The Chaos Balance

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

“It’s still the same,” Ayrlyn said. “They must have… I don’t know what.”

  Neither did Nylan, but it felt wrong. He tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was dry, and there was no water left in the bottles on the mare. Had he drunk his too quickly?

  By mid-afternoon they had crossed two or three more lines of hills and found no sign of streams, ponds, or springs-or of settlers, just more lines of hills covered with sun-browned grass.

  They reined up at another hill crest, perhaps two more lines of hills later.

  “There’s something down there.” Ayrlyn pointed almost due south, where a slightly higher hill cast a shadow over a flat, barely shining surface.

  “I thought there weren’t any lakes this close. That’s not your lake, is it?”

  “It doesn’t feel like a lake,” admitted the redhead.

  “It be a lake,” said Sylenia. “It needs be a lake.”

  With that Nylan could definitely agree.

  As their mounts carried them downhill and closer, he could see that the flat surface was a small lake or a large pond, but it looked almost bright green, even in the late afternoon shadow. Even the shores of the lake were-sere, without vegetation. There were no signs of houses.

  Nylan continued to study the ground around the lake, finally noting several circular arrangements of stone in bare spots between the irregular clumps of brown grass on the higher ground to the south and east of the dried lake bed. “Someone’s had a campsite here-not recently.”

  The mare’s hoofs crackled as she left the sparse grassy flat around the lake bed and carried Nylan down the gentle barren slope toward the edge of the water. There, he dismounted slowly, and swallowed.

  He bent and scooped up a handful of the water, smelling it, then licking his fingers. He winced. The water was saltier than merely brackish, and the white splotches that laced the barren ground were salt crystals.

  “A salt lake?” asked Ayrlyn.

  He nodded. “Maybe… maybe I can order-sort enough to keep us going.”

  Whuffff… The mare edged toward the water.

  Nylan didn’t know if she would attempt drinking it or not; so he handed the reins to Ayrlyn before he walked to the pack mare to unstrap the small bucket.

  He half-filled the bucket with the salty water, and set it on the shore, trying to summon the dark order fields. His forehead began to perspire, though he couldn’t imagine that he had enough water within for sweat, and his vision to blur.

  The water in the bucket swirled, and white heaps appeared beside it. The smith took a deep breath, looked at the half bucket of water, then dipped his finger into it and licked. “It tastes all right to me.”

  “Waadah?” pleaded Weryl.

  Nylan carefully poured some of the water into the bottle Sylenia proffered and handed it back to her.

  Weryl slurped, but didn’t seem to spill any.

  In turn, the silver-haired angel refilled two more bottles, one for Ayrlyn and one for Sylenia, and drank the small amount in the bottom of the bucket.

  The second bucketful was easier, and Nylan refilled the rest of the water bottles.

  “What about our mounts?” asked Sylenia.

  The smith turned and looked at the horses. With open mouths, all panted in the sun. Nylan wasn’t totally certain, but he had the feeling that they wouldn’t be panting unless they were in poor condition.

  Nylan groaned under his breath. He hated to think about the effort involved in using order fields to get enough water for the mounts-yet if he didn’t…

  In fact, even if he did… He sent his perceptions out to his mare, then shook his head.

  “What be the matter?” asked Sylenia.

  “We’ll be camping here tonight-one way or another.”

  “The mounts?” asked Ayrlyn.

  He nodded.

  Sylenia slipped out of her saddle, but left Weryl in his seat as Nylan refilled the bucket with brackish water for a third time, and began to marshal the order fields once more.

  They really didn’t have anything else to use but the bucket. So Nylan held it for the mare. Some water splattered over his forearms, but not too much. The smith took away the bucket after the mare had finished half a bucket and offered it to Ayrlyn’s chestnut. His eyes blurred.

  “I can do the next batch,” Ayrlyn offered. “I’d better do it. You look like dead flame.”

  Nylan handed her the bucket. His legs were shaking so much that he had to sit down, right on the salt-crusted lake bed.

  “You must eat.” Sylenia pressed a biscuit upon Nylan, that and one of the water bottles he had filled.

  He sat on the dry lake bed in the growing shadow of the hill to the northwest, and ate, slowly. On the grassy area by one of the old campfires, Ayrlyn had set up a tieline and tethered the horses.

  After the shakiness passed, the smith stood and walked slowly up to join her. They both sat down, along with Sylenia, and Weryl, and ate.

  Abruptly, Weryl stood and tottered toward a stone poking out of the gray-brown dirt, a stone that might have been calf-high on the boy. All three adults watched.

  “I wish I had his recuperative powers,” Nylan said.

  “You do. You’ve just done more.” Ayrlyn smiled and reached out and squeezed his hand.

  More? Too much more? Nylan wondered, but he took another sip of water and watched his son explore the ancient rock.

  CVII

  NYLAN BOLTED UPRIGHT on the bedroll in the dim light of dawn. He was sweating, despite the light breeze. His mouth and lips were dry, and his heart raced. For a moment, he sat there, breathing deeply and looking down the gentle incline to the flat and dark green waters of the brine lake.

  “Another dream?” On the bedroll beside his, Ayrlyn rolled onto her side facing him.

  Nylan rubbed his temples with the fingers of his right hand, then squinted, finally nodding.

  “About the forest?”

  “You had it, too?” Nylan’s mouth was dry and felt cracked, as if he had trudged through a stone desert. He glanced to his left, but Weryl still snored, his mouth partly open. Beyond Weryl, Sylenia lay motionless, her face toward the south and away from Nylan.

  “I think so. It was about trees and earthquakes and white lightnings and dark clouds.” Ayrlyn kept her voice low, barely above a whisper.

  “Chasing me.” He coughed, then glanced to the east, but the horses grazed quietly, still all on the tieline. “Symbolism.”

  “It’s getting harder to tell the difference between reality and symbolism.” Ayrlyn rolled into a sitting position, brushing her short red hair back off her ears.

  “Isn’t it? It’s getting a lot clearer-no, it’s not at all clear- but it’s feeling more important that we reach this enchanted forest, except I don’t think it’s exactly enchanted.”

  Ayrlyn took a deep breath. “We’re going to have the entire armed forces of Cyador pushing over the Grass Hills as soon as they can-or as soon as they find out about the mess at the mines.”

  “Do we know that for sure?”

  “You’re asking that now?” She shook her head. “Given the way rulers and empires work, and the fact that almost all people resort to force when they have it, a full-scale armed invasion’s about as sure a thing as you could bet on without actually standing in front of a bunch of charging lancers. Even Fornal thinks so.”

  “And we’re riding through hills and dust to find a forest we’re not sure exists except in our dreams?”

  “It exists.”

  Nylan tried to lick his lips again, and couldn’t. He reached for the water bottle he had left by his head, uncorked it slowly, and sipped. “I don’t even know how or if it will help find a way to stop the Cyadorans.” He took another sip. “But nothing else will.” He shrugged.

  Surprisingly, Ayrlyn grinned. “I’m game.” She reached for the water bottle.

  Nylan handed it to her. “What?”

  “For the first time in seasons, you’re not the cold, logical engineer. You’re not
calculatedly whittling away at a superior force. You’ve said, ‘This is what I feel.’ It makes sense.”

  “It does?” Nylan wasn’t all that sure it did. He tried to clear his throat.

  “Enough. We need to eat.” Ayrlyn sat up straighter and reached for her boots, shaking them out before pulling them on. “I hate living in my clothes, and that’s all we do.”

  “Ooooo…” Weryl rolled onto his side.

  Nylan followed the redhead’s example and pulled on his own boots, then turned toward his son. Nylan’s smile faded as his nose wrinkled. “You smell. I’ll be glad, I think, at least in certain ways, when you can take care of some things all by yourself.”

  Weryl’s smile vanished, and the boy turned toward Sylenia. “Enyah?”

  “Your father be right, child.” Sylenia shook her head as Nylan lifted Weryl and carted him down toward the lake.

  By the time he had lugged the boy a good distance down the shore and cleaned him off-first using the salty water, and then using some desalted water that left him with a headache-and returned, Ayrlyn had biscuits and cheese laid out for them.

  The yellow brick cheese was hard enough that Nylan almost had to use his belt dagger like a saw to hack off chunks small enough to chew.

  Weryl promptly spit out the fragment he had been offered.

  “Manners, Weryl,” said Nylan wearily, rubbing his forehead.

  “Wadah, pease.”

  Sylenia proffered a water bottle.

  All four ate slowly, silently, as the white-orange sun peered over the eastern hills.

  “We ought to get moving pretty soon,” Ayrlyn said. “Before it gets too hot.”

  “I wish we knew more,” Nylan said after swallowing the last crumbs of a too-dry biscuit. “Like exactly where we’re headed. A map would help.”

  “The Cyadorans don’t leave those lying around,” mumbled Ayrlyn, trying to swallow her own dry biscuit crumbs.

  “The white wizards use a glass to see,” pointed out Sylenia. “Could you not do that? I have a small flat glass.”

  Nylan shivered. The thought of using that twisted white energy for anything-anything at all… he just couldn’t do it.

  “That might be difficult,” Ayrlyn said.

  “Can you not do something?”

  The engineer frowned. Lasers… lasers had a parallel in the order forces, and he’d used that parallel in smithing. The glass was parallel to electronics. Nagging thoughts chased through his mind… piezoelectrics… glass, what was glass? Silicon, and what was silicon? Sand? Order out of chaos? Sand was chaotic enough, but you could make glass, mirrors, lasers, mirrors, mirror shields…

  “Frig… I should have seen it!”

  “What?” asked Ayrlyn.

  “So obvious…”

  “What?” Ayrlyn’s voice carried an exasperated edge.

  “The mirror shields. You don’t keep traditions unless they serve a purpose. I assumed-maybe you did, too-that those reflective shields were half practical, half traditional.”

  “Oh…” Ayrlyn nodded. “They’re protection against lasers-and white wizards’ firebolts. They don’t have any lasers left, but-”

  “Right. What else do they have?”

  “There was a mention of fire cannon in the scrolls. Lasers?”

  “Could be. Or it could be something like a flamethrower.”

  Nylan frowned.

  “Antique weapon. You shoot jets of flammable liquids at people and things and light it. If you keep the pressure up, it doesn’t come back and burn you… something like that.” Ayrlyn took a sip of wafer, then stood and stretched. “Sitting on the ground isn’t my idea of comfort.”

  “Flamethrowers… we can deal with. White magic lasers would be another thing,” Nylan said.

  Weryl climbed up Sylenia’s shoulder to a standing position, then tottered toward Ayrlyn, flinging his arms around her trousered leg. “Ahwen… ahwen.”

  “You are an imp.” Ayrlyn smiled, but lifted the silver-haired child and hugged him.

  Nylan corked the water bottle and stood. Despite the wind that blew out of the north, he could still smell the brackish salty water below. Salt and sand and grass hills and enchanted forests and white empires…

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Maps, glasses, forests… you name it.” The smith rubbed his temples. That was the problem with thinking. The more he thought, the more problems and ramifications he discovered-and each had more complexities than the last.

  He pursed his lips. Could he create a map, an image? Well… if he tried and failed, it cost nothing, unlike tampering with white chaos energy. Sands, granules of sand-he walked slowly toward the burned-out fires of the salt-collectors.

  “No… Weryl, let your father think for a moment.”

  Ayrlyn’s words almost drifted around him as he reached the nearest of the old stone fire rings. He scuffed the ground with his boot. Was it sandy enough?

  After a moment, he walked back down along the dried-out section of the lakeshore. At the north end, where a stream had once flowed into the brine lake, or still did seasonally, perhaps, he found a depression less than three cubits across filled with sand.

  A map, he thought, a map.

  Nothing happened, except that he had the faintest twinge in his skull.

  Piezoelectric crystals, order flows, how do you get a map from that? Flows… chaos flows, patterns?

  The second time he abandoned the idea of maps, instead concentrating on the flows of order and chaos.

  The sands swirled, darker grains appearing until a pattern appeared.

  “Well… it’s something…” The silver-haired angel squinted at the sandy pattern, then sat down abruptly beside it. His heart was racing again, and his knees were weak.

  Ayrlyn and Weryl appeared behind him at the edge of the dry-stream.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Takes… energy.”

  Her eyes went to the sands. “You did it!”

  “Sort of. It doesn’t look like much to me.”

  Ayrlyn pointed. “Could that be Westwind, and the river and Lornth here, and that border there, the reddish sands-isn’t that the outline of Candar itself?”

  “Maybe.” There weren’t any large-scale maps of Candar, not that the engineer had seen, and his view of the continent had been limited to the brief time when he’d been jockeying an unstable and overloaded lander through a turbulent atmosphere. There was a definite resemblance between his sand map and what he thought he’d seen-but did that really mean anything?

  He hauled himself to his feet.

  “And this dark splotch here-that has to be the forest, and we’re here… it’s not all that far.”

  Nylan hoped not, even as he followed Ayrlyn’s explanation. Now they were reduced to real faith in the unprovable- magic, sorcery, or whatever-following their instincts, the sun, and a map created by subconscious manipulation of sand. And he’d thought the U.F.F. High Command had been screwy!

  CVIII

  A SMALLER VERSION of the silver and malachite throne no more than four cubits high rested on the white marble dais. The white marble wall behind the throne rose to a balcony covered with open grillwork that concealed the Archers of the Rational Stars.

  Lephi studied the throne, then turned to Triendar. “Be still, old friend, and just listen.”

  He gestured to the two tall Mirror Lancers who stood by the double doors, and they opened the doors. A tall man entered the hall, wearing the uniform of the Mirror Lancers, a uniform without the green sash and no longer white, but smeared with charcoal and blood, and with yellow and red dust ground into the fabric. The doors closed. The majer bowed. “Your Mightiness.” His voice was even, resigned, calm.

  “I have been told that you commanded the force that took the mines, and lost them, and that you returned with less than a third of your command.” Lephi’s voice was cold. “Is that accurate?”

  “Yes, Your Mightiness.”

  “Is it also true
that you failed to mine the copper and sent none back to Cyad?”

  “We mined the copper, Your Mightiness, and sent the wagons to Syadtar. I do not know what happened after that. During the entire campaign, I received no dispatches and no supplies.”

  “I will not have it!” Lephi glanced around the room, less than a tenth the size of the receiving hall in Cyad.

  Majer Piataphi stood below the dais, resigned, waiting.

  “Why did you return? Why did you bother? The Archers of the Rational Stars have terminated many for far less. So have the white mages.” Lephi’s head inclined fractionally, in the direction of Triendar, who stood to his left, a pace back from the rearmost part of the throne.

  “I saw no point in having the rest of the foot and lancers slaughtered.” Piataphi shrugged. “We received no supplies. We lacked enough horse to attack, and there was no forage. The barbarians would not stand and fight, except when they could find smaller detachments and outnumbered them.”

  “You left with more than enough mounts.”

  “In the middle of the night, the barbarians cast fireballs over the walls and into the barracks and stables and corrals. They were not like the fireballs of the white mages, for they left no trails in the sky. We drove them off, but not before we lost nearly sevenscore mounts.”

  Triendar’s hands, hidden in his flowing sleeves, tightened into near fists, but his face remained impassive.

  “I need no more catalogues of failure.” Lephi smiled. “You almost hope I will turn the Archers of the Rational Stars on you, Majer. I won’t. You will lead the van against the grasslands barbarians, and you will lead from the front of the very first squad.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  “Go!”

  The majer turned, rather than backed away, and walked toward the double doors, which the lancers opened as he approached.

  After the doors closed, Lephi walked to the window at the right end of the chamber and looked beyond the white stone walls toward the browned Grass Hills. “Fireballs, supplies and copper that never arrived-what do you make of it?” He did not turn toward the mage, but left his eyes on the Grass Hills.

  “He tells the truth-”