Recluce 07 - Chaos Balance (59 page)

THE MAJER STEPPED out of the direct sunlight and under the tent awning, past the two Mirror Foot guards. Neither guard moved as Piataphi approached the carved and lacquered green chair where the marshal waited, fanned by yet another guard.

   The majer bowed.

   “You have news, Majer?”

   “The barbarians have stopped retreating, ser,” announced Piataphi. “The van scouts report that they have gathered on the west bank of the river to defend the town called Rohrn.”

   “The name matters not.” Queras raised his right hand, then dropped it. “Like all the others, it will stink. They all stink. Once it is razed, once we have the land in hand, then we will build a proper town, houses with tile floors, and baths, and covered sewers. A town worthy of Cyad and His Mightiness.”

   “When will the attack begin, Fist of His Mightiness?” asked Piataphi.

   “Tomorrow.”

   “The only access from the east bank is a stone bridge, and they have removed the center span,” said Piataphi carefully.

   Queras frowned, then said coldly, “The engineers are constructing the bridges upstream of the town now. There should be no problems. The water is low. By tomorrow, all will be on the west bank.”

   Piataphi bowed. “You have foreseen all.”

   Queras offered a faint smile. “The river bluffs that protect them from any attack from the east will leave them nowhere to go. That will be more . . . expeditious than chasing the smelly wretches all over the plains.” Queras smiled. “You see, Majer, there is no problem that cannot be solved with the application of adequate force.”

   “Yes, ser.” Piataphi bowed once more, deeply, deeply enough that the marshal did not see his eyes.

IN THE DARKNESS that held but a glimmer of gray, the chimes clanged, off-tone, off-key, once, then again.

   Nylan looked across the darkness of the quarters with eyes that had been open for what seemed most of the night to the cots where Sylenia lay, and where Weryl snored softly. Despite the open shutters, the room was close, hot, and the sounds of men moving across the packed clay of the barracks yard grew louder. A horse whinnied, then another answered. A set of wagon harnesses jangled.

   He turned to face Ayrlyn's also open eyes. “Not much for sleeping, was it?” he whispered.

   She shook her head, then leaned forward and touched his cheek with her lips. “I'll be glad when it's over.”

   “I hope I'll be glad when it's over.”

   “Pessimist.” Ayrlyn stretched, then rolled into a sitting position, her knees tucked up almost to her chin.

   “Realist. We'll either be dead or the agents of a huge change, and no one likes agents of change, especially our friend Fornal.” Nylan yawned and sat on the edge of the bed that was a cross between a cot and plank platform. His back was stiff, and he stood slowly, stretching. “Ohhhh . . .”

   “It's not that bad,” hissed Ayrlyn.

   Outside, the off-key triangle chimes clanged again.

   “Da? Ahwen?” Silver-haired Weryl sat up, his green eyes wide, arms extended.

   “In a moment, son. Let your old dad get his boots on.”

   “Does no one here ever sleep?” grumbled Sylenia, throwing back her blanket with a disgusted gesture.

   “Actually,” Nylan said, “we were sleeping while you were out exchanging sweet words with a certain armsman.”

   “Sleeping you were not, not even when I returned.”

   Nylan flushed.

   . . . walked into that one . . . Ayrlyn shook her head and headed for the provisions bag.

   As Ayrlyn used her dagger on the remaining squash bread, Nylan hacked off several slices of the hard yellow cheese. Even more than an eight-day old, the orange bread was better than that turned out by the Lornian armsmen's cooks. On the other hand, the cheese, tough as it was, remained a definite improvement over wasol roots.

   “The cheese, it is hard.”

   “It's what we have.” Nylan refrained from comparing cheese and wasol roots. “The bread is still good.” Ayrlyn grinned, then erased the expression as she handed a slab of the orange stuff to Weryl, who sat on the end of his cot, eyes fixed on the food.

   “Food.”

   “You can eat,” Nylan told his son, and followed his own advice.

   When they had finished their quick breakfast, the engineer looked to the redhead. “Can you find out where the Cyadorans are-without using too much effort?”

   Ayrlyn's eyes glazed over, and Nylan waited . . . but only briefly.

   “They're camped on the bluffs four or five kays south, and they're beginning to form up.”

   Nylan nodded. “The chimes were right, then?”

   “Looks that way.”

   The two began to strap on their blades.

   Then, Nylan picked up Weryl, holding him tightly. His eyes burned, and he swallowed. How long he held his son, he did not know.

   “Nylan ...”... need to go ...

   “I know.” The engineer lifted his head and looked into the green eyes. “You be good for Sylenia, you understand?”

   “Good, da?”

   “He always be good,” said the dark-haired nursemaid. “Greedy, mayhap, but good.”

   Nylan set the silver-haired child on his cot, but Weryl's arms stretched out again. “Da?”

   “He has to go, child.” Sylenia picked up the boy. “They both must go ... and Tonsar.”

   Nylan and Ayrlyn eased out into the yard under a dark green-blue sky barely turning orange in the east beyond the roofs of Rohrn. The clank of harnesses, the whuffing, and chuffing and neighing of mounts and the low murmurs of wary armsmen filled the space between the stables and the barracks.

   As they crossed the yard toward the stable, the dark- cloaked figure of Fornal pointedly turned his back to the angels, and began to talk to Lewa. Nylan frowned.

   “He doesn't want to see us.”

   “I wonder why.”

   “Because he can't deal with us. He knows we're the only hope, but we stand for change and for a lot of things he finds hard to accept. And he's smart enough to know that there's no point in making a point until there's a reason to,” suggested Ayrlyn.

   “After the battle, if we have an 'after.' ”

   “Something like that, but there will be. And we'll have to deal with that, too.”

   “So . . . we're disposable if we win?”

   “I don't know,” Ayrlyn admitted. “Gethen's hard to read, and there's Zeldyan. She's not happy with Fornal, either.”

   Huruc offered a half-gesture, half-salute as he rode past.

   Both angels returned the gesture.

   “Some people still think we exist,” Nylan noted.

   “The better ones.”

   Nylan tried not to breathe too deeply, not when the front of the stable smelled of manure, horse urine, damp straw, and other even less appetizing items, but his nose twitched and his mouth curled.

   “Pretty rank,” Ayrlyn confirmed.

   Like their choices-rank: Ryba's feminist dictatorship- clean, ordered, and oppressive; Lornth's honor-bound, backward, and filthy male autocracy; or Cyador's chaos-founded, clean, male-dominated, and all-controlling empire.

   “We have another choice,” she pointed out. The forest. . . more home than anything . . .

   “Not unless we defeat Cyador.”

   Still, his thoughts held the small and clean cottage that had seemed more homelike than most of Candar. Had it been more homelike than Sybra? He wasn't certain, and that comparison would have to wait.

   Their mounts were near the front of the stable, for which Nylan was glad, having the feeling that matters got even ranker deeper in the recesses of the ancient structure.

   They groomed and saddled the two mares quickly and silently, although Ayrlyn ended up helping the always-slower Nylan. By the time they led their mounts out to the comparatively less odorous yard before the stable, the sun peered over the roofs of Rohrn. Only a dotting of distant white clouds marred the green-blue sky-to the west.

   “Angels!” boomed a burly mounted figure. “I have not my orders from you.”

   Nylan couldn't help but grin. “Tonsar.”

   “Lord Gethen, he told me to find you. And to do as you ordered.” Tonsar's voice lowered slightly. “Sylenia-she told me the same, and she was not gentle in her words.”

   “She has gotten a little more forthright,” Nylan observed cautiously.

   “She speaks her mind, and you men ...” Ayrlyn shook her head and mounted.

   Nylan followed her example and climbed into his saddle. “Was I complaining? Did I say a negative word?”

   “You didn't have to.”

   The chimes rang again, longer, more loudly.

   “Ah ... angels ... my orders?” Behind Tonsar was at least a squad of armsmen, mounted. Nylan could see Sias's long face.

   The engineer paused, fingering his chin. “Actually, it's pretty simple. You'll need a squad or so just to keep anyone from bothering us while we work. It'll be easier if we can get out of Lornth, but we don't need to be on top of the enemy.”

   A figure in black galloped out of the barracks yard, holding a huge blade high. A good tenscore armsmen cantered after him.

   “There goes the great armsman,” muttered Nylan.

   “Don't be bitter.”

   “We are ready,” announced Tonsar. “We will shield you while you destroy the white demons.”

   “Let's go.” Nylan turned the mare after the departing armsmen, but let her walk quickly. He doubted that a canter or gallop would make any difference, except to leave him sore.

   The Lornian forces were drawing up to the southeast, less than a kay beyond the last houses that could have been deemed a part of the town. There was no wall, as was the case with any town the angels had seen in Lornth.

   Gethen and Fornal had arrayed their armsmen in four squares, with Fornal positioned with a small mounted guard before the two squares to the right, and Gethen before those to the left. Nylan rode to a point even with the front rank of the squares and midway between the second and third squares.

   Gethen glanced in their direction.

   Nylan shifted his weight in the saddle, watching as the lines of white, the shimmering round shields reflecting the sunlight, formed a semicircle on the flat that had been fields and meadows, a semicircle of destruction that was more than two kays away from the outskirts of Rohrn, and more than a kay from the Lornian forces. The white troops and lancers stretched from the river bluff due south of the town all the way to the northwest road that led to Lornth itself-an arc of nearly a hundred and twenty degrees filled with armsmen and weapons, without a gap.

   “Here?” asked Ayrlyn, reining up.

   “As good a spot as any.”

   “Never have I seen so many armsmen . . .” whispered Tonsar.

   Nylan hoped never to see so many ever again, either. “You better get your squad set up.” He swung out of the saddle.

   Ayrlyn followed his example.

   “Someone will need to hold our mounts,” he told Tonsar.

   “Sias!”

   “Yes, ser.”

   “Don't worry, Sias,” Nylan told the young former apprentice as he handed over the mare's reins. “You won't miss a thing.” In fact, you just might see too much.

   The engineer let his senses range over the ground, just trying to get a feel, trying to extend his links to the distant forest, and to the order-chaos boundaries that felt all too far away.

   “This is going to get nasty,” he said in a low voice. “All that distance . . . hope we can do it.”

   “It already is nasty,” Ayrlyn pointed out.

 
  “So how do you plan to stop them, ser angel?” Gethen, flanked by a pair of hard-faced armsmen, and followed by the square-faced Huruc, reined up beside Tonsar. “You had told us to leave this spot for you. Will you rout them on foot?”

   “Do you really want to know?” blurted Nylan. “I apologize, ser Gethen,” he added quickly. “We hope to raise the forces of the forest to stop them before they attack. Or before most of their forces can reach us.”

   “Before?”

   “Why not? There's not much doubt about what they intend, not after what they did to Jerans and southern Lornth.” Nylan swallowed, his mouth dry..

   “No.” Gethen's words were cold, colder than his eyes.

   A series of horn calls echoed from the south.

   “Do what you must do,” said Gethen gruffly. “The white demons are raising their banners. We will hold while we can.” With a stiff nod, the older regent turned his mount toward the armsmen arrayed to the north of where Nylan and Ayrlyn stood. Stood alone amid the mounted host.

   Nylan swallowed, or tried to. His throat felt dusty, dry.

   Ayrlyn handed him a water bottle.

   Another series of horn calls stabbed the day, and a faint rumbling, and trembling of the ground began.

   Whhstt! A firebolt arced into the air and exploded.

   “We'd better . ..”

   “Just do it!”

   Absently, Nylan corked the water bottle, bent and set it on the dusty ground that had been a meadow, and pushed his senses to the south, well behindhand beyond the white and red blotches that represented the slow-advancing Cyadoran forces.

   Reflected light flashed from the Cyadoran shields, and Nylan closed his eyes, concentrating, feeling, seeking.

   The power he sought seemed so distant... so far south.

   “We can do it.” Ayrlyn's words and presence warmed him.

   He tried to relax, to extend his tenuous probe, but much as he pressed, that distant link eluded him, flitted from his mental grasp.

   The ground vibrated with the impact of hoofs and feet, and the horns echoed toward Rohrn again.

   Another blast of fire soared out of the south and splashed across the meadow before the Lornian forces. Little balls of fire rolled toward the mounted armsmen, each leaving a long charred line behind it before dying away. A gust of wind carried the odor of burned grass northward, and Nylan sniffed inadvertently.

   The engineer tried to wrench his attention back to that distant and continual barrier struggle between order and chaos, even as yet another fireball hissed toward the Lornian armsmen.

   For a moment, less than an instant, Nylan touched the dark bands of order, bands binding the very soil in place over the ancient rocks, slowly infusing those artificial planoformed established boundaries with the mixture of order and chaos that ran through the forest and through much of Cyador and southern Lornth.

   Then ... the link snapped, and he stepped sideways, off-balance.

   “Again . . .” whispered Ayrlyn.

   After another deep breath, the engineer tried once more, this time conceiving of the link as a network, an underspace connection. For a longer instant, his thoughts held the dark bands of order, but the chaos lines eluded him, snapping back so hard that he staggered where he stood, then sat down roughly.

   “What the frig... the angel doing?” came a hissed whisper.

   “Silence!” ordered Tonsar.

   Nylan stood, helped up by Ayrlyn. Somehow he needed to stand.

   A huge white fireball arced toward the Lornian forces, shattering in midair and spraying liquid flames among the mounted armsmen of the first square, the one farthest left of the two angels.

   “Aeeeeiiii ... no ... no ...” The screams of dying men seemed like whispers against the growing thud of hoofs and the underlying shrieks of chaos lifted by the mages to the south.

   Whheeeee. . . . eeeeee! The shrieks of suffering and dying horses climbed above those of the armsmen.

   Another fireball flared, turning the grass before the Lornian forces into a wall of flame, flame so hot that it seared the skin and singed the hair of the men and horses in the front rank.

   Sweat ran down Nylan's forehead, and into his eyes, burning them as the struggle to release the energy in the order-chaos boundaries throughout Candar burned through his skull and soul. His own hair crinkled in the heat.