The Chaos Balance

XII

The white-robed wizard stood near the front of the barge, on the raised section of deck right behind the three-cubit-wide bronze cleats, each shaped like a horned ox, around which the two ropes had been wound.

“Gee-ah…” The low sounds of the boat drovers whispered across the canal surface in the gray before dawn as the four oxen pulled the gilded White Lily northward from Fyrad, their hoofs clicking faintly on the worn paving stones originally laid for the ancient steam tugs that long ago pulled the barges from the city of the Winter Palace, propelled by the same chaos engines that the Second Company of White Engineers was laboring to re-create for His Mightiness’s fireship under construction at Cyad.

Themphi frowned. These days, oxen were more dependable, far more dependable. As for building a replica of an ancient fireship…he shook his head. Maintaining the steam device for the palace doors was tiring enough, yet Lephi wanted a fireship, with an ancient fire cannon, regardless of the cost and the impact on that precarious balance between order and chaos.

He glanced back at the low superstructure that held the privileged passengers, and the seven remaining guilty Mirror Lancer officers, then at the canvas awning under which the other passengers slept. One of the officers had attempted to assault the wizard. Themphi had turned the proceeds from the resale of that officer’s household and concubines over to the wronged peasant girl along with a year’s pay from each officer. In that, Lephi had been right. Erratic as the Emperor was, he was more often correct than not. The white wizard shook his head as he glanced westward in the general direction of Cyad.

“A peasant girl…and she will be the richest woman in…what is that wretched place…Nystrad.” Themphi stretched and looked at the deckhouse where young Fissar still slept. The young always slept, unaware of the continual balancing acts required of their elders.

Far behind the deckhouse were the piers of Fyrad where the swift coaster had brought him from Cyad, far more swiftly than taking the North Highway.

Then his eyes dropped back to the glasslike surface of the canal.

Water bugs, almost as large as the wizard’s clenched fist, skimmed across the shimmering surface, darting between the stalks of the reeds trimmed back to less than a cubit above the water, even with the smooth graystone blocks that formed the side of the west towpath of the waterway. The barge glided northward from Fyrad along the Great Canal, past trimmed reeds and ancient stone canal walls.

A kay or so to the east of the canal, the river wound a more sinuous course, and one more dangerous, with its population of stun lizards and sharp-toothed crocodators. The river was used by the peasants who had no coins to pay the tolls of the canal-and those who wished to avoid the keen-eyed Imperial inspectors.

“Gee…ah…”

Themphi fingered his smooth-shaven chin, looking straight down and catching sight of his own angel-shaded reflection in the silver-gray waters.

The white-trimmed blue barge continued to glide through the mirror-smooth waters of the Great Canal, another work that Themphi knew could not be replicated by the Empire he served. North toward the Accursed Forest, that expanse of…who knew what that had been bounded by white stone walls and wards since the founding of Cyador-and perhaps before.

He shivered as he thought of the teetering balance between order and chaos that awaited him.