The Enduring Flame Trilogy 001 - The Phoenix Unchained

by James Mallory

  DESPITE Harrier’s misgivings, it wasn’t actually all that difficult to get back into the cave.

  They waited a bell and a half—the Temple rang out the bells, just as if they were back in Armethalieh—and just as First Night Bells was ringing, they made their way back toward the cavern mouth. It had already been fully dark for quite some time, and the air was filled with the scent of flowers from the ornamental gardens; the night-blooming varieties had the heaviest perfume.

  They had rented a lantern from one of the lantern-booths, but they’d blown it out as soon as they could do so inconspicuously. A number of the park’s patrons had left at sunset, and those that remained had gravitated either to the extensive gardens—which were brilliantly lit for evening—or to attend the Evening Litany of the Light in Imrathalion Temple. The building was almost as beautiful from the outside at night as it was on the inside during the day. At night, the light streamed outward through the many windows of colored glass set into its walls, turning the entire building into a giant ornamental lantern of a sort.

  Harrier paused for just a moment to admire it, one part of his mind thinking that with the Temple so brightly lit, anybody in or around it wouldn’t be able to see anything outside it—such as the two of them. Then he turned away, following his friend—his idiot friend—into the dark. Tiercel always made his plans seem so logical. That was always the trouble.

  They reached the wooden barrier, groping their way over its surface as if they were blind, because by now they were very far away from the lights and any light of their own would attract far too much attention. The barrier was pressed right across the cave mouth, and they had to move it in order to get around behind it. It made a grating sound as they shifted it, and Harrier’s heart hammered guiltily in his chest. He didn’t think even Tiercel could talk his way out of the situation if they were caught.

  But no one caught them, and they slipped behind the wooden panel, shifting it back into place behind them.

  “DO you mind lighting that thing now, o great and powerful High Mage?” Harrier asked, when they’d spent a few minutes groping their way along the path by touch. The lanterns that had been lit for the daytime visitors had all been doused for night, and the cave was absolutely lightless. Even though—as far as Harrier remembered—the corridor was straight and the path beneath his feet was smooth, he still found himself staggering and stumbling, bumping into Tier-cel and the walls. It was blacker than the back of his closet in here, and he had the spooky feeling that there wasn’t any air, though he’d been fine when they’d been down here before.

  “Oh. Yeah. Sure.” Tiercel sounded a little embarrassed. He stepped away from Harrier, and a moment later the lantern glowed to life.

  With the light from the lantern it seemed a little easier to breathe, though it didn’t really show them much more of the cave. If Tiercel showed any sign at all of casting one of his MageLight spells, though, Harrier vowed, he was going to smack him so hard he’d forget all about being a High Mage.

  They quickly returned to the main cavern they’d been in before. It had taken the tour about an hour to reach it the last time, with all the stops and starts; the two of them, alone, got there in half that time.

  According to Amalgar and Eredor, there’d been either a big battle or a village of Endarkened creatures here once; no one remembered which. Though Tiercel’s lantern cast only a few feet of light in their immediate vicinity, Harrier remembered that the floor here was as smooth and even as if it had been built by human hands, and the sloping walls of the cave were covered with a thick glittery something that looked like frost. They’d all been told not to touch it, but he had, and it had crumbled under his fingers like salt. Standing in the middle of the cavern now, neither of them could see the walls at all by the light of their single lantern.

  “I think we want to go this way,” Tiercel said. His voice had a creepy flat sound in the cave, as if it ought to echo and didn’t. Harrier had noticed that the last time they were down here. In some places in the cave, sounds had echoed so much it was deafening. In others—like this cavern—sounds were weirdly flat.

  “You mean, past the rope that blocks off that section of the cave from people going into it?” Harrier said resignedly.

  “That’s right,” Tiercel answered matter-of-factly.

  Harrier didn’t ask how he knew. It looked familiar to him, too.

  The lantern flame flickered and danced as they ducked under the rope, and Harrier’s sword rang loudly against the stone wall as he twisted to follow Tiercel. He hissed in dismay—that echoed, as loud as all the Thousand Bells of Armethalieh rung at once—but there obviously wasn’t anybody down here at night.

  Tiercel held the lantern high as he walked. It occurred to Harrier that they might get lost down here. Back in the other section of the cave there’d been signs, and a marked trail, and lanterns at regular intervals. Here there was nothing but empty places where lanterns could go, and cryptic marks that he couldn’t read chalked onto the walls.

  They were moving down one of the long narrow corridors, the kind that Amalgar had said had been carved by the Endarkened out of the rock when they couldn’t find a passageway going where they wanted it to go. Harrier trailed his hand along the rock as he walked. It was smooth under his fingers, as smooth as any wall built at home. After a few minutes they reached a cross-passage.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  Tiercel hesitated.

  “Well,” Harrier said, pointing, “that one leads up, and that one leads down, so we should probably go down, don’t you think? Because if whatever you’re looking for was waiting for us on the surface, you’d have found it already.”

  Tiercel looked at him curiously. “How do you know? Where the corridors go, I mean. I thought you’d told me everything you dreamed. And it’s all level.”

  “I did. And I didn’t dream this. I just know.”

  Tiercel grinned at him. “ ‘Just know?’ Now you know how I feel most of the time.”

  They followed Harrier’s lead.

  THAT corridor opened out into one of the drop-offs Eredor had told them about; a narrow ledge surrounding . . . something. Tiercel wanted to light it with MageLight, and Harrier wouldn’t let him; there’d be no place to get rid of the glowing ball of light later.

  But there was a wind rushing up from below, cold and soft and steady, and if the lantern hadn’t been well-shielded it would definitely have gone out. They were obviously standing at the edge of a very deep drop.

  The ledge was narrow enough so they had to walk single file and be very careful, and neither of them liked it much. They had no idea how far the ledge extended, or if it would just stop and they’d have to turn back and try to find another way, but soon they came to a set of wide shallow steps. By silent agreement, they followed them down into the dark. Neither of them wanted to stay on the ledge one moment longer than they had to.

  It was a long walk.

  At the bottom there was a sense of . . . space. Without the stone wall to reflect its light back at them, their lantern was only a dim spark in a great darkness, and they’d never been in this part of the caves before.

  “I’m going to make a light,” Tiercel said.

  “No!” Harrier said instantly.

  “I have to.” Tiercel sounded slightly panicked. “I thought the lantern would be enough, but it isn’t. I can’t see where we’re going. What if we fall into something? I have to!” Before Harrier could stop him—or hit him, the way he’d vowed to—Tiercel had set the lantern down on the ground and flung his arms wide. The familiar ball of MageLight began to grow between his hands.

  But before it quite took shape, the radiance streamed upward from his hands like smoke from a bonfire. It reached the ceiling of the chamber, and swirled through the stone like ink dropped into water, spreading until the entire ceiling of the cavern began to glow a bright unnatural blue.

  Now it was as bright as midsummer noon in the cavern, and Harrier blinked, squinting.
“I didn’t do that,” Tiercel said hastily.

  “Sure,” Harrier said, unconvinced. He looked around.

  The cavern revealed by the MageLight was huge—bigger than anything else they’d seen inside the mountain. Without the glowing ceiling, they’d never have seen it all; if Harrier had decided to take a walk across it—he didn’t think he would, actually—it would probably take him an hour to get to the other side.

  In the center of the floor of the chamber there was a huge lake of black glass. It was perfectly round, and gleamed like a mirror in the brightness of the ceiling. Because of the brilliance of the light, he could see the countless crack-lines that formed a green and gold tracery in its surface.

  “Really” Tiercel said. “I was just going to make a small one. One I could move around. I wasn’t going to do something like this. I just—It just—Harrier, I think somebody did this before.”

  He sounded excited, as if he’d discovered a new fact, and that, more than anything else, convinced Harrier that Tiercel was telling the truth. Not that Tiercel would lie to him in the first place—Tiercel wouldn’t lie to anyone, that was what was always getting him in so much trouble—but there were actually some rare occasions upon which Tiercel Rolfort was wrong about something.

  “Yeah. Okay. Some other High Mage made the ceiling glow,” Harrier said.

  “Maybe.” Tiercel didn’t sound as sure this time.

  “Can you make it stop?”

  “No.”

  “Great.”

  “At least we can see now.”

  Harrier concentrated on the cavern. Tiercel was always at his most irritating when he was looking at the bright side of disasters. At the edges of the cavern were more of the stone icicles Harrier had seen elsewhere, and along the far wall there were a series of round holes going halfway up the cave wall. They looked like nests for birds or bats—really big ones—and Harrier wondered what they’d been for. Probably, he decided, he didn’t really want to know.

  Unfortunately for Harrier’s temper, it turned out to be a good thing that they could see every detail of this cavern so clearly, because without the cavern’s brilliant illumination, they never would have found the exit they were looking for. Even with the help of so much light, it was nearly Watch Bells, as closely as Harrier could guess the time, by the time they found the way out they needed.

  THE corridor leading off from the huge cavern was narrow, and their bodies blocked the light coming from the space behind, leaving them with only the illumination from the lantern they carried, but even so, Tiercel didn’t suggest using MageLight again.

  He could hear water running, and knew that it was the underground river that he’d heard in his dream. He had a crawly unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach, the same sort that he associated with drawing the glyphs, but much stronger. He hadn’t had it around Roneida—but then, his magic had been completely exhausted then, so he probably wouldn’t have been able to sense anything at all, now that he came to think about it.

  He had no intention of letting Harrier know about it, though. Because Harrier would either want to turn around and head back the way they’d come—and by now they were probably in a certain amount of trouble, because somebody would have noticed that their horses hadn’t been claimed when the park closed—or want to find whatever it was and hit it with his sword, and Tiercel didn’t think either of those things was really the right thing to do.

  Was there another High Mage here somewhere? Could High Mages sense each others’ presence? Only the other times he’d felt like this—the various points along their journey, and in Sentarshadeen, just at first—there hadn’t been a High Mage anywhere. He was pretty sure of that. If High Mages were all that common, the Wildmages would know about them. He was absolutely certain of that.

  They reached the end of the corridor. It was a relief in one way, because the passageway was so narrow that it was barely wider than they were. Harrier’s shoulders had scraped along the sides as they’d walked, and if Tiercel wobbled at all, either left or right, he’d banged into the sides. He’d been okay before, when they’d been down here with the tour and the caves were brightly lit—and they hadn’t gone into such narrow spaces—but in the corridor, even though he knew better, the sense of being trapped, buried alive, was almost too strong to ignore. He was at the edge of panic, down here in the dark, and he didn’t want Harrier to know about that, either.

  On the other hand, the place they came to was obviously another huge cavern. All they could see was a lot of darkness, and the puddle of light around their feet from the lantern. The trouble was, the lantern had been getting dimmer and dimmer for the last several minutes. It was almost out of oil, and when it went out, he was going to have to cast MageLight again, and Tiercel hadn’t liked the feeling he’d gotten inside when the ceiling had lit up—as if things were spiraling out of his control in a way that was so far beyond “dangerous” that he wished he’d agreed with everything that Harrier had ever said.

  Suddenly Harrier let out a stifled quacking noise, as if he were trying to shout, but very quietly, and grabbed Tiercel’s shoulder. When Tiercel looked where he was looking, he saw two globes of orange fire rising up from the floor of the cave. And the crawly unsettled feeling was so strong he felt as if he wanted to run—only he couldn’t quite decide on a direction.

  “Welcome,” a deep voice said. “I have been waiting for you.”

  Twelve

  Into the Elven Lands

  DO IT,” HARRIER said in a strangled voice, and Tiercel needed no more encouragement. He dropped the lantern—not even stopping to set it down this time—and spun MageLight from his fingers. At his feet the broken lantern flared into a last brief moment of life as the puddle of spilled oil ignited and burned away with a huff. Tiercel hardly noticed. He was forcing all of his will into the glyph that summoned MageLight, calling his power until the effort left him dizzy and a shimmering foglike ball of blue larger than a haywagon rolled slowly into the air. It showed him a space even larger than the cavern with the glass lake, a cavern filled with stone rivers and icicles and fantastic frozen shapes in a rainbow of colors.

  And in the middle of it, something was alive.

  It was big, and black, and shiny, and for some reason, even though it was at the bottom of a cave, it had wings. The glowing lights he and Harrier had seen a moment ago were its eyes; its head was the size of a fishing boat and it looked as if it could swallow a horse without choking.

  “That’s better, isn’t it?” the voice said again. The enormous head nodded at the ball of MageLight, and the golden eyes blinked slowly. “I can see very well in the dark, but humans can’t, you know.”

  It was talking.

  “You’re a dragon,” Tiercel said, suddenly recognizing what the creature must be.

  “Yes,” the dragon said, sounding pleased. “I am.”

  The dragon was what was making him feel this way, he realized. It was like standing next to a hot stove, but instead of heat, the dragon radiated crawliness. Knowing that didn’t make the feeling go away, but somehow recognizing the source of it made it much easier to deal with.

  “Well,” Tiercel said, after a long pause during which nobody said anything, “what are you doing here?”

  “Oh. That. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Waiting for us?” Harrier demanded, sounding outraged. “You couldn’t have known we’d be coming.”

  The dragon sighed. “Harrier Gillain, we’ve known Tiercel would be coming since before he was born. Oh, I haven’t been here that long. Dragons are creatures of magic, but we need to eat, and there’s not much to hunt around here these days. Besides, I was promised, well, a very long time ago, that I’d never have to hunt for myself again. And I prefer not to. But I have been waiting long enough to get hungry. So we should go.”

  “Go?” Tiercel asked, hearing his voice slide upward. “Where are we going?”

  The dragon sighed again. “We’re going to the Elven Lands, which is whe
re you wanted to go in the first place. It’s not that I don’t think that travel isn’t broadening for young minds, but Jermayan doesn’t think you’d reach your destination on foot—leaving aside the matter that it would take you another year to get there. So we’ll take a faster route.”

  “I, er, ah, um. Jermayan?” Tiercel asked.

  “My Bonded. You know, you really can ask all these questions after I’ve had dinner.”

  “We’re going to see the King of the Elves?” Tiercel couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. Maybe “Jermayan” was a common Elven name. He hoped so.

  “Certainly not. We’re going to Karahelanderialigor.”

  “Kara-Kara-hara-ha—” Harrier stuttered.

  “You can learn how to pronounce it later,” the dragon said crisply. “Do come along.”

  It raised itself to its feet—apparently it had been lying down before—and now it simply loomed. Tiercel had always known that dragons were big—“as large as the sky,” the old nursery-rhyme went—but stories couldn’t compare with seeing a dragon in the flesh. It was as big as one of Harrier’s full-rigged deep-water cargo ships.

  “Please,” he said, a little breathlessly. “We can’t just call you ‘dragon.’ And you know both our names.”

  “My name is Ancaladar,” the dragon said kindly.

  “No it isn’t,” Harrier said instantly, and Tiercel groaned. But he felt a sinking feeling as well. Jermayan-and-Ancaladar;Jermayan-and-Ancaladar, his mind chanted.

  This wasn’t just any black dragon. This was Star-Crowned Ancaladar, who had fought against the Endarkened, whose Bonded was Jermayan Dragon-rider, King of the Elves.

  “Oh?” the dragon responded in offended tones. “Perhaps you know best, young Master Gillain.” Without another word, he turned himself gracefully around and began to walk off. There was a loud rasping sound as his scales slithered over the stone.

  Tiercel aimed a kick at Harrier’s ankle. “Do you know who that is?” he hissed.