L. Modesitt - Cyador’s Heirs

“Try to figure out some things … and see if I can do them well enough to practice them.”

Altyrn nods. “I’ll let you know if anything changes. I doubt the Meroweyans are going to want to ride and march through this.” He gestures toward the window. “They might surprise us, but the scouts will let us know.” He pauses. “Do you need the fire?”

“Not now, ser. I might not at all.”

“Good. No offense, but you’ve turned some chambers into ovens.”

Lerial just nods and sits on the only chair in the main room except for the one Altyrn has pulled up behind his narrow table. He needs to think.

It’s not as though ordermages can’t manage chaos, reflects Lerial. It’s that it unsettles them or … He isn’t sure exactly what, but healers deal with chaos, if in a different way, all the time. So it is the way of handling it. He can direct chaos through his patterns. He’s proved that. But to handle it without just redirecting chaos drawn and concentrated by a white wizard … that’s another thing. He doesn’t even like the idea. But … he’s already had to do things he doesn’t like in the slightest, such as killing people and ordering rankers into places where some will be-and have been-killed.

For a time, he goes over what might be possible, but, in the end, much as he worries about it, he needs to look into the clouds. He stands and makes his way to the front door. There is a slight overhang that mostly shelters a narrow area just outside. Lerial slips outside, closing the door behind himself. He does notice, in the gloomy light of a drizzly morning, that the plank siding of all the dwellings in Bherkhan, those that he can see, has an oil finish, but the finish is almost a tan color. Does every hamlet pick a different shade of oil? It does appear that way.

Lerial pushes away the thoughts of oil and directs his senses to the clouds above. There is a flow of order and chaos, a pattern, or rather two patterns, because there is one set of flows inside the cloud … and a different flow outside, and yet the two interact. There is also more order in the cloud than in the air around it, and Lerial thinks it should be the other way around … except … a cloud is a structure, while the air is more like chaos. He uses his order-senses to follow the patterns of a section of the clouds just to the east, because he can see them, at least he can see them as well as he can see anything, while staying under the overhang of the roof and not twisting his neck.

The two patterns … they’re almost like the order line coil creates a related chaos coil … of sorts. Except that the comparison isn’t quite right, and Lerial cannot think of a way to make it so. But what would happen if you nudged the flow inside, because that’s more like order?

Lerial does so, and the chaos outside the center of the cloud strengthens, as if more is flowing to join that already there. He keeps watching. Is the patch of sky to the east darkening? It certainly looks that way.

Then, there is a small flash of … something, as if chaos had flowed one way, and order rebounded along the same path … or maybe it had been the other way. Lerial cannot tell because it has happened so fast, but the thunder that follows suggests that whatever he did triggered a small bolt of lightning.

The rain to the east intensifies, for perhaps a tenth of a glass before stopping. The clouds there, or now more to the south, because they are slowly moving southward, begin to thin, so much so that, for perhaps a tenth of a glass, hazy sunlight filters through that thin film, but before long the order-chaos patterns in the clouds reassert themselves, and a more uniform drizzle dribbles down on Bherkhan once more, except, Lerial notices, the drizzle is finer and lighter than before.

Of course! You changed the patterns, and the clouds rained harder, and that left less water in them … Lerial nods, even as he finds himself grinning. And you did something that created lightning, if only in the air.

He takes a deep breath, knowing he has a great deal of effort … and work ahead of him … if he can even make what he has in mind work, but if he doesn’t …

He doesn’t even want to consider those possibilities. Instead, he sends forth his order-senses once more.

Twoday dawns bright and clear-and by midmorning the air is too warm to be merely springlike, as Lerial recognizes as he stands in the sunlight outside the officers’ temporary quarters, trying to use his abilities to separate order from chaos in clear air, a task he is finding difficult, but not impossible, as a small cloud begins to form in the air several hundred yards above him. Interestingly enough, the more he makes the separation, the easier it becomes.

He looks up to see Altyrn riding toward him, followed by Juist. From the majer’s bearing, and the hint of chaos swirling around him, Lerial can sense that the majer is worried, if not upset, and he releases his hold on the small cloud above him, looking at it for several moment as it drifts southward in the light and warm breeze, still holding its shape. Even though it contains comparatively little moisture, if slightly more than the air around it, while he knows it will dissipate, the process is going to take longer than he has thought it would.

He walks swiftly toward Altyrn.

Even before he has completed dismounting, the majer addresses Lerial. “Muster your company and be formed up in half a glass. The scouts have reported that the Meroweyans are less than five kays away. They’re not moving that swiftly, but they’re headed here.”

“We’re withdrawing, ser? Where?”

“All the way to Escadya.”

“That’s almost fifteen kays, isn’t it?”

“We need the distance and the time. We’re going to have to let the people do what they can. We still don’t have any war arrows to speak of and only a few handfuls of spears that the rankers have made in the last day. There’s been no word from Juist or Denieryn. Facing well over a thousand armed Meroweyans with four Verdyn companies that contain only three companies’ worth of rankers and no weapons except sabres and a few lances that are useless in this kind of fighting is something I’d rather not do.” Altyrn’s voice is edgy, something Lerial has not heard before.

“I wasn’t questioning, ser. What else can we do that makes sense right now?”

“I know you weren’t.” Altyrn’s brief smile vanishes. “I had to tell Elder Klerryt about his daughter.”

“He’s here?”

“He and the other elders are already on their way to Escadya.” Altyrn pauses, then adds, “What made it worse for him was that she didn’t have to serve. She was older and had already done her service as a woodland warden. She was the one who insisted. She told her father that if some offspring of the elders didn’t serve, how could they insist that so many other young people should.” Altyrn offers a sardonically wry smile. “I thought you might understand that.”

Belatedly, Lerial understands some of what Alaynara had meant by saying that practicality included who people were. She thought you knew … and you had no idea. “Her experience was why she was so good an archer, I imagine.”

“Did you talk to her much?” asks the majer.

“Some. About the same as the squad leaders.”

“It might help if you wrote a letter to the elder. Not the specifics of what happened. I told him those.”

“Just about how good an archer, how good a leader she was?”

Altyrn nods as he ties his mount to the short hitching rail. “Not immediately, but when you have time.”

Once the majer walks toward the door, Lerial strides toward the small dwellings holding second company, marveling about the fact that, with roughly eighty rankers left out of slightly over a hundred, it is the closest to full strength of all of Altyrn’s companies.