L. Modesitt - Ordermaster

“What about Lord Fergyn?”

“No one seems to know. I’d wager that he’s moving through the area just south of the Nierran Hills toward the north road. That’s closer than we’d like”

“It’s closer to the dockyards.”

“And most of the factors’ warehouses.”

“Are they short of supplies?”

“I’d imagine so, and their armsmen haven’t been paid in several eightdays.”

“Have you heard from Commander Casolan?”

“We’re still looking at almost an eightday before his forces arrive.” Hagen offered a laugh, a sound somewhere between sardonic and humorous. “I was wondering if you have any other magely stratagems that might work against an attack on the road into the harbor.”

“Are there any places where the road is narrow? Any bridges that they have to cross?”

“Only the causeway, and that’s not really that narrow. It was built by Lord Estloch’s great-grandfather through the marshes. For ten years he justhad anyone convicted of crimes sent there to cart rocks. It’s two kays long, and between three and five rods wide. If we blocked it, though, they could just ride through the city. In any case, the causeway is so open that they could see anyone waiting there for them. You couldn’t hide us, could you?”

“I could hide you from sight, but it would be hard on the armsmen, because they wouldn’t be able to see, and any wizard could still tell that I was doing it.”

“I had hoped …”

“Let me think about it. How long do I have?”

“Norgen thinks they’ll begin before dawn tomorrow.”

Kharl nodded.

“If you need supplies of any sort, let me know.”

After Hagen left, the mage and former cooper tucked The Basis of Order inside his tunic and walked to the eastern side of the tower. The sun warmed his back as he studied Valmurl and the harbor. In the distance, he could barely make out the causeway, just a darker line through the dark waters of the harbor.

What could he do? How?

He glanced at the stones of the parapets, catching sight of a fragment of dried leaf that had been blown into a corner in the stone, doubtless by a winter storm. He’d had luck in working with leaves before. Could he try removing the order from a fragment of a leaf, leaving only chaos? Would it be like hardening the leaf, then infusing the order elsewhere?

With his order-senses, Kharl reached out for the piece of dried leaf, no larger than perhaps a quarter of his palm. Carefully, he tried to sense the order links within the bleached and ragged tan fragment. The dark links felt faded, but so did the whitish points of chaos.

Rather than strengthening the links between the minute segments of order, as he did when creating shields, Kharl concentrated on the ties between two points. He tried to break the linkage, but all that happened was that he felt warmer, as if he had been walking uphill. He paused. Mere force wasn’t the answer.

Technique-that was what worked. But what kind of technique? He considered for a moment. When he strengthened air into a barrier, he reinforced the hooks and links. Was there a way to unlink one small segment from another? He tried visualizing two segments of darkness as linked by interlocking open hooks, then concentrating on turning them so that they separated.

Once more, he could feel himself getting hotter, but nothing happened with the leaf.

Were the ordered sections of the leaf, faded as they were, tied together more like a hook and eye? He tried that, but the results were the same. Nothing happened, except he was sweating more than before.

What about some sort of latch structure? He realized that he was trying to visualize the unknown, but order had to have some pattern or structure. Didn’t it? The latch idea didn’t work either.

For a time, he just leaned on the stones of the parapet, letting himself cool back down, thinking about how many ways order could be structured. When he felt somewhat refreshed, he tried not forcing his concepts of linkage on the leaf, but instead concentrated on trying to receive, to sense, the order-structure of the leaf. For a time, he could sense nothing except the darkness of order and the reddish white of chaos. Instead of turning away, he took a deep breath and let himself and his senses drift toward the leaf.

In time, he began to get an impression of linkages, of hundreds of rows of tiny twisted hooks. Instead of immediately trying to use that image, he willed himself to gather in an even more detailed understanding of the order linkages of the leaf, trying to gather an image of just how the links twisted and how much each needed to be turned to be unlinked from the next. The leaf seemed to have frayed barbs on the tips of the hooks. That was the way Kharl perceived them, at least.

Ever so gently, he began to press, then push and twist. One of the minute linkages released, and then another. The third and fourth were easier, and, almost immediately, Kharl could feel heat rising from the leaf. Despite the cool breeze coming from the ocean and across Valmurl, he had begun to sweat even more heavily.

The heat was far greater than if the leaf had caught fire and burned on the spot. Involuntarily, Kharl stepped back.

He could feel a surge of chaos-stronger than even that thrown by the chaos-wizard who had tried to attack the Great House-and he threw himself to the side. A jolt of pain flashed through his ribs at the sudden movement, and he staggered farther to his right.

A vortex of white chaos flared upward from where the leaf fragment had been, and the force of the chaos-explosion flung Kharl onto the stones that paved the top of the tower. He lay there for a moment, letting the pain subside. The explosive force had not been that powerful, and he might not even have sprawled on the stones had he not already been off-balance.

From what he could tell, his ribs had not suffered any worse damage, thanks to the heavy binding around them.

He lifted his head, then slowly and carefully rose. He could sense no more free chaos-or none that was concentrated, for there was a white miasma of scattered chaos slowly drifting westward above the tower.

After a short time, the mage and cooper eased back toward the lower part of the embrasure in the parapet where the leaf fragment had been. There was no trace of the leaf. Five black lines, each a fingernail’s width in depth, had been scored in the granite above where the leaf had been, radiating out from a small pit in the stone, also blackened.

Kharl shook his head slowly. All that chaos from such a small fragment of a leaf? No wonder so few mages survived trying to release chaos from objects. What if he had been experimenting with wood-or metal?

Kharl’s legs were trembling, and his vision was blurring. Slowly, he sat down and rested his back against the parapet. He could also feel that his face was reddened, as if he had spent the day under a hot summer sun.

Was what he had done possible to replicate from a greater distance?

His lips curled into a wry smile. What he had done wasn’t something he wanted to try if he couldn’t do it from a distance-and from behind a stone wall or the like.

All that chaos, he marveled, just from a winter-dried fragment of a leaf.

Had the mage from Recluce who had destroyed Fairven released chaos in such a fashion? Or had he used something even more terrible?

After a time, Kharl rose, moving slowly toward the stairs down to the kitchen. He needed to practice what he had tried, but not without some more to eat-and certainly not without even greater care-and more distance between him and what he was working on.

By the time the sun hung over the hills to the west of Valmurl, Kharl was exhausted. He had trouble focusing his eyes. He’d spent most of the afternoon on the tower, working on how to release chaos from various substances through the manipulation of the order bonds that held all objectstogether. It hadn’t taken him long to discover that the amount of chaos within a substance was almost directly proportional to its size and density. The difficulty of releasing the order bonds was more than proportionally harder with denser materials, like metals, and even harder with mixed materials, like rocks or alloys like bronze.