Natural Ordermage

XXX

For almost an eightday, Zastryl had drilled Rahl with various blades, forcing him to learn the basic moves. Holding the blades had been uncomfortable, and more tiring than using a staff or truncheon, even though the ironbound staff was heavier than all but the big two-handed broadsword. But Rahl didn’t have any difficulty handling the discomfort. He did wonder why Zastryl insisted he spend so much time practicing by himself. When Rahl had asked why, the answer had sobered him.

“So long as you just practice moves, it’ll be slightly painful to most of you black types. Once I make you spar, it’s going to hurt a lot. There’s no point in hurting you while you’re learning the basics. That would just slow things down, and you don’t need that.”

Then, on threeday, Zastryl appeared with another weapon and handed the scabbard and sheath to Rahl. “This is a falchiona. It’s the most common blade in Hamor. It’s a cross between a sabre and a falchione, with a few nasty touches.” The armsmaster smiled. “The naval marines call it a bitch blade. It has a few peculiarities you won’t find anywhere except Hamor. For most of the length of the blade, like a sabre, it only has one edge. But from the tip back for the first hand, both sides are edged. The means you can slash from either direction at the tip, but you don’t sacrifice the strength of the body of the blade. It’s harder to handle well. That’s why we didn’t start with it.” He nodded. “Draw it.”

Rahl suppressed a wince as he did. The shimmering Hamorian steel felt evil, far more so than the other blades he’d handled.

“You can sheathe it. I’m going to give you a practice blade like it. There aren’t any edges, and you’ll need to wear some padded armor while you spar with Aleasya. Even without the edges, a blow can break an arm or fingers just like that.”

Rahl handed the falchiona back to Zastryl.

In turn, Zastryl extended another blade, less menacing, but just as heavy and more lifeless. “Just practice your basic moves with it, while I get Aleasya and the gear you’ll need.”

Rahl took a stance on the stone floor and began to practice with the substitute blade. It was better balanced than he’d thought, yet he felt somehow off-balance using it, even though he could tell that, physically, he was not.

After some time, Zastryl returned with Aleasya. He carried what looked like a padded coverall over one arm. She wore formfitting black, although Rahl thought he sensed some sort of light armor under the shirt-tunic, and held a practice blade.

“Have you met Aleasya?” asked the armsmaster.

“We’ve met a few times.” Rahl inclined his head to her.

“Let’s get you into the coverall,” Zastryl said.

Rahl was feeling more than a little warm in the coverall but suspected he might well need it. As broad-shouldered and muscular as Aleasya was, and as a former ship’s champion, whatever that was, Rahl knew he’d be fortunate to escape with only a few bruises.

“Aleasya will begin with some of the standard openings,” Zastryl offered. “Do your best to stop them, but don’t worry. Right now, she won’t carry through.”

“Yes, ser.” Facing the weapons trainer, Rahl felt chaos, almost as if it were trying to climb up from the blade through the hilt into his hand and arm. Every time he lifted the blade, a twinge of fire streaked up his arm. He could feel the sweat beading on his forehead, but the heat was coming from the blade and his struggles with it, not from the warmth of the partly armored coverall.

Aleasya began with a quick exploratory thrust, one that Rahl managed to deflect.

From there, it got harder, as much because Rahl had to fight the chaos-pain of handling the weapon as much as he had to fight Aleasya. At a pause, he blotted his forehead.

“Are you all right?” asked Zastryl.

“So far. Just let me have a moment.” Could he use his shields to block the chaos from striking back up the blade at him? If he could just concentrate on Aleasya…

He thought-and abruptly, the pain of the chaos vanished. He could sense it, just below his hand, but now he was free to concentrate fully on learning and using the falchiona. With each pass, he began to sense more and understand more about the blade and what lay behind the moves.

Zastryl began to offer quick comments in between the short encounters where Aleasya demonstrated various attacks and maneuvers before using them.

“Most of the time,” the armsmaster called from the side, “a lead from the edge side is a feint. But not always, especially if the aim is to disable or disarm you.”

“That’s a setup for an arm slash…”

“Don’t drop the blade tip!”

When Zastryl called a halt, sweat was pouring from Rahl’s forehead, and he felt light-headed, almost unsteady. He’d certainly worked harder and longer with the staff before without such effort tiring him so much, but he could have been getting overheated in the heavy coverall.

He began to unfasten the padded and sweaty coverall.

“I’ve never seen a mage type handle a blade that well, or learn it so quickly.” Aleasya glanced to Zastryl. “Have you?”

“No. He’s done something.” Zastryl began to walk toward the pair.

As if a giant wave had risen from a shore where he stood, Rahl could feel his shields crumpling under that unseen wave and redness rising around him. He could feel himself falling…forward into reddish blackness.

When he could see again, he was on his back looking up at the beamed ceiling of the arms-training building. Hovering over him was someone, but for several moments, the image was a swirl of indistinct color. Then he could make out the face of Kelyssa, the younger healer.

“Kelyssa?”

With that single word, Rahl’s head felt as though it were being hit with a heavy mallet and splitting apart, and his eyes burned.

“What did…you can tell us later. How do you feel? Can you see me?”

“Yes. My eyes burn, but I can see you.”

“And you can hear?”

“Yes.”

“Can you feel your fingers and toes?”

“They hurt, but I can feel them.”

“Wiggle them.”

Rahl did.

“Now move your arms and legs, just a little, and gently.”

Rahl could sense a reassuring aura of black order from the healer as she probed his body. Then she straightened. “I think he’ll be all right, but we ought to watch him at the infirmary for a while.”

“Do we need to get a cart for him?” asked Zastryl.

“Just let him rest for a while, and I’ll be able to walk him over there. I think he should be fine in a day or so, but I’ll have Deybri look at him to make sure.” Kelyssa turned back to Rahl. “I’m going to help you sit up.”

Gingerly, Rahl rolled to one side, then sat up on the hard stone. At that point, he realized that the coverall had been stripped from him. He glanced around and saw the padded armor lying in a heap several cubits away.

“They thought you’d had a heat bout,” said the healer.

After a short while, Rahl finally got to his feet. Kelyssa insisted that he take her arm as they walked from the weapons-training building toward the infirmary. Each step hurt, and Rahl felt as though he’d been beaten with a staff. Yet he hadn’t taken a single blow from Aleasya.

Once he was in the infirmary, Kelyssa had him sit in a padded chair and sip ale. The ale helped with the light-headedness, but not with soreness. While the throbbing in his head subsided, it did not vanish so much as retreat into a muted dull pounding.

He had just about finished the beaker of ale when Deybri appeared.

She glared at him. “That was even stupider than taking on the black wall. You could have killed yourself, you know?”

Rahl just looked at her. From shielding himself from chaos?

“I went and talked to Zastryl and Aleasya first. You have to have blocked yourself.”

“I just shielded myself from the chaos in the falchiona,” Rahl protested.

“Weren’t you told not to use active order?”

“But shields aren’t active…”

She shook her head. “Didn’t Kadara and Leyla keep warning you about the dangers of trying things when you don’t have an understanding of how it works and why? You couldn’t block chaos from the blade. There wasn’t any actual chaos in the blade. That’s the way your mind interprets the potential chaos of using a blade and the disorder that use causes. Your shield was actually fighting yourself, as well as whoever you were sparring against.”

“Aleasya,” Rahl admitted.

“Why did you do it?”

“Because it hurt to use the blade and fight the chaos-or what I thought was chaos-and I wasn’t learning and being very good at it.”

The healer snorted. “You’re an ordermage. You’re not supposed to be that good. They just want you to be able to put up enough of a front with a blade so that you can buy time to use order. You’re supposed to learn how to handle it with the pain. Didn’t they tell you that?”

“Not exactly. Magister Zastryl said that it would be painful and that I might have to use them…” His words trailed off.

“For what?”

“To keep people off me for a short time,” Rahl admitted. Still, Zastryl hadn’t been anywhere near as clear as Deybri had been. He hadn’t told Rahl that one of the points of the exercise was to deal with the pain. Why couldn’t people be clear? He was having a hard enough time learning what he had to learn without trying to figure out what they really meant. He was more than a little tired of guessing.

Deybri shook her head. “You’ll be all right. Go over to the mess and eat-as much as you can without getting sick. Then take it easy and get a good night’s sleep. No sparring against anyone for two days. When you resume, don’t do what you just did-even if it hurts like the demon’s whiteness. You might not recover a second time.”

That worried Rahl more than anything she’d said. But, even with the worry, he was also getting angry again because he wouldn’t have gotten so close to killing himself if he hadn’t been getting incomplete answers or nonexistent answers to his questions. The magisters and magistras acted as if everything were spelled out in The Basis of Order, and whenever he tried to get an answer, he was either chastised or told to find it out himself…and then, when he had attempted to discover something on his own, they’d declared him a danger to all Nylan.

“Rahl…that’s life.”

“What?”

“You’re getting angry again because things haven’t been explained to your satisfaction. Do you think that people are going to explain everything that seems evident to them just to make you comfortable? You have the ability to think. Your problem is that, because certain skills come to you easily, you just use them without thinking about them or what they might do to you or to others.”

“Wait a moment,” he replied. “Let me put it a different way. You and all the others here are perfectly willing to explain things endlessly to those who have few abilities and take a long time to learn things. Yet you’re not willing to make a similar effort in explaining the implications of what I can do. Just because I’m able to do things, everyone seems to think that I should know what happens next.”

“That attitude is exactly why you’re being exiled,” Deybri said calmly, almost sadly. “You have enough order-talent that most ordermages would give an arm or a leg for that ability. They’ve worked for years to master and understand what they do. You can do things easily and with minimal effort, and then you complain and get angry when the magisters expect you to spend some time and effort thinking before you act. And this is another time when you got into trouble doing what you were told not to do. No…I won’t say much about it, and I will say, if asked, that you honestly didn’t understand that shields were active order-magery. It’s also the last time I’ll help you if you use one single bit of active ordermagery.” A faint, almost rueful smile appeared. “Now…go get something to eat.”

Rahl set the not-quite-finished beaker of ale on the side table and rose from the chair. “Thank you.”

As he left, he was still angry, if not at Deybri. At least she offered some explanations.