Magi'i of Cyador (38 page)

"Of what, Bluoyal'mer?" Captain-Commander Luss does not conceal his puzzlement. "The City Guards report to the Majer-Commander, but unfortunates within the city do die at times under the blade despite the efforts of the City Guards. Why would such a killing be of interest to the Magi'i... or me?"

"Ah... you do not know." Bluoyal nods happily. "That is best."

Luss waits.

"The heir was killed with a lancer sabre. A single cut of a lancer sabre."

"I wish that I could say that no lancer would do such to a trader known for his arrogance. Or that such has never happened." Luss offers a shrug and a smile. "Yet those who have their golds speak for them sometimes find themselves without voice."

"As happened with Shevelt," Bluoyal points out. "You know aught of this?"

"No. I wish that I could say that it had not happened. Or that all lancers were so effective. But it did occur. However... this trader was killed on foot and in the dark, as I recall. Those are not the conditions for which lancers are trained. Also, I recall something about a dagger...." Luss raises his eyebrows.

"There was a dagger. It did not kill him. A healer was summoned. There were traces of focused chaos around the wound, and the killing wound was made by cupridium. Nothing else cuts the way a lancer sabre does."

Luss frowns thoughtfully. "That sounds far more like a renegade magus who has stolen a blade than any lancer officer I have known. Far more. And a lancer from the ranks, in the trade quarter? That would be impossible in Cyad. He would have been noticed immediately."

"We also looked into this. Someone stole a Dyjani trade plaque and used it as authorization to have a Brystan sabre plated and refinished with cupridium...." Bluoyal lets the words drift off.

"You see... it could not have been a lancer. Lancers are constrained from keeping such weapons, and certainly someone would have noted an outland blade being reformulated with cupridium. Any lancer who attempted such would immediately have been noted."

"As I said... the man was noticed."

"Oh? Perhaps you had best explain how this might implicate a lancer." Luss waits.

"The Brystan sabre was replated-under false pretenses."

"You said such." Luss's voice betrays a trace of exasperation.

Bluoyal smiles crookedly. "There is one... difficulty...."

"Oh?"

"The Brystan sabre was not delivered until the day after this Shevelt was murdered."

"Why are you telling me this?" questions Luss. "You claim the man was killed with chaos added to a cupridium blade that did not exist until the day after the murder. No lancer was ever seen, and the weapon was not handled by a lancer. Or is that what you wished to know?"

Bluoyal shrugs. "It is helpful. An enumerator ordered the blade to be plated, and reclaimed it. Yet no one knows who that enumerator was. Except that he was of average size and wore the garb of a senior enumerator and had ten golds and a Dyjani trade plaque."

"Ten golds? Someone could have hired a halfscore bravos for that."

"You see?"

Luss frowns.

"You do see. There are two threads. First, whoever killed this Shevelt did not wish it traced to him. Or her. Shevelt was a danger to someone. Or he knew something. That by itself is meaningless. It could have been over a woman. Or a slight. Anything. But... then we have someone who has taken the risk of stealing a trade plaque and spending ten golds to make a Brystan sabre cut like a lancer weapon. Yet no one has been killed in such a way in the eightday following. And the blade was not even finished when the killing took place."

Luss shakes his head.

"One other matter..."

Luss stares hard at the Emperor's Merchanter Advisor.

"The journeyman who dealt with the enumerator swears the man knew nothing of blades. I trust you understand what that portends."

"I fear I do. There is more here, and more than one man involved."

"Then you would not take it amiss if I discussed this with Lector Kharl?"

"Perhaps we both should," Luss suggests.

"A most excellent and worthy idea, Captain-Commander." Bluoyal blots his face with a green shimmering cloth. "Most excellent."

LXIII

In the early morning light, Lorn rides easily beside Maran as the two lancer officers near the wall warding the Accursed Forest. Lorn's mount is a white gelding of moderate size, while Maran rides a fractious white stallion three hands taller at the shoulder than the gelding.

"You're lucky it's clear," Maran observes. "We often have an early morning fog in the winter, especially around the wall. It can make it difficult if the forest tries to use a fallen trunk as a bridge to escape because no one sees anything until the giant cats are loose and killing cattle or peasants or until a stun lizard has killed an entire wagon team."

Lorn nods, listening to the words and remembering them, neither accepting nor rejecting what the majer says.

Even from a kay away, the Accursed Forest towers into the sky, a mass of greenery that appears more like a dark, low-lying cloud than vegetation. The crown of the forest canopy rises at least two hundred cubits skyward, and the ward-wall itself appears as little more than a thin shimmering white line at the base of the trees it confines.

The grass through which the narrow road leads dies away, and the white paving stones continue toward the wall through a grayish white dirt that oozes the red chaos of salt-killed soil. The light breeze intermittently swirls powder-like soil and salt across the road. Lorn can also sense residual chaos-from firelances, or magus-bolts, or perhaps from the specal firecannon Maran had mentioned the afternoon before.

"It's amazing the first time you see it," Maran observes. "It's hard to believe that anyone could have built something this massive and so long. Remember, the part that's underground is ten times as deep as what you see."

As they approach the wall more closely, Lorn glances upward at the dark-trunked trees that appear evenly spaced just inside the wall. Each trunk appears to be set no less than thirty cubits from the next and no more than forty. At the height from which Lorn can see their bases across the top of the wall, he judges each trunk to be between ten and fifteen cubits in diameter.

Maran reins up the white stallion a good fifty cubits back from the wall, and Lorn follows the majer's lead.

Then Lorn studies the wall-a barrier not terribly high, perhaps five cubits high, low enough that he can look beyond it while mounted. Each white granite wall stone is an oblong two cubits long, one cubit high, and approximately one thick, from what Lorn can tell. The wall's thickness is three courses. He looks to the southeast, but there the wall seems to end less than a kay away, a spot marked by the fifty-cubit-high granite structure that stands a quarter kay back from the wall-the southernmost chaos tower. The tower is windowless and squat.

He glances back to his left, where the wall seems to stretch endlessly to the northwest, a line of white dwindling and then vanishing into the gray-green of the horizon. "It looks as though any one of those trees could fall and crush the wall."

"If it were a normal wall, they might. The bark and the outer layer splinter and shatter, but their heartwood absorbs all the chaos for a long time, and that allows all sorts of animals to use the trunk as a bridge." Maran snorts. "Then, to remove it from the wall proper takes special engineer equipment, and the engineers have their hands full. Sometimes, there are seeds that sprout as well."

"Even in the salted soil?"

"Even there, and at times the seeds and fragments get thrown or carried beyond the barrier strip."

Lorn glances from the wall back along the road. At most, one of the tallest trees would cover less than a quarter of the distance to where the grass begins. "How often does that happen?"

"An actual full trunk falling-perhaps ten a season in a bad season, five in a good season. Two years ago, there were close to three score in the autumn. That was the most ever."

Lorn frowns. Between twenty and forty tree trunks falling across the wall every year? In a bad year, that might approach one an eightday.

"A giant cat or a stun lizard-they're about as dangerous as a company of barbarians."

"How many lancers do we lose every year?" asks the captain.

"Some years, perhaps a handful. Two years ago, we lost almost tenscore." Maran shrugs. "That was high." The majer turns his mount right, along the white paving stones of the twenty-cubit-wide road that parallels the wall, back along the wall toward the chaos tower.

Lorn follows, his eyes and senses still studying the wall.

Every two hundred and fifty cubits is a glittering cube of crystal, from which chaos radiates above the whitened granite. A stronger, but less obvious, line of chaos runs from ward to ward through the cupridium cables within the white ceramic casings set under the capstones of the wall, cables that link each cube with the next.

The entire wall glitters with chaos and power, yet it seems almost insignificant against the unseen wall of dark order that the Accursed Forest represents. Lorn does not quite shudder, but he wonders how Maran can accept the Forest so casually. His chaos-order senses range over Maran as they have over the wall, and he has to force himself not to stiffen in the white leather saddle. Smoldering beneath the pleasant exterior and the uniform of a lancer is a magus-or a lancer with the power of a second-level adept.

Lorn lets a faint smile cross his lips. His eyes lift and study the road and what lies ahead-the white granite structure that is one of the dozen chaos towers to power and reinforce the very structure of the ward-wall. A low chaos-reinforced white granite wall-built exactly like the ward-wall-runs from the chaos tower building to the ward-wall proper. Although it rises nearly fifty cubits above the dead and salted-soil area in which it is located, it too is dwarfed by the bulk and power of the Accursed Forest to its north.

Just what sort of chaos-power had the ancients used to confine the Accursed Forest? And how had Cyador been able to maintain those wards for so long?

Knowing that he has more immediate problems than the source of the wards' power, Lorn glances from the wall to Maran, then back to the ward-wall.

LXIV

The sun has not cleared the crown of the Accursed Forest, effectively the eastern horizon, as Lorn's replacement lancers mount up around the second waystation on the southwestern ward-wall. The waystation is simple enough, a single low structure with stables and barracks for three squads, three officer's rooms, and a mess staffed by the local cadre of five. The walls are the same white granite as every building associated with the ward-wall, and the roof is of hard green ceramic tile.

There had been another reason for delaying Lorn's departure, he has discovered. Had he left Geliendra a day earlier, both his de facto company and the Fifth Forest Patrol Company would have been at the same waystation at the same night-a cramped situation. As it was, the two patrol-ing groups had merely passed each other the day before.

Lorn rides the gelding out into the center of the courtyard and waits. He is in command, for the trip to Westend, of the equivalent of two squads, each headed by a very fresh junior squad leader. Before long the two squad leaders ride up.

"Ser?" asks Kusyl, the older of the two junior squad leaders. "You want us to start on the wall?"

There are two perimeter roads that follow the ward-wall. One is set fifty cubits back from the wall-the other more than a kay back from the wall, roughly a hundred cubits back from the area of deadened soil. Patrols ride in a line abreast, one squad on strung out from the wall road, one in a line inward from the outside perimeter road.

"You had the perimeter yesterday afternoon, right?" replies Lorn. "Yes, ser."

"Then you start on the wall road. I'll be riding with you." Lorn turns in the saddle. "Fynyx... you and your squad patrol in from the perimeter road."

"Yes, ser."

Kusyl has already ridden back toward the lancers clustered around the stable doors. "Form up! First squad starts on the wall road!" Fynyx follows. "Second squad here! Column by twos! Now!" Once the squads are formed up, Kusyl reports, "First squad ready, Captain."

"Second squad, ser," Fynyx reports next.

Lorn nods and uses his heels to nudge the gelding forward and out through the open courtyard gates. A low ground mist, no more than a cubit high, covers the grass to the south and west of the waystation, fading away over the salted ground that borders the ward-wall. "Line abreast!" go out the orders from the squad leaders. Riding side-by-side, Lorn and Kusyl ride toward the Accursed Forest, turning their mounts onto the wall road. The column follows, each lancer turning until all are in the line abreast. Then, the first squad heads northwest in the shadow cast by the forest crown that towers over them, even though the massive trunks do not rise until they are almost seventy cubits back from the wall.

Muted sounds that Lorn cannot make out exactly drift across the comparatively low ward-wall, barely audible above the clopping of his mount's hoofs on the white granite stone of the road. A scent that is partly floral, partly something else, swirls past Lorn intermittently. His nostrils twitch as he tries to identify the sources... and fails.

"Quiet morning, ser," offers Kusyl. "Is it this quiet in the Grass Hills?"

"Sometimes, it's much quieter, except for the wind. The wind blows most of the time there." Lorn stands in the stirrups, trying to readjust to the riding he has not done for nearly half a season.

"Times... you can hear the big cats scream... eerie... comes across the wall like an arrow."

"I've never heard one," Lorn confesses.

"You'll know," promises the squad leader. "You'll know. No mistaking that."

The squad rides parallel to the wall road at a steady walk, passing ward after ward as the sun rises until Lorn and the lancers are riding in sunlight instead of shade.

As mid-morning nears, he wants to yawn. After two days of riding the wall, and time spent in the evening studying the ward-wall patrol manual that Maran had provided, his eyes tend to blur whenever he looks toward the chaos and whitened granite that prisons the Accursed Forest. Yet... he will be doing this for years to come.