The Phoenix Endangered (21 page)

He knew that there were many who would name him foolish and even wicked for setting his will against the Light. Everyone was taught—
he
had been taught—that the Light was always good. But the children of the desert should know better. Light scoured. Light blinded. Light killed. It was Darkness that was the friend and ally of the desertborn, and the truth that all Wildmages should have understood without any need for Bisochim to teach it to them was that both Light and Darkness were vital to the Balance. It was for this reason first of all that he worked to restore the true Balance by bringing Darkness back into the world. The fact that he could save his Bonded from dying at the end of his brief life—because he would not die at all—only added urgency to his task. For Saravasse’s sake most of all, he must succeed.

And to protect the Isvaieni from becoming the army that would face the Light in futile battle, he would hide them here, where they could not be found. To accomplish that task, Bisochim had once more donned the blue robes of an Isvaieni Wildmage and gone forth among the tribes, something he had not done in many years. He had spoken to the leaders of many of the tribes—urgently, persuasively. But not of their own safety. No. Desert life itself was a battle for survival; there was no battle from which the Isvaieni would run. Instead, he had spoken of war, had spoken of the sanctuary in the Barahileth as a place of
only temporary retreat, a place where the tribes could gather and make themselves strong against the day when they would sweep the enemy from their desert home. It was the only way he could gather them together, the only way he could lead them to safety. And for the sake of what he had told them, they had agreed to follow where he led.

If not for the numerous wells Bisochim had summoned up out of the sand, his people would have died upon the journey to the Lake of Fire, for never had so many Isvaieni—with all their flocks and herds—attempted to travel together. Survival in the desert meant not overtaxing the desert’s scant resources by gathering too many people in one place: the only time the tribes came together was for the yearly Gathering, when they spent a few short days at one of the largest oases to be found in the entire Isvai. For the rest of the year, each tribe followed its own path between Sand and Star, hunting, tending its flocks, and perhaps meeting occasionally to trade. Now they moved across the desert as if they were in fact the army of Bisochim’s vision, but this army journeyed not to war, but to a paradise such as none of them had ever imagined, a place where they might spend all their hours in idleness and play.

Bisochim had dreamed, once he had settled his Isvaieni on the meadows and fields at Telinchechitl and returned to his fortress, of going back at once to his greater task, for the work of building the bridge, slowly and with infinite care, that would allow him to make that vital adjustment to the Great Balance. He must allow the
possibility
of Darkness to reenter the world without doing anything that might summon up the full hideous manifestation of it that had once nearly scoured the world bare of all life. Once he had accomplished that task, the waning power of magic would be revived and refreshed. He could bind his years to Saravasse’s. He would share in her immortality, not she in his mortality. The Wild Magic would be reborn, a proper measure of the world it shaped, as it had not been for centuries.

This task had occupied him for years, and at last he was close enough to hope that another turn of the seasons, or
two, or three—five at the most—might see his work completed. He begrudged every instant he spent away from that precious labor, even on the most necessary of tasks, but he had been resigned, even before he had arrived, to the knowledge that there would be one last problem to solve before returning to the work of setting the Balance back into true would be possible.

In the Isvai, the tribes looked for aid in the ultimate problem of their survival to the Wildmages. Those who wore the blue robe were members of no tribe, and of all. In service to the Wild Magic, they went where they were needed: protecting the people from the ravages of the Sandwind, leading them to new wells when the old ones failed, finding the lost, healing the sick and the injured when they could, and providing counsel to help the Isvaieni live the lives the Balance asked of them. Between Sand and Star, no tribe trusted the lone traveler, for one who traveled alone might be a thief or an outcast. In the Isvai, tribe met only with tribe for the safety of all. Only those who wore the blue robes of the Wild Magic were exempt from this law; a Wildmage might travel with this tribe or that for a season, but all knew that those who held the Three Books walked alone upon the sand, listening always for the voice of the Wild Magic.

For many years, Bisochim had hoped that others who bore the Three Books would see what he had seen. That he would gain allies. Bisochim had never approached any of his brethren openly, but he had watched them carefully. Should any of them even begin to question the insidious doctrines of the Light, he had vowed that he would seek them out to offer his friendship and support. But such a day had never come, and so he had realized that those who had once been his brothers would someday become his enemies. The other Wildmages did not understand, as he did, that the Balance was flawed.

It had not surprised him that there had been no Wildmages among his Ingathering. He would have been more surprised if there had been: undoubtedly the False Light
that they served had led them to keep themselves far from him, lest he show them the truth and gain powerful allies. He knew that once he took the tribes beyond their grasp, they would begin to move against him. They must. The Light would demand it. They would, in that moment, become his enemies as much as that unknown champion against whom he had sent the shadow of the Firecrown.

He made one last bargain with himself. If the other Wildmages had merely fled the Isvai for the safety of the
Iteru
-cities, he would leave them in peace. The Wildmages of old had lived in harmony with a Balance that encompassed both Dark and Light. Surely—when his work was done—his brethren could strike such a balance as well.

But this hope was disappointed as well.

It took almost a fortnight after his return to the Barahileth before Bisochim could leave the tribes to their own devices. It took that much time for the Isvaieni to believe that a place so unlike anything most of them had ever seen could be real, and a place that they were meant to stay. And it took nearly all the days of those sennights for the tribes to settle the places where they would place their tents, for there must be places found for tents, and flocks, and cookfires among the fountains and the trees. But at last Bisochim was able to leave the Isvaieni to the care of their leaders, return to his stronghold, and descend to the deepest chamber within it.

Even Bisochim was not certain of how far beneath the earth that chamber lay, for it was not a place he had made, but one he had found: a perfect bubble of black glass cast up by the Lake of Fire at some point in the distant past. He had made only two changes to what he had discovered here: he had smoothed the floor so that it was perfectly even, and in the center of the chamber, he had called a small pool of water from the deep earth. The pool was still and black, and he used its water for no purpose but his magic. Now he cast blood and powdered bone upon its surface, for he had spent a moonturn and more leading the tribes to this place, and sennights before that convincing
them to come, and he must know what the other Wildmages had decided to do.

The spell he cast did not show him the present. There were other, simpler, means of seeing that. And to see where a man or woman was in the world at the moment he looked upon them would not tell Bisochim what they meant to do. Only Time could tell him that. He gazed now into the pool, and saw the Wildmages of the Isvai gathered together, an army of grim purpose. They were mounted upon
shotors
, and led many more, and the
shotors
that they led were heavy-laden with waterskins. Enough, perhaps, to let them make their way across the Barahileth in pursuit of their people, if their magic was strong enough to permit them to sense the Isvaieni through the wards that Bisochim had set around his stronghold. And it would not even require magic—just now, and for sennights to come—to discover the way to the Lake of Fire. The passage of thousands of people and their herds across the desert had left a trail that it would not need magic to follow.

But why and when and how they meant to follow did not matter. The intent was enough. Their plan must not be allowed to come to pass.

And so Bisochim cast a second spell, a spell that would show him not What Would Be, but What Was. He saw the Blue-Robes as they sought one another across the sands of the Isvai. And he drew upon the power he had gained to send storm after storm across the Isvai, harrowing and scouring the desert with lethal Sandwinds until not one of them remained alive.

To accomplish this task was the work of many days, for to call and control a Sandwind—many Sandwinds—with such precision required constant attention, and Bisochim had no desire to harm the desert or its creatures any more than he must. But his enemies must be destroyed for the good of all.

Bisochim slept only rarely now, for stronger and stronger spells sustained him, and the day did not hold enough hours. To listen for the subtle voices of the fire took all his
concentration and skill, yet those voices contained the information to guide him—both to restore the Balance, and to keep his people safe. In gathering the tribes, he had been too long away from them, lost precious time. But when he was done with this task, exhaustion claimed him, and Bisochim surrendered to a rare period of true and precious sleep.

“M
ASTER
? M
ASTER
?”

The soft voice of one of his inhuman servants woke him. It had taken all his art to give the creature a voice, for it was simple enough to give stone the shape of a man and the semblance of life, and nearly as simple to conjure watchers and guardians out of the air itself, but to give either the power of speech was a skill that had eluded him for years. He had only bothered to do it for one of his servants, for what would they need to talk to him about? Now he was grateful that he had.

“Yes?” He sat up and regarded the stone statue he had named Zinaneg wearily. He knew the creature would not have roused him except for something he himself would consider urgent.

“Your kinsmen fight among themselves. There is blood,” the creature said in its soft inhuman voice.

Bisochim rolled quickly from his sleeping mat and flung on his blue robes. For so many years he had refused to wear them, for he disliked the deference the tribes had given him. The deference, he had thought then and still believed, should be accorded to the Gods of the Wild Magic, and to the Balance, not to those who only did what they could to keep the Balance. Now the robes had become necessary once more.

By the time he reached the garden below the lake, the fight was over. The ring of watchers—a mixture of Laghamba and Tabingana Isvaieni, with a few scattered watchers from other tribes—parted like a dune before the Sandwind at the sight of his blue robe. At its center, one
man stood over another, his blood-smeared
geschak
in his hand.

“Tharam, what have you done here?” Bisochim kept his voice calm and level as he walked forward and knelt at the side of the blood-stained body lying upon the grass. Breath yet remained in the still form, though the wound was deep and had been meant to kill. He stretched out his hands, slowing the bleeding, drawing upon Saravasse’s power to begin the work of healing. Around him, he heard the watchers murmur in amazement, for he had asked no aid, called upon none of the watching Laghamba Isvaieni to contribute power to the Healing, as would have any of the other Wildmages they knew.

“Limrac insulted me, Wildmage,” Tharam said. “How could I let such a thing go unpunished?” His voice was troubled now that his anger had passed, for while quarrels and feuds were as frequent among the Isvaieni as among any people anywhere, they began and ended in harsh words. For a man to shed the blood of another of his own tribe was cause for immediate banishment. At the Gathering of the tribes, all were bound by the Gathering Peace, and to shed the blood of a member of another tribe would be cause for the same instant banishment.

But this was not the Gathering, and the Gathering Peace did not bind the Isvaieni now. Now, for the first time, the thousands of Isvaieni were forced into each others’ company not for days, but for moonturns.

On the march it had not mattered, for no Isvaieni was fool enough to brawl with his neighbor on the move, when the desert lay all around them, an eternal and unsleeping enemy. And when they arrived at their new home, amazement at so much luxury—endless grass for the flocks, and sweet water, and unfamiliar trees bearing delicious fruit—had kept the Isvaieni quiet for a few sennights more. Thus it was that, in the first days after their arrival, Bisochim saw none of the things that he saw so clearly now, kneeling beside Limrac’s Healed body.

As soon as the shock of reaching their unfamiliar new
home wore off, the trouble would have begun. There were nearly three dozen tribes who called the Isvai “home.” Some tribes counted their members in the hundreds, and their tents would fill even Sapthiruk Oasis when they came to water their flocks. Other tribes—like the Nalzindar—could not number even two score among their people. All were used to days spent in hard labor. The Isvaieni were not accustomed to idleness, and there was little for them to do here. There was nothing for them to hunt in the Barahileth, and there was food in abundance—even for so many—from Bisochim’s flocks and herds and fields and orchards. Nor need the Isvaieni tend them, for Bisochim’s magical servants did that work. And the Isvaieni’s own beasts need not be herded and guarded either, for they would not wander away from the water and rich forage—there was nothing beyond it but sterile sand.

Without the fountains that constantly misted the air with water, all that grew would wither away and the air itself would be too hot to breathe. And for this reason, there was as little place for the people to go to escape each other’s company as there was reason for their animals to stray. In deep night, when the sands cooled, the Isvaieni could leave the protection of the gardens and their fountains and go out into the desert, it was true, but during the day they must remain packed into intolerable closeness to one another. Grievances that could be ignored during a Gathering, or set aside during a chance meeting at an oasis, festered and grew until they must be answered in blood. This might be the first such quarrel, but he knew—with sinking heart—that it would not be the last. He must craft a net for the anger of the young warriors—and quickly.