Magi'i of Cyador

LXIV

THE SUN HAS not cleared the crown of the Accursed Forest, effectively the eastern horizon, as Lorn’s replacement lancers mount up around the second waystation on the southwestern ward-wall. The waystation is simple enough, a single low structure with stables and barracks for three squads, three officer’s rooms, and a mess staffed by the local cadre of five. The walls are the same white granite as every building associated with the ward-wall, and the roof is of hard green ceramic tile.

There had been another reason for delaying Lorn’s departure, he has discovered. Had he left Geliendra a day earlier, both his de facto company and the Fifth Forest Patrol Company would have been at the same waystation at the same night-a cramped situation. As it was, the two patroling groups had merely passed each other the day before.

Lorn rides the gelding out into the center of the courtyard and waits. He is in command, for the trip to Westend, of the equivalent of two squads, each headed by a very fresh junior squad leader.

Before long the two squad leaders ride up.

“Ser?” asks Kusyl, the older of the two junior squad leaders. “You want us to start on the wall?”

There are two perimeter roads that follow the ward-wall. One is set fifty cubits back from the wall-the other more than a kay back from the wall, roughly a hundred cubits back from the area of deadened soil. Patrols ride in a line abreast, one squad strung out from the wall road, one in a line inward from the outside perimeter road.

“You had the perimeter yesterday afternoon, right?” replies Lorn.

“Yes, ser.”

“Then you start on the wall road. I’ll be riding with you.” Lorn turns in the saddle. “Fynyx … you and your squad patrol in from the perimeter road.”

“Yes, ser.”

Kusyl has already ridden back toward the lancers clustered around the stable doors. “Form up! First squad starts on the wall road!”

Fynyx follows. “Second squad here! Column by twos! Now!”

Once the squads are formed up, Kusyl reports, “First squad ready, Captain.”

“Second squad, ser,” Fynyx reports next.

Lorn nods and uses his heels to nudge the gelding forward and out through the open courtyard gates. A low ground mist, no more than a cubit high, covers the grass to the south and west of the waystation, fading away over the salted ground that borders the ward-wall.

“Line abreast!” go out the orders from the squad leaders.

Riding side-by-side, Lorn and Kusyl ride toward the Accursed Forest, turning their mounts onto the wall road. The column follows, each lancer turning until all are in the line abreast. Then, the first squad heads northwest in the shadow cast by the forest crown that towers over them, even though the massive trunks do not rise until they are almost seventy cubits back from the wall.

muted sounds that Lorn cannot make out exactly drift across the comparatively low ward-wall, barely audible above the clopping of his mount’s hoofs on the white granite stone of the road. A scent that is partly floral, partly something else, swirls past Lorn intermittently. His nostrils twitch as he tries to identify the sources … and fails.

“Quiet morning, ser,” offers Kusyl. “Is it this quiet in the Grass Hills?”

“Sometimes, it’s much quieter, except for the wind. The wind blows most of the time there.” Lorn stands in the stirrups,trying to readjust to the riding he has not done for nearly half a season.

“Times … you can hear the big cats scream … eerie … comes across the wall like an arrow.”

“I’ve never heard one,” Lorn confesses.

“You’ll know,” promises the squad leader. “You’ll know. No mistaking that.”

The squad rides parallel to the wall road at a steady walk, passing ward after ward as the sun rises until Lorn and the lancers are riding in sunlight instead of shade.

As mid-morning nears, he wants to yawn. After two days of riding the wall, and time spent in the evening studying the ward-wall patrol manual that Maran had provided, his eyes tend to blur whenever he looks toward the chaos and whitened granite that prisons the Accursed Forest. Yet … he will be doing this for years to come.

Lorn glances at the wall once more, sensing the cascading webs of chaos that hold the dark order back.

“Ser!”

Lorn follows the yell and the gesture from one of the junior lancers. In the midst of the dead soil, perhaps a hundred cubits west of the wall road, rising from the salt-dead soil is a sprout of green, a shoot that is nearly three cubits high and beginning to branch out.

Lorn can sense the pulse of dark order within the green, and it almost seems as though the shoot is growing as he studies it. “Lances ready,” he orders Kusyl.

“First squad! Form up! Lances ready!”

“Have them attack and discharge.”

“First duad! Advance and discharge!”

Lorn watches as the first two lancers ride toward the green sprout, then rein up ten cubits short of the growth, train their lances, and discharge them. Golden-white chaos floods over the greenery, but little occurs except a shivering of the growth that is nearly shoulder high on the lancers’ mounts.

“Second duad!”

As the first pair turns and rides to the rear of the column, the next two lancers ride forward and repeat the effort.

Lorn watches. It takes six lancers before the growth blackens and begins to crumble, and four more before nothing remains.

“Ser! There’s no sign of anything remaining,” calls Kusyl.

“Good. Have them reform while I ready the message to the Engineers.”

“Yes, ser.”

Lorn turns the gelding toward the wall, reining up perhaps five cubits from the shimmering granite beside one of the chaos-pulsing crystal wards. There, he takes out the grease pencil and jots down the ward number on the blank message scroll. “Ward West 163 South, 150 cubits due west of the wall road. One sprout three cubits high. Destroyed with firelances.” Then he signs the missive and rolls it, riding back toward the column that has reformed. He also makes a note of the location on a blank scroll for himself.

“Ser?” asks the squad leader.

“Kusyl, here’s the message to the Mirror Engineers at Westend. Pick someone to ride ahead and deliver it.”

“Yes, ser.” The squad leader scans the ranks. “Prytr! Forward!”

A small and wiry lancer ranker moves his mount to the side and rides along the side of the column, where he reins up. “Yes, sers?”

Kusyl extends the scroll. “You’re acting as messenger. Take the captain’s scroll directly to the duty desk of the Mirror Engineers at Westend.”

“Yes, ser.”

As Prytr rides off ahead of the column, and as the first squad resumes its measured pace and study of the wall and the deadland, Lorn glances back at the residual chaos, slowly leaching away from where solid black order and focused white-gold chaos had met. The firelances have destroyed the sprout, and infused the trunk with enough chaos to destroy the root structure, from what Lorn can sense. That he will tell no one. And it has taken full charges from a half-score of lances to destroy one thin green growth.

Under what seems an unseasonably warm winter sun, hiseyes fix on that distant spot where the white shimmering line of ward-wall merges with the darker bulk of the Accursed Forest and the horizon. Ahead of them, twenty kays or so, there is another chaos tower, just as the midpoint chaos tower lies thirty kays behind them.

Yet the chaos towers all over Cyador are weakening. How much longer will these hold, and what will hold the Accursed Forest back when they fail? Lorn snorts to himself. Unless he can determine a way to deal with both the Forest and Maran before Maran deals with him-and without alerting anyone else-Lorn will find himself failing long before the towers do.

He keeps riding, his eyes scanning the wall and the dead land stretching out from the white granite chaos bulwark.