The Phoenix Endangered (49 page)

“Something I’d rather avoid doing ever again,” Harrier said, reaching for the waterskin again.

“And then they held us prisoner,” Tiercel said.

Harrier groaned in exasperation. “Yes, Tyr. They held us prisoner. And I don’t know why. And most of them left, because there are only a few tents out there now. And I don’t know why they did that either—but most of their
tents are gone, and you’ll have to ask Ancaladar for details, because he’s the one who saw the camp, and he might even have seen where they went.”

He’d forgotten just how
annoying
Tiercel could be when he’d gotten fascinated by something and wanted to discuss it endlessly. It was bad enough when it was just something that bored Harrier. It was much, much worse when it was something where Harrier was afraid that Tiercel’s endless questions might uncover information Harrier didn’t want him to have.

“There were only twelve tents here when I arrived,” Ancaladar said. “Seventy
shotors.
They’re all gone now,” he said, sounding rather pleased with himself.

“Tell me you didn’t eat all of them,” Harrier muttered, throwing the block of cheese back at Tiercel. Tiercel tried to catch it, but his hands were still too clumsy; it hit him in the chest and bounced to the ground. Harrier suspected the two of them were done with it anyway. He was exhausted and wanted to sleep, ridiculous as that was after all the time he’d spent wine-drugged into unconsciousness.

“I didn’t eat any of them,” Ancaladar said, sounding affronted. “Well, only one or two of the
shotors.
And only to encourage the people to flee. The
shotors
were far more sensible. They fled immediately.”

“They won’t come back, will they?” Tiercel asked. Half curious and half worried, and it had always driven Harrier crazy—even more so now, knowing that Tiercel wasn’t ever going to change, not if he lived until the end of the world—that Tiercel could never make up his mind to be one way or the other about anything.

“If they try, I will chase them away again,” Ancaladar said grimly.

“Can you see where they are right now?” Harrier asked. “Because … I’d like to know they’re really gone. And I’d like to know where all the rest of them are. There were thousands of them here … before.”

“The bodies in the city and on the plain outside it are
less than a sennight dead,” Ancaladar said. “Five days. Perhaps six. Even though this is a desert, I have … some experience with battlefields.”

Harrier winced inwardly.
Yeah, I just bet you have.
Until Ancaladar said something like that, it was easy to forget just how
old
the black dragon was, and how much he’d seen. A war he still wouldn’t tell them much at all about: the Great War. The war he’d tell them bits and pieces about: it didn’t even have a name in their history books, Harrier realized. They just called it The Great Flowering, as if there hadn’t been a war, just a victory.

“But they didn’t burn the city,” Tiercel said, puzzled. “They didn’t, right?”

“We’d have smelled that,” Harrier said. “And they didn’t. They wanted the water,” he said, realizing. “The irrigation canals are full, which means they opened the floodgates in the city. Probably to water their
shotors.
And they wouldn’t burn the city until the last minute—until they were ready to go. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to get at the
Iteru.”
He ran a hand through his hair. It was filthy, and matted with dust, and the back was clotted with dried blood—his. He winced when his hand touched a sore spot.

“You really look awful,” Tiercel said.

Harrier smiled, and felt his bruised lip split open all over again. “I guess you did think you were a Silver Eagle after all back there,” he said in retaliation. “You were definitely convinced you could fly.”

Tiercel made a face, but Harrier was still thinking. “I have an idea about where the rest of the Isvaieni are, but I’d like Ancaladar to check for me, if he’s willing,” he said.

“Of course,” Ancaladar said sympathetically. “I need to hunt, in any event.”

“Be careful,” Tiercel said.

“Very,” Ancaladar agreed. “What is your idea, Harrier?”

“All along we’ve known that them traveling in such a large group was a problem for them,” Harrier said, speaking
slowly because his head hurt, and his eyes hurt, and the better he started to feel, the more he realized that everything
else
hurt, too. “That large a group can’t find enough water, or food, or much of anything. So … now I think they’re going home. I don’t think they’re going to bother with Akazidas’Iteru, or anything north of here. Maybe we actually hurt them badly enough. Or scared them. So I think they split up into small groups to do that, and left over several days. And left the city intact, because it’s their best source of water. The last group was probably going to burn it before they went.”

Harrier knew he ought to take comfort from the thought that they’d saved Akazidas’Iteru, because if they hadn’t been here, if they hadn’t done what they’d done, he knew that after the Isvaieni had destroyed Tarnatha’Iteru they would have gone right on to Akazidas’Iteru.

He rubbed his eyes wearily. Had the Light, the Wild Magic, saved one city at the expense of another? He remembered that someone, once, had told him that the Balance was about all things, not just people: about animals and trees and that the Wild Magic wove its plans on so large a scale that the Wildmages who did its work often didn’t understand why they did what they did when they paid their Mageprices. But it hurt to think that the Wild Magic could care so little about the people of Tarnatha’Iteru that it had let them all die.
It does care
, he told himself.
It just cares about something else more.
And he didn’t know what that was. He knew it was the Great Balance, but that was just a phrase to him. It was too big for him to really imagine. But he tried, because if he didn’t, he’d have to think that Zanattar had been right: there was a False Balance and he was following it.

No. He would never believe that. Never.

“So … Follow them, and they’ll lead us right back to whoever filled their heads with all this ‘; False Balance’ nonsense,” Tiercel said, interrupting his thoughts.

“If your Lake of Fire is here, whoever-it-is is probably
camped out right on the shore,” Harrier agreed. “But I don’t want anything to happen to Ancaladar.”

“And I do not wish anything to happen to Tiercel,” Ancaladar said in return. “I can fly so high that no eyes upon the ground can see me. And so I shall. I will go now, and first make certain that no enemies surround you, and then see all that lies on the face of the desert.”

The dragon withdrew his head from the tent.

“Oh, good,” Tiercel said to nobody in particular. “And I… I think I’m going to stand up.”

By clinging to the center pole of the tent, Tiercel managed to get to his feet. He winced, sucking air between his teeth and hissing in pain, and wavering back and forth, but he didn’t fall over.

“Now that you’re standing up, what are you planning to do?” Harrier demanded.

“Explore,” Tiercel said simply. “I still feel… kind of sick.”

“They were keeping us drunk,” Harrier said, trying not to sound indignant.

“Why?” Tiercel said. “Me, they knew I was a Mage, okay, but why you? And if they meant to keep us as some kind of hostages, why not send us off with the first group that went back, instead of keeping us with the last?”

“I … don’t… know,” Harrier repeated steadily. He dragged himself to his feet as well, because right now, the prospect of drowning Tiercel in one of the irrigation ditches was starting to seem really attractive.

He didn’t drown Tiercel, but they both decided that the water in the ditches wasn’t
that
dirty, and if it was, it was good clean dirt. They found clean clothes in one of the tents—not pants and tunics and vests like the townsfolk wore, but the ankle-length robes and over-robes of the desert-dwellers. Neither of them cared at the moment, though, because they were clean. They carried them to the edge of the nearest ditch and stripped and used the filthy rags of their clothes to wash themselves. Maybe their own clothes could be salvaged later.

“This has blood all over it,” Tiercel said, picking up Harrier’s tunic from where he’d dropped it in a sodden lump on the ground. Harrier had started to scrub himself with it, seen how soiled it was, and simply tossed it aside.

“They hit me in the head. I bled,” Harrier said. He was holding up a wad of wet cloth to the back of his head. The cold felt good, and maybe he could soak the blood out of his hair eventually.

“In the back,” Tiercel said. “Not the front. There’s blood on the front of your tunic.”

“I said they hit me in the head,” Harrier said evenly.

“Why?” Tiercel asked simply, regarding Harrier steadily.

“Because they’re murderous Darkspawn. And I was trying to get us somewhere to hide until you could wake up and call Ancaladar.”

“You killed one of them,” Tiercel said, and it was as if he’d suddenly figured out the answer to a question. “That’s why—”

Harrier began to laugh. He didn’t know why hearing Tiercel say something that was only the truth hurt so much. “You always think you can do things so much better than I can,” he said, hating himself and unable to stop. “How many did you kill when you threw MageShield right up in front of them? Maybe I didn’t kill as many as you did, but at least I got my hands dirty! I got my hands dirty,” he repeated softly.

“Harrier, no! I didn’t mean—” Tiercel blurted out.

Harrier turned away and waded out of the canal. He picked up the bundle of clean clothes and walked back toward the tent.

By the time he reached it he was dry, and he began to dress. There was supposed to be a sash worn with this. And something under it, too, he bet. Probably if he looked around some more he could find them.

He saw a shadow stretch across the rug behind him. “Get out,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Tiercel said, but he didn’t leave. “I didn’t know.”

“Now you do,” Harrier said evenly.

“Do you think I—” Tiercel stopped. “Do you think I feel any differently about you than I did? You did something—”

“I killed people,” Harrier said harshly.

“So did I,” Tiercel answered.

Harrier shook his head. He couldn’t tell Tiercel that was different. He didn’t want to tell Tiercel it was different—
how
it was different. Tiercel had stood on a wall a mile away and cast a spell. And he’d known he was responsible, and he’d seen the people die, and it was horrible, but he hadn’t stood inches away from another man with a sword in his hand and been sprayed with his blood and seen the light fade from the man’s eyes as he fell.

“I know it was different,” Tiercel said, still quietly. “I couldn’t have done what you did. Not because I don’t know how to fight with a sword. It’s not that.”

“What, then?” Harrier said, when Tiercel didn’t say anything else.

“It must have been horrible. Having to kill somebody like that, and… having to keep doing it. You weren’t even doing it for yourself. I’m sorry.”

“You can shut up now,” Harrier said. He wasn’t angry any more. He just wished he didn’t have to remember what he’d done. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he didn’t really know who he was saying it to. It didn’t seem fair to be sorry for the people he’d killed, when they’d killed so many other people, but he was. “They didn’t have any choice,” he said slowly.

“No,” Tiercel said seriously. “Someone lied to them and told them we were Tainted. And they came to kill us, thinking they were doing the right thing. And when they got here, they
had
to get into the city, or else they’d all die. We tried to save the city. And you tried to save me. And we’re both still alive. And maybe we’ll never know why.” Harrier heard Tiercel take a deep breath. “And I guess we have to think of our being alive as a good thing. Because we still have a chance to find the Lake of Fire.”

And maybe a better chance—now—than they would have had if Tarnatha’Iteru hadn’t been destroyed, because maybe Ancaladar could follow the retreating Isvaieni back to whoever had sent them. Harrier thought of a Balance so vast and terrible that it could sacrifice a city to show them the way to their goal. And he thought of all the cities—all the
people
—there were in the world, not only here, but beyond Great Ocean. For just a moment he could glimpse the scale of that Balance, but then he realized that wasn’t the point. For humans to think that way—to see the world on such a scale—meant that they’d say that anything that happened, anything they chose to do, was okay. And that wasn’t right. Only the Wild Magic itself could see the world that way. People had to trust in the Light, and care about each other, and Wildmages … well, Harrier guessed that Wildmages had to trust in the Wild Magic and pay their Mageprices.

“Stop talking. Now. Really,” he said.

“Okay. I’m done,” Tiercel said.

W
HEN
A
NCALADAR RETURNED
a couple of hours later, the two of them were sitting in the doorway of one of the tents, roasting meat on a spit. They’d found a basket of freshly killed hares in one of the tents—the skinned and cleaned bodies were packed in oil; the tent was obviously meant to be a larder of sorts—and had put together a meal. All of the loaves were unappetizingly stale, but there was an entire barrel of uncooked dough, and Harrier had found a griddle-stone. They ate hot flatbread, and drank mint tea with honey, and waited for the meat to cook.

Harrier could see the walls of the city in the distance. It looked fine on this side—untouched—except for the fact that there were tiny black specks moving along the top of the wall, and when one of them was jostled off and flapped awkwardly into space he realized that they were birds.

When Ancaladar came back, he made a low pass over the city. As he did, suddenly the sky above it was black with birds, as thousands of them boiled up out of it squalling in fright. Harrier saw a flash of motion along the ground, too, as something came running along the city wall, but it was too far away to see exactly what it was.