Magi'i of Cyador

Lorn’alt, Jakaafra
LX

AT THE CREAAKING from the front wheels, the round-faced second level adept Magus who sits across from Lorn shakes his head. “They need better maintenance.” His eyes show an occasional flash of the goldenness that may in future years give him the sun-eyed appearance of more senior Magi’i. Fine lines already radiate from the corners of those eyes, for all that he is but a handful of years older than Lorn.

Lorn nods to the magus. Every few kays, a creaaaaking has filled the front compartment of the firewagon that rolls along the Great Eastern Highway toward Jakaafra. The sound seems to come from the front wheels and lasts but a few moments before fading away.

“Firewagons should be silent,” the magus continues. “Don’t you think so, Captain?”

“They should be as well-maintained as possible,” Lorn responds.

With a definitive nod, the magus looks to the undercaptain, on Lorn’s right. “Don’t you agree, Undercaptain?”

“Yes, ser,” replies the dark-haired undercaptain. A faint sheen of perspiration covers his forehead, but he makes no move to blot it away.

Sitting on the left side of the compartment, facing forward, Lorn watches the magus seated directly across from him, but the man in white shimmercloth closes his eyes. After a time, so does the black-haired undercaptain.

Seemingly the only one even half-awake in the late afternoon, Lorn rubs his chin, his fingers feeling the stubble and the griminess of the long trip in the firewagon, and they are not scheduled to reach Geliendra until late afternoon. He shifts his weight on the too-lightly padded and contoured bench seat, then once again glances out through the window, a window whose ancient glass creates the slightest of distortions, rendering the fields and dwellings that they pass lesssubstantial, as if they were not quite as they should be.

Once the firewagon had traversed those few kays of the Eastern Highway that bordered the northeast corner of the southern grasslands-roughly halfway between Cyad and Geliendra-the land beside the highway has become far more lush than that through which Lorn had passed on his way to Syadtar-or even that of the fertile areas around the lancer training base at Kynstaar. While he has expected to see the furled gray leaves of winter, there is green everywhere, much more than he would have expected. Yet Fyrad and the southeastern lands of Cyador are warmer, far warmer, than cool Cyad, at least in winter.

Wrapped in his own silence, Lorn watches, as outside the firewagon passes the towns, and then the well-tended holdings. Yet, for all the prosperity of those glazed brick dwellings with their intricate exterior green ceramic privacy screens, their immaculate brick outbuildings, their woodlots with their borders as neat as if they had been measured by an enumerator … Lorn feels vaguely uneasy. Is it because those houses are more truly Cyador than the massive sunstone and granite structures of Cyad itself? Or that such regularity is somehow at odds with the chaos that supports it? Or something deeper?

He frowns, letting his order-chaos senses reach beyond the firewagon, beyond the comforting warmth of the chaos cells at the back of the vehicle.

From what he senses, the regularity of the holdings that the firewagon carries him past is what it seems. Yet … something does not feel right. Or is it that he does not feel in accord with those regular holdings and what they represent? He can almost sense the chaos glass in his bag, as if it burned to be released. Yet he knows that the glass holds no chaos itself, and serves merely as a focus.

Lorn takes a long slow breath, and closes his eyes, hoping that he can sleep for some of the remaining ride to Geliendra.