The Order War

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  CXXI

  After lighting both lamps, Justen eased the powder into the forge and began to pump the great bellows, his senses attuned to the granules that would become false lead. As the heat built up in the powder that he hoped to turn into metal, he could more easily sense the chaos locked in order within the tiny specks.

  Thrap… thrap…

  Justen looked toward the door, but kept pumping.

  Thrap… thrap… thrap!

  The engineer eased the powder out of the flame and turned toward the smithy door.

  A dark and squarish figure in black waited.

  “Master Turmin… please come in.”

  The mage stepped inside the smithy. “I hope that I’m not too late.”

  “Too late?”

  “How much false lead have you made?”

  Justen swallowed. “How did you know? I haven’t told anyone.”

  “We mages have our ways.” A crooked smile crossed the older man’s face. “Not magic. I heard that you were frequenting the slag piles by the old iron mines. When a wizard does that…” He shrugged.

  “I’m not a wizard like you and Gunnar.”

  “No… you’re potentially far greater, and consequently far more dangerous.” Turmin cocked his head, his eyes straying toward the forge. “Heating and order-sorting the powder, I presume?”

  “I thought it would work.”

  “Oh, it will work, all right. And about a season after you’ve finished with the third or fourth batch, you’ll probably die of the wasting sickness. In your case, you’re more ordered. You might even make six or seven batches.”

  Justen swallowed hard.

  “Can we get something to drink? I rode straight from Alberth.”

  The younger man nodded. “Let me bank the forge. Will leaving the powder here hurt anyone?”

  “Probably not, if you get rid of it tomorrow. If it’s been heated only slightly, you can scatter it into the ocean.”

  Justen banked his mother’s forge, but left the powder on the brick shelf to cool. Then he blew out the lamps.

  Turmin followed him back to the empty kitchen.

  Justen extended an arm to one of the wooden chairs, then asked, “Beer or greenberry?”

  “Greenberry. I’m not so ordered as you. Besides, I meant it when I said I was thirsty.”

  Justen frowned. “What about your mount? I forgot-”

  “Your sister was kind enough to water Vaegera. I told her I was meeting you on wizardly matters. She also insisted on feeding the mount.”

  “Elisabet…” Justen shook his head and walked from the kitchen and into the dim adjoining parlor, where a sandy-haired girl leaned forward, cupping her ear to listen.

  Elisabet stood up as he entered. “All right,” she said. “You caught me. Will you tell me about it later?”

  Justen grinned and nodded. “What I can.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  By the time Justen returned to the kitchen and retrieved the pitchers from the cooler, his sister had disappeared. He walked back to the table, juggling two mugs and two pitchers.

  After setting down the beer, he filled a mug with greenberry and extended it to the older mage.

  “Thank you.” Turmin swallowed the entire drink in two gulps.

  Justen smiled and refilled the mug, then poured a half mug of the dark beer for himself. He sat on a stool across from Turmin and waited for the other to speak.

  “Justen, I can only talk from the books, the ones locked away in the Temple, because there’s no one alive today who can do what Dorrin and Creslin did and wrote about. You know, in their later years, each compiled some remarkable insights. Dorrin’s work created The Basis of Order, you know?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Well… once Gunnar told me about your explosive powder trick, I knew it wouldn’t be long before you were up to something. I just didn’t know what. And I’m certainly in no position to judge your motives, but I would rather have you know the dangers beforehand. False lead has been around for at least two hundred years, perhaps longer, Dorrin mentions it. When you put enough of it together, you get enormous heat, almost raw chaos; yet, in small doses, it’s as ordered as any metal, although it doesn’t ever appear in nature in its pure form.” Turmin took another sip from the mug, and Justen waited.

  “The problem is that it also sends out little bursts of chaos-”

  “The white flashes?”

  “You can see them?”

  Justen nodded.

  “That’s something. Anyway, we don’t know why exactly, but if you put a bird, for example, especially a delicate cage bird, near false lead, after a while it wastes away. So have the few wizards who worked with it for any length of time.”

  Justen waited. The mage was silent. In the darkness beyond the single lamp on the porch, a lone frog croaked from the small pond downhill from the smithy.

  “And?” Justen finally asked.

  “That’s it. I’ll answer any questions you have.”

  “Why did you tell me all this?”

  “I’m fond of Gunnar, and I think you have a lot to offer.”

  Justen pondered the wording. “That doesn’t sound like you’re overly fond of me.”

  “Whatever you’re going to do, it’s likely to be terrible. I’m not exceedingly fond of the doers of terrible deeds.”

  “Then why didn’t you just let me kill myself with the false lead?”

  “Probably Gunnar would have died, too.”

  “What else?”

  “Did you meet an Angel?”

  Justen shook his head at the unexpected question, then sipped from the mug before answering. “She was called an Angel, but I’m not sure she was. She was a druid, and very old.”

  “Just as you will be one day, if you survive this madness.” Turmin eased out of his wooden armchair and refilled his mug before settling back.

  “You’re not exactly answering directly,” Justen observed tartly.

  “I suppose not. It’s hard to be direct when you deal with great power.”

  “Great power?”

  “You have exceedingly great powers, young Justen. I may be old, but I would like to remain hale and healthy for what years remain to me.”

  Justen sighed.

  “What did you intend to do with the false lead?”

  “I thought I had a way to combine it with order so as to destroy chaos.”

  “With greater chaos, of course?” Turmin’s tone was dry.

  “Probably.”

  “Would that have done anyone any good?”

  “Maybe not. But something has to be done about Fairhaven.” .

  “Ah, yes… the White brethren.”

  “We’ve ignored them, and they’ve perverted order to serve chaos, and they will take over all of Candar.”

  “All of Candar?”

  “All right… not Naclos.” Justen sighed.

  So did Turmin.

  “I have a suggestion, young Justen. If you intend to use order to destroy chaos… use order, not chaos bound in order. It’s a great deal safer for all of us, including you.”

  “How?”

  “How indeed? Have you seen light through an angled piece of crystal?”

  “You get a rainbow.”

  “That’s a form of order, is it not?”

  Justen looked down at the nearly empty mug. “I suppose so.”

  “You’ve seen the lens experiment, haven’t you?”

  “The one where one of the magisters lights a fire with a glass? Yes.”

  “Doesn’t that show that light has power?”

  “I think you’re reaching, ser.”

  Turmin laughed softly. “I probably am, Justen. I probably am. Still… I know, and now you know, that trying to use false lead will probably kill you before you can do what you feel you need to do.”

  “Nothing’s ever simple, is it?”

  “No.” The older mage stood. “I have a long ride ah
ead of me.”

  “You could stay here. You’re more than welcome.”

  “Your courtesy is appreciated, but I have obligations in the morning.”

  “You’ll be riding most of the night…”

  “Sometimes that comes with the responsibilities of being a mage, Justen. Your turn will come, if it hasn’t already.” Turmin reached down, lifted the mug, and drained the last of the greenberry.

  “At least let me pack a few things for you to eat.”

  “That would be welcome, I confess.”

  Later, Justen listened as the mare trotted away into the night, the sound of her hooves echoing over the whisper of the breeze. He turned back to the forge. Tomorrow he would have to scatter the powder into the Eastern Ocean. The sea would spread it far enough.

  And then he would have to look at crystals-crystals and light.

  CXXII

  “What are you doing?” Eldiren glanced from Beltar to Jehan.

  They faced the walls of Armat, across the low valley split by the River Arma as it flowed in a curve from below the hill where the White forces massed, across the plain, and down through the upriver gates. The gates were actually more like towers, with spiked chains that spanned the river.

  With decent siege engines or more cannon, neither the towers nor the city walls would have been a problem. But the damned Black engineer’s destruction almost two years earlier of a decade’s worth of cannon work had yet to be more than partially replaced, especially since smiths favorable to the White viewpoint who could also work iron were not exactly plentiful.

  “Doing me Suthyans a favor.” Beltar smiled crookedly. “I’m going to clean up their dirty river. And their dirty harbor.”

  Eldiren scratched his head.

  Jehan looked speculatively at Beltar. “Something to do with the river, and the chaos springs?”

  Beltar grinned. Eldiren frowned.

  “What are those down there?” Beltar pointed to the four buildings on the hillside below, and to the road that linked them to the main highway to Armat.

  “The inn and the hot springs,” answered Eldiren. “But you made everyone leave.”

  “Exactly.” Beltar grinned.

  Eldiren’s mouth opened. “You wouldn’t-”

  “Try me. It’s a lot cheaper than losing soldiers.”

  The thin White Wizard glanced to the River Arma again.

  “It will take some effort, but I can get the river to boil, maybe even for an eight-day.” Beltar shrugged. “If dial doesn’t work-”

  “You really don’t like using troops, do you?”

  “But I do. They had plenty to do on the march from Rulyarth.”

  “Only skirmishes.”

  “So? If the enemy won’t fight more than skirmishes, is that my fault? We have conducted a military campaign, and they have retreated. My troops don’t want to die trying to storm stone walls. Do you, Eldiren?”

  Eldiren shook his head.

  “How about you, Jehan?”

  “Of course not. Neither do most of the troops, the lancers especially.”

  Beltar closed his eyes and began to concentrate.

  Shortly, the ground rumbled and brimstone fumes seeped from the buildings below. Troops began to wet scarves against the smell. In time, yellow waters boiled out of the springs and poured across the less than hundred cubits into the River Arma.

  Fog, then steam, rose from the river by the time Beltar slumped against the portable table. “… take a while…” he gasped.

  Across the river, a handful of peasants poured from huts and began to walk uphill, away from the steam. Some tried to drive sheep, oxen, and other livestock.

  “They won’t forget,” murmured Jehan.

  “I hope not,” snapped Beltar.

  The ground rumbled again as a gout of yellow steam and water erupted from the springs and geysered toward the river.

  Eldiren wiped his forehead, wrinkling his nose against the stench. He coughed, half-gagging. “Are we… supposed to survive this?”

  Jehan turned his horse back uphill, and Eldiren followed.

  So did Beltar, with a grim smile. “Who says power doesn’t work?”

  “It works,” answered Jehan absently. “But what happens when it doesn’t? Every time you succeed, you make it less likely that you will survive failure.”

  “No White Wizard survives failure anyway,” countered Beltar.

  Eldiren let his mount trail the other two, his eyes on the steaming water flowing downstream toward Armat, his nose and guts trying to ignore the stench of boiled refuse.

  CXXIII

  “How did he take it?” asked Gunnar.

  “He got rid of the powder, and that’s mostly what counts.” Turmin looked out from the terrace to the flat silver of the Eastern Ocean, “False lead is nasty stuff. Nasty, nasty, nasty stuff.” He shivered.

  “But how did you persuade him? Justen doesn’t let go of things easily.” The younger wizard shook his shoulders, as if to loosen them.

  “I told him to fight chaos with total order, not chaos bound in order. And I pointed out that crystals can order light.”

  “Light as a weapon against chaos? Ordered light? I mean, it ought to work, I suppose. That was Dorrin’s theory… but no one has ever made it work.”

  “I didn’t tell him that.”

  “That wasn’t exactly fair,” protested Gunnar.

  “What he was planning would have been a lot worse.”

  “Maybe… but what if he does make it work?”

  “No one has in two hundred years.”

  “No one was Justen.”

  “It will still be better than false-lead explosives.”

  “I hope so. I do hope so.”

  “So do we all.”

  CXXIV

  Justen glanced at the cloudless sky of late spring, then carried the odd-shaped frame from the shed out to the stone walk that led from the front porch to the road.

  After setting the frame in place on the stone slab in the walk and the square of plain iron beneath it, he tilted the lens in the frame until the light fell in a point on the square of iron. The concentrated sunlight was easily absorbed by the iron, just as magic or chaos would have been.

  He waited for some time, but the iron changed not at all. Finally, he edged a splinter of wood into the light. Shortly, it began to char, then flared into a brief flame. During the process, Justen concentrated not on the wood, but on the flow of light, sensing the strands as they passed through the lens.

  Could he weave more light into the lens? Not like a shield, where the light was woven away from the object, but in a way that the light would be knit together? He frowned and reached out with his senses to touch that light, as strong as iron and as delicate as spider silk, to weave it into a tighter pattern that flowed through the lens.

  As the sweat beaded on his forehead, he could sense the heat on the iron and see the faint, reddish glow.

  He tried to widen the web his mind wove, and shadows fell around him as though a cloud had grown to cover the sky.

  A single point of light flared on the iron, and a few sparks showered off the plate fragment.

  “Justen!” Elisabet shouted.

  He shook his head. The shadows vanished, and he stood again in full sunlight, sweat dripping from his entire body. He looked toward the porch, from where Elisabet looked back at him.

  She walked down the steps and along the graveled path until she reached him. “I’m sorry. I spoiled it, didn’t I?”

  Reaching out, he squeezed her shoulder. “I can do it again. It works. I know that now.”

  “It felt weird, Justen.” Elisabet shivered. “Then I looked at you, and you were standing in the shadows but there weren’t any clouds. And then the metal caught fire. It was on fire, wasn’t it?”

  “Something like that.”

  At the sound of another set of steps, Justen glanced over Elisabet’s shoulder toward the smithy. Cirlin, her leather apron still in place, walked briskly
along the path toward them. Justen waited.

  “Trying to forge without coal or charcoal?”

  “Not exactly. I was just trying something out.”

  “I’m no wizard, son, but whatever you did-” she shook her head “-it felt like you’d shaken the ground or something.”

  Justen looked down at the lens in its frame, then at the fingertip hole in the iron plate.

  Cirlin followed his eyes. “Neat, like a punch. But you didn’t do it that way, did you?”

  “No. I tried something with sunlight. It worked fairly well. At least I think it did. The iron was actually burning.”

  “You burned iron with the sun?”

  “I’ll have to do more than that if I want this to work.”

  “Land engines and iron-burning lenses-darkness knows if I want to see what else you’ll come up with.”

  Justen almost missed the glint in her eyes, then chuckled.

  Cirlin shook her head ruefully before she headed back to the smithy.

  CXXV

  The tall, redheaded wizard climbed the stairs, a loosely rolled scroll in his hands, a tight smile fixed on his lips.

  “Derba, what do you have there?” The slightly stooped figure of Renwek stepped forward on the landing outside the High Wizard’s chamber.

  “A scroll for the High Wizard.” Derba bowed. “From Wizard Commander Beltar. That’s how he is styling himself.”

  “Wizard Commander now,” mused Renwek. “Even Zerchas was not quite that presumptuous.” Derba waited.

  “Might I see that?”

  “But of course. You are the advisor to the High Wizard.” The younger White Wizard offered a too-deep bow as he offeree! the scroll.

  Renwek unrolled the parchment and began to read. Then he closed it. “Perhaps you should come with me.”

  “I would not presume-”

  “You already have, since it is clear that you read it first.” Renwek turned and rapped on the door.

  “Yes?”

  “I have a scroll from Wizard Commander Beltar.”

  “Wizard Commander Beltar?” There was a pause. “Come on in, Renwek.”

  “Derba is with me, ser.”