After Dasir, the road got straighter, emptier, and the hills more barren, with a few scattered goats, the kind that made for bounties or dinner, assuming anyone could catch them. That night Yelena supervised dinner-dried meat, cheese, and tea that tasted metallic from the pot-at a waystation in the middle of nowhere. I shared my bag of dried peaches.
“Nice to have dried fruit,” mumbled Weldein.
“There are some advantages to traveling with a craftmaster,” suggested Yelena.
I had to orderspell the water twice. That’s how brackish it was.
A day later, Weldein pointed to the next kaystone-Jikoya.
“Wait,” was all he said.
A smaller, and poorer, version of Dasir-that was Jikoya. The whitewashed plaster of the houses was graying, and the roof tiles were often cracked and some were missing. Some children were barefoot and ragged. I felt my warm jacket and looked at them. Goats ran free.
“What about the goats?” I asked, recalling that uncontrolled goats were food and/or bounty, according to the autarch’s laws.
“People here don’t pay that much attention to the laws. They’re too poor, and the autarch is far away,” said Freyda, riding almost beside me.
There was a barracks-of sorts-attached to a house. I slept on the floor, on my bedroll, rather than trust the vermin-infested straw pallet. Even so, and with what wards I could muster, I had a few reddish bites when I rolled to my feet the next morning. I understood-at least somewhat-the autarch’s willingness to trade Jikoya to save trained troops.
Breakfast was hot porridge, and it was hot, which was about all it had to offer. I found grain for Gairloch, and he munched happily enough.
From Jikoya, the old, old road south ran toward.Lythga, and that took two days. Camping in the desolate hills with the low wind howling off the not-too-distant mountains was more restful than sleeping in the Jikoya barracks, and not much colder, although I found both Weldein and Jylla shivering and stamping the next morning.
“Cold?”
“You wizards never get cold, do you?” asked the young man.
“Sometimes, but it gets colder than this where I’m from, and it certainly gets colder up north, in places like Spidlar and Sligo.”
“They can have it,” said Jylla, huddling close to the small fire.
I shrugged, wishing I could wash up, but there had been no water, outside of a single plains pothole, since Jikoya.
I did have some of my hoarded redberry and shared it with the others.
“See… wizards do have some good surprises!” Weldein stated, munching on cheese and spraying some forth with the words.
“This wizard…” grudged Jylla.
Gairloch wasn’t that happy about the lack of water, but he got to drink at another pothole, as Yelena predicted, by midmorning.
Late in the afternoon, an irregular line of trees appeared on the southern horizon.
“That’s the Sturbal River. It’s just a stream. Circles west and south around the High Desert. Weren’t for that, and the old mines, Lythga wouldn’t be there,” explained Weldein.
A good kay outside of Lythga, the narrow road joined a wider one that stretched to the east to the town and southwest along the Sturba!.
Yelena gestured to the east. No kaystone marked the approach to Lythga, and the road was rutted with old tracks. Even the shoulders had deep gouges half filled with red dust and sand. I looked at the gouges and then at Yelena.
“It used to be a mining road. They took copper, and silver, and a little gold from the mines, but it’s all gone now. Has been for centuries.”
The gouges looked old, and I probed them with my order senses. I couldn’t tell much, only that they had been there for a long time.
After climbing a low hill, Gairloch whuffed, thirsty. On the slope down to the Sturbal and the narrow stone bridge were two roofless log squares that had once been houses. A short cedar grew in the doorway of one. Next to the bridge was an even smaller roofless structure.
“The old tollhouse,” explained Yelena. “That’s how they paid for the bridge.”
On the other side of the stream, a deep gash in the land with only a narrow ribbon of water, were more roofless houses, with desert scrub and cedars growing in and around them.
The road turned northeast, following a twist in the Sturbal, and I glanced from one ruined building to another for nearly a kay. There was a square, with a pedestal that had once apparently held a statue, and three buildings on the northeast side. One had a sign with a pickax crossed over a sword. The second had crossed candles, and the third was boarded up.
Yelena reined up outside the sagging stables behind the Pick and Sword.
Lythga made poor Jikoya look as prosperous as Kyphrien itself.
“Have you been here?” I asked the others.
The three troopers shook their heads.
“It’s been five years,” said Yelena. “I hope it’s the last time.”
So did I, especially after a boiled bear dinner that made cold cheese seem wonderful. Weldein and I shared a room whose floor sagged more than a sailor’s hammock. But I did sleep- after a lot of work with wards to deal with insects.
Weldein watched my muttering over the wards, shaking his head.
The next morning was gray again, with more drizzle that wasn’t rain and that didn’t bring much moisture to the ground. I was stiff, but the stiffness left as we rode eastward until almost noon, with brief stops to water the horses. Sometime near noon, Yelena picked a spot on a point that was almost a sandbar in the stream where we could eat and let our mounts graze on the sparse grass and drink. Gairloch preferred the leaves of one type of scrub, but they seemed harmless.
I gave Jylla the last of the white cheese.
“Thank you. You’re not bad for a wizard. I can even see why the commander likes you.”
I shrugged. I hoped so.
I was the last, as always, to remount for the ride to the Lower Easthorns, now looming reddish-brown and close enough to touch. It still was mid-afternoon before Yelena reined up-perhaps half a kay from the beginning of the road across the lower pass. The sunlight filtered through thin, hazy clouds above the plains to the west and south behind us, the plains that rose higher to the south until they became the High Desert of southeast Kyphros.
“I hope your task is easier than the last time we parted so.” Yelena inclined her head.
“So do I, Leader Yelena.”
Weldein gave me a salute as they turned away, and I nudged Gairloch toward the entry to the lower pass road. I only looked back once, and they were already dots on the road.
The road at the beginning of the pass was narrow, not much more than a dozen cubits wide before it dropped down into the narrow stream that had so little water that I could have stepped across it. The streambed was a good four cubits below the road surface, and the smoothed and curved surfaces of the boulders and stones around which the stream flowed showed that it often was wild and deep. The road itself bore hoof prints, even an oxen track, and recent droppings.
Gairloch stutter-stepped through the natural rock gates, but the steep rock walls curved away from the road and stream within a dozen rods, and the road began to climb.
Wheee… eeee…
“I know. It’s no fun carrying all those tools, and you don’t have any company, either.” I patted him on the neck.
On the way, when we got to a straight section of the road, with no one around, I practiced setting up my shields, the kind that shuttled light around me. While no one could see Gairloch or me, I couldn’t see anyone else either, and had to use my very rudimentary order senses to feel my way along.
Gairloch couldn’t see anything, and he shortened his steps. I patted him again, offering him a little sense of order, but I wanted him to get used to it again before we had to use it for real. The shields only worked for light, and that meant if he whinnied, anyone could hear us. They could also see hoof prints. Magic doesn’t solve all problems. It would be nice if
it did, but it doesn’t.
After a while, Gairloch’s stride lengthened a little, and he stopped being quite so skittish. I released my hold on the shields and took a deep breath. We’d covered less than a kay. It was a slow way to travel.
“Good fellow.”
As we climbed and as the sun dropped, the road got colder. Both my breath and Gairloch’s began to steam in the late afternoon. Higher in the low mountains, I could see patches of snow. I stopped and pulled on my heavy jacket, although I didn’t close it.
After about another ten kays, the road stopped climbing quite so steeply in a long flat valley filled with a mixture of brown grass, short cedars, boulders, and heaps of snow on the north side of the boulders and cedars. The road was dampened clay, and most tracks had faded with the melting of the earlier snowfall. Some of the grass had been cropped short, but in the dimness, I could see no sign of sheep or goats.
Yelena had said there was a waystation, and there was, although the ancient door had rotted off the heavy old iron hinges, and the sod-grass roof clearly leaked when it snowed or rained-at least I assumed the damp spots and depressions in the dirt floor were from natural moisture.
Door or no door, I wasn’t that cold. Even a little order-mastery solved that, but cold food was another thing. Cheese was all right cold, and so was the bread, but after nearly an eight-day, I was missing Rissa’s cooking. I even missed my own cooking.
I let Gairloch graze for a while, then fed him some grain and led him to the spring behind the waystation. I looked at the road to the east, which continued to climb into the Lower Easthorns, then dragged him back to near the waystation where I unrolled my bedroll in a sheltered corner. I slept, without dreaming.
X
West of Arastia, Hydlen [Candar]
GERLIS TAKES OUT the small polished glass and sets it in the center of the cream-colored linen that covers the portable table, centering it carefully. Then he walks to the tent entrance and peers out through the canvas flap.
“Orort, I don’t wish to be disturbed-except by His Extraordinarily Supreme and Willful Mightiness, the Duke.”
“Yes, ser.” The guard inclines his head, and by the time he lifts it, the tent flap is back down. He swallows.
Inside, Gerlis sits on the polished white oak stool and stares at the screeing glass, ignoring the sweat that beads on his forehead and the heat that slowly builds in the tent.
First, white mists appear in the glass, then a wavering image, which Gerlis studies. Five dusty riders plod down a narrow road. The lead rider is a Kyphran officer, accompanying a figure on a smaller horse.
As the image wavers and fades, Gerlis frowns. “Danger from a few Kyphrans?” He wipes his forehead. After a time, he stands and walks to the corner of the pavilion tent, where he lifts a bottle of wine and takes a single long drink.
“Turning already… curses of the power…” He takes another drink before he sets the open bottle back on the top of the closed single trunk that doubles as a second table beside the narrow cot. Then he walks back to the table and sits down.
Again, he concentrates, and is rewarded with the mists, and a second image-that of a slender balding man in a tan uniform with a sunburst pin upon his collar.
Gerlis frowns. “The sundevils… spells trouble… but not for a time.” He gestures, and the glass blanks. “Not until after Berfir holds Hydlen firmly.”
For the third time, his eyes fix on the glass and call for an image-that of a thin man in the colors of Hydlen who sharpens a long knife and looks over his shoulder toward the setting sun.
Gerlis nods at last.
“… friend Cennon… assassins yet…” His words to himself are barely a whisper.
He lifts his left hand and gazes at it. “The left hand of the Duke, and many will rue it.” Whitish-red fire flickers from his fingertips, and he smiles. Far beneath the meadow, the earth rumbles, and shortly the grasses beyond the tents ripple in the windless afternoon.
XI
A COLD WIND blew through the door, and scattered snowflakes danced into the waystation. A thin carpet of snow lay inside the doorway.
I climbed out of my bedroll, somewhat stiffly, and struggled with a few scraps of wood and some twigs I collected from the scrub bushes. Before too long, a small fire burned, heating water in my single battered pot. I needed tea or something.
Gairloch had whuffed and whinnied the whole time I gathered wood and twigs, and I went back out and untied him.
Whheeeee… eeeeee… eeee.
“I should have untied you first? Is that it?” I led him to the spring, and then let him browse as he could while I used my pot to make too-strong tea to go with biscuits that had gotten hard enough to use my chisels on. Instead I dunked them in the tea, ignoring the tea-smoky taste. Then I had some raisins and the last of the olives. Olives don’t travel that well, except in brine, and brine’s heavy.
My washing up was cursory, with no shaving, since I wasn’t likely to sweat, not with the chill wind off the higher peaks and the scattered snowflakes reminding me that it was almost winter, although the pass was never supposed to be closed by snow. Or not for long, because it was so far south.
I looked at the clouds before I went back into the waystation and stood in front of my little fire. While order-mastery did keep my body from getting too cold, a fire helped, too.
A small piece of older cedar wedged in the corner of the near empty wood bin caught my eye, and I wriggled it free. It wasn’t that long, perhaps a third of a cubit and maybe three spans wide, but it had been rough-sawn at both ends, and discarded as too short for firewood, I guessed. The grain was even, and while I warmed myself as the fire died down, I took out my knife and began to experiment. Carving hadn’t been my greatest strength, and it could use some improvement.
A face lay under the wood, but whose face it might be remained to be seen as my carving progressed. I couldn’t tell with the little I did before the fire died and before it was time to head onward toward Hydlen. Then I fastened my jacket and packed the cedar into one of the bags on Gairloch.
Gairloch whinnied. His breath steamed, and the whiteness mixed with the snow flurries.
“Let’s go, old fellow.”
The road climbed gradually, and the snow got heavier. I had a sense that it was not going to get too heavy, but I worried, since it was beginning to stick on the road and especially to build on the scattered patches of grass and on the cedars.
So Gairloch put one hoof in front of the other, and I worried, and we traveled east until we reached the top of the pass. We didn’t rest there, not only because of the snow, but because, according to Yelena, the descent was longer, and the road twisted more. I didn’t want to be too high in the hills if my senses were wrong about the amount of snow.
For a time the snow got heavier, but the wind dropped off, and the flakes fell almost straight down. A light blanket of white coated just about everything, Gairloch’s mane included, until I brushed it off.
Then it stopped, but the air remained still, and the only sounds were Gairloch’s breathing, my breathing, and the stolid clop of one mountain pony’s hoofs.
The white blanket got blotchier, with boulders sticking through, and the snow began to slide off the bowed branches of the trees, mostly cedars in the higher sections of the road. In time, the way followed another stream, narrow and with only a trace of water, but the trace became a brook, and then a stream as the road wound its way lower.
Whheeee… eeee…
“All right. You’re thirsty. We’ll stop, but not here. Down there where the bank isn’t so steep.”
I guided Gairloch toward a flattened space by the stream, mostly clear of snow. The little that remained was melting away, although the sun remained hidden by the woolly gray clouds.
The earth thrown loosely over blackened branches, the rodent tracks, and the scrapes in the ground showed others had camped there, though not too recently. I walked Gairloch down to a sandy bank, and he lapped the water greedil
y.
“Easy… easy… That’s cold water.” I knew. I touched it with my finger, and it was cold enough to chill right to the bone, order-mastery or no order-mastery. Cold as it was, it smelled clean, with just a hint of evergreen resin.
After he drank, I gave him a little grain before I remounted and continued downward on the road to Faklaar.
Somewhere on the way eastward, I noticed the change in the trees. On the far west side of the Lower Easthorns had been cedars, twisted low cedars clinging to the reddish and sandy soil between rocks and boulders, with only patches of grass, and scrub bushes.
I was seeing oaks now, black and white, with softer woods, and an occasional lorken tucked into a grove-good supplies and healthy trunks for a woodworker. The trunks were straighter, and some were old-older certainly than the impressive trunks in the woods south of Land’s End in Recluce and some of those Recluce trees dated back to Creslin and Megaera-the mythical Founders. The trees in Hydlen felt older, even if they weren’t bigger. But the trees of Recluce reportedly had been planted by the ancient order-masters. That would have given any tree a certain advantage.
Trees or no trees, I kept riding, and the clouds eventually broke enough that once or twice in the afternoon there were patches of sunlight.
XII
East of Lavah, Sligo [Candar]
AFTER DRAWING BACK the drapery that covers the shelves of the rough bookcase against the cottage wall, the man in brown smiles. His eyes stop on each volume, as if to drink the words and the knowledge within.
“What you could tell…” He laughs. “What you do tell. What you are already telling!” Then he shakes his head. “For so long, so long, you have been hidden.”
The clopping of hoofs on the hard ground outside drifts through the half-open window by the crude door. Sammel lets the cloth drop across the front of the case, leaving what appears as a draped but narrow table.
The Death of Chaos Page 8