The Phoenix Endangered (53 page)

“What if somebody looks up and sees us?” Harrier finally thought to ask. He knew there wasn’t anything the people on the ground could possibly do about them, but he still had the feeling that they shouldn’t be seen.

“They won’t,” Tiercel said confidently. “They just… won’t think to.”

Harrier decided he didn’t know what bothered him more: knowing that Tiercel could cast spells this easily, knowing he hadn’t noticed that Tiercel had cast one at all, or the fact that they were both probably going to be dead by sundown. He thought it would probably be best if he
didn’t think about any of those things for as long as he possibly could.

“N
OW WE ENTER
the Desolation,” Ancaladar said about an hour later. “We should soon reach our destination.”

Looking down, Harrier could see what he meant. They’d just passed another group of Isvaieni on the desert below—even when Ancaladar’s shadow passed directly over them they didn’t look up, so he guessed Tiercel’s spell was working—and even Harrier could see that this part of the desert was somehow … bleaker … than the part they’d been flying over before. The ground was a paler color, and it seemed to be more of the flat baked terrain and less of the rolling sand.

He also saw why Ancaladar was so confident that he knew where they were going, and no longer needed to wait for them to lead him there. Harrier could see a white scar across the face of the desert below. It ran as straight and true as an arrowshot, and after everything he’d heard from both Tiercel and Ancaladar about desert oases and Isvaieni methods of travel in the past fortnight, he had to agree: somebody had made this, and he was betting on recently.

He forced himself to breathe evenly and not let Tiercel know how nervous he was. They were getting close now.

But when they’d flown for another hour—covering hundreds of miles, they had to be, because it had taken Ancaladar less than two hours to cover the same distance that the Isvaieni had traversed in three sennights of travel—they began to realize that reaching their destination would be no simple matter.

“Hey,” Tiercel said in an odd voice. “Is that a second group?”

“It is not,” Ancaladar answered, sounding equally distressed.

Harrier looked down. The Isvaieni caravan was below
them again. “But you’ve been flying straight south the whole time,” he said.

“So I had thought,” Ancaladar said grimly. He flew on.

An hour later, they encountered the same group again.

“This isn’t working,” Tiercel said.

“What isn’t?” Harrier said. “What’s happening?”

“Ancaladar’s turning,” Tiercel said. “He’s got to be. And none of us is noticing until we get back here.”

“Okay,” Harrier said. “It’s magic. You know a lot of … defenses.”

“I’ll try that,” Tiercel said unhappily. “But I don’t think it will work.”

While they flew south—again—Tiercel explained that while a spell-shield might have some effect, what was keeping them away from their destination was probably another spell-shield.

“In which case it won’t help?” Harrier said, guessing.

“Right,” Tiercel answered.

And it didn’t, because soon enough they were back where they’d started from again.

Ancaladar tried everything any of them could think of—flying east and circling around, flying west and doing the same, everything he could think of to somehow go
around
whatever it was that blocked them, but nothing worked. The sun was climbing toward midheaven by now, and even though they were high above the desert heat, they were still hungry and thirsty. And both Harrier and Tiercel were worn down with the constant tension of waiting for something to happen. It was small consolation to know that they’d finally found the place Tiercel needed to go if they couldn’t get there.

At last Ancaladar simply climbed high into the cool air and circled while Harrier, holding tightly to Tiercel’s belt with one hand, cautiously untangled the waterskin with the other so they could both drink. He thought Tiercel was far too casual about his precarious perch on Ancaladar’s back. It was all very well to say that Ancaladar would
catch them if they fell. There was the problem
of falling
first.

“We could probably be home in time for tea if we hurried,” he said, as one of Ancaladar’s wide sweeps over the Isvai let him look briefly northward. He couldn’t see Armethalieh, but he could imagine it.

He wondered, suddenly, if that was actually the right thing to do. They’d have to believe Tiercel if he came home with Ancaladar beside him. High Magistrate Vaunnel could gather an army, and—

And how long would that take? A year? At least. And suppose they came. There’s no water anywhere in this desert south of Tarnatha’Iteru for sure
—
and our army would have the same problem the Isvaieni army did: supply.

They could fly back to Karahelanderialigor and ask the Elven Mages to come and help, but Harrier wasn’t sure they would. They’d sent Tiercel off alone in the first place, after all.

“We could,” Tiercel said. He sounded wistful. “I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”

“Probably not.” Harrier wished it were. He’d like it to be. But if all those Isvaieni had been convinced there was a True Balance and a False Balance … who else had been convinced? In ancient times, Anigrel the Black had first convinced everyone in Armethalieh to banish all the Wildmages from the City, and then had spent moonturns telling the citizens that there was no Endarkened threat and no war until it was nearly too late for them to rally their forces and turn its tide. What if someone was doing something like that now? What if—if they went home—all that happened was that Magistrate Vaunnel tried to have them both locked up? Ancaladar could rescue them, he was sure, but…

Suddenly Harrier had a horrible blasphemous thought. He knew that the Blessed Saint Idalia had died to destroy the Queen of the Endarkened. He wondered if that was going to happen to Tiercel—if that was what was
supposed
to happen to Tiercel—and if Tiercel was going to be reborn as an Elf and grow up and become an Elven Mage and
then
solve the problem. He bit his lip very hard to keep from breaking into nervous laughter.

“But what
do
we do?” he asked, when he thought he could manage to talk without sounding like a lunatic. “Fun as this is, we can’t just fly around up here forever. There has to be some way to get there. Otherwise all those Isvaieni couldn’t just be going home again, could they?”

“They are not creatures of magic,” Ancaladar said, sounding about as irritated as Harrier had ever heard him sound.

Ancaladar’s explanation—when he made it—sounded just about ridiculous enough to make sense to Harrier. Ancaladar said that the magical defense of what was might very well be the Lake of Fire would keep him away from it forever. If Tiercel tried to find it by magic—without Ancaladar—Tiercel wouldn’t be able to locate it either. But if Harrier and Tiercel simply walked along the road scarred into the desert down there and followed it to its end, nothing—nothing
magical
, at any rate—ought to stop them from making their way to its end.

“That’s stupid,” Harrier said. But the more outrageous the explanation for something magical was, the more likely it was to be the truth. In the last year, Harrier had found out more about magic than he’d ever expected or wanted to, and he’d decided that all of it, even—Light forgive him, the Wild Magic—seemed to be pretty unlikely.

“I am sorry, Harrier,” Ancaladar said. He sounded exasperated—whether with the circumstances or with him, Harrier wasn’t entirely sure. “I do not see how you could possibly do it, in any event.”

“Yeah,” Harrier sighed. “We’re missing a few necessary things: food, tents,
shotors
—and there’s the fact that the Isvaieni would be sure to object if they saw us.”

“Steal them,” Tiercel said.

“Have you lost your mind?” Harrier asked politely,
once he’d decided that Tiercel was talking about stealing
shotors.

“Ha. No. We know where we can get a tent and food. All we’d need to do is steal a couple of
shotors.
And we can conceal ourselves—I’ve got spells for that—and we can—sort of—sneak in behind them.”

“‘All,’” Harrier said, ignoring the second half of Tiercel’s idiotic idea.

“Look, I know it won’t be easy. But we don’t need saddles, because there are saddles back at the camp. And Ancaladar can steal the
shotors
for us.”

“I can,” Ancaladar said, sounding pleased. “I can swoop down upon them and carry them off.”

“Oh,” Harrier said.
Are you both out of your minds
? “No swooping. Not while I’m here.”

“Indeed not,” Ancaladar said firmly. “I shall first locate a suitable place for you to wait. Then I shall acquire some
shotors.”

I
T DIDN’T MAKE
sense for them to go all the way back to Tarnatha’Iteru and start again from there—for one thing, it would add nearly a moonturn to their travel time, and there wasn’t that much food at the camp. For another, it would increase their chances of running into one of the bands of Isvaieni if they had to cross the entire desert. Ancaladar was looking for someplace near the Scar Road where they could wait. He would go and raid a couple of different Isvaieni camps—picking ones a long way away—for
shotors.
(He and Tiercel both agreed that four was a good number; Harrier was too disgusted by the entire plan to comment.) Once he’d brought them back, one of them would stay with the animals to keep them from wandering off while the other flew back with Ancaladar to Tarnatha’Iteru to make up a bundle of supplies and tents (which Ancaladar would carry in his claws) and then return.

“I well recall the days when I refused to be used as a beast of burden,” Ancaladar said mournfully.

“It’s only once,” Tiercel said comfortingly.

“It is always ‘; only once,’” Ancaladar answered reproachfully.

“There don’t exactly look like a lot of
places
down there,” Harrier said, leaning over Tiercel’s shoulder and peering at the ground. “No, wait. What’s that?”

“The place that I saw earlier,” Ancaladar said smugly. “There is even water.”

“I
T’S A CITY
!” Tiercel said excitedly, as Ancaladar made a long low circle over it coming in for a landing. Harrier only hoped that Tiercel would bear in mind that he
couldn’t fly
, and stay where he was until they were down on the ground again.

“Not for a long time,” Harrier answered, looking down.

The bits and pieces and scraps of broken stone and chunks of road going nowhere covered an area he thought might even be as large as Armethalieh. It was impossible to tell whether this city had ever had a wall, but somehow Harrier got the impression that it hadn’t. He thought everything would have been more bunched up if it had. All the bits of ruin he could see seemed to be laid out on a grid, as if the whole city had been built—or at least planned—all at once.

Ancaladar landed, and as soon as he did, the heat radiating up from the sand struck Harrier like a blow. “
Hot,”
he said comprehensively. He thought he’d gotten used to desert heat in the last several sennights, but this was like standing inside a bake-oven. He began to sweat immediately, and rubbed at his face, trying to keep the trickles of moisture out of his eyes.

“Yes,” Ancaladar said apologetically. He stretched out his neck so that they could both slide off. It was even hotter standing on the ground; Harrier could feel the heat soaking up through his boot soles. Now his skin was only prickling, as the sweat dried on his skin immediately, leaving behind a flaking crust of salt. It itched, and he rubbed at his face distractedly.

“There is water there. And shelter, I believe. I shall return as quickly as I can.” Ancaladar swung his head in the direction of something Harrier had glimpsed as they’d been coming in for their landing: it looked like an open basement. The air above it shimmered faintly—if there was an uncovered well here, the sun was probably doing its best to suck it dry of moisture.

“Come on,” Harrier said to Tiercel. “If we stay out here, we’ll fry.”

T
HERE WAS A
well. It was down at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and it was open to the sky. The air directly around the well was a little cooler than it was everywhere else here—probably because the sun was sucking water into the air, but even so, the stone of the basement was too hot to kneel on until they splashed water from the waterskin Harrier carried on it. The stone didn’t quite sizzle, but the water dried almost immediately, and as soon as it did, the stone heated up again. Everything in direct sunlight was hot enough to cook on. Harrier took the precaution of refilling the waterskin he carried, even though they both drank directly from the well itself.

It was just as well that Ancaladar had been right about there being shelter here, too, because unless they climbed directly into the well itself, Harrier didn’t think they could survive here at all for very long, and even if they did, they’d be badly burned. But a sort of tunnel led off from the basement, and while neither of them was in any mood to go exploring, once they’d gone a few feet along it, they were out of the sun. Even that much shelter was enough to make them feel cooler, after a few minutes’ exposure to the sun of the Desolation.

Eighteen