Recluce 07 - Chaos Balance (51 page)

THE SILVER-HAIRED an gel plopped on the ground in front of the bushes, setting Weryl down between his legs, and glancing out across the kays of lower lands filled with tree shoots that separated the house from the older growth of the forest.

   He ran his hand across his chin, clean-shaven, and with a few cuts. His hand-forged equivalent of a straight razor wasn't especially forgiving, especially when there was no equivalent of soap around. Water oozed down his neck from his damp hair.

   The grass that had covered the hillside was turning blotchy brown in some places, and not others, and he wondered what pattern the forest had in mind, if it had a mind, for where there would be grass and where there would not.

   Weryl levered himself up by grabbing Nylan's right knee, then stiff-legged his way to the nearest bush, where his fingers closed on a branch, gently.

   Ayrlyn sat down beside Nylan, her short hair damp from her efforts to wash it. “What are you thinking this cloudy morning?”

   He glanced at the low gray clouds, then at her. “The forest is the key to it all.” Nylan felt stupid-again-for stating the obvious, but the obvious was all he had.

   “Do you know why?”

   “No. Not exactly. The whole planet is like a ship's flux system-enormous power, constrained by order, with a continual swirl of lesser fluxes.” Nylan swallowed, then rubbed an itching nose. “The white stuff-what we call chaos-that's where most of the power lies. Order-the dark flows- they're more like boundaries than real flows, and they maintain the system. You need both.”

   “You've made progress.”

   “It's all taxonomy, just reclassifying the stuff we've known already.”

   Weryl released the first branch, glanced back at his father, then walked perhaps ten cubits before sitting down with a plop to study a green shoot growing in a crack between two stones of the front walk. His fingers stroked the green, gently.

   “If there's no chaos, there's no energy to run the system,” observed Ayrlyn. “Without your order, then you'd have uncontrolled energy that would swirl out and dissipate in entropic heat?”

   “I don't know. That's my guess. There's got to be a balance, and somehow the Old Rats maintained that balance. Something happened-”

   “What are you going to do?”

   “We're going to act as system engineers, I guess.”

   “I'm no engineer.”

   “This isn't a ship's system, either. It takes feel. That's where you come in.”

   “Oh?”

   “I'm going to try to feel out the system.”

   “After what's already happened?”

   “We'll try it just inside the old growth.”

   “We're going to walk into that?” Ayrlyn frowned.

   “Why not? As we found out, it can hit hard even from a distance. What's the difference between being in the middle of a flux or standing at the edge if it goes chaos?”

   Ayrlyn grinned wryly. “Only the size of the particles that you're reduced to, but I don't know that I'm in the mood to be reduced.”

   “Before you do battle with the forest,” suggested Sylenia, standing by the edge of the bushes, “best you eat.”

   “She has a point.” Nylan lurched to his feet and toward Weryl, scooping his son up and carting him back into the small house. The smith's shoulder brushed the green-glazed ceramic screen. Such artistry-all abandoned so quickly. Then he supposed he'd have abandoned it too, especially if there were a lot of those big cats prowling around. The locals, Ayrlyn had pointed out, didn't carry much in the way of weapons.

   Several loaves of bread were spread on wide leaves, along with some nuts and what looked to be yellow apples.

   “Those are pearapples,” Sylenia explained. “Yusek brought me one, once. These are better. They are fresher.”

   Nylan sliced off a chunk of the loaf and chewed the moist and tangy bread. “What... is this . . . ?”

   “It be squash loaf. I can bake. With but one pot. . .” The dark-haired woman shrugged. “Weryl, he is good at finding the healthy fruits and things. I follow him.”

   Ayrlyn looked at Weryl. So did Nylan. Was Weryl sensing the forest the way he did the notes from the lutar?

   “Da! Ahwen!”

   “Does this bread keep? For travel?” asked Ayrlyn. “We'll need something on the way back.” If we get that far. Ayrlyn frowned. “Pessimist.”

   “I could wrap it in leaves.” Sylenia shrugged. “Do you plan to leave soon?”

   “Not that soon,” Ayrlyn said after taking a swallow of water. “The nuts are good.”

   “They must be cooked, or they are bitter.”

   Nylan was glad Sylenia knew about the local vegetation. He probably would have starved. Then, those of them in Westwind nearly had in the first year, at least partly out of ignorance. He tried the nuts, and they were tasty. He kept eating until he realized that he was no longer hungry, but that he was almost stuffing food into his mouth.

   “Nervous?”

   Nylan nodded. “You?”

   “Of course.”

   He wiped his mouth and took another low swallow of water, then stood.

   “Da! Ahwen!”

   Nylan bent and lifted Weryl, hugging him tightly for a moment. Weryl hugged him back, then turned his head.

   “He wants to give you a hug.” Nylan eased Weryl toward the redhead.

   Ayrlyn embraced the silver-haired boy, and Nylan could sense her tears. “Be good, Weryl. Be good.” She set him on the glazed tile floor, and Sylenia immediately took his hand.

   Nylan swallowed. Am I doing the right thing? Have I any choice ?

   No, came the thought from Ayrlyn.

   They walked quickly out the rear door to where the mounts they had saddled earlier waited.

   “This is scary,” he admitted after climbing into the saddle.

   She nodded, pursing her lips.

   They rode into the growing outer forest without speaking, letting the mares pick their way toward the unseen wall and the boundary between the ancient domain of the forest and its recent acquisition.

   “We can do this. We just have to think about balance.”

   “Thinking about it is easy, but trying to make ourselves part of it isn't going to be easy.”

   “Nothing important ever is.”

   Nylan nodded. She was right about that.

   After tying both mares to trunks that were noticeably thicker than the day before, the two walked slowly toward the creeper-covered wall that was measurably lower than the day before.

   “For something that doesn't think, it's certainly removing its past boundaries quickly enough,” Ayrlyn noted.

   “Thought and intelligence are just illusions that primates glory in.” Nylan's voice was dry. So was his mouth. The narrow gray-green leaves on the new trees seemed to rustle, though he could sense no breeze, and a mist drifted out from the older growth, carrying the unfamiliar mixed floral scent that was neither too cloying nor too astringent.

   Nylan swallowed and stepped across the creepered and vanishing wall. He swallowed again, and tried to relax.

   Ayrlyn touched his arm. “We're doing this together, remember.”

   What were they doing?

   Nylan finally let his thoughts drift outward, as though he were still on the powernet of the Winterlance, letting his mind follow his senses through the mist, through the green shoots, through the intertwining of the hot reddish white of chaos, and the cool black bands of order. Beside him, he could sense the order-rooted solidity of Ayrlyn, and even the distant presence of Weryl, though his son seemed a more innocent balance between darkness and chaos.

   Their progress seemed nearly effortless, as they stood there, yet moved through the swirls of darkness, jets of chaos, and unseen and intertwined webs where the two forces merged. Yet there was no gray, only black and white, a blackness deeper than night, a whiteness tinged with sullen red, like the hot coals of a smithy.

   Beneath the surface flows was a deeper, more intricate intertwining of order and chaos. Why was the pseudonet flux more simple in the open air? Was it the earth? Or was everything more complex the deeper one went?

   Nylan took another breath, then tried to let his senses take in the subtle mixtures of ordered red and white iron and white-red chaos that seemed pure fiery destruction. Mixtures of order and chaos, patterns intertwining, tugged at him, drawing him toward them.

   There-amid a grove that seemed to grow as he watched- was an upwelling of pure black, somehow power-surged, white-red simultaneously, that wrapped itself around a fountain of white tinged with red. Beyond the fountain was a rhythmic pulsing of smaller order-beats against a squarer kind of chaos, like a powerboard balance.

   Nylan cleared his throat, and Ayrlyn's hand touched his elbow, a tinge of dark and comforting order in the fluxes that swirled and rose around them. He relaxed, as he could, and tried to take in, without judgment, the intertwining of order and chaos, trying to let himself drift along the lines of order, along the forces that made the Winterlance's powernet seem insignificant, toward a small fountain of blackness that somehow seemed to geyser deep out of the roots of the forest, deep out of the melting rocks far below Candar, far below Cyador.

   Even as his senses neared the fountain, it shifted, toward chaos, and a torrent of white boiled around the blackness, and red chaos, oozed, then spurted forth. A cool thread of black beckoned, and for an instant, Nylan felt as though he understood the interweavings of the patterns, like the webs of perfectly matched ships' nets holding and focusing against the Mirror Towers of the Rats.

   A line of molten chaos, red with dull white, lashed from nowhere, and needles like precisely focused lasers burned through him. Another thicker band of white began to twine around the engineer's senses, wrapping itself around his knees and oozing ever upward, tightening around his waist.

   Nylan started, realizing that he could not just stand and let himself be enfolded, and tried to wrench free-even as another thinner white line slashed at him again, moving impossibly quickly for something rooted in a slow-growing forest.

   A band of black, ordered steel slammed at him, and his knees buckled, and another line of white, tinged with red, slashed, and he lifted his arms and turned, trying to protect Ayrlyn from the assault of chaos and who knew what else. His soul and face burned.

   “I'm fine.” Her words were more felt than heard.

   Nylan held to himself, trying to stand above the fluxes, as must any engineer, struggling to pattern what could be patterned, letting flow free the chaos that must flow, and forcing himself, his senses, into a ball of ego.

   Nylan! Nylan, the engineer, who holds the fluxes, rides the chaos-that is me. That is who I am! I am Nylan . . . NYLAN!!!!

   The lashes of chaos and order continued, but Nylan permitted himself a grim smile as he felt the attacks pause. With another deep breath, with sweat oozing off his forehead, and stinging into his eyes, he could feel the powers of the forest weakening, or backing off, and he increased his efforts, trying to master both the flows and himself before chaotic fluxes rebounded-and he knew they would, for chaos always rebounded.

   Ride the flows! Hold the patterns!

   He sent that thought to Ayrlyn, pressing order upon her, and received a similar feeling in return, except Ayrlyn was not Ayrlyn, but an intertwined pillar of order and chaos, warm, yet cool.

   An image formed-one that Nylan knew was not real- and yet it appeared alive and immediately before him.

   A figure in the undress olive blacks of a U.F.A. marine stepped across the turned and settled soil between the lines of knee-high trees. She lifted a black blade shortsword, a blade of Westwind, a blade Nylan knew he had forged.

   Nylan strained to see her face, but a shadow cast by no sun remained across the face of the marine who carried no shield, no sidearm, only the short blade. Then, out of the shadows, two dark eyes slashed the engineer.

   I rode against the first chaos wizard you fought, face-to-face, and I died. I died, and you live. I understood that we must fight, and I died. You still fight against the need to fight, yet you live on. You are the great engineer, the one who rides the chaos fields, and you abandoned me to the depths of chaos. Great engineer, you sought order where there was none, and built a mighty tower because of me, because of those like me. Yet we are forgotten, and all will remember your name. You are a self-deceiving hypocrite: You claim you want peace, yet wherever you turn, death follows. You establish order, and chaos reigns.

   Nylan could not move, and though he could feel Weryl squirm in the distance, he could not reassure the boy-or Ayrlyn. The words pounded through him: “self-deceiving hypocrite . . . self-deceiving hypocrite . . . self-deceiving . . .”

   Then the figure of Cessya raised the shortsword, the blade he had forged, and turning it slightly, slammed it across the side of his face. His entire cheek burned, and he staggered, before catching himself, the words still ringing: “self-deceiving . . . self-deceiving ...”

   He swallowed as the chaos and order swirled around him again, as another figure shimmered into being on the mist-damp soil between the towering trees that seemed to ring him as he watched.

   A woman in a brown tunic, dark-haired, barefooted, stood there, her head downcast. Then her face lifted, and she beckoned, as if for Nylan to listen. He looked and saw that her shoulder slumped, almost cut away from her body, and dark, dark red stained the tunic. Blood drooled from the corner of her mouth.

   ... oh, great mage, you saved me, and you saved my daughter, and then you cast me against your enemies so that you would not have to fight. I died, and my daughter wept, and you had no answers. I died, and you could not tell her why. I died, and you lived. How many others died so you might live, a great mage ?

   “No!” insisted Nylan. “It wasn't that way.” Except that the words remained in his mind, and his mouth did not move.

   . .. but it was. Niera is alone, cold on the heights you have left, with no one to comfort her. You lived, and you built, and you promised. Then you left, and there is no one to explain, no one to comfort. . . .