The Magic of Recluce (45 page)

Yelena and two others waited, already mounted, as I walked up with my staff and pack.

“Where's your pass?” demanded the ostler.

“Oh, hell…” I had never bothered to get anyone to sign the damned parchment square. “Just a moment.”

“Leader Yelena?”

“Yes, order-master?”

“I forgot to have the sub-commander autograph this pass.”

“Autograph?”

I kept from shaking my head at the brown-haired sub-officer with the long nose and square chin. “A pass to release my horse.”

“Pheww on a pass! Get your horse.” She rode into the stable in front of me.

“…on official business for the Sub-Commander. None of this crap about passes!”

The ostler was backing into a corner as Yelena threatened to ride him down.

I ignored them both and quickly saddled Gairloch, recovering my saddlebags in the process.

The ostler swallowed as I rode out. “Good…day…order-master…”

“Good day.” My tone was not totally cheerful. I hadn't wanted to pay for the stable, since my stock of coinage was scarcely deep, and having to ask for Yelena's assistance bothered me.

“That's a horse?” asked the sub-officer.

“No, this is Gairloch. You don't think I could really ride one of those monsters you use, do you?” I grinned at the dour officer.

“Glad you recognize it, order-master.” I almost fell off Gairloch when she smiled back.

The other two looked at each other and kept their mouths closed as we rode out through the gates into Kyphrien.

Even in the gray drizzle that had begun to fall, the city was light—whitewashed walls, red tile roofs, and limestone-or marble-paved streets. People talked, like a city of hundreds of Shervans.

“…best breads in Kyphros, by exclusive patronage of the autarch…”

“…and you could have crossed the river barefoot, he drank so much. Never have I seen an animal drink so much, and beyond that…”

“Your fortune, not even a copper! Who will grudge a mere copper for knowing all that will befall you.”

“Hezira, I said, there's to be none of that. No, none of that, Hezira—that's what I told her, but, of course, she didn't listen. Why would she listen, with her high house and her silk gowns?…”

I eased Gairloch closer to Yelena. “Is it always this noisy?”

“No.” She shook her head. “It's usually noisier. This is early. It gets louder later.”

“Look at the pony! See the pony, Berrna! He must be a northern pony. He's so shaggy…”

Outside of the autarch's walled residence—not really a castle or even a palace—and the associated guard area, Kyphrien was an open and unwalled city, where the houses and businesses scattered farther and farther apart as we headed north and west toward the Westhorns I could not see. There never was a point at which I could have said Kyphrien ended and the countryside began, but we were on another gently rolling road even before mid-morning.

The drizzle had damped the dust, but not yet turned it into mud. Gairloch matched the pace set by the brown gelding carrying Yelena without seeming to strain, and we traveled through the morning without talking, which was fine with me, especially after the hubbub that had been Kyphrien.

Yet I liked the country, found it friendly, even if it were not as lush as Gallos or even Recluce. The spareness of the colder and rolling hills, which steepened within kays to the northwest of Kyphrien, appealed to me. I even noted several locations that would have been ideal for setting up my own woodworking—with streams high enough for a water supply, not far from the road, and with ample and varied timber within carting distance.

I shook my head—planning to be a workworker, still? Uncle Sardit would surely have laughed. How well he had wrought he did not know. Or maybe he did, and I was the one who didn't know.

Thoughts of working wood would have to wait. If I could deal somehow with Antonin…if…

I cast my thoughts back over my last encounter—the one with the white wizard—recalling how I had fought with the staff to control my defenses and my energies. What had that meant?

There had been something in the book…something…I could not recall it, but made a mental note to look it up.

Midday found us halting beside a stream that bordered the road, but we did not actually cross it.

“That's not really a bridle,” noted the young man who had followed behind me. “How do you control him in a pinch?”

“I never thought about it.” I pulled out some hard white cheese and offered him a piece.

Wheeee…eeee
…

Yelena was watering her horse, and, deciding that Gairloch was thirsty as well, I looped the reins over the saddle and thwacked him on the flank, watching as he ambled into the water ankle-deep.

The soldier had taken the cheese, but he looked away suddenly as Gairloch left me.

The other trooper, a woman probably my own age, with short sandy hair and green eyes, surprisingly dark skin, and a ragged scar running across most of her right cheek, stepped closer.

“Cheese?” I offered.

“Thank you.” Her voice was simultaneously grave and cheerful. “Are you…the…order-master?…”

I grinned. Why not? “I'm Lerris. Yes, I'm the one from Recluce who knew the sub-commander. She's my friend.”

Her eyebrows rose, and I could imagine the stories already circulating through the guard.

“In addition to being a blademaster,” I added, “she is also a lady. And my friend.”

“I didn't mean…”

I waved her apology off. “Rumors are rumors. I care for the lady a lot, but that's all until we have done what has to be done. Then we'll see.”

“Are all the men from Recluce like you?”

“…Aaaccccuuu…” I almost choked on the cheese. “…No. Probably none of them are as dense as I am.”

“The order-master is joking, Freyda,” interrupted Yelena. Her voice was cold, but her eyes were smiling. “You'd better water your horse. We're not stopping that long. You, too, Weldein.”

When the two were out of earshot, the sub-officer looked at me. “You're more dangerous than you look.” But she was almost smiling.

I shrugged. “I can't not tell the truth, and that makes it difficult.”

“You can't?”

“Not without paying for it somehow.”

She was the one to shake her head. “I'm glad I'm just a leader.”

As I reclaimed Gairloch and fed him some corners of a grain cake, I thought about what she said. I had to agree with her. The more I learned and the more I could do, the more complex it got.

K
YPHROS WAS BIGGER
than I thought. The way the Westhorns angled westward as they marched south meant that we had to ride two days to reach the foothills that almost matched the Little Easthorns in size.

I had guessed that at some point the road, since it was an older road, would cross the wizards' road for which I searched. I didn't know that, but it seemed right.

The first night we actually stayed in a small inn in a town—Upper River. Why it was called Upper River, no one knew, and Yelena's maps showed neither Lower River, nor even a stream called Upper River. The inn was clean. That was about all. Dinner was overcooked goat steaks smothered in a strong cheese. The beds sagged, and I shared a room with Weldein, who by then was scared stiff of me, although I had said nothing, and who snored loudly.

The second night we stopped in a place called Quessa. Lodging was in one of the soldiers' way stations there, but staffed only by a couple. I could guess where the soldiers were. The dinner meal was another spicy casserole, followed by a huge fruitcream pie—much better fare than at the inn at Upper River.

Quessa itself was fair-sized for the relatively isolated area in which it stood, with more than a score of houses and stores serving the surrounding farms and orchards. The people were still what I thought of as Kyphran stock, with dark skin, darker hair, and broad smiles. They also talked and talked.

I retreated to the large guest room, the one that Tella and Bardon insisted I must have, and closed the door. The lamp by the double-wide bed was bright enough to read by, and I had some reading to do.

It didn't take long, and all that I found was what I had remembered, a single paragraph, not even a long one. The key words were simple: “Order cannot be concentrated in and of itself, not even within the staff of order, and no man can truly master the staff of order until he casts it aside.”

Except the words were wrong, somehow. No matter where my staff was, it still gathered order and repulsed chaos. For a long time, I looked through the pages of the book, but nothing else shed light on that paragraph.

After I replaced the black-covered and well-thumbed pages in my pack, I stared into emptiness. The pieces were there—that I knew. How they fit, I didn't. The white wizard had died when my staff had touched his fingertips, or at least when it had gotten close. The staff had been nearly as close to other sources of chaos without that violent a reaction, and if a simple staff could destroy a chaos-wizard someone would have gone against Antonin long before. Unless there were reasons to maintain chaos…

I didn't like that thought at all.

So I tried to sort out my feelings about Deirdre, Krystal, and Tamra, but the thought of sorting out those three was enough to exhaust me on the spot, and I blew out the lamp and slept, sort of, until the gray of dawn crept through the window.

The next day brought more talking over breakfast. The trip carried us into wilder countryside, with the end of the orchards and fenced fields. The clouds had dissipated, but the chill remained, and we rode in a bright chill toward the unseen Westhorns. By mid-morning, the road straggled through underbrush that had begun to reclaim the less time-trampled edges of the road, and the lands beyond the road that had once been grazing lands were dotted with mature trees and scattered brush, including thickets upon thickets of wild redberries.

A sense of unease lay over the road, growing as we climbed each of the ever-steepening hills.

Yelena's face grew tighter with each hill, and the bigger horses strained and began to puff. On a particularly high hill-crest where the road was wider, perhaps because the hummock of stones and fallen timbers looming in the brush back from the north side of the road might have been an inn or roadhouse in times past, I motioned for the sub-officer to stop.

For the first time, looking to the west, I could see the white-tipped dark bulk of the Westhorns. Even from where we had halted, still a good thirty kays from the foothills beneath those massive slopes, I could also see that they were indeed impressive, and that at least another day of riding lay before me.

“We're getting close, I think. I can feel chaos ahead.”

Yelena squinted against the cold bright sunlight. “We're still quite a ways from the Westhorns.”

“I can make it from here. You're needed against Gallos.”

Yelena shook her head. “Order-master, what would happen if I had to tell the sub-commander that we left you this far short of the Westhorns?”

I sighed. She was right. “All right. Let's go. But if there's too much chaos ahead, I want to be able to send you back.”

“Why?”

“Because I might have trouble protecting you.” I laughed harshly. “I might have trouble protecting myself.”

The chaos I sensed seemed to recede as we rode westward. Either that, or it was stronger and more distant than I had thought.

By nightfall, we still seemed scarcely closer to the base of the Westhorns, although we could see some of the nearer peaks, their ice-covered spires glinting rosy in the sunset.

We camped in another long-deserted farm, sheltered by a single standing stone wall. I set wards, but nothing woke me, and the fourth morning of the trip dawned as gray as the morning when we had left Kyphrien.

I wondered how many more had died on the hills of Northern Kyphros while I rode on my fool's errand toward the Westhorns. Then, again, what else could I do? No warrior, I could but try to bring order where I might.

In a way, that was similar to woodworking, except in crafting I built upon the natural order, whereas in order-mastery—I thought—I tried to strengthen natural order to repulse an unnatural disorder.

“Cheese?” I offered some to Weldein, absent-mindedly.

He took it, equally abstracted, as he looked from the hillside, where we had camped not far from a small brook, toward the mountains. Then he looked at the white cheese, as if wondering how he got it.

“Eat it. It's good cheese. A mill-master gave it to me.”

“Why?” asked Freyda.

“Because I helped his goddaughter.”

“Was she pretty?” Weldein inquired. His tone was polite.

“Very. Unfortunately,” I added.

The two exchanged glances, and, for some reason Weldein blushed.

“She didn't like you?” That was Yelena.

“She did like me.”

“If she was pretty…” Weldein sounded confused.

I really didn't want to explain, but I sighed and went on. “I found her attractive. She was capable and bright. That just made it worse.”

“So you left her for duty?” Yelena asked. “How noble…”

“No.” My voice was cold, but I couldn't help it. “I left because I had a job to do, and because I realized there was someone else still in my heart, and because…” I broke off. What I would have said would have sounded unforgivably pompous. So I shut up. It was probably true, but it was arrogant.

This time all three exchanged knowing glances, and things were even worse.

“What about the goddaughter?”

“I found her a good-looking and talented husband who loved her, and provided a dowry, and we both cried like hell.”

That shut them up, but I felt petty about it as we packed the horses for the coming day's ride. Finally, I stepped over to Yelena. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean…”

She smiled, as softly as I had seen her smile, and touched my arm briefly. “Don't be. It's good to see that great order-masters are human, that they love, and make mistakes.”

I shook my head. “I'm not a great order-master.”

Yelena swung onto her brown gelding. “Then there are none.”

I pondered that as I climbed onto Gairloch. Perhaps that was the problem, that there simply were no great order-masters to combat the great chaos-masters like Antonin. Then I frowned. A simple solution, too simple. And simple and easy answers were almost always wrong.

By mid-morning, the feeling of impending chaos was stronger, much stronger, and not receding.

The road had not been used in some time, except for-a single rider whose prints appeared now and again in the sheltered spots in the clay. How long since the prints had been made, I could not tell. Nor could Yelena.

“We have not had a great rain since summer.” She pursed her lips.

I could feel the energy ahead, perhaps as near as over the next hill-crest.

Overhead, heavy gray clouds rolled.

Thurummmm
…

No rain fell as we rode up the especially-steep hill.

“Stop,” I said, feeling the chaos pressure. “There's something ahead.”

“Armed men?”

“No.” I sent my perceptions forward, but could only detect a small hump in the road, somehow tied down with chaos. Nothing else. “I think it's all right for now.”

The hump was a body, or what was left of it.

Yelena rode almost up to the figure, then dismounted, standing back from face-down remains. “Outlier's belt.”

“Careful…there's chaos there.”

The sub-officer nodded. “I know. We've seen this before.” She drew her sword and touched the body. A bright blue spark flashed against the steel. She glanced at me. “That's another trick of the white wizards.”

Even from where Gairloch and I had stopped, the heat from the spark momentarily warmed the chill noontime air.

She used the sword to lever the body over onto its back. The Kyphran soldier's face was a charred and shattered mass—the target of a fireball thrown by Antonin or Sephya or some other chaos-wizard.

I could guess what happened. The outlier had been lured or charmed this far out and then destroyed.

“Chaos fed on him. Too bad we can't feed on chaos. We'd never go hungry any more.” She motioned to Weldein. “Let's take care of this. Not much time, but there are stones there.”

In the end, all of us created a cairn by the side of the deserted road.

As we remounted, Yelena's remark got me thinking. In a way, chaos fed on chaos. The stronger Antonin became, the more he could destroy, which increased the amount of chaos in Candar. In the whole world, really. If the old masters were right, increased chaos had to be balanced
somewhere
with increased order.

I swallowed hard. If what I thought was true was in fact true, Talryn and the Brotherhood had a lot to answer for, one hell of a lot.

That didn't resolve my particular problem. While I was getting stronger, Justen had been right. It was a slow process. Antonin could literally tear holes in mountains and buildings and infect whole cavalry troops with chaos. It would be years, if ever, before I could confront Antonin directly—and that wouldn't help Krystal or the autarch, or the people of either Gallos or Kyphros.

Justen's method was clear. He kept reinforcing low-level order everywhere around Antonin, from healing in Jellico to sheep-ranching in Montgren. That order limited the indirect spillover of chaos and protected most of the innocents. Just as clear was the fact that Antonin was willing to let all of that low-level order build up, because it allowed him to increase his powers. Which, in turn, let Justen exercise his powers…

I rubbed my temples with my fingertips. Was the whole thing an exercise in circles? Was any wizard, white or black, really being honest about it? Was this the reason why no one had answered the questions behind my questions?

“What now, order-master?”

I understood. Now she had the reason to be dismissed—and Krystal needed them in the Northeast more than I needed them here.

“This is as far as you go, sub-officer. This is where chaos starts.”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded, wanting to ensure that all of them carried the same message back. “I can't protect you and search for the white wizard, not without endangering us all. I thank you for the escort, for the company, and for your understanding.”

“Thank you, ser.”

“Thank you…”

Yelena held back a moment when the other two turned their mounts. “We'd like to see you again, ser.” Then, the hardness returned to her face, as the discipline reasserted itself.

I watched the three until they were out of sight, checking to make sure no chaos waited for them, but I could detect none—not in that direction.

Toward the Westhorns—that was another question. Supposedly, the old road should cross the wizards' road before too long. Supposedly…but things never quite turned out as they were supposed to. And when they did, I was finding that I wished they hadn't.

A cold wind blew from nowhere, almost more in my mind than across that high slope where I began the last, solitary part of my quest—if quest were what it was. Why was I traveling a near-abandoned road toward a wizard who had swatted me aside like a fly the last time we had met? What did I think that I could possibly accomplish when Talryn or Justen had been able to do nothing?

Then again, had they really tried? Who was telling the truth? Or was anyone?

I shivered, but Gairloch lifted his head, as if to say we should get on with it.