The Chaos Balance

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Whhhhssstttt!! EEEEEeeeee… Not only did fire flare from the ground, as a curtain of chaos flame rose around the four and their mounts, but a sulfurous mist/haze burned through his nostrils, and he almost gagged, dry mouth and all.

  Whheee… eeeee… eeee… Horses screamed.

  Nylan hoped Sylenia could control their mounts. He wished she’d dismounted, but forced his concentration back on the barriers that held back primal chaos from them, trying not to think about Weryl, continuing to focus on that insubstantial line of order between them and disaster.

  Wheeeee… eeee… Another set of horse screams-more distant-rose above the rumbling and shrieking of released chaos.

  A thin line of white force probed toward them, and Nylan could sense Ayrlyn bat it away as though it were an insectonce, and then a second time.

  The ground lurched again… and again… and the fires that had exploded out of the ground screamed and slashed through Nylan’s skull. He swallowed, his eyes tightly closed, his mouth and throat dry, his chest tight, and his heart racing.

  The engineer, despite both knees on the ground, felt as though he rode both the powerfluxes of a translating subspace ship and a horse of chaos simultaneously-all while being skewered by a surgically thin, high-grade weapons laser that was trying to flay every nerve he had.

  Blackness-and angry whitened red-swirled around the engineer and around the healer, jolting them, fusing them, then yanking them apart. Heat welled up and past the order barrier, and Nylan’s face felt flayed by lines of fire, by dust that ground itself against his skin.

  Whhheeeeee… eeee… The screaming of chaos rubbing against order barriers went on… and on… and on…

  Almost instinctively, the two angels struggled to close off the rupture Nylan had created, pushing, pressing order lines back toward a smooth flow.

  Balanced-they were balanced… all the way… Those were Nylan’s last thoughts as one hand grasped Ayrlyn’s and the other tried to keep himself from toppling forward onto ground heaving so much that dust rose everywhere.

  Then he did pitch forward as the order/chaos rupture sealed, the barrier collapsed, and the backlash of both balanced forces swept over them.

  CXXXII

  THE MAGE UNDER the white awning staggered, then steadied himself on the portable white wood table.

  “Something… terrible… terrible…” murmured Themphi, looking down at the shards of shattered glass on the white surface. Blood dripped from the gashes in his forehead, leaving watery reddish stains on some of the mirror shards and darker splotches on the chaos-bleached wood.

  “What was it?” Fissar stood at his shoulder, proffering a dampened white towel. “The glass shattered. I could feel it.”

  “It felt like another, a powerful one, yet it had the feel of the Accursed Forest, and it was closer, far closer-no more than a half-day’s ride to the east.” The white mage blotted away the blood gently, then stopped and extracted another sliver of glass from his hair above his right ear. “Go tell Triendar…”

  “Ah…” stammered Fissar as he glanced from Themphi to the wiry white-haired mage who stepped in from the sunlight and under the shade of the awning. “Ah… ser…”

  “Tell me what, Themphi? Why is your tent set up? And with what new magery were you toying? I could sense the order-chaos pulses from the marshal’s wagon.”

  “None. No new magery. I sensed something… strange, and I set up the tent, just the roof part, you see, so I could concentrate. I was screeing the flank guard. They had encircled someone-no more than four riders. There was a flare of chaos, and my glass exploded.”

  Fissar opened his mouth and then closed it. The balding white-haired mage pursed his lips. “Perhaps Marshal Queras should know this. What happened to the flank guard?”

  “I do not know.” Themphi felt sweat mixing with blood, and he carefully resumed blotting away both. “Except I do not think they survived. Neither did the young mage with them.” Fissar’s mouth opened again.

  “With that much of a chaos-order mix, I would think not. Do you have any idea what caused it?” asked Triendar.

  “It acted like a mage, but it felt like the Accursed Forest… in a way.” Themphi handed the bloodied towel to Fissar so that he could work a tiny sliver of glass from his left hand. “You felt that the Accursed Forest has destroyed those lancers?” Triendar frowned. “Even in the ancient times, the forest used animals, not the white forces directly.”

  “It was a mage, but not exactly. It was like the forest, but it was not the forest.” Themphi took the towel again, then paused once more to ease out another chunk of bloody glass. “Are you certain?” Themphi nodded.

  “That could be most worrisome. Have you a spare glass?”

  “Yes,” answered the younger mage warily. “Then try to seek out the cause of this… this problem. Once you know, we will tell the marshal that we think there may be a problem.” Triendar worried at his chin. “You had best hurry. The lancers have finished with the hamlet beyond the rise, and the marshal is having his tent struck.” He paused. ‘Then, it may be best to wait until morning. We could do little anyway… but do your best to discover the source of this… problem.“ Triendar coughed, pursed his lips. ”One of our mages?“

  “Pirophi, I think.”

  “He was always a little oversure, but… still. Do what you can.”

  Themphi nodded, then turned to Fissar. The younger man had already opened the small chest beside the portable table.

  CXXXIII

  THE CANDELABRA HELD lit stubs, barely a finger in length. Wax drippings wound around the silver base and seeped across the purple cloth. Three empty bottles stood on the table. So did two goblets, one full, the other empty. Against the glass of the center bottle rested a half-curled scroll.

  Zeldyan reached for the scroll again, then stopped, and looked across the table toward Gethen. “Reading it once more will change nothing. There is nothing left of Syskar, Kula, and dozens of smaller hamlets. Clynya is a charred ruin, and the field crops have all been fired, those that could not be harvested quickly before the white demons destroyed them.” She glanced toward the half-ajar door to the adjoining room that served as Nesslek’s bedchamber. “A poor beginning, my sleeping son.”

  “Poor indeed,” rumbled Gethen. “I have found less than tenscore in armsmen to bring here to Rohrn for Fornal. Tenscore! Two small companies of the white demons’ lancers would overwhelm them in a morning-or sooner. Tenscore, and the holders begrudge that, even while they demand we hold back the demons.” His eyes fixed Zeldyan. “And you, daughter, letting me go, and then bringing Nesslek to this rundown place.”

  “You would have me wait helpless in Lornth? This way I could bring all the armsmen from the keep. You need every blade that can be found.” Zeldyan brushed back a strand of blond hair, and her fingers dropped to the table, then curled around the base of the crystal goblet that bore the etched seal of Lornth, a goblet mostly full of the amber white of Carpa. “I do not know that all the cold iron in Candar would stop them.” Gethen touched his beard. “Fornal would claim so.”

  “That we know.”

  “My brother claims much.” Zeldyan glanced toward the bedchamber door yet again. “My brother…”

  “You question… ?”

  “I do not like the way in which he regards Nesslek,” admitted Zeldyan. “Was it not Sylenia who brought them to heal my son? Was it not Fornal who insisted he was not ill? Yet I feel much discomfort in saying such.”

  “You say it, my daughter.”

  “I feel it. As I felt it when Fornal suggested to Relyn that he could claim the ironwoods.”

  “Fornal said that?”

  Zeldyan nodded. “Did you not know?” Gethen cleared his throat, lifted his goblet, sipped, set it down. Finally, he spoke. “Where are your angels now?”

  “I do not know. I will not yet give up hope, not while Lornth stands.” Zeldyan sipped from the goblet she had refilled but once.

  “You have greater fai
th than I, my daughter.”

  “Faith? I know little of faith these days. I know people. Lady Ellindyja will die prating of empty honor. Fornal will use a blade at the slightest pretext. You will use arms, but only if all else fails. And the angels, they will keep their word, or die. If they can, the angels will return.” The candles flickered in the momentary breeze that flitted through the open window, bringing the sour smell of Rohrn, a town that had seen better days.

  “If they can…” Gethen said.

  “We have not lost that from which we would not recover.”

  “Not yet, but the white demons are like locusts, or like a grass fire, charring everything before them.” The gray of Gethen’s hair glinted in the dim and flickering light that shifted as the candle flames wavered in the gentle and cool breeze from the open window. “If your angels do not return… we will fight as we can… as we can…”

  “They will return.” Zeldyan’s fingers tightened on the goblet, and her eyes went to the partly open door. “They will return…”

  CXXXIV

  A COOL WIND brushed his face, and Nylan shivered. Shivered? In the middle of southern Lornth? He shivered again.

  “You must drink. You are burning,” said a voice.

  Burning? Whose voice?

  Images of chaos-fire, order bounds, and the screams of dying men and horses swirled through his skull. Force… force… always force.

  “… force…” he murmured. Was it Ayrlyn who talked to him through the darkness? Ayrlyn, who had always been there for him? No-she had been swept under the blackness with him. Ryba? The dark marshal?

  “Drink.”

  A water bottle was pressed to his lips, and he drank, slowly, through cracked lips and a dry mouth, finally sensing that Sylenia held the bottle.

  Nylan opened his eyes, then shut them quickly as lights strobed through the darkness. Propped up against something- packs or blankets-he continued to sip the water Sylenia offered him. Even closed, his eyes twitched with the flickers of light, as though individual powerfluxes flashed through them. Unlike the mass of pain that had flowed through him after battles before, he felt more exhausted than threshed or beaten. An acridity came with the evening breeze, an acridity that carried the odor of burned grass and rock- and charred flesh. Nylan swallowed the bile at the back of his throat.

  “Ayrlyn?” he finally asked.

  “I’m awake,” came a tired voice out of the light-strobed darkness. “Better than you, but not much. We may have overdone it.”

  Overdone if? Probably. Don’t I overdo everything?

  “Stop it,” said Ayrlyn wearily. “We didn’t have much choice, and we did it together.”

  “It is terrible,” Sylenia said into the darkness. “All around, nothing lives. Nothing moves.”

  “Weryl?” Nylan croaked.

  “He cried, but he sleeps. He is innocent, like my Acora was.”

  All children were innocent, supposedly. Weryl was, that Nylan knew, but the engineer had to wonder about people like Ryba and Gerlich and Fornal. He knew better, but he found it hard to believe they had ever been innocent. He could hear Sylenia moving, carrying the bottle toward the redhead.

  “You, healer, must also drink again.”

  “Thank you,” Ayrlyn said, after a time.

  Sylenia returned the water bottle to Nylan. “Again.”

  The engineer drank, more easily the second time, even as questions flitted through his mind.

  How much time did they have? Would the Cyadorans turn all their forces against Ayrlyn or him? Or did they think the two angels had perished? Either way, also, the Cyadorans would continue to march northward. Of that he was certain. He and Ayrlyn had to do something. But what?

  Even as he attempted to consider the problem, he could feel his eyes getting heavier, closing, against his unspoken protests.

  Finally, in the gray before dawn, Nylan pried his eyes open, relieved that he did not experience the shooting, flickering light-strobes of the night before. Carefully, deliberately, he sat up in the stillness, an unnatural stillness without even the chirp of insects or the rustle of grass. His mouth was dry again, and filled with the taste of ashes, a taste that matched the gray of the dawn. His head throbbed with a dull aching, and his shoulders and back were sore and stiff. The skin of his face simultaneously itched and hurt and felt crusty.

  His hands trembled as he fumbled for his boots, boots that Sylenia had pulled off. He certainly hadn’t been able to do that. Then he managed to reach the water bottle and take a long swallow.

  Ayrlyn rolled over on her bedroll, and he waited, taking another sip of water, as she struggled to sit up.

  “Good morning.”

  “Wiped out… and you’re.still cheerful,” she grumbled, shifting her weight cautiously, clearly as stiff as he was.

  He extended the water to her, watched as she put the bottle to her lips and drank.

  “You two,” said Sylenia, rolling over, sitting up, and pulling on her boots. “Stinks here. Will for a long time.”

  Nylan looked beyond Sylenia and Ayrlyn, toward the east and the orange glow that was the almost-rising sun. Thin trails of smoke rose from one part of the scorched hillside. The four mounts, on a tieline that Sylenia had set up, grazed almost disconsolately on the sparse clumps of brown and green grass near the charred border between their sanctuary and the ashes beyond.

  “Will it be safe to leave?” asked Sylenia. “Once we eat?”

  “Yes,” Nylan answered. “If more armsmen don’t come.”

  “Good.”

  Ayrlyn frowned.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You’re older,” Ayrlyn said. “It’s not the hair, either.”

  He turned his head and looked at her, deliberately. Her hair was still flame-red, but there were lines around her eyes, and darkness within and beneath them. Her skin was blistered in places, ready to peel. “So are you.”

  She took another swallow from the water bottle. “We’ve got to figure out how to handle this better.”

  “Any ideas?” he asked.

  “No, but after we eat and feel better, we’re going to sit here and play with it, until you and I understand, because next time we try without understanding, we’ll be old and gray or dead or both.”

  “Oooo.” Weryl stretched on his small bedroll, thrusting out arms and legs.

  “He feels better than we do, I’ll bet,” offered Nylan. “That wouldn’t be hard.” Ayrlyn stretched and leaned toward her boots. “Ohhhh.”

  The engineer eased himself to his feet and lumbered the few cubits to the provisions packs that Sylenia had unloaded. There he bent laboriously, his knees and back creaking, extracted the heavy squash bread, and hacked off several slices. One he proffered to Ayrlyn, once she had her boots on. She stared out at the gray desolation that was turning into a patchwork of brown and black and gray with the rising sun.

  “Thanks. Need something… head aches.” Ayrlyn took a slow mouthful and chewed mechanically.

  In a way he couldn’t fully describe, Nylan could sense both her headache and his own. He began to eat slowly. “Wead…” offered Weryl.

  Nylan bent and broke off a chunk of the orangish bread for his son, then reclaimed the water bottle silently from Ayrlyn. “We do not leave? We must stay amidst this?” Sylenia made a sweeping gesture to encompass the entire hilltop.

  “Not any longer than we have to,” temporized the engineer, half-mumbling around the still moist and heavy bread.

  “But… the white demons… they ride toward Lornth,” protested Sylenia.

  “Slowly,” said Ayrlyn. “What good will it do for us to hurry up and get killed? That’s what will happen if we don’t work this out.” She paused. “And Tonsar will probably get killed, too.”

  Sylenia frowned.

  “Oooo!” Weryl sputtered forth orange crumbs, waving a chubby fist. “Wadah…”

  Nylan uncorked the water bottle, took a quick sip, wiped the rim, and offered it to his son. After Weryl
drank, he wiped the bottle again, gave it to Ayrlyn, and walked toward the circular rim of ashes around their impromptu camp, chewing another chunk of the bread.

  The ground was burned in spots, turned in others, and merely cracked elsewhere, but some of the cracks were wide enough for a mount to be swallowed shoulder-deep. Everywhere reeked of chaos, ugly unseen white-red chaos, yet bands of dark order ran through the white.

  Nylan shivered, but kept walking around the perimeter of the order-insulated island of unburned and unchanged grassland.

  “… terrible angels,” murmured Sylenia to herself.

  Nylan was inclined to agree. So far, he’d managed everything terribly, and it was a wonder they were still functioning, much less alive.

  The mixture of ashes and cracked land extended more than a kay in every direction. The engineer shuddered again. Just what were they working with? Could the white mages call up similar energies?

  He didn’t feel that they could, though he couldn’t- again-say why. But if they could…

  Once again, balance was the key, somehow. Instinctively he understood that. He shivered as he thought of chaos, like a fever… like a fever… chaos as a fever, Nesslek… the chaos fever that had killed Ellysia. But he hadn’t tried to drive out the chaos, just contain it… twist it within order.

  Had they still kept order and chaos too separate the day before… kept them too isolated, too pure?

  “Could be,” offered Ayrlyn, as she stepped up beside him.

  “How could we keep them less separate?”

  “Use more order insulation? Smaller and separate chaos tubes?” She shrugged and took a sip of the water bottle she carried. “We could experiment with very small tubes and compare how they felt.”

  Nylan nodded. Empirical research-that might work.

  “It will,” offered Ayrlyn.

  He glanced back to where Sylenia offered Weryl another chunk of the heavy bread, then nodded. “We’d better get started.”