L. Modesitt - Natural Ordermage

“She’s not here. She has today off, and tomorrow. She said she was going off somewhere.”

Rahl could understand that. At times, he wished he could go off somewhere. “Thank you.” He offered a pleasant smile, then slipped out of the infirmary.

He didn’t want to stay around the training center, but he didn’t want to walk down to the harbor either, even though he had not yet seen the black ships. With the summer sun beating down, it would be unpleasantly hot. Someone had mentioned that there was a pleasant path that overlooked the cliffs to the west.

He nodded and started out.

Even by the time he reached the two stone pillars that flanked the opening in the wall at the western end of the grounds for the training center, he was blotting his forehead. Across the street were several dwellings, set among a groomed parklike setting. On the south side of the northernmost one, two children were playing ring-catch. The oldest could not have been more than six or seven.

For a moment, Rahl just stood and watched as the boy spun the ring into the air and the younger boy danced around, trying to catch it with his wand. Rahl smiled. Ring-catch had never appealed to him, but that might have been because Sevien had been the only one his age living nearby, and Sevien never could catch the ring, and his throws had been even worse.

Then Rahl turned uphill and followed the sidewalk a good half kay before both the street and the walk ended in a circular paved area with three dwellings clustered around it. Between the one to the north and the one to the west was a walk. Rahl took it. The path was smoothly paved with gray stone, although the stones had been cut only about two cubits wide, and their centers were hollowed out from years of use.

Past the two houses were open meadows, with grasses almost waist high, and an occasional acacia tree. To his right, almost a kay up the gentle grassy slope, stood the black wall, featureless from that distance but not appearing all that tall. To his left, the grassy meadows sloped gently down to the edge of the black cliffs, precipices that rose from little more than a height of ten cubits immediately northwest of the harbor reportedly to more than a hundred cubits above the narrow sandy beaches just short of the black wall.

The walkway Rahl took ran almost due west until it intersected the one that followed the cliff edge. Rahl thought the cliff path ran all the way from the harbor to the wall in the north, but he had not walked it. Before long, he reached the cliff-edge walk. On the downhill side was a stone wall, also about two cubits high, but it was of a hard flagstone, and each flag was less than a full thumb length in thickness, but close to three cubits in length, and all were mortared in place.

A light and cooling breeze blew off the Gulf, but the waves seemed almost languid, with barely a whitecap in sight. Ahead of him, he saw a couple walking in the same direction as he was. They stopped, and the woman pointed out to sea. Rahl followed her gesture. There was a large sea turtle swimming through the low swells, parallel to the sheer black cliffs.

Rahl kept walking for another half kay or so. Two couples walking southward passed him, and both the men and women offered him pleasant smiles. The couple he had been following walked all the way to the end, where the path ended at the black wall. Then they turned and walked back.

Rahl stopped and stepped onto the graveled shoulder of the walk to let them by.

“Thank you,” said the man, a blocky figure who carried a touch of order about him.

“You’re welcome.” Rahl nodded.

After they passed, he glanced out at the Gulf again. He looked for the giant sea turtle, but he didn’t see it, or anything else except the various birds that swooped and then rode the air currents high and higher, before diving at the waves. A sea eagle caught a fish with its claws and carried its prey to a ledge in the cliffs. Rahl watched for a few moments more, letting the wind blow past his face, before he continued northward.

The walk ended in a stone-paved hexagon. One side ran against the cliff wall, and another against the black wall. There were two backless black-stone benches set so that whoever sat on them could look out at the Gulf. Instead, Rahl straddled one so that he could study the wall and the order that it embodied, although he could not say that it actually emanated order.

The black wall looked to rise a good six cubits in height above the ground, and the stones were so precisely cut that Rahl could not see any noticeable difference in size, no matter how hard he looked. There was only the thinnest line of mortar between the stones.

How had the builders set order into the stones themselves?

With the sun falling on his left side, Rahl tried to let his senses just take in the wall, to feel the order. From what he could feel, the order overlapped a lesser chaos, almost in linked fashion, as if the order were both a frame and a surface, with the power of the contained chaos supporting and strengthening the framework.

But from where had the chaos come?

The heat of the sun on his face called to mind the section of The Basis of Order that had stated that sunlight was both like chaos and order, or had it been chaos and water? But the book had said that sunlight held both chaos and structure. Had the builders of the wall done the same with the stones?

He turned his attention back to the wall. Could he try to see how the order was structured over and around the stones? Or was it within them? Order had definitely not been stretched over sections of the wall. Rather, each stone had an order framework, and there were links between the stones.

Rahl extended what he thought was a thin line of order, just touching the link between two stones. That link felt more like a knot, but there was something “behind” it. He tried to lift or twist the link, but that didn’t seem to work. Then he tried to see how the order twisted back into itself.

CRUUMMPP!

Even before he heard the explosion, Rahl felt himself being thrown backward.

Darkness flared across him.

“Ooooo…” He realized that he was making the sound and shut his mouth, slowly struggling to his feet amid the grass into which he’d been flung. He felt bruised all over, but he didn’t seem to have any gashes or cuts. His eyes went to the wall, and he swallowed.

The last ten cubits of the wall were little more than rubble, cracked and splintered black stones frozen in a black cascade, part of which had spilled over the paved area and part of which had overflowed the low cliff wall and fallen onto the sands of the beach below. Pieces of stone were also scattered across the pavement and around both benches.

How had all that happened? He hadn’t been trying to do anything, just investigating how the wall had been order-linked. He certainly hadn’t meant to unlink anything.

Now what was he supposed to do?

After staring at the destruction for a time, he turned and began to walk back toward the training center. There was no point in doing anything else. Sooner or later, the magisters would discover that he had been the one, and best he tell them well before that.

He glanced back at the wall over his shoulder, once more, then tightened his lips. He didn’t even want to think about what Kadara would say. Or what his latest mistake might do to his already slender chances of avoiding exile.

He kept walking.

When he got back to the training area, he went straight to the study used by the duty mages. It was closed, and Kadara was nowhere in that part of the building. He tried the mess, then the canteen. He was headed for the infirmary, and then to the weapons-training hall when he saw the magistra on a path south of him.

“Magistra!”