Magi'i of Cyador

LXIII

IN THE EARLY morning light, Lorn rides easily beside Maran as the two lancer officers near the wall warding the Accursed Forest. Lorn’s mount is a white gelding of moderate size, while Maran rides a fractious white stallion three hands taller at the shoulder than the gelding.

“You’re lucky it’s clear,” Maran observes. “We often have an early morning fog in the winter, especially around the wall. It can make it difficult if the forest tries to use a fallen trunk as a bridge to escape because no one sees anything until the giant cats are loose and killing cattle or peasants or until a stun lizard has killed an entire wagon team.”

Lorn nods, listening to the words and remembering them, neither accepting nor rejecting what the majer says.

Even from a kay away, the Accursed Forest towers into the sky, a mass of greenery that appears more like a dark, low-lying cloud than vegetation. The crown of the forest canopy rises at least two hundred cubits skyward, and the ward-wall itself appears as little more than a thin shimmering white line at the base of the trees it confines.

The grass through which the narrow road leads dies away, and the white paving stones continue toward the wall through a grayish white dirt that oozes the red chaos of salt-killed soil. The light breeze intermittently swirls powder-like soil and salt across the road. Lorn can also sense residual chaos-from firelances, or magus-bolts, or perhaps from the specal firecannon Maran had mentioned the afternoon before.

“It’s amazing the first time you see it,” Maran observes. “It’s hard to believe that anyone could have built something this massive and so long. Remember, the part that’s underground is ten times as deep as what you see.”

As they approach the wall more closely, Lorn glances upward at the dark-trunked trees that appear evenly spaced just inside the wall. Each trunk appears to be set no less thanthirty cubits from the next and no more than forty. At the height from which Lorn can see their bases across the top of the wall, he judges each trunk to be between ten and fifteen cubits in diameter.

Maran reins up the white stallion a good fifty cubits back from the wall, and Lorn follows the majer’s lead.

Then Lorn studies the watt-a barrier not terribly high, perhaps five cubits high, low enough that he can look beyond it while mounted. Each white granite wall stone is an oblong two cubits long, one cubit high, and approximately one thick, from what Lorn can tell. The wall’s thickness is three courses. He looks to the southeast, but there the wall seems to end less than a kay away, a spot marked by the fifty-cubit-high granite structure that stands a quarter kay back from the wall-the southernmost chaos tower. The tower is windowless and squat.

He glances back to his left, where the wall seems to stretch endlessly to the northwest, a line of white dwindling and then vanishing into the gray-green of the horizon. “It looks as though any one of those trees could fall and crush the wall.”

“If it were a normal wall, they might. The bark and the outer layer splinter and shatter, but their heartwood absorbs all the chaos for a long time, and that allows all sorts of animals to use the trunk as a bridge.” Maran snorts. “Then, to remove it from the wall proper takes special engineer equipment, and the engineers have their hands full. Sometimes, there are seeds that sprout as well.”

“Even in the salted soil?”

“Even there, and at times the seeds and fragments get thrown or carried beyond the barrier strip.”

Lorn glances from the wall back along the road. At most, one of the tallest trees would cover less than a quarter of the distance to where the grass begins. “How often does that happen?”

“An actual full trunk falling-perhaps ten a season in a bad season, five in a good season. Two years ago, there were close to three score in the autumn. That was the most ever.”

Lorn frowns. Between twenty and forty tree trunks fallingacross the wall every year? In a bad year, that might approach one an eightday.

“A giant cat or a stun lizard-they’re about as dangerous as a company of barbarians.”

“How many lancers do we lose every year?” asks the captain.

“Some years, perhaps a handful. Two years ago, we lost almost tenscore.” Maran shrugs. “That was high.” The majer turns his mount right, along the white paving stones of the twenty-cubit-wide road that parallels the wall, back along the wall toward the chaos tower.

Lorn follows, his eyes and senses still studying the wall.

Every two hundred and fifty cubits is a glittering cube of crystal, from which chaos radiates above the whitened granite. A stronger, but less obvious, line of chaos runs from ward to ward through the cupridium cables within the white ceramic casings set under the capstones of the wall, cables that link each cube with the next.

The entire wall glitters with chaos and power, yet it seems almost insignificant against the unseen wall of dark order that the Accursed Forest represents. Lorn does not quite shudder, but he wonders how Maran can accept the Forest so casually. His chaos-order senses range over Maran as they have over the wall, and he has to force himself not to stiffen in the white leather saddle. Smoldering beneath the pleasant exterior and the uniform of a lancer is a magus-or a lancer with the power of a second-level adept.

Lorn lets a faint smile cross his lips. His eyes lift and study the road and what lies ahead-the white granite structure that is one of the dozen chaos towers to power and reinforce the very structure of the ward-wall. A low chaos-reinforced white granite wall-built exactly like the ward-wall-runs from the chaos tower building to the ward-wall proper. Although it rises nearly fifty cubits above the dead and saltedsoil area in which it is located, it too is dwarfed by the bulk and power of the Accursed Forest to its north.

Just what sort of chaos-power had the ancients used toconfine the Accursed Forest? And how had Cyador been able to maintain those wards for so long?

Knowing that he has more immediate problems than the source of the wards’ power, Lorn glances from the wall to Maran, then back to the ward-wall.