“I will never understand you.”
“Just as long as you find us something to eat. I’m starving.”
The two boys set off once again in the direction of a cookshop they remembered from the morning, where the food was both cheap and plentiful.
“ARE you sure it’s this way, Har?”
“I thought it was.”
The sun had set while they’d been walking back in the direction of their lodgings, and the lamps made all the streets look different than they had when they’d set out for the Library in the early afternoon. The two of them realized that they were not only completely lost, but completely lost in a part of Ysterialpoerin where—from the look of things—it would not be a good idea to stop and ask for directions.
Garbage clogged the drainage gutter running down the center of the narrow street, and rats scuttled through the piles of refuse that lay heaped in drifts along the walls. All of the windows that they saw were barred and shuttered, and the shutters themselves were chipped and battered.
Neither boy was entirely certain of how they’d ended up in this narrow maze of twisting alleyways when they’d been walking down a pleasant—though shabby—merchant street a moment or two before. They’d been on a street that sold books. . . .
“I’d better look at the map,” Tiercel said, reaching into the pocket in his cloak.
Harrier looked around. It was already so dark that they could barely make out each other’s faces, let alone the fine print and finer lines on the street map Tiercel had bought that morning. The walls of the alley hadn’t been whitewashed in living memory, and there weren’t any lanterns—even at the intersections—rendering their surroundings even gloomier. And of course, they didn’t have a lantern. They’d been sure they’d be back at their lodgings before it got dark.
Abruptly Harrier realized what Tiercel was about to do.
“Tyr, I’m really not sure it’d be a good idea to do that glowy thing right now,” Harrier said. Tiercel still hadn’t figured out how to make the globes of MageLight he could create go away.
“Well, without it we aren’t going to be able to see,” Tiercel answered, lowering his hand. He sounded irritated. “Find me something to cast it on, then, and I’ll use that. We can at least hide it, or stuff it under our cloaks, or something.”
Harrier really didn’t want to go poking around in the trash-heaps at the edges of the alley, but fortunately somebody had dumped the broken remains of an old chair among the debris. He pulled it cautiously free of its pile of garbage and was starting to pull it apart in order to get a handy length of wood when he heard the sound of many pairs of feet coming toward them. Torches flickered on the walls of the intersection at the end of the alley.
“Come out, street rats! It’s time to take your thrashing!” an oddly familiar voice bellowed. After a moment, Harrier recognized it as the stranger they’d bumped into in front of the library. He stared at the advancing torchlight, more in disbelief than in any recognition of possible personal danger. How had the stranger found them? And why had he bothered? As he was still staring at the light, Tiercel ran forward, grabbed his arm, and dragged him back up the alley in the other direction.
“I will find you!” the voice bellowed from behind them.
THEY no longer concerned themselves with trying to find their way out of whatever part of Ysterialpoerin they were lost in. All Tiercel cared about now was staying away from the creature that pursued them. He was sure it was the same creature that he’d met before, on the High Plains; whether it had also been the steward he’d bumped into outside the library, he wasn’t sure.
It didn’t matter.
Whether due to the stranger’s magic, or simply because the people who lived in this district, being no strangers to violence, knew enough to avoid it whenever possible, the alleys and backstreets down which they fled were completely deserted, despite the early hour. Tiercel and Harrier knew they were probably running in circles—they had to be; if they’d been running in a straight line they’d undoubtedly have reached one of the main streets by now. Even the few tiny shops that they passed were barred and shuttered, their windows dark.
“WE should stand and fight,” Harrier growled.
Both boys were sweaty and out of breath. It didn’t matter how fast they ran, or how far—and by now they were feeling their way through total darkness, as the last light had faded from the evening sky—every time they stopped to catch their breath, they heard the taunting voice of their pursuer half a street behind them, and the chase was on once more.
“And get killed?” Tiercel panted. “We don’t know how many people he has with him.”
“Okay. I should stand and fight. You should keep running,” Harrier amended.
“That’s not any better,” Tiercel said.
“Those seem to be our only choices.”
They saw the glare of torches behind them and staggered off down the alley once more.
“WE should have turned back there,” Tiercel said with resignation.
“It’s a dead end,” Harrier snarled, kicking the wall.
Tiercel spread his hands, and the air between them began to glow.
“Don’t do that!” Harrier said, automatically.
“If I’m going to die, I want to see who’s responsible,” Tiercel said. The small ball of MageLight hovered for a moment, then rose up to hover several feet above his head.
The alley was narrow, barely ten feet wide. Decaying garbage heaped the three walls of the dead end, its scent sickeningly sweet even in the cool night air. Buildings rose up five stories high on all three sides, but there were no windows within their reach. The ancient brick was crumbling and irregular, but not uneven enough to give enough purchase for climbing.
There was nothing anywhere within reach that could possibly be used as a weapon. Neither boy was carrying anything more threatening than their eating knives.
They waited in silence, panting, hearts hammering.
Nothing happened.
Their pursuer didn’t arrive.
“YOU know,” Harrier said after several minutes, “none of this makes any sense. Why chase us around this Dark-damned rabbit warren for an entire bell and then—when he’s got us cornered—not come finish us off?”
“Yes,” Tiercel said.
“ ‘Yes’ is the answer?”
“It’s a riddle. It’s not a ‘he,’ Harrier, it’s an ‘it.’ Something that isn’t human. It doesn’t think like a human being. When it came after us—me—on the Plains, it didn’t act human at all. I think it’s learning about . . . us.”
“About you, you mean,” Harrier said with sudden insight. “It wanted to see what you’d do when you thought it was going to kill you. I don’t see why it bothered. It already sent the Goblins after us.”
“No,” Tiercel said slowly. “I think that’s something else doing that. And I think this—whatever it is—is testing me.”
“Well . . . did you pass?” Harrier asked, still looking up the alleyway.
“I have no idea,” Tiercel answered. “Maybe I was supposed to confront it instead of running away from it. Try to set it on fire or something. But I can’t see how that could possibly have been a good idea.”
“Probably not,” Harrier said with a sigh. “We’re still lost, though,” he said after a moment.
“Not if this map is at all accurate,” Tiercel said with a faint grin, reaching into his cloak pocket once again.
ONCE they were no longer being hunted, and with Tiercel’s map to guide them, it took them only a few minutes to work their way out of the twisting maze of alleys they’d been lost in and back out onto one of the main streets. As soon as they could see the glow of street lamps in the distance, Tiercel sent the globe of MageLight to go sailing up into the sky. He had no idea what would happen to it, or if it would just keep rising forever, but until he could figure out how to unmake the things he could so easily make, it was a simpler solution than just having the blue balls of light fo
llow him around eternally.
They came out very near to the place where they’d gone in, back on the street of the booksellers. Though it was fully dark—and had been for some time—the street was well-lit by hanging lanterns, and filled with pedestrians, mainly students from the university. After their recent narrow escape, even Tiercel wasn’t tempted to linger, and with the aid of their streetmap they made their way to the main thoroughfare that had been their original destination.
After a late—and on Harrier’s part, much-appreciated—dinner at a cookshop, they returned to their lodgings to plan what to do next.
“WE can’t stay here,” Tiercel said, pacing the small room. “Now that it’s found us, who knows what it’ll do next?”
“We can’t just pack up and leave in the middle of the night. For that matter, the horses could use a good sennight’s rest before we set out again. And we haven’t even started buying supplies yet. There are towns between here and Windalorianan, sure, but if we want to get a good price—”
“No. I’ve been thinking. The Dragon’s Tail is pretty heavily settled. There will be inns all the way up the road, and no real place to get away from people anyway even if we do camp in someone’s field. Let’s sell the mule here, and buy supplies for over the Bazrahils in Windalorianan when we get there. It will be faster.”
“You’re sure?”
Tiercel nodded.
“All right. We can sell the mule tomorrow down at the horse market. But it’s not going to get us out of here any faster, because the horses still need to rest and fatten up before we head out again.”
“I want to leave tomorrow.”
“Without me, then. I’m not walking to Windalorianan when Lightning goes lame. They both need to be re-shod, too, and that means finding a farrier, and—”
“What if something happens because we stay here?” Tiercel demanded edgily. “Ysterialpoerin is almost the size of Armethalieh!”
“And has Magistrates, the City Watch, the Fire Watch, a detachment of the Militia—maybe there are even Wildmages here. You can’t be responsible for everything that happens in the world, Tyr.” Harrier watched Tiercel pace their tiny room, knowing it would take force to make him stop.
“I can when it’s my fault.”
“You said it wasn’t your fault that the Dark was coming back.”
Tiercel made a sound of frustrated exasperation and flung himself face-down on his bed.
Harrier leaned against the door, as much to keep Tiercel from rushing out through it as to keep out of Tiercel’s way. His sword lay on top of his bed. He could have brought it with him when they’d gone out earlier, but he hadn’t thought of it. Why go armed in a civilized place like Ysterialpoerin?
From now on, he didn’t care how civilized a place seemed—or whether or not he really knew how to use a sword. He was taking it with him everywhere.
The trouble was, Tiercel had a point. Harrier fingered the Wild-mage talisman around his neck, thinking it hadn’t been much help this evening. Something was still after Tiercel, and he had no more desire than Tiercel did to see innocent people harmed simply because they were in the way when whatever was chasing Tiercel came after him again. But at the same time, the two of them had been traveling fast and hard for sennights, and they needed to stop and rest as much as the horses did. Maybe they were safer in a big city than a small village.
And maybe not.
There was no way of knowing.
AFTER he had dispatched the echo of the Firecrown to its work, moonturns passed as Bisochim devoted himself entirely to his work. In its way, it was a task as subtle as wakening the desert to life in his old stronghold had been: water was life, but too much water, too soon, would have destroyed the life he sought to nurture there. And what he sought, above all, was Balance, not destruction. Above all things, he wished to avoid that which he saw in his vision: the clashing of armies, and war.
But the Light was powerful, and relentless. And the closer he came to success, the more possible it was that one of the Enemy might seek him out.
The voices in the fire were stronger now, urging him to take every care—not only for himself, but for the people he had sworn his oaths upon the Three Books to protect. It was the voices’ care for the Isvaieni that convinced Bisochim, once again, that what he was doing was right, for if they were truly no part of the Balance, they would hardly have urged him to a course of action that went so much against his solitary nature. But he knew they were right. The people of the Isvai must be protected, if there were any chance they were in danger.
He must know.
Once again he went down into the deep rock, to his scrying chamber, to the still black pool, and cast bonemeal and blood upon the water.
Once again the vision had not changed, though the Firecrown had walked the world for almost a season now. His enemies had grown beyond its powers, or there were too many. Perhaps it could destroy them all with time, but the compassion the Fire had taught him urged him not to gamble with the lives under his care.
He must defend the Isvaieni against the Light.
Light . . . such a positive word. Light was always good, was it not? But a child of the desert knew that Light was not always good. Light killed. Light sterilized. Light blinded.
And the Light was doing all those things now. Eventually, there would be nothing left but Light. The Light surely recognized what he was doing by now, and would be working to destroy him, destroy Saravasse. Eventually an army would come here, led by the champions of the Light.
In ancient times, armies had been mustered against peril, danger had been recognized, only at the eleventh hour, and so countless lives had been lost that could have been saved. He saw the danger now, long in advance. He would go out among the tribes and bring them to him, deep in the Barahileth, where they would be safe. He would create a paradise for them with his magic, here at the edge of the Lake of Fire. He would turn the desert into a garden. There would be peace and plenty for all.
But he must get them here first.
They would not come merely for his word, not if he told them he was bringing them here to keep them safe. The desert honed its people, burned away all that was not hard and lean and sharp. Desert people were steel forged in the fires of extremity. They did not flee from battle. If he told them that an army marched upon the Isvai, they would unite as he wished, true. But only as a prelude to war. The people of the Isvai lacked only a purpose to become the greatest army the world had ever known.
Very well. He would go among them speaking of war and battle, of fire and the sword. He would promise them death and enemies, and if only he knew that his greater purpose was to save them from both of these things, a small deception did not matter. All would become clear to them in time. Let them gird for battle. If the only way to unify them and lead them to where he needed them to be was for such a purpose, he could give them that purpose.
He would give them that purpose.
It was his destiny.
SHAIARA, Darak’s only living child, might have inherited her father’s staff of leadership at his death, but she would not have kept it if she had not been worthy of it. Though she had become their leader when she was barely a woman grown, she had led the Nalzandar Isvaieni for the past two years as ably as ever he had, and theirs was a way hard even by the hard standards of the desert, for her tribe lived by hunting. Only by hunting. They kept no herds, and only the few shotors needed to pack the tribe’s tents and supplies. They tended no gardens. They settled in no place for longer than a hand of days, because to do so would deplete the game and upset the Balance. They traded what they had in abundance—hides, green-cured in the sun—for what they did not make for themselves. Their diet was meat, a little grain, the few greens and bitter fruits that could be found growing wild. They drank only water; a child could grow to old age without so much as tasting anything sweet. They were hard, lean, bronze. A silent people by nature, more attuned to listening than to speaking, they were set apart by their si
lence at the yearly Gathering of the Tribes. For that reason, they tended to avoid the other tribes. Shaiara was their emissary. She did the trading, the negotiations for spouses, the needful interaction with those not of the Nalzandar who, to her peoples’ eyes, were as soft and alien as the city-dwellers of whom Shaiara had heard but never seen. And though it was that a lone traveler in the Madiran was always viewed with suspicion, all knew the ways of the Nalzandar, and it was a saying oft-repeated in the Isvai: “if one rides alone, that one is Nalzandar.”
So it was that Shaiara rode out alone one morning in the cold, grey light of desert dawn, toward an oasis a few hours away. The shotor beneath her was swift and strong, for her tribe bred the hardiest beasts in the desert, and she led a pack-shotor burdened with a tall stack of stiff, clattering hides. If there was not a tribe at Sapthiruk Oasis when she came, she would wait, for she was patient, as a hunter must be, and she meant to find a buyer willing to trade for the hides she carried with woven robes and desert cloaks. Such things were expensive . . . but these were no ordinary hides. The stacks bound to the back and sides of the shotor bore soft fur of russet and honey, the colors of the desert sunset. This was the fruit of three seasons of hunting, the hides of the elusive feneric, a carnivore the size of an ikulas-hound, whose fur was much prized by tribesmen and city-dwellers alike for its softness and colors.
But as she neared Sapthiruk, she immediately knew that something was . . . off.
It was signaled at first by the unwonted growth of vegetation, long before the oasis itself was in view. There was grass here. Grass! Oh not, perhaps, the sort of thing that a city-dweller would have thought of as grass . . . not a lush meadow, nor rolling turf. This was desert grass, gray-green and growing in tufts. But it should not have been here at all.
And there were herds grazing here. Not just a few, but . . . many. As many as if it were a Gathering of the Tribes, though this was neither the time nor the place for that.
The Enduring Flame Trilogy 001 - The Phoenix Unchained Page 24
