Recluce Tales

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “Not yet…” She smiled again.

  “What is the secret of those engines?” I asked conversationally. “Perfect order?”

  “In a way.” Cirlin smiled. “Why are you so interested?”

  “Why wouldn’t a factor be interested? The black ships are faster than any vessels on the sea. Just think how much faster trading ships could travel with engines like those.”

  “You couldn’t afford to buy an engine like that,” she said. “That is, if the Brotherhood agreed to make one for sale.”

  But the Hamorians could. That, I did know. “Do you ever think that will happen?”

  “Not unless you factors take control of everything, and that wouldn’t be good.”

  “Why not? If the factors of Recluce had faster ships…”

  “There would be more chaos everywhere in the world.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “Some things aren’t a matter of belief.”

  “Like engineering designs?”

  “If they work…” She shook her head. “It’s been an interesting discussion, but I have to meet someone.” She set her empty glass on the wooden bar, smiled, then turned and slipped away.

  I glanced around that part of the inn. I was alone, except for the two engineers in the corner—still playing Capture.

  V

  By fiveday, there was no helping it. I’d have to see Lhean. He lived in the engineers’ house, the one for men, because of certain events in his past that he doubtless regretted, but then, women have often caused men great regret. I was waiting there for him when he returned after work.

  His mouth opened when he stepped through the door. “Moraris … what are you doing here?”

  “I need your help.”

  “I’ve heard about that. I don’t have five golds, let alone three hundred.”

  “I’m not asking for golds. I want access to some old engineering plans.” I’d already decided that even Lhean wasn’t about to help me get anything recent, but, if in a few years, the Brotherhood discovered Hamorian ships based on old designs, who would know … or care?

  He looked at me as if I were mad. Perhaps I was, but what choice did I have? “Not anything recent,” I explained. “Older drawings of engines.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

  “Just one set of plans for an older engine.”

  “You don’t understand…”

  What I understood was that, if I didn’t get those plans, or something like them, I’d likely be maimed and disfigured by twoday evening … assuming I was still alive. That … or I’d be penniless and skulking through the hills … or the like, if not worse. None of that exactly appealed to me, for obvious reasons. So I took a different tack. “Who got you out of that mess with the girl in Sigil?”

  “That was a long time ago,” he protested.

  “Your family still doesn’t know, and they certainly don’t know about those enddays you spent with Marryk.”

  “You promised…”

  “I did, but I’m in deep. You said you owed me, and you do. And I need a favor.”

  “How old a design?” he asked warily. “And of what?”

  “Old enough that the plans won’t be missed any time soon. I need plans of the engines of one of the older black ships, after The Black Hammer and well before the Mighty Ten.” That was necessary because even I knew that the engines of the lost Mighty Ten could no longer be built, even with perfect order.

  Lhean gulped. “I can’t do that.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to … or…”

  “Moraris … please…”

  “I’m afraid this is a matter of life and death, Lhean.”

  “One of your trading messes?”

  “You might say so.”

  He took a deep breath. Then he closed his eyes, as if concentrating … or trying to come up with an alternative.

  I waited.

  Finally, he said, “Wait here.”

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “Go and get you a set of plans. What else?”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  He shook his head. “The marines won’t let anyone into the main engineering hall who isn’t an engineer or an apprentice, especially this late in the day. I’ll have to be very careful anyway. Just wait here. I’ll either be able to get what you want in a glass or so … or not at all.”

  “It had better not be not at all. And don’t cross me. I’ll make sure everyone knows everything if you do.”

  He looked at me. “I know that.” Then he added, “I’ll do the best I can for you. That’s all I can promise.”

  I didn’t like leaving it up to him that way, but I didn’t see what else I could do, not after what Elnora and her vindictive family had done … and, besides, I couldn’t even sell the factorage to outlanders who’d be willing to pay for it. If what I did went against the Brotherhood, in a way, they’d brought it on themselves.

  So I watched as he left, then paced around his small quarters, sat down, stood up, paced some more, and finally sat down again on a worn armchair that faced the door.

  As I sat there, glancing at the closed door, I wondered. Should I have left and come back later? What if Lhean weaseled out and told one of the senior engineers? I shook my head. I was almost out of time and options, and I’d just have to trust him, much as I worried about it.

  More than a glass passed before he eased back through his door. I did breathe a sigh of relief, although slowly enough that I doubt he heard it.

  “Here are your plans. I put them in this half-staff case.” He held up a leather case.

  “Not that I don’t trust you, but I’d like to take a look.”

  “I thought you might.” He untied the leather thongs and handed the case to me.

  I eased out the rolled sheets and unrolled them on the modest table where Lhean doubtless ate. The first sheet actually had a title—“Turbine Design.” From the age of the paper and from what I could tell, the plans looked like what Lanciano wanted.

  “You’ve done well,” I said as I carefully re-rolled the sheets and replaced them in the leather case.

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you? His narrow face looked almost furtive. “I mean, how you got them?”

  “That’s the last thing I’d tell anyone.” I certainly meant that, for many reasons. Who knew what else I might need? “Thank you.”

  He looked at me sadly. “Moraris … please be more careful in the future. I’ve done what I can for you. I don’t think I could do it again.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “The plans will be missed, sooner or later, and then they’ll be harder to get to.”

  That made sense, but still …

  “You’d better go, before anyone else sees you. That wouldn’t be good for either of us.”

  I had to admit that he was right about that. Still … I watched every corner … and I took a most indirect way to Hamor House.

  Even so, I kept looking over my shoulder, but I saw no one following me.

  When I got there, Lanciano wasn’t there. Or, if he happened to be, he made me wait for more than a glass, and it was dark by the time he ushered me into the same small room where we’d met before.

  “You come to beg for more time, trader?”

  “No. I have what you want.” I lifted the case.

  “Oh?” His dark eyes indicated complete skepticism. “You show me.”

  So I set the leather case on the end of the table desk, untied the leather thongs, and took out the rolled plans, smoothing them out and stepping back. I felt as though a chill descended upon the room as I did so, but that had to be my imagination.

  Lanciano bent over and looked at the first sheet. His eyes widened. Then he studied the second sheet and all the others. Finally, he straightened and shook his head, almost as if he did not believe what he saw.

  I didn’t smile. Not yet.

  “I am impressed, Trader Moraris. These wil
l indeed pay off your note.”

  “And a bit more.”

  “Do not be greedy, Moraris.”

  “That might be for the best,” said a third voice.

  Lanciano started, his eyes widening, and I half-turned.

  Just inside the door stood two figures clad completely in black. From the cut of their garb, it was clear they were black mages. I didn’t recognize either, but that might have been because their faces were somehow obscured.

  Lanciano’s hand went to the hilt of the blade at his waist.

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” said the taller figure in black.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?” asked the shorter figure. From the lighter voice, it was clear she was a woman, and somehow that irritated me. Always … always it was the women who spoiled things.

  “The plans?” asked Lanciano. “They are false?”

  “No … those are plans for a steam turbine. In fact, they’re copies of the plans of Dorrin’s third turbine. I doubt they’d do you much good.” The taller black took a step toward Lanciano.

  The shorter one seemed to be watching me.

  For the first time I’d ever seen, the Hamorian actually looked angry. He glared at me. “You told them.”

  “No, he didn’t, but it would have been better if he had. Much better.”

  “Why aren’t the plans any good?” I found myself asking.

  “They’re absolutely accurate, but it takes close to perfect order to make the components. Otherwise, the turbine will fail. Sometimes, the failures have been spectacular, I’m told.” The taller black mage went on. “You aren’t the first to attempt to get the plans. You won’t be the last.”

  “You’ve both been looking for perfect order,” said the unnamed woman whose voice I did not recognize. “It would be a shame if you didn’t find it.”

  “Perfect order,” sneered Lanciano. “It does not exist.”

  “Oh … it does. Perfect order is where nothing changes. Black iron comes close, so close that we claim it embodies perfect order, but it’s not quite. In people, perfect order exists when the body holds no chaos at all.”

  I tried not to swallow as I realized what the mage meant.

  “Words,” scoffed Lanciano.

  “I’m afraid not, honored trader,” said the taller black mage, sadly.

  Suddenly, a far greater chill filled the room … or the space around the Hamorian. He didn’t even have time to look surprised. He just toppled forward.

  The shorter black mage stepped forward and picked up the plans and deftly rolled them up, replacing them in the leather case.

  “What are you going to do with me?” I asked. “Give me your perfect order?”

  “That would be too easy,” replied the taller one. “Besides, we promised we wouldn’t.”

  That was what Lhean had meant by saying he’d do “his best” for me! He’d put the demon-cursed Brotherhood above his own cousin. Hadn’t family and all I’d done for him meant anything at all?

  “We could put you on a merchanter to Hamor,” added the woman, “but you wouldn’t live long enough to regret your stupidity. Southwind, I think, will be good for that. The head councilor thought so.”

  “That’s where they follow the Legend.” I tried not to swallow.

  “It’s another form of order, just not perfect order,” said the shorter black mage, “refined by women, by the way. And we have a ship headed that way, leaving tonight. You’ll even get to know how good those engines are.” There was a hint of a nasty smile behind those words.

  “You won’t be able to see for a while,” added the man. “Not until you’re on board. This way, the honored Hamorian trader will be found alone. His heart stopped. You will have vanished. Everyone will suspect you did it … somehow. And you won’t be able to say a thing.”

  Or ever return to Nylan. Or be a trader or a factor anywhere.

  I knew I shouldn’t have talked so much to the woman engineer. Women … no matter what you do, they’ll get a man in trouble every time.

  Over the years, a number of readers of the Recluce Saga have asked about Cassius, and how he came to Recluce. Well … here’s the answer …

  BLACK ORDERMAGE

  I

  There was the fire, welling up everywhere on the flight deck—and an explosion and a flash of brilliant white. Everything seemed to hang in the balance. Then, blackness flowed around me, and after that so did currents of black-and-white light. The black felt calming. It was reassuring. The white burned.

  Both vanished, and I dropped maybe two feet onto something hard. It only took a moment to catch my balance. I was used to pitching decks. But … there wasn’t any heat, and there weren’t any flames. A moment before, I’d been acting as nozzleman on the flight deck, and now my hands were empty. Less than three yards away from me a little guy in red-and-yellow rags took what looked to be a curved sabre and slashed a bigger guy in blue and black across the back of his calf. Even before the big guy went down, a silver-haired woman in black slashed the smaller man’s throat and then took out another attacker with a neat thrust.

  Another crewman in blue went down, and a pole—no, a staff—rolled across the deck toward my feet. I grabbed the staff. It wasn’t that much different from the pugil stick I’d used when I’d been an instructor in SEE except it wasn’t padded at the ends. They were ironbound.

  The odors/feelings of blood and death shook me like I’d been slammed into a steel bulkhead. I looked out. I was still somewhere on an ocean, but the water looked grayer than the Pacific, and the air was colder. The sky was different—a really different greenish blue. I’d never seen anything like it, not even before a tornado and not in bright sunlight. I glanced down. The deck was wood. I could smell something burning. Coal? Then I could see that the ship had funny stacks, sort of belled like the old stove in Papaw’s house in Hebron. But the people were wearing stuff I’d never seen, and there was another ship, lower, and sleeker, with raked sails, grappled to the railing of the higher-decked vessel where I stood on the aft quarter. Someone yelled, and I jumped. Then more of the men in the ragged and dirty red and yellow were climbing over the rail. Two of them looked at me the way Mamaw might have looked at a plump chicken.

  One of the raiders came charging toward me with his sword—a wide-bladed scimitar of some kind. I spread my feet and brought up the staff from below. No one ever thinks that way. He didn’t, either—not until the iron-tipped end cracked into his arm just below the elbow and his blade went flying. The woman in black ran him through with one thrust.

  By then I was facing a big guy, wider than me, anyway, with a long-handled ax that looked like it could cut right through my staff. I feinted toward his head. When he ducked and dodged, I brought the staff back into the knee that held most of his weight. It cracked. Most men would have toppled. He just staggered. It was enough for me to thwack him topside. He went down then—hard.

  More of the raiders were swarming up the side of the ship. Seemed to me that it was better to get them when they had at least one hand occupied, and I ran to the railing, using the staff as a lance on the first one who started to scramble onto the deck. He went flailing and bounced off the hull and into the water.

  I managed to take out three more, one way or another, but that wasn’t much help, because there were five of them.

  Something slammed into my shoulder. I yelled. A metal bolt stuck out. But another one of the honkies in red and yellow was swinging his scimitars at me. Even with one arm barely working, I used the other one and my body weight to swing the staff across. It connected with his temple, and he went down like one of Papaw’s flour sacks tipped off the wagon.

  Then something else hit me.

  II

  When I tried to wake up, I could hear a woman was speaking to me. I tried to listen. I thought I should understand what she was saying, but the words didn’t make much sense … and then they faded away. So did I.

  When I woke again, so
meone was jabbing hot red needles through my shoulder, and someone else was beating on my skull with a shovel. I was in a narrow bed, lying on something like a rough sheet, and a woolen blanket covered my legs. The bed was spare and wooden. The walls of the small room were dark stone, and the windows did have glass. The only light came from a brass lamp hung on the wall, like the kerosene lamp Mamaw had kept when she’d moved from Hebron after Papaw’s death to be closer to Ma.

  A gray-haired woman in a green shirt, except it was more like the tunics in bad historical movies, held a mug of something to my lips. I swallowed. It was piss-poor beer, not so bad as Narragansett, but almost that bad. I drank it all anyway.

  Behind her was the silver-haired woman in black. She said more of the words I didn’t understand, while the older woman fed me some broth that made the beer taste good. Before long my eyes closed.

  That was the way things were for days and probably longer, except I didn’t see the silver-haired woman again, only the older woman, and I kept wondering where I was and what happened. Had I somehow lost my mind?

  III

  The first time I could finally stay alert—and remember what had happened—I was sitting on the side of a pallet bed in a locked room with barred windows. The two small windows had glass, but it was filthy and outside the bars. My head still ached with a dull throbbing, and the continuous sharp needles in my shoulder had been replaced by occasional stabs from an invisible knife. The sleeve of my working denim shirt had been cut away, and the shoulder was so heavily bound that I could barely move my lower arm. How had I gotten from fighting a flight-deck fire to a shipboard fight on an antique steamship with staffs and swords? Had I deserted and gone out of my mind? Or just gone out of my mind?

  The ironbound door opened. A guard in dirty and faded red set a platter and a mug on the floor, then quickly closed the door. The food was different, but not any better than Navy fare. Just several slices of cold lamb—mutton, really—a wedge of cheese close to rancid, a chunk of stale bread, a bruised golden-red fruit, and a mug of the bitter beer. I was hungry enough that I ate it all.

  Later, two guards escorted a woman into my cell. She wore faded black. Her hands were chained together, and the chains were heavy dark iron. Her skin was tanned, like she’d spent a lot of time in the sun, and she was white. I’d have said she was around thirty, but her hair was silver, even her eyebrows and the fine hair on the exposed part of her forearms. The silver looked natural—and brilliant. But there were bruises on her face and arms, and probably elsewhere. She was the one who had fought so fiercely on the deck of the ship. I couldn’t help admiring her bearing and her spirit, even though we were both captives.