Ordermaster

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Kharl spent the time practicing his order-skills, particularly his shields, and in studying The Basis of Order in the manner in which he had found most effective-by questioning. Sometimes he read in his quarters, but when he could, he preferred the sheltered area on the top of the north tower.

  On fiveday, after midday dinner, he was in the bright and cool sunlight of the tower, his back against sun-warmed stone, perusing a particularly obvious section, wondering why the writer had felt it necessary to empha size the point so thoroughly.

  Every strength is a weakness, every weakness a strength, for under the Balance there cannot be more order than chaos. Thus, if order is concentrated in one place, there must be another place where there is less and where it will take less effort for chaos to prevail. Likewise, the same is true of chaos ...

  That had certainly been the case in his own experience. If he concentrated order into a shield, for him to resist the firebolts of the white wizards, that order had to be restricted to a very small area. On the other hand, he asked himself, was there a time or place where the use of additional order spread over a large area, almost like seasoning over a large piece of meat, would prove useful? Kharl considered it, but could not think of a situation where it might be useful. Perhaps he might in time.

  He continued reading, until he came to a passage which seemed both direct and obscure, simultaneously.

  Because chaos reflects the absence of order, it can manifest itself in two fashions, or both at once. The first is as what appears as white fire, and that is chaos free of all order and all constraints, but chaos drawn from elsewhere by one who is able to do so and imposed upon what order may exist in a given place. The second is that chaos caused by the withdrawal of order from the place itself. Both methods produce that force known as chaos, and the unrestrained chaos created by either means cannot be differentiated, one from the other. The first method is the easiest, and the one most widely practiced, but the amount of chaos that can be mustered is limited by the strength of the wizard, because by nature such free chaos is widely dispersed. The second method does not require strength alone, but great mastery of both order and chaos, and has seldom been employed because failure to attain mastery is almost inevitably fatal.

  Kharl understood the concepts well enough, but there was no explanation of why attempting the second method was so dangerous. He read on, but nowhere could he find any explanation of the dangers-or even of the reasons behind the caution.

  He frowned. The book seemed to suggest that technique was the key to the second method. As a cooper, he certainly understood that the key to any craft was skill and not brute force, but exactly what sort of skill was required to remove order from an area or an

  object? What would happen if he did?

  He marked his place in the book and closed it slowly, thinking.

  What sort of danger was involved? Why hadn’t the book explained? Or was it like so much else-something that the writer had not wanted to spell out? Or could not?

  “Ahhh.. .”

  Kharl turned his head, then rose from where he had been seated.

  Hagen was walking across the stones of the tower.

  “You look worried-again,” offered Kharl.

  Hagen nodded. “These days . .. I’m worried all the time. The rebel lords look to be trying something else. Hensolas has gathered his forces, and they include half of the regular Austran lancers from the eastern district, the ones who were under Vatoran. Norgen’s scouts are reporting that the rebels are moving around Valmurl to the southeast.”

  Kharl didn’t know enough about the local geography to understand what that meant. “Where are they heading?”

  “I’d judge that they’re planning to use the southern high road into the harbor. If they take the harbor, they can claim they hold Valmurl. It also makes it much easier for the Hamorians to send them supplies.” “What about Lord Fergyn?”

  “No one seems to know. I’d wager that he’s moving through the area just south of the Nierran Hills toward the north road. That’s closer than we’d like”

  “It’s closer to the dockyards.”

  “And most of the factors’ warehouses.”

  “Are they short of supplies?”

  “I’d imagine so, and their armsmen haven’t been paid in several eight-days.”

  “Have you heard from Commander Casolan?”

  “We’re still looking at almost an eightday before his forces arrive.” Hagen offered a laugh, a sound somewhere between sardonic and humorous. “I was wondering if you have any other magely stratagems that might work against an attack on the road into the harbor.” “Are there any places where the road is narrow? Any bridges that they have to cross?”

  “Only the causeway, and that’s not really that narrow. It was built by Lord Estloch’s great-grandfather through the marshes. For ten years he just had anyone convicted of crimes sent there to cart rocks. It’s two kays long, and between three and five rods wide. If we blocked it, though, they could just ride through the city. In any case, the causeway is so open that they could see anyone waiting there for them. You couldn’t hide us, could you?”

  “I could hide you from sight, but it would be hard on the armsmen, because they wouldn’t be able to see, and any wizard could still tell that I was doing it.”

  “I had hoped ...”

  “Let me think about it. How long do I have?”

  “Norgen thinks they’ll begin before dawn tomorrow.”

  Kharl nodded.

  “If you need supplies of any sort, let me know.”

  After Hagen left, the mage and former cooper tucked The Basis of Order inside his tunic and walked to the eastern side of the tower. The sun warmed his back as he studied Valmurl and the harbor. In the distance, he could barely make out the causeway, just a darker line through the dark waters of the harbor.

  What could he do? How?

  He glanced at the stones of the parapets, catching sight of a fragment of dried leaf that had been blown into a corner in the stone, doubtless by a winter storm. He’d had luck in working with leaves before. Could he try removing the order from a fragment of a leaf, leaving only chaos? Would it be like hardening the leaf, then infusing the order elsewhere?

  With his order-senses, Kharl reached out for the piece of dried leaf, no larger than perhaps a quarter of his palm. Carefully, he tried to sense the order links within the bleached and ragged tan fragment. The dark links felt faded, but so did the whitish points of chaos.

  Rather than strengthening the links between the minute segments of order, as he did when creating shields, Kharl concentrated on the ties between two points. He tried to break the linkage, but all that happened was that he felt warmer, as if he had been walking uphill. He paused. Mere force wasn’t the answer.

  Technique-that was what worked. But what kind of technique? He considered for a moment. When he strengthened air into a barrier, he reinforced the hooks and links. Was there a way to unlink one small segment from another? He tried visualizing two segments of darkness as linked by interlocking open hooks, then concentrating on turning them so that they separated.

  Once more, he could feel himself getting hotter, but nothing happened with the leaf.

  Were the ordered sections of the leaf, faded as they were, tied together more like a hook and eye? He tried that, but the results were the same. Nothing happened, except he was sweating more than before.

  What about some sort of latch structure? He realized that he was trying to visualize the unknown, but order had to have some pattern or structure. Didn’t it? The latch idea didn’t work either.

  For a time, he just leaned on the stones of the parapet, letting himself cool back down, thinking about how many ways order could be structured. When he felt somewhat refreshed, he tried not forcing his concepts of linkage on the leaf, but instead concentrated on trying to receive, to sense, the order-structure of the leaf. For a time, he could sense nothing except the darkness of order and the reddish white of chaos. In
stead of turning away, he took a deep breath and let himself and his senses drift toward the leaf.

  In time, he began to get an impression of linkages, of hundreds of rows of tiny twisted hooks. Instead of immediately trying to use that image, he willed himself to gather in an even more detailed understanding of the order linkages of the leaf, trying to gather an image of just how the links twisted and how much each needed to be turned to be unlinked from the next. The leaf seemed to have frayed barbs on the tips of the hooks. That was the way Kharl perceived them, at least.

  Ever so gently, he began to press, then push and twist. One of the minute linkages released, and then another. The third and fourth were easier, and, almost immediately, Kharl could feel heat rising from the leaf. Despite the cool breeze coming from the ocean and across Valmurl, he had begun to sweat even more heavily.

  The heat was far greater than if the leaf had caught fire and burned on the spot. Involuntarily, Kharl stepped back.

  He could feel a surge of chaos-stronger than even that thrown by the chaos-wizard who had tried to attack the Great House-and he threw himself to the side. A jolt of pain flashed through his ribs at the sudden movement, and he staggered farther to his right.

  A vortex of white chaos flared upward from where the leaf fragment had been, and the force of the chaos-explosion flung Kharl onto the stones that paved the top of the tower. He lay there for a moment, letting the pain subside. The explosive force had not been that powerful, and he might not even have sprawled on the stones had he not already been off-balance.

  From what he could tell, his ribs had not suffered any worse damage, thanks to the heavy binding around them.

  He lifted his head, then slowly and carefully rose. He could sense no more free chaos-or none that was concentrated, for there was a white miasma of scattered chaos slowly drifting westward above the tower.

  After a short time, the mage and cooper eased back toward the lower part of the embrasure in the parapet where the leaf fragment had been. There was no trace of the leaf. Five black lines, each a fingernail’s width in depth, had been scored in the granite above where the leaf had been, radiating out from a small pit in the stone, also blackened.

  Kharl shook his head slowly. All that chaos from such a small fragment of a leaf? No wonder so few mages survived trying to release chaos from objects. What if he had been experimenting with wood-or metal?

  Kharl’s legs were trembling, and his vision was blurring. Slowly, he sat down and rested his back against the parapet. He could also feel that his face was reddened, as if he had spent the day under a hot summer sun.

  Was what he had done possible to replicate from a greater distance?

  His lips curled into a wry smile. What he had done wasn’t something he wanted to try if he couldn’t do it from a distance-and from behind a stone wall or the like.

  All that chaos, he marveled, just from a winter-dried fragment of a leaf.

  Had the mage from Reduce who had destroyed Fairven released chaos in such a fashion? Or had he used something even more terrible?

  After a time, Kharl rose, moving slowly toward the stairs down to the kitchen. He needed to practice what he had tried, but not without some more to eat-and certainly not without even greater care-and more distance between him and what he was working on.

  XII

  By the time the sun hung over the hills to the west of Valmurl, Kharl was exhausted. He had trouble focusing his eyes. He’d spent most of the afternoon on the tower, working on how to release chaos from various substances through the manipulation of the order bonds that held all objects together. It hadn’t taken him long to discover that the amount of chaos within a substance was almost directly proportional to its size and density. The difficulty of releasing the order bonds was more than proportionally harder with denser materials, like metals, and even harder with mixed materials, like rocks or alloys like bronze.

  He’d enlisted the armorer to cut him minute scraps of copper, iron, bronze, and tin, and he’d also taken his own wood samples from the workroom of the Great House’s carpenter. No one had asked him what he wanted the materials for, almost as if no one even wanted to hazard a guess as to what a mage had in mind.

  Kharl smiled wryly. He was definitely learning, and he’d discovered things that weren’t in The Basis of Order ... or rather, tricks that were barely hinted at in the order manual. Although the book’s lack of clear directions for technique had bothered him in the beginning, he was beginning to understand why whoever had written it had avoided describing techniques except for a few relatively basic points.

  Wood was easier to work with, but the chaos-energy released wasn’t that much greater for most pieces of wood than for a leaf the same size, except for a tiny fragment of lorken, and that had almost been as hard to handle as iron, although the “feel” had been different. On the other hand, the chaos released from a small fragment of an iron nail had blown off a quarter of one of the granite parapet stones and cracked the remainder of the stone. Kharl was just glad that he had had the presence of mind to use very small bits of metal and crouch behind one of the granite parapet braces several cubits away. Even so, he’d suffered several small cuts from flying stone fragments.

  Even with all the work and experimentation he had done, Kharl had been unable to release the order bonds from much farther than a rod away for the heavier substances, such as metals, and perhaps twice that for woods. Exactly how what he had discovered would help Hagen, he was unsure, but perhaps the lord-chancellor might have an idea or two.

  Kharl found himself shivering as the wind picked up. The spring day had started out cold, but the morning breeze had died away, and the cloudless sky and sun had joined to turn the afternoon almost as hot as early summer. Nearing sunset, the wind had risen and shifted, blowing out of the north and cooling the top of the tower.

  “Will it work?” came a voice from the west side of the north tower.

  The other’s figure was blurred to Kharl’s sight, but he recognized Hagen’s voice. “Will what work?”

  “Whatever you’ve been doing up here all day that has everyone in the Great House afraid to get near the tower, or even beneath it.” Hagen laughed. “I told them that the only time to worry would be if you fled the tower.”

  As Hagen moved nearer, and Kharl’s vision cleared, the mage could make out the dark circles under the lord-chancellor’s eyes. “You’re tired. And worried.”

  “Wouldn’t you be? Hensolas has moved his forces to Kiford. That’s less than five kays from the southern end of the harbor causeway.” “Why was it built? Does it go anywhere?”

  “It’s a direct road south. They say that Lord Esthaven built it so that he could move armsmen from the southern barracks directly to the harbor.” Hagen laughed. “The barracks were never used after Esthaven, and Lord Estloch tore them down and reused the stones for rebuilding the barracks in the city. They were wood before.”

  “How soon will Hensolas attack?”

  “Tomorrow, I’d wager.”

  “You didn’t tell me until now?” said Kharl.

  “Why? You’re doing the best you can, and I just would have wasted your time and mine. You understand what’s happening.”

  “I may have wasted it anyway. I’ve been trying to work out how to release chaos from objects.”

  Hagen frowned. “Is that something black mages can do?”

  Kharl understood the question Hagen hadn’t asked, the one he hadn’t wished to ask, and replied, “There is one way that is acceptable for a black mage. That is not to handle the chaos directly, but to remove the order bonds from an object and leave the chaos.” Kharl offered a crooked smile. “It’s not recommended. According to the ... to what I’ve heard and learned, trying to do that could kill a mage.”

  “You’ve been doing it.”

  “I couldn’t think of anything else that might be helpful,” Kharl admitted. “I don’t know how useful it will be.”

  “You blew pieces of granite off the tower.
Stone shards were falling in the courtyard.”

  Kharl nodded. “I have to be close, somewhere within twenty or thirty cubits.”

  Hagen fingered his clean-shaven chin, tilting his head to one side. “We still might be able to figure out something. Let’s go get something to eat, and we’ll see what we can work out.”

  “I am hungry,” Kharl admitted. He was ready to listen. Besides, he was too tired to try anything else.

  “Good. You look like you could use a good meal.” Hagen turned.

  Kharl followed the lord-chancellor down the stone steps from the tower.

  XIII

  In the darkness before dawn, Kharl used his order-senses check the causeway to the east of the flat-bottomed boat. Using them was necessary, because the boat had been covered with reeds and grass, from which jutted straggly cattails that remained from the fall before. In the mist that covered the marshes bordering the causeway, the concealed boat looked like another marshy hump, one of a number, if the only one in the immediate area. Under the canvas covered with grass and clumps of plants, the fetid mixed odors of marsh and harbor backwaters were almost unbearable.

  Kharl swallowed.

  “How much longer, ser mage?” asked Dorfal, the young armsman and former crabber, his voice low.

  “They’re still a good kay or more south of us,” Kharl whispered back. As he waited with the clammy fog all around him, Kharl wondered, once more, how he’d managed to get himself where he was-sitting in a flat-bottomed boat less than thirty cubits off the causeway, essentially alone. There was a squad of armsmen waiting well to the west of the marsh, but they were out of sight, and too far away to be of much immediate assistance. They were there to protect Kharl once he returned- and to escort him back to the Great House.

  How had he gotten into this mess? By the way he had dealt with Guil- lam, everything else had followed. While it might not have been his fault, not totally, it was certainly his responsibility. More important, if he didn’t support Ghrant, he’d have nothing, and he didn’t want to go back to that.