The White Order

XXV

CERRYL WIPED HIS forehead. Despite the gentle dry breeze out of the west, he still found himself sweating in the midday sun. His eyes went from the team to the road, so straight that he could see the gentle crown of the road more than two hundred cubits ahead.

After half a day, the road still amazed him-so level that Dylert’s causeway seemed rough by comparison, stretching for kays, the entire length with low walls on each side. On the inside of the wall on both sides was a half-cubit-wide drainage way formed of the same smooth stone blocks, with large stone drains no more than every fifty cubits. Not a blade of grass nor a single weed marred the space between the walls.

His eyes drifted to the left, the south side of the road, where the pinkish white stone wall dropped almost fifteen cubits to the nearly dry stream below.

“What else do you know about the wizards’ roads?” he finally asked Rinfur.

“What be there to know?” countered Rinfur, not taking his eyes off the team. “My grandda, he drove the roads, and it be said that his grandda drove them as well.”

“They don’t look that old.” Cerryl looked at the low stone wall to the left. His eyes said that the even edges and slightly rounded corners looked as though they had been quarried and set within the past few years, yet there was a sense of darkness and age about the stone, a sense that he could feel rather than see.

“They be old.” Rinfur laughed. “Some folk say that the black demon Creslin-the whites forced him to build half the road afore he escaped, and that be why he created the black isle, so as to build a land that would bring down Fairhaven. Been generations, and it hasn’t happened. Don’t look as it will, either.”

Cerryl shivered, looking at the road, so straight, so ordered, so perfect. Ahead was a faint mistlike cloud of dust, partly shrouding a wagon rumbling toward them.

“Over now. . now. . Ge-ahh!” called Rinfur. The team edged to the right.

The brown-haired youth watched as the other wagon neared. Two men sat on the seat of that wagon, drawn by a matched team of four grays. Both men wore cyan livery. The driver flicked the reins, almost imperceptibly, and the wagon, larger even than Dylert’s wood wagon, edged toward the wall on the south side of the road.

The brasswork of the oncoming wagon glistened in the midday sun like spun gold, and the cyan paint shimmered metallically, and a brown canvas was strapped over the wagon bed, hiding whatever the cargo might be.

Behind the wagon rode four lancers in the same cyan livery as those who had followed the white wizard to the mill in pursuit of the renegade wizard. Cerryl forced himself to sit erect, to look casually at the wagon as it passed.

White dust drifted up from the wheels of the cyan wagon as it passed on the left, headed toward Lydiar, Cerryl supposed. Neither the driver, nor the soldier beside him, gave Cerryl or Rinfur more than the briefest glance. Nor did the lancers who trailed the wagon.

“Do you know whose wagon that was?” Cerryl asked.

“Mayhap the duke’s-having his colors and his guards,” answered Rinfur, “a-coming back from Fairhaven. If you can’t get it in Lydiar or Fairhaven, folks say you be not getting it anywhere.” Rinfur gave a low chuckle. “ ’Cept on Recluce, and it not be healthy to say that too loud.”

“Why doesn’t anyone talk about Recluce?” asked Cerryl.

“ ’Cause it be not exactly healthy, especially in Fairhaven. The whites have no love of the blacks. Never have, and never will, not since the days of the ancients when the black demon Nylan overthrew ancient Cyador and brought darkness back to Candar.” Rinfur shook his head and glanced over his shoulder. “Enough said, lad. Dylert says you know your letters, and you be going to apprentice with Tellis, the scrivener. Well. . I’d be expecting Tellis has books that be saying more than this poor teamster ever knew. . and reading be safer, too.”

Cerryl glanced back, but the road was clear.

Rinfur flicked the reins. “Now. . the traders’ square in Fairhaven, that be something the like I never saw before. . spices, and blades of metals of all colors, and. .” He shook his head. “That be something you need see. .”

Cerryl nodded and listened as the wagon rumbled westward.