The White Order

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “And another thing, lad. Don’t think I don’t know you been sweet-talking Erhana into teaching you the letters after dinner.” Dylert grinned. “Or any other time.”

  “I don’t do it when I’m supposed to work, ser.” Cerryl looked down at the clean-swept floor stones.

  “That you don’t, and you work hard. Harder than any boy I had here.” Dylert frowned. “Why the letters?”

  “My da, he could read. Least I could do is learn my letters,” said Cerryl, knowing he was not telling the entire truth, and hoping Dylert did not press him.

  “Trying to match your da.” Dylert nodded. “Folks don’t talk much of your father. You know why?”

  “They said he was a wizard.”

  “He tried to be a wizard, lad. There be a difference.” Dylert paused, then added, “The white mages, they choose you… if they think you might be one of them. No one be making them do what they do not wish to do. No one be crossing them. And trying to be a mage without their blessing… that be a mighty crossing.” Dylert cleared his throat. “You understand that, lad?”

  “Yes, ser.”

  A creaking issued from the door to the barn.

  “Dylert! Wagon’s here. I got a long trip back,” called Erastus.

  “Then, we be loading right now,” returned the millmaster before looking down at Cerryl, if not so far down as the fall before. “You can use the handcart. Get the best ten gold oak planks from the second barn. You got a good eye. He gets good seconds. Understood.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  “Better run back and tell Brental that I’ll be there soon as we get Erastus off. Then get the oak.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  “Good.” Dylert smiled. “Off with you.”

  Cerryl scurried out of the barn and toward the mill, half-sighing in relief as he ran to give Brental the message. Dylert hadn’t said he couldn’t keep learning his letters, and he hadn’t forced Cerryl into an actual lie.

  XIV

  In the background, Cerryl could hear both wheels rumbling and thumping, and the water roiled down the millrace behind where he sat in the shade, brush in hand. Neither the intermittent light breeze nor the shade was enough to keep him from sweating in the hot afternoon, nor to keep away the flies that buzzed back and forth, seemingly always at the back of his neck. He absently brushed one away, only to feel it circling back.

  Whhhrannnnnn…

  Cerryl looked up from where he sat on the low stone wall, not letting go of the stiff brush he used to clean the oxen’s yoke. Scrubbing the yoke was a slow and tedious process, working the dirt and grime out without scarring the wood.

  Inside the mill, at the far end of the center aisle, Brental, Viental, and Dylert worked a big pine log through the beginning of a series of cuts. On one side Brental checked the guides through which the log fed, drawn by the cradle wound from the upper and smaller waterwheel. One the other side, Dylert watched, one hand on the cradle release, the other on the drop gear. Viental reset the log after each pass, edging the cradle a quarter span more toward the blade.

  Cerryl blinked. The reddish white glow surrounding the blackness of the blade-had he seen that? Right through the heavy log? He thought he had before, but on this afternoon, the glow seemed brighter. He squinted, leaning toward the mill, his fingers tightening around the broom handle.

  Why could he sense something he couldn’t see? Not see properly anyway. The reddish white glow was there-the same glow he’d felt in the mines that even Syodor had avoided-and the same glow that, in a much lesser degree, permeated the books from his father.

  He frowned. Another question, one he pondered, time and time gain. Why had his uncle never mentioned that he had been the master-miner? Cerryl hadn’t learned that until Dylert had said so.

  He studied the yoke, then nodded. Even Brental would be pleased. He looked back at the blade. It seemed brighter, yet with an angry reddish tint, one he hadn’t seen before.

  He bent down to lift the yoke to carry it back up to the stables, but his eyes went back to the mill, where the reddish white of the blade, that color no one else seemed to see, loomed over the massive log and the mill blade, almost as though it were ready to lash out at Brental and Dylert. He took a step down the causeway, then stopped and glanced back again.

  His lips tightened before he set down the brush and yoke and scurried into the mill, almost running down the center aisle, the clomping of his heavy boots drowned in the screech of the saw and the thumping of the waterwheels.

  Dylert, standing on the platform above and to the right of the saw, waved him back.

  Cerryl shook his head and pointed toward the blade.

  Dylert gestured again, impatiently.

  “Please, ser! Stop the blade,” Cerryl shouted, but his words were lost in the whining of the blade. He pointed to the blade again, gesturing, trying to make Dylert understand. Then he glanced toward the drop gear on the small platform below Dylert.

  Before Cerryl had taken more than a pair of steps, the millmaster had dropped down to the drop gear lever and yanked it.

  Cerryl took a deep breath as the whining screech of the blade died down, and a dull clunk reverberated through the mill.

  Dylert turned away from the drop gear, clambered back to the water gates and closed them, and set both wheel brakes.

  Brental looked from Cerryl to the saw platform, where the blade was still hidden, locked in the big pine log.

  Viental just scowled.

  The millmaster climbed down and walked toward Cerryl. “Now… never seen you run like that, lad. Hope this be worth it. Best be worth it, indeed.” His face was streaked with sweat, with sawdust plastered across his cheeks and imbedded in his beard. His jaw was set, waiting.

  Cerryl swallowed. “Ser… the blade… something be-something is wrong with it.”

  After a moment, Dylert frowned. “You be seeing that from without?”

  “Hearing, ser,” Cerryl lied. “It… sounded wrong. I know… you are the millmaster… but I had to tell you.”

  “Hpphhmmm. Sounds he hears,” grumbled Viental.

  Brental glared at the stocky laborer.

  “Well… we be shut down. Might be looking afore anything else.” Dylert frowned. “If there be a crack or flaw,” he shrugged, “then we stand lucky. If not,” he looked at Cerryl, “a lot of work you’ll have to do, young fellow. A darkness lot to make up for this.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  Dylert glanced at the other two. “Got to clear the blade anyway. Let’s be at it.”

  Cerryl stepped back and watched as the three men wrestled the log off the blade. Sweat continued to ooze down his back.

  “Now… he has to hear it…” mumbled Viental, with a look at the youth.

  “Time enough to complain when we find he be wrong,” answered Dylert. “If he be wrong. Cerryl’s not a flighty chap, like some.”

  A last shove by Viental, and the log slipped away from the blade. Brental looked at the drop gear and then at the water gates before taking a cloth and brushing away the sawdust that had swirled around the circular toothed blade.

  The color drained from the redhead’s face. “There’s a crack here… might not a held another pass.” His eyes went to Cerryl.

  Then Dylert glanced at Cerryl, frowned, then grinned. “Guess you might yet make a mill man, boy. Anyone hear a blade off-true like that…” He shook his head. “My da, he claimed he could. I never could. That be why… I check the blade so often. Thought he was a-tellin‘ tales.”

  Cerryl looked down for a moment, his eyes on the sawdust-covered stones around the saw platform. “I wasn’t sure, not all the way, but… I didn’t want anyone hurt, and you talked about how a broken blade…”

  “He listens, too,” said Brental. “Glad I am that he does.”

  Viental shook his head ruefully. “Know why my mother said to wait afore talking.”

  “Well… good thing Henkar got the new blade forged and tempered… This rate we’ll never survive… t
wo blades this season. Best we get to it,” Dylert said. “Can’t be cutting with a cracked blade.”

  While the three men wrestled to replace the blade, Cerryl stepped back and slipped out of the mill, trying to keep from shaking as he did. Again, he’d barely managed to avoid revealing what he had really seen.

  Outside, in the hot but slightly cooler shade by the now-silent millrace, he swallowed.

  Finally, he lifted the heavy yoke and walked slowly uphill toward the stables.

  XV

  Cerryl looked at the handcart, upside down on the flooring stones just inside the mill door, then at the dark-stained and battered half bucket filled with grease.

  With a slow and silent deep breath, Cerryl reached into the bucket and dipped out a globule of the dark substance with his right hand and methodically began to grease the cart wheels and axle, using a thin stripped fir branch, barely more than a twig, to push the grease where his fingers couldn’t reach.

  Behind him, at the other side of the mill, Dylert directed Brental and Viental as the three continued cutting a half-dozen oak logs from the upper woods, logs that Dylert had marked and felled a season before. Cerryl’s eyes went to the saw platform, but his senses only saw the normal whitish red of the cutting, not the angry red of a stressed or cracked blade. He nodded and looked back down at the dark gray grease.

  After another repressed sigh, he dipped out more grease.

  “Some folk here to see you, Cerryl.” Erhana stood in the door to the mill, her voice barely audible over the whine of the big blade and the thump, thump of the wheels.

  “Me?” Cerryl finished daubing grease on the top exposed part of the cart’s axle. “To see me?”

  Erhana smiled, then added, “Your aunt and uncle, I think.”

  Cerryl looked around for the grease rag, then saw it under the side of the upended left cart wheel, where he’d placed it to keep any extra grease from falling on the floor stones. He picked it up and wiped his hand as clean as he could, then straightened, and walked out the door into the sunlight.

  Overhead, the summer sky was filled with white puffy clouds scudding westward, clouds that cast fast-moving shadows across the hills of western Lydiar and the forests to the north of the mill.

  Cerryl glanced from Erhana to his aunt and uncle and then back to the brown-haired girl. “Thank you.”

  Erhana nodded and slipped uphill toward the house where Dyella was carding wool in the shade of the porch.

  “How are you?” Cerryl asked after a moment.

  Syodor carried a small pack. Nail stood beside him, empty-handed. Both looked downcast, somehow smaller than Cerryl recalled them.

  “You’ve grown.” Nail licked her lips nervously.

  “My feet have, anyway.” Cerryl offered a smile.

  Neither Syodor nor Nail returned the smile.

  “What… what is the matter?” Cerryl felt uncomfortable with the proper use of “is,” at least in speaking to his aunt and uncle, but he remained determined to speak properly. He looked steadily at his uncle.

  “Things have been better, lad. Aye, they have been.” Syodor looked at the ground, not speaking for a time. “The duke… my patent… said no longer could grub the mines.”

  “I’m sorry.” Cerryl nodded gravely, feeling that his words offered little comfort. “I really am. I wish I could do something.” Even as he spoke, sensing the discomfort of his aunt and uncle, he found himself wondering why Syodor’s words felt so wrong, even though his uncle had often worried about the patent.

  “Best you can do, child,” said Nail, “be to take care of yourself.”

  “You got a place, Cerryl. Better than we could give you now.” Syodor again looked down at the stones of the causeway. “Dylert be a good man.”

  “I know, uncle… but what about you? Where will you go?” Cerryl swallowed. He’d never expected Syodor or Nail to be anywhere but at the house by the ancient mines.

  “Don’t you be worrying about us,” admonished Nail. “Not like as we got that much longer to worry, child. ‘Sides, we got a place.”

  Cerryl looked back at his uncle.

  “Got a cousin in Vergren,” said Syodor, his voice flat. “Sheep country there. He’s got an extra cot. Small, and it needs some work. Even managed to borrow his mule cart. Take most of our things.”

  “Isn’t there anything… any place else?”

  “What else we need, lad? The mines are over for me. Have been for a long time. Just didn’t want to admit it.”

  Syodor’s voice was rough, Cerryl realized belatedly. “I’m sorry. Can you tell me where you’ll be?”

  “Tomorrow we set out,” said Nail. “Like as dawn. Gerhar be Syodor’s cousin. His place be on the old north road, past the second hill, to Vergren, that be.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “The Duke’s man gave us but four eight-days, and it was most of that finding Gerhar.” Syodor forced a wry smile, one that did not touch his remaining good eye. “Lucky we be that Gerhar has but one young daughter and can use the extra hands.”

  Cerryl shook his head. “Perhaps I should come…”

  “No.” Syodor’s voice was as firm as Cerryl had ever heard it. “Better you remain here with Dylert. Leastwise you have a trade. If anyone asks, best you tell them you be an orphan, but that your folk come from Montgren, Vergren way.” He laughed once. “That be true enough, now.”

  Cerryl moistened his lips.

  “Brought you some things,” said Nail, after another moment of silence.

  Syodor opened the pack. “Pack be yours, too, Cerryl. Sooner or later, like as you be needing it.” He took out something, something that glowed white beneath his hand with the light that was like that of the sun, and yet not. “This, it be your da’s,” the miner added gruffly, extending a small knife in a sheath. The knife and sheath were nearly toy-sized, small enough to fit within Cerryl’s palm. “This, too,” Syodor added, placing a silver-framed mirror-a screeing glass-beside the knife.

  Cerryl glanced down at the items in his hands, then at Nail.

  She met his glance. “There be no denying what a man be. Your da, he couldn’t ha‘ been other than he was. Nor you, Cerryl. He was a-fiddling with the light afore he could talk, or so your mother said. Too young, she said.” Nail shrugged. “You be a mite older. I seen you with the glasses and the white fire. Tried to keep you from a-burnin’ yourself too young.”

  Syodor nodded. “Anyways, we thought… we wanted you to have them, not when you be too young, though. I kept them away from the house,” the miner added. “Knew as you’d feel them somehow.”

  “There be a warm winter coat there. You da’s… saved it for you, and a scarf, your ma’s best scarf…” Nail sniffed. “Know as you can’t use a scarf… but felt you ought to have something that was hers.” She stepped forward and abruptly hugged Cerryl. “Did the best we could for you… and for your ma.” Tears streaked her face.

  Cerryl could sense the absolute certainty of her words, and, swallowing hard, he had to fight to keep his own eyes from watering. “I know you did. Always be thankful… always.” He swallowed again and hugged her back, realizing how thin and frail she had become.

  As suddenly as she had hugged him, Nail backed away in two swift steps, sniffed, and blotted her eyes. “Had to come with Syodor. Wouldn’t ha‘ been right, otherwise.”

  Syodor grasped Cerryl’s forearm with both hands and squeezed, and gnarled and bent as the one-eyed miner was, Cerryl could still feel the strength. “You be not a burly man, young Cerryl, but strong you be in ways not of the eye. If you be careful, you be doing well for yourself.” Syodor released the grip and stepped back quickly. “We be light proud of you.” After a moment, he added, “Best we be going, now. A long trip tomorrow.”

  “Take care… please…” Cerryl stammered, feeling somehow numb, as though he should say more, do more, but not knowing what else he could say or do.

  “Best as we can, lad,” said Syodor, “and you the same.”

&n
bsp; Nail sniffed again and nodded. The two turned and began to walk down the lane.

  Cerryl wanted to run after them. Instead, still holding the canvas pack, in which he had carefully replaced the mirror and the knife, Cerryl watched as his aunt and uncle walked slowly down the lane, back to the main road, and the mines-and Vergren.

  “Cerryl? What you doing-” Dylert stopped talking as he saw the two figures walking quickly toward the main road. “That Syodor?”

  “They came to say good-bye,” Cerryl said slowly. “The duke canceled his patent, and they have to leave the mines. After all those years…”

  “Where are they going?” Dylert’s voice was softer.

  “Uncle has a cousin in Vergren. He’s going to tend sheep, he said.”

  “Sad thing it be,” offered Dylert. “The masterminer of Lydiar, and a shepherd he must end his days.”

  “I offered to help them.” Cerryl looked down at the causeway. “Uncle Syodor-he insisted I stay here.” He looked at the millmaster. “That’s all right?”

  Dylert laughed sadly and shook his head. “Cerryl, you be worth more than I pay you. Would that I could pay more, but stay you can, young fellow.” His gaze went to the distant figures. “Darkness if I can figure the ways of the world. Older I get, the stranger it seems. Master-miner, best there ever was, and a shepherd he must be.” The millmaster shook his head again.

  Cerryl swallowed and continued to watch, long after Dylert had left, until Syodor and Nail vanished on the dusty road, amid the fast-moving shadows of the clouds.

  XVI

  Unto the generations stood the black tower on the heights of the Westhorns, and from it issued forth the demon warriors and their blades, controlling trade and using the very blood of those who displeased them to create the mortar that bound their stone roads.

  Nor did they suffer any man grown to survive upon their heights, discarding him like an empty husk of maize once they had wrested his seed from him…

  For all this wickedness, Westwind survived and prospered, until the day when the Guild at Fairhaven sent a hero to Westwind, a stranger who beguiled the Marshal of the heights with song. Yet once she had borne son and daughter, the Marshal laughed and sent away that hero. In her evilness, she had her guards slay him in the depths of the Westhorns.