The Phoenix Endangered (60 page)

“W
HY BUILD SO
deep? And why does it get bigger as we go down? Why put the dragons on the bottom instead of the top?” Harrier asked.

“They had magic,” Tiercel answered absently. He ran his hand over a wall. Harrier found the fact that every single surface—the floor included—glowed bright moon-blue
almost as disconcerting as the fact that this place was bigger than the biggest cavern in the Caves of Imrathalion. Except that the walls and floor and ceiling Caves of Imrathalion hadn’t all been as smooth and level and squared-off as the rooms of his
house.
And they hadn’t all been covered with … weird stuff.

“So was it
useful
magic?” Harrier asked. He thought he was being reasonably patient, because they’d been here a fortnight already, and all they really seemed to be doing was finding out how a bunch of Elves who were older than
rocks
had lived.

“Useful to them,” Tiercel said, sounding amused. “They defeated the Endarkened, which allowed
us
to happen. And created the Wild Magic as we know it.”

“Which is creepy to think about. You know that, right?”

“Maybe,” Tiercel said. “But, Harrier, don’t you see? This is the very beginning of the relationship between dragons and people. The beginning of dragons sharing their magic.”

“The beginning of dragons
dying,”
Harrier muttered. He hadn’t meant for the other two to hear that, but he’d forgotten how much the stone magnified every sound.

“Yes, well,” Tiercel said uncomfortably. “Ancaladar, you want to give me a hand here? I can’t see the carvings at the top of the wall.”

Considering that the carvings at the top of the wall were at least a hundred feet above Tiercel’s head, that was an amazing—and typically Tiercel—understatement.

“Now I am a ladder,” the dragon sighed. “Of course.” The great black dragon lowered his head, and Tiercel stepped onto it as if he were stepping onto a log. Harrier resisted the temptation to tell the two of them to be careful as Ancaladar slowly raised his head until Tiercel’s head nearly brushed the ceiling.

“See?” Tiercel said, leaning in to peer at the wall.

“See what?” Harrier demanded from his position far below both of them. “And don’t expect me to catch you if you fall.”

“It says here—” Tiercel began.

“You can read that?” Harrier demanded.

“I’m looking at the pictures. And guessing. A lot. What’s weird is that the letters look like the High Magick glyphs, only the glyphs are just
glyphs
, they aren’t an alphabet, so even though—”

“Light and Darkness, Tyr, don’t make me come up there and
hit
you!”

“Okay, okay! I’m
guessing
that what this says here is that the Elves of Great Queen Vieliessar Farcarinon’s time weren’t worrying about their Bonded dragons dying—except by accident. And the dragons weren’t worried about dying either.”

“It says all that up there?”

“This is the fifth level we’ve been on and there have been carvings and writings that were clear enough to read on levels three, four, and five, so, no. It doesn’t say
all
of this right up here. Would you like to come up here and look at this section of the carvings for yourself?”

“Um … no. How come they put that stuff up there where nobody could read it, if it’s so important?”

Even all the way down on the floor Harrier could hear Tiercel sigh. “Oh,
I
don’t know, Harrier. Maybe because this was just
decoration
and they had the same stuff written down in a much more useful and accessible way in
books.”

“Okay. Right. So what does it say?”

“You know that—”

“Bonded, it is not that I am becoming tired of standing here …” Ancaladar said meaningfully.

Tiercel cleared his throat. “It says that the dragons’ Bond was supposed to be a
temporary
condition. I’m not sure I’ve got that right, but… there’s something about the Bond, and something about time, and something about a Mageprice being fulfilled, and I can’t figure it out. But what I
can
figure out—and I’m sure about this—is this: when the Bond is paid, the dragons will stop dying.”

“Yeah, well that time obviously isn’t yet,” Harrier said before he could stop himself.

“No,” Tiercel said, sounding wistful. “I guess it isn’t the Time of the Three Becoming One’ yet.”

“I’m not even going to ask what that means,” Harrier said as Ancaladar gently lowered Tiercel to the floor again.

“Good,” Tiercel said, sighing, “because I don’t know. Which three, or how they become one, or what that has to do with … anything. Does it mean there won’t be any more Elven Mages?”

“You’re asking me?” Harrier wanted to know.

“No,” Tiercel said, stepping from Ancaladar’s head to the floor. “I’m just asking.”

“Fine. Now do you—”

“Oh, I really don’t think you’re going to like this,” Tiercel said.

“Look, Tyr, we know they won,” Harrier said, caught halfway between irritation and worry.

“Yeah. But I’m starting to think they didn’t do it here—as in, they weren’t in Abi’Abadshar—um, the name means something like either ‘; glorious rightful rule’ or ‘; city of the red bones’ if you’re interested—when the Endarkened were cast out in Vieliessar Farcarinon’s time. Okay, you know about the Firesprites, right?”

“No.”

“Ancient race the Endarkened killed. But not until a long time after Abi’Abadshar was built. And abandoned, because this was where the Firesprites lived. Here. In the Barahileth, and the Elves made an alliance with them, and one of the provisions was that they would leave.”

“And you know this because of the …?”

“Pictures.”

“Right. Which they put on the walls because …?”

“They liked putting things on walls?
I
don’t know. The point is that the Elves built this city as part of their war against the Endarkened. They made an alliance with the Firesprites, and turned the war in this area over to them. I think. After which they withdrew from this city.”

Tiercel began moving around picking up his gear—which
was scattered all over the place—and packing it up. Harrier wondered if what Tiercel had been hoping to find on this level was the same thing they’d both been hoping to find somewhere here in Abi’Abadshar all along: an answer, directions, some clear instruction on what exactly it was they were supposed to do in order to do …

The thing that the Elves and even the Wild Magic seemed to be so serenely confident that Tiercel
could
do: stop Bisochim from calling the Endarkened back into the world. Harrier wondered if it might be as simple as going to the Lake of Fire and finding Bisochim and saying: “
Hey, we don’t know what it is you think you’re doing, but you really aren’t. And calling the Endarkened back into the world is a really bad thing, so please stop now, okay?”
If it were that simple, probably somebody else would have done it already.

“Which means that if there’s an answer it isn’t going to be here, because this is not only an
old
place, it’s an old place from, um, the middle of the war so even though the Elves not only probably wrote everything down and they
definitely
carved it into every flat surface they could find,
these
flat surfaces don’t have any information about how the war came out and particularly on how they managed to
win
it.” Harrier looked back up the corridor—he supposed he might as well still call it that, although it wasn’t exactly. A big enough space to make Ancaladar look reasonablesized. Enough room for
two
Ancaladars side-by-side.

“Come on, Harrier. We never thought there’d be a real answer here. If there was a perfect solution available here, wouldn’t they have used it in the next war? And the next?”

“And the next, and the next, and the next—just how many wars are there going to have to be?” Harrier demanded in frustration.

“I don’t think the Dark stops trying, Har,” Tiercel said softly. Harrier wondered if Tiercel felt as frustrated by all this as he did. Or maybe even more frustrated—Tiercel was the one who knew all the history, the one who had all the
details
about all the times the Dark had tried to kill all of them. “I wonder what time it is?” he added.

“Time to go.” When Tiercel looked at him in surprise and suspicion, Harrier said: “No, really. It’s almost time for the evening meal—I mean, considering how far down we are, we’ve just about got time to get back for it if we start now.”

It had surprised both of them to find that no matter how deep below the surface of Abi’Abadshar they went, Harrier always knew exactly what time it was up above. Since Ancaladar did, too, they knew that Harrier was accurate. How and why he could be was something none of them really understood. More Wild Magic stuff, Harrier guessed.

“Yeah, okay,” Tiercel said.

“Because I’m not moving down here,” Harrier added belligerently.

“I said I was coming,” Tiercel said, hefting his bag of gear over his shoulder.

I
T WAS ONLY
a little odd to be sitting around a campfire underground, Tiercel decided. Odd-but-nice, because at least the Nalzindar and their garden-camp were a lot more normal-seeming than places so far underground it took him and Harrier almost two hours just to walk to them. Abi’Abadshar was so old that when he stopped and thought about it, Tiercel really couldn’t get his mind around the sheer
age
of it. Every time he tried to imagine something older than the World of Men his mind just … stopped. It was easier to imagine a world that didn’t have humans in it any more than one in which there hadn’t been humans
yet.
Thinking about it raised so many fascinating questions, and there was nobody to ask—he wasn’t sure even the Elves knew the answers. But… had they—human people—come from somewhere else? Had the Wild Magic made them out of some other creature, the way the Endarkened had been made from Elves? No matter how much he
wanted to know, the answers wouldn’t be carved into the walls here, because this city was too old for that. It had been born—and died—long before there had been Men at all.

Tiercel found that he liked the Nalzindar very much. It made him a little sad, thinking that he would have liked the other Isvaieni just as much, and now, because of what Bisochim had done to them, he’d never get to know them. Shaiara’s people were quiet and shy, and Tiercel had quickly learned that they would never look directly at him when he was speaking to them, and that it was hard to get most of them to say more than a word or two at a time, either. The most disturbing thing about the Nalzindar was something that wasn’t something they were, or something they did, and it had taken him an entire fortnight to think it through and realize what it was and why it was so disturbing.

But Shaiara had told Harrier that this was all of the Nalzindar that there were, and there were only thirty of them, and that included three babies too young to walk and two kids that Tiercel thought were probably somewhere around the age of two and one who was maybe four and a couple who were seven or eight and a boy around twelve who spent all his time staring at Harrier and Tiercel as if he’d never seen anything like them before and hadn’t said a single word in their hearing the entire time they’d been here. So there were only twenty-one adult Nalzindar, and only seven or eight of
them
looked old enough to be about the age of Tiercel’s father.

And Shaiara wasn’t anywhere near that old. She was around his and Harrier’s age. Tiercel had wondered at first if Bisochim had killed her parents and that was why she was the chief of the Nalzindar now, but Ciniran—who didn’t seem to be as shy as the others—had said that Shaiara had been leading the Nalzindar for years.

Tiercel supposed that someone their age being what amounted to a First Magistrate made as much sense as
Harrier being a Knight-Mage or him being the Light’s Fated Warrior intended to defeat the Endarkened. And there was nothing much he could do about either of those things, either. So he took each day as it came, doing his best to become used to the fact that the only sunlight he really saw came filtering down through cracks in the broken stone of the roof, and that if he wanted to see full day and open sky he had at least half an hour’s hike to one of the exits to the outside. He spent most of his time a mile underground looking at things nobody had seen for thousands of years, hoping that something he found there would tell him what he needed to know to stop the Dark from coming back this time.

And at the end of each day he did his best to put all of that out of his mind and think about nothing more complicated than the things he’d used to think about when he’d been a student back in Armethalieh: dinner, and a quiet evening, and then going to bed.

The evening meal among the Nalzindar consisted of roast meat, or stew, and fresh-cooked flatbread with spiced oil (now that there was oil; before this, it had been animal grease) and various fruits and vegetables. The Nalzindar were hunters, and when they’d roamed the Isvai, the evening meal had marked the time, several hours after sunset, when the hunters would return to the camp to share their news of the day’s success or failure. The Nalzindar, like most of the creatures of the desert, hunted at dusk or dawn, and kept as still as possible in the day’s greatest heat. Now—by their standards—they didn’t need to hunt at all, but the evening meal still marked the end of their day. There might be some talk of the days’ activities—though only, Tiercel had discovered, if they involved something the whole tribe needed to know. At meals, Harrier and Tiercel sat beside Shaiara—honored guests—with a half-dozen of what Tiercel thought of as “senior” Nalzindar gathered around them, although they weren’t much older than Harrier’s oldest brother. He knew most of their names
by now: Marap and Kamar and Natha and Talmac and his brother Turan. Even Ciniran ate with them, although he didn’t get the impression she was one of the “senior” tribesmen. Actually, aside from Marap and Kamar and Shaiara herself, Tiercel wasn’t sure of the relative status of anyone here.