5.Death of Chaos
XIX
AFTER ALL-OR what little-I'd discovered, I kept riding, until I could barely stay in the saddle. By then Gairloch was tired, too. I camped in the trees, between scrub and cedar, on the uphill side of the road, and took off his saddle. But I wasn't about to brush him. I used the wrong arm to carry the saddle, as the pain immediately reminded me.
How there would be anyone else on the road I didn't know, except locals headed to Arastia, and they would scarcely be traveling in the middle of the night. Still, some caution was necessary, and I had selected a spot not visible from the road.
I woke not much after dawn, stiff as a chair spoke. My head ached, and my arm throbbed and itched-at the same time. Gairloch was already chomping through the greenish leaves of the one kind of scrub bush he liked. It looked like a greenberry, but it wasn't.
Wheeee... eeee...
I could tell he was thirsty. So was I, but I could drink from the canteen and he couldn't, not as much as he needed. So I saddled him and packed everything together and rode until I found a brook another kay farther on. While he drank, I order-spelled more water for the canteen, and then washed and checked my arm. There was no sign of chaos, but the whole area around the scabbing gash was black and green. I added a touch of order and pulled my shirt back on. The itching got worse, and that meant that it was healing and that I wanted to claw it.
The overcast skies, the gusting wind, and the dampness of the air forecast rain. Before Gairloch had carried me another five kays, the first droplets fell out of the gray clouds. Another kay, and the drizzle turned into light rain. I started to look for the waterproof, before remembering I had left it with Alasia. I was going to get wet, but would the redhead have even cared? I still had trouble understanding how she, or anyone, could attempt to steal Gairloch without a trace of chaos. I also felt bad that I hadn't done something about the stable girl in Faklaar who had asked for nothing except understanding.
All the while the road turned and twisted uphill and generally west, though it twisted back east one cubit for every two cubits west it carried me. The air was thick and smelled of damp cedar and rain.
In time, the rain became a steady sheet of water, and we plodded onward. There was no reason not to keep traveling, since no real shelter appeared and both Gairloch and I would be almost as soaked standing under a cedar inadequate for shelter as plodding onward. One advantage was that if Gerlis had been following us with magic, he certainly couldn't so long as the rain lasted. White magic doesn't work well through falling water, but then, neither did a drenched woodworker and a soaked mountain pony.
The water seeped everywhere, down my neck, through my shirt, and off my knees and into my boots. Each hoof squushed, and each toss of Gairloch's head threw more water in my direction.
In retrospect, would it have been better to take the shorter route both ways? I didn't know. Some of what I had learned had come from meeting with people, sensing how the people reacted, although I would have been pressed to explain what that had added, and why. The shopkeeper in Arastia had told me about the troop movements, but the autarch had her own ways of discovering that sort of information.
I wiped the water off my forehead and out of my eyes. One thing I did know. A quicker return was safer, now, and that would get me back to Krystal sooner. I had no illusions about my getting back to my workshop for long. This latest white wizard was going to prove costly for woodworking, I feared, and I didn't really want to think about how it might affect Krystal.
The rain kept falling-through the morning, through the day, through the afternoon. As Gairloch carried me higher and deeper into the Lower Easthorns, the stream got noisier and wider from the rainfall, though the road was built at least three cubits above the top of the stream at the lowest. Some places, there was a drop-off of nearly ten cubits.
The rockets seemed like the least of the problems facing me. How could I deal with that much chaos? And what on earth had Gerlis been doing in that valley, to make the earth heave? Why?
Plodding through the rain, I worried that I hadn't found out more, but I'd been concerned about being discovered and not getting back with the information. As I worried, I got wetter, and the rain just kept falling.
Somewhere on the road, under a twin-peaked mountain, I found a waystation, like the first one I'd used on my way into Hydlen, without a door and with a sagging roof.
With the rain pelting down, it was definitely an improvement over camping out. I took one dry comer, and gave Gairloch the other.
Since there was some wood, I made a fire and had tea. The chimney didn't draw that well, and smoke swirled around-but didn't get too thick, since fresh damp air poured in through the open doorway.
I shared some of the apple flakes with Gairloch, along with a grain cake. Then I had to walk him down to the stream, and we both got wetter. After that I took off my clothes and wrung them out and draped them around, hoping that the air and the heat from the fire would dry them out some. My. shirt, trousers, and drawers were soaked, as were my boots. My arm throbbed, and the scab itched.
After eating I found a part of my corner out of the wind and lit my candle. I opened the book-The Basis of Order- and huddled inside my bedroll in my corner. My staff was right beside me, since I didn't have to worry about innkeepers. I read for a long time, trying to find a key as to what I could do if I had to deal with Gerlis.
There were some hints-things like, “there is power, and the control of power. Chaos unchecked can obliterate its would-be user. So can order. What an order-master must do is channel that power...”
Fine, I'd known that with Antonin. Knowing something is so doesn't necessarily help much. That was still the problem with the book, Justen, and my father. Everyone was perfectly willing to tell you the problem, and even what needed to be done-often in boringly detailed ways. They just weren't much help in telling you how to solve the problem. Just like the old children's tale about crossing the torrent on a rope. All they needed was a rope across the river. But no one knew how to swim the torrent to carry the rope across.
Great. I needed to channel power. How did one control and channel power? I went to sleep trying to figure that one out.
The rain still fell the next morning, but more like a heavy mist than a rain, and the stream wasn't as high. My shirt was dry, or close enough, but everything else was damp. I had spare drawers, those dried on the ride, and there was only a slight stain from the leather of the packs. Who looked at drawers? Drawers were like wood glues-necessary and boring.
Gairloch got two more grain cakes while I was dressing and packing up, and I brushed him hurriedly before saddling him and leading him out to the stream. He did drink a lot, and so did I.
I mounted. He whuffed.
The road twisted and turned, and got rougher, with more and more potholes. The stream got narrower.
The cedars got shorter and farther apart, and no one rode or walked the road besides Gairloch and me.
The drizzle turned into winter mist again, and the ice-damp wind blew around and through us. The road twisted and turned, and rose and fell. Finally, when it got too dark to see, we stopped and camped.
The next morning I got up, and started all over again. I fed myself and Gairloch, washed up, brushed him, and packed up.
I mounted. He whuffed.
The potholed road twisted and turned, sometimes.with cubits-wide sections having slid into the stream. The stream got even narrower.
The cedars got shorter and so far apart that they looked like squat sentinels, rather than trees.
The winter mist swirled, dropping occasional snowflakes, and the ice wind blew around and through us. And the road twisted and turned, and rose and fell, and the stream became a narrow trickle.
After a while, each section of the mountain-trail road seemed to take on a certain boring similarity to the section before-until the valley of death.
Even the mist that hung over the place seemed tinged with chaos, and nothing moved. The sole sounds were the wind over the rocks, Gairloch's hoofs, and my breathing. It reminded me of Frven, except worse.
Piles of ashes had drifted on each side of the road, half frozen into wind-sculpted mounds. The narrow stream had cut but a thin channel through the layer of ash that covered all the ground, and that ash muffled even the sound of the water over its rocky streambed. The reddish rocks on the valley floor were cracked, as though they had been baked in an oven. But, in places, along the walls of the narrow valley-more like a gorge-were huge black smudges as if greasy fires had burned there.
Gairloch's whinny took on a plaintive air, echoing back and forth between the bare rock walls.
“Easy... easy...” I wanted out of there, too. Nothing lived in the valley. Not a tree, not a bird, not a blade of grass. Just ash, and rock, and hard-fired soil, and a dead stream. The mist should have softened it, but it didn't, only made the unseen flames of chaos dance with a more sinister grace.
I tried not to shudder and urged Gairloch on through the ashes and chaos, looking at the greasy black splotches on the rock walls, almost hearing screams.
Then I swallowed, and my eyes burned. I had found Ferrel's grave-and ashes.
I patted Gairloch, even as I let my senses take in the devastation. The squads with Ferrel had been attacked with rockets. Those who had survived that, if any, had probably been murdered under the blade, and Gerlis had turned his awesome firebolts on the entire valley-just like the first white wizards I had run into had charred meadows into the same dead ashes.
As I kept Gairloch on the road, I kept riding and thinking. None of it made much sense. Why did they use so much power? How could I-or anyone-stop them?
Wheeee... eeee...
I patted Gairloch again, saying nothing until we passed out of the valley of death. The road turned northwest. I kept thinking, trying to get the smell of ashes and death out of my mouth and my mind.
Finally, I stopped at a spring that seemed to be the headwaters for the stream. With snowflakes drifting around me, and a light white carpet on the ground, I washed my face and eyes, and rinsed my mouth. It helped, but I could still taste ashes. Then I checked my arm. The scab itched, but I couldn't sense any chaos, and the bruise around the scab was now totally green and yellow.
Gairloch drank his fill while I looked back to the southeast.
Finally, I gave him the last grain cake and had some cheese and biscuits and apple flakes.
What controlled chaos? Iron and black iron. I didn't have any black iron, and there wasn't a smith outside of Recluce, not that I knew of, who could forge it. I might be able to make some out of some weapons steel, by concentrating on ordering it, but it would be a very small piece of black iron, and it would take a lot of effort. For what?
On the other hand, Recluce was supposed to be orderly because of the iron that ran beneath it. How did the earth contain chaos? With pockets of iron ore? Why did the brimstone and fire springs only flow forth in some places?
I ate without really tasting what I put in my mouth, realizing again just how little I knew about how the world really worked.
I walked toward the spring and looked at it, trying to duplicate what I had felt that Gerlis had done, trying to trace its roots into the rock. The rock seemed to block me, but I could sense the water, the branches and the flow, and I had the feeling that I could have traced it, had I only known how. But The Basis of Order didn't mention that. At least, I didn't recall anything like that.
When I finally shook my head, snow flew, and a thin layer had fallen on my saddle. Absently, I brushed it away.
I couldn't follow chaos lines, but I could follow water. Was water more orderly?
Gairloch whickered.
“Sorry, fellow. It's snowing, and we're in the middle of the mountains, and I'm just standing here. Not very bright.” I mounted.
The trail road I had followed joined the main road, or what I took to be the main road, to Kyphros less than two kays farther on.
Gairloch and I turned due west and headed downhill. The snow stopped, but the wind picked up, and the late afternoon got colder.
That night, in a waystation with a door, I went through more of The Basis of Order, trying to read between the lines, under the lines, find hidden meanings in the words. Even when I thought I'd found something, I wasn't sure what I'd found.
“... iron has a grain, and through that grain can order be stored as in a warehouse, both in tools and even deep within the earth...”
“... separating order out of chaos is like forging a fine pair of blades and giving each to twin sons of the ruler at his death...”
Twin blades? What did that have to do with how to contain chaos?
The last one I read seemed to offer a glimmer of an idea.
“... too much order, or too much chaos, may recoil upon the user and consume him as fat in a smith-fire...”
How could I help Gerlis obtain too much chaos? What would happen if I helped him get more chaos, and he just used it on me? That seemed dangerous, demon-damned dangerous.
I finally blew out my candle stub and tried to go to sleep, but the wind howled, and my mind turned and twisted like a mountain road. And I remembered Ferrel and the glint in her eye when she had handed back my knife.