The Phoenix Endangered (45 page)

The Telchi stepped forward and said firmly that the Mage needed to rest and meditate after casting his spell. It was a ridiculous notion, but then again, nobody here had any more notion of what a High Mage did than Harrier’d had this time last year. Nonsensical as his words were, they made the guardsmen step back and leave Tiercel alone, and
when the three of them reached the foot of the steps at the Main Gate, and the servant from the Audience Chamber approached them to say that the Consul wished to see them, Harrier simply repeated what the Telchi had said, and added that they’d see Consul Aldarnas when his master had refreshed himself.

“Y
OU
DIDN’T
JUST
say ‘when my master has refreshed himself,’” Tiercel said in disbelief. The moment Harrier had come in he’d known the rooms were empty—it was a weird feeling—but he’d still wanted to check. He’d been right. There was nobody here but the three of them.

“Hey,” Harrier answered, mock-indignantly, “I wasn’t the one who decided I was your attendant back in the Audience Chamber.” At least Tiercel didn’t look quite so much as if he wanted to
hit
somebody now.

“So now you’re my servant?”

“Oh, you wish,” Harrier said feelingly. He walked over to the side-table. The breakfast dishes were gone, but there was a selection of fruit and pastry set out, a beaker of cold mint tea, and a
kaffeyah
service all set up and ready. Looking at it, Harrier thought that Rial had probably thought the brazier in his bag had been part of a
kaffeyah
set, because it looked very much like the little brazier that went under the pot to heat the water.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t exactly argue,” Tiercel said.

“It’s always been my life’s ambition to wait on you hand and foot.” Any other time, Harrier would have found this conversation annoying. Now he was just grateful that Tiercel was talking about something—anything—besides what had just happened on top of the wall. He picked up the tray with the
kaffeyah
service and brought it over to the table. He’d prepared
kaffeyah
for the Telchi often enough. “Light that, will you?” he said, when he was done setting up the pot.

“Do it yourself,” Tiercel said sulkily.

Harrier laughed. “What am I, your servant?” Sympathy was the last thing that would be good for Tiercel, even if it was what he deserved.

“Hah. Funny.” Tiercel pointed a finger at the brazier beneath the pot, and it
whooshed
into life.

“I
CAN’T DO
that again,” Tiercel said a few minutes later.

He’d been staring off at nothing as the
kaffeyah
brewed. Daspuc and Rial had come to the outer room—because they were supposed to be here and do something or other with Tiercel today, if just help him read through all his High Magick books—and Harrier had gone and sent them away, telling them to come back after midday. It felt very odd to him to be giving orders to Sub-Preceptors of the Light, but Tiercel’s safety (and comfort) was more important.

At first Harrier thought that Tiercel was talking about hurting people. Every time he closed his eyes, Harrier could see the mass of bodies and hear the screaming. It had to be far worse for Tiercel—he’d caused it to happen.

But to his surprise, Tiercel ran a hand through his hair and said: “I’m tired,” and Harrier realized that what he was talking about was walking for miles from one end of the city to the other. He frowned. There wasn’t any other way to get to the wall above the South Gate. Not anymore.

“I shall go,” the Telchi said. “You may stand upon the wall here, and I shall alert you when it is time to replace the shield again. I shall allow them to approach closely, but not to be trapped within it.”

“Don’t you need to see where it goes?” Harrier asked curiously.

Tiercel gave him a long-suffering look. “I couldn’t see all sides of the city the
first
time, Har. No. Just… I don’t…”

“In any event, it would be imprudent to cause great loss of life among the Isvaieni’s
shotors,”
the Telchi said reprovingly, before Tiercel could tell him that he didn’t want
to make anything like what had happened today ever happen again. “Our purpose is to deny them the resources to feed their army.”

And the Isvaieni would simply cook and eat the dead animals.

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON
Tiercel and Harrier went to another audience with the Consul; this time in his private rooms, not the Audience Chamber. The Consul thanked Tiercel for all he was doing to save the city, and promised him that once this was over, Tiercel would have all the help he could provide in locating the Lake of Fire. It was a gracious gesture, though it was hard to imagine what help that would be, unless Consul Aldarnas had information that even the Merchants’ Guild lacked.

After they returned to their rooms, the Telchi insisted that Harrier resume his lessons—there was little else for either of them to do, he pointed out, and a shaded garden outside at their disposal. The two of them spent the entire afternoon at sword-work, and Harrier felt much better after resuming his routine.

Tiercel dropped and recast the shield once again late that night. He told Harrier about it when Harrier got up the following morning. By then Tiercel had been awake for two days, and he was beginning to look as bad as he had back in Armethalieh when they’d both thought he was dying of something.

During the day that followed, he dropped and recast the shield another three times. Each time—the Telchi told them—the Isvaieni mounted their
shotors
and rode down toward the city. But by the middle of the second day, only a few hundred would come. The guards on the walls would shoot at them while the shield was down, but only if they came close enough that they could be sure of shooting the riders and not the
shotors.

By the fourth day, Tiercel didn’t bother to search through his books for spells any longer.

“I can’t concentrate,” he said.

His voice was slurred. He was never left alone now—Haspuc or Rial or Harrier or the Telchi or someone else was always with him to help him stay awake. The Telchi said that by now the Isvaieni were undoubtedly very weak. He also said that they certainly wished to seem weaker than they were, so Tiercel must hold out as long as he could. And he must do it on will alone, and whatever help
kaffeyah
could give him. The city’s Healers had drugs to summon sleep—and drugs that would banish it, too. But too much or too little of either could have the opposite effect—and an overdose of either drug could kill. They didn’t dare take the chance.

“So don’t,” Harrier said agreeably. “Just pay attention.” Harrier still wasn’t completely clear on how the High Magick worked, but Tiercel had said back at the beginning that the MageShield would only be there as long as he was conscious to hold the spell in place, and Harrier had to figure he knew what he was talking about.

“I can’t,” Tiercel whined.

Reflexively, Harrier glanced through the open doorway to the sleeping room’s window. But the light was still purple. The MageShield was still in place.

“It’s hot in here,” Tiercel sighed. He rubbed his eyes. “I keep saying that, right?”

“You’re running a fever,” Harrier said. “I guess it’s from staying awake.”

Certainly Tiercel
looked
as if he was running a fever. His eyes were red-rimmed and glittering, his skin was pale, and his cheeks were flushed. Harrier was starting to wonder if maybe Tiercel ought to be let to try to get a couple of hours of sleep—surely the Isvaieni couldn’t get over the wall in a couple of hours. Except maybe a lot of them could. And he didn’t think that after four days awake they could wake Tiercel up after an hour or two asleep.

Tiercel nodded jerkily. “Yeah,” he said, far too slowly. “I guess …” he trailed off and stopped, as if he’d forgotten what he wanted to say right in the middle.

Just then Daspuc walked into the room and bowed. The young Light-priest had lost much of his fear of this peculiar situation in the last four days.
You can get used to anything with enough time
, Harrier thought. “Master Harrier,” he said quietly. “It is time.”

“Come on, Tyr,” Harrier said, taking Tiercel by the elbow and guiding him from the room.

B
Y NOW HARRIER
was pretty familiar with the layout of the Consul’s Palace. He led Tiercel through several private corridors and up a flight of stairs that led to the roof. Yesterday Tiercel had been unsteady on the stairs, but today he stumbled so badly on every step that Harrier practically had to drag him.

The roof of the palace was another garden. There were plants in pots—Harrier could identify less than half of them, but all of them smelled nice—and little ornamental wooden buildings where you could sit and look out over the city, and (if the city wasn’t covered in MageShield) be cooled by the evening breeze. All Harrier cared about was that it wasn’t as far for Tiercel to walk as up to the top of the wall.

“Okay, Tyr,” he said. “Drop the shield.”

“Okay,” Tiercel said docilely.

The shield vanished. Since it had been doing that every once in a while for the past few days and had always come back, nobody in the streets below paid any attention any more.

And by now they weren’t bothering with spotters, either. They were just timing it out to the point where Tiercel put it back into place. Five minutes here, ten minutes there, because they knew by now that it would take the army at least half an hour and maybe longer to move its scouts toward the city.

Harrier counted slowly; he knew Tiercel was too. When they got to a hundred, it would be time for Tiercel to cast the spell again. He reached a hundred.

Nothing happened.

“Tiercel?” he said.

Tiercel was staring off into space, weaving slightly back and forth on his feet, his eyes unfocused. Harrier grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him violently. Tiercel gasped and stared at him wildly. “What? What?” he stammered.

“Cast the shield! Cast it now!”

Suddenly the sky over the city bloomed with purple light.

“Did you see him?” Tiercel demanded, sounding frantic. He jerked himself free of Harrier’s grip and stumbled away. “The man—the one we saw in Ysterialpoerin! The one I saw on the Plains—the one who couldn’t see you! He’s here!”

There was so much conviction in Tiercel’s voice that Harrier actually looked around. But there was nobody on the roof except them.

“No,” Harrier said quietly. “No, Tiercel. I didn’t see him.”

“He’s here,” Tiercel said. “I don’t know how he got into the city, but he did. He’s been following us since we left the Veiled Lands. He didn’t want to come near me while Ancaladar was with me, but he came back.”

It would have sounded reasonable, except for the fact that it was impossible. Not that they couldn’t have been followed—because whatever that
thing
was, Harrier knew it wasn’t human. It might even have taken it this long to find them again after they’d vanished through the Magedoor into the Veiled Lands and come back out the other side.

But what he
did
know was that nobody had entered the city since Tiercel had put up his shield, and that there was nobody on the roof.

“C’mon, Tyr,” he said gently. “Let’s go downstairs.”

A
FTER THAT
, H
ARRIER
was too worried to leave Tiercel alone with anyone else. When the Telchi came to join
them a few hours later, Harrier told him what Tiercel had said.

“Who is this man?” the Telchi asked. “What does he look like?”

“I don’t think he’s a man,” Harrier said slowly. “Tiercel thought he was something, well,
not human.
But we were never sure what.” He shook his head in frustration. When they’d gone with Ancaladar through the Magedoor, there’d been so many new things to think about all at once—and then, when they’d left Karahelanderialigor, and he’d gotten his Three Books, there’d been
that
—that he’d almost forgotten about the strange red-haired man. When Tiercel’s visions had returned outside the Veil, Harrier had worried about their attacks resuming, but as the sennights passed, it had almost become a habit of paranoia rather than that he’d actually expected something to happen.

He described the man—for lack of anything better to call him—as best he could. If he’d been the strange bear that attacked them just north of Sentarshadeen, they’d seen him three times: once there, once on the Plains just before they’d met Roneida, and once—perhaps twice—in Ysterialpoerin. And each time, except for the red coloring, he’d looked different.

The Telchi frowned when Harrier was done, weighing his words. “This is troubling news. The Endarkened, it is said, could change their form so.”

“Yeah,” Harrier said, sighing. “But Tyr said he didn’t think it was really
evil
, whatever it was, and whatever it was trying to do. And if it
was
one of the Endarkened, I don’t think either of us would be alive right now.”

“Very true,” the Telchi agreed. “Still. A red-haired man in the city should be simple to find.”

Harrier nodded. He and Tiercel stood out here because they were both so fair, and because his hair was red and Tiercel’s was blond. The southerners were the descendants of High Reaches folk; Harrier hadn’t seen anyone with blue eyes since he’d come to Tarnatha’Iteru, and everyone’s hair was some shade of dark brown. There’d
been other northerners in the city when they’d arrived, but the last of them had left a moonturn before—whether because they believed in the danger, or simply because they thought the city was unsettled didn’t matter: they weren’t here now.

“If he’s here,” he said.

“I saw him.”

Though Tiercel was right there in the room while the two of them were having the conversation, he’d simply stared silently off into the distance, and after a few minutes, both of them had almost managed to forget that he was there.

Harrier hesitated. He didn’t want to say that Tiercel was probably seeing a lot of things that weren’t there right now, but he was thinking it. Tiercel’s eyes were sunk into his skull, and he looked more than exhausted: he looked ill. Harrier couldn’t imagine how he was managing to stay awake.