Colors of Chaos (Saga of Recluce)

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Cerryl hid his nod and observed, “Silksheen sounds too dear for most. What do you find the best things for trade?”

  “Me? What the good might be matters little, save that I can purchase it for many fewer coins than I can sell it and that there are many who would buy. Copper when new ships are being built; grain before others know that the crops will fail; tin or zinc whenever it is cheap; silver in the winter, for it is always cheaper then.” Layel spread his hands. “You see, I will reveal all.”

  Cerryl smiled. “Not quite, for you have not revealed how you know when a good is cheaper and will become more dear.”

  “Father has not ever told me that; he just seems to know.” Leyladin glanced across the table. “Are you both finished with your dinner?”

  “If there be something special for sweets, Daughter.”

  Cerryl reluctantly decided against another fowl breast, knowing he would sleep uneasily with its weight in his gut. “Yes, thank you.”

  “Meridis?”

  “Could you hearty men not eat more?” asked the cook as she appeared in her blue livery.

  “A full breast I had,” answered Layel, “and richer than anything I’ve had in days it was. Quite enough, thank you.”

  “Excellent,” added Cerryl.

  Meridis took the platters with a smile. “A yam molasses pie we have, though as getting enough of the sweet molasses was a chore, and dearer than you would have liked, Master Layel. Each eight-day a few more coppers it takes, or silvers.” The door closed behind her.

  “They’ve raised prices at The Golden Ram again,” Cerryl said. “That’s twice this year.”

  “Aye, and it may happen yet again.” The factor shook his head. “But enough of such. Leyladin tells me that you are a bright flame in the Patrol. How came that?”

  Cerryl spread his hands. “Scarcely a bright flame, just a very junior Patrol mage who has much to learn.” He paused as Meridis set what seemed to be a quarter of a golden brown pie before him and then before Layel. A smaller section went before Leyladin.

  “There you be, and I be not expecting more than crumbs returning to the kitchen.” The door closed behind Meridis.

  Leyladin laughed. “She means that.”

  Cerryl looked at the huge chunk of pastry and filling. So much for trying to spare his gut. He looked helplessly at Leyladin, then said, “You have to eat all of yours, too.”

  The healer glanced down and swallowed. “Me?”

  “She looked at you, too,” Cerryl pressed, with a grin.

  “If I must…” Leyladin offered a groan.

  “Such sounds from the woman who as a child ate an entire half-pie,” Layel offered.

  “That was then,” the healer said. “Much has changed.”

  Indeed it has, reflected Cerryl as he began to eat the sweet. Indeed it has. He was not looking forward to returning to the Halls, not by himself.

  XXXVII

  CERRYL GLANCED FROM his notes to his half-written daily report to Isork, then at the doorway as Isork himself stepped into the small duty room.

  “Ser.” Cerryl stood immediately. “I didn’t know you were coming.” He gestured at the desk. “I was just finishing my report. Gyskas should be here before long.”

  “I didn’t come to see Gyskas.” Isork slipped into the chair across the desk. “Sit down.”

  Cerryl sat.

  “I understand you occasionally still walk with one of the patrols?”

  “Yes, ser. Not too often…but every so often. I don’t tell them before that day when, or why…I just do it.”

  “Why?”

  “Ser…I couldn’t say exactly,” Cerryl fudged, “but…it feels better when I do. People know I’m young, and I felt that they had to know I intended to learn the city and keep the peace.”

  “You also walk the section by yourself when you aren’t on duty.”

  “Yes, ser. I don’t know that I’m helping much…Nothing seems to happen when I go with any patroller…”

  “You’re keeping the peace if nothing happens.” Isork laughed. “When you’re on duty, even when you don’t patrol, almost nothing happens.”

  “Ser…you said that people respected the Patrol here. I just wanted to make sure that they still did.”

  “Oh, they respect you. So do the patrollers. They see you walking the streets by yourself, checking out things—”

  “I’m still trying to learn where everything is,” Cerryl explained. “I don’t want to have my lead patrollers trying to explain where something happened.”

  “We need more mages who’ve been through whatever you’ve been through.” Isork shook his head. “Your patrollers call you their tough little sawmill bastard. First new Patrol mage in three years that I can keep. First one who’s either patrolling or where he’s supposed to be, too.” The pudgy-looking but muscular Patrol chief glanced around the room, then frowned. “Don’t let that go to your head. You’ve still got a lot to learn, but you’re on the right road.”

  “Thank you, ser.” Cerryl waited, suspecting from the Patrol chief’s body position that Isork had more to say.

  After a moment, Isork looked at Cerryl. “I heard you were asking about silksheen.”

  Cerryl didn’t bother to ask how the senior Patrol mage knew. “Someone killed a trader and stole some silksheen. It’s costly, and there couldn’t be many places where it could be sold. No one reported anyone missing or any cart being stolen. So I thought people who handled silksheen might know.”

  Isork nodded slowly. “Asking general questions discreetly is fine. I’d appreciate it if you would tell me if you find out anything. Silksheen, as I am most assured you have discovered, is only traded by two or three merchants in all of Fairhaven. They are quite close to many of the senior mages.”

  Cerryl returned the nod. “I did discover that, and I have no reason to make further inquiries.” Not now, and certainly not in any direct way, not after what I found out so far.

  “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.” Isork rose. “I enjoy reading your reports.” After another smile, he nodded a last time, turned, and left the duty room.

  Cerryl swallowed. Not a very good head, not at all.

  XXXVIII

  CERRYL STRODE THROUGH the open double doors of the section building’s assembly room and crossed the floor to the speaking stones, ignoring the murmurs from the four patrollers to the right of the entryway. He stepped up on the stones and looked out at the small group. His eyes fixed on lead patroller Sheffl. “What happens to be the problem?”

  The muscular patroller cleared his throat “Ser mage, these two men cannot agree. They stopped us on patrol.” He raised his eyebrows and half-smiled, gesturing to the two shorter figures who stood on either side of him.

  A squat, fair-skinned, and red-haired man dressed in brown glared at the other man. The second had short gray hair, was tanned as if he worked in the open often, and wore faded blue trousers and a sleeveless blue vest. The tanned man in the vest ignored the glares from the squat man, and his eyes rested on Cerryl.

  “They were arguing?” Cerryl asked the patroller. “Close to breaking the peace?”

  “You might say that, ser.” Sheffl’s limp black hair flopped across his forehead with the nod he gave. “Karfl—he’s the mason there, in the blue vest—he was waving a stone hammer a lot. Queas was reaching for a staff. He was really yelling, could hear him from the back alley. Thought maybe…” The lead patroller shrugged.

  Beside the double doors, just inside the room, the other four patrollers waited, watching, their faces indicating various degrees of boredom and interest.

  Cerryl looked at the tanned mason. “Why were you arguing?”

  “Demon-damned artisans…be all the same. Queas…he said he be a-tradin’ a set of china pieces, ten platters and ten mugs and two pitchers, if I would repair and rebuild the stone wall at the back of his courtyard.” Karfl shrugged. “Should have known better. Got the wall done, and a bit of work it was, too. Some fool h
ad backed a wagon through it, mud-brick and not fired brick or stone. Then Queas offers me ten platters and two pitchers and says I should be lucky. Only did it because I wanted the set as a consort gift for my daughter Viaya. Can’t have a consort gift without mugs.” Another shrug followed.

  “I see.” Cerryl could sense the man’s belief that the situation was as he had told the Patrol mage. After a moment, Cerryl glanced at Queas. “What do you have to say?”

  “I offered him ten platters, yes, and two pitchers, but not the mugs,” Queas replied. “I am a poor potter, and I had the platters already. So the pitchers I had to throw and fire and glaze. Pitchers, they are not easy, not if you want their handles to be strong. But the pitchers, they are good, good enough to sell anywhere. So are the platters.”

  Cerryl held up a hand. “Did you offer him the platters and the pitchers when you first talked about how you would repay him for repairing the wall?”

  “That is what I said, ser mage.”

  Cerryl frowned, catching something about the words. “Did you tell him that you were offering ten platters and two pitchers, or did you say you were offering him a set of ten and two pitchers?”

  “A set of ten, it is ten platters.”

  Cerryl turned to Karfl. “What did you think he said to you?”

  “A set of ten, and that means platters and mugs. Some places, it be even ten small plates as well, but I weren’t expecting that.”

  Cerryl pursed his lips. Demons! People arguing over the meaning of what a set was. He directed his next words to Queas: “If a merchant, like Likket or Nivor, or Tellis the scrivener, asked you for a full set of ten pieces of china…what would he expect to get?” Cerryl’s eyes focused on the potter, as did his senses.

  Queas shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Ah…but…ser mage…Karfl is not…ah…he is a mason.”

  “You have a different meaning for masons?”

  Queas bowed his head. “I will make ten mugs. It will take an eight-day, though. I cannot fire and glaze properly, not with the work I have accepted coins for…not sooner.”

  Cerryl looked toward Karfl.

  “An eight-day don’t matter, ser mage. Just so as I can get a proper consort gift for Viaya.” The mason squared his shoulders.

  Cerryl addressed the two. “I trust this will not come before the Patrol again.”

  “No, ser mage,” murmured Queas.

  “Not ’less he don’t deliver the mugs,” stated Karfl.

  Cerryl nodded to Sheffl. The lead patroller gestured to the door, and Karfl marched out, followed by a subdued Queas.

  “…mages got some uses.”

  Cerryl smiled faintly as he heard Karfl’s muttered comment. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what Queas might be saying or thinking.

  Back in the duty room, Cerryl sank into the high-backed chair. Sometimes, even when people heard the same words, they still didn’t agree. Sometimes people, like Queas, were too quick to interpret words in the way that they wished. He took a deep breath. At least, he hadn’t had to put them on road duty or refuse duty or flame them.

  At the scritching sound, he looked up.

  Wielt paused in the doorway. “Ser?”

  “Yes, Wielt…come on in.” Cerryl gestured to the chair. “Sit down. Your feet have to be sore.”

  The blonde messenger glanced around the duty room, then leaned forward and murmured, “Ser…you have to be careful.”

  Cerryl frowned. “Careful? I always try to be careful.” His words were low, probably because the messenger’s had been also.

  Wielt whispered, “It’s not in the southwest, ser.” He straightened and said loudly, “Will that be all, ser mage?”

  Cerryl swallowed, then answered. “Ah…” He raised his voice: “That’s all for now, Wielt.”

  “Thank you, ser.” Wielt left quickly.

  “Be careful,” Cerryl murmured. And not in the southwest section…Why? His inquiries about silksheen? Why would that upset people? Yet Isork had suggested care. Where had Wielt heard what he’d heard? Cerryl smiled. Messengers often overheard things, he imagined.

  He frowned.

  As with so many other things in Fairhaven, much more was hidden than revealed. He needed to talk to Leyladin, if he could, since she was the only one beside Myral and Kinowin he trusted. But Myral was failing, and Kinowin was Isork’s superior. That left Leyladin, yet…he worried about bringing her too much into the intrigues.

  XXXIX

  CERRYL STEPPED OUT of the foyer and down the stone steps onto the paved sidewalk beside the Avenue, turning north into the cold rain that seemed to get heavier with each step. Not wanting to discuss all the warnings he’d received in the Halls of the Mages, where all too many might overhear, he’d asked Leyladin the evening before if he could stop by her house after his duty. With a smile, she had agreed.

  “You just didn’t realize it would be raining,” he muttered to himself. Ahead, the colored carts in the Market Square were shrouded in rain and mist rising from the pavement warmed by the vanished sunlight. His eyes flicked through the fall rain, and he forced himself to concentrate despite the headache the storm had brought. He turned westward on the street south of the square. Someone was watching him—not quite as in a screeing glass, but definitely watching. Cerryl could half-feel, half-sense the observation, and he studied the line of walls fronting the house to his right.

  A blurred figure, half-concealed by a tree limb, stood at the corner of the wall less than thirty cubits away. A figure holding something…a bow?

  Abruptly, and as quickly as he could, Cerryl raised a wall of chaos all the way around him—or tried to—and lurched forward and toward the nearer section of the wall, where he hoped the archer could not get a clear shot. He half-tripped, half-dropped to his knees.

  Pain flared through his left shoulder.

  On his knees, still a half-dozen cubits from the wall, he overlooked the burning of the heavy shaft in his arm. His eyes narrowed toward the figure in blue nocking yet another shaft.

  Anger flared through Cerryl, and chaos flowed after the anger.

  Whhhstt! The bowman flared into a pillar of fire, white ashes dropping across the wall with the rain.

  Cerryl forced himself to concentrate, somehow focusing chaos wrapped in order around the iron, using that raw force to expel/destroy the arrow. White stars flashed across his eyes, and he closed them, but for a moment.

  Opening his eyes, ignoring the stabbing in his arm, he staggered upright, then looked down at the redness welling from the wound across the white of his shirt and tunic. He clasped his right hand over the wound, hoping it would help staunch the blood.

  He put one foot in front of the other, then repeated the action until he found himself tottering up the stone walk to Leyladin’s door.

  He had barely let the knocker fall when she appeared.

  “I felt it! What happened?” Her eyes and senses encompassed him. “Darkness! Take my arm.”

  She helped him inside through the foyer and the front hall, leaving drippings of mud and blood, and laid him out on the settee in the front room to the left of the foyer—the pale blue silk-hung room he’d never entered.

  “I’ll get blood on—” he protested.

  “Hush.” She concentrated, and he could feel the order and the warmth from her infusing his upper arm and shoulder, even as she gently cut away the white fabric from around the wound. “It’s not as bad as it could have been.”

  “I blocked some of it—just not quick enough.”

  “I need to clean this and then stitch it up. The muscle is ripped up, but it’s not so deep as I’d thought. You must have done something to hold it off.”

  “Told…you…”

  “Hush…” She pressed a cloth against the wound. “Hold this. I’ll be right back.”

  Cerryl held the cloth, listening to Leyladin as she entered the kitchen.

  “…a bottle of the brandy, Meridis! I don’t care what Father says…It works.”
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  Even before the words died out, the healer was back with a small case, a bottle, and a clean white cloth. “First, we need to clean off the blood and everything else.”

  The cork came from the bottle, and Cerryl wanted to scream as the liquid sloshed across the wound.

  “Sorry…dear one…but it helps. No one’s quite sure why, but with both brandy and order most wounds heal cleanly.”

  Cerryl didn’t like the word “most.”

  “Don’t squirm. There’s still cloth in the wound, and I need to get it out…chaos behind it…not much, but it will grow if I don’t…”

  Cerryl kept his teeth clamped together, hoping he wasn’t biting his tongue, feeling the sweat bead on his forehead and the salt run into the corners of his eyes.

  “There—that’s the worst of it. Now…more brandy and some order…”

  Cerryl winced again, in spite of himself. “That hurt more than the arrow.”

  “You will recover.” Leyladin forced a laugh. “Now…just rest for a moment. You need it and so do I.” She sat down on the floor beside the settee. “Should I send a messenger to Isork?”

  “Not yet…” Cerryl didn’t know when would be a good time, if ever. “Kinowin…later.”

  “Lady Leyladin. You be white.” Meridis scurried into the sitting room, carrying a tray of bread and cheese and a bottle of wine and two goblets. “Ser Cerryl…you look like some nourishment might not hurt.”

  The tray went on the floor beside Leyladin, who took a small knife and began to cut wedges off the block of white cheese.

  Cerryl smiled as Leyladin handed him a small wedge of cheese, then chewed it slowly, realizing just how tired and hungry he felt. He glanced at the healer—as pale as Meridis had said.

  “Healing is hard work, I see.”

  “Harder than most reckon,” she said after swallowing. “Much harder, sometimes.” She passed a chunk of bread.