The Chaos Balance

CXXIX

From her mount beside Nylan’s, Ayrlyn raised her eyebrows. “You all right?”

“Sorry.” Nylan flushed at the growling from his stomach. “Sylenia’s culinary inventions have definitely kept us from starving, but the side effects are…” Rather than finish the sentence he never should have begun, he glanced to the west, at a hillside that had rapidly become all too typical, a patchwork of brown and black and gray.

So far, all the holdings that they had passed since entering southern Lornth were ashes, black lumps in the midst of blackened grass that stretched for kays around even the most humble of hovels. Four days of scattered ashes and cinders, and more scattered ashes and cinders.

“We’re eating, and we don’t have to stop to forage,” Ayrlyn pointed out.

Nylan wished he’d said nothing.

“Might have been better,” Ayrlyn grinned.

“You would eat ashes were it not-” began the nursemaid.

“I’m sorry. I know.” Nylan sniffed the air as the mare carried him up the long incline. “Something’s burning.”

“Grass.”

“More than grass. More than just a holding.” The engineer glanced at Ayrlyn.

The redhead’s eyes glazed over, and she half-slumped in the saddle.

Nylan slowed his mare to match the slower pace of the half-attended chestnut that Ayrlyn rode.

“Gwasss…wadah, pease?” Weryl coughed after his request.

“You are not thirsty,” Sylenia informed her charge.

Nylan suspected that Weryl just wanted to talk, but, precocious as his son appeared to be, his vocabulary was still rather limited. So he asked for water, and more water.

“There was a town ahead. Clynya, maybe, but it’s hard to tell.” Ayrlyn shivered and straightened in the saddle.

“Hard to tell?” Although he asked, Nylan had a feeling that he knew what she meant.

“Exactly. You know.”

He did-the town had been burned the way the holdings they had ridden past had been.

They reined up at the top of the hills and looked northward. Nylan glanced across the blackened expanse, kays and kays, on each side of the river. Smoke still swirled up from blackened heaps. Was the smoldering mass on the right side of the river all that was left of the barracks where they had stayed?

Along with acridness of ashes and cinders came the odor of charred meat. Only the thin plumes of grayish smoke moved in the afternoon heat, rising in thin spirals-except for a single figure that might have been a dog darting along what had been the road through Clynya.

“Clynya? This be Clynya?” asked Sylenia in a choked voice.

“We think so.” Nylan studied what had been the barracks and the stable, where even the collapsed sod roof seemed, if his eyes were reliable from the distance, to smolder.

“They are demons…”

Nylan nodded, absently wondering again how a people who could build such clean and advanced homes could so consciencelessly destroy whole towns and their inhabitants. Ayrlyn had once said that technology enabled mercy, but the Cyadorans seemed less merciful than their lower-tech neighbors, rather than more.

“Because they don’t believe outsiders are real people.” Ayrlyn cleared her throat.

“And because they understand that force is the only true arbiter?”

“Probably.” Ayrlyn spoke dismissively, and Nylan felt her feelings, both her acceptance that people relied on force and her general but intense disgust that it had to be so.

“The Cyadorans and Fornal speak the same language in that respect. Iron, cold iron, is the master of all.” He flicked the mare’s reins. Whatever they decided, sitting and watching the remnants of Clynya smolder wasn’t going to further their efforts. “Now what? Keep riding?”

“Any better ideas?”

He shook his head. Even the dog-if it had been a dog-had vanished, and only the smoke swirled on the east side of the river. “How long ago, do you think?”

“A day, maybe two.”

Why had everything taken so long? Why had he been so dense? And now, even if they caught up with the Cyadoran hordes…what could they do?

“We couldn’t have gotten here much quicker. Try to remember that,” Ayrlyn said.

“That’s easy to say.” And I still don’t know how to stop them…

“Use the imbalance…like you said.” Ayrlyn eased her chestnut closer to his mare as they continued down the road toward the ruins of Clynya.

“For destruction?” Nylan rubbed his neck, then eased his right hand behind the leather straps of the blade harness and tried to massage his stiff left shoulder.

“You’re the one who keeps pointing out that people only respect force.”

“I have trouble with that.”

“You don’t want to become like Ryba,” Ayrlyn said.

“No.”

“Using force doesn’t mean you have to glory in it or flaunt it.” Ayrlyn reached across the space between mounts, leaning sideways in the saddle for a moment so her fingers could squeeze the wrist of his rein hand. “Anyway, we have to figure out how to use that imbalance first.”

Nylan nodded. If they didn’t use what they knew to survive, morality would become quickly irrelevant. The problem was that, having opted for survival, most survivors in Candar never seemed to regain their morality.

“That bothers you.”

“Absolutely. I know I’m no better than anyone else, maybe not so good. So how can I believe it when I promise myself I won’t change the way Ryba did?”

“You’re not the same.”

Nylan would have liked to hope so, but self-justification was a specialty of human beings, and he was more than conscious of being all too human, of seeking self-justification all too easily.