L. Modesitt - The Chaos Balance

“It’s quiet.”

They slipped over the nearly flat green creepers that still worked to reduce the former wall and past the outer guardian trees. Nylan felt like he should be holding his breath. Even Weryl was silent.

“There’s a big cat ahead.”

In a way he could not describe, Nylan could feel Ayrlyn’s perception of the big tawny cat, but the cat seemed almost disinterested in the humans, and was following a large-tailed rodent of some sort.

The angels slowed, letting the predator move away from them.

Nylan stood by the trumpet flowers, holding Weryl, trying to sense…something. The flows of dark order and white chaotic power swirled around them. The smith looked absently at his son as he did at the forest-and his mouth opened. For like the forest, Weryl was order and chaos, less balanced, with faster and stronger swirls of the competing forces. Nylan turned toward Ayrlyn.

She too held both forces, but with more deliberateness, more…majesty.

Balance-did it allow greater use of power? How could he find out? He moved forward, just trying to soak in the feel of the underlying energies.

Several hundred cubits beyond the cleared expanse where they had stopped on their last trip, past another line of guardian trees, was a pond, almost oval, more than two hundred cubits long.

Nylan shifted Weryl from his still-sore left shoulder to his right.

They stood above the eastern end of the pool, at the top of a short grassy slope that led down to the clear green water. A fish of some sort, with orange fins and a brownish and orange-spotted body, glided up to the top of the water and took an insect-a water spider perhaps-with only the slightest of ripples.

“Wadah!” Weryl smiled and jabbed his right hand toward the silver-shimmered and tree-shadowed green surface.

At the far end of the pond, beside a bush with narrow silver-green leaves, a gray loglike object, at least ten cubits long, slipped under the surface, and a line of ripples moved toward the three.

“We’d better-” began Ayrlyn.

“Yes.” Nylan felt the menace of the big lizard. Although the balance constraints would certainly allow him to use the blades against the monster lizard, he had some doubts whether blades would be enough. At the moment, the lizard was merely investigating. That he could feel. With Weryl in his arms, prudence was definitely better. Nylan turned.

“Wadah…” Weryl lurched back toward the pond.

“Some other day. We’d rather not be lizard food.”

“That’s a big lizard, and it’s got some sort of order-chaos storage, like a weapon.” Ayrlyn began to walk quickly to catch up with the other two. “But it’s balanced, like everything in the forest.”

“Outside…all of Candar is unbalanced.” With his senses, somehow extended but passive, on the lizard, Nylan walked quickly back the way they had come, Weryl on his shoulder. They passed another stand of the purple trumpet flowers, one that he did not recall. He could catch the hint of the reiseralike fragrance that drifted into the green canopied amphitheater from somewhere. “That’s what the forest tries to right, except that it’s blind.”

“How will this help us-or Lornth-against Cyador?” Ayrlyn took a deep breath without slowing. “It smells good.”

“Where’s the lizard?”

“Oh…it stopped at the water’s edge. There are two cats prowling around there. One might have been the one we saw earlier. They can feel the order changes, too, I think.”

“Why aren’t they following us?”

“Nylan…whether you recognize it or not, you’ve balanced a tremendous amount of order and chaos in yourself. It makes that lizard look puny. If I were a big cat, I’d be a lot more interested in the lizard.”

“Great…I don’t even know how to use it…not really.” A thought struck him, and he turned and looked at Ayrlyn, seeing what she had described in him in her. He swallowed. “You…”

She shook her head.

He laughed. “You! You’re just the same as me or that lizard.”

“It’s scary,” Ayrlyn admitted, her eyes going back over her shoulder, even though nothing seemed to move in the greenlit forest. “I never thought of myself as powerful.”

“The forest would.”

“Wadah!” interrupted Weryl with a lurch.

Nylan reached up and steadied his son. “When we get to the horses.” His eyes narrowed. “Look…at Weryl.”

“He’s got it, too, that balance.”

“Do you think…?”

“I don’t know.”

Neither did Nylan, but his scarcely more than infant son was somehow instinctively balancing order and chaos. Their ordeal? The forest? He didn’t know.

They kept walking, the only audible sounds those of insects, the rustle of the high canopy, their own breathing, and scattered bird calls.

Once beyond the guardian trees of the old growth, Ayrlyn paused by the chestnut, reins in her hand. “Nylan…what did we learn today?”

“We learned something. It’s like powerfluxes-the greater the potential difference and the better the balance…that’s the key.” He eased Weryl into the seat behind the saddle. “And that it’s easier for children. Or Weryl.”

“It’s still unsettling. We walk in there, and we walk out, and each time we’re a little different, and I can’t quite remember how it happened, but I can sense that it did, and that we’re different.”

“Are we different in a bad way?” Nylan strapped Weryl in place.

“No…I don’t think so. But how would we know, if that’s what the forest wants?”

“That’s why we have to leave.”

“Oh…if we feel that way when we’re beyond its power?”

He nodded. “And if it lets us go-”

“Then it leaves the choice to us.”

“Exactly.”

“Will it?”

“Somehow, I feel it will.” Nylan mounted the mare. “The forest even gives the animals limited free will. The lizard didn’t have to chase us. Nor the cats.”

“It wants something.” Ayrlyn swung into her saddle.

“Of course. Somehow…we’re going to help the forest.” A grim laugh followed his words. “And it will help us.”

“That far from here?” she asked, drawing the chestnut beside his mare.

“The Old Rats took their planoforming equipment and used it to resculpt this part of western Candar, but they sort of overlaid the old topography, and some of it wasn’t necessary. They probably didn’t have enough power to do it right-and they sort of stretched out the marshes and the water and created grasslands over what was almost a desert, and moved streams. It wouldn’t last forever, and maybe it shouldn’t have lasted this long-but there’s a lot of energy there.” He shrugged. “Any time there’s an imbalance…”

Ayrlyn nodded. “But some of this still doesn’t make sense, ecologically. A larger forest would have maintained the grasslands because it would have cooled the whole region.”

“I thought rain forests grew-”

“That’s it! This isn’t a rain forest.”

Nylan waited.

“Rain forests usually develop in areas of thin soil and high moisture. The soil here is comparatively rich, and the normal rainfall would be more temperate.”

“So, healer and ecologist, what’s the jump point?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know…exactly. The Rats didn’t have to slash the forest back into a relatively small square. They could have adopted some form of large alternating bloc agriculture-there aren’t that many towns here, and from what we’ve seen, they’re not overcrowded. That would show that the population pressure was never that great.”

Nylan rubbed his forehead. “You’re assuming that the forest would let them. Look at how fast things are overgrowing the old boundaries.”