The Magic Engineer

by Jr. L. E. Modesitt

  The redhead holds his narrow lips so tightly they almost turn white. He has persuaded his father to let him spend time with Hegl, and if Hegl will not have him…

  He steps through the open doors and out toward the washstones, where he pauses and splashes his face with the cool water, letting it carry away the heat of the smithy and the embarrassment. After pumping a drink from the spout, he leans toward the garden fed by the runoff from the washstones. Neatly edged in fitted gray stone, the different colored leaves of the herbs, and the few purple-flowered brinn plants, have formed almost mathematically precise rectangles.

  Dorrin lets his senses touch the herbs, feeling the beginning of root rot in the winterspice, always a problem, according to his mother, because Recluce was far warmer than the climes of Nordla. With the practice borne of training, his senses enfold the winterspice, adding the strength the bluish-green-leaved spice needs to resist the dark fungal growths.

  Out of habit, he checks the others, even the rosemary in the drier upper stone garden. With a shake of his head that displaces not a strand of his tight-curled and wiry red hair, he straightens.

  “I wondered why my spices have grown so true this year.” A gray-haired and stocky woman stands by the washstones.

  “Your pardon,” offers Dorrin.

  “My gain, you mean, if you have even a fraction of the skill of your mother.” She smiles. “Why are you out here?”

  “Wandering thoughts,” confesses the youth. “I thought about the wrong thing and turned an unfinished ingot into black steel. Hegl was less than pleased.”

  “He would not be,” affirms the smith’s wife. “But he will find some use for it, if only to demonstrate the strength of his work.”

  Dorrin shakes his head.

  “Kadara will not be back from the Temple until later…she has afternoon classes.”

  “I know. I’m going home until Hegl needs me.” The red-haired youth turns and walks down the flagged path toward the stone paved street.

  Behind him, the smith’s wife shakes her head for an instant before looking at the herb garden. She smiles as she studies the plants.

  Dorrin’s steps carry him past two of the stone-walled and split-stone shingled homes of Extina before he turns and walks up the stone drive slightly wider than the drives of the neighboring dwellings. A set of prints in the faint dust that has settled on the short wiry grass indicates where his mother’s light steps have trod as she has inspected her own garden and trees.

  V

  The man in black looks up, preoccupied, almost as if he does not see the youth on the covered terrace as he walks slowly up the stone walk.

  Looking out beyond his father, Dorrin can see the Black Holding, where the Council on which his father serves meets. No one has lived there in the three centuries since the deaths of the Founders. Slightly to the left of the Black Holding begins the High Road, which stretches to the southeastern tip of Recluce. Much of the southern part of the isle remains forested and uninhabited, except for the few crafthalls and the rich Feyn River plains, where most of the isle’s grains are grown.

  As his eyes flick back to the black buildings on the highest point of the cliffs, Dorrin frowns, absently wondering how true the tales are about Creslin and Megaera. How could they have died at the same exact instant—just as the sun rose? Or is that just another bit of superstition he is supposed to swallow? At least his models do not rely on belief. He frowns. Or do they?

  “Dorrin…” calls the thin-faced man. “We need to talk. Get your brother. The kitchen is fine.”

  “Yes, ser.” He turns and walks down the rear steps from the terrace. Kyl is weeding his own private herb garden, as result of their mother’s threat to withhold sweets until both youths’ gardens are presentable and orderly. Dorrin smiles. The order of Dorrin’s garden has never been a problem. On the other hand, Kyl—his dark-haired younger brother—prefers fishing or crabbing or just staring at the Eastern Ocean to any sort of gardening.

  The stocky boy is not weeding. Instead, he sits disconsolately beside a small pile of wilted weeds. “I hate gardening. Why can’t I go off with Brice, like I wanted?”

  “I suppose,” begins Dorrin, kneeling down beside Kyl and immediately removing small unwanted sprouts as he talks, “because father is a black wizard of the air and mother is a healer. If they were fisherfolk, like Brice’s parents, then they wouldn’t want us to be wizards or healers…”

  “I hate gardening.”

  Dorrin continues to weed, his hands quick and precise among the plants. As he weeds, his fingers stroke the herbs, infusing them with order. “I know.”

  “You don’t like learning about the air, do you?”

  Dorrin shrugs. “I don’t mind learning anything. I like to know about things. I want to make things—not like Hegl, but machines that do things and help people. I’ll never shift the winds or control the storms.”

  “Father can only do little things with the winds. He said so himself.”

  Dorrin shakes his head. “He only does little things, because he fears the effect on the Balance. What good is it to have a power you can’t use? I’d rather do something useful.”

  “Fishing is useful,” Kyl observes. His eyes stray to Dorrin’s hands. “You make weeding look so easy.”

  Dorrin shakes dirt off his fingers and stands, brushing off his gray trousers before straightening up. “Father sent me after you. He has some news.”

  “About what?”

  Dorrin shrugs again before he turns back toward the house. “I don’t think it’s good. He was walking slowly and thinking about something.”

  “Like the time when you ruined Hegl’s iron?”

  Dorrin flushes, but does not turn to let his younger brother see the reaction. “Come on.”

  “I didn’t mean that…”

  Dorrin keeps walking.

  “…and thanks for the help with the weeding.”

  “That’s all right.”

  The weather wizard stands by the kitchen table that seats but four. Both youths incline their heads slightly as they step into the room from the covered porch where they all dine together in weather better than the raw overcast outside. Their mother is sitting in the chair by the window.

  “Sit down,” suggests their father.

  They sit, one on each side of Rebekah. Sitting on the remaining chair, the tall wizard clears his throat.

  “…not another lecture…” mumbles Kyl under his breath.

  “Yes…another lecture,” affirms their father. “This is a lecture that you have heard and forgotten. And it’s very important, because a time of change is upon us.” The wizard sips from the cup he has carried to the table. “Among the White Wizards of Fairhaven there is a chaos wizard whose like has not been seen for centuries. They call him Jeslek. He has even begun to raise mountains in the high plains between Gallos and Kyphros.”

  Rebekah shivers. “Not even the Founders…”

  Oran takes another sip from his cup before speaking. “Something is going to happen, and we have to be prepared. Chaos could crop up just about anywhere.”

  “Anywhere? That’s silly,” comments Kyl.

  “You think that Recluce is immune to chaos?” snorts the tall man. “You think that the order with which we live just happened?”

  “No,” answers Dorrin heavily, wishing his father would get to the point. “This has something to do with me, doesn’t it?”

  His mother looks out the window. Kyl looks at the tile of the floor, then at his brother.

  “Dorrin, now is not the time for your games with machines and models.” Oran draws out the words.

  “Now, Oran,” temporizes the red-haired woman. “He’s still young.”

  “Young he may be, but order doesn’t flow right when he’s around. Have you talked to Hegl? Poor man’s afraid to work iron when Dorrin’s nearby. I can’t sense the storms when he gets worried. Crellor—Never mind! And with the Fairhaven wizards talking about fleets and pressuring the Nord
lans to stop trading with us, things are getting too serious to have order disrupted.” The air wizard frowns, then coughs. “Too serious,” he repeats.

  “What do you want me to do? Disappear?”

  Oran shakes his head, pulls at his chin, then purses his lips. “Nothing is ever that simple. Never that simple.”

  Dorrin picks up the heavy tumbler and sips the lukewarm redberry.

  Kyl winks at his older brother, and Rebekah glares at her younger son. Kyl shrugs when her glance shifts to Oran.

  Finally, Oran looks at Dorrin. “We’ve talked about this all before, about how you insist on making your models and thinking about machines. And I asked you to think about it.” The tall wizard pauses. “It’s clear that you haven’t taken my words seriously enough.”

  “I have thought about it,” Dorrin says slowly. “I would rather be a smith or a woodworker. They make real things. Even a healer helps people. You can see what happens. I don’t want to spend my life watching things. I want to do things and to create things.”

  “Sometimes, watching things saves many lives. Remember the big storm last year…”

  “Father…? The legends say that Creslin could direct the storms. Why can’t—”

  “We’ve talked about that before, Dorrin. If we direct the storms, it will change the world’s weather, make a desert of Recluce again, and kill thousands everywhere. You’re just going to have to concentrate on what you’re supposed to be doing. And I can’t make you. I’m sending you to study with Lortren.”

  “Is that wise?” asks Rebekah.

  “What else can I do? He doesn’t listen to me.”

  “Father?”

  “Yes, Dorrin.”

  The redhead takes a deep breath. “I do listen to you. I can’t do what you want me to do, and I don’t want to. You are a great air wizard. I never will be. Can’t you just let me be what I am?”

  “Dorrin, machines and chaos were what brought down the Angels. Now, admittedly, you couldn’t handle chaos if your life depended on it, which, thankfully, it doesn’t. But this obsession with building machines is unnatural. What good will they bring? Will they make people healthier, the way healers do? Or will we tear up the earth in search of metals? Will we poison the rivers refining them? And part of the order of Recluce is supported by the core of cold iron ore that runs down the hills above the Feyn. Would you throw that away for machines that would run and wither away?”

  Dorrin looks down for a moment, then turns to his father. “It doesn’t have to be that way. Hegl doesn’t make a mess. Everything there is reused.”

  “Hegl doesn’t need stones’ and stones’ worth of metals. Machines do.” Oran shakes his head. “Perhaps Lortren can make you two understand.”

  “What did I do?” protests Kyl.

  “Nothing,” answers the air wizard.

  “But…?”

  “Oh…I was referring to Dorrin’s friend Kadara. She thinks that strength and skill are the answer to everything. She refuses to listen to her mother, only to Hegl, because she only respects physical strength.”

  “Kadara’s going to the Academy, too?” Dorrin looks from his brother toward his father.

  Oran nods. “I am not exactly pleased with the idea. Nor is Hegl, but the Brotherhood is even less pleased about the thought of either one of you continuing essentially unsupervised, especially as friends. Lortren should be able to teach you a thing or two.”

  “What if he can’t?” asks Kyl fearfully.

  Both parents look at the younger son.

  “Well, what if he can’t?” demands the dark-haired boy.

  “We’ll face that later,” answers the air wizard. “And Lortren is a woman. She is equally adept with a shortsword and the manipulation of order.”

  Kyl’s eyes dart from his father to his older brother and back.

  Oran takes another sip from his tumbler.

  Rebekah stands. “Dinner will be ready in just a moment. Kyl?” She inclines her head toward the pantry. Kyl scurries for the tableware.

  “I need to check something,” the air wizard comments, setting the tumbler on the top of the pie safe before walking toward the study.

  Dorrin looks toward his mother, who slices scallions into a skillet. After a moment, he walks toward the porch to think before dinner.

  VI

  “There are no great weather-wizards on Recluce now. Not like Creslin.”

  A thin man in white shakes his head. “Was he as great as the records say? Destroying an entire Hamorian fleet?”

  “That was before he really got going,” snaps a heavier man in the first row. “Check the older histories. Especially about the weather.”

  “Don’t play games with the youngster,” croaks another voice. “Just tell him.”

  “You tell him, Fiedner.”

  “It is so simple, young master wizard,” croaks the dried-out wizard called Fiedner. “So simple, and so complex. Three centuries past, the Council included Blacks. Not many, to be sure, for the Whites looked down upon the Blacks. And the magic of order is more complex and less directly powerful than that of chaos. Or so everyone thought until Creslin walked off the Roof of the World.”

  “He was real?”

  “Aye, that he was. Real enough to change a White witch into an order-master near as great as he. Real enough to destroy scores of ships sent against him. Real enough to turn Kyphros into the hot desert it is today, and northern Spidlar into a cold and snowy wilderness. Real enough to turn Recluce from a desert into a garden island.”

  The young man shakes his head. “Folk tales! Nonsense!” Fire flares from his fingers—not just red-tinged white, but a flame like a blade that saws a chunk out of one of the granite columns bordering the chamber.

  Clunk…

  “Folk tales, they are. But you’re here today because Creslin lived then.”

  “Explain,” demands the slim young man with the sunlike eyes and white hair.

  “The Balance is real. Aye, real, and you disregard it at your peril. Jenred the Traitor never believed in the Balance, and we have paid and paid for that ignorance. In Creslin’s time, chaos dominated, and the Balance was forced to find a focus. The Blacks manipulated the focus into creating Creslin, and they had him trained outside of Fairhaven.”

  “Westwind? That much is verifiable.”

  “It is what is not verifiable that concerns you, Jeslek. Creslin was order-bound, but trained as a Westwind senior guard. That meant more then. Along the way, even before he attained his powers, he killed an entire bandit troop singlehandedly, and three or four squads of White Road Guards. Oh, and he could sing almost as well as the legendary Werlynn.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “It saved his ass when magic wasn’t enough. You had better learn the same,” cackles the old voice.

  “Bah!” The voice cuts nearly as deeply as the chaos fire of the speaker. “Not even the Blacks of Kyphros could stop me.”

  “They are not the Blacks of Recluce.”

  The words hang for a time in the air.

  “Who said that?”

  But no voice owns the statement, and in time Jeslek sheathes his fires and steps into the twilight outside the chamber, walking along the never-dark, white-lit streets of Fairhaven toward the old city center.

  VII

  The tall man tethers the horse and locks the brake on the two-seated wagon. The two redheads reach for their belongings. Shortly, four figures traverse the stone lane that leads gently uphill from the coastal road. The two redheads bear packs on their shoulders. The two men walk as though they bear heavier and unseen burdens.

  The paved and time-smoothed walk of black stone stretches toward half a dozen black stone buildings roofed with a gray slate nearly as black as the stone walls. Even the wide windows in the buildings are framed with dark wood. The grass between the walks and walls and buildings is dark green, thick, wiry, and short.

  The four pass a diamond-shaped garden of blue and silver flower
s—set within low walls of the same black stones. The leaves rustle in the cool fall breeze. In the deep green-blue sky, white puffy clouds scud westward.

  “Where are we going?” asks the sole female, too old to be a girl, too young to be a woman.

  “To the black building on the right,” responds the tallest figure.

  “All the buildings are black.”

  “Kadara,” warns the shorter of the two men.

  “This whole place is black.”

  Dorrin glances from Kadara, who has had the nerve to voice his own feelings, to his father. “Why is it called the Academy?” He has heard the answer, but knows that Kadara has not, and does not want Hegl or his father to be critical of her.

  Oran’s lips quirk before he responds. “Originally, it had no name. It started years ago when a former Westwind Guard tutored some younger Blacks in self-defense. They paid for the tutoring by teaching logic and the science of order to what was then the remnant of the Westwind Guard detachment.” Oran pauses, gestures at the building. “The side door, there.” He steps forward. “Someone supposedly called the place the Academy of Useless and Violent Knowledge. It became the Academy.”

  They walk up two wide stone steps onto a small covered porch. Kadara tightens her lips, and her eyes rake over both her father and Oran before coming to rest on Dorrin. Hegl shifts his weight as he stops.

  “Perhaps they can teach me about using a blade,” she says mildly.

  Oran opens the dark oak door and holds it for the others. The three others remain on the wide stones of the porch without moving. Finally, Dorrin shrugs and steps inside. A white-haired and muscular woman a shade shorter than Dorrin appears in the doorway on the far side of a foyer that measures perhaps seven cubits on a side.

  “Greetings.” Her voice is more musical than her stern and ageless face.

  Dorrin nods. “Greetings.”

  “Greetings, magistra,” offers Oran.

  “I’m still Lortren, you pompous ass,” returns the black-clad woman. “You know what I think about titles between adults.”