L. Modesitt - The Chaos Balance

He swallowed and looked back at Ayrlyn. “What did you see?”

“The worst of myself.” Ayrlyn shuddered for a moment. “How all of Candar is slanted.”

“Slanted?” As he asked the question, Nylan shuddered, involuntarily thinking about the worst of himself-the endless twists toward self-deception and trying to avoid facing what was.

“It feels…slanted…from way down.”

The smith nodded. She was right. It did, and when he and she had rested some, then they’d look into it. But they needed rest.

He looked upward.

The featureless gray clouds were beginning to separate into still indistinct but separate, darker, and more ominous chunks of gray, and the mist had stopped falling. It appeared near midday.

Midday?

“It took awhile,” Ayrlyn said. “That sort of self-examination usually does.”

“And the cat was sitting there all the time?”

“Probably. We would have been dinner if we’d failed.”

Nylan shuddered again, as he turned back toward the mares.

Overhead, the clouds roiled, and the deep roll of thunder rumbled across the forest.

Ayrlyn carefully blotted away the flaking and blistered skin, trying not to wince as she did.

Nylan moved the pump lever with his left hand, bending down and letting the cool water flow over his face. A day later, he still felt blistered and burned, and the left side of his body-symbolism made real? — was bruised from his cheek to his waist, not to mention the slash on his arm.

He knew that the body could manufacture wounds-but the slashes and burns on his shirt and leathers were another question.

Slowly, he straightened, trying not to breathe too deeply to avoid the aches in his chest and ribs. The air was cool, still damp, from the thunderstorms that had raged much of the night.

“A pretty pair you be.” Sylenia took the bucket, which she had made less leaky with wood slivers and some form of paste glue she’d concocted, and began to fill it. “You walked into a forest, and you return as though you have fought the fire demons, and you ride back through a storm, and you smile.” She shook her head. “The storms rage, and you sleep the sleep of the dead. This morning you look no better, and worse than after many battles. Yet you smile.”

“We weren’t looking forward to meeting the forest,” Nylan admitted.

“You did battle with it,” snorted the dark-haired woman. “Battling the white demons, that I can understand, but a forest?”

Ayrlyn smiled, a bit sadly.

“The Cyadorans fought it. They tried to wall it away,” Nylan pointed out.

“Much good it did them.”

Although Sylenia had a point in one way, Nylan still wondered. Cyador had stood for far longer than Lornth.

“I do not understand,” said Sylenia after a moment, slowing her pumping. “They did not like the forest. They built walls around it. There be much land, and yet some lived so very close to it.”

“Good question,” Nylan said. “And there’s no one left around here to answer it, but I have an idea.”

“I’d like to hear it,” suggested Ayrlyn in a tone that said she knew he wanted to explain, and would anyway, no matter what she said.

Nylan flushed, but continued. “The ancient Old Rationalists-the white demons-changed much of the land, and the power they used…it remains beneath the soil in many places. I can feel this, and so can Ayrlyn. It’s…disturbing.…They squeezed the ancient forest back and back. But they either couldn’t totally destroy it, or they worried that they shouldn’t. Either way, that disturbance beneath the ground thins out the closer you get to the forest.” The silver-haired angel shrugged. “So the closer you get, the less disturbance. That means that those people who might be sensitive to the chaos beneath the ground, even if they didn’t know what it was, would feel more comfortable living closer.”

“There couldn’t have been that many,” Ayrlyn pointed out. “We’ve only seen this small village.”

“Probably not.” Nylan took a swallow from the water bottle, then handed it to Ayrlyn, tightening his lips and trying to ignore the itching that was becoming more frequent from his various wounds. Were they beginning to heal that fast?

“This be too much for me. And young Weryl, he will have everything out of the packs. Again.” Sylenia marched back into the house.

After a moment, the smith turned to the healing healer. “Fine. We’ve learned a little about balance. Now what do we do?”

“We walk back through the forest and learn more. It should be easier this time, now that we’ve begun to reconcile the balances within ourselves.”

“How much easier?” asked Nylan warily.

“I’d still bring blades. We don’t know much about the wildlife.”

There was far too much they didn’t know, and probably too little time. Nylan wanted to shake his head. Fine…they understood the balancing of the forest better, and its powers-but how could those be turned against the Cyadorans? Or could they, when the forest had failed before?

“The forest didn’t have us,” Ayrlyn said. “Let’s get the horses saddled.”

Nylan could sense the depth of her conviction, but it was conviction, not a plan, and he could also sense that they were running out of time.

The sun hung well above the forest before they reached the area outside the old growth. But even before he tied the mare to another one of the trees in what had been the edge of the Cyadoran field, Nylan could sense that the forest was different-or were they different?

“We’re different. The forest grows, but it doesn’t change.”

“Everything changes but the forest?”

“That’s not…” Ayrlyn paused. “It changes. Trees grow and die, and plants, but the overall balance doesn’t.”

“Isn’t that life?” he asked, stepping toward where the older growth began.

“On a large enough scale, but humans distort things so much…”

Nylan understood the unspoken feelings. Humans pushed the natural balance so far that the reaction was equally violent. He stepped across the slightly raised creeper-covered line, looking down momentarily. “I don’t think it cared much for the Old Rats’ barriers.”

“It instinctively opposes unnatural barriers.”

“Whereas humans instinctively create them?”

Ayrlyn nodded.

Nylan slowly edged his way through the close-spaced trunks, his hand not on the shortsword blade, but close, and his ears listening for strange rustles or something like the tawny cats they had encountered earlier.

They continued to walk, Nylan glancing ahead as they followed one of the clear “paths” in and around the guardian trees. That was what they felt like. As they stepped between two of the gray-barked giants, Nylan stopped.

The whole forest before them had changed, become more like an amphitheater. Silently, the two surveyed the expanse before them. Towering brown-trunked trees loomed overhead, widely spaced, some perhaps two hundred cubits high, forming a canopy just thick enough to turn the sunlight green while admitting enough light for the lower-growing vegetation. Under the high canopy grew shorter trees and bushes, none touching the others.

“This is different. I hadn’t expected-”

“The outer lines of the trees are almost like a wall,” said Ayrlyn.

Nylan nodded and stepped toward a purple trumpet flower bearing a stamen that flowed like golden notes-like the ones Weryl had grasped from Ayrlyn’s lutar-from the bell of the floral instrument. Around the trumpet flower was a cluster of lower plants bearing tiny white starflowers. Each plant had its own space, and Nylan could feel the intertwined balance.

“You could sing, now, couldn’t you?”