“Don’t!” hissed Ayrlyn from her chestnut.
Even as she spoke, Nylan could sense that same coiling of dark order force and white chaos, as if poised to strike, and he pulled back into himself.
Whufff… Nylan’s mare sidestepped.
“Even she can feel it.”
Almost as if an echo, the chestnut shuffled her feet as well.
“I get the image,” Nylan answered.
“They were pretty well organized.” Ayrlyn’s eyes traversed the fields and the well-maintained ditching.
“Probably still are, away from the forest.” He had to wonder what they could find in an enchanted forest that would help them defeat or at least stop a land that could provide high-class ceramics, stoves, and large-scale irrigation works, not to mention firewagons, fireballs, and who knew what else.
Silently, Nylan rode through the green shoots that reached nearly to the mare’s withers, trying to guide her through the more open areas. The flatness of the ground was deceiving, so deceiving that when he looked back toward the house, he realized that they had covered several kays, and still had not reached the taller growth, although the ground they crossed held black cinders, cinders and ashes.
“Someone tried to burn this back, with that chaos flame, I think,” said Ayrlyn.
Once Ayrlyn had called it to his attention, he also could feel the faint residue of chaos laid across the balance that the shoots embodied.
“Didn’t do them a lot of good.”
“I wonder. There’s more here that we don’t know.”
Despite his curiosity, Nylan did not try to extend his perceptions, but left them open to pick up images, hoping that would give him enough warning.
“Careful…”
“I’m just listening.” Even without straining he could sense the order/chaos pulse of the forest, so strong that he felt like some sort of insect creeping around a giant.
“It makes you feel that way,” Ayrlyn noted.
“You’re doing it again.”
“So? You could tell I feel that way, if you wanted. We’ve been through this before.”
He did not answer, instead trying to sense not only the forest, but Ayrlyn.
Ayrlyn-flame, banked, who felt what? Awe, fear, and yet who knew that the forest held the key.
Nylan wished he had her faith.
The shoots got thicker and thicker, but not any closer together, and grew in a pattern of sorts that seemed more defined the closer they rode up toward the older growth that towered into the gray sky.
Abruptly, the mare sidestepped again, turning away from the dark line of the older trees. Nylan reined up.
“Mine won’t either,” announced Ayrlyn.
“Hmmmm…” Nylan dismounted, and handed the mare’s reins up to Ayrlyn. “I don’t see anything. There’s not that much undergrowth here.” He took several steps toward the older trees of the forest, then paused, looking back at Ayrlyn and the mounts. The redhead shrugged.
He walked another ten cubits and paused, looking down at a knee-high growth of creepers that extended both east and west as far as he could make out. Between the leaves he could see scattered traces of white-some form of stone.
“There was a wall here,” he called back softly.
“I can feel it.”
Slowly, Nylan stepped over the low barrier, scanning the area around, listening with ears and senses. While the sense of looming dark order and pulsing white chaps was fractionally stronger, nothing changed. In a way, that bothered him as much as if something had changed.
Abruptly, he turned and walked back to Ayrlyn. “Let’s head back and think about this.”
She nodded.
They both understood. Merely looking and physically searching wasn’t going to yield what they sought.
CXVII
TWO OFFICERS IN white uniforms, with green sashes, stood in the small room that contained little more than a flat wooden table, five wooden chairs, and several easels with maps upon them.
“Angels… riding in the direction of the Accursed Forest.” Majer Piataphi handed the scroll back to the marshal. “Ser… I cannot tell that to His Mightiness. I cannot tell him that three of them, just three, destroyed a local patrol and vanished.”
“You are a lancer officer, under my command, Majer.”
Queras stated flatly.
“As such, ser, I must offer my best judgment. This is not a good idea. I am not in charge of the border patrols or the local patrols.”
“You are under my command, Majer.” Queras’s voice turned chill. “All Mirror Lancer officers are. You will follow my commands.”
“You can only execute me for failing to carry out an order-and then you will have to reveal what that order was.” Piataphi smiled bitterly. “The way His Mightiness feels about me… I would be turned into flame before him. After he flamed me, or if he did not flame me, ser, how would he feel about your trying to divert responsibility? Remember what he did to the officers of the Eighth?” Piataphi’s words were level, and he did not blink as he regarded the senior officer.
“Brave you may be, Majer,” said Queras as he finally shook his head, “but wise you are not. You defy me, and you lost an entire command, and allowed the barbarians to drive you from our lands. Our lands. That shows little wisdom.”
“Yes, ser. That is why I must be honest. I have little left but that. I know the white mage stands by Lord Lephi, and he would know if I deceived.”
Queras’s eyes raked over Piataphi.
“Follow the Emperor’s commands,” added the majer. “Do not tell him nor return until we are ready to march.”
“And the angels, O wisest of unwise lancers? How, pray tell, would your unwisdom address them?”
“If we prevail against the barbarians, then there will be time to deal with them and the forest. Even the white mages have left the Accursed Forest to deal with the grassland hordes.” Piataphi smiled again, tightly. “And if we fail… then we have no worries.”
“I am certain we will have no worries. Very certain. You will lead every charge.”
“Yes, ser.” Piataphi nodded fatalistically.
CXVIII
THE TWO ANGELS sat on the grass before the bushes that screened the front door. The clouds had broken the day before, and the unfamiliar stars glittered brightly in the early night. Weryl snored inside, and the faint odor of some form of vegetable soup being undertaken by Sylenia seeped from the house, mixing with the damp and subtle fragrances drifting from the forest.
“Pleasant,” Nylan said. “First time in I don’t know how long that we haven’t been running or fighting or-”
“Peaceful.” Ayrlyn leaned her head against his, her hair still damp from washing.
“Almost like we’re under the shelter of a huge unseen mountain.”
“A growing mountain. There are shoots in the back now, all around the house and shed.”
“It’s been waiting a long time,” he pointed out. “Either that or sleeping.”
Nylan yawned, as a dreaminess passed across him, and he could feel that Ayrlyn experienced it, too. “Just feel it,” she whispered.
He took a slow and deep breath, then another, and could feel… he would have been hard-pressed to describe the sensation, although the images carried by the flows of that unseen power were clear.
Vivid images… almost rising before them, yet ancient images, images of a distant past… that also was somehow obvious. A history?
A green spark, a living spark, with light and dark entwined, grew within a forest, and from that came other sparks, all linked, and the sparks spread, ever so slowly, until they carried flows, flows of light and darkness, order and chaos, that held the forest, that were the forest, as ever so slowly all the trees took on the sparks, the light and the darkness.
The rain fell, and under the green-blue sky, the trees grew, and died, and the deer roamed, and grew and died, and so did the tawny cats, and the tree rats, and the wide purple blossoms, and the ugly-sno
uted lizards.
The dark flows of blackness and the white chaos were mixed and twisted-and balanced. The trees grew and grew, and some died and fell, but always for all the changes, the white and darkness turned in and out, but balanced… until the heavens shivered, and the ground trembled.
Then… lines of fire flickered, white lines, force fluxes like a chaotic power net, firebolts white-infused and red-shaded like those thrown by the wizards who had tried to storm Westwind… and the white unbalanced forces lashed across the forest, across the grasslands to the north and west,. across the stony hills beyond the grasslands.
White lines of fire, fire that reflected light and darkness, burned through the forest, and the gray ashes fell like rain.
The forest struggled, and sent forth new shoots, and the white fires slashed across the shoots, twisting the flows, sending shudders through the ground itself, creating heat and tangled fires deep beneath Candar.
The rivers heaved themselves out of their banks, and the white mirror fires turned their waters into steam. Metal mountains grumbled across the water-polished stone hills and smoothed them, ground them, and suffocated them beneath strange new soil, and grasses that had never been.
Green shoots struggled through the ashes, and were turned into more ashes, and the ground heaved and trembled.
Lines of white stone slammed down like walls, pinning the trees behind lines of force that burned… and burned, burned somehow because the force of the ordered chaos that prisoned the trees was backward, because chaos bound order.
A sense of timelessness followed, inaction behind white stone walls, until the heavens shivered again, and the white walls cracked, and crumbled, and lines of white fire and darkness cascaded from ice-tipped peaks.
And the balanced flow of light and darkness resumed, with a sense of something like purpose and joy-except it was neither-and the dark presence of the forest mountain loomed.
Nylan shivered and wiped his suddenly damp forehead. A tree… or a clone group of trees, like the ancient aspens of pre-Heaven… had that been the beginning of the forest? The forest did not know; it only felt and sensed. Yet it had a vague concept of self, a concept that…
“How would you translate that,” he asked.
“I wouldn’t. Just call it Nados or Naclos or Nasclos… something phonetic like that. It won’t mind.”
“Naclos,” the engineer decided. “Not that it means much.”
“It means ‘Great Forest’ or something like it.”
“It is great.”
“So much power,” murmured Ayrlyn.
“It wasn’t very effective against the Old Rats.”
“It wasn’t? How do we know? Also, it has a longer perspective. The old barriers, whatever they were, have failed, and the forest seems to be well on the way to regaining its former position.”
“Unless those white wizards return with something stronger.”
“Maybe they left to do something else?” she suggested.
“Like fight Lornth? Why would they do that?”
Ayrlyn shrugged. “We’re missing a lot of pieces. That’s just what I feel, but I couldn’t tell you why.”
Although the night was warm, Nylan felt cold, almost alone under the looming yet unseen shadow of the forest. “I’m too tired to think.”
Ayrlyn slipped to her feet. “So am I. Maybe sleeping on it will help.”
Nylan wasn’t certain about that, either, but he rose, slowly, inhaling the half-familiar smell of the vegetable soup as they walked back to the small house under the glittering light-points of the still-strange stars.
CXIX
NYLAN BLOTTED HIS forehead one-handed as he rode through the young trees that nearly reached his chest. The air was moister, but even in full afternoon sun with the sun falling full on his back, not nearly so hot as it had been in southern Lornth. The forest’s impact, he supposed.
As they neared the older growth, rising nearly a hundred cubits overhead, the mare sidestepped, then snorted, and tossed her head.
“She doesn’t want to enter the old part of the forest.” As he spoke Nylan realized how stupid the words sounded. He felt stupid.
They’d ridden up and down the borders of the forest, but everywhere was the same-spreading greenery, scattered and abandoned houses of a sophistication far above anything they had seen elsewhere in Candar… and the same unseen and looming sense of the forest, with its balanced flows of order and chaos.
It was like a riddle, a simple, but impossible riddle, and riddles had always made the smith feel stupid, because they were so obvious after the fact, and made him feel like he wanted to take something and bang his head or smash the riddler. But there was no way, and no point, to smash something like the forest. Still, he was beginning to understand why the Cyadorans had referred to it as accursed.
“It’s not that bad,” Ayrlyn suggested.
“I’m just frustrated. Every day we putter around here is another day that the Cyadorans could be attacking Lornth, another day wasted.” The silver-haired angel dismounted and tied the mare’s reins to one of the larger shoot-trunks. So did Ayrlyn.
“So you want to ride back to Syskar and get slaughtered after the first charge of the Cyadorans?”
Ayrlyn’s commonsense retort just made him feel more imbecilic. Instead of answering, he began to walk through the growing forest back toward the older growth, the towering dark trunks that stretched toward the green-blue sky.
His boots crackled, and he looked down at the desiccated and browning bean leaves and stalks. “It doesn’t care much for crops.”
“Or monoculture,” added the flame-haired angel.
Nylan stopped short of the creeper-covered wall, now only calf-high. “It’s lower. It shouldn’t be able to work this fast.”
“There are a lot of things that shouldn’t happen here.”
Nylan half-snorted. About that, she was certainly right. But those impossible happenings occurred all the same. He took a deep breath, then another, and stepped over the disintegrating white gravel that had been polished stone not that long before.
“Careful…”
The angel smith glanced around. Where he stood was in full shade, but otherwise felt no different from the newer growth.
Whuffl… uffff…
“Easy… easy…” Ayrlyn’s words carried, and both mares seemed to settle down.
Nylan continued to survey the deeper growth to the south, his hand on the hilt of the shortsword at his waist as he turned his head to see what might have spooked the mounts.
To the south the trunks were spaced more widely, and clear openings ran deeper into the woods, almost like pathways. There was a sense of… organization, but how could a forest without more than rudimentary self-consciousness be organized?
“Balance,” suggested Ayrlyn as she stepped over the former wall and up beside him.
“Great. What do we do with balance?”
“Think about it.”
All he’d been doing was thinking about it, thinking about it and walking around it, and studying it… and what had he learned? Not much.
“We’ve learned that it can flatten you from a distance,” pointed out the redhead. “And that even the Old Rats couldn’t destroy it, but only confined it.”
“Or chose not to.”
‘ “If they could have destroyed it and didn’t, given their inclinations, it meant there was a good reason why. One based in sheer power, I’d bet.”
Nylan yanked out the shortsword and began to walk along the de facto pathway deeper into the forest.
With a look over her shoulder, Ayrlyn followed. The deeper woods were quiet, shadowed, with the same sense of everything in its place. A mixture of odors, like a muted and unfamiliar floral perfume, permeated the cool shade.
Nylan edged around a smooth-barked tree a good four cubits in girth.
Grrrrr…
Across an open space of less than ten cubits, at the base of a rough, gray-barked tree with fissured r
idges and a trunk nearly as big around as the shed that stabled the horses, crouched a tawny cat. Bigger than any of the few Nylan had seen in the Westhorns, its body was more than five cubits long, and teeth like white daggers glistened in the shadows.
The smith’s fingers tightened on the heavy blade he carried.
“Don’t…” hissed Ayrlyn. “Just lower the blade and back away.”
Nylan paused. He hated to be backing up if the cat tried to pounce.
“Nylan…”
He lowered the blade, and took one step backward, then another.
Grrrr…
As he backtracked, he lost sight of the great cat, but kept listening for movement, watching for the slightest sign. Ayrlyn retreated with him, except more silently, and she had left her blade sheathed.
Moving backwards, it felt to Nylan that it took most of the afternoon to reach the creeper-covered wall, but the sun still hung midway in the afternoon sky when he stepped out of the older growth. “Why did you tell me to lower the blade?”
“Balance. It felt right.”
With a glance back toward the old growth, Nylan finally sheathed the blade, then wiped his forehead. He looked toward the towering trunks again.
“The cat won’t follow us,,” she said.
“You sound so sure.”
“I feel sure, and that’s funny, because I don’t know why.” The redhead gave a nervous laugh.
“You were right. I wish you knew why,” Nylan said.
“It has to do with balance.” She spread her hands, almost helplessly. “I know it does. We’re still missing pieces.”
“We probably always will be, but we have to do something.”
“Such as?”
“We need to provide it with some direction,” suggested Nylan.
‘“How?”
Nylan sat up straighter. “I don’t know. Even trying to use any control of order flows seems to set off a reaction.”
“Balance… that’s the message.”
“But why? It doesn’t really think, not the way we do.”
“Does it have to?” asked the redhead dryly. “That’s our job, and we aren’t doing very well at it.”
The Chaos Balance Page 51
