The Death of Chaos

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “lam.”

  The ship swayed, and a dull thumping sound reverberated through the hull.

  “I mean, do you talk to trees… ?”

  She shook her head.“Trees don’t listen. Sometimes, we listen to them, or to the rest of life…”

  “Do you… I mean… is it… just trees?”

  With a laugh, she answered. “No. I have a man. A mage who is also a druid.”

  “Oh…”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed that an old woman like me-”

  “Old? You can’t be more than eighteen.”

  “If you knew how old I really was…” She gestured toward the cabin door. “I’d like to go up on deck.”

  He stared down at her boldly.

  Dayala sighed and looked back at the young man for a long moment, feeling the darkness well from her, feeling the age and the power of the Great Forest surge forth.

  The youngster paled. “I’m sorry, Lady.”

  She touched his shoulder lightly. “I did warn you. Let’s go.”

  Jelker hurried the three steps to the ladder and scrambled up, leaving Dayala to make her way topside alone. After shaking her head, she took her time.

  Later, standing by the port rail, she watched the shore fall away, her eyes focused beyond Diehl toward the Great Forest.

  Once the Eidolon cleared the bay, the dull thumping stopped, and the ship shivered into full sail before the wind.

  Dayala kept one hand on the poop railing as the Eidolon gently eased over a low wave, and a small spray of white outlined the bow. In the late afternoon light, the ship steadied, quieter than ever.

  The paddles still, the great ancient steam engine cooled. While the wind held, and it would, the captain needed to burn no coal.

  “Always get a good wind coming out of Diehl,” observed the second mate, pausing beside Dayala for a moment, his short brown hair disheveled by the wind. “Most times, anyway.” He glanced at the browns Dayala wore and then at her bare feet. “You a druid and traveling? That doesn’t happen much.”

  “Only when it is necessary. Very necessary.”

  “And this is very necessary?” A smile played around his lips.

  “If you do not want the world to belong to Hamor and for chaos to perch on every hilltop.” Her tone was light.

  The man’s eyes flicked to hers. Then he looked down at the planks. “I guess it must be important. Druids don’t lie.”

  “Sometimes it would be easier.”

  He shivered, and then bowed. “Need to be getting on, Lady.”

  A faint and bitter smile crossed the druid’s lips, and she turned her eyes to the northeast, toward Kyphros and Ruzor. Toward where she would meet Justen.

  XC

  I SLOWED GAIRLOCH to a deliberate walk as the road dipped into another small dry valley in the Little Easthorns. Around us were rocks and more tree-covered rocks. Most of the rocks in the Little Easthorns were red and black, and rough, unlike the heavier and grayer rock of the Easthorns and Westhorns.

  As I studied the flat area in front of me, I wished I had a better memory for details.

  “Is this the one?” asked Weldein for at least the third time, running his fingers through his short blond hair.

  “I don’t know yet I was only here once before, and that was almost three years ago.” It felt as if a lot longer than three years had passed.

  Kkhhcheww… “Friggin‘ dust…” mumbled Fregin.

  “We know,” snapped Berli. “We know.”

  I paused, sensing the aura of chaos. On my left seemed to be a thick and intertwined grove of scrub juniper bushes, while on the right was a large gray-white boulder that blocked the view to the north.

  Slowly, I eased Gairloch toward the apparent boulder, reaching out with my senses. I nodded. “This is the place.”

  “Just a bunch of boulders that way,” mumbled Fregin, reining up behind Weldein.

  Berli had dismounted and brushed at the reddish-white dust of the flattest part of the road.

  “Stop raisin‘ dust.” Fregin sneezed.

  I concentrated on the illusion, although I could tell it was fraying, tracing back the lines that held it together, half marveling at the fact that even Antonin had had to use order to serve chaos. That use of order was how and why the illusion had lasted, of course.

  Finally, I traced back the webs and slowly separated them, breaking them into smaller and smaller segments of chaos within order, much in the same way as I had finally reordered myself to match the pattern that I had seen in Justen, except this time I was almost working in reverse.

  “Demon-damn! Where’d that road come from?” asked Fregin.

  “It’s always been here,” answered Berli, straightening up. “See. Here are the outlines of the paving stones.”

  Weldein shook his head. “I’ve ridden this road a dozen times and never seen this.”

  “You weren’t meant to. The illusion was strong enough to hide it from anyone but a mage. Kry-the commander sent. some people to find this, but they never did, and somehow I never did get out here to find it-something always kept happening.”

  “Imagine that,” said Berli dryly.

  “Anyway, it will stay like this now.”

  “Is that good?” asked Weldein. “You said the Hamorians were using it.”

  “They’re starting at the other end. If they get this far…” I shrugged.

  “I see what you mean.”

  Before we left, I studied the dry wash again. The spot had actually been a crossroads of sorts, because a covered drainage way ran under the north-south road that Kyphrans had used for years. The top of the drainage way was part of the other road itself-the road between Gallos and Kyphros and the one we had just ridden up from Tellura.

  I wondered why people hadn’t used the wizards’ road before Antonin hid it, but maybe that was because it didn’t lead anywhere nearby. Still, that didn’t make sense. The white wizards had built the road to be the shortest east-west highway across Candar.

  Berli slipped back into her saddle, and I turned Gairloch east and onto the dust- and dirt-covered paving stones. There was a shallow set of ruts where Antonin’s carriage had passed. At the bottom of the rut, I could see traces of the paving stones beneath, unmarked, uncracked.

  Whatever else they had done, the white wizards had built well, as I knew from the part of the road still used from northwest Kyphros to Sarronnyn.

  We traveled another ten kays before I found out why the part of the road we traveled hadn’t been used before Antonin arrived. The faultless stonework of the old road, concealed as it was by a thin layer of dirt and some scrub brush, ran right up to a huge pile of red and black rocks tumbled together, a pile nearly forty cubits high. The rocks had apparently peeled away from the cliff above the road and buried it, perhaps for centuries.

  Why hadn’t anyone tried to reopen the road before Antonin? I frowned, then nodded. It was a military road. It didn’t improve travel between Gallos and Kyphros. With the use of steamships, trade was easier by river and the ocean, and, probably most important, it would have taken hundreds of workers a good season to move just the pile of stone in front of me.

  Even Antonin had only created a stone-fused narrow passage through the rock pile. The lingering feel of chaos surrounded the narrow passage.

  Wheee… eee…

  “I know. It feels terrible.” I patted Gairloch on the neck.

  Kkcchew! “Damned dust is white now,” muttered Fregin.

  “The chaos wizard did this?” Weldein pulled up beside me, and we were almost shoulder to shoulder. I could have reached out and touched the fused stone wall. It would have been a tight fit for Antonin’s carriage.

  “The second one-Antonin. The feel of chaos is fading, but it’s still there.”

  “He burned through this, and you defeated him?” asked Berli, close behind, her words echoing from the stone.

  “Sometimes, luck and order can overcome brute force.”

  “Prefer the
brute force, myself,” grumbled Fregin. “Can’t always count on luck.”

  I appreciated that sentiment, especially since the growing rumbles of chaos from the depths to the east of us indicated that the chaos wizard ahead had much more brute force than Antonin or Gerlis had possessed. How had Sammel gathered such force? Was it because he knew the basics of order? That would explain a lot.

  “Gettin‘ right thirsty,” Fregin said to Berli.

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Hungry, too.”

  “You’re always hungry.”

  We stopped in the shade of a cliff another two or three kays farther east along the road. I offered slices of the white cheese and the bread that Barrabra had pressed on me the morning before when we had left Tellura.

  Food wasn’t the problem. Water was. The summer had been so dry that there was no water in the drainage way beside the road, and we’d only passed one spring.

  I wiped my forehead… then paused. If I were such an earth wizard, why couldn’t I look for springs and the like?

  Sitting in the shade, I let my senses try to seek out water. I’d , sought and found iron before, deep beneath the earth. Water shouldn’t be that hard.

  It probably wouldn’t have been, had there been any to find, that is, any that wouldn’t have taken a team of miners to get to. Absently, thinking of miners, I wondered how Ginstal was doing in his efforts to rebuild the Hrisbarg iron mines. Not too well, I hoped, since that would only strengthen Hamor’s hold on Candar.

  I chewed through the bread and cheese and moistened my mouth with some water from my water bottle. There was less than a quarter left, and Gairloch hadn’t drunk since morning, and even in the shade he was hot and panting. After putting the food back in the left saddlebag, I took another deep breath and concentrated on trying to find water.

  “I’m not sure,” I told Weldein, “but there might be a spring another kay or so ahead.”

  He nodded as he mounted, as if my announcement were only to be expected.

  I wasn’t quite as accurate as I’d hoped. It was more like three kays, but no one could have missed it, because it was more like a stream that flowed into the drainage way and then slowly vanished into the ground beneath the stones lining the drainage channel.

  Still, everyone got plenty to drink, even Gairloch, although I made him take it in steps, and we refilled our bottles before we set out again.

  “Some advantages to being with a wizard,” conceded Fregin.

  “Tell us that when chaos-fire is flying around our heads,” suggested Weldein.

  That night, I didn’t even have to find another spring. We camped in a long-abandoned, stone-walled waystation with a flowing spring. The roof had ages-since turned to dust, but we didn’t exactly have to worry about rain or cold.

  I didn’t sleep all that well, not with the feel of chaos growing stronger and deeper with each kay we moved eastward, but what good was it to tell the others that I was sensing chaos that they couldn’t feel or hear?

  The next day was pretty much like the previous one.

  We found another, smaller rock pile where Antonin had burned a passage, and the carriage tracks pointed eastward. Most of the time, the wizards’ road was surprisingly clear, and from the carriage tracks, the dried horse droppings, and the lingering hints of chaos, it was clear that Antonin had indeed used the road frequently.

  Late in the day on the second day on the wizards’ road, we came to a grove of scrub junipers, planted right in the middle of the road, and totally blocking it.

  “Where’d that come from?” demanded Fregin.

  “It was probably always here,” answered Berli.

  I shook my head. The grove felt wrong, but I was tired, and it took a moment for me to realize that it was another illusion. After fumbling a bit, I dissolved the illusion as well.

  There was another crossroads, and even a weathered kaystone that announced, “Yryna-10 K.” I’d never heard of Yryna, but the placement of the stone on the northern side of the crossroads seemed to indicate that the town was somewhere in Gallos, and I thought I would have heard of it somewhere had it belonged to Kyphros.

  “Yryna?” asked Fregin.

  The rest of us shrugged.

  As Gairloch carried me eastward along the wizards’ road, I realized two things. First, the cliffs around the road were higher, and, second, there were no carriage tracks on the road.

  “Somewhere ahead, the road must be blocked.”

  “No tracks?” asked Weldein.

  “That’s good and bad. It means the Hamorians haven’t gotten the road unblocked yet, but I don’t know if we can get through, either.”

  “What do you want to do, Master Lerris?”

  I shrugged again. “Go on.”

  From my own experiences in the deadlands, I suspected that the road got worse and hadn’t been used, even by Antonin, nearer Frven. Otherwise, why would he have used the muddy and boggy roads around Howlett?

  Most of the paving stones had remained generally in place, although a thin layer of soil covered many areas, and there low bushes, brush, and scrub oak had started to take hold, more than in the section of road we, had already traveled.

  We camped at another abandoned waystation that night, with yet another spring that seemed to flow into the ground.

  The rocks and the cliffs beyond the road had turned into a heavier gray, and I hadn’t seen the sharp-edged red and black rocks, not since we had left the crossroads five or six kays behind.

  We finished the last of Barrabra’s bread and the white cheese, leaving only hard travel bread, some dried mutton, and yellow brick cheese.

  Again, that night, my sleep was fitful at best, and I woke up twice in a hot sweat, feeling as though chaos-formed of snakes of molten iron-were stalking me. The wards I had set didn’t help much against nightmares, or against my own fears.

  The second time, I walked out to the spring, where a mountain rat scurried away. Overhead, the stars glittered blue-white and cold, and even my breath seemed to steam. I splashed my face with the cold water, and that helped, but I still woke before dawn.

  The next day, as we moved into the Easthorns, the canyon walls got higher, and, except around noon, the road was generally shaded. That morning, it had been chill enough that Weldein and the two guards rode with their jackets fastened.

  The ground seemed to shake underfoot, but I said nothing, and Gairloch picked up one hoof and then another, placing each carefully. The sense of chaos had grown nearer and nearer, and I uncapped my water bottle and took another swallow, glancing down at the dry drainage canal beside the road.

  As we rode eastward in the early afternoon, in the distance ahead, I could finally see another slumped mass of rock, even larger than the first mass, that turned the road into a dead-end canyon. I kept riding until we reached the tumbled stones that had peeled off a cliff that seemed more than a kay high and cascaded across the old highway.

  “Doesn’t look as though we can go too much farther.” Weldein wiped his forehead and unfastened his jacket.

  I fingered my staff.

  Still, I could sense the nearness of chaos, and a whispering sound that suggested troops ahead-a lot of them.

  Whhnnnnn… A mosquito whined past me, presumably toward Weldein, who offered a more tempting target.

  I looked at the pile of rock that had fallen across the old stones of the road. A few had bounced even farther westward, creating a rough dam, and turning the stone-lined drainage channel into a semistagnant pond. The dried algae on the rocks showed the water was lower, much lower, than normal. That was also probably why there was one lonely mosquito whining through die hot shade of the road canyon and not an entire swarm.

  Somehow I was glad that the heat was hard on mosquitoes also.

  The ground shivered underfoot, and Weldein looked at me.

  “Stay there,” I told Weldein, as I dismounted.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Climbing a rock. So I can see them.”


  “See who?” demanded Fregin.

  “The Hamorians on the other side of the rock pile.”

  “Won’t their wizard see you?”

  “Not while he’s handling that much chaos.” At least I hoped Sammel didn’t. So I clambered up the rocks, carefully, slowly, sweating every cubit of the way, trying not to hold my breath, while still grasping my staff. If I needed it, I didn’t want to have to climb down and up again.

  I almost laughed when I got to the top and looked eastward.

  Beyond the huge pile was a flat expanse-two hundred cubits or so of untouched road-and then another pile of rock almost like the one where I perched.

  Looking upward, I could see what had happened. An entire cliff had collapsed and fallen down over a slight ridge that had split the rock flow into two avalanches, leaving a section of good road between the two piles of rock.

  Then I frowned, and concentrated, trying to trace the chaos ahead.

  Rurrrr… Crackkk!!!!

  The ground shivered underfoot, and several smaller stones bounced downhill, away from Weldein, thank the darkness.

  Beyond the second rock pile, chaos was working and building.

  Dust flared into the sky, and I could see the pile begin to move, almost to shrink. Stones, some larger than a hut or a hovel, tumbled downhill, northward into a caldron of what seemed to be molten chaos, a seething lake of fire.

  The heat made noonday Kyphros, even in recent days, seem cool.

  White lines of chaos lashed at the rocky rubble. The few small cedar and scrub junipers that had clung to the rocks flashed into ashes that fluttered skyward with the smoke and white dust.

  “What is it?” called Weldein, his voice barely audible above the roaring and the whistling of the wind.

  “More demon dust!” screamed Fregin.

  “Is it the chaos wizard?” yelled Weldein.

  I gave him an exaggerated nod, then waved him away from the rock pile on which I perched before turning back toward the slowly shrinking pile of rock.

  GGRRRRurrr… More rocks bounded down away from me.

  I glanced up toward the cliffs up to my right, grayed and weathered rock that looked none too steady. Even as I watched a small fragment of the cliff cascaded away and downward.