The Phoenix Endangered (37 page)

“Wait—wait—wait—” Harrier gasped. “If we’re going to do this incredibly stupid thing, we’ll need horses.”

“You’re going with me?” Tiercel asked in disbelief.

Harrier simply smacked him.

A
FEW MINUTES
later they rode out through the gates on a pair of horses from the Consul’s private stables. They hadn’t had to go far at all to get them; half-a-dozen horses and the same number of
shotors
were being held right at the gate, standing saddled and bridled and ready to go behind a line of City Guard. Tiercel wasn’t sure what their purpose was: last-minute escape? Bribes for the enemy army? He didn’t think they’d work for either purpose. Despite that, he wasn’t quite sure how Harrier had managed to talk the Captain of the City Guard into giving them two of the horses and opening the gate. Saying “my friend has something he wants to try,” really didn’t seem to Tiercel as if it was a really persuasive argument.

“I don’t quite see…” he said, as they rode out through the gate.

“Oh, come on, Tyr. You remember Batho.”

“No.”

“He was on the wall the day we came. He wasn’t the Captain of the Guard then, but Gurilas deserted when the refugees arrived, and he was promoted.”

“Clear as mud.”

“So, he’s a friend of the Telchi’s, and I’ve been training beside him for almost a month, and he knows I’m the Telchi’s apprentice, and he probably actually thinks we want to make a run for it, and won’t he be surprised?”

Tiercel would have laughed—Harrier’s bizarre sense of humor surfaced at the oddest moments—but he happened to glance up. Even on the northern side of the city, they could still see the column of the advancing army. It was getting close. “Come on,” he said. “We need to hurry.”

They spurred their horses into a gallop.

I
F THE ADVANCING
Isvaieni were surprised to see their path barred by two lone riders, their leaders gave no sign of it. To Harrier’s ill-concealed astonishment (he did his best not to show how stunned he was, but the Telchi had said that every thought he had was displayed on his face for the world to see, and Harrier had no reason to doubt it), when they brought their horses to the front of the advancing horde (calling them “the Darkspawn army,” accurate or not, had seemed a lot funnier when he couldn’t see them), the line of
shotors
slowed, then stopped. If they hadn’t been moving at the slowest of slow walks, they all would have started banging into each other immediately, but all that happened was that a sort of
ripple
of stillness spread through the army, as rider after rider brought his
shotor
to a halt.

One of the many lessons the Telchi had been teaching him that wasn’t immediately involved with hitting someone or avoiding being hit was in learning to estimate, at a glance and at a distance, the number of people in a group. Harrier hadn’t quite been sure what purpose learning something that arcane could have. Now he knew. It was so that he knew that there were between four and five thousand people out here. Nearly as many as there were still inside the city. And all of these were prepared to fight.

“We want to talk,” Tiercel said quickly, before the other man could say anything. “My name is Tiercel Rolfort. I’m from Armethalieh. It’s a city in the north. I want to know… what you want.”

The leader of the army stared at Tiercel for a long moment. A
shotor
was a good bit taller than a horse, so he was looking down. Harrier had a desperate urge to reach for his swords, but the man was armed, and so were the men on both sides of him. Harrier wasn’t sure how quickly Tiercel could cast a spell, but he wasn’t sure it was fast enough to keep them from getting killed if Harrier did something that blatantly provocative.

“Once Golden Armethalieh was the last defense against the Darkness,” the man said slowly. “I, Zanattar of the Lanzanur Isvaieni, say this. Now Armethalieh is a crucible of error and Taint, just as the
Iteru
-cities are. Its day for Cleansing will come.”

“You’re wrong,” Tiercel said firmly. “Armethalieh isn’t Tainted. And neither is Tarnatha’Iteru. But—”

“You follow the False Balance. Since the time of the Great Flowering, the Balance of the World has been out of true, for the Light destroyed the great evil that beset the world in that time—as was only right—but those who kept the Light in those days did not stop where they should have, and so ever since that day, the Great Balance has been tipping more and more away from what the Wild Magic means it to be. Generation after generation has followed this False Balance, upholding it for their own purposes. They have taught that Light is always good. But the children of the desert know better. Light scours. Light blinds. Light kills. It is Darkness that is the friend and ally of the desertborn, and the True Balance contains both Darkness and Light. This is the Balance as it was kept in ancient times, the Balance that will be restored to the land.”

You’ve got to be joking.
Harrier didn’t need to see Tiercel’s face to know he was as stunned as Harrier was. You didn’t need to be a Wildmage to know that this was crazy
talk. Anybody who’d ever gone to Light-Day services knew it.

“No,” Tiercel said urgently. “Zanattar, you have to listen to me. The Light sent me here because—”

He didn’t get a chance to finish. Harrier saw Zanattar reach for his sword, and he cried out and spurred his horse forward, reaching back to draw his swords, and Tiercel raised his hands, and a wall of purple light appeared between him and the Isvaieni army.

Fortunately Harrier hadn’t drawn his swords before Tiercel cast MageShield, because the sudden appearance of the glowing wall of light made his mount plunge and rear, and he needed both hands to control it. Tiercel was having the same problem.

It took the two of them several minutes to calm the animals. The horses would have been happy to simply bolt, but in one direction there was the wall of Mageshield, and in the other there was the wall of the city. Frankly, Harrier would have been happy to simply get off and walk, if his mount would cooperate by holding still for long enough.

When it finally did, he looked up to see that the wall of MageShield extended as far as he could see. He looked up. It went as high as he could see, too, arcing over the city.

“Tiercel?” he said.

“The Light sent me here because there’s Darkness somewhere out there in the desert,” Tiercel said quietly. After a moment, Harrier realized he was finishing the sentence Zanattar hadn’t let him say.

“You’ve cast MageShield all around the city,” Harrier said.

“I had to,” Tiercel said. “Anything less, and they’d just have come around it.”

Like the flames of a fire, the shield wasn’t quite opaque. Through the barrier, Harrier could see—dimly—the Isvaieni army. They weren’t approaching closely—in fact, they’d retreated—but they were spreading out all along the front of it in an ominous mass.

MageShield didn’t block sound at all. He could hear the sounds of shouting, voices mingled and blending until the only thing he could really make out was that they were all angry. It was a bone-chilling sound.

“We need to get back inside,” Harrier said.
If they’ll let us in.
He turned his sweating, trembling mount and forced himself to look up at the city walls. The entire wall above them was crowded with bodies. Everyone looking down at them was white-faced and silent, but Harrier could already hear the sound of screams and wailing from within the city.

“W
HO TOLD HIM
that, do you think?” Tiercel asked. “About the Light, and the Balance?” They were riding slowly back toward the gate, and Tiercel sounded as if he’d suddenly decided that knowing the source of Zanattar’s ravings was of vital importance.

The wall of MageShield fire gave everything an eerie brightness—far brighter than even the full moon, bright enough to cast their shadows on the wall beside them, dark purple against bright purple. In this strange light—bright yet unclear—Tiercel’s hair was vivid pale purple, his skin a darker unnatural shade of violet, their chestnut horses indistinct black blobs.

“I don’t know. Maybe he made it up,” Harrier said. “Maybe he’s been talking to your Fire Woman. Do you think it matters? It’s not like he’s going to tell you now.”

“No. But I’d still like to know…” Tiercel stopped.

“Why they told him that? Oh, come
on
, Tyr. So he’d come here with all his friends and destroy the
Iteru
-cities, why else?”

“Okay,” Tiercel answered. “Why did they want him to do that?”

“Supply,” Harrier answered. It hadn’t occurred to him until Tiercel asked, but suddenly it made sense to him, unfolding in his mind as if someone had unfurled a map upon a table. He saw Armethalieh and Sentarshadeen, the
closest northern cities to the Madiran, saw the Armen Plain and the Trade Road. “If anybody wants to enter the Madiran—for trade or any other purpose—they need to supply at the
Iteru
-cities before they head farther south. I bet they’ve destroyed the wells when they’ve destroyed the cities, too. They can retreat into the desert, and nobody can follow them. It makes sense.”

“I don’t like it,” Tiercel said stubbornly.

Harrier just snorted. “There are so many things about this that I don’t like. How long can you hold that shield in place, anyway?”

“As long as I have to,” Tiercel answered quietly.

Harrier deliberately didn’t look at his friend as the words struck through him. When he’d asked the question, he’d only been thinking of the Isvaieni, and how long it might take them to give up and
leave.
But now he realized they had another problem—and a greater one.

What if they didn’t?

Tiercel drew on Ancaladar’s power to cast his spells, and Ancaladar’s power was as close to infinite as made no difference. There wasn’t any way for Tiercel to use it up.

But Tiercel could use
himself
up. Harrier’d listened to him talk about the High Magick for long enough to know that there were pretty much two kinds of spells. One kind you cast and they were over and done with, like Fire or MageLight (Tiercel’s MageLight, anyway), for example. The other kind needed to be held in place by the will of the Mage.

Like MageShield.

Ancaladar’s power was infinite.

Tiercel’s endurance wasn’t.

Thirteen

The Wind that Shakes the Stars

Z
ANATTAR OF THE
Lanzanur Isvaieni had set out with all the other young hunters of the tribes in search of the Nalzindar. They had gone forth from the plains of Telinchechitl in groups that each numbered as many as a man had fingers and toes, swiftly crossing the Barahileth. Where once there had been nothing but an arid waste of sand and salt and the
ishnain-pans
whose white dust could blind the unwary and raise sores upon the skin, now Bisochim’s magic had hidden deep wells of sweet water so that his pledged Faithful could make their way in safety. They reached Kannanatha Well, and the edge of the Isvai itself, and set off in search of their lost brethren.

For days they searched. Had anyone but another Isvaieni viewed their progress, it would have seemed that they wandered aimlessly, but Zanattar and his comrades followed the ancient paths that all the tribes, from Adanate to Zarungad, followed between the wells and oases that were life itself in the desert. The Nalzindar followed them as well, for to turn your back upon water between Sand and Star was to turn your back upon Life.

They found nothing.

The very sand itself had been scrubbed clean, as if by Sandwinds so powerful that Zanattar could not imagine their force. The
sheshu
and the
fenec
cowered in their burrows, just as if there had truly been a great storm, and the desert antelope were scarce and skittish, driven far from their normal grazing. At first, Zanattar and his followers struggled even to feed themselves, for the hunting was poor, and they had not thought to bring food beyond what they would need to cross the Barahileth, for the Isvaieni
had always fed themselves upon what the Isvai would give them.

At the end of a fortnight, there was talk of turning back, for the same thought was in every mind: there was nothing here to find. Kazat and Larazir, brothers and members of the Thanduli Isvaieni, said aloud what all were thinking, one night as they sat before the tents, drinking
kaffeyah
and listening to the
shotors
grind their teeth as they chewed their cuds. Perhaps, Kazat said, Shaiara had taken her people and found sanctuary in the
Iteru
-cities.

“Perhaps she has taken them north into the Great Cold,” Zanattar answered contemptuously. He knew only as much as anyone knew of the Nalzindar, but it was enough to tell him that they would never go willingly to the desert’s edge. But he led this small party by courtesy, not by right, and though they had all pledged oaths of blood-fellowship to each other and to Bisochim’s holy cause back in Telinchechitl, Zanattar was not foolish enough to test those pledges by ordering the others to do something they truly did not wish to do.