The Death of Chaos

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  The falling stones flared into white powder, and began to pelt down like fine stone mist.

  The blue-green of the sky was disappearing behind a mist of stone dust, chaos-fire, ashes, and who knew what else. I wiped my forehead, and the back of my hand came away gritty.

  What could I do?

  I shook my head and began to climb across the flat section of the rubble, and then down toward the short piece of the old highway.

  Let Sammel spend his time and energy on removing the first pile of stone. I’d certainly have a better chance if he were tired, but I had to hang on to the top of a large boulder as the ground rumbled, and more stones shifted around me.

  The day seemed dimmer, almost like twilight, as I struggled downward, trying to make sure I was never in a crevice between two stones.

  I climbed across rocks and down, and the ground rumbled, and the stones on the once-enormous pile melted or flared away.

  By the time I stood on the old highway and looked eastward, the last fragments of stone were melting away. I took one deep breath and then another, and carrying my staff, began to walk toward the smooth expanse of cooling flat rock that had replaced the old road.

  Through the fog of dust and fine white ashes, I could see, well back, a few sunburst banners, and sense several thousand troops.

  Before them was a pillar of white-Sammel. Now I could see him.

  I stopped just short of stones hot enough to burn through my boots.

  Sammel stood on the other side, still in his brown robes, almost looking like the kindly hermit I had once thought him. Although I couldn’t see his face clearly through the chaos fog, I imagined that his eyes were still sad and the top of his skull bald.

  Even from nearly two hundred cubits away, what I did see was the total power of chaos surrounding the man. He flared with power, and his whole body radiated the white of chaos so deep that it was that ugly reddish-white.

  What should I do? Even if the order-encircling technique would work-even if I did cut him off from the outside chaos forces, there was enough force within him to fry me into burned bacon or the human crisped equivalent.

  Yet I had succeeded in wrestling the Balance, and survived. So how could I use what I had learned against Sammel?

  “So! You would challenge the power of knowledge?” His voice rang like a trumpet.

  Challenge the power of knowledge? I really hadn’t thought of it that way. My fingers felt slippery on the staff, and I laid it down on the road, knowing that it could not help me.

  “Come! Join me! Spread knowledge to the starving world.”

  Why was it that all the chaos wizards wanted me to join them? Or did they think I was stupid enough to believe that anyone possessed by chaos could share anything? I waited, building my own shields, quietly.

  “Can you not see, young Lerris, that Recluce has tried to destroy Candar by denying the people knowledge?”

  I could see that, certainly. That had been my own complaint. My father and the Brotherhood had denied us all knowledge. I found myself nodding.

  “And can you not see that nothing will change Recluce? Recluce will not save Candar, or your beloved Kyphros.”

  How did he know I had made my home in Kyphros? He was with the Hamorians. Did that mean their envoy-Leithrrse- had told him?

  “The Black Brotherhood preaches order, but to keep Recluce ordered, they create disorder in Candar, and cast out anyone who would question them.”

  All of what Sammel said was true, but it didn’t matter.

  “Only through knowledge can people advance. And only Hamor will allow knowledge to be used to help people.”

  “Like your rockets helped people? Or your rifles. Or your-” I couldn’t finish the sentence because I really didn’t know what other devices he had turned over to Hamor.

  “It is too bad you do not understand.”

  I extended my senses toward Sammel and the figure in tan behind him.

  “Be done with him… he’s only a young wizard, and not that powerful-”

  “I will do as I choose.”

  A long silence followed, while I struggled. I did not want to unleash chaos, nor did I want Sammel unblocking the road and opening Candar to the well-armed and effective soldiers of Hamor.

  Crack!

  As I had struggled with my own thoughts, the firebolt flared past me and flattened around the shoulder-high boulder to my left. The rock flamed, and just slumped like a candle set next to the hearth might ooze into a lump.

  Another firebolt whistled by me, and although my shields deflected it, I still staggered under the force thrown at me-and that was after Sammel had reduced half a mountain to nothing.

  Two more firebolts seared toward me, and flared around my shields.

  I took two steps backward, while I sent my senses downward, down to the depths, seeking iron. Iron was the key-or copper-or some rocks like that-anything that could contain the power of chaos.

  Whhhsssttt! Whsssttt! Crack! Crack!

  Then, even as I danced aside, trying to deflect another wave of those already endless-seeming firebolts, I sweated, struggling to open up an order channel from the depths and through the ground. With the first effort, my thoughts bounced back as though they had struck a metal shield, and my mind went numb, just like my arm did when Tamra hit my staff at the wrong angle.

  For a moment, I just stood there on the ancient highway, looking blankly into space, sweat pouring down my face.

  Another firebolt jolted me back, and I tried to ease my thoughts into the depths, sideways, trying to reach that deeper level, as I had in Hydlen, and as I had that night when I had wrestled the Balance.

  “Mere rote order cannot prevail against knowledge!” trumpeted Sammel. He followed his florid words with two additional flashes of chaos-flame.

  More rocks in the pile behind me turned into stone replicas of melted wax, and I could feel the heat building around me, as the stone dust and chaos fog rose even more thickly around me.

  Stone splintered around me, fragments flying like the bullets from the new Hamorian rifles.

  Crack! More stone splinters flew from the impact of another firebolt, and I ducked in spite of myself, knowing that ducking wasn’t going to help-only my control of order and chaos would really help.

  I staggered again as chaos and stone slammed against me, and reeled from the smell of burning leather, burning cloth, and singed hair-all mine.

  Finally, struggling deep beneath Candar, while fending off firebolts, and feeling torn into pieces, I wrapped my senses around that mass of near molten iron, that reservoir of order that created the Balance and made chaos in Candar possible, trying to guide it upward, toward the channels that Sammel had already used.

  As the next fireball arched overhead, slower than the last, I continued to struggle to free the deep and ancient iron from its bounds.

  Through the smoke fog and stone haze and the flickering energies of order and chaos, I could sense the Hamorian troops backing toward the east and toward Certis, but I knew that direction would change if I failed.

  The next fireball seemed smaller, slower, showing that Sammel was tired. So was I, but I kept struggling to ease open, force open those channels, to let that upflowing well of molten order, imbued with the fire of chaos, seethe toward the twilight, toward the ancient road where we struggled.

  Whsst!

  I pushed the small mass of flamed chaos aside.

  The road trembled underfoot in the momentary silence while Sammel wiped his face beyond the haze of smoke and stone dust that separated us. As I tried to guide, to order the chaos I had freed from its iron bonds, I could hear the rumbling… and I had to shift my weight as the ground trembled again, and the trembling was my creation.

  Another firebolt, larger, slammed into my shields, and I danced aside, trying to keep my senses wrapped around the rising column of order-circled and chaos-fired iron, trying to keep channeling more and more of the deep chaos into that column.

  The anci
ent road stones creaked, and at least one cracked like one of the Hamorian rifles. The trembling grew, and the whole road shook.

  Even without throwing another firebolt at me, Sammel abruptly turned and began to run, back toward the Hamorian troops.

  The ground rumbled, again, almost belching, as a column of molten ironstone burst up from the road, literally beneath Sammel. Even before the molten iron reached him, a web of chaos interlocked with order formed around him, shielding him from the heat and chaos.

  The iron-based lava fountained into the afternoon shadows, filling the canyon with a reddish glare, and the odor of brimstone slashed at me.

  Yet Sammel remained untouched within his web of order and chaos.

  I turned the fountain toward him, surrounded him, but his shields held. Unfair as it might be, I knew I must destroy him, or within days the road to Kyphros would be open. And I could see the bodies strewn across Kyphros, bodies like Shervan’s and Tendril’s, bodies like Krystal’s. Wincing at the heat and the pain, I forced more fountaining iron into the twilight sky, until heat and molten stone rained down on Sammel and the Hamorians.

  Yet, as I did so, I was aware that the sundevils were fleeing pell-mell eastward, out of the range of the heavy iron. Not all of them made it-that I could tell from the wave of whiteness that whispered back toward me, whispered of deaths that beat against my shields.

  Despite the growing heat and the pile of already cooling iron lava, Sammel still persisted, and his shields held off the chaos and the heat that surrounded him.

  So I reached out with my senses into the mountain walls sheered smooth by the ancient white wizards, and somehow undid the bonds holding the canyon wall above, almost like pulling out ancient pegs from a tall, tall dresser created by a mastercrafter.

  With a whispering that crescendoed into an earth-shaking roar, gray stone crumbled, then cascaded downward, some of it hitting the old ridge line and bouncing toward me, and I cast up yet another shield, throwing what seemed to be every bit of energy I had around me.

  Despite the shields a wave of gray stone surrounded me, and I felt as if I had been thrown against the canyon wall and bounced back and forth between the gray slabs of stone that flanked the road. Then I staggered and half fell, half sat, as chaos rained around me, holding tight to my shield until I no longer could and until blackness fell across me.

  I woke up to raindrops falling on my face. When I looked back east, the small sharp knives I thought I was through with jabbed at the back of my eyes, but I could see steam hissing off hot rock. I couldn’t hear the hissing, or much of anything, except intermittently. My face was wet and cold, and rain was splashing into puddles. Trying to move reminded me that I’d been bounced against something, or many things, that were hard.

  “Uhhhmmm…” I rolled over onto my knees and finally worked myself into a sitting position.

  Rain splashed down from gray clouds, not low thick ones, but clouds high enough that I could see the tops of the cliffs. The rain was letting up because, I suspected, there just hadn’t been that much water in the air-assuming the explanations in The Basis of Order were correct.

  My legs felt stiff, and so was my back.

  Before trying to stand, I looked to the east-and shivered. A steaming mass of black and gray rock blocked the canyon, reaching almost to the bottom of the ridge that had split the original rock fall. The darker gray of the south wall showed where the rock had sheared away.

  Clouds of steam still billowed off the black and gray-and I could feel the heat, not surprisingly, since I was less than two hundred cubits from the western edge of the hot rock.

  Scattered smaller boulders lay on the expanse of old road where I sat. I used a nearby one, more than a cubit high, to lever myself to my feet. Then I looked for my staff. For once I felt I needed it, just like an old man might, to help me along.

  It took a while, but I found it, partly buried beneath dust and smaller rocks. After that, I stood and surveyed the mess, closing my eyes occasionally to relieve the pain of seeing.

  I had no strength left for order sensing, but I was already sure that Sammel hadn’t survived, and there was no way that the Hamorians were going to use the wizards’ road anytime soon-not with the mass I had created and the older and smaller-but still large-rockfall behind me.

  More importantly, they wouldn’t know how many other rockfalls remained to be cleared, or whether I might be able to destroy an army with another rockfall.

  The raindrops’ steaming continued, although the rain was tapering off, and I could see gaps in the clouds to the north.

  With that, I turned back toward the older rock pile and hobbled toward it, then slowly eased my way upward. I’d gotten perhaps halfway to the top when I saw a bedraggled figure in greens waving.

  Weldein was saying something, but I couldn’t make out the words, as he clambered down toward me.

  “Weldein?”

  He answered, but I couldn’t hear the words.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be there in a moment.”

  I was wrong. Climbing the rest of the rock pile took longer than a moment. In fact, it was almost dark by the time we struggled back down to the other side.

  Berli had a small fire burning, and Fregin lay on his bedroll beside it, his left leg at an angle.

  “It hurts…”

  “… boulders… hit him,” explained Berli. “Can’t… heal him?” Her words were far away, and I had to squint and look at her face to make out what she said. Of course, that meant my eyes hurt even more.

  I just looked at her through the darkness.“Not now. We can straighten the leg. He won’t die, and when I’ve got some strength back, I’ll set it, and then heal him enough so it won’t fill with chaos.”

  Weldein said something, I thought, about what I had done. “How much did you see?” I asked, watching him closely. He shrugged, and I saw for the first time the cuts and scrapes, and the shredded leathers over his left arm. “Let me see that.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Weldein’s injuries weren’t that bad, surface cuts and deep bruises, but some of those bruises, especially the big ugly one across his arm and shoulder, had to hurt. Grrrrrrrr… rrrrr…

  I found myself swaying in the aftershock of the chaos-order quake.

  Berli put an arm out to steady me. She and the staff helped me get over to the stone coping on the side of the road, where I eased myself down.

  Weldein studied me for a long moment, then shook his head, and muttered a few words. “What?” I concentrated on him. “You look older.”

  “I feel older. I feel like an old man. Everything aches.” Fregin snapped something from beside the fire, and Berli answered.

  I turned to catch Fregin’s response, then realized he was talking to me.

  “… leg… fire… like… you… do something?” Weldein glared at him. “He knows… last battle… wizard… snapped bones… burned… body… you… good… die… heal you…” Once more I could only catch some of the words and guess at the others, and squinting and concentrating hurt.

  “… hurts…”

  The ground shivered, more gently.

  Fregin closed his eyes and moaned.

  Berli shook her head and grinned wryly. I found myself grinning without really knowing why. After a moment, Weldein shook his head also, and offered a grin.

  I sat on the stone coping of the old road and slowly ate cheese and travel bread, interspersed with water. Water hadn’t tasted that good in a long, long time.

  “What happened?” Berli asked more than that but I missed it. Weldein explained something with both words and gestures. I thought he was saying that I dropped a mountain on Sammel, but he could have been talking about anything. “… never… stand… your way,” said Berli. “It wasn’t like that,” I protested. “I figured out how to turn his chaos against him, and to bring up more order and chaos from the earth. But it wasn’t enough, and I was afraid he’d escape and open the road.” I shrugged and wished I
hadn’t. “So I managed to unbind some of the stones up there. It wasn’t anywhere close to a mountainside.”

  “It looked like it.” Weldein sipped from his water bottle. “…rock and…mountain…huge hill…” He gestured again and looked at Berli, and I had no idea what he said.

  I tried to raise order senses, but I couldn’t. “I can’t do anything tonight.” My eyes seemed hard to focus, and Berli seemed very close and then very far away, and I started to topple over.

  Someone caught me, and laid me out on my bedroll, and I slept.

  XCI

  Nylan, Recluce

  “HOW COULD YOU three have let such a disaster occur?” The big man with the nearly jet-black skin circles around the end of the table. “Do you have any idea what happened in Candar last night? Any idea at all?”

  “Some,” admits Talryn.

  Maris lifts his hands. “Someone could tell me.”

  “Don’t play ‘poor trader’ now,” mutters Heldra.

  Cassius’s eyes seem to flash red as they sweep across the two men and the woman. “Another few moments, and there would have been an order-chaos portal, and who knows what could have happened? Or what creature could have appeared from where?”

  “Order-chaos portal?” Maris fumbles out the words.

  “Where do you think I came from? Where do you think the angels came from? Does anyone else on this planet have truly black skin? Didn’t Talryn tell you?”

  “I forgot.” Maris looks down.

  “I forgot?” Cassius snorts and looks at Heldra. “Did you forget too, counselor?”

  “We had hoped Lerris and Sammel would cancel each other out. Sammel already killed both members of a black squad.”

  Cassius shakes his head. “Do you know what happened?”

  “Not exactly, Cassius.” Talryn shrugs. “We’re convinced that Lerris and Sammel ran into each other. Lerris prevailed, but we’re not sure if he survived. Sammel didn’t. There’s no chaos signature left.”

  “They just… fought… and wrenched order and chaos every which way in half of Candar? And you don’t know what happened?”