Colors of Chaos (Saga of Recluce)

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  The miller’s eyes widened, and he looked at the rut-frozen ground.

  “Let’s take a look at your mill.”

  The miller glanced at the score of lancers and at Hiser’s hard blue eyes. “Ah…as you wish, ser mage.”

  Two lancers, sabres out, led the way as the stocky man walked ponderously along the frozen red clay to the planked door in the middle of the building. He opened the door and paused. “Dark inside. But one lantern and no striker.”

  “Hold up the lantern,” Cerryl said dryly, waiting until the miller did before focusing a touch of chaos on the wick.

  The lantern flared into light. The millmaster swallowed.

  “Inside,” Cerryl suggested.

  One of the lancers took the lantern from the miller and stepped into the mill. The millmaster followed, and then came Cerryl.

  Cerryl studied the mill floor, covered with sawdust that had to have been there since fall—or even summer. The few racks flanking the blade, wrapped in oiled cloth, were empty.

  “Now the storage barn there.” Cerryl gestured in the general direction of what he knew had to be the curing and storage barn.

  With a deep breath the millmaster turned, and the four walked from the mill across the road and to the sliding door. The bearded man’s hands fumbled as he unlatched the big door and pushed it sideways.

  Perhaps a third of the racks contained planks, mostly smaller cuts, though Cerryl noted perhaps two dozen heavy oak planks that might work for refurbishing the piers. After walking to that rack and checking the planks, he turned and left the barn, then waited for the millmaster to slide shut the heavy door. The wind whistled more loudly as the four walked back toward the house and the still-mounted lancers and their subofficer.

  Before the house, Cerryl turned once more to the bearded man. “We need timber. More than what you have here. You need your mill. You have no logs to cut, but there is enough water in the river to run the blade. The ice isn’t that thick, and the mill is undershot anyway. It was designed to work in the winter.”

  “Ah…yes.” The miller glanced at Cerryl.

  “I once worked in a mill. Do you have a wagon and a team?”

  “Yes, ser.” The millmaster’s eyes darted toward the outbuilding to the west of the long house.

  “Then you will turn that wagon into a sledge. Remove the wheels. I will send a half-score of able men to help you fell and move the logs. If we get timbers and planks from those logs, you will get golds. Not many, but more than if I have to burn the mill. The choice is yours.” Cerryl forced a smile like Anya’s—hard and bright.

  “You drive a hard bargain, ser mage.”

  “No. There are many who lost everything. You get to keep what you have and work hard for a few golds. Most would envy you.”

  The bearded man’s eyes did not meet Cerryl’s.

  “Best you prepare,” Cerryl said firmly. “You will have workers tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Yes, ser.” The resigned tone was barely audible.

  Cerryl ignored it and remounted the gelding.

  As they rode back down the narrow road, Hiser glanced at Cerryl. “You promised men.”

  “The troublemakers…Bring them out here tomorrow. The first one that makes more trouble, bring him back to me.”

  “Ah…”

  “I’ll kill him with chaos,” Cerryl said flatly. “In front of all the lancers. Don’t think I won’t. And any others who lay a hand on the locals, except to defend themselves.”

  “Ah…after the last one…you won’t have trouble, ser.” Hiser grinned raggedly. “What will you do when the troublemakers reform?”

  “I’ll think of something.” Cerryl shrugged. “Or maybe we’ll have enough planks, or maybe the locals will want planks, and the miller can pay some of them.” He flicked the reins.

  Planks and timber will be the least of your problems. Of that he was certain.

  CXI

  CERRYL REINED UP by the south gate to Elparta, where the heavy wooden gates had been rebuilt and replaced on the gate pillars. The damp wind seeped through the oiled leather of his white jacket. He shifted his weight in the hard and cold saddle as he studied the river walls, the tumbled stones still sprawling away from the low wall cores that had been shifted and tilted in places by Jeslek’s use of chaos on the River Gallos. The tumbled section ran northward to the middle river gates and then farther downriver to the north city gates.

  After a moment, Cerryl turned to Hiser, mounted and waiting on his left. “We need to work on those…the river walls.”

  Most of the houses on the hill where he and his lancers were quartered had been repaired and reshuttered, if crudely. So had the dwellings in the area to the north and east of the south gate—not a hundred cubits from where he surveyed the river and where Fydel had quartered the majority of the White Lancers remaining in Elparta.

  “What about the other houses?” asked Hiser.

  “They’ll have to wait.” Besides, if we get the walls and all the piers back, come spring, there will be people returning and paying crafters to rebuild—or doing it themselves.

  “Ought to wait,” grumped Ferek. “Fools, all of ’em.”

  Fools? Or just fearful? “Perhaps. It doesn’t matter. Finishing the piers and then the gates and the river walls comes next. Without trading facilities, the city will suffer more in the years to come.”

  “Should suffer,” murmured Ferek under his breath.

  Cerryl ignored the comment. “Tomorrow, have them start on the river side, all the way past the barracks houses, up to the trading gate—the middle one. After that, we’ll see.”

  “That be several eight-days’ work.”

  “I imagine so.” Cerryl flicked the reins. “We’ll go by the Market Square on the way back. Didn’t you say people are showing up to trade?”

  “Some,” answered Hiser cautiously.

  “When they think we’re not looking,” added Ferek.

  The three, followed by four lancer guards, rode along the avenue from the south gate toward the center of Elparta. Away from the river, the smell of fish and mud dwindled, but the air seemed smokier.

  As he neared the edge of the Market Square, Cerryl slowed the gelding. One of the stores—a chandlery—had been repaired, although the door was shut and the windows shuttered. A shutter on the adjoining cooper’s shop clattered slowly against the mud-splattered plaster of the wall, moved back and forth by the wind.

  A bellow, inchoate but loud, echoed across the seemingly empty square, followed by a scream and another, sharper yell.

  Cerryl glanced around, then at Hiser.

  Before either could speak, a man in a green vest and an oversized and open brown cloak ran out of an alleyway, darting around a pile of brick and mud. He dashed toward Cerryl. “Ser mage! Help! They’ll kill me, they will.”

  Another man, swinging a sabre, his belt undone, scabbard banging against his leg, charged around the rubble and after the ginger-bearded and vested man.

  “Halt!” bellowed Ferek.

  Both the bearded man and the man chasing him slowed, then stopped as they saw the six lancers with unsheathed blades. The sabre-swinging man was a lancer, Cerryl could see, despite the afternoon shadows that lent an air of gloom to the dilapidated square.

  The vested and bearded man turned to Cerryl. “Your lancer…he took out his blade and he threatened me. He said if I did not have my daughter…service him…he would kill us both.”

  Cerryl glanced at the unbelted lancer, who had sheathed his sabre.

  “It’s a lie!” yelled the lancer. “Ser,” he added quickly as he saw the white cloak.

  “He said he would kill us both, I swear,” insisted the man with the curly beard and gold earrings.

  Behind the two men were another pair of lancers, dragging a woman forward.

  “What have you to say?” Cerryl’s gray eyes focused on the single lancer.

  “They’re lying. She’s a trollop and a cutpurse and—”


  “See this cut? Do you see it, ser mage?” demanded the man in the vest, pointing to a short slash across his chin that dripped blood onto a stained shirt that might have once been white silk and onto a dirty brown cloak. “Your lancer did this to me.”

  Cerryl looked at the woman, struggling in the arms of two lancers who half-dragged, half carried her toward Cerryl, the subofficers, and the four lancer guards. One of the lancers lugging the woman kept looking down at her open cloak and ripped blouse, which showed half-exposed full breasts.

  “He tried to kill me,” insisted the bearded man.

  “They…she offered…They tried to kill me…” stuttered the accused lancer, glancing from the bearded man to the woman.

  Cerryl fixed his eyes on the woman. “Did you steal the lancer’s purse?”

  “I stole nothing.”

  “Did you offer yourself to him for coins?”

  “He forced himself on me.” The woman drew herself up as much as possible with the two lancers restraining her.

  “She had a knife, ser,” added one of the lancers holding the woman.

  “What about the knife?” Cerryl asked.

  “I had no knife. What would I do with a knife against such a brute?”

  Cerryl smiled tiredly and turned to the lancers. “Bring her out into the street here. Let her go and stand away from her.”

  The two men looked at each other, then frog-marched the dark-haired woman forward, abruptly releasing her.

  Cerryl seized chaos and flung it, almost contemptuously. Whhhsst! Where the woman had stood was a pillar of fire.

  The man in the green vest ripped himself out of the hands of the lancer and started to run.

  Despite his headache, Cerryl forced himself to concentrate.

  Whhssst! A second firebolt created another heap of flaming charcoal that subsided to white ash.

  Cerryl looked at the stunned single lancer. “They lied. You did also, but not so much. If I find you like this again, you’ll join them.” His eyes went to the two unknown lancers—from Fydel’s forces probably, since he recognized neither. “Tell your comrades.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  Cerryl glanced at Ferek, then Hiser, before turning the gelding toward the low hill that held their quarters.

  “Darkness-fired lucky, you were…”

  “Coulda been you…”

  “Fair…he is…cold as the Westhorns, too.”

  Cold? Cerryl almost laughed, half in frustration. You’ll be the most disliked mage in Candar the way things are going. Or the second most disliked, after Jeslek.

  He leaned forward and patted the gelding’s neck. Horses didn’t talk back or mutter behind his back. At least, his didn’t.

  CXII

  CHAOS BY ITSELF guarantees neither prosperity nor the failure of prosperity; chaos guarantees but life, while order in excess must lead to death.

  The nature of man is that of chaos, and not of order, for man is alive, as is chaos, and the goal of order is perfect stillness and all parts of a whole in an unchanging array.

  Yet chaos unchecked is as ruinous to a prosperous land as order unchecked, and the excesses of man can be checked successfully only by the application of chaos bounded by order.

  Order applied directly to that which is man will retard, if not destroy, that spirit of life nurtured by the flame of chaos; likewise, all life upon the world is nurtured by that flame of chaos that is the sun itself.

  A land bound to chaos may fail to prosper, but it will not destroy itself, for chaos is as life; a land bound to order must, in the end, destroy itself, and all around it, for order is like the ice of the north in the times of the Great Chills, seeking always more order, until nothing lives within its scope.

  A great mage must strive always to use chaos for prosperity, that is, growth and change bounded by the chill of order, yet never must he pay obeisance to order, for order will take his spirit and leave him a shell of what he might have been, as a mighty city empty of all souls, as a seed without kernel, as a hearth without flame…

  Colors of White

  (Manual of the Guild at Fairhaven)

  Part Two

  CXIII

  IN THE PRIVATE study, empty while he waited for Teras, Cerryl stood over the conference table and concentrated. The silver mists of the glass swirled, then parted.

  Leyladin stood in the corner of the front foyer of the Halls of the Mages in Fairhaven. With her was the dark-haired Lyasa, and the two talked, apparently quietly, for there were few gestures. Abruptly Leyladin turned her head slightly and smiled but for an instant, and Cerryl knew she had sensed his presence through the glass. Lyasa raised her eyebrows, also momentarily, and Cerryl released the image.

  He left the mirror glass on the table and walked through the archway from the small study into the front sitting room and up to the window, where he opened the shutter. Cold welled off the cloudy panes, intense cold, for all that little snow had fallen upon Elparta in the past eight-day.

  The avenue beyond the front wall and the personal and carriage gates was empty for the moment. Cerryl shivered, though he was not cold, thinking of the lancers who had been disciplined and the villagers who worked for a few coppers—conscripted in effect—on restoring the walls and gates of Elparta.

  One instant Elparta had been a functioning city on the river, the next a ruin. Why? Because rulers disagreed…because the Guild insisted on existing and because people like Rystryr and Syrma and Estalin wanted golds more than prosperity for their people. And what of Anya and Jeslek? Are they any different, save that they seek power? Or the traders like Jiolt and Muneat?

  Cerryl snorted to himself. “The snare of power is that you think you do it for prosperity for all when it is for your own benefit.”

  “Ser?” asked the lancer standing inside the foyer.

  “Nothing. A mage musing to himself.” As if it mattered, as if you will ever have that kind of power. He shook his head. You’re deceiving yourself. You have power, if not so much as a Jeslek. Still, he was having trouble with the limited power he had. He was trying to rebuild a city and keep order, and the lancers—at least some of them—hated him and the locals hated him because he represented Fairhaven.

  And none of them really even understood Fairhaven. You think that’s surprising? Half the Guild doesn’t.

  Teras stamped inside the front foyer, then closed the carved dark wooden door behind him. “Sorry being so slow, ser.”

  “That’s all right.” Cerryl waited until the big lancer hung his riding jacket on one of the pegs in the foyer, then turned and walked back to the study, sitting at one of the chairs beside the conference table. He gestured for Teras to sit down as the captain passed through the archway from the sitting room.

  “Thank you, ser.” Teras kept his eyes on Cerryl as he seated himself carefully, gingerly, as if he feared the chair might break under him.

  “How are the quarters’ houses faring in the cold?”

  “About the same as barracks anywhere. Warmer than outside and colder than most would like, except for those raised in the hills, and they say it’s too hot.” Teras offered a rueful grin.

  Cerryl nodded. “How are they finding the food?”

  Teras shrugged. “They complain, but they know you eat what they eat. That suits them.”

  The captain had not mentioned Fydel, and Cerryl decided against bringing that question up. Fydel was using coins gained somewhere to improve the fare served at his private table, and all the officers knew that.

  “It’s plain,” Cerryl said with a laugh. “I’m trying to get some dried fruit and nuts and more cheese, and coins to buy more eggs from the locals.”

  “You cannot take eggs from a peasant.” Teras laughed.

  Not when you couldn’t even find the chickens, you couldn’t, reflected Cerryl. “Teras? Why do you think we’re here? In Elparta?”

  “That’d not be wise of a captain to guess at the reasons of the High Wizards, ser. Begging your pardon.” A grim smile
crossed the hulking lancer’s face, and Cerryl understood, again, why Teras remained a captain and would always remain a captain.

  “I understand.” In turn, Cerryl smiled. “From your viewpoint as a captain of lancers, after the work crews finish repairing the river walls, what should they do next?”

  “Clear all the streets that yet have rubble in them. Let the locals repair dwellings as they wish or choose not to. Then if, as you say, the Guild and the lancers need to maintain a garrison here, we should have the workers build a proper barracks and stables. By the south gate, I would judge.”

  “That may have to wait until after spring. I was charged with having the piers and the river wall repaired first, and work on the wall is slow,” Cerryl answered. “If I accompany the High Wizard in the spring, I will suggest the barracks to him.”

  Teras nodded, as if he expected no more.

  Cerryl almost frowned. Was that the answer? Spread out the members of the Guild so that their presence was accepted and understood—and backed with lancers as necessary? He wanted to laugh. While it might work, who would listen to him? All the powerful mages wanted to be in Fairhaven, where the prestige and the power seemed to lie. Is it that way in all lands?

  He forced his attention back to the lancer captain and on learning what else he needed to know.

  CXIV

  THE SOUND OF the gelding’s hoofs was muffled by the span or so of snow that coated the cobblestones of the avenue from the south gate. Cerryl glanced over his shoulder, barely able to see the four lancers acting as his guards through the snow that had begun to fall as he had left the sawmill—snow and cold that helped block off the lingering odors of decay and death and pillaging, snow that gave him a headache, if not one so sharp as from rain.

  Good thing you don’t need too much more in the way of lumber…not until spring, and then there won’t be enough. He hoped he could put off worrying about lumber until spring. He had enough other problems to worry about—and far sooner.