L. Modesitt - Magi'i of Cyador

Then he crosses the courtyard to his quarters quickly, but Kusyl is right, for the rain has diminished to a fraction of its former intensity.

He bolts the door behind himself, pacing around the small room, thinking. After a time, he recovers and opens the silver-covered book, searching for a poem that may reflect his conflicting emotions, either his sense of loss at Ryalth’s absence … perhaps his growing understanding of how fortunate he has been to have found and held her or his anger at Maran’s smallness. He passes by page after page of verse, feeling the weight of melancholy, until he pauses, caught by an image, though it is not what he has sought.

He reads the words slowly, and aloud, for the combination of the subtle strangeness and the angular characters always suggests restraint.

An ornamented garden, filled with flowers,

statues surrounding lovers’ bowers,

these we will not find in granite walls,

nor in the heights of Palace halls,

vain images of a world long lost in space

that none can bear to view or to replace.

Love you I will these last days we hold,

loving till we are ash and order cold,

for ancient images are not for keeping,

nor Palace walls and second falls for weeping.

He frowns, wondering again who the writer might have been. Then he shakes his head, looking for something slightly less melancholy, but the best he can find is the first stanza of another verse.

Virtues of old hold fast.

Morning’s blaze cannot last;

and rose petals soon part.

Not so a steadfast heart.

“Not so a steadfast heart …” he murmurs to himself. Is his heart that steadfast? He shakes his head and turns to the lines about pears, recalling Ryalth’s voice as she had read the words on a chill morning that had been warmer than most he has known.

Then, only then, he slowly closes the book. Ryalth had asked him so long ago what he knew of the ancients. He still does not know, only that they had somehow seen an age end, a life end, and it had colored everything written in the small, seemingly eternal, silver-covered volume he holds.

TO LORN’S RIGHT the ward-wall glimmers white in the steam of the morning of Second Company’s second day of patrol-outbound from Jakaafra compound on the second full patrol since Lorn has returned from his furlough and seen Ryalth off on her way back to Cyad. While it is too early to have heard from her, he worries.

He also worries about the weather and the Accursed Forest. The cold rain has been followed with still air and a sun that seems as hot as early summer. The air is damp and warm, and steam rises from the road and even from the deadland,so much so that Lorn can barely make out the second squad’s lancers in the line abreast stretching in from the perimeter road.

Lorn blots his forehead with the back of his hand, even though his jacket is fastened behind the saddle. His eyes and chaos senses focus on the ward-wall ahead, for the chaos field set up by the wards is truly chaotic and seems almost to fade away at times. He turns his head left and calls to Shynt, “Tell them to watch things closely.”

“Aye, ser.” In turn, the junior squad leader calls out. “Watch close now! Could be aught all in this mist! Watch close.”

As the gelding carries him along the wall road, headed almost directly into the sun, Lorn struggles against the glare of sun and reflected light to make out the midpoint chaos tower that the company must be approaching-that and the fallen trunk he knows must lie ahead. Still, Second Company rides another three kays before Lorn sees the line of darkness crossing the ward-wall ahead-and behind it, the white granite of the midpoint chaos-tower building rising above the ground mist, less than half a kay behind the fallen tree. For a long moment, he studies the point nearly a kay away where the tree has struck the granite of the ward-wall, noting that white oblongs are strewn across the wall road-the first time he has seen such.

He turns in the saddle and calls to Shynt, “Form up into five abreast. We’ll head out to join the second squad.” His fingers touch the single chaos lance in his holder-fully charged and then some.

“There’s a fallen tree ahead. Form up five abreast, staggered! Pass it out!” orders the junior squad leader. “Five abreast!”

After guiding the gelding away from the ward-wall, Lorn urges his mount up alongside Shynt’s. The lancers fall into their five-abreast ranks as Lorn and Shynt pass, until they have gathered the understrength squad together. Shynt barely has the first squad formed up a quarter kay from the wall and riding outward toward Kusyl and his second squad-already formed up on the perimeter road-when a messenger rides toward Lorn, reining up and then turning his mount to ride beside the lancer captain.

“Ser,” the messenger blurts. “Squad leader Kusyl, ser, he wants you to know that there’s another trunk down on the far side of the chaos tower.”

“Another?” murmurs Shynt to himself.

“Thank you,” Lorn replies. “Tell him we’ll join him on the perimeter road off the crown of this trunk. And tell him to stay well back until we get there.”

“Yes, ser.”

The lancer rides back toward Kusyl, and Lorn and the first squad continue riding in formation, outward through the ground mist that has begun to dissipate, out toward the perimeter road and the second squad.

Lorn keeps studying the dark trunk whose length they parallel, but he sees nothing overt, no giant cats on the trunk, no night leopards-just a huge trunk-wall that seems blacker than most of the fallen forest giants he has encountered on previous patrols.

As Lorn nears the second squad, formed up on the perimeter road, Kusyl rides forward to meet his captain. “Two of’em down, ser,” reports the senior squad leader. “You can see the second, on the other side of the tower building.” He points. “Looks big as this one. Could be bigger. Hard to tell from here.”

Following the gesture, Lorn nods. “Two or not, we’ll have to check this one first. We’ll follow the road and then head straight at the crown.”

“Yes, ser.”

Lorn continues to watch the two fallen forest giants, separated by almost a kay, with the bulk of the midpoint chaos tower and its connecting wall between them, yet he can see nothing moving except dark birds that are clearly vulcrows.

When they are opposite the first tree, Lorn reins up, then turns. “Form up on me for the approach to the crown.” The captain looks from Kusyl to Shynt.

“Yes, ser.”

“Yes, ser.”

Lorn eases the gelding forward, then slips the white firelance from the holder. He also checks the sabre. Once the squads flank him, with seventy-five cubits separating him from the forward lancer on each side, and he rides alone once more, he urges the gelding toward the mass of twisted and splintered branches and greenery that lie six hundred cubits before him.

A vulcrow flutters to land on a branch protruding higher than the others, its black feathers glistening under the hot spring-like sun, something dangling from its mouth before the morsel disappears when the scavenger swallows. Lorn rides closer to the forest canopy. He can see long strands of moss-like vegetation.

The air smells of splintered and resined wood, of acrid crushed leaves, and slightly of the acrid and musky scent that tells of stun lizards. The branches rustle, then crack ominously, and the crackling is followed by a greater odor of musk and an intensified acridity.

“Prepare to discharge firelances!” Lorn orders without turning his head, his eyes sweeping the twisted greenery.

“Firelances to the ready.”

The two stun lizards that crash from the fallen tree are five cubits high at their front shoulders, and stretch more than twenty-five cubits. The heavy tails do not lash. The nearer and fractionally larger lizard halts, then watches Lorn through black eyes that do not blink. Soundlessly, a black tongue flicks out like a lash, pulling a gray sparrow Lorn had not even seen from the air.