The Phoenix Endangered (33 page)

As he was now. Only now they weren’t forms. Now the dance had a partner, for outside, in the twilit courtyard, Harrier circled and moved and feinted with him. The wooden swords they both carried moved almost too fast to see, as the two fighters spun and turned and blocked. Tiercel didn’t
know all that much about sword-fighting—he’d never even watched the Elves practice back in Karahelanderialigor—but it didn’t seem to him that Macenor Telchi was holding back much.

And Harrier was
fast.
No matter what the Telchi tried, Harrier’s swords were there to block it, until at last Harrier stumbled, and the Telchi’s sword caught him a sharp “
thwack”
along the ribs. Harrier yelped, and the Telchi laughed, and that seemed to indicate the end of the match.

Tiercel ducked back inside the room before either of them saw him. What he’d just seen troubled him more than he liked to admit even to himself. Harrier had only been doing this for a few sennights, and he was good enough to challenge a man who’d been a master of swords since before he’d been born. Somehow doing weird things himself seemed almost natural to Tiercel. He didn’t have to watch someone else doing them, after all. But watching Harrier turn from, well,
Harrier
—his best friend, someone who hadn’t even wanted to
touch
the sword Roneida had given him—into the person he’d just glimpsed in the courtyard was more unsettling than everything that had happened to Tiercel in the past year.

Harrier has been Called by the Wild Magic to be a Knight-Mage. Just like Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy. This is what it means
, Tiercel reminded himself. He thought, for the first time, that back when Kareta brought him the Three Books, Harrier might have had a better idea of what they would mean than Tiercel had, and maybe that was why he’d fought this so hard. Because Tiercel suspected, down deep inside, that becoming a Knight-Mage might be a greater change for Harrier than becoming a High Mage had been for him.

It wasn’t something they talked about, because Harrier didn’t like to talk about things that made him as uneasy as the Wild Magic did. Tiercel really didn’t have any idea of whether or not Harrier was reading the Three Books he’d been given, or had any notion of how uncanny his sudden
ability with the sword was, but he
did
know that Harrier wouldn’t thank the person who brought those things to his notice. And so Tiercel devoted his attention to other things.

With Ophare’s help, he’d managed to make a pretty good start on searching every possible place in the city where possible information on The Lake of Fire might be found. To his surprise and his enormous disappointment, there were no public libraries in Tarnatha’Iteru of the sort he was used to finding in the Nine Cities, but Ophare had been able to direct him to other sources of information. There were scholars who were willing to share their knowledge of the past with him, especially when they discovered how much he already knew about pre-Flowering history. And while one of them—Master Arapha—was able to tell Tiercel of an ancient race of Otherfolk who had been made of and lived in fire, that information was interesting rather than immediately useful, since the Firesprites had been swept out of existence long before the founding of Armethalieh.

For a while Tiercel held out hope that the archives of the merchant traders would be able to provide him with the information that he sought, for the records they kept stretched back for centuries, to the time when the String of Pearls, as the eleven
Iteru
-cities were called, had first been built and the first trade-routes had been mapped across the Madiran. If not for the fact that many of the rich merchants of Tarnatha’Iteru owed the Telchi favors, and the fact that the Telchi was willing to call upon that goodwill to gain Tiercel access to the records stored in the Merchants Guildhall of Tarnatha’Iteru, it would have been difficult for Tiercel to do that research. The merchant traders of each city guarded their secrets jealously for fear that their rivals from the other
Iteru
-cities might try to gain access to their information, whether of sources for rugs and spices, or of the fastest route from one place to another.

Tiercel could have gotten into the Guildhall by himself—before he’d left Armethalieh (it seemed like a lifetime ago) his father had told him that he could call
upon Chief Magistrate Vaunnel’s name in an emergency, and even Consul Aldarnas owed allegiance to Chief Magistrate Vaunnel. But if Tiercel did that, word that he’d done so would get back to Armethalieh, and he knew Harrier was right: they didn’t dare attract that kind of attention to themselves. He vowed to repay the Telchi—somehow, sometime—for all he was doing for them.

It was more than disappointing that after all that work and trouble, Tiercel’s answers weren’t there either, though it took him more than a fortnight of daily visits to figure that out. By then, his head was stuffed with information about cities and wells and oases and camps and Isvaieni tribes and their affiliations and their chief products and what they should be offered in trade. He felt he could probably draw a map of the entire desert, from the Madiran to the Barahileth.

But there was nothing, anywhere, about a Lake of Fire.

“I
THINK WE
should go,” Tiercel said to Harrier.

It was a bit over five sennights now since they’d arrived in Tarnatha’Iteru, and it was slightly entertaining to Tiercel that here in the depths of the desert they’d both managed to almost entirely lose the sun-darkening they’d picked up on the way here. But in the Madiran, nobody went out in the harsh desert sun without protection—or at
all
during the hottest part of the day—and Tiercel had gotten used to keeping the hood of his light desert robe pulled well up whenever he left the Telchi’s house.

It had taken him a couple of days to plot out the best time to grab Harrier for a discussion of their future. It wasn’t—exactly—that he didn’t want the Telchi involved in it. It was just that he wanted to talk to Harrier privately first, because he knew that the Telchi wanted Harrier as his apprentice, and that Harrier was paying his Mageprice by being trained, and if they had to talk about that, he didn’t think Harrier
would
talk about it in front of somebody else. So Tiercel needed to find a time when he could
catch Harrier alone. Mornings weren’t good, because that was when Harrier went off to practice. Evenings weren’t good either. The evening meal came late—it was served far later here than it was ever served in Armethalieh—and after it, all Harrier wanted to do was sleep. The middle of the day involved other lessons for Harrier, and Tiercel was usually out then anyway, since he was still asking a few last questions around the city.

About Wildmages, for example. In the Madiran, they moved about freely and openly in both city and desert. But he hadn’t seen any in all the time he’d been here, and when he’d started asking questions he discovered that there hadn’t been one seen in Tarnatha’Iteru in over four moonturns. Nobody he’d talked to was willing to say whether that was unusual or not, but Tiercel needed to
know.

Meanwhile, if he actually wanted to talk to Harrier while Harrier was awake it had to be now. Early in the evening, after Harrier had finished his evening practice and come back to his room after his bath, but before the evening meal. He’d made sure to get back to the house extra early just to be sure to be here.

“Go where?” Harrier said. He flopped down on his bed, still rubbing at his hair with a towel. “You’ve found something?”

“No,” Tiercel admitted. “I’m not going to, either. But I still think what I’m looking for is here. In the desert, I mean. Somewhere.”

“So, what? We just … go? We’d need guides, and there aren’t any.”

“You can find water with the Wild Magic. Ophare says so. The Wildmages here find wells all the time.”

“Do I look like one of the local Wildmages to you?” Harrier asked in long-suffering tones.

“What they can do, you can do. If you have to.”

“And why would I have to, if we stay here?”

“Because we can’t stay here, and you know it. We got a good price for the horses. I changed out my money for the local currency, and I’ve been asking what things cost. We
have enough to buy
shotors
and supplies. We’ll ride out into the desert—Radnatucca Oasis isn’t far from here. I’ll call Ancaladar. We’ll search from the air.”

“And do what with the
shotors?”
Harrier asked.

“He’ll be hungry when he wakes up.”

“Great. Fine. So we ride lunch out to this oasis, and when Ancaladar gets there, we fly all over the desert looking for this place, and then what? Tyr, what about all your
stuff?
Ancaladar doesn’t exactly come with saddlebags, you know. And what about supplies? Okay,
maybe
I can find water without needing to sleep for three days afterwards—which I’m not promising. That doesn’t mean I can find
dinner.”

Those were good points, but what Tiercel saw right now was that Harrier was coming up with reason after reason to not continue their search, and he began to wonder if it was because the Wild Magic wanted Tiercel to go on alone and leave Harrier behind. Maybe it was keeping Harrier from thinking of leaving.

“We can bring extra
shotors.
Supplies. Set up a base camp. Har, we’ve got to try something!” Tiercel said urgently.

“Yeah. Let me think.”

Tiercel groaned in frustration. When Harrier wanted to “think” about something, it usually took days—if not longer—for him to reach a conclusion. But to Tiercel’s surprise, this time it didn’t take long at all.

“This oasis. Where is it, exactly?”

“Exactly? Um, Radnatucca Oasis is about a day from here, into the desert. It’s where the merchants meet the Isvaieni. Most of them won’t come into a city.”

“And it’s got water?”

“It’s an oasis, Har.”

“So you could take Ancaladar there, and set up a base camp, and keep a couple of
shotors
there—not for eating—and fly around in circles until you found the place, right? And when you found it—or were sure it wasn’t here—
then
we could actually do something. That makes a lot more
sense to me than just charging off into the desert—without food or water or—you know—
guides.
And all you’d actually have to worry about is if whatever made the Isvaieni disappear came after you, but Ancaladar would be right there. And I could come out and bring you—I don’t know—goats or something.”

“I could go by myself,” Tiercel said, because this still sounded to him a lot like Harrier wanted to stay here in Tarnatha’Iteru.

“Go
where?”
Harrier demanded, and now he sounded irritable—and a lot more like the Harrier Gillain Tiercel knew. “You have no idea where you’re going, or even if what you’re looking for is
there!
We don’t even know how big this Dark-damned desert is—you’ve told me yourself that the maps just sort of … stop … in the middle of the Isvai and past that they’re guessing. And I could tell you what the coast looks like all the way to the Southern Horn, but that’s a few hundred miles west of here, so I don’t think it’s terribly helpful just at the moment. You and Ancaladar can cover hundreds of miles from the air, and see everything there is to see. And protect yourselves if you run into something bad. Isn’t that what he’s been teaching you all this for? Time to use it.”

Tiercel stared at Harrier in something like shock. Sure, Harrier could plan things. But his plans usually involved things like lunch. Or a lot of lunches, because of course Tiercel knew that Harrier had been the one to pack and plan for most of their travel so far. But this went far beyond that.

“So while I’m flying around in circles in the desert, what will you be doing?” He tried very hard not to think about Knight-Mages or Kellen the Poor Orphan Boy or how much Harrier had changed just in the few sennights since they’d been here, and he must have succeeded because when Harrier answered, he wasn’t at all defensive.

“Finishing up as much of my education as I have time for, of course. You don’t think I’m going to let you go off
to the real trouble without me, do you? And I’ll tell Ancaladar, too—he’ll listen to me, even if you won’t.”

Tiercel let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding in. Harrier didn’t mean to leave him to go on alone, and the Wild Magic wasn’t going to ask it of him.

N
OW THAT THEY
had a plan—or the beginnings of one—it was easy enough to tell it to the Telchi and enlist his help. The first thing they’d need to do would be to purchase beasts to ride to Radnatucca Oasis. Though so short a journey could be accomplished on horseback, the Telchi recommended the purchase of
shotors
, for the ugly sturdy creatures were far more dependable in the desert. If Tiercel meant to stay at Radnatucca for an extended period—with or without Ancaladar—he would need copious supplies as well, which meant at least six beasts: two to ride, and four to carry their supplies. (“Are you going to tell him you’re going to feed most of them to Ancaladar?” Harrier had asked.) The Telchi could guide them to Radnatucca with ease, for he had been there on several occasions as a caravan guard, and the sight of Ancaladar would hardly be a surprise to him. It would take, at most, a few days to make those preparations, and purchase what they would need, and then they would be ready to go.

But they were already out of time.

H
ARRIER WAS ALWAYS
up-and-out before dawn, a combination of new habits and old. Tiercel didn’t feel the same need to go rushing into the day; he usually arose in a more leisurely fashion (when the sounds of practice outside his window became too persistent to ignore), dressed, breakfasted on the cold dishes still set out from the meal Harrier and the Telchi had enjoyed earlier, and then collected Ophare and went off on his day’s errands.

Today, however, he’d barely begun his second cup of
tea—there was proper tea available here, which in Tiercel’s opinion was one of the most welcome things about the place; while he loved
kaffeyah
, he’d missed tea—when there was a wild flurry of activity. First Latar went rushing out into the streetside courtyard, then he came running back the other way with Niranda in tow. Tiercel had never quite figured out her place in the Telchi’s household—she seemed to do most of the cooking, but she also did most of the marketing, and the cook Tiercel’s mother employed to keep the Rolfort household fed would have quit on the spot if asked to do his own shopping.