked for night two bells ago and now every window in the place was open to air the house of the lingering scent of smoke.

  “Candles,” Lord Rolfort answered, with a look at Tiercel that was both irritated and disappointed. “My eldest decided to try reading in bed by candlelight, Light knows why. He fell asleep. It won’t happen again.”

  “Beds are for sleeping, chairs are for reading,” the Fire Warden said firmly, as if reciting a watchword. “If more people would remember that, there’d be fewer home accidents.” He glanced at Tiercel, and frowned. “Your boy doesn’t look at all well, if you don’t mind my saying so, Lord Rolfort.”

  In fact, Tiercel didn’t feel at all well, either. Once the initial terror and excitement of the fire had worn off, he realized that he felt feverish and exhausted. The clothes he’d been wearing when he did the spell were as soaked in sweat as if Henmon had been pouring water on him, not the flames, and despite that, he couldn’t keep his teeth from chattering.

  In fact, he could barely keep his eyes open.

  It was that—and not any lie he’d told—that had led his father to say what he had to the Fire Warden. Henmon had seen the candles in his room as he’d dragged him out, but the old footman had been too rattled to say quite where they’d been. And they were gone now, in any event, consumed by the flames.

  Tiercel felt guilty—as much as he felt anything other than weary—but he thought it would be just as well to let the misunderstanding stand. He really didn’t want to explain to his parents that he’d been doing magic up in his room tonight. Especially since the spell hadn’t worked.

  Only it had. He just hadn’t cast the spell he’d been meaning to. “Fire is the first and simplest spell of the High Magick . . .” It said that over and over again in all of the books on the High Magick that he’d read. He’d cast Fire. And maybe the woman and the Lake of Fire were just a hallucination and wouldn’t happen again.

  TO Tiercel’s great relief, the rest of the night—what there was of it—was unencumbered by dreams of any kind. But when he finally awoke it was nearly First Afternoon Bells, and he’d slept long past the time the Ship’s Bondsman would meet with the Captain of the Marukate. He felt far too giddy and light-headed to even get out of bed anyway.

  Not that it would have done me any good if I’d been there, he thought ruefully. He’d wanted to help, but all he’d done last night was nearly set the entire townhouse on fire. He hadn’t learned a single thing that would account—one way or the other—for the injuries to the Marukate’s hull, and now it was too late for it to matter. He was truly sorry for that, because it was very likely that the captain would lose his ship, and, as Harrier had said, it was pretty unlikely he’d run it onto some rocks if it had been wrecked where he said it had.

  Still, there was nothing Tiercel could do.

  But someday there will be. It isn’t fair for it to be one man’s word against another in a situation like this, with both of them having something to gain from being right. Someone should investigate who has nothing to gain. If I am ever a Magistrate, I promise I will make sure that that is always what happens. Someone should care about the truth, and only the truth.

  THAT evening Tiercel received a stern lecture from his father about his carelessness with candles. He apologized sincerely—he truly hadn’t meant to set anything on fire, no matter how he’d done it—and promised truthfully never to light another candle in his rooms. He’d certainly learned his lesson. High Magick belonged in books, and in the past. He never intended to try to cast another spell.

  He hated to deceive his parents—even by accident and omission—but he simply felt too embarrassed and ashamed to admit what he’d really been doing when the room caught on fire. Besides, he had been reading. Sort of. Just not in bed. And if he said that the room caught on fire because he’d cast a spell—not trying to cast a spell, but actually casting a spell—and not because one of the candles fell over and rolled, they wouldn’t believe him anyway. He didn’t quite believe him, and he’d been there. Better to leave matters the way they were.

  So he apologized sincerely, and promised to do better, and Mama dosed him with strengthening cordials and kept him home from Preparatory School the next day too, and on the whole, Tiercel was grateful to get off as lightly as he had.

  Only he hadn’t.

  IT was almost a sennight later, and Tiercel had done his best to forget the whole frightening and humiliating incident. It was the first night since the fire that he wasn’t sleeping on a trundle bed in his study, because the repairs to his bedroom were finally complete. The fire-damaged room had been scrubbed to within an inch of its life and completely repainted, but even with new curtains, new rug, and new bedding, it still smelled faintly of smoke and scorch. It looked very bare—all the odds and ends that used to clutter it up were gone, lost in the fire, and most of his clothes were still at the fuller’s and tailors being cleaned and repaired. And now Harrier would never have to make his report on his Naming Day gift, though he would have to confess to loaning it to a friend (hardly a major transgression, really), because the Compendium was one of the many things that had been lost in the blaze. Tiercel promised himself that he’d buy Harrier a “replacement” gift, and something that Harrier would probably like better.

  He lay on his back in the center of the bed—it was a new mattress, and felt strange—and was certain he’d never manage to fall asleep in this room turned strange and new.

  But he did. And suddenly he was back on the shore of the Lake of Fire again. Only this time it was far more real than it had been in his last vision. This time he could feel the heat of the wind on his skin, could feel the breeze blowing through his hair, smell the scents of burnt rock and sulfur, hear the pop and hiss of the burning lake, feel the itch in his eyes as the hot wind dried them.

  And most of all, he wasn’t him.

  “Welcome,” he heard. “I had nearly given up hope that you would come. Are you ready at last to accept the gifts I have for you?”

  It was as if when she spoke he could suddenly see her, although Tiercel knew she’d been there all along. The Fire Woman from his vision—and now, dream. The one who was horrifying and terrifying, though she only looked beautiful. The one that h
e wanted to go to, even though the thought revolted him. She was calling to him, just as she had in the vision. But it wasn’t him.

  And he knew, if whoever she was calling went to her, or if she noticed that Tiercel was there too, and could see her, something really terrible was going to happen.

  Suddenly her gaze sharpened, and Tiercel realized she had noticed he was there—or at least that something was. In another moment she might see him.

  HE awoke with a strangled yell, shaking with utter panic. For a moment he was convinced that the Fire Woman was right here in his room with him, and was half out of the bed before he was able to stop himself. But no. He was alone in his bedroom.

  She might not be here, but she’s real. He had no idea why he was so convinced of that. A dream. It was only a dream.

  He tried to convince himself of that, but he couldn’t. Tiercel had never been very good at lying to himself. This was something unlike anything he’d ever imagined to be possible—at least possible now, in the modern world—but he believed in it, and that frightened him even more. Things like the Fire Woman belonged to the Time of Mages. He knew she wasn’t human, but he didn’t even know what kind of Otherfolk she might be. All he knew was that if she got what she wanted, something terrible was going to happen. Unfortunately he didn’t know what it was. It was like starting a book in the middle.

  What he did know was that all of a sudden, magic wasn’t something safely locked away in the history books—or safely in the hands of the Temples and the Wildmages. It was right here. Stalking him. And he didn’t have the faintest idea of what to do about it.

  Eventually Tiercel calmed down enough to light his bedside lamp, and then managed to talk himself into getting out of bed and opening his curtains. The cheerful familiar light from the street calmed him further, pushing the images from the dream farther away. He lit more lamps, then got up and read in his study until dawn.