Scion of Cyador

LII

In the late-winter afternoon, Lorn stares into the chaos-glass, painstakingly transferring details of the image he has called up onto the maps on his personal study desk, as he tries to trace the geography of where the Jeranyi raiders travel. After he finishes drawing in a section of river, and the low hills around it, he releases the image, sets the pen in its holder and closes his eyes. He massages his temples for a moment, then leans back, his eyes still closed.

His thoughts do not cease, and he has to wonder, even with his maps, how he can continue to fight against a seemingly endless enemy. How many new strategies will he be able to develop come spring and summer when the barbarians flood southward once again? How can he direct his patrols under such conditions without giving away the secret of his ability to find the barbarians?

His abilities, mighty as they might seem to some, are limited. If he concentrates greatly, he can summon images in a chaos-glass, or charge a firelance or so, or move a door latch from the other side of the door, or throw a handful of firebolts. He cannot do all at once, or even in succession. His abilities can only change the edges of what may be-so far as he can tell.

After a moment, he opens his eyes, and shakes his head.

Why had he been so successful in Biehl? Because he had not waited for the enemy to come to him, but moved to take the fight to them. Was that the overall problem with Cyador?

Why had no one taken the fight to the Jeranyi?

He fingers his chin, looking blankly through the window into the cold and gray afternoon, out at patches of snow and frozen and thawed and frozen ground beyond the walls of the compound.

Cyador is far from crowded. Its people do not use all the lands they have, not really. So the Mirror Lancers are not attacking, but merely defending. Lorn shakes his head. Had the ancients established the Land of Light with all their force in the belief it would grow to fill those borders? Or to use the border areas as buffers?

He ponders, considering the discussion he had years earlier with his mother, before he was sent to Jakaafra to patrol the Accursed Forest, where she had pointed out that Lancers and Magi’i were few indeed. Cyador has expanded, and those who have been expanding their numbers have not been the lancer officers and the Magi’i, but merchanters, crafters, working folk, peasants, and others. Even so, Cyador has not expanded to fill its lands to overflowing.

Is that because its people are prosperous? What is prosperity? Is prosperity the answer to the first of his father’s questions? A frown follows that. Cyad would exist without prosperity, and without the Magi’i, but it would not be Cyad as he has known it.

His mind skips to the third question, and he laughs as he thinks of Dettaur, realizing that Dettaur does not understand that a lancer officer’s power comes only from the acceptance by his men of the officer’s authority. A single officer can be killed by a misaimed firelance from behind, or by one deliberately misaimed.

Therefore, as his father’s second question intimates, the lancer officers maintain power because the people accept their handling of it. The barbarians do not accept the power of the Mirror Lancers, and so, the struggle is between the beliefs of the people of Cyad and those of the Jeranyi and Cerlynyi.

And that conclusion helps little at all in determining how he will face the spring and summer raids.

His lips twist, and, slowly he reaches for the silver volume, opening it and paging through, stopping and reading the last lines of the verses about recalling the Rational Stars.

I had a tower once, across heavens from here….

Oh…take these new lake isles and green green seas;

take these sylvan ponds and soaring trees;

take these desert dunes and sunswept sands,

and pour them through your empty hands.

Those are not the words of an empire builder, Lorn feels, or of a man seeking to conquer lands. He pages farther into the book, reading another section.

…I hear the altage souls lifting lances

against what the future past advances,

while time-towers hold at bay

the winters of another day,

what we would not face

what we could not erase…

until those towers crumble into sand

and Cyad can no longer stand.

Those, too, are the words of a defender. He shakes his head. Everything his father has stood for, and the Mirror Lancers-all are the roles of defenders. And while Cyad-and her people-are well worth defending, defenders always lose in the end…if they always fight on their own territory.

His eyes look into the gray afternoon, an afternoon that somehow does not appear quite so gray, quite so forbidding. He needs to find a way to take the fight to the Jeranyi.

Yet how can he? With five companies, six at the turn of spring?

Does he have to defeat the barbarians? What about the question Rhalyt had raised? He had no fleet, no fireships to stop the traders going to Jera.

Then he nods. Perhaps there is a way. Perhaps…but it will require much more screeing, and time, and then…he will see.