Natural Ordermage

LXXIV

On fiveday, Taryl caught Rahl as he was leaving the mage-guards’ mess at breakfast and drew him aside.

“Have you been studying the Codex and the Manual?”

“Yes, ser.” Rahl had, particularly since he’d gotten his own copy and returned Taryl’s, although he had noted which sections of the mage-guard’s Manual had been the most perused.

“What is the one fundamental necessity for any land to survive?”

Rahl knew what he thought, but that wasn’t what Taryl wanted, and he had to quickly think back on what was in the Manual of the Mage-Guards. “The need to maintain order, ser.”

“What is the role of the Triad?”

“To assure that order is maintained and chaos is used only for just and lawful purposes, ser…”

“Why are all mages, except healers, forbidden to engage in commerce?”

Rahl remembered the prohibition, but he did not recall any reason being stated for it, other than the fact that mage-guards were not to take advantage of their position. “Because they could use their abilities and position to personal advantage?”

“They certainly could,” Taryl replied dryly. “Why shouldn’t they? Everyone else in the world does.”

“Because they represent the Emperor,” Rahl guessed. “If they represent him, they have to be impartial and above reproach, and if they get into commerce, they can’t be either?”

Taryl nodded slowly. “Simple as that seems, a goodly proportion of mage-guard trainees have trouble with understanding it.”

“But…ser…if those with order-or chaos-talents cannot be other than mage-guards or healers, but a number don’t understand that…?” Rahl wasn’t quite sure how to finish the question.

“What happens to them? They’re put in places where there’s no temptation, like Luba, or the quarries, or Highpoint station, or the Afrit rubber plantations, or the mines.” Taryl nodded. “That’s enough for now. I’ll be examining you at any time from here on. The questions will get harder.”

“Yes, ser.”

“Now…go get your truncheon. Talanyr and Rhiobyn will do the copying today. You’ll be accompanying Grawyl. He’s one of the mage-guards who deals with loaders and breakers. You won’t ever be a primary mage-guard here, because you don’t handle chaos, but you need to see how they work. Grawyl knows that. Meet him at the duty desk.”

“Yes, ser.”

Rahl hurried back to his room, grabbed his truncheon, and made his way to the station wing of the building. Grawyl, whom he knew by sight, but not by name, was waiting. He was big-a good head taller than Rahl, broader in the shoulders, and his brilliant green eyes, black eyebrows, and short-cut black beard gave him a menacing impression.

“So you’re the one Taryl reclaimed from the loaders. They didn’t call you Rahl there, I’d wager.”

“No, ser. Blacktop. That was before I got my memory back.”

“Blacktop…Blacktop…oh, you were one of the quiet scary ones…ready to explode all the time, but you never did after the first time. Bushy black beard, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Rahl didn’t remember exploding, only that there had been a time of heat and pain.

“I remembered you, and that means you shouldn’t have made it.” Grawyl laughed good-naturedly. “But then, one way or another, most of us here shouldn’t have survived.” He turned, expecting Rahl to follow him out to the wagons.

Rahl did, taking his place in the second seat beside Grawyl.

“Ready, ser?” asked the driver.

“Ready.” Grawyl didn’t look at Rahl while he continued. “We’ll move from crew to crew. We check with the overseers. Some of them can spot trouble before it happens, and some don’t know why something happened even afterward. Most of those don’t last.”

“What happens to them?”

“They get killed, or hurt-or they end up as workmen or something like it. There’s always a need for someone.”

As they sat in the mage-guard wagon that carried them northward through the already-hot morning air, Grawyl continued. “Only one rule here, really. Don’t threaten. Just act. Threats mean nothing. But don’t act unless you’re sure of why you’re acting.”

Ahead of them, to the northwest, under the thin and hazy gray clouds, the air above the massive blackened furnaces shimmered and wavered from the heat radiated from the furnaces. Only the faintest hint of a breeze touched Rahl’s face.

“Some mage-guards have a hard time remembering that the loaders and breakers, and even the sloggers,” Grawyl went on, “are men. They do a job. If we hurt them, especially if we kill them, we’ve hurt someone, and we need a good reason. On top of that, there’s one less to do the job. So, one of our jobs is not only to provide a stronger form of discipline than the overseers, but it’s also to watch the overseers, to make sure that they don’t abuse their power.”

“In a way, you’re protecting the workers, then.”

“Who else do they have?” asked Grawyl.

For a moment, the only sounds were those of the creaking of the wagon and the rumbling crunching of the iron tires on the grit on the paving stones of the road.

“I try to avoid following a routine when I’m doing the inspections. That way, no one knows exactly when I’ll be in any one spot. It’s better that way. We’ll be starting close to the middle of the coking furnaces. The overseer supervisor says that the loader crew on coking furnace three needs looking at.”

The wagon began to climb the lower section of the road along the top of the short ridge to the east of the line of coking furnaces. Rahl glanced westward at the first furnace, a squat structure whose metal and once-yellow bricks had merged into a dark and dingy gray. A crew of loaders stood waiting by the dock as a team of sloggers pulled a coal wagon into place.

Farther westward, he could see the dark figures of breakers working on the slag outside the blast furnaces and more loaders at the base of the slag piles shoveling broken slag into wagons. The clinking of shovels barely rose over the distance-muted roaring cacophony of furnaces and mills.

When the wagon pulled off into a turnout short of the loading dock above the third coking furnace, Rahl followed Grawyl up the slope to a point just above the dock and coal wagon. From there, Rahl just looked at a loader crew-six bearded and sinewy men with shovels in ragged heavy trousers and armless canvas semitunics, their skin darkened and weathered by seasons of exposure to sun and heat. Their bodies and arms moved in rough unison as they scooped, turned, and shoveled the chunks of coal from the wagon into the chute that led down to the coking furnace. Even from fifteen cubits away, Rahl didn’t recognize any of the loaders.

The second man in line paused, just slightly, but enough to throw off the rhythm of the loaders, and the third man growled under his breath. The overseer’s lash flicked out-twice.

The second man didn’t move, just took the lash, and struggled to fit his shoveling into the pattern of the others.

The third growled more loudly, muttering something to the second man.

Rahl thought he sensed something about the second man, but the feeling vanished even as he tried to identify it.

“Hold!” snapped Grawyl.

The overseer raised his whip but did not actually use it. “Stand and rest!”

Rahl could see the relief in the second man-that and a thin line of blood across his upper right arm. The third loader bore no obvious mark of the lash, but the stiffness of his body betrayed anger and rage.

Had that been what Grawyl had meant about him?

Grawyl stepped toward the line of loaders, and Rahl followed, but kept a half pace back of the mage-guard.

Once more, Rahl caught a flash of something like chaos, but not exactly, from the second loader in line. What was it? Then he almost shook his head. It was wound chaos of some sort, and it was strong, but his order-skills were still so unreliable that he hadn’t been able to recognize it from farther away.

“Ser…” he said quietly, “the second loader is ill. I can’t tell how, but he is.”

“Thank you. I had that feeling from the way he moved.” Grawyl turned toward the overseer. “Send the second man there to the sick barracks. He’s not well enough to handle a shovel, and it’s slowing the crew.”

“Yes, ser.” The overseer’s tone was flat, not quite contemptuous.

Grawyl turned toward the man. “If you don’t watch out more for your crews, I’ll have you take his place as a loader.”

The overseer blanched beneath his olive skin. “Yes, ser. I will, ser.”

Grawyl said nothing, just stepped away and headed back toward the smaller wagon.

Rahl followed.