Magi'i of Cyador

LXXIX

THE SPRING-LIKE breeze gusts past Lorn as the lancer captain rides along the perimeter road just north of the white granite structure that holds the northeast midpoint chaos tower-the tower that Lorn is convinced has not operated perhaps in several years. The gelding’s hoofs barely tap on the smooth granite of the road, and the faint chirping of insects in the fields to his left occasionally lifts above the sighing of the wind in the meadow grass that is already knee-high there.

With the breeze, Lorn feels cooler, and the perspiration he has blotted from his forehead does not return, not until the breeze dies down. To his right, the second squad continues riding forward in their line abreast formation, looking for signs of any Forest incursions, but in the three patrols sincethe last fallen tree, there have been no shoots or any additional fallen trees.

Behind Lorn’s saddle is fastened a second sabre in a battered sheath. All the men know it is there, and none remark upon it, not after seeing that their captain had lost his first sabre battling a stun lizard. Yet that is not why Lorn carries it. He can sense the dark order within the cupridium forgedexterior of the blade, and he knows that, in some instances, it will have greater effect against the order-backed attacks and creatures of the Accursed Forest, for it has become all too clear that the Forest employs linked order and chaos, and that such is far more effective than either order or chaos alone. Where and how-of the exact circumstances-he is less certain.

He readjusts his garrison cap.

“Going to be a hot summer, ser,” Kusyl says, raising his voice to cross the stretch of road that separates the two men. “All the signs point to it, every one. Vytly says the grapes are coming in early, and not a late frost to nip’em, either. Melons, too, and even the redberries are fruiting early.”

“I hope it’s not as hot as the Grass Hills,” Lorn answers with a laugh. “I could do without that.”

“No, ser. Nothing that hot. Maybe feels hotter here, though,’cause the air’s damper, you know.” Kusyl gestures to his left, toward the silent bulk of the Accursed Forest. “Always rains more around the Forest. Be why folk live here, even worrying’bout the creatures.” The junior squad leader pauses, then asks, “Heard any more about the big cats?”

“Every so often, I get a scroll complaining that a bullock or a sheep’s been killed. I try to explain.”

“They should be out here, looking at one of them trunks after it falls. Give’em a real different look at things. Wager none of them be pensioned lancers.”

A murmur rises from the lancer fifty cubits to Kusyl’s left, one that Lorn barely hears, and Kusyl does not. “ … such a man as a pensioned lancer … not Paradise likely!”

“I’m sure they’re not,” Lorn answers across the ten cubitsbetween them. “I doubt a pensioned lancer would stay too close to the ward-wall.”

Kusyl laughs. “Not me. Be going back to Kynstaar, I am, when that day comes. Open a tavern there, and take golds from lancer officers.”

Lorn smiles.

Ahead is the place where the last tree had fallen, but, as Majer Weylt had told him eightdays before, there is no sign that a Forest tree had ever toppled across the ward-wall. The wind has filled in the depressions in the deadland with loose salty soil and carried away the sawdust. Poorer peasants have crept out into the deadland at dawn and at twilight and carried off the remaining branches for firewood. And the wind and the insects have removed the leaves. To the south, Lorn can discern no noticeable gap in the huge trunks that comprise a second wall behind the ward-wall itself.

It is almost as though no tree had ever fallen across the ward-wall.

Except … Lorn recalls that there are dead lancers, strange animals roaming the northern lands of Cyad, and farm animals killed and dragged off into the dark. And he knows that other trees will fall, as falls the rain, as blows the wind.