The White Order

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “You were a scrivener’s apprentice…” Faltar said gently.

  “I told you, didn’t I?” Cerryl wasn’t sure what he’d told to whom anymore, but he thought he’d told Faltar.

  “Yes. When you first came to the halls.” The blond student mage glanced up the avenue, toward the line of clouds to the east. “We’d better hurry. That looks like rain.”

  “It won’t get here for a while, and the wind feels good.” Cerryl walked faster, enjoying stretching his legs.

  “Sometimes… I wonder what it would have been like. To have a trade, I mean.”

  “It’s different. I don’t miss the sawmill.”

  “Sawmill?”

  “Oh, I was a mill boy before I was apprenticed to Tellis. The winters were cold, and I never seemed to get warm. Dylert was fair, but the work only got harder as I got bigger.”

  Faltar’s steps slowed as he looked sideways. “No one would ever guess. You’re not that big. You look more like a scrivener.”

  “Thin and scrawny?”

  Faltar flushed.

  Cerryl laughed softly. “I do. I know it.”

  Two girls, probably not much older than Pattera, saw the white tunics and slipped down the side way in the middle of the row of the grand houses with their now-gray trees and gardens.

  “They weren’t that pretty,” said Faltar.

  “Who?”

  “The girls. Don’t you like girls?”

  “I like girls. I wasn’t looking.”

  “Ever had a girl? You could, any time, if you wanted.”

  “No. I could have, but…” Cerryl wondered how Benthann might be doing. Somehow, he’d felt it would have been wrong to go back to Tellis’s, even if he couldn’t quite say why.

  “And you didn’t?” Faltar’s voice rose slightly. “It could have caused a lot of trouble.”

  “Well… it’s different here. If you find a girl who’s willing, and most will give you a tumble.”

  “Why? Because they’ll get a dowry settlement from the Guild?” Cerryl struggled to keep the edge from his voice. “Well… it’s better that way.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Oh.” After a moment, Faltar asked, “You’ve been through a lot of hard times, haven’t you?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know. Except you don’t see things the same way. And you’re so quiet. Sometimes, when you’re in a place, it’s as though you’re almost invisible.”

  “Sometimes, I wish I could be. Especially now.”

  “Derka says that some of them can do that. They bend light around themselves. There’s another way to do it, but he won’t tell me what it is. He says it’s not a good thing to do.”

  Light again-always light. Cerryl nodded. “Why do you want to be invisible?”

  “I am already. Kesrik, Bealtur, they wish I didn’t exist. I’m not a mage’s son, and I don’t come from coins.”

  “Kinowin didn’t, either.”

  “And he looks like he had to beat them into accepting him. He’s a head taller than even Jeslek.”

  “They say that Creslin was small.”

  “But he was a black mage.”

  “Power is power,” said Faltar.

  Was it? Cerryl glanced past the last house on the left-Muneat’s, the only one he knew, with the bird fountain-and to the square, where only a handful of shoppers still remained around the colored carts. “They say coins are power, too.”

  “It’s not the same. Coins aren’t. Kesrik comes from coins, and Sterol doesn’t give a copper.”

  “Maybe that’s why Sterol is High Wizard.”

  “It’s not just chaos power. Jeslek can hold more chaos than anyone.” Faltar glanced around nervously.

  “It’s what you can do with it. I know that. And Sterol and Jeslek aren’t the best of friends. They wouldn’t have quarters as far apart as they do if they were.”

  “That’s true. None of the mages talk about it, though.”

  “What good would it do?” Cerryl stepped off the curb and started across the empty avenue to the square. “They’d risk making either Sterol or Jeslek angry.”

  A wisp of thin smoke, bearing the smell of roast fowl, drifted by the two students.

  “Smells better than anything in the halls.”

  Cerryl had to admit that it did.

  “Split a half fowl?”

  “How much, do you think?” asked Cerryl.

  “Two coppers, maybe, for a half. One for you and one for me.”

  “Since it’s not often…” The younger student grinned, trying not to think how many days’ pay that would have been once.

  Faltar walked over to the blue wagon and the hefty woman in gray at the spit over the charcoal in the metal firepit. “How much for a half?”

  “Three coppers, ser.”

  “Two,” insisted Faltar. “I’m hungry enough that I don’t want to haggle.”

  The woman shrugged. “Two, I can live with. It’s late.” She pulled the spit off its holder and deftly lifted a thick black knife-more like a cleaver.

  Cerryl found his mouth watering as Faltar handed him the browned and dripping quarter fowl, and he bent forward so that none of the drippings would touch his tunic.

  “Better than in the halls,” confirmed Faltar, his mouth nearly full.

  “Yes,” mumbled Cerryl, finding himself nearly ravenous.

  They ate silently and quickly.

  Cerryl had to lick his fingers clean, and they still felt sticky.

  “I’m going to look around.” Faltar inclined his head and then slipped toward a green-and-blue cart-or the slender girl holding up a woven basket.

  The younger mage smiled to himself and turned the other way, Passing a cart filled with long yellow gourds and thin green ones. He Paused after several vegetable carts at another kind of cart painted gold and silver. Three blades lay on a display board covered with blue velvet. was short and dark-and he could feel the chill of ordered iron. The second was of fired white bronze, like a white lancer’s sabre, although it wasn’t. The third was a huge iron broadsword, one that Cerryl doubted he could have lifted, with a wound-copper hilt.

  “You like the sabre? For you, a mere gold,” insisted the pallid man by the cart, limping forward from where he had been talking to a darker swarthy fellow.

  “No… no thank, you.” Cerryl smiled and stepped back.

  “As you wish, ser.”

  He could sense the anger and disapproval and turned. “I’m not a weapons mage.” He wasn’t sure there were any weapons mages, but the blades felt wrong for him.

  The man bowed, almost as if puzzled.

  Cerryl nodded and passed to the next cart, where colored scarves were wound loosely around polished wooden pegs on a display board and fluttered in a breeze that barely ruffled his hair.

  “Scarves of silksheen, real silksheen from Naclos.”

  Cerryl had never heard of anything from Naclos, and he reached to touch a silver scarf. As his fingers touched the fabric, smoother than anything he had ever felt, the color darkened almost into gray. He let go of the edge of the scarf and watched as it flashed silver.

  “Only two silvers for you, young ser. Just two silvers.”

  Two silvers for a scarf barely a cubit and a half long and half that in width? Two silvers? Cerryl had never had a whole silver at one time. He smiled politely and stepped away.

  The sound of the first bells of late afternoon echoed up the avenue and across the square. The vendor at the next cart began to unroll the canvas to cover the cart bed and the three baskets of potatoes that remained.

  “Best we head back.” Faltar appeared at Cerryl’s elbow.

  “Did you find anything?”

  “No. One pretty girl, but not that pretty.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.” Cerryl turned toward the Halls of the Mages.

  “Oh… things? What would I do with anything except books? Derka wou
ld only ask me what value it had.”

  “We can’t hold property, can we?”

  “No. Didn’t Jeslek tell you that?”

  “Not in so many words. He never says anything directly.”

  “Derka doesn’t much, either.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “We’re supposed to figure it out, and if we can’t, well, then…” Faltar left the sentence unfinished.

  Cerryl knew well enough what the other meant-all too well.

  LIV

  Cerryl sat at the table, looking blankly at the slate and the wedge of chalk beside it. The whole room smelled of chalk, unlike any of the other mages’ chambers he had been inside.

  Standing at the other side of the ancient table was the heavyset Esaak, wearing flowing white robes of the older style, rather than the white tunic and trousers used by Sterol and Jeslek and all of the younger mages.

  “Master scholar Cerryl… might I have your attention?” Esaak’s jowls wobbled as he spoke, and his voice rumbled.

  “Ser?”

  “Have you read any of the book I left for you? Naturale Mathematicks, it is called, if you do not remember.”

  “Only a few pages, ser.”

  “Why not more, might I ask? Is the ancient and honored study of mathematicks beneath you?” Esaak half-turned, walking a few paces across the dusty floor.

  “No, ser. I fear I am beneath it.”

  “Such refreshing honesty.” The older mage’s words dripped irony. “You seek to disarm me with false modesty.” He coughed several times, with a rumbling deeper than even his bass voice.

  Cerryl felt tongue-tied, feeling he was off on the wrong foot.

  “Well?”

  “No, ser. I can read and write, but my education has been limited to history mostly. The honored Jeslek has insisted that I read all of Colors of White and complete a large map within a short period of time. I have to do some anatomie drawings for the mage Broka. I read the first section of the Mathematicks, but much of it was so unfamiliar…”

  “Tell me what you thought you read…”

  Cerryl wanted to sigh.

  “Go on. What was the first section about? Surely, surely, you can tell me what the words said?”

  Why did all the mages ask questions rather than tell anything? It seemed to Cerryl almost as though he were being asked to teach them. He moistened his lips. “Ser… the very beginning I understood. That was about the history of reckoning, where the first use of numbers were words like ‘yoke’ and ‘pair’ or ‘couple’-two things because we have two hands. Then, as people gathered more goods or crops, or lived in larger settlements, larger numbers were needed, and they came up with terms to count larger groups of things, like ‘score’ and ‘stone’…”

  “What is similar about the two?”

  Cerryl looked as blank as he felt.

  “They’re each a pair multiplied by ten,” snapped Esaak. “A stone is a pair of fists ten times over. A score is a couple of hunters ten times over. Go on.”

  “Then the book started talking about something called partition enumeration…”

  “And when it got a little difficult… you stopped reading?”

  “No, ser. I kept reading. I understood the idea of dividing groups of things into groups of the same size and using symbols to represent larger numbers, like ten score, but when it started on how to scrive such numbers, and that you had to have a symbol for nothing…”

  “Why shouldn’t there be a number for nothing? Isn’t not having something as important to know as having something?”

  That wasn’t exactly what Cerryl had meant. At least, it wasn’t what he thought he’d meant. “It is, ser. I meant…”

  “What did you mean? Mathematicks is precision, not vague statements about a few stone or score. How would you like it if a lancer scout told you that the force you faced was a bunch of scores of arms-men?”

  “I’d want to know more.”

  “And you should.” Esaak gave an even louder and more dramatic sigh, readjusting his robes as he did. “You know… you’re all alike. All of you seem to think that what we teach you is because we owe you something.”

  “Oh… the days, the years I have spent pounding and prying knowledge into empty-ordered heads. For what? So that you can go off and dash your brains out against some evil-hearted order magician from the black isle? So you can overload a ship and sink it in the sight of rough water?” Esaak exhaled noisily.

  Cerryl waited, not knowing what to say, or even if he should attempt to say a word.

  “You all can see the value of even learning to fire-scrub sewers, or to memorize every bone in the body the better to destroy it, or to make maps for the day when you will direct lancers in battle… But what is behind it all? Mathematicks! Calculations! Numbers!”

  Cerryl felt like slinking out by the time Esaak was through, although the older mage had said enough-eventually-that Cerryl could grasp the idea of a symbol of nothing as a place holder for calculations. It made sense, but, like too many things, no one had ever explained it.

  There was one question that Esaak had raised and not really answered-what did all the mages do besides make life difficult for student mages? If Jeslek happened to be any example, they didn’t spend all that much time with students, just enough to set them on projects and complain about the results. They came and went, and so did many carriages and wagons, and Cerryl had overheard talk about various rulers, and soldiers, and even sewers. Jeslek had talked about governing but said that it wasn’t ruling but guiding, without ever defining what he meant.

  Cerryl felt dazed. He had learned much already, but none of it really answered the question of what exactly the white mages did. Everyone talked around everything without describing it.

  Slowly, he walked back to the common, then began to hurry as he realized he was due to meet Eliasar. He dropped the book on his cell desk and practically ran to the common.

  The blocky mage rose from the corner table and looked toward the flustered Cerryl. “You can slow down. Where were you?”

  “Esaak was tutoring me on mathematicks…”

  “Is he still using that stupid example about ‘a bunch of scores of lancers’?”

  “He did use a phrase like that, ser.”

  “Let’s get you out to the armory, boy, and I’ll tell you why it’s a stupid phrase.” Eliasar turned and marched toward the rear corridor.

  Cerryl found himself nearly running to keep up with the quick steps of the battered-looking Eliasar.

  “Old Esaak is right about one thing. Numbers and calculations are important, but in battle-ha! Who knows?” Eliasar stepped into the rear courtyard, striding past six mounted lancers without even looking at them.

  Cerryl gave the mounts and their riders a slightly wider berth than the mage.

  “Look-I need to know exactly how many horses I’m taking on an expedition to say, Spidlar. Spidlar’s as good an example as any. We’ll be fighting there before long, anyway, unless I miss my guess. How much feed does a mount require? How many mounts? How many days? So how much grain do I need? How many lancers? How many levies that we have to feed? How much can I count on from foraging? That’s the sort of things, you need numbers for. Darkness, half the time in a fight, you can’t see how many, or where, or know if what you’ve got is even where it should be. And you don’t have time to use a glass, and even if you did, you probably couldn’t figure out what you saw quick enough to use it before it changed.”

  Eliasar marched through an open doorway and into a long room filled, it seemed to Cerryl, with racks and racks of weapons. The white mage passed the line of white bronze lances, shimmering in their racks, and stopped in the rear before another set of racks, yanking out what appeared to be a padded shirt. “Put that on. Right over your runic. Won’t be wearing it that long anyways.”

  Cerryl pulled on the padded shirt.

  “Now this.” Eliasar extended what appeared to be bronze body armor of some sort, a combination of
breastplate and back plates and shoulder gauntlets or whatever they were called. “Over your head.”

  The student mage struggled into the heavy bronze half-armor.

  “Remember this is white-bronze. Good steel is heavier.”

  Heavier? Cerryl wasn’t sure he could have carried heavier armor.

  “And this is only partial armor.” Eliasar picked up a long heavy blade and a pair of gauntlets and marched out, as if expecting Cerryl to follow. “You won’t wear this, probably not ever, but you’ll wear it today.”

  The youth followed the older mage back out and across another courtyard, along yet another corridor and out into an empty practice yard where a heavy wooden post, more like a heavy slashed tree trunk, stood. Eliasar stopped a half-dozen cubits short of the post. “How do you feel?”

  “It’s heavy,” admitted Cerryl.

  Eliasar handed Cerryl a pair of bronze gauntlets. “Put them on.”

  Cerryl pulled on the gauntlets, flexing his fingers. Surprisingly, the fingers of the metal gloves moved easily.

  “Take this.” Eliasar extended the blade, then pointed to the wooden post. “Go ahead. Take a whack at it.”

  Cerryl just looked. “I don’t know how.”

  “Just lift the blade and chop.” Eliasar stepped back several paces.

  Awkwardly, Cerryl lifted the blade and swung it. The white bronze bounced off the wood, and Cerryl staggered back a step, trying to keep his balance.

  “Strike again.”

  Cerryl levered the blade around, and his whole arm ached as the blade struck the post and rebounded.

  “Do it again.”

  With both hands on the big hilt, Cerryl forced another thudding blow to the post, followed by yet another, further numbing Cerryl’s arms.

  “Keep at it!” demanded Eliasar.

  When the arms mage finally allowed Cerryl to stop, the youth was drenched with sweat, and he could barely lift the blade to hand it back to Eliasar.

  “It’s not so easy, is it?” asked the blocky mage, taking the gauntlets back as well.

  “No, ser.”

  “You barely swung that blade for a tenth part of a morn, and some battles last all day. Best remember that when you order armsmen to fight.” Eliasar turned, clearly expecting Cerryl to follow, leading him to yet another courtyard that Cerryl had no idea existed.