“If you had real need of it,” she began.
“I know. I’m nervous. I keep thinking that if I knew more… but I never will. Not that much more. Can you tell me any more about the trial?”
Dayala shrugged nervously. “You know more than most. You almost went through the trial the first time you met the great forest. That makes it both harder and easier. You know more, and you have more reason to fear. And you should not fear. You are strong enough, if you trust in yourself.”
“So when do I undertake this trial?”
“Whenever you wish. We will have to go back to Merthe.”
“Can we start tomorrow?”
Dayala nodded.
LXXXVI
Justen sat on the edge of one of the narrow beds, looking across the darkness to Dayala, who unfolded the thin blanket provided by the guest house.
Somewhere he could hear Duvalla singing softly, and the warm odor of fresh-baked bread wafted through the half-open window. A few voices, only a few, for even the center of Merthe was far quieter than the edge of Rybatta, drifted to his ears, but he could not make out the words.
“There have to be some rules for this.” Justen’s voice bore an exasperated tone. “Otherwise, I could just go up on the overlook and say ‘Hullo, great forest’ and walk away.”
“If the great forest accepted the trial, it would not be that simple. And if it did not, then it would not be a trial. But there are rules. You must enter the great forest on the path that leads downhill from the black rocks. You must always stay on that path until you reach the end, or until you can go no farther, and then you must return by the path to the road to Merthe.” Dayala took a deep breath, then added, “I am bidden to tell you one other choice.”
“Bidden?”
“You must choose between the safe and the glorious. Those are the only choices open to you.”
“The safe and the glorious? What does that mean?”
Dayala looked at the floor.
Finally, Justen spoke again. “When is the trial over?”
“When you set foot on the road to Merthe.”
“Proof of the will and the way, I guess.” Justen nodded, then frowned, shifting his weight on the narrow sleeping pallet. “Dayala, you make it sound so simple, but nothing is that simple.”
“Simple does not mean easy. It is simple to walk across the Stone Hills to Naclos, but was it easy?”
“Why me? Why did you risk your life to get me? Why did you risk it again when I got tangled in the great forest?”
She looked down and did not speak.
Justen waited, sitting on the pallet, drumming his finger on the wooden frame.
“Justen, you see and you do not see. Would I tie my life to yours and then unnecessarily endanger you?” *…do love you…*
Justen saw tears in her eyes, and he could feel the combined sadness and frustration they represented. His own eyes burned. “But why? Why did you tie us together?” He could barely choke out the words. “You didn’t have to… to, rescue me.”
“Because you are a Shaper. What you… learn if you survive the trial, will let you… change the world… and no Shaper, the Angels decreed… can go unfettered.” Her words were more sobs than coherent phrases by the last syllable.
A cold chill settled over Justen, colder than the winds off the Northern Ocean.
LXXXVII
Justen walked alone, wearing brown trousers, brown shirt, and his old black boots. He and Dayala had walked from Rybatta back through Viela to Merthe, where she waited. Now he walked toward the edge of the great forest, toward the overlook, trying not to think too much of what awaited him there above the great forest. Trying not to think of the druid who had held him like a lover, but who was not a lover, not yet. Trying not to think too deeply.
And he had once thought of Naclos as almost a park, where trees and animals and druids lived in peaceful harmony!
He stopped where the path split, one fork heading out into the grasslands, the other uphill through the low brush to the overlook. Then he turned and started uphill, wondering how many others had made the same choice and how many had headed into the grasslands as wanderers, forever exiled from the land of their birth.
Just before the hillcrest, in the clearing where they had spent that night more than who knew how many eight-days before, he took a last look toward the grasslands-out toward the Stone Hills, where everything had seemed so simple. Then he climbed the last few cubits and looked down on the forest.
There are two ways… the safe and the glorious… the safe and the glorious… the safe and the glorious.
Justen swallowed, then shook his head. Darkness damned if he would creep. Not for the Whites of Fairhaven or for the intertwined order and chaos of the great forest of Naclos.
The sun touched the western horizon, and Justen took another deep breath. He’d taken too many breaths, and not enough thought.
He frowned. The form of the trial was his, so long as he came to terms with the forest, so long as he walked the forest in full order and in body.
But there was no stipulation on how he accomplished that challenge. He grinned and pursed his lips, bracing his back against the smooth, dark stones, dark with order… and with blood.
He shook his head nervously, then looked across the great forest and into the golden dust of twilight.
He broadcast his challenge to the great forest.
*I am! Here I am!*
*No… oh, be careful, Justen…*
Even from afar, he could feel the clear, thin thoughts from Dayala, and he barely had time to push a vague sense of reassurance back toward her before the first lash of white spiked out of the twilight toward him.
He imagined himself as a stolid black iron anvil, a basic force of order, and the lash shattered on him, white blobs of chaos burning in the air around him… burning, yet not burning.
Before that first lash had shattered against his presence, two other, thinner, webs-one of white and one of black- circled around him, spinning tighter as if to crush the basic order within him. His breathing became labored, shallow.
Justen let himself become iron, white-hot iron just below the point of burning, radiating heat…
The twin spirals began to radiate heat back at him. Without moving his mouth, Justen grinned and let his iron core accept their heat, take it all, just as heat-greedy iron would always take that heat. Making that heat his, he took the first step down the path. The two pulses shriveled under his iron will, hard like the hands of the sometime-smith he was, even before he reached the lower bushes at the edge of the great forest.
*I am Justen! I am me!*
Crack…
A heavy branch thundered through the canopy above him, dropping almost at his feet and blocking the path.
Justen paused, then released the heat he had received from the second attack. The bark of the fallen branch smoldered, then flared, and he burned through the heavy wood as a blade would cut through a stick of cheese.
He set his left foot inside the forest, and his right. Sweat poured from his forehead, and dark shadows rose in the light he cast.
Cracckkk…
Justen burned away the second trunk-sized limb before it reached him, and stepped deeper into the green gloom.
With each cubit, the path grew fainter, harder to discern, as if it were fading away with each step, but Justen put one foot, and then another on that disappearing path.
Another burst of power flared in the depths of the forest, and an enormous forest cat charged toward Justen, who flinched. The cat’s teeth-each tooth larger than a belt knife-glinted like silver blades, and the extended claws dripped blood.
Justen concentrated on bending light, on bending force around himself, and the cat vanished.
A figure in dark gray stepped forward out of the shadows, holding a short shaft. Justen slowed, but the soldier with the shadowed face carried no blade, no shield, only the short length of oak barely a finger’s thickness.
The so
ulless eyes of the Iron Guard looked through Justen as she extended the order-tipped arrow. You are of chaos, as surely as I am… for death is chaos, and you have created death, not just by your own hand, but by the hands of hundreds…
He shivered, then looked through the figure with his order-senses, but only the tiniest pulses of energy appeared behind the image.
Take it… it is yours, great Master of Chaos.
Master of Chaos? Never! He put up a hand as if to push the arrow away, knowing that the image had to be some gambit of the great forest’s.
Take it…
The Iron Guard hurled the arrow at his outstretched hand, and fire shot through his left arm as if a knife point had ripped open his arm from wrist to shoulder.
It is yours, Master of Chaos, returned to you…
Justen squinted, trying to see beyond the image, but nothing stood there, and his eyes watered as he walked past the Iron Guard, his arm almost leaden with the pain.
A red-haired woman stood beside the path, beckoning, smiling… except that her face was half-charred and the bones of her cheeks and forehead protruded from split and blackened flesh. Ashes clothed her.
Come with me, Justen. You loved me… and I suffered this because of your love…
No! Justen gritted his teeth. / did not cause that suffering. Firbek did! You never loved me! You loved Gunnar.
Her arms reached for him, and Justen threw up more shields, but a finger, impossibly long, reached out and seized his good right arm, and her nails burned into his forearm like white-hot iron spikes from his own forge. His flesh sizzled, and the stench of it filled his nostrils.
You loved me, and your love has killed me.
Justen trudged forward, his arms hanging limply, into the darker shadows that lay in his path.
A black-haired woman in blue leathers wheeled her horse, then halted the beast, steam rising from its nostrils, across the path. She pointed the shortsword at Justen’s breast.
Come… great Bearer of Destruction. Join us.
Behind her, Justen could sense the rising hordes of the dead, could feel the white-cloaked figures. He stopped.
Join us…
Blood dripped from one arm, while the other bore four blackened spots, burned through shirt and skin and flesh, spots aching with the pain beyond pain.
Join us…
He looked dully at the horse soldier. What was he missing? His head throbbed. He could not lift his arms.
Join us… Great Deceiver… believer in your creed of order alone… order alone…
The sword touched his chest, burning away his shirt. Smoke rose into his nostrils.
Join us. You cannot escape.
Cannot escape… Cannot escape. The words rang through his ears and head…cannot escape.
Then Justen laughed and grasped the blade, ignoring the slashes across his palms. “No! You join me. I accept you! You are my chaos, my evil. You are me!”
A dull watting rose and fell… rose and fell… and Justen released the shields that had blocked him from the great forest and that had turned himself against himself.-
He lay on the path, and before him growled the forest cat, not impossibly large but extraordinarily real-and less than ten cubits away.
Slowly, he staggered up, his slashed palms burning with sandy grit, his arms barely able to help him rise. He glanced at his left arm and the open gash that ran from wrist to elbow, and at the four charred depressions in his right forearm. He swallowed.
The cat growled.
“Go home, cat. I don’t want to play anymore.”
He squinted. In the darkness, the path seemed to tilt before his eyes. He straightened and put one foot in front of the other.
“No light-damned forest is going to-”
The cat growled once more.
His teeth clenched tightly, Justen stared at the cat.
The cat’s tail twitched, and one paw lifted.
“I won’t… won’t, won’t!” Justen howled, and howling, drew together the patterns he had used but twice before, knowing now that he needed neither powder nor cannons, but only order and will, order and will… order and will!
Whsstttt…
The ground trembled, the forest monoliths swayed, and a single line of light flared from Justen’s hand, passing over the giant cat and leaving no sign of the animal, no burned ashes, no screams. A pathway burned straight ahead for as far as Justen could see.
The echo of his order-chaos shift reverberated in his brain as if two mirrors reflected the sun back and forth down an endless corridor, a corridor stretching simultaneously deep into the earth and up into the heavens. And all along that corridor, the ancient Angels wept, and Ryba-she of the swift ships of Heaven-held her head, and the Demons of Light smiled before they drowned in the darkness of brilliant order.
And somewhere, a forest cat slunk off to lick its paws, to sleep away its terrible nightmare of an ancient Angel.
Justen coughed, then staggered forward, concentrating on one step at a time. He took a step and a deep breath, a step and a breath, a step and a breath…
How long it took, he did not know, save that when the grayness of dawn lightened the forest, he stepped onto the road to Merthe.
Dayala stood there, white-faced, red-eyed, scars on her arms and across her face, blood oozing from her hands.
“That bad…?” He took a last step onto the road, and his knees crumpled.
Her arms were strong and gentle-like a lover’s-as she lay down with him and their tears and blood mingled and fell on the dust.
LXXXVIII
“Zerchas was right, you know.” Beltar sipped a glass of wine and glanced at the surf beyond the breakwater. “Jera is too pretty a place to destroy.”
Eldiren silently lifted his goblet in assent.
“We’ll probably have to head back to Rulyarth soon, if this mud ever clears from the roads. It’s hard to believe we’ve been here all summer, nearly half a year.”
“Sometimes… until we lose more troops taking some forsaken crossroads that decides the war’s not over. You don’t see that here in Jera.”
“War is ugly, Eldiren. Enjoy the benefits while you can. At least you don’t have to worry about Jehan slinking around and reporting to Zerchas every time you take a piss.” Beltar took a healthy swallow from his goblet.
“Jehan’s not that bad. He probably doesn’t have much choice.”
“With Zerchas, probably not. But I still have to worry about him. Once we get on the road, it won’t be so bad.” He lifted the goblet again. ‘ They say the roads will freeze several eight-days before the snows fall, if they fall at all.“
“Snows? It’s barely harvest time.”
“The winter comes earlier here. We’ll have to start preparations for the attack on Suthya… if we want to begin right after the spring thaw.”
“They won’t surrender?”
“Zerchas says not. The Suthyans want to haggle over everything. I think they’ll knuckle under once the armies begin to chew up their countryside.”
“Like Sarronnyn? The Sarronnese still haven’t knuckled under. They never will. They hale us.”
“Never say never, Eldiren.”
Eldiren toyed with the empty wine glass, holding it up and catching the light of one of the wall lamps in the clear crystal.
“They say you can scree in a good crystal goblet.” Beltar laughed. “Ever tried it?”
“No, I cannot say that I have.” Eldiren glanced toward the half-empty bottle of red wine.
“See if you can look into Naclos. Maybe it would be easier with the goblet.”
“Naclos?”
“Try to find out what happened to that engineer.”
“He died.”
“Eldiren. Someone who twists order into chaos isn’t going to get fried by one of your firebolts. Zerchas may think so… but we know better. Don’t we?” Beltar smiled. “Why don’t you try to find him in Naclos? For me…rather than for Zerchas.”
“Belt
ar…”
“You don’t have to explain. No one wants to commit suicide to make Zerchas happy. Light knows, I wouldn’t. But try to scree for that engineer. I feel uneasy, like he just might be up to something.”
Eldiren set the goblet on the table before him, took a deep breath, concentrated, and looked at the mists forming in the space between the thin layers of crystal. The center of the goblet momentarily reflected the dark circles beneath his sunken and deep-set eyes.
The serving girl-daughter of the villa’s former owner- turned and looked openmouthed at the twisting pillars of white and black that writhed in the mists of the goblet.
A soundless shriek split the twilight, and the goblet shattered, strewing glass fragments over the table. Eldiren pitched forward onto the table, and blood oozed across the linen. The serving girl sank into a heap in the doorway.
Beltar shook his head groggily before picking a glass splinter out of his cheek. “Darkness…” He lifted Eldiren’s face off the table linen, picked out the glass fragments, and then blotted the cuts with a cloth soaked in the wine.
After that, the White Wizard struggled to lay the younger man on the couch against the wall, where Eldiren breathed slowly, as if stunned by a blow to the head.
Beltar looked at his empty wine glass, then at the still half-full bottle. He shook his head and instead, reached for the last chunk of the now-stale bread left in the basket.
He did not have to wait long before the hooves clattered on the stones outside.
“Where is that mangy, lying excuse of a wizard?” Zerchas stepped over the still-prostrate body lying in the doorway. His eyes flicked from the glass and blood on the table to the unconscious man on the couch.
“Dead? That engineer’s so dead that his latest feat has shattered every screeing glass in Candar. Engineer? He’s no more an engineer than… Eldiren is a White Wizard.” Zerchas turned toward Eldiren. “Too bad he’s stunned, but it’s easier this way. Lie to me, would he?”
Beltar stood. “You didn’t give him much choice, Zerchas. You really wanted me to protest, didn’t you? So you could have an excuse to be rid of both of us.”
The Order War Page 36
