And all of that… he had once done so easily, so effortlessly.
All that he had known was lost to him, and he was struggling just to master enough order to qualify as the lowest of mage-guards in one of the least desirable stations in Hamor.
He could feel the tears of rage and frustration seeping out of the corners of his closed eyes.
Why had it come to this? Why?
LXXVII
For Rahl, the next eightday was filled with more of what had gone before—copying reports, accompanying mage-guards on their rounds and duties, studying the Codex and his own copy of the Manual and answering Taryl’s questions, and sparring with Khaill and, occasionally, other mage-guards. Upon occasion, Taryl would watch the sparring. More often he did not.
Late on sevenday afternoon, as Rahl left the exercise room after a series of sparring bouts with Khaill, Davyl, and Chynl, he found Taryl outside in the corridor, clearly waiting for him. The mage-guard carried a small satchel.
“Ser?”
“You’re the best with a truncheon in Luba. Even Khaill admits it,” Taryl said mildly. “You’re better than most with a falchiona for a time.”
‘Thank you, ser, but… that is hard for me to accept.“ Rahl wiped the sweat from his forehead, wondering what Taryl wanted.
“Why is that so hard? You’ve obviously practiced for years.”
“There must be others…”
Taryl laughed. “There are. Some of the blades at Cigoerne would cut you up if you used a falchiona against them, but you’re close to holding your own with the truncheon against anyone.” He paused. “You realize that you’re using your order-senses in the sparring…”
“Not at first…” Rahl paused. “I mean, they’re not there when I begin… and they’re really still not there. I can’t think about it at all, or they’re gone.”
“How are you coming in regaining your control of your order-senses otherwise?”
“I can sense order and chaos now and again, and sometimes I can find my way without seeing. It comes and goes.”
The thin-faced mage nodded. “I’m not surprised. You’ve got order-energies wound in and around you so tightly that I’m surprised you can walk. Most mages would die for the amount of order that clusters around you.”
“Then why can’t I use them?” Rahl barely managed to keep from snapping.
“Let’s take a walk… outside, where no one else is around.” Taryl turned and headed toward the door at the end of the corridor.
For a moment, Rahl stood there. Was this going to be another meaningless and useless lecture, like so many he’d listened to over the past year? Would Taryl be just like the magisters after all? He hoped not as he hurried to follow the mage-guard.
Once on the flat ground south of the building, Taryl stopped. The sun was low in the western sky, just above the rugged mountains. He turned to face Rahl. “No…
I’m not going to lecture you. You’re the type for whom lectures are worse than useless. I have another sort of exercise I want you to work on.“
Rahl nodded, grateful that Taryl would not lecture him but questioning silently exactly what the other had in mind.
Taryl withdrew two knives, still in their leather sheaths. “Catch.” He tossed one, then the other, to Rahl. “What am I supposed to do?”
‘Turn with your back to the sun. Leave them sheathed, but juggle them. Toss one in the air, then flip the other into the hand that tossed the first, and keep doing that. I want you to do this without trying to sense or control the knives with your order-skills. Use only your eyes and your hands. Eyes and hands. Don’t ask why. Don’t question. Just do it.“ Taryl’s voice was calm, but firm.
Rahl turned so that the sun beat gently on his back and took a knife in each hand, still in their sheaths. He tossed the first one up, then tried to flip the other to his free hand, where he caught it awkwardly.
“Keep them moving. Don’t stop.”
Rahl managed two more tosses before he dropped one of the knives into the dirt.
“Pick it up and keep going.”
For the next several attempts, Rahl could only keep the knives in motion five or six times, but then he settled into a routine.
“Faster!” snapped Taryl.
Rahl dropped a knife.
“You need to pick up speed. Don’t ask why. Just do it.” After a time, Rahl managed to keep the knives moving faster.
“Now… without stopping, turn and face the sun, but don’t look at it. Concentrate on the knives.”
Rahl managed the turn, if unsteadily, and kept the knives going.
“Concentrate on the knives. Close one eye, but keep looking with the other. Concentrate on the knives.”
Rahl kept going, but it was hard because with one eye it was harder to judge distance, and he staggered several times.
“All right. Catch them and stop for a moment. Don’t ask me any questions. Not a single one.”
Rahl was just happy to stop. Even though there wasn’t that much strength involved in the exercise, the air was warm, and he was sweating as much as he had while sparring. He blotted his forehead with the back of his left hand.
“Using order came easily and naturally to you, didn’t it?” asked Taryl. “Before you lost your memory, that is.”
“Yes, ser. For the things that I could do. For the others, I just couldn’t. I did tell you that.”
“The mountains look so dry from here, don’t they?”
“Yes, ser.” Rahl was puzzled by why Taryl was talking about the mountains, but he’d been ordered not to ask questions. He didn’t.
“When you collect water from all the mountains, even from the dry ones like those west of Luba, you can fill an aqueduct. It’s how you collect it that matters, and from how wide an area.” Taryl cleared his throat. “Now… take the knives from their sheaths. Set one aside and toss the other from hand to hand until you’re comfortable with the weight and balance. Just use your eyes and hands, nothing else.”
“Yes, ser.” Rahl tossed the single blade back and forth, watching as it crossed the space between his hands, the bare blade picking up an orangish red tinge from the sun low in the sky. A gust of wind whipped grit across his face.
“Keep tossing.”
Even with one eye blurring from grit in it, Rahl managed to keep the blade moving.
“All right. Stop and pick up the other blade.”
Rahl had the feeling he knew what was coming next, but he didn’t ask.
“Now we’ll start the first exercise all over again, with your back to the sun. You’ll need to be more careful, and if you can’t catch one by the hilt, let it drop. Just try not to drop them too often.”
“Yes, ser.”
Rahl was more than a little nervous. He’d never liked blades, and juggling two knives, even if they were only single-edged blades, didn’t help much. He dropped one blade immediately.
“You didn’t need to do that, Rahl.” Taryl’s comment was mild, almost resigned. “Start again.”
Handling two naked blades forced Rahl to concentrate all his attention on the blades, and still he kept dropping them.
“Rahl…”
He forced even greater concentration on the blade juggling.
Abruptly, he could sense everything around him—the blades, the order-force around Taryl, and even the dull-redness around the blades.
“Keep juggling…”
Rahl tried, but the distraction of regaining his order-senses overwhelmed him, and he ended up dropping both blades into the sandy dirt. His order-senses vanished. “Oh…”
“You had your full order-senses for a moment, didn’t you?” asked Taryl.
“Yes, ser. But… how?” He realized he’d asked a question and stopped talking.
“Recluce doesn’t have the answer to everything,” Taryl said quietly. “Now… what did all that feel like?”
Feel Like? Why did that matter? “Ah… I don’t know.”
Taryl sighed. “Too many mages th
ink of order-senses as outside their bodies. For chaos-mages, in a way, that makes sense, because they need to maintain a separation from the body. Chaos can be extremely corrosive if it’s not handled properly. For an ordermage, it’s different. How you feel is important. Pick up the knives. You can rest for a moment, but then you’re going to do this again, and when you get the feeling of your order-senses, don’t try to use them or examine them. Just try to capture how they feel. Take in the feeling, just the feeling, nothing more.”
Questions boiled up inside of Rahl, and he looked helplessly at Taryl.
“No questions now. When we’re done, I may answer some. That depends on how well you follow my instructions.” After several moments, the mage-guard nodded. “Pick up the knives.”
Once more, Rahl was so distracted by the possibility that the exercise might help him regain his order-senses that he kept dropping the knives—once, twice, and then a third time.
“Rahl! Do you want to go back to being a checker?” Rahl froze.
“You’re not following my instructions. You’re to concentrate on the knives and nothing else. Nothing! Do you understand me?”
“Yes, ser.”
“Then do it.”
Rahl took a deep breath, then put a knife in each hand and concentrated just on the knives. Toss… flip… toss… catch…
“Now… turn toward the sun. Don’t drop the knives.”
Rahl turned. Sweat was beginning to pour down his forehead.
Again… he had his order-senses.
“The knives… stay with the knives… stay with the knives…”Taryl’s voice was somewhere between order and plea.
Rahl could barely see with the sun in his face, but he kept working with the knives… trying to follow Taryl’s instructions… and somehow just trying to experience the feeling.
“Let the knives fall… follow them with your eyes, just your eyes…”
For several moments after the knives kicked up the dusty soil, Rahl could sense everything around him, but he made no attempt to use or explore that sense.
Another gust of wind hurled grit into his eyes, and they began to burn… and he lost his order-senses.
“Good.” Taryl actually sounded satisfied, to Rahl’s surprise.
“Ah…” Rahl stopped. Even asking if he could ask a question was a question.
“Yes. You can ask questions, but pick up the knives.” Taryl extended an oily rag. “You need to wipe them off as well.”
“Why…?”
“Why does this exercise work? What I did was get your mind and body focused on something else, but something hard enough that your order-senses might surface if you weren’t pushing them away by trying too hard to use them. That’s why you do better sparring after a while, especially when you’re working against someone good. What I had you do doesn’t work for everyone. There are different ways of learning to handle order. From what I’ve heard, Recluce tries to get everyone to learn it by reading and thinking. There’s a book. I imagine they gave you one—The Basis of Order. Not everyone can learn that way. You’re a natural ordermage. Someday, you might even become a full ordermaster. That’s if you’ll listen to me and follow instructions.” Taryl laughed ruefully. “You’ve been trying to think your way into regaining your abilities. That won’t work for you. Not in my experience, anyway.”
Rahl carefully wiped one blade clean and sheathed it, and then did the same for the second.
“Natural ordermages work better by feel, and you have to get the feeling for something. If you lock in the right feeling, it’s almost effortless. Otherwise…” Taryl shook his head.
“What should I do now? After the exercises, that is?”
“Don’t try to do anything with your order-sense. You may get flashes of it now, and you may not. If you do, just try to absorb the feeling. The more you can feel and identify that feeling, the sooner you’ll recover order-handling ability.” Taryl smiled. “You might want to get cleaned up before dinner.”
As Rahl walked toward the small cramped shower room, he wanted to shake his head. A mage-guard in the ironworks of Hamor knew more about how to help him than all the magisters in Reduce. How could that be, when Reduce was the bastion of order?
LXXVIII
Over the next few days, little changed—except at odd times, Rahl would experience a return of his order-senses. The first few occasions were brief, but thereafter each time the feeling lasted a little longer—so long as Rahl did not attempt to do anything with what he felt. On eightday, he was the clerk-recorder for the duty mage-guard, and that kept him from joining Talanyr in going to Guasyra.
On threeday morning, he found himself once more assigned to follow a mage-guard. Dymat was not a chaos-mage, but an ordermage, one of the oldest mage-guards Rahl had seen, with silver hair and a long horselike face.
As they stood near the duty desk, Dymat studied Rahl, then shook his head.
“Ser?”
“I’ll tell you later, young Rahl. Do you know what I do?”
“No, ser. Only that you’re involved with the mills and forges.”
“I’ll explain on the ride to the rolling mill. We might as well get started. Besides, Klemyl is waiting.” Rahl only knew that Klemyl was one of the younger mage-guards at Luba station, slightly shorter than Rahl himself, with curly dark red hair and a high-pitched voice.
Dymat turned and walked quickly across the entry hall where the duty desk was located and out through the door to the wagon area. Three wagons remained, and Dymat hurried toward the second one. Klemyl was already in the forward bench right behind the driver. Dymat swung up into the second bench, and Rahl followed.
Klemyl smiled politely, nodded, then turned to face forward, addressing the driver. “We’re all here. You can leave.”
Rahl had the impression that, for all his politeness, Klemyl was less man pleased. Was that because of Rahl… or for some other reason? Rahl certainly hadn’t had anything other than passing contact with Klemyl.
For several moments, as the wagon picked up speed under a gray summer sky, Dymat was silent. Despite the high clouds, the air was warm and would be stifling by midday. Rahl’s nostrils burned slightly from the acridity in the air, and his eyes watered.
“What I do is simple, tedious, and vital to all of Hamor. In fact, this is true of what almost all the mage-guards do,” began Dymat, his voice overly loud, at least to Rahl. “The production of iron plate, beams, and rods is most important for all of Hamor. The mills turn the pig iron into plate and other materials. They operate at high pressures and temperatures and contain many steam engines that provide power for the mills. If chaos should gain a foothold anywhere, production could be slowed or even halted for days, if not eightdays.” Dymat smiled and looked at Rahl, as if expecting a response.
“I can understand that, ser.”
“Speak up, Rahl.”
“Yes, ser,” Rahl replied, more loudly.
“You will see steam engines and steam tugs the like of which exist nowhere else. Do you know why?” Dymat looked intently at Rahl.
Rahl tried to think of a possible reason. If keeping out chaos was so important… “Ser, is that because—”
Dymat didn’t seem to hear.
Rahl raised his voice. “Is that because those engines require the constant inspection of mage-guards to keep chaos away so that they will continue to work?”
“I see you can think. Not so quickly as one might wish,” bellowed Dymat, “but one cannot have everything in Luba. No, one cannot.”
Rahl merely nodded.
“We must keep chaos at bay all the time, and I will show you how.” Dymat turned and looked ahead.
The wagon followed the road to the north, in the direction of the loading docks, but then took the fork that continued farther west. Before long, they passed south of the southernmost of the coking furnaces, and then south of the lowest of the blast furnaces built on the inclined slope that stretched to the north.
As Rahl studied the west
side of the furnaces, he realized that the slope had to have been built—possibly by magery—because the slope was far too regular and the west side had been cut away, so that each furnace was exactly the same distance above the one below. He also noted that great stone causeways ran from the west side of the furnaces to the mills.
The driver turned northward, following another paved road toward what looked to be the southernmost mill. Then the wagon reached one of the stone causeways. It jolted once, then again, as its iron tires crossed something. Rahl looked down. The wagon had passed over a pair of iron-lined grooves in the stone, set almost three cubits apart.
The driver turned westward on the center of the causeway, and Rahl noted that another set of iron grooves bordered the north side of the stone pavement. Ahead was the mill, so large that it stretched at least four hundred cubits from north to south, and even farther westward. Shortly, the wagon halted some fifty cubits short of the east end of the mill. A huge arched portal gaped before them, an opening fifty some cubits across, Rahl judged.
“We get off here,” announced Dymat, easing off the wagon.
Rahl joined him and walked beside the mage-guard toward the portal. He glanced back, but the wagon was on its way to take Klemyl to whatever his duty was. Rahl moistened his lips and took two hurried steps to catch up with Dymat.
From within the mill issued a thunderous rumbling, combined with dull and heavy impacts so powerful that the stone beneath Rahl’s feet vibrated. Occasional shrieks, as if iron itself were being torn apart, punctuated the rumbling thunder.
Then, from the right side of the portal, an enormous flat wagon rolled forward, pushed by what could only have been the steam tug mentioned by Dymat. Both the wagon and the steam tug had iron wheels almost as tall as Rahl, and both were constructed entirely of iron. The steam tug had long drivers attached to its wheels. It took him a moment to realize that the massive wheels fitted in the iron-lined grooves. The steam tug measured a solid thirty cubits in length, and a plume of gray smoke issued from a squat stack near the front of the tug.
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