The Magic of Recluce

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Supper, taken alone in a smallish dining room with a warm fire and only five tables, was provided by a plumpish woman wearing a stained white apron. It consisted of spiced brandied apples, a thin pepper-laced potato soup, and thick slices of tough mutton with even thicker slices of brown bread. I ate it all, and drank three glasses of redberry.

  “Quite a lot for a slender fellow,” observed the woman, whom I took to be the innkeeper’s wife. The innkeeper himself had vanished.

  I shrugged. “It’s been a long cold trip.”

  “Mountain weather’s been warmer than usual.”

  “It was warmer than the blizzard on the hills of Certisice, thunder, and snow up to my knees.”

  A puzzled look crossed her face, then passed. “Would you like anything else?‘

  “Directions to my room, and then the bath.”

  “The bath room is at the end… that way.” She pointed in the direction of the stable. “I’ll show you your room.”

  I barely glanced at the room, apparently the smallest of a half-dozen, if the doorways and spacing between them meant anything, and left only cloak and saddlebags there. My coins were in the openly-displayed purse and in the hidden slots in my boots and belt. Then we walked back toward the bath, down the stone-walled corridors. Even the interior walls were of stone, saving the doors themselves.

  Hot water they had, flowing from some sort of spring. The stone-walled room had been built around the spring, clearly, and the source of the faint metallic odor in the valley was definitely from the hot springs, of which there had to be more.

  Metallic-smelling water or not, bathing in the rock tub chiseled from the stone was wonderful, loosening aches I hadn’t even recognized. I didn’t leave that healing flow of heat and relaxation, and dry myself with a thick brown towel, until I resembled a prune.

  I also took the liberty of washing my undergarments and wringing them out. After all, for three golds I deserved a few extras, and neither the innkeeper nor his wife said a word when I walked back toward my room barefoot and wearing just my trousers, with the rest of my clothes draped over my arm.

  The room, with a single narrow window looking out on the back meadow that I could not see in the darkness, contained a bed, a narrow wardrobe, and a candle in a sconce above the bed. The window, two spans of real glass on a pivot frame, was wedged shut.

  The bed, narrow as it was, actually had sheets and a worn coverlet. I thought about blowing out the candle. Certainly my eyelids were heavy enough, but the paper corner protruding from the belt pouch recalled the letter or note I hadn’t even read.

  So I sat on the bed and unfolded the heavy paper. The reversed images of some letters where the two sides had been folded together told me that, despite the careful phrasing, the words had been placed on the heavy linen paper in haste.

  Lerris-

  In traveling, even a wizard can be trapped while asleep. Read the section on wards (alarms) in your book before you sleep in strange covers.

  Try also, for your sake, to take the time to read the entire book before you make one too many mistakes. Spend some time doing something simple and thinking. You can’t think and learn if you’re always on the run.

  Since the gray wizard had been right more than once, I levered myself off the bed and pulled The Basis of Order from my pack. Then I slowly thumbed through the end sections until I found “Wards,” taking several deep breaths to keep my yawns from overpowering me.

  I didn’t quite understand the theory, but the mechanics were less difficult than healing that damned woman or even weaving my weather-net. The interesting part of the wards were that they would work without my conscious direction. The bad part was that they didn’t do much besides warn.

  I thought there might be more, but if so I wasn’t in shape to learn it. So I slipped the door wedge and bar in place, put my knife under my pillow, and blew out the candle. My eyes closed before the light died.

  I woke with a jolt from a dream of endless mountain trails. The room was dark, black, yet a ring of light from the wards surrounded the door.

  … üüttt… chhh…

  I tried to get the sleep out of my mind, reaching for the knife, then almost laughed.

  “Anything I can do for you?” I called.

  The sounds stopped but no one answered, although I could feel two bodies on the other side of the rough plank door.

  I waited, and they waited.

  … üütttch…

  “I really wouldn’t, if I were you,” I added casually, wondering what I would do if they attempted to break the door.

  The prying noise stopped again, and I tried to think, when all I really wanted to do was sleep.

  The wedge wouldn’t hold up long, not against a determined attack. The whole sneaky effort meant the innkeeper was only after the weak.

  I walked across the cold stone floor and let my feelings examine the door and the frame-solid oak set in stone, with the hinges on the outside, swinging into the room.

  Then I shook my head. Idiot, idiot… the innkeeper didn’t want into the room. He was placing a bar through the iron handle on the other side to keep me from going out. The Stone walls, the narrow window, all made sense. The innkeeper just didn’t like direct violence.

  I checked again. The two were gone, now that they were convinced I was safely captured.

  Lighting the candle, I stood up and walked to the window. If the wedges came out… Finally, I nodded and began to dress, wincing at the chill undergarments. They were still damp, but I could only hope my body heat would take care of that.

  Then I went to work on the window as quietly as I could, -thanking Uncle Sardit silently the whole time. Not easy, but the exertion warmed me up. The chill and heat had taken their toll on the glues, and with a little help here and there, I managed to slide the whole window into the room.

  Out onto the frozen grass went my pack, cloak, and saddlebags. If I had been a pound heavier I wouldn’t have made it through the narrow opening.

  Getting the window back in place I cheated, using some of the sense-weaving order-strength, but even by my father’s lights, using power to fix something wasn’t tempting chaos.

  Then, I walked slowly, cloaked in darkness, to the stables. Gairloch was fine, munching on some sort of grass.

  Setting another round of wards, I recovered my bedroll and curled up on some straw in the stall next to Gairloch.

  The first hint of light woke me, not the wards, which I dropped. I saddled Gairloch, listening for the innkeeper and hearing nothing. Then I used an old staff to pry open the storage closet and took six grain cakes, which I stuffed into the provisions sack. I really wanted just to take them just to pay the innkeeper back. Besides, with the provisions from Justen, I wasn’t even certain I would need them. But the Easthorns looked cold, and Gairloch had saved my neck already and then some.

  In the end, I left four coppers, probably too much, but that was the least my wonderful innate and growing sense of order would let me leave. After all, despite his dubious hospitality, the innkeeper had bought them somewhere, and leaving the coins made me feel better.

  After sliding open the stable door, with the reflective cloak around us, Gairloch and I stepped out into the silence of the winter dawn.

  … thunk… thunk… thunk… Less than a kay across the meadow, we came to a brook. I dropped the shield, looking for signs of pursuit; but the inn remained dark, without even a plume of smoke from the chimneys. After Gairloch drank, I replaced the cloak of reflected light until we reached the road and the marker that featured an arrow and the name “Passera.” The edges of the road contained drifted snow, often up to Gairloch’s knees, but the wind kept most of the road clear, almost as if it had been designed that way.

  Still, more than once we had to flounder through crusted and drifted snow gathered in the most sheltered elbows of the road.

  Not knowing who or what to trust, and how, I avoided the next inn, instead finding a sheltered cleft up a canyon from the road
. Getting to the cleft and concealing our tracks was more work, in the end, than fortifying an inn room would have been, but I slept more soundly, even on the narrow, rocky, frozen ground out of the wind. And it didn’t cost me three golds or the equivalent duke’s ransom, though I did wake up with the tip of my nose nearly frozen.

  Climbing the eastern walls of the Easthorns wasn’t quite as draining-not quite-as surviving the winterkill storm. While it had taken two days to escape the storm, it took nearly two days more after Carsonn just to get to the top of the southern pass. In that whole time, I passed three other groups heading toward Certis, all of at least four riders, and all heavily armed. They had made my passage possible, in one instance having shoveled through a small snow avalanche across trie road.

  They never saw me or Gairloch, not when I heard them from a distance and removed us from the road and their sight.

  The weather never changed-cold, cloudy, with gusty winds sweeping in and out of the canyons and carrying fine dry snowflakes. What’s more, at the top of the southern pass, there wasn’t even any view, just a crest in the road that ran between two nearly sheer rock walls. At one instant, I was riding uphill; and the next, downhill.

  Not until I reached the top of the foothills overlooking Gallos, another day, and another night spent under an outcrop shivering even within my bedroll, did I find a view.

  For nearly three kays the trail down was nothing but an open ledge slanted against a blackish granite.

  Halfway down I stopped, able to see anyone approaching in either direction, and guided Gairloch into an alcove back from the road. I climbed up to a flat overlook to look out over Gallos under the first full day of winter sun since leaving Jellico.

  Gallos didn’t look much different from above than I imagined Certis might have, just mixed and muddy browns, divided by thin gray lines that had to be stone walls or fences, and infrequent gray-brown and wider curving lines that were doubtless roads.

  Down toward my right, to the north, where the road broke away from the rocks and entered a line of forested hills that separated the meadows and hedgerows and stubbled fields from the Easthorns, I spotted an interweaving of smoke plumes in a cultivated valley. What I could see of the valley looked small, in any case. Passera, I guessed.

  Leaning back against the rock alcove with Gairloch right below and with the afternoon sun warming the black slab behind me, I finally re-read Justen’s note.

  I still hadn’t had time to read the whole book, and on the mountainside wasn’t exactly the place to do that in any case. But Justen had been right more than once… and that was more than enough reason to think about what I was to do before I descended the rest of the way into Gallos and Pas-sera.

  Besides the simple matter of survival, I had two problems-neither insurmountable, but both requiring solutions. First, my supply of coins, not exactly large to begin with, was running short, even despite Justen’s provisions. The loss of nearly four golds for a short night’s lodging in Carsonn and the grain cakes for Gairloch had not helped in that matter; although, balanced against the payment for the sheep-healing, I was somewhat better off than I would have been, and a good hundred fifty kays further toward the Westhorns.

  Second, I still didn’t have the faintest idea of the problem or cause or whatever-it-was that I was supposed to resolve. This business of blind traveling and quests was getting tiresome, if not plain boring.

  Whatever I didn’t know, I did know two things. If I kept blundering into towns and problems, sooner or later an unseen crossbow quarrel or rifle shot would leave me in less than ideal shape, if not dead. That assumed that Gallos would allow rifles; some of the Candarian duchies classed firearms as chaos-weapons, rather than undependable heat-energy weapons. But dead would be dead, one way or another.

  I’d also realized from the unusual nature of the storm on the hills of Certis, and from the unguarded look of the nasty innkeeper’s wife when I had mentioned the unseasonable storm, that the ice and snow had not been entirely natural… not at all. It also meant that someone hadn’t exactly been able to locate me, with magic or otherwise.

  Gairloch-the pony was another question I had ignored, and kept ignoring. Why did he trust me, and a few ostlers only? Had his presence in Freetown been coincidental? Or a matter of odds?

  I looked away from the view of Gallos and down at the not-quite-shaggy golden-brown of his heavy coat. No animal less sturdy would have managed what we had gone through nearly so well.

  With another sigh, I reached out with my feelings… looking…

  … and came away shaking my head. Gairloch was a mountain pony, but not just a mountain pony. Just as I had strengthened the innate sense of order within the sheep of Montgren, so had someone strengthened that order within Gairloch, to the point that the pony would lash out or shy away from anyone manifesting disorder. That was all, and yet…

  I shook my head. Someone, something, had thought farther ahead than I cared to speculate. Even with my back against the warm rock, I shivered.

  I still wasn’t thinking fast enough.

  So I sat on the outcropping and tried to think out what I had to do next. I had to learn what was in the book and to apply it. I had to make a living of sorts with enough space and time to read. And I had to avoid getting much notice. That was especially important, particularly if my disappearance from an apparently locked room in Carsonn were relayed to Antonin or whichever chaos-wizard was after me.

  I didn’t understand why, though. I wasn’t as dangerous as Justen, and Tamra was certainly as much a threat as I was. I shook my head, wondering where she was and what she was doing.

  Avoiding further notice meant avoiding Passera. If it took a whole troop to cross the Easthorns, a single rider would be seen as magician, or bandit, or common thief, and even given my recent outlays, the amount of coins I carried would give full suspicion to one of those assumptions.

  All this led to the need to reach Fenard, a town large enough for me to seek a woodcrafter who needed an extra hand without raising too many questions.

  I sighed. Every time I thought, the problems got more complex and involved more than just me.

  “Come on… we’ve got another piece to travel, and a few more nights on the road.”

  Click… click… Gairloch’s shoes clicked on the smoothed stones of the highway as it descended down the long slope to Passera, and, eventually, toward Fenard.

  XXXVIII

  THE BLOND WOMAN juggles the knife as she rides, glancing ahead, then back at the rotund trader perched on the gray mare that walks heavily beside the lead pack mule. “No trouble yet.”

  The trader eyes the black-haired woman-shapely, even in the faded blue tunic and trousers-on the scarred battle-pony, who scans the road ahead.

  The older woman, the black-eyed and black-haired one, turns to catch the trader’s appraising stare. She touches the blade at her belt, and a faint smile crosses her lips.

  The trader sees the smile and the hand on the hilt of the blade and shivers. “See… anything?” he stammers.

  “Could be… there’s a line of dust headed our way. Only a single rider, though. No trouble there.”

  “You fixing to join up with the autarch?” asks the trader, each word tumbling out almost before the last is finished.

  “Why?” asks the blonde.

  “The word is that Kyphros needs blades; the autarch doesn’t care whether they’re men or women, just so long as they’re good.”

  “I don’t know…” The blonde’s voice is flat.

  “We’ll see after we deliver you… and collect our pay…” laughs the older woman.

  Her laugh is not a laugh, and the trader shivers again. The blond woman rides further ahead, and the dark-haired woman’s free hand strays toward the hilt of her blade.

  XXXIX

  SKIRTING PASSERA WAS easy enough, except for the river bridge that held towers and a guard force. While the towers would hold against brigands, I doubted they would stop even a few score of w
ell-trained and armed men.

  They didn’t have to. The gate just had to stop us. So Gairloch and I waited nearly till dusk, until I sensed the gate about to open and slipped through going the other direction. They even left the gate open while three of them checked under the bridge from the mountain side.

  I didn’t wait for them to finish, taking Gairloch step by slow step across the stones, hoping that the gentle click of his hooves would be muffled by the rush of the narrow river below the bridge.

  All the practice had given me a fairly good sense of place without seeing, but I still worried that someone could see through the reflective shield. In a way, it was faith, sheer faith, to walk beside an armed guard with a sword ready to use, separated from that violence by the thinnest of light-curtains… and I couldn’t even sigh.

  Beyond the gate, Passera was open enough, though Gairloch and I quickly left it well behind as we continued into the forested hills beyond the town. I dropped the shield as soon as possible after turning into the trees once the road curved out of sight.

  From that point on, I would be a journeyman woodworker, with only a horse left because of my unsettled youth and the trouble in Freetown.

  With each step toward the plains of Galios, the hills became more gentle, the trees less frequent, and the air warmer, if a temperature that left the clay of the road a cold gelatin rather than stone-hard ice could be called warm. The rock fences by the road gave way to rock posts and split rails, and these in turn were replaced by all-wooden rail fences that seemed too spindly to contain stock or to hold up against a strong wind.

  The infrequent and clear brooks gave way to half-empty or totally empty canals flowing in grids between ever vaster and flatter expanses of stubbled fields.

  After Passera, I finally stopped in a crossroads with no name and slept in the stable with Gairloch. It looked cleaner than the battered inn. Even so, the cost was three coppers for me and two for Gairloch. I didn’t ask about a room.