The Chaos Balance

LXXIX

As the squads rode southward, following the back trail, the sun poured its heat through the green-blue sky.

Nylan took another long swallow, finishing the water in the second bottle, then recorked it and replaced the bottle in the holder. The heat just baked the moisture out of him, and he was always facing dehydration. He blotted his forehead with his forearm, then half-stood in the saddle, trying to stretch the muscles in his thighs and legs.

He turned in the saddle. With no breeze, the yellow-gray dust raised by the single squad they had brought died away quickly, and he could see no signs of other riders, such as white lancers. In fact, he saw little except hills covered with browning grass, grass that got sparser with each key they rode southward.

Riding to his right, Ayrlyn juggled the crude map, her eyes going from map to trail and back again.

“How are we doing?”

“If the map and the scouts are right, we should be reaching a stream before too long.”

“Hope so.” His eyes dropped to the two empty water bottles. A third-still full-was fastened to his saddlebags.

Ahead, the trail seemed to wind over and around yet another set of brown-grassed hills. With each hill they passed, another set appeared, almost as if they stretched to a horizon they would never reach. The last tree had been kays behind them, not all that far from Syskar.

“Have faith,” Ayrlyn said with a laugh.

“I have faith. Faith that everything will work out in the most difficult manner possible.”

“That’s skepticism, not faith.”

“I have faith in skepticism.”

Tonsar cleared his throat but said nothing.

From the riders behind came a low hum of words barely above a mumble, words their speakers did not wish to reach their leaders. Nylan could guess at the general tone and content.

Nylan had drunk a third of the last water bottle, and the sun hung nearly overhead when the trail suddenly dipped into a depression, not quite a gorge because the slopes remained mostly grass-covered, with some smooth boulders protruding in places where the narrow and winding stream had undercut the ground.

“See?” Ayrlyn grinned at Nylan.

“So Siplor, he was right,” said Tonsar.

“Good.” Nylan glanced south and then west, but nothing moved. There were only the brown-covered hills and the sun-and them.

“Make sure that all the water bottles are filled-upstream from here-and all the mounts fully watered,” ordered Ayrlyn.

“It’s going to take awhile,” noted Nylan, with a glance at the stream, not more than a cubit wide. “And we’d better use whatever you call that water ordering.”

“I’d planned to.”

Tonsar turned his mount and stood in his stirrups. “Watering time! Take turns! Do not foul the water, and fill your bottles upstream. Keep your mounts’ hoofs out of the stream!”

A low murmuring rose and faded. The burly armsman eased his mount back toward the two angels.

“This is the last stream, then?” Nylan dismounted and stood on the dusty bank beside a scrubby gray-leafed bush while the mare drank.

“That’s what the map says,” Ayrlyn said after dismounting. “It vanishes a few kays south of here, and the trail turns west and intersects the main road from Lornth to someplace called Syadtar. The mines are on the road, and I’d guess it was once a trading road before the Cyadorans closed off free trading.”

Nylan looked at Tonsar.

The armsman spread both hands. “I do not know. I am from north of Lornth, closer to Carpa. Siplor, he be from a hamlet east of Clynya, and he says that there are no more streams, but…”

Nylan unstrapped his three water bottles and glanced toward Ayrlyn. “You want to watch the mounts while I refill ours?”

“You can carry six?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Three water bottles each?” Tonsar balanced on a thin strip of gravel beside where his gray slurped up the stream.

“It’s cooler where we come from,” said Nylan. “Remember?”

“But this…this is not even full summer.”

“I can’t wait,” said Ayrlyn dryly.

Nylan carried the bottles southward, upstream, trying to ignore the commotion behind him.

“Stop mucking the water, Ungit…”

“…keep that beast’s ass away from the water…”

“…take the reins…get water for us both…”

Whhheeeeee…eeeee…

Nylan shut out the noise and concentrated on filling each water bottle and using his control of the order fields to ease the residual chaos-bacteria? — from each.

When they resumed riding, heading westward, Tonsar began to study the horizon, then the trail behind, then the trail ahead, then to stand in the stirrups and peer ahead again.

“Settle down, Tonsar,” Ayrlyn suggested mildly.

“South of the mines, that is where we will end up,” predicted Tonsar as the short column continued westward on the trail that might have once been a road. “And there will be white demons everywhere.”

“We’re already south of the copper mines,” Ayrlyn answered, “and we haven’t seen a single white demon. We won’t, either. Not unless we see a huge cloud of dust, and if they have that many riders, they won’t be able to keep up with us.”

Tonsar pointed westward, toward a spiral of dust. “The white demons…at least we will perish with honor.”

Ayrlyn’s eyes semiglazed, and she swayed in the saddle as the mare carried her westward and as Nylan eased closer to her. He always worried when she did that.

After a time, she straightened and turned to the burly armsman. “Tonsar, that’s just a dust devil. Besides, with what we’re working on, if the Cyadorans aren’t afraid of us yet, they will be.”

Despite the heat, Nylan almost shivered at the healer’s words, words uncharacteristic of a healer, but getting to be more characteristic of Ayrlyn. Was that what Candar was doing to them-turning them harder and colder? Did they have much choice if they wanted to survive?

He wondered about Istril’s visions…and her faith that Nylan could provide a better life for Weryl. So far…Weryl probably would have been better off in Westwind-but that hadn’t ever been the question. It was what would have happened as the silver-haired boy grew older. But how often did people sacrifice the present for the future? And how wise was that when there might not be a future?

Forcing his thoughts back to the road and what they needed to find, he glanced at Ayrlyn. “There’s scarcely any wind. Why…”

“A dust devil?”

He nodded.

“You get swirls out of the air above, because of the heating and some of the colder winds out of the Westhorns. I’m guessing, but it’s sometimes like an inversion, and the colder air presses through…or something. I’d guess that the winter winds here are something. Probably not too cold, but strong, and then there are drenching thunderstorms in the spring. That’s what supports the grass. Then it dries, and”-Ayrlyn smiled brightly-“it starts all over again.”

“The horse nomads left because of the winds. That was what my grandmother said,” Tonsar volunteered.

Almost as suddenly as it had appeared, the distant dust devil vanished.

“I have a question, Tonsar,” Nylan said quietly.

“Ser?”

“About Sylenia. How do you feel about her?”

Tonsar swallowed again. After a moment, he coughed, then shrugged. “I like her. I like her very much. Is that wrong?”

“She seems like a good young woman.”

“Her man was Yusek. He died on the Roof of the World. Her little girl died of the chaos fever. That is why she can be a nursemaid.” Tonsar wiped his forehead, something Nylan hadn’t seen from the burly armsman before. “She was close to Enyka.”

“Enyka?” asked Ayrlyn.

“My sister. She went to Rulyarth with Gidser when ser Gethen and Lord Sillek opened the port to our traders.” Tonsar swallowed. “Gidser says that trading is easier there.”

“Do you have a consort?” Nylan asked bluntly.

“Me? No, ser. It is a long tale, and once I almost did, but she left me for a merchant, like Enyka took Gidser. Armsmen, they do not find consorts easily.” Tonsar offered a wary smile.

Nylan could sense the other’s apprehension, but not the chaos that seemed to go with deceit. His eyes crossed Ayrlyn’s, and she nodded.

“Are you interested in asking Sylenia to be your consort?”

Tonsar looked down at the mane of his mount. “I would…but I do not know…she has lost one who was…an armsman.”

Nylan wanted to laugh. The outgoing, almost boastful, armsman was timid, or worried, or self-conscious.

“I think she would have you, Tonsar,” Ayrlyn said. “If you do not wait too long to ask her.”

“And you, angels?”

“We have no problems with her being your consort, if that’s her wish,” answered the healer.

“If you treat her well,” Nylan added.

After a long look at Nylan, Tonsar finally grinned. “I worried. I worried many nights, and she said all would be well. But I worried.”

“Trust her.” Ayrlyn’s tone was both dry and prophetic.

Tonsar’s grin got wider.

In the silence that followed, Nylan studied the browned hills, and he could almost sense the rockiness beneath, as though the soil had been laid over rocks without the depth that natural processes would have created. He frowned. There was also something else, an orderliness, a thin line of order that separated the topsoil and the topmost subsoil from the underlying stones, stones that his order senses registered as preternaturally smooth.

“There’s a funny line of order under the soil,” he finally said.

“I do better with clouds,” Ayrlyn said. “Unless I’m lying on it, the ground is just ground. Even then it’s hard to sense much.”

Nylan felt just the opposite-sensing order in metals and earth was far easier than in the swirling currents of the atmosphere.

“It has to be sloppy planoforming,” Ayrlyn added. “Even without your senses, I can tell it’s not going to hold that much longer. The rocks are beginning to show through. If there were a lot of rain, the erosion would be fierce. As it is, there’s some grassland stability, but it won’t last much longer.”

“Grassland stability?” asked the engineer.

“There’s a thin line between grasslands of this type and desert. Grasslands can actually create rain that wouldn’t be there otherwise.” Ayrlyn shook her head, still surveying the area ahead.

“So can trees.” Nylan lowered his voice. “I’m still dreaming about them. Is that because we never see any?”

“Could be. Except…what are you dreaming? Is it the same stuff about dark and white flows?”

“It’s never been anything else.”

“Not for me, either, and that’s beginning to bother me.”

Just beginning? Nylan questioned silently.

Surprisingly, it was not that long after midday when the trail turned along a ridge line and began to parallel a wider track just to the west.

“Is that the road you want?” asked Ayrlyn.

“That’s it. We need to find some ambush spots, places where they couldn’t see if the road were blocked, and where they couldn’t drive a wagon around the barricade. We’ll also need stones-big ones-nearby.”

“You don’t want much, do you?”

Nylan shrugged. “If we can’t find everything, we’ll work out something else.” In some ways, that was exactly what he feared.