L. Modesitt - Colors of Chaos

After reclaiming his jacket, Cerryl left his stark barracks room and made his way down the stone steps and across the rain-splashed stones of the courtyard. The ostler nodded as he walked up, then disappeared into the stable. Cerryl glanced around the courtyard and at the miniature pools of water between the paving stones, pools occasionally rippled by the light rain that still fell. While he waited, he cast his senses toward the walls but could discern only a guard and no chaos. Then he shifted his weight and glanced around again, as he had been ever since Shyren’s words about the dangers of Jellico. The real dangers of Jellico are within these walls .

“Here he be, ser mage.” The ostler led out the gelding, still with the definitely bedraggled white and red livery.

The streets of Jellico seemed fractionally less crowded as Cerryl rode slowly out of the gates and turned the gelding north and toward Pastid’s warehouse. Pastid remained absent, the building locked.

With a deep breath Cerryl eased his mount back west and toward the lower hill, the back side of which held Triok’s establishment. The rain continued to spit out of the low clouds, intermittently, but the dark gray clouds promised a heavier fall before long. Cerryl continued to scan the areas through which he rode north and west of the viscount’s palace, with both his eyes and his chaos senses, feeling, somehow, somewhere, a slight increase in chaos. Was Jeslek nearing? Or something else?

Triok’s building resembled what Cerryl would have thought a trader’s place to be, with a small and narrow two-story brick dwelling attached to a timbered warehouse with a tile roof. A muscular bearded man was standing at one end of the wagon before the loading doors, shifting bales of something from under the canvas covering the wagon bed to the open loading door of the warehouse.

Cerryl dismounted and led the gelding toward the man. “Trader Triok?”

“None other, ser mage,” grunted Triok as he moved another bale.

“Your consort may have told you that I’d been trying to see you for the past few days-”

“That she did. That she did.” Triok straightened after setting down the bale and frowned. “Don’t be knowing what you Whites be wanting of me. Pay my tariffs and taxes. Don’t go your way often, but better this way.” He gestured toward the medallion on the wagon.

Cerryl nodded. “I just wanted to ask a few questions. You only pay one set of taxes, except for the medallion, but they’re collected by the viscount’s men-Pullid’s men, actually.”

“Been that way for years. Afore Pullid was Zastor. Don’t remember the fellow afore him.”

“Do you remember when the rate was a tenth?”

Triok frowned. “Not been that long ago. Three, four years, ’cause that was the year the brigands got Siljir in the pass heading down to Passera.”

“Do you recall when the rate went from a twentieth to a tenth part?”

Triok laughed. “Not that old, young ser mage, not by a mighty bow shot.”

Cerryl nodded. “How do you find the White highways?”

“Like ’em. Don’t like the tariff, have to say.” Triok looked toward the gray sky and then the warehouse door, as if to indicate he had better matters to attend to than educating a young White mage, preferably before it began to rain even harder. “Be good if we had a road into Spidlar…once the troubles there are over,” he added quickly.

“I’ll convey that.” Cerryl smiled. “Thank you.” He led the gelding back from the wagon slightly before remounting.

“…what was that about?” Triok’s consort stood inside the loading door.

“Don’t know…care less…but didn’t take many moments, leastwise…”

Cerryl frowned. Myral had said the tariff for large outland merchants was a twentieth, but it had been collected as a tenth for years, and none in the Guild had known or cared. Somewhere over three years ago, the rate had been raised in Certis to 15 percent. Why? And why then? Wasn’t that when Rystryr became viscount? Or had that been afterward?

He kept riding, headed eastward until he reached a larger street to take him back to the viscount’s palace, still wondering, his gray eyes scanning the streets, the scattered shops, and the mostly shuttered windows.

Cerryl halted the gelding just before the corner of the larger street that led southward to the viscount’s palace. While he didn’t exactly sense chaos, what he did feel was unease, something he could not describe. As he studied the empty street ahead, he mustered chaos around him.

Empty? When has any street in Jellico been empty?

He glanced toward the top of the wall to his left, a good three cubits above his head, even mounted, not a house wall, but a wall enclosing a courtyard of some sort.

A dark figure peered over the wall, bearing something…

Cerryl swallowed and flung chaos, then turned to the other side and flung a second wall of chaos fire. Whhhstt!

Sprung! Sprung!

Crossbow bolts and chaos fire met. Both figures on the walls vanished.

Clunk! Clunk!

The crossbow bolts clattered along the damp paving stones. Belatedly Cerryl could feel the rain begin to mist down around him, so light as to barely cause a twinge in his skull.

Cerryl raised the light-blurring screen and simultaneously urged his mount ahead and around the corner, raising yet more chaos, but the street remained empty for almost a block. He was breathing heavily as he rode carefully southward for a block. The street ahead, across the way that he knew led eastward to the market, was also empty, and he turned eastward to find a less direct-and more crowded-way back to the palace.

After another few hundred cubits, with the main square in sight, he reined up, leaving the light-blurring screens up. He remained on the gelding, trying to catch his breath.

He sniffed, smelling something beyond the sewage and filth and roasting fowl, something burning. Two wagons, each pulled by a single horse, careened down the street into the Market Square and then eastward. A building was burning to the northeast of the square, down the street where the trader Freidr had his establishment. Cerryl swallowed, then eased his mount in the direction of the wagons, reining up once more well back of the building where flames flickered from a single window.

A group of men in gray threw buckets of water on the roofs of the surrounding buildings, then, as the fire did not seem to grow, began to dump buckets on the warehouse itself. The rain began to fall even more heavily, and cold water seeped down the back of Cerryl’s neck. He shivered in the saddle but did not urge the gelding any nearer to the dying fire or the men who fought it. The thin blonde woman sobbed under the overhang of the cooper’s shop, holding an infant while Cerryl watched.

To Cerryl’s surprise, the fire guttered out, but he realized part of that was because the fire had apparently started in the office and the office walls were stone. The combination of the rain and the bucket brigade had managed to quench the flames before they spread.

Cerryl nodded to himself-chaos fire.

Still keeping the blur screen up, he turned his mount and headed back toward the viscount’s palace. Once inside the second courtyard, he reined up outside the stable and dismounted.

“Ser?” asked an ostler he did not know or recognize.

“I’m Cerryl, returning my mount for grooming and stabling.” He offered a polite smile.

“Oh…you be one of the mages. Yes, ser. I’ll be taking him, then, and Firkflat will be back shortly.”

Cerryl could sense the confused groom was telling the truth and handed over the reins. “Thank you.”

“Our duty, ser. Our duty.” The groom bowed.