Recluce 07 - Chaos Balance (55 page)

   SO NUMEROUS WERE the horses that the entire countryside rumbled like a massive drum. The white uniforms spread across the mottled brown and green of the grasslands so that the hills looked as though early winter had fallen upon them.

   Behind the lancers and their horses came the foot, rows upon rows, white and well dressed out even for all the kays they had marched. Behind them rolled the legions of wagons-supply wagons, armorers' wagons, and the glistening wagons of the marshal's equipage.

   Behind the van rode Marshal Queras, Majer Piataphi, and the white mages. Triendar squinted from beneath a broad and floppy white hat. Themphi's face was red and blistered, while Fissar bounced in his saddle.

   The van had slowed at the ridge line that overlooked a lower-lying and greener valley.

   “There are the grasslands barbarians!” announced Queras. On the far north side of the valley stood a settlement, flanking a large pond or small lake. To the west, above the grassy swale that connected the two ridges, waited a dark mass of riders under the fir tree banners of Jerans.

   As the Cyadorans watched, the Jeranyi horse wheeled, formed a wedge, and then plunged down through the swale and up onto the west end of the ridge, toward the left flank of the advancing Cyadoran Mirror Lancers, the drum of hoofbeats echoing on the sunbaked grasslands.

   “To the left!” ordered Piataphi, spurring his mount toward the van that had begun to turn.

   The white-bronze trumpet sounded its triplets, and the shields lifted, flashing light spears into the Jeranyi ranks, and the white lances leveled as the massed Cyadoran force slowly swung around. Light spears winked from the polished shields, turning the front ranks of the Jeranyi into a blaze of reflections. Majer Piataphi reached the front rank of the lancers and lifted his sabre again.

   The day filled with the clash of blades and lances, sabres and shortswords, and the dark knot of Jeranyi appeared ever smaller as the lines of white-clad armsmen swelled, as did the clangor.

   Themphi stared as bodies fell from bloodstained saddles; Triendar shook his head ever so slightly, so slightly that the floppy hat barely moved. Fissar, pale white, looked at the small lake, well away from the blood, and swallowed convulsively.

FROM HER MOUNT beside Nylan's, Ayrlyn raised her eyebrows. “You all right?”

   “Sorry.” Nylan flushed at the growling from his stomach. “Sylenia's culinary inventions have definitely kept us from starving, but the side effects are . . .” Rather than finish the sentence he never should have begun, he glanced to the west, at a hillside that had rapidly become all too typical, a patchwork of brown and black and gray.

   So far, all the holdings that they had passed since entering southern Lornth were ashes, black lumps in the midst of blackened grass that stretched for kays around even the most humble of hovels. Four days of scattered ashes and cinders, and more scattered ashes and cinders.

   “We're eating, and we don't have to stop to forage,” Ayrlyn pointed out.

   Nylan wished he'd said nothing.

   “Might have been better.” Ayrlyn grinned.

   “You would eat ashes were it not-” began the nursemaid.

   “I'm sorry. I know.” Nylan sniffed the air as the mare carried him up the long incline. “Something's burning.”

   “Grass.”

   “More than grass. More than just a holding.” The engineer glanced at Ayrlyn.

   The redhead's eyes glazed over, and she half-slumped in the saddle.

   Nylan slowed his marc to match the slower pace of the half-attended chestnut that Ayrlyn rode.

   “Gwasss . . . wadah, pease?” Weryl coughed after his request.

   “You are not thirsty,” Sylenia informed her charge.

   Nylan suspected that Weryl just wanted to talk, but, precocious as his son appeared to be, his vocabulary was still rather limited. So he asked for water, and more water.

   “There was a town ahead. Clynya, maybe, but it's hard to tell.” Ayrlyn shivered and straightened in the saddle.

   “Hard to tell?” Although he asked, Nylan had a feeling that he knew what she meant.

   “Exactly. You know.”

   He did-the town had been burned the way the holdings they had ridden past had been.

   They reined up at the top of the hills and looked northward. Nylan glanced across the blackened expanse, kays and kays, on each side of the river. Smoke still swirled up from blackened heaps. Was the smoldering mass on the right side of the river all that was left of the barracks where they had stayed?

   Along with acridness of ashes and cinders came the odor of charred meat. Only the thin plumes of grayish smoke moved in the afternoon heat, rising in thin spirals-except for a single figure that might have been a dog darting along what had been the road through Clynya.

   “Clynya? This be Clynya?” asked Sylenia in a choked voice.

   “We think so.” Nylan studied what had been the barracks and the stable, where even the collapsed sod roof seemed, if his eyes were reliable from the distance, to smolder.

   “They are demons . . .”

   Nylan nodded, absently wondering again how a people who could build such clean and advanced homes could so consciencelessly destroy whole towns and their inhabitants. Ayrlyn had once said that technology enabled mercy, but the Cyadorans seemed less merciful than their lower-tech neighbors, rather than more.

   “Because they don't believe outsiders are real people.” Ayrlyn cleared her throat.

   “And because they understand that force is the only true arbiter?”

   “Probably.” Ayrlyn spoke dismissively, and Nylan felt her feelings, both her acceptance that people relied on force and her general but intense disgust that it had to be so.

   “The Cyadorans and Fornal speak the same language in that respect. Iron, cold iron, is the master of all.” He flicked the mare's reins. Whatever they decided, sitting and watching the remnants of Clynya smolder wasn't going to further their efforts. “Now what? Keep riding?”

   “Any better ideas?”

   He shook his head. Even the dog-if it had been a dog- had vanished, and only the smoke swirled on the east side of the river. “How long ago, do you think?”

   “A day, maybe two.”

   Why had everything taken so long? Why had he been so dense? And now, even if they caught up with the Cyadoran hordes . . . what could they do?

   “We couldn't have gotten here much quicker. Try to remember that,” Ayrlyn said.

   “That's easy to say.” And I still don't know how to stop them. . .

   “Use the imbalance . . . like you said.” Ayrlyn eased her chestnut closer to his mare as they continued down the road toward the ruins of Clynya.

   “For destruction?” Nylan rubbed his neck, then eased his right hand behind the leather straps of the blade harness and tried to massage his stiff left shoulder.

   “You're the one who keeps pointing out that people only respect force.”

   “I have trouble with that.”

   “You don't want to become like Ryba,” Ayrlyn said.

   “No.”

   “Using force doesn't mean you have to glory in it or flaunt it.” Ayrlyn reached across the space between mounts, leaning sideways in the saddle for a moment so her fingers could squeeze the wrist of his rein hand. “Anyway, we have to figure out how to use that imbalance first.”

   Nylan nodded. If they didn't use what they knew to survive, morality would become quickly irrelevant. The problem was that, having opted for survival, most survivors in Candar never seemed to regain their morality.

   “That bothers you.”

   “Absolutely. I know I'm no better than anyone else, maybe not so good. So how can I believe it when I promise myself I won't change the way Ryba did?”

   “You're not the same.”

   Nylan would have liked to hope so, but self-justification was a specialty of human beings, and he was more than conscious of being all too human, of seeking self-justification all too easily.

THE LOW CHIRP of crickets or grasshoppers or cicadas or the Candarian equivalent filled the evening. Nylan burped as he settled onto the grass uphill from their camp. He didn't know whether his indigestion came from the slimy wasol roots or the filling but heavy squash bread. All he knew was that his guts felt like they contained lead, and he hadn't eaten all that much. He had the feeling that the orange loaves were endless, that Sylenia had been so enchanted with the ceramic oven that she had baked enough for an entire squad for seasons.

   “Only half a squad.” Ayrlyn slipped through the dimness and sat down beside him by the small stand of scrub oak bushes that shielded the hollow in the ridge where Weryl snored softly and Sylenia lay.

   The scrub oaks were all that passed for cover on the hills flanking the river plain. They'd taken the hill road because Ayrlyn's wind scouting had indicated the hill road was more direct and because that way they could slip past the slower-moving Cyadoran force that followed the river road. Tomorrow, she'd said.

   “Tomorrow.” Ayrlyn shifted her weight, trying to get comfortable on the hard ground.

   “What are we going to do if they find us-or some of their scouts do?”

   “I was going to ask you that. You are the engineer, and I do trust your feelings.”

   “I appreciate the trust, but I haven't been all that successful in applying engineering-”

   “You managed to power and control the laser to build Tower Black, and I don't think that was just technology or luck.” Ayrlyn patted his shoulder gently.

   “This is different.”

   “How?”

   “There's no technological basis at all.”

   “It still has to be a system. I'm quoting an engineer. A very good engineer.”

   “Thanks. He didn't know what he was talking about. He just thought he did.” Nylan coughed gently and shifted his weight. The ground was hard.

   “You mentioned the separation in the ground,” she prompted.

   “It's almost a power differential. And theoretically, if there's a power or an energy imbalance between two forces, there has to be a way to convert that imbalance into usable power.” He shrugged. “I just haven't figured out the mechanism for doing it.”

   “You sound like an engineer, but maybe this is simpler.”

   “Maybe.” Nylan wasn't convinced. Nothing was ever simpler than it seemed. Not in his experience, and when it was, there was usually an incredible price to pay. Add to that that they'd left the forest before he'd really had time to work things out because they both knew that time was short and hoped that they could puzzle it out while they traveled.

   He snorted softly to himself, wondering if their “puzzling” would leave them even more open to white wizards. Then, he had to hope that the wizards were either farther away or concentrating on the battles. Just like him, they couldn't do everything at once. He hoped.

   The insect chirping died away for a moment, and Nylan glanced around, extending his perceptions into the darkness. He smiled as he sensed a foxlike predator creeping after some sort of ground-dwelling rodent.

   The rodent bolted for its hole, and the fox pawed at the ground for a time, then slipped downhill and toward the valley.

   “It wasn't a fox,” Ayrlyn said. “It was something like a coyote, except it was fox-sized.”

   “Call it a foxote?”

   “It probably has a local name that we don't know.”

   “Probably.”

   Nylan looked skyward, into the cloudless evening and the unknown stars that glittered as impersonally as ever.

   “In the forest, does the order balance the chaos? Or is chaos balanced by order?” Ayrlyn asked into the silence.

   “What's the diff-” He paused. “Oh . . .” He swallowed. “Well . . . order provides both a balance and ... I'd guess you'd call it an insulator or separator.”

   “If that's so, then isn't chaos more powerful? Ideally, I mean?”

   “I don't know.” He shrugged, tugging on a long and dry stem of grass. “My guess is that in larger concentrations that would be so, but as you break down chaos into smaller and smaller fragments, order gets progressively more effective.” The stem broke, and Nylan absently chewed the end, then put it aside as his tongue tingled with a bitter taste.

   “What if you tied up all the chaos?”

   “You'd end up tying up all the order. But that's not our problem.” He sighed. “Someday someone may have to deal with that, and I wish them well, but we're nowhere near that. I'm just trying to figure out-”

   “How about experimenting? In little bits?”

   Of course, that was what all his talk had been about-trying to avoid, subconsciously, actually plunging in. What all that white energy could do terrified him.

   “It is a little awesome.”

   Nylan laughed softly. “A little awesome?” He turned and hugged her. “I love your understatements. A little awesome.” He laughed again.

   “I'm glad you find me amusing.”

   “A little awesome?”

   “Nylan.”

   He closed his mouth. Did she know? Did she have any idea of the power that lay beneath Candar?

   “I guess I didn't know. I'm sorry.”

   “It scares me.” The smith shook his head. “It scares me a lot.”

   “You can do it.” Ayrlyn reached out and squeezed his right hand. “We can do it.” We can.

   “I just don't know.” Still, her warmth and her willingness to share the risk warmed him, and he squeezed her hand in return.

   “What if you just used the order lines, like a pipe?”

   Nylan frowned for a moment. While it might not work, that sort of experiment wouldn't be that hard, sort of like the way in which he'd held the laser together at the end.

   “You can, you know,” she said, quietly.

   He wasn't sure, but the only way to find out was to try. He reached beneath the ground, his senses extending until they touched the chaos/order boundary.

   “I can't follow you, not very far,” said Ayrlyn.

   “Can't follow you very far on the winds, either,” he grunted. Already his forehead had begun to perspire. With as gentle a touch as possible, he urged, coaxed, encouraged the order lines to turn toward the surface, reforming them in one small area into a tube, except it was more like an open-ended cone.

   He swallowed as the tip of the unseen cone touched the top of the ground. “Now what?”

   “You have to break the circuit?”

   That wasn't it, not exactly-more like creating a ground in the air, or something like it. He winced as the power sink, or whatever it was he had formed, seemed to glow. He could see his boots with his eyes, and not just his senses.

   Whhhhhssstttt!! A jet of fire-was it fire?-exploded out of the ground, turning the night into dawn, and an unheard screaming slashed through Nylan's skull.

   The engineer swallowed, his eyes closing involuntarily against the light, against the energy, against the heat. His mouth was instantly dry, his heart pounding. The line of fire rose higher until it had to have been nearly ten cubits high- a fountain of chaos-fire brighter than the sun.

   “There!” Ayrlyn had closed her eyes against the burning light.

   The engineer forced his senses back out, grasping for the order cone. He squeezed, prodded, and closed the tip of the cone, letting the boundary layer drop back into place, in effect damping the release of chaos.

   “Whewww ...” he sighed, his eyes still closed, sparks and flashes still sparking across them, though the darkness of night had fallen again. He rubbed his eyelids and then massaged his temples.

   “You could say that,” added Ayrlyn.

   “Lightning! Was that lightning?” Sylenia demanded, sitting bolt upright on her bedroll. “How could there be lightning? There is no storm.”

   “Don't worry, Sylenia,” Nylan lied hoarsely. “We're experimenting. Just experimenting.” He swallowed.

   “Experimenting? What is that? You are making lightnings from the ground? That is experimenting?”

   In a way the nursemaid's statement wasn't a bad analogy, since most lightning did result from a power buildup and disparity between a cloud and the ground, but the engineer didn't want to get into that. “There won't be any more strange lights. Not tonight.”

   “You are sure?”

   “I am sure.” Nylan blotted a forehead that was both hot and cold. Suddenly, he felt like he reeked, reeked of sweat and of sheer terror.

   “He won't do it again,” Ayrlyn added.

   “Thank you, healer.” Sylenia lay back on her bedroll, murmuring just loud enough for the angels to hear, “... bad when they fling blades through armor. Now ... now they bring fires from the ground ... what would Tonsar say? Oh ... he would say much . . .”

   “He would, too,” whispered Nylan.

   “You,” said Ayrlyn. “You have been known to say more than a few words when-”

   “Enough.” The smith touched her chin, then covered her lips with his, holding her tightly, letting her hold him, trying not to shiver too much.

   What might happen on the morrow was left unsaid, unthought. So was the possibility that they had alerted every wizard in kays. But they were short of time, knowledge, and experience-and very alone and exposed.