The Chaos Balance

CXXXIV

A cool wind brushed his face, and Nylan shivered. Shivered? In the middle of southern Lornth? He shivered again.

“You must drink. You are burning,” said a voice.

Burning? Whose voice?

Images of chaos-fire, order bounds, and the screams of dying men and horses swirled through his skull. Force…force…always force.

“…force…” he murmured. Was it Ayrlyn who talked to him through the darkness? Ayrlyn, who had always been there for him? No-she had been swept under the blackness with him. Ryba? The dark marshal?

“Drink.”

A water bottle was pressed to his lips, and he drank, slowly, through cracked lips and a dry mouth, finally sensing that Sylenia held the bottle.

Nylan opened his eyes, then shut them quickly as lights strobed through the darkness. Propped up against something-packs or blankets-he continued to sip the water Sylenia offered him. Even closed, his eyes twitched with the flickers of light, as though individual powerfluxes flashed through them. Unlike the mass of pain that had flowed through him after battles before, he felt more exhausted than threshed or beaten. An acridity came with the evening breeze, an acridity that carried the odor of burned grass and rock-and charred flesh. Nylan swallowed the bile at the back of his throat.

“Ayrlyn?” he finally asked.

“I’m awake,” came a tired voice out of the light-strobed darkness. “Better than you, but not much. We may have overdone it.”

Overdone it? Probably. Don’t I overdo everything?

“Stop it,” said Ayrlyn wearily. “We didn’t have much choice, and we did it together.”

“It is terrible,” Sylenia said into the darkness. “All around, nothing lives. Nothing moves.”

“Weryl?” Nylan croaked.

“He cried, but he sleeps. He is innocent, like my Acora was.”

All children were innocent, supposedly. Weryl was, that Nylan knew, but the engineer had to wonder about people like Ryba and Gerlich and Fornal. He knew better, but he found it hard to believe they had ever been innocent. He could hear Sylenia moving, carrying the bottle toward the redhead.

“You, healer, must also drink again.”

“Thank you,” Ayrlyn said, after a time.

Sylenia returned the water bottle to Nylan. “Again.”

The engineer drank, more easily the second time, even as questions flitted through his mind.

How much time did they have? Would the Cyadorans turn all their forces against Ayrlyn or him? Or did they think the two angels had perished? Either way, also, the Cyadorans would continue to march northward. Of that he was certain. He and Ayrlyn had to do something. But what?

Even as he attempted to consider the problem, he could feel his eyes getting heavier, closing, against his unspoken protests.

Finally, in the gray before dawn, Nylan pried his eyes open, relieved that he did not experience the shooting, flickering light-strobes of the night before. Carefully, deliberately, he sat up in the stillness, an unnatural stillness without even the chirp of insects or the rustle of grass. His mouth was dry again, and filled with the taste of ashes, a taste that matched the gray of the dawn. His head throbbed with a dull aching, and his shoulders and back were sore and stiff. The skin of his face simultaneously itched and hurt and felt crusty.

His hands trembled as he fumbled for his boots, boots that Sylenia had pulled off. He certainly hadn’t been able to do that. Then he managed to reach the water bottle and take a long swallow.

Ayrlyn rolled over on her bedroll, and he waited, taking another sip of water, as she struggled to sit up.

“Good morning.”

“Wiped out…and you’re still cheerful,” she grumbled, shifting her weight cautiously, clearly as stiff as he was.

He extended the water to her, watched as she put the bottle to her lips and drank.

“You two,” said Sylenia, rolling over, sitting up, and pulling on her boots. “Stinks here. Will for a long time.”

Nylan looked beyond Sylenia and Ayrlyn, toward the east and the orange glow that was the almost-rising sun. Thin trails of smoke rose from one part of the scorched hillside. The four mounts, on a tieline that Sylenia had set up, grazed almost disconsolately on the sparse clumps of brown and green grass near the charred border between their sanctuary and the ashes beyond.

“Will it be safe to leave?” asked Sylenia. “Once we eat?”

“Yes,” Nylan answered. “If more armsmen don’t come.”

“Good.”

Ayrlyn frowned.

“What?” he asked.

“You’re older,” Ayrlyn said. “It’s not the hair, either.”

He turned his head and looked at her, deliberately. Her hair was still flame-red, but there were lines around her eyes, and darkness within and beneath them. Her skin was blistered in places, ready to peel. “So are you.”

She took another swallow from the water bottle. “We’ve got to figure out how to handle this better.”

“Any ideas?” he asked.

“No, but after we eat and feel better, we’re going to sit here and play with it, until you and I understand, because next time we try without understanding, we’ll be old and gray or dead or both.”

“Oooo.” Weryl stretched on his small bedroll, thrusting out arms and legs.

“He feels better than we do, I’ll bet,” offered Nylan.

“That wouldn’t be hard.” Ayrlyn stretched and leaned toward her boots. “Ohhhh.”

The engineer eased himself to his feet and lumbered the few cubits to the provisions packs that Sylenia had unloaded. There he bent laboriously, his knees and back creaking, extracted the heavy squash bread, and hacked off several slices.

One he proffered to Ayrlyn, once she had her boots on. She stared out at the gray desolation that was turning into a patchwork of brown and black and gray with the rising sun.

“Thanks. Need something…head aches.” Ayrlyn took a slow mouthful and chewed mechanically.

In a way he couldn’t fully describe, Nylan could sense both her headache and his own. He began to eat slowly.

“Wead…” offered Weryl.

Nylan bent and broke off a chunk of the orangish bread for his son, then reclaimed the water bottle silently from Ayrlyn.

“We do not leave? We must stay amidst this?” Sylenia made a sweeping gesture to encompass the entire hilltop.

“Not any longer than we have to,” temporized the engineer, half-mumbling around the still moist and heavy bread.

“But…the white demons…they ride toward Lornth,” protested Sylenia.

“Slowly,” said Ayrlyn. “What good will it do for us to hurry up and get killed? That’s what will happen if we don’t work this out.” She paused. “And Tonsar will probably get killed, too.”

Sylenia frowned.

“Oooo!” Weryl sputtered forth orange crumbs, waving a chubby fist. “Wadah…”

Nylan uncorked the water bottle, took a quick sip, wiped the rim, and offered it to his son. After Weryl drank, he wiped the bottle again, gave it to Ayrlyn, and walked toward the circular rim of ashes around their impromptu camp, chewing another chunk of the bread.

The ground was burned in spots, turned in others, and merely cracked elsewhere, but some of the cracks were wide enough for a mount to be swallowed shoulder-deep. Everywhere reeked of chaos, ugly unseen white-red chaos, yet bands of dark order ran through the white.

Nylan shivered, but kept walking around the perimeter of the order-insulated island of unburned and unchanged grassland.

“…terrible angels,” murmured Sylenia to herself.

Nylan was inclined to agree. So far, he’d managed everything terribly, and it was a wonder they were still functioning, much less alive.

The mixture of ashes and cracked land extended more than a kay in every direction. The engineer shuddered again. Just what were they working with? Could the white mages call up similar energies?

He didn’t feel that they could, though he couldn’t-again-say why. But if they could…

Once again, balance was the key, somehow. Instinctively he understood that. He shivered as he thought of chaos, like a fever…like a fever…chaos as a fever, Nesslek…the chaos fever that had killed Ellysia. But he hadn’t tried to drive out the chaos, just contain it…twist it within order.

Had they still kept order and chaos too separate the day before…kept them too isolated, too pure?

“Could be,” offered Ayrlyn, as she stepped up beside him.

“How could we keep them less separate?”

“Use more order insulation? Smaller and separate chaos tubes?” She shrugged and took a sip of the water bottle she carried. “We could experiment with very small tubes and compare how they felt.”

Nylan nodded. Empirical research-that might work.

“It will,” offered Ayrlyn.

He glanced back to where Sylenia offered Weryl another chunk of the heavy bread, then nodded. “We’d better get started.”

“Not until you eat and drink more.”

“Yes, healer.”

Ayrlyn smiled and handed him the nearly empty water bottle. “Don’t forget it, master of the chaos balance.”

He had to grin back at her.