The Phoenix Endangered (61 page)

Even though he was determined to be a good guest—and even though he knew how much worse his situation could be—Tiercel found his evenings among the Nalzindar more boring than he could once have imagined. After the meal they simply went off to sleep. And he couldn’t practice his spells. He really didn’t dare (considering that a simple spell of Magelight had made the walls light up so brightly, he had no idea what might happen if he cast the wrong spell), and besides, Ancaladar wasn’t there to work with him. Ancaladar wasn’t even there to talk to, most of the time in the evening, because Ancaladar spent most nights hunting. Desert game was small and sparse, and unless he wanted to leave the desert entirely and fly to a place where he could take larger prey, he needed to hunt every night. And while Ancaladar
could
fly to such a place, none of them really liked the idea of him being so far away from Tiercel, considering what had happened the last couple of times.

At least—in this land of what the Nalzindar called “peace and plenty”—some of them were willing to stay up after dinner just to keep “the strangers” company. (Tiercel got the idea that even if he and Harrier spent the next ten years here in Abi’Abadshar with the Nalzindar, they’d still be known as “the strangers”), because even after a long day spent hiking through the echoing caverns below, neither of the two of them was ever quite tired enough to sleep immediately. After dinner most evenings, Shaiara and Ciniran would walk with them through the gardens for an hour or so, accompanied by floating balls of Coldfire. About a half an hour’s walk away from the camp, there was a pool with a little waterfall. The two Nalzindar never grew tired of gazing at the falling water.
There were even fish in the pool, though none of them could imagine how they’d gotten there. Harrier had assured the Nalzindar that fish were safe to eat, and had even offered to catch and cook some, but even though Harrier was a “Revered Wildmage” (and Tiercel would
never
get tired of teasing him about that, at least when they were safely out of earshot of any of the Nalzindar) so far none of the tribe had been willing to take him up on his offer.

Sitting beside the waterfall, they would talk, though Harrier and Tiercel and Ciniran did most of the talking.

“You couldn’t be planning to spend the rest of your lives here?” Tiercel asked one evening. “I mean, this is a beautiful place, but…”

“Where else should we go?” Ciniran had asked simply. “The Isvai is not safe.”

“But there are other places,” Tiercel said.

Ciniran stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“Um … north?” Tiercel suggested cautiously. “You could go north?”

Shaiara had made a faintly amused noise. She was far-too-polite to ever tell them they were idiots, even when Tiercel suspected they were definitely
being
idiots, but she could convey her mirth at foolishness when it presented itself to her, and frequently did. “Into the Great Cold?” she said in disbelief.

“You make it sound as if it’s like—I don’t know—thinking about packing up and going off to live in the Elven Lands,” Tiercel protested.

“And why should I consider living in the Veiled Lands, when they belong to the Elder Brethren, who would surely not welcome my intrusion?” Shaiara asked. “Still less would I wish to go to live in a wasteland of frozen water.”

“No, no, see, the north isn’t like that,” Tiercel said, wanting to make her understand. “Well not all the time. No, it isn’t even like that in winter—okay, there
is
frozen water—I mean, snow and ice—on the ground, well, snow falls out of the sky, but—”

To his irritation he heard Harrier laugh out loud as he
stumbled through his explanation, and even Ciniran gave a single soft chuff of amusement. But it became clear to both of them—to all of them—that the thought of the Nalzindar traveling to a land where they had no idea of how to survive was only a stopgap at best. It might offer temporary safety, but if Bisochim could not be stopped at the Lake of Fire, that safety would be very temporary indeed.

Twenty One

A Double-Edged Gift

“I
F WE HAVEN’T
found anything in the last—oh, how many is this?—six?—eight?—levels, I don’t see why you want to keep going down,” Harrier complained.

“It’s ten levels now. This will be the tenth. And among other things, don’t you want to see how far down this
goes?”
Tiercel answered.

It was now a full moonturn since the two of them had arrived in Abi’Abadshar. There were whole stretches of time when Harrier could forget … things.

The destruction of Tarnatha’Iteru. The thought that the man who’d given him his swords and taught him all that he knew about using them was certainly dead. The fact that this was only a waystation on their way to destroy the Fire Woman and stop Bisochim—and only when it was very late and he was completely alone did Harrier ever take out and look at the thought that
stopping
Bisochim was going to mean
killing
Bisochim.

He’d killed a man whose name he didn’t even know. He’d killed, in fact, several men, and the fact that he didn’t know the exact number made him want to cry, if there’d been any place he could have done it without anyone knowing. And it didn’t matter
why
he’d done it, or what those
men’s friends and families had done to Harrier’s friends (and would do to his family if they could get at them). Having killed had hurt something and changed something inside him, and Harrier would give nearly anything for those moments not to have happened—and to unknow the knowledge that if more such moments lay in his future, he would not turn aside from them.

So he followed Tiercel as Tiercel looked for answers, and practiced with his swords down in the echoing stone depths where none of the Nalzindar could see him—because he couldn’t bear the thought that any of them might see what he was doing and praise him, or want him to teach them what he knew—and did what he could to help the Nalzindar in other peaceful ways, and read his Three Books, and hoped that some solution to their problem would present itself.

But not if it meant that Tiercel intended to descend to the center of the world looking for it.

“No,” Harrier said simply. “Either there are answers here, or there aren’t. And you have to make up your mind which it is. Because just the
surface
of this place is bigger than Armethalieh. And we do not have time to search every inch of the whole underneath of it, because you know what? I do not think the Endarkened are getting weaker while you are drawing pictures of ancient Elves on
pieces of paper!”

He hadn’t meant to lose his temper. He hadn’t meant to yell. But if anybody—or
anything
—had thought that turning him into a Knight-Mage was going to make him all calm and reasonable all the time like, say,
Ancaladar
, they were a lot stupider than they ought to be, was all Harrier had to say.

“Do not yell, Harrier,” Ancaladar said gently. “We all are aware of the dangers that surround us.”

“No,” Tiercel said reluctantly. “He’s right.
You’re
right. There’s a lot about the spells they used, but… Elven Magery and the High Magick and the Wild Magic are three different things, just to begin with. I can’t learn Elven
Magery any more than I can learn the Wild Magic. It’s just… I thought… You know … I haven’t had one single vision since we got here,” he finished quietly.

“I know.” And Harrier had wondered why that was, because Tiercel’d had them from the moment they’d come through Pelashia’s Veil and right up through when Tarnatha’Iteru fell. Never in any pattern. Never really changing.

“So I think this place is shielded somehow against the Endarkened. Come on, Har. If Bisochim was looking for the Nalzindar, wouldn’t he have found them? You could—it’s a Seeking spell. Remember how you told me a couple of moonturns ago that I had to be careful about what I brought back from the Isvaieni camp at Tarnatha’Iteru in case I brought back something that Bisochim could Seek and use to find the Nalzindar? But he wouldn’t need something like that. To See something or somebody you know is a simple spell.
I
could—Shaiara’s said she’s met him, so Bisochim knows what she looks like, and
I
could find somebody if I knew what they looked like, and so could you, couldn’t you? So the only reason he hasn’t been able to find them is—”

“Because they managed to hide in the
one place
within a couple of thousand square miles that’s full of shields against the Endarkened that
still work
after about a million years?” Harrier said.

“Pretty much.”

“Which means you think there might be some other magic here that still works?”

“Pretty much.”

“And you didn’t mention this about a moonturn ago
why?”
Harrier asked with long-suffering patience. If not for the fact that Ancaladar’s head was between him and Tiercel, he would have contemplated smacking him. Yes, it was very wrong to hit someone who was unarmed when you were armed—and Harrier never went anywhere without his swords, just as Tiercel couldn’t be persuaded to carry anything more threatening than his wand and his
eating knife—but Harrier didn’t think those rules could ever have been meant to apply to Tiercel. The people who’d come up with those rules hadn’t known Tiercel.

“We haven’t found any objects below the fifth level. And all we’ve found there and above have been furniture, household objects, a lot of gold and jewels. Things that would survive for thousands of years. And nothing remotely magical. The protective shields are probably built into the stone of the city, but…”

“But something else might not be,” Harrier said, starting to get excited now, “and it doesn’t have to be something powerful enough to destroy He Who Is and an entire army of Endarkened, because that isn’t what we’re dealing with.”

“And if there’s something here, there’s no point in doing a spell to try to find it, either your kind or mine, because the shield-spells will just soak up everything. How do you make a spell to look for something if you have no idea of what you’re looking for, anyway?”

Harrier sighed in frustration, his momentary excitement evaporating. Tiercel was right. He leaned back against the wall. They’d have to search every inch of this place now and hope they’d recognize something useful—if there
was
something useful—when they saw it. He stared down into the opening for the steps leading from the Ninth Level to the Tenth. The top few steps weren’t dark, because the Ninth Level was full-moon bright, but after that, Harrier couldn’t see how far down the steps went, and each level tended to be just a
little
larger in scale than the last. “Is this the last one?” he asked hopefully.

“I have no idea,” Tiercel answered.

Harrier sighed. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t see why you never do this,” Tiercel grumbled, gesturing back at the glowing walls.

“Because I don’t make the walls light up and glow for sennights or possibly
forever
, is why,” Harrier said inarguably. “Go on. We brought lunch but we didn’t bring dinner.” He really hated eating down here anyway. It didn’t
matter how large the space was—and it was huge—or how well-lit it was (and it was actually more brightly lit than the underground gardens in which the Nalzindar were living); Harrier could still imagine the crushing weight of all the rock above him. Somehow it seemed to leech all the savor out of the air itself, and though for some reason the air wasn’t damp, it seemed as if it ought to be. At least higher up the passages had been dirty, but this far down the levels weren’t even that. There was just a lot of … nothing.

He stepped away from the wall—though there really wasn’t any reason he needed to—as Tiercel reached out and touched two fingers to the wall. An icy white ring of brightness raced away from the place where Tiercel’s fingertips met the stone, expanding in all directions. No matter how many times Harrier had seen it happen, it still fascinated him to watch the bright circle of light as it raced over walls, ceiling, down over the steps, and to see the stone bloom slowly into the familiar blue-white radiance in its wake. It took the leading edge of the spell less than a score of heartbeats to reach the bottom of the stair and race outward, out of sight. It seemed as if it happened both fast and slow while he was watching, because watching an ordinary Coldfire spell (and Harrier realized that in the last year, he’d actually begun to think of some spells as “ordinary”) make all the stone in sight glow as brightly as a single object that the spell had been cast on (and the first corridors that Tiercel had illuminated showed no sign of going dark, even a moonturn later) was both weird and fascinating, no matter how many times Harrier got to see it happen.

When the spell had finished its work, Harrier saw—with a sigh of resignation—that it was a really long way down, which meant it was a really long way up. As much as he hated the thought, if they were going to do much exploring below this, maybe they
should
start camping down here, because it had actually taken them more than a bell just to get this far.