Recluce 07 - Chaos Balance (52 page)

   “You left Gallos without my urging. I didn't even know you.”

   Nistayna lifted her face and spat, and a gobbet of blood left those dead lips and splattered across Nylan's neck, searing like acid on bare skin... I took the blade you forged, and I died, and my daughter is alone, without mother, without father . . . and you left Westwind, left my poor Niera ...

   Even as Nylan pushed away the image of Nistayna, another swirled into place from the endless mists of the Accursed Forest-endless mists that oozed from the depth of ancient trees and greens. A redheaded marine officer in patched leathers pulled over olive blacks urged her mount toward Nylan, then reined up, her blue eyes leveled like lasers at the engineer. One of the twin shortswords jabbed at his chest.

   . . . great engineer, great smith . . . the greatest in all Candar . . .

   Great smith? Nylan wanted to snort.

   Who else forged the black blades of death that shear through the toughest plate armor? Who else forged the bows of night and the shafts that penetrate all? Who else built the tower that dared the Roof of the World? Who else? You have abandoned all you forged. Tell me I did not die for nothing. Tell me that the cairns of Westwind will not wither into meaninglessness. Tell me . . .

   Each question raised by Fierral ripped into Nylan. Each one. Had the marine officer died for nothing? Had Nistayna been right? No!

   Nylan refused to accept that. Order did not require that a tower or a patch of ground be defended forever, to and beyond death. Neither did chaos. There was a time to defend, and a time not to defend, a time to fight and a time to flee, a time to build and a time to tear down, a time to accept the past, and a time to reject it.

   He stood unmoving, thrusting away the image of the dead marine and guard. Yet, before she faded, the blade he had forged spun toward the smith, turning end over end, so slowly. The razor edge nicked his left shoulder, barely missing Ayrlyn, and a gout of flame puffed from the wound, his own blood flaming as it oozed from his skin, burning, aching.

   Come . . . great forger of destruction . . . welder of chaos . . . receive your just reward. . . .

   Another figure rose from the swirling fog of order and chaos-a black-haired, black-bearded man cloaked in purple, who wore maroon leather trousers, and a tunic of purple that matched the cloak. In his shoulder harness was a two-hand broadsword. He smiled, and his entire body was consumed in flames, yet he was untouched.

   Behind the black-bearded man, Nylan felt the rising hordes of the dead, felt the purple-clad soldiers that marched toward an unseen black tower, felt the shadowy presence of white-cloaked chaos wizards.

   You mean well, great smith and destroyer . . . and so did I.. . join me, for we are alike.

   Nylan looked down, beyond Ayrlyn, almost unnaturally silent beside him, to the shoulder where blood, flame, and red-whitened ashes flowed, feeling more blood and ashes weeping from his injured face, wounds that ached with the pain beyond pain.

   .. . join me . . . for did you not destroy thousands with the best of intentions . .. did you not forge death and more death to save but a handful of ungrateful women?

   The smith forced his eyes back to the Lornian leader. What couldn't he see? Why had every figure he had dismissed brought up another with more disturbing questions?

   . . . join us . . . join us, for you deceive yourself as you believe the world deceives itself. While you talk of balance, you believe in forging an order, your order. Like us, you are a believer in self-order, a believer in deception .. . deception ...

   The big sword swung toward Nylan, and he ducked, but his skull jolted, and fire seared across his eyes. Smoke rose, and he smelled burning hair. His own hair?

   You cannot escape yourself. You would be a hero . . . and heroes never escape. They deceive themselves so they may always create more destruction to save yet another lost soul, another poor victim . . . until they lose themselves to their deceptions. You are the great smith, the great hero of Candar and the Westwind . . . and you will be lost to your heroism, great mage .. . join us .. . for you cannot escape . .. you cannot relinquish the need to save all who need saving.

   .. . cannot relinquish . . . cannot relinquish-the thought reverberated through Nylan. Why couldn't he relinquish the need to save? Why not?

   As the burns seared his arms, and his skull hammered, he swallowed, and ignoring the burns, the smoke, the pain, lowered his head, accepting that he could not save the world. Accepting that he tried to save so many because of his own, unworthiness, because he had to prove that he was . . . was always . . . had always been . . . worthy.

   Above him, impossibly distant, the trees rustled, and the ground trembled, and a huge tawny cat padded toward Nylan, blue eyes burning.

   Nylan waited.

   Grrrurrrr. . . rrrrrrurrr. . .

   Order and chaos swirled around and through him, and he understood, not just with his head, but with his heart, his feelings, that they were not separate, but two sides of the same coin, understood that one could fight neither chaos nor order, but only those who misused one side of that coin. He understood, too, that the evils fostered by Cyador and by Westwind would be countered by equal evils.

   And the great smith s eyes burned, and, standing motionless before the great cat and the Great Forest, he shuddered.

   Beside him, nearly simultaneously, Ayrlyn shuddered, and Nylan knew she had fought her own demons, and they shivered together, in a cold beyond cold, and a heat beyond heat.

   So did the soil, and the trees, and even the grasses that surged along the new-forged lines of balance, seeking the old patterns sundered by the mighty planoforming engines of the Rationalists, engines that had ignored the balance that had been and would be.

   The fluxfires of the Great Forest, of the depths, and of all that struggled slashed through Nylan, and through Ayrlyn, and their pain intertwined and redoubled, and they shuddered again, in the agony of discovering the balance of order and chaos within.

   Nylan staggered, and glanced toward Ayrlyn, standing on the firm damp soil between mighty trees. Her fair face was crisscrossed with burns, and blisters sprouted on her forehead.

   “Darkness . . .” he murmured.

   “You, too,” she choked back.

   His head throbbed, as though it had been squeezed between his tongs or flattened by his own hammer and anvil. Small sharp lances stabbed through his eyelids. A heavy dark welt was turning into an ugly bruise on his left arm, as was another across his neck.

   “You still think this . .. was a good idea?” Ayrlyn's words seemed to waver in and out of Nylan's ears.

   “No, except I didn't have any better ideas.” After several swallows, the smith finally was able to moisten his dry lips.

   “Some day . . . some day ... do you think we'll learn not to meddle?” she asked.

   “I doubt it.”

   “Darkness help us.” Ayrlyn staggered, then caught her balance.

   RRRrrrrrrr. . .

   They both suddenly looked at the big cat, sitting on its haunches no more than a dozen cubits away, blue eyes still fixed on them. Then, the cat yawned, showing long white teeth, long pointed teeth, and stretched. After another yawn, it padded back and was lost in the ancient trees.

   “Whewww . . .” said Nylan.

   “Frig . . .”

   “That's another way of putting it.” The smith swallowed, still trying to sort out what the whole experience had meant. He glanced toward the taller trees, realizing as he did that, even without trying, he saw, and almost understood, the ebb and flow of order and chaos, chaos and order. He sensed those flows, effortlessly, and he saw the wrongness that underlay it all.

   He swallowed and looked back at Ayrlyn. “What did you see?”

   “The worst of myself.” Ayrlyn shuddered for a moment. “How all of Candar is slanted.”

   “Slanted?” As he asked the question, Nylan shuddered, involuntarily thinking about the worst of himself-the endless twists toward self-deception and trying to avoid facing what was.

   “It feels . . . slanted . .. from way down.”

   The smith nodded. She was right. It did, and when he and she had rested some, then they'd look into it. But they needed rest.

   He looked upward.

   The featureless gray clouds were beginning to separate into still indistinct but separate, darker, and more ominous chunks of gray, and the mist had stopped falling. It appeared near midday.

   Midday?

   “It took awhile,” Ayrlyn said. “That sort of self-examination usually does.”

   “And the cat was sitting there all the time?”

   “Probably. We would have been dinner if we'd failed.”

   Nylan shuddered again, as he turned back toward the mares.

   Overhead, the clouds roiled, and the deep roll of thunder rumbled across the forest.

AYRLYN CAREFULLY BLOTTED away the flaking and blistered skin, trying not to wince as she did.

   Nylan moved the pump lever with his left hand, bending down and letting the cool water flow over his face. A day later, he still felt blistered and burned, and the left side of his body-symbolism made real?-was bruised from his cheek to his waist, not to mention the slash on his arm.

   He knew that the body could manufacture wounds-but the slashes and burns on his shirt and leathers were another question.

   Slowly, he straightened, trying not to breathe too deeply to avoid the aches in his chest and ribs. The air was cool, still damp, from the thunderstorms that had raged much of the night.

   “A pretty pair you be.” Sylenia took the bucket, which she had made less leaky with wood slivers and some form of paste glue she'd concocted, and began to fill it. “You walked into a forest, and you return as though you have fought the fire demons, and you ride back through a storm, and you smile.” She shook her head. “The storms rage, and you sleep the sleep of the dead. This morning you look no better, and worse than after many battles. Yet you smile.”

   “We weren't looking forward to meeting the forest,” Nylan admitted.

   “You did battle with it,” snorted the dark-haired woman. “Battling the white demons, that I can understand, but a forest?”

   Ayrlyn smiled, a bit sadly.

   “The Cyadorans fought it. They tried to wall it away,” Nylan pointed out.

   “Much good it did them.”

   Although Sylenia had a point in one way, Nylan still wondered. Cyador had stood for far longer than Lornth.

   “I do not understand,” said Sylenia after a moment, slowing her pumping. “They did not like the forest. They built walls around it. There be much land, and yet some lived so very close to it.”

   “Good question,” Nylan said. “And there's no one left around here to answer it, but I have an idea.”

   “I'd like to hear it,” suggested Ayrlyn in a tone that said she knew he wanted to explain, and would anyway, no matter what she said.

   Nylan flushed, but continued. “The ancient Old Rationalists-the white demons-changed much of the land, and the power they used ... it remains beneath the soil in many places. I can feel this, and so can Ayrlyn. It's . .. disturbing. ... They squeezed the ancient forest back and back. But they either couldn't totally destroy it, or they worried that they shouldn't. Either way, that disturbance beneath the ground thins out the closer you get to the forest.” The silver-haired angel shrugged. “So the closer you get, the less disturbance. That means that those people who might be sensitive to the chaos beneath the ground, even if they didn't know what it was, would feel more comfortable living closer.”

   “There couldn't have been that many,” Ayrlyn pointed out. “We've only seen this small village.”

   “Probably not.” Nylan took a swallow from the water bottle, then handed it to Ayrlyn, tightening his lips and trying to ignore the itching that was becoming more frequent from his various wounds. Were they beginning to heal that fast?

   “This be too much for me. And young Weryl, he will have everything out of the packs. Again.” Sylenia marched back into the house.

   After a moment, the smith turned to the healing healer. “Fine. We've learned a little about balance. Now what do we do?”

   “We walk back through the forest and learn more. It should be easier this time, now that we've begun to reconcile the balances within ourselves.”

   “How much easier?” asked Nylan warily.

   “I'd still bring blades. We don't know much about the wildlife.”

   There was far too much they didn't know, and probably too little time. Nylan wanted to shake his head. Fine ... they understood the balancing of the forest better, and its powers- but how could those be turned against the Cyadorans? Or could they, when the forest had failed before?

   “The forest didn't have us,” Ayrlyn said. “Let's get the horses saddled.”

   Nylan could sense the depth of her conviction, but it was conviction, not a plan, and he could also sense that they were running out of time.

   The sun hung well above the forest before they reached the area outside the old growth. But even before he tied the mare to another one of the trees in what had been the edge of the Cyadoran field, Nylan could sense that the forest was different-or were they different?

   “We're different. The forest grows, but it doesn't change.”

   “Everything changes but the forest?”

   “That's not...” Ayrlyn paused. “It changes. Trees grow and die, and plants, but the overall balance doesn't.”

   “Isn't that life?” he asked, stepping toward where the older growth began.

   “On a large enough scale, but humans distort things so much , . .”

   Nylan understood the unspoken feelings. Humans pushed the natural balance so far that the reaction was equally violent. He stepped across the slightly raised creeper-covered line, looking down momentarily. “I don't think it cared much for the Old Rats' barriers.”

   “It instinctively opposes unnatural barriers.”

   “Whereas humans instinctively create them?”

   Ayrlyn nodded.

   Nylan slowly edged his way through the close-spaced trunks, his hand not on the shortsword blade, but close, and his ears listening for strange rustles or something like the tawny cats they had encountered earlier.

   They continued to walk, Nylan glancing ahead as they followed one of the clear “paths” in and around the guardian trees. That was what they felt like. As they stepped between two of the gray-barked giants, Nylan stopped.

   The whole forest before them had changed, become more like an amphitheater. Silently, the two surveyed the expanse before them. Towering brown-trunked trees loomed overhead, widely spaced, some perhaps two hundred cubits high, forming a canopy just thick enough to turn the sunlight green while admitting enough light for the lower-growing vegetation. Under the high canopy grew shorter trees and bushes, none touching the others.

   “This is different. I hadn't expected-”

   “The outer lines of the trees are almost like a wall,” said Ayrlyn.

   Nylan nodded and stepped toward a purple trumpet flower bearing a stamen that flowed like golden notes-like the ones Weryl had grasped from Ayrlyn's lutar-from the bell of the floral instrument. Around the trumpet flower was a cluster of lower plants bearing tiny white starflowers. Each plant had its own space, and Nylan could feel the intertwined balance.

   “You could sing, now, couldn't you?”

   “I don't know if I'm balanced enough. I've been afraid to touch the lutar.”

   Will I ever be balanced enough again . . . so many deaths . . . killings ...

   As he caught the fragments of her thoughts/feelings, he reached out and squeezed her hand. “You are, or you will be.”

   Treeeeaaalll. . . treallll. . . They both glanced up at the musical call.

   The branches rustled in one of the lower gray-green-leaved trees to the right of the path, and Nylan half-saw, half-sensed, something like a tree rat vanishing. The impression of balance seethed even more strongly around them, as did an ugly sense of imbalance that tilted or loomed beyond the forest.

   “Almost an oasis of balance here,” said the redhead as she bent to sniff a delicate four-pointed green and white flower. “Why . . .” would the Old Rats have destroyed this?

   Nylan frowned at her unspoken question. “Power... that's what always drives people. I just don't quite understand the link.”

   “Let's keep walking. Don't think about it. Let your subconscious work on it.”

   His hand reached for the blade at his waist as he thought about the Cyadorans, and his stomach tightened. He still had no answers, and less time, but he took a deep breath and tried to relax. Some things couldn't be forced, no matter how pressured he felt.