Arms-Commander

XXXV

Even by midmorning on fiveday, Saryn was getting a bad feeling about the line of thunderstorms to the northeast. They looked darker than most, and she could hear the distant rumbling of thunder. Also, thunderstorms that formed earlier in the day were more severe. So far she’d had no word from the Marshal as to the progress of the Gallosian forces, but no news meant that Arthanos wasn’t all that close. Not yet, anyway.

By just before noon, the line of thunderstorms had reached the other side of the valley opposite the mesa, and rain was beginning to fall there. Saryn had been careful to place the penetrators on rock high enough not to be flooded but low enough that they weren’t anywhere near the highest points on that part of the mesa. But still…she looked toward the oncoming ominous clouds and the sheets of rain that looked black in the gloom cast by the thick and towering clouds blocking the sun. The penetrator casings were iron, and there were far more lightning flashes than she’d yet seen in a mountain thunderstorm.

There certainly wasn’t time to move the penetrators off the mesa, not when it had taken most of a day to get them up there, and with the intensity of the oncoming storm, Saryn wasn’t certain that anywhere would have been safe. Probably she should have waited to cart them onto the mesa, but she’d always hated to be forced into doing anything at the last moment.

Now…by being too prepared, she might lose everything.

Could she use her skills with the “flow” of order to draw or keep the lightning bolts away from the penetrators? How? Was it even possible?

What was a lightning bolt? She didn’t see how it could be order. Was it some form of chaosbolt, like those flung by the white mages?

She walked hurriedly eastward toward the mesa, angling her path so that she reached a point just a few yards down from where the rock surface flattened into the mesa top and a handful of yards back from the cliff overlooking the valley. The gusting chill winds whipped at her, and she had to refasten her riding jacket. Then she sat down on one of the tumbled rocky chunks and concentrated on the nearest edge of the thunderstorm, no more than a kay away.

At first, all she could sense was a swirl of chaos. Rather than probe, she just let her senses absorb the swirling winds and water droplets. Before long, she began to grasp that, for all the chaos, there was a pattern there, and an interplay between order and chaos.

Cracckkk! A blast of energy slammed somewhere down into the valley, but it was close enough that for several moments Saryn heard nothing. Then tiny high-pitched bells rang in her ears before her hearing began to return.

Scattered rain droplets began to pelt her, and she tried again to absorb the pattern or patterns within the approaching thunderstorm. Somehow the water droplets collected or embodied order. That order was tossed up by chaos high into the storm, then dropped, only to be hurled upward once more. With each cycle, more order was gathered…and so was more chaos, except the chaos, she realized, was being drawn from the ground or rocks beneath the storm.

That’s it! Lightning is chaos cloaked in order…and it actually flows in both directions at once. Somehow…somehow, she had to create enough of an order-barrier around the weapons so that the order strength of the storm wouldn’t draw chaos from the mesa and through the iron casings of the penetrators, but from a point at least a few yards away from them.

She began to scramble over the rocky ground and bare rocks in the direction of the weapons. She didn’t want to get too close, but she just couldn’t handle order flows from a distance. Nylan might have been able to, but she didn’t have his skills.

She stopped well over fifty yards from the weapons, dropping behind a block of red rock that offered protection from flying iron or lightning-she hoped. The rain droplets were falling faster and harder, and another roll of thunder shook the air. Saryn forced herself to concentrate.

First, she tried to sense any order-pathways around where the weapons were. There were only three, and they were faint. There didn’t seem to be much chaos, either. But she could sense a distant rush of it moving from the north end of the mesa, as if it accompanied the wall of rain that had begun to sweep toward her and the weapons. All Saryn could think of was to try to braid the three faint order-pathways into a loose pattern around the penetrators. That might divert the buildup of chaos to another higher area of the mesa. If she could make it work…

She kept trying to reinforce those order-barriers while, all around her, a sort of pressure built, not order, but not exactly chaos, either. She felt as though she were being pressed into the rock, even while water poured down on her.

Crack! Crack! Crack!..

Scores of miniature lightning flashes-or slender reedlike stalks of order and chaos-flared across the higher rocky hump to the south of the waterproof-covered penetrators. The bitter smell of ozone-something she hadn’t expected to smell again after she’d left the Winterlance-filled the air around her. At the same time, her ears reverberated. When the reverberations finally died away, and the rain subsided to something more like a shower, there was a deep silence-except that in the distance, she could hear the faintest roll of thunder. She glanced up and to the southwest. Another lightning bolt flared against a ridgeline of a peak perhaps three kays away, but the sound she heard was so faint that the lightning strike should have been more like ten kays away.

Soaked as she was, she needed to check the penetrators, especially the fuses, to make sure that the wind hadn’t ripped them out of their oiled leather. So she extended her senses again-or tried to-except an unseen hammer slammed into her skull so hard that she staggered…and almost fell. For a moment, she just stood on the wet rock, water dripping off her, trying to gather herself together.

She’d seen Nylan collapse after using his skill with order too much, but that had been to destroy thousands. All she’d done was to divert a lightning bolt some twenty or thirty yards.

All? And just how much power is in one of those? She winced. She hadn’t thought of it in quite that way.

After a moment, she edged toward the waterproof-covered weapons. They looked untouched, and there were no signs that the lightning had struck close. She certainly hadn’t seen or felt it, but she could have missed a strike amid that last set of blasts. She paused. If any had been struck, shouldn’t it have exploded? Or could the powder be slow-cooking?

She wished she could use her senses to check the penetrators, but even the thought of using them at the moment brought on a throbbing in her skull. Finally, she hurried toward the still-mostly-covered weapons. They were cool to the touch, and no water, or anything else, had gotten to the oilskin-covered and rolled fuse cables. After repositioning the waterproofs, she stepped back and glanced up. The northern sky was almost clear-a crystalline greenish blue, and the storms were already well to the southwest.

As she turned and walked carefully back over dampened, red sandy soil and rain-slicked red rock, she couldn’t help but think about Ryba. After ten years of being Ryba’s arms-commander, Saryn had come to assume, if tacitly, that Ryba’s visions were true. What if they were not? And even if they were-this time-would what she saw always come to pass? Was that why Ryba kept most of them to herself? Somehow, Saryn doubted that Ryba had foreseen everything that had happened with Nylan.

She kept walking through the scattered droplets that were tapering off to nothing, making her way off the top of the mesa and down toward the upper camp. As she neared the twisted trees, she could see that a Westwind guard waited, her mount breathing heavily from the ride up the hills and over the shoulder.

Saryn waved and hurried toward the woman.

As Saryn drew closer, the guard said something, but Saryn couldn’t hear the words. She stopped and looked closely at the guard. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear that.”

“A message from the Marshal, ser.”

Saryn only heard some of the words, but by watching, she got the meaning-or close enough, since the guard then extended a folded sheet of paper.

“Thank you.” Saryn took the small square of paper and read Ryba’s precise script.

Commander-

Arthanos will reach the pass at the end of the valley no later than noon tomorrow. So far, he has lost almost two companies of cavalry.

Under the words was Ryba’s seal.

Saryn could only hope that she didn’t have to deal with another thunderstorm, especially at the time when the Gallosians finally reached the valley.