L. Modesitt - Natural Ordermage

He didn’t have answers to his questions, but he was far calmer when Carlyse returned, after completing arrangements for quartering the youth and having him sent south to Diancyr, a small town on the outskirts of Cigoerne where the mage-clerk school was located. After that, the rest of the morning and early afternoon went without incident. So far as he could tell, the duty mage-guard was basically a coordinator, backup, registry-receiver, and record-keeper combined, which explained to Rahl why the duty was rotated so that every mage-guard only stood duty-either day or night-only about once every two eightdays.

Rahl had noticed that he had not seen much of Undercaptain Craelyt, and it was a surprise when the undercaptain appeared at the duty desk in late afternoon with another mage-guard.

“Ser.” Rahl stood.

“Rahl, I thought you ought to meet Myala, since she’ll be the one you’ll be partnered with for the next few eightdays.” Craelyt offered a warm smile, stepping back and inclining his head to a wiry brunette with a sharpish nose and intense gray eyes. Chaos lurked behind moderate shields-chaos and controlled anger.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Rahl offered. “Captain Gheryk had high praise for you. He also told me to listen to you.”

Myala nodded politely but not effusively. “I’ll meet you at the duty desk right after early breakfast on eightday.”

“I’ll be there.”

“It’s good to meet you.” She stepped back and glanced at Craelyt. “Thank you, Undercaptain. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“You’re excused, not that I have to, since you’re not on duty.” Craelyt smiled warmly once again, waiting until Myala had departed before turning back to Rahl. “She’s all to the point, Rahl, but a good mage-guard. She doesn’t stay around here much when she’s off duty, but that’s understandable, since she has two daughters and a consort who like to see her.”

Craelyt offered a parting nod and slipped away soundlessly.

Rahl sat and read the station manual again, then stood and stretched, then riffled through the duty log, reading some of the older entries.

“Rahl…you’re getting jittery.” Carlyse gestured. “Go inspect the piers. See if that other Jeranyi ship has come in yet. If it has, take a good look, and then tell Suvynt and come report to me.”

“I can do that.” He rose quickly.

“You don’t have to be that enthusiastic.” But she smiled.

Once outside the mage-guard station, Rahl stretched, then turned toward the piers. The afternoon was warm and muggy, as if the moisture dropped by the intermittent rains had never quite left.

Pier one was almost filled, if with smaller vessels, mainly from Austra and Nordla, and vendors and teamsters were everywhere, but matters were orderly. Rahl nodded to Hegyr, who was the roving pier mage, as they passed.

On pier two, there were fewer vessels, including the Wavecrest at the far end. Before Rahl reached the Jeranyi ship, he approached a wagon and team loaded with amphorae and barrels beside a comparatively large but four-masted and square-rigged Sarronnese ship. He could smell something pungent on the light breeze blowing off the harbor, something like vinegar.

“Friggin’ careless sow’s ass…idiot offspring of a gelded boar…” One of the teamsters was swearing and tossing heavy pieces of pottery into his wagon. He glanced up and broke off the stream of epithets. “Just upset, ser. Hoist crew dumped the amphora right on the stone…said it was our fault, left it for us to clean up.”

“What was in it?”

“Some kind of special vinegar.” The teamster’s eyes were watering.

Rahl could feel the stinging in his own eyes as well. “That’s unfortunate, but you’re doing a good job cleaning it up.” He nodded. That was one of the responsibilities of the teamsters. They could be fined-or worse-if they left garbage or refuse on the piers. So could a ship’s captain.

The teamster nodded, then went back to work, mumbling in a lower voice. “…good job…frigging good job him…”

Rahl was slightly annoyed, but he couldn’t blame the man. Besides, he was trying to think about where he’d smelled that before. Where had that been? He frowned.

Pickles! There had been barrels and barrels of Feyn River pickles in the warehouses at the Nylan Merchant Association, and they’d come off a Jeranyi vessel, and Daelyt had been evasive about why a Jeranyi vessel had been carrying so many barrels of something with as little value as pickles. That had bothered him then, and it bothered him even more with what Jyrolt and Gheryk had said-and what Dalya had said the other night. But how could he find out if that had been true?

He was still thinking about barrels of pickles when he finished his tour of the piers and returned to the duty desk.

“Anything of interest?” asked Carlyse.

“Nothing besides a few broken amphorae of special vinegar. The teamster had them mostly cleaned up when I got there. There’s still only the one Jeranyi ship at the piers.”

“That’s fine by me.”

Gheryk came by several times, but only nodded, and Rahl was more than happy to leave the duty desk when Carlyse was relieved. He was quick to make his way to the mess. His stomach was growling in protest.

Through the first part of the meal, he kept thinking about vinegar and pickles, and finally decided to ask what had been fretting at him.

“Caersyn,” Rahl began, “if we see something or remember it, or want to cross-check, is there any way to look at the manifests that are given to the tariff enumerators?”

For a moment, Caersyn’s face had no expression. “What do you mean?”

“Well…the enumerators don’t inspect every bale and barrel. What if we discover that a ship has been declaring, say, raw wool, but it’s only raw wool on the outside of the bale, and finished cloth on the inside. It might be a good idea to see how many times that ship has been declaring low-value things…”

“Oh…I see what you mean. I don’t know.” He turned. “Do you, Woralyt?”

The heavier graying mage-guard nodded. “We’ve had to do that occasionally. Not in a while, though. We can go over to the enumerators and ask to review manifests…but you have to do it on your own time, not duty time, and you can take notes, but you have to leave the manifest there.”

“I just wondered.”

“That’s how,” replied Woralyt.

Caersyn nodded in agreement and took a long swallow from his mug.

Rahl decided he had to look at some of the manifests of a year ago…as soon as he could. He also needed to keep practicing Taryl’s methods for expanding and improving his use of order-skills. He could sense that his shields were getting as close to what they had been, if not even stronger, and he was beginning to regain some of what he had lost, particularly in a deeper sensing of order and chaos; but he still only had the most general sense of weather and no sense at all of what lay beneath the surface of the ground. And he certainly couldn’t bind anything together with order.

As with all mage-guards, Rahl had one day an eightday for his own use, and that was sevenday. After breakfast, he immediately headed to the building adjacent to the mage-guard station-the one that housed the tariff enumerators.

The staff enumerator behind the counter that he still remembered was pleasant enough.

“What can I do for you, ser?”

“I need to look at the cargo off-load declarations for all the Jeranyi vessels for last fall.”

“You’ll have to go through quite a few. We file them by day by ship name.”

Rahl nodded. “That will be fine.”

“Ah…I have to put your name and a reason on the form.”