Arms-Commander

XXXIII

Eightday afternoon found Saryn stretched out on rough red rock, peering over the edge of a precipice, a rope fastened tightly around her chest. Some ten yards behind her, toward the center of the mesa, two guards from fourth squad held the other end of the rope. A chill wind whipped her short hair around her face as she tried to see down into a split in the rock a yard and a half in width. On the other side of the split was a stretch of rock some fifty yards in width, and a good two hundred yards from east to west.

Another gust of wind slammed into her, half-inflating the back of her riding jacket. She could feel the pressure of the wind lightening her body, as if trying to pull her away from the rock, but after a moment, the pressure lessened. She understood all too well why the top of the mesa was barren, except for a handful of stunted trees. Wind or no wind, she needed to find where to place the explosive penetrators, not only where they would dislodge the most rock but where she could make sure that the fuses could be lit with the right timing. She edged forward until her head was well out over the opening between the mesa and the spurlike section of rock, trying to see and sense whether the narrow crevice was wide enough to lower the penetrator into it as far as necessary and whether a targeted explosion would break the section loose.

She couldn’t see any light farther down in the crevice, but there was a thin line of light halfway down on the north end that suggested that section might be easier to break away. She needed the bulk of the overhang to break loose, but that was the part opposite from where she was stretched out. If that section didn’t break away, there wouldn’t be enough rock cascading down into the valley below to reach the road with the volume necessary to be effective.

After easing back just a bit, Saryn tried to relax enough to let her senses probe the depths below. At first, she could sense nothing except small creatures she thought might be some form of bat. After a time, she began to sense faint lines, some of them more like dark gray, and others more a pinkish white gray. Below her, and to her right, near where she “felt” the crevice ended and the two sections of rock joined-or split, depending on which way she looked at it-there was a “knot” of both blackness and the faintest whitish red. Was that a vulnerable spot where she could place one of the penetrators? Or was it a stronger area that the chaos could not weaken?

Could she find a smaller area-a much smaller one-somewhere else on the mesa with the same sort of knot where she could experiment to see what the knot was? That would have to wait. She glanced at the sky to the west, which was darkening rapidly as a line of thunderheads began to build, as they often did in the afternoons over the Roof of the World. Finally, she rose to her feet and edged some fifteen yards to the north, until she felt she was standing above the knot. She slipped the charcoal-grease stick from its bag, then knelt and scrawled a large arrowhead, its tip pointing toward the juncture of order and chaos.

As she stood, another gust of wind buffeted her, and she crouched and moved back away from the edge of the cliff, moving carefully over the patches of crumbling rock. She glanced westward again. She had about a glass before the storm reached the mesa, and they needed to be off the exposed surface and back down in the rough rocky shelter they’d put up in the middle of some ancient twisted mountain pines in the saddle between the rise from the lower hills to the west and the mesa. The mounts and the wagons and carts were almost a kay farther down, because that was as far as anything with wheels could go and because there was no shelter at all for the horses any farther up the rocky saddle.

She hurried westward, back along the edge of the crevice another fifty yards or so, followed by the two guards holding the other end of the rope. Then she knelt, close to the middle of the long crevice, and again tried to sense the order below on the sides of the crevice. The dark gray and pinkish gray lines were almost random, and there were no junctures or knots.

She stood and moved back, then walked farther west, where she tried again. This time, she sensed another juncture, slightly less obvious than the first one. She took out the grease stick and marked the stone, then glanced northward. Dark sheets of water engulfed the peaks north of the hills on the other side of the valley. The grease ought to hold the marker in place, but, if not, she could always locate the junctures again, now that she had a fair idea where they were.

Her last attempt was near the end of the crevice, where it was barely a yard in width, but, as she suspected even before she tried to sense any weakness in the rock below, the patterns of darker gray were more defined-stronger, she thought-than those of the pinker gray. She stepped back and motioned to the two guards. “We’re heading back down to the shelter.”

“Yes, ser.”

As she walked back toward the west end of the mesa, and the sloping, rocky, ridgelike saddle back down to the upper camp, she stopped. Had she sensed something like another juncture?

“Just a moment,” she called to the two guards, even as she was moving toward the edge of the cliff. Since what she sensed was several yards, if not farther, below the lip of the cliff, she flattened herself and edged forward until she could look partway down. What she had found was an outcropping of rock projecting from the cliff some twenty yards below her. Over the years, the stone around the outcrop had peeled away, leaving a ledgelike formation a few yards long that projected out perhaps a yard and a half.

Saryn’s problem was simple enough. She had no way to exert force on that outcropping to see whether the juncture she sensed represented strength or weakness. Although she was personally convinced it was weakness, she couldn’t very well go on feelings alone when so much was at stake.

At that moment, several long rolls of thunder echoed across the valley toward the three guards. Saryn glanced northward. The storm was definitely moving quickly toward them.

“Frig…” How could she test her idea?

If the darker gray represented a form of order…could she somehow move it out of the juncture, divert it, smooth its flow into the cliff…and let the pinkish gray dominate?

Another roll of thunder washed over her, and she could sense the concern of the two guards at the other end of the rope. Saryn forced herself to concentrate on the order-chaos knot at the base of the isolated small ledge below her. While it might be easier to work on the pink, somehow, that didn’t feel right. She took a slow breath, then used her senses to try almost to stroke the grayish order away from the juncture.

Another gust of wind whipped across her, stronger than any of those that had swept the top of the mesa earlier. She kept trying to ease the gray away from the pink, and several smaller strands retreated into the cliff proper…and reformed, as if completing a circuit.

Crack….

Saryn could feel the stone shudder beneath her, and reflexively, she grasped a stone protrusion in her right hand. The ledge slowly leaned out away from the cliff, then, after a second crack, dropped away and plummeted toward the scree nearly a thousand yards below. Saryn looked down to follow it…and wished she hadn’t. The red chunks of rock at the bottom of the sheer drop looked incredibly distant. She quickly concentrated on easing back from the edge while keeping a firm handhold on the solid outcropping her right hand clutched.

At the same time, she couldn’t help but wonder. In both atmospheric and space piloting, she’d had no problem in looking down; but on top of rocks on a planet that had no aircraft, she found being at the top of a cliff incredibly disconcerting.

She pushed those thoughts away as she stood and walked back toward the two guards. They needed to get off the mesa before the thunderstorm finished crossing the valley and swept down on them.

“Any luck, ser?” asked Hoilya, the taller of the two guards and the one closer to Saryn.

“More than I’d hoped for, but we’ll have to come back early tomorrow and start positioning the devices.” That would be even more difficult than finding where to place them had been, Saryn suspected.

“We need to hurry,” she added, as another roll of thunder announced the oncoming thunderstorm.

Heading down off the mesa, she couldn’t help but wonder if order and chaos could be used like power flows, with variations on current and voltage. But…order and chaos?