The Death of Chaos (55 page)

   Almost every hundred cubits, Justen had me check the closeness and strength of chaos. I wasn't sure which was more tiring-that or the walking. When we finally got back to where we had camped, I just sat down.

   Dayala sat beside me. I still couldn't believe that she walked everywhere barefoot and that it didn't bother her.

   “Krystal thinks I should talk to you.”

   She smiled, just waited, as I guess I expected a druid to do.

   “She thinks I'm getting too tied up in liking to be a hero, but I don't want to be a hero. At least, I don't think so.”

   There was more silence, a lot, before she spoke.

   “I do not always understand people, Lerris. That may be because I see the web of life, and it is honest. People deceive themselves rather than face pain, and that deception leads to violence. Violence leads to pain, and pain to more deception and violence.” Then she rose, even before I could say anything. “I need to think, and so do you. Your questions will only have meaning if we are successful.”

   As I was pondering what Dayala had said, Justen called to me. “Lerris? Can you create a small dam down at the point there?” Justen pointed downstream to where the canyon narrowed.

   “Probably. How high?”

   “Only so high as you can get it without drawing on chaos- even channeled through order.”

   I frowned. That would make it harder. “I'll see what I can do.”

   That meant shifting order bonds in the rocks around the point. Still, if I strengthened some, that would change the force of others...

   Letting my senses roam through the rocks and pathways for a time, I tried to get a feel of the land. I also found some underground streams and caves. After thinking about Justen's earlier comments about skill, I tried little nudges here and there, little shifts. It took longer, but slowly rocks began to slide into the canyon that was really more of an overgrown gulch. Then larger rocks followed, and some clay, and more rocks.

   Finally, I withdrew my senses from the ground and sat on a stone, sweating.

   “Here.” Dayala handed me my water bottle and some travel bread. “It is almost midday.”

   I didn't question how she knew. I just drank and ate.

   “You were very gentle,” she said. “Justen was pleased. The water is rising now, and there will be a small lake before they arrive.”

   “There's not enough water to drown them.”

   Her face turned bleak. “We cannot afford to be that kind.” She shuddered.

   So did I. Then I ate a large chunk of cheese and took a short walk into the woods.

   Justen was waiting when I returned.

   “See if you can get an idea of when they will reach the turn in the road down there.”

   I sat back down on the boulder again. By extending my senses, I could feel out the Hamorians, from the heavy tread of massed feet echoing through the ground to the hoofs of their scouts leading the way. How many score were there? Several hundredscore, it appeared, as the line of troops seemed to stretch back over two kays on the winding road.

   Justen was waiting as I looked up.

   “Before mid-afternoon, or a little later, but they're stretched out for nearly two kays on the road.”

   “I'd figured that.”

   “Are you going to turn that lake into boiling water?”

   “Something like that,” he admitted, “except worse.” He paused. “Lerris, just let me handle this. Watch-with your senses-but don't try to do anything unless I fail.”

   “How will I know?”

   “I'll be dead, and even you can figure that out.”

   I let the words pass, understanding that their bitterness came from his own fears.

   “Wouldn't it be easier if I helped?”

   He looked at me with cold eyes. “We'll both be needed later, and your technique is still too rough. You did all right with the dam, but you had time, and you wouldn't with the sun-devils. So watch and learn. This is something you can't practice. You've already figured that out, I trust.”

   I had, and I shut my open mouth. I didn't feel better about it, but I had been the one complaining that he hadn't been around when I'd stuck out my neck. So how could I complain when he told me to stand back, especially when I felt that he was right?

   Dayala touched my arm, just touched me, and I felt the warmth of reassurance-and a touch of fear.

   “I could help,” I whispered to her.

   “Not now. He is right, and how would he explain to Gunnar if anything happened to you? If we need you, you will be rested to help him.”

   I looked at her, and her eyes were dark. She straightened and then followed Justen to a spot under one of the pines, where the needles had made a long soft cushion. They lay there, fully dressed, except Dayala was barefoot, holding each other.

   Grrrurrrr... Chaos rumbled beneath us, enough that small waves licked across my makeshift lake.

   So I watched the road, watched the dust rise and grow ever nearer to where we waited, listened as Weldein checked to make sure his people were hidden, and that all the fires had stayed out.

   And the tramp of feet neared, and chaos rumbled beneath us, and even the ground shook slightly, but enough that I saw Berli stumble.

   Faint steam began to rise from the water, and dust puffs rose off the road below as the ground shook.

   I extended my senses and tried to follow what Justen was doing, as he structured, more than opened, dozens of narrow passages from the mixture of chaos and molten iron beneath toward the stream and my makeshift lake.

   The sound of hoofs neared, followed by heavy feet, and behind, the squealing of supply wagons. Even from more than two kays away I could hear the sundevils, making no particular effort to be still.

...had a girl and she was mine

Had a girl and she was fine.

Took a merchant through design,

But her bouncing boy is mine...

...three, four... out the door...

   Just below the pine tree, Justen now stood on a solid wedge of rock far enough back from the lip of the canyon that he could not be seen from the road below. Beside him stood Dayala. With my senses extended, I watched.

   Grrrurrrr...

   The narrow order passages swelled, and through them came heat, steam, and boiling water-below that were ropes of molten iron, twisting upward. Yet Justen was not close to touching that mix of chaos and order. Instead, it was almost as though he were building structures for those fiery elements to follow, letting them follow the easiest courses-those he had constructed.

   Now the ground around us was shaking, and I grabbed a pine limb to steady myself. My hand got sticky from the sap, but I held on, glued by resin and muscle, even as my legs tightened to balance me against the growing tremors rumbling up from beneath us.

   Wheeee... eeee... eeee... Horses whinnied, but I couldn't tell which horses-those of the sundevils or ours.

   The sundevil column slowed, still almost a kay below my makeshift dam, where small waves rolled back and forth and where steam was rising now almost like a fog.

   My fingers tightened around the tree limb, but it bent as I rocked with the swaying of the ground, then began to crack. I staggered and sat down hard, partly on the rocky ground and partly on a small scrub cedar that jabbed my leg through my trousers. After scrambling off the offending cedar, I sat on a flat boulder uphill of a low pine that I could peer through at the road below.

   Justen and Dayala continued to weave their order webs, and that intertwining conflict between order and chaos that I had sensed and struggled with deep beneath Candar rose closer and closer to us, and to the waters of the lake, where low waves began to form.

   As I watched, trying to keep my eyes fixed through the near continuous swaying of the ground and rumbling, I could sense Dayala building a shield on the uphill side of the stream and lake, even as Justen began closing his order tubes. Closing?

   Grrrurrrrrrr... The ground rocked more violently.

   The Hamorians had bunched up even more, and I could see a sun banner or two, and a few scouts. A heavy haze had appeared, shading the sun so that it shimmered without much heat through a layer of fog above us.

   The lake steamed so much that I could not even see the water, just clouds of mist and vapor. I was sweating, and I wiped my forehead.

   Just out of sight, the Hamorians continued to bunch up, for a time, until two scouts finally rode around the corner and turned uphill, moving at not much more than a walk.

   They seemed to study everything. Then one pointed-right toward me, it seemed, though I was behind a low pine. But his gesture was toward the steaming water. The other pointed down at the steam rising from the stream water.

   They rode up the readjust to where they could see the lake. Both were wiping their foreheads, and they turned back downhill. I tried to extend my senses to pick up what was happening.

   The ground rocked even more violently, and one of the sun-devil scouts grabbed his horse's mane. The other mount tried to rear, but only went halfway up and staggered coming down.

   EEEEEeeeeeee!!!!!

   A thin line of steam and heat erupted up through the lake, then another, and a third, and the water began to bubble violently. I could sense an immense bowl of chaos and order beneath die water, so hot that I could almost feel my forehead blistering.

   The ground heaved, then rocked, and the mists and fog had grown so much that it seemed like twilight.

   Whhheeee... eeee... All the horses were screaming, rearing, lashing out with hoofs.

   A tall pine above die road snapped, and began to fall, slowly, toward the boiling lake.

   The chaos and heat beneath the lake grew greater, and then... Justen squeezed off his order tubes.

   The ground beneath the road swelled, and great cracks ran down through the clay, and steam hissed into the air.

   Dayala struggled to hold a shield between us and the lake.

   With the CCCCURRROUMMMMPHHHHhhhhh greater than a falling mountain, steam, boiling mud, red-hot rocks, gouts of molten lava, and boiling water flared upward, some of it toward us and against Dayala's shield, and then all of it gushed downhill.

   Trees were ripped out of the hillside. Boulders were thrown down through the canyon almost like massive shells from stone bombards. Loose branches and splintered trunks shredded through vegetation and troopers and animals and wagons.

   So fast was the explosion of heat and steam and rocks and molten metal that almost no screams competed with the roiling, rumbling, explosion of destruction.

   A wave of whiteness flared away from the destruction, whiteness filled with death.

   I sat there on the boulder and squeezed my eyes closed for a time before I staggered upright. When I opened my eyes, they stabbed, and I hadn't even been me one handling order and chaos.

   The ground continued to heave even after I looked at the huge hole where there had been a lake, even as molten rock continued to ooze forward. Steam rose from that hole as the stream dropped into the pit from above.

   I stepped back to keep the heat from blistering my face, and tried to sense the destruction downhill. For more than two kays, there was no road, just a boiling mess of mud, rock, and vegetation. Beyond that the stream boiled, what little of it was left, and the waters would steam for a long time. Higher on the hills, leaves were boiled off limbs, and bark off trees, leaving them like bleached bones rising from mud and sodden vegetation.

 
 The second major road to Kyphros was blocked, although, certainly in the Lower Easthorns, an alternative route was possible. What wasn't possible was the immediate re-creation of the Hamorian army.

   So far as I could tell, no one had walked or run away from Justen's and Dayala's wave of destruction. And so far as I could tell, neither had even come that close to touching chaos.

   I swallowed and walked toward them.

   Justen looked haggard, and he swayed where he stood. Dayala, standing beside him, also swayed.

   The whiteness from the mass of sliding clay and steaming water had shivered through me like a hammer on steel, and my head still rang like an anvil, and knives stabbed through my eyes, but I walked up to them. Neither really acknowledged my presence, and I turned and headed toward where I had tied Gairloch, hoping that he was still there.

   Weldein looked at me and swallowed as I passed.

   I only counted seven mounts, and there should have been nine, but Gairloch and Rosefoot were still there, and I patted Gairloch for a moment. “Good fellow...” Then I grabbed the water bottle and the provisions bag from behind the saddle and started back across the steaming hillside.

   Weldein looked at me. “Hersik and Nytri are gone.” His face was red, almost blistered.

   “If they went downhill they're dead. Otherwise, they're probably all right.” I kept walking, and he walked with me for a time.

   As we passed, Berli looked at Huber. “See why you don't want to get one of them really mad at you?”

   Huber gulped. Behind her, Pentryl stared at the boiling and steaming mass that seethed and oozed down the canyon that had held the stream.

   I stepped up to Justen. “Sit down and have a drink.”

   “What is it?” He slumped onto the pine needles. So did Dayala.

   “Just water.”

   “Better than nothing,” he rasped. Deep wrinkles gouged his face, and his neck was old and wattled.

   After he drank, I offered him some of the white cheese from my saddlebags in return for the water bottle.

   “Better.”

   He didn't look that much better. His hair stayed silver, almost all silver, even if some of the wrinkles faded from his face.

   Dayala didn't look that much better, once I looked at her, and handed her the water and some cheese. She was wrinkled also, .and while her hair remained silver, it seemed duller, as though some of the life had gone out of it, which it had, I supposed.

   I walked uphill to Rosefoot and pawed through Justen's saddlebags and found some of the dried fruit. When I got back, I practically thrust it at her.