Natural Ordermage

XXV

Rahl struggled to get up on both sevenday and eightday morning, but it was harder on eightday. Was that because he didn’t have that much to do, except read The Basis of Order and think?

He took a shower, and the sun-heated water was almost lukewarm, probably because it was getting into late summer, when the days and nights were warmer, and on an eightday when not so many people got up early to bathe and wash up. He dressed and made his way to the mess, where he was sitting alone, slowly eating, when Kadara walked into the hall and sat down across from him.

“It was good of you to help Deybri the other day.”

“She needed it. How could I say no?” He paused. “I suppose I should have asked how he is doing.”

“He died last night.”

Rahl winced. Should he have gone back and offered more help?

“You couldn’t have done any more. He didn’t die from the lungs. He was older, and his heart gave out. Healing doesn’t always work, even when you do everything right. I’m not here to blame you. You did what any good mage would have done.”

“You’re telling me so that I don’t remind Deybri about him?”

Kadara shook her head, but Rahl sensed no negative feelings. “Sometimes, you understand so much…and other times…” She rose. “I just wanted you to know.”

“Thank you, magistra.”

After Kadara left, Rahl pondered what she had said…and what she had not.

He also couldn’t help but worry about his own lack of progress in understanding what he was doing with order. It seemed as though he could either do something, or not do it, and when he could do things, he couldn’t figure out how he had done them. He just did them. When he couldn’t do things, he didn’t seem to be able to figure out how, and sometimes he didn’t have the faintest idea how to accomplish tasks that the book suggested were simple.

Rahl dawdled over his breakfast, but finally finished the last mug of cider, and was about to roust himself to rinse his dishes when he saw Meryssa hurrying into the mess. She glanced around, then walked toward Rahl. “Have you seen Khalyt? I thought he might be here.”

“No. I haven’t seen him this morning.” Rahl looked at her, then asked, “Is everything all right?”

“Yes.” Her smile was rueful. “I should say that everything is going as it’s supposed to. I just wanted to say good-bye to Khalyt,” Meryssa said. “I’m leaving this afternoon. Well…I won’t be leaving Nylan yet, but I have to report to the ship.”

“The ship is that Legacy one?”

“The Legacy of Westwind.”

Rahl offered an encouraging smile. “You’ll do well.”

“I might, but you’re just humoring me.”

“I’m wishing you well by saying that you will do well.”

“I like that better, Rahl.” Meryssa glanced around the mess. “You take care of yourself.”

“Thank you.”

Rahl waited until she had left the mess before standing and taking his dishes to the rinse buckets. Then he stepped out of the hall into the bright summer sun and hot early morning that promised a sweltering day.

He walked slowly to the infirmary, where he opened the door, stepping inside cautiously.

Within moments, Kelyssa appeared. Rahl had only met the younger healer once before.

“Rahl, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I was looking for Deybri.”

“She’s not here. She has today off, and tomorrow. She said she was going off somewhere.”

Rahl could understand that. At times, he wished he could go off somewhere. “Thank you.” He offered a pleasant smile, then slipped out of the infirmary.

He didn’t want to stay around the training center, but he didn’t want to walk down to the harbor either, even though he had not yet seen the black ships. With the summer sun beating down, it would be unpleasantly hot. Someone had mentioned that there was a pleasant path that overlooked the cliffs to the west.

He nodded and started out.

Even by the time he reached the two stone pillars that flanked the opening in the wall at the western end of the grounds for the training center, he was blotting his forehead. Across the street were several dwellings, set among a groomed parklike setting. On the south side of the northernmost one, two children were playing ring-catch. The oldest could not have been more than six or seven.

For a moment, Rahl just stood and watched as the boy spun the ring into the air and the younger boy danced around, trying to catch it with his wand. Rahl smiled. Ring-catch had never appealed to him, but that might have been because Sevien had been the only one his age living nearby, and Sevien never could catch the ring, and his throws had been even worse.

Then Rahl turned uphill and followed the sidewalk a good half kay before both the street and the walk ended in a circular paved area with three dwellings clustered around it. Between the one to the north and the one to the west was a walk. Rahl took it. The path was smoothly paved with gray stone, although the stones had been cut only about two cubits wide, and their centers were hollowed out from years of use.

Past the two houses were open meadows, with grasses almost waist high, and an occasional acacia tree. To his right, almost a kay up the gentle grassy slope, stood the black wall, featureless from that distance but not appearing all that tall. To his left, the grassy meadows sloped gently down to the edge of the black cliffs, precipices that rose from little more than a height of ten cubits immediately northwest of the harbor reportedly to more than a hundred cubits above the narrow sandy beaches just short of the black wall.

The walkway Rahl took ran almost due west until it intersected the one that followed the cliff edge. Rahl thought the cliff path ran all the way from the harbor to the wall in the north, but he had not walked it. Before long, he reached the cliff-edge walk. On the downhill side was a stone wall, also about two cubits high, but it was of a hard flagstone, and each flag was less than a full thumb length in thickness, but close to three cubits in length, and all were mortared in place.

A light and cooling breeze blew off the Gulf, but the waves seemed almost languid, with barely a whitecap in sight. Ahead of him, he saw a couple walking in the same direction as he was. They stopped, and the woman pointed out to sea. Rahl followed her gesture. There was a large sea turtle swimming through the low swells, parallel to the sheer black cliffs.

Rahl kept walking for another half kay or so. Two couples walking southward passed him, and both the men and women offered him pleasant smiles. The couple he had been following walked all the way to the end, where the path ended at the black wall. Then they turned and walked back.

Rahl stopped and stepped onto the graveled shoulder of the walk to let them by.

“Thank you,” said the man, a blocky figure who carried a touch of order about him.

“You’re welcome.” Rahl nodded.

After they passed, he glanced out at the Gulf again. He looked for the giant sea turtle, but he didn’t see it, or anything else except the various birds that swooped and then rode the air currents high and higher, before diving at the waves. A sea eagle caught a fish with its claws and carried its prey to a ledge in the cliffs. Rahl watched for a few moments more, letting the wind blow past his face, before he continued northward.

The walk ended in a stone-paved hexagon. One side ran against the cliff wall, and another against the black wall. There were two backless black-stone benches set so that whoever sat on them could look out at the Gulf. Instead, Rahl straddled one so that he could study the wall and the order that it embodied, although he could not say that it actually emanated order.

The black wall looked to rise a good six cubits in height above the ground, and the stones were so precisely cut that Rahl could not see any noticeable difference in size, no matter how hard he looked. There was only the thinnest line of mortar between the stones.

How had the builders set order into the stones themselves?

With the sun falling on his left side, Rahl tried to let his senses just take in the wall, to feel the order. From what he could feel, the order overlapped a lesser chaos, almost in linked fashion, as if the order were both a frame and a surface, with the power of the contained chaos supporting and strengthening the framework.

But from where had the chaos come?

The heat of the sun on his face called to mind the section of The Basis of Order that had stated that sunlight was both like chaos and order, or had it been chaos and water? But the book had said that sunlight held both chaos and structure. Had the builders of the wall done the same with the stones?

He turned his attention back to the wall. Could he try to see how the order was structured over and around the stones? Or was it within them? Order had definitely not been stretched over sections of the wall. Rather, each stone had an order framework, and there were links between the stones.

Rahl extended what he thought was a thin line of order, just touching the link between two stones. That link felt more like a knot, but there was something “behind” it. He tried to lift or twist the link, but that didn’t seem to work. Then he tried to see how the order twisted back into itself.

CRUUMMPP!

Even before he heard the explosion, Rahl felt himself being thrown backward.

Darkness flared across him.

“Ooooo…” He realized that he was making the sound and shut his mouth, slowly struggling to his feet amid the grass into which he’d been flung. He felt bruised all over, but he didn’t seem to have any gashes or cuts. His eyes went to the wall, and he swallowed.

The last ten cubits of the wall were little more than rubble, cracked and splintered black stones frozen in a black cascade, part of which had spilled over the paved area and part of which had overflowed the low cliff wall and fallen onto the sands of the beach below. Pieces of stone were also scattered across the pavement and around both benches.

How had all that happened? He hadn’t been trying to do anything, just investigating how the wall had been order-linked. He certainly hadn’t meant to unlink anything.

Now what was he supposed to do?

After staring at the destruction for a time, he turned and began to walk back toward the training center. There was no point in doing anything else. Sooner or later, the magisters would discover that he had been the one, and best he tell them well before that.

He glanced back at the wall over his shoulder, once more, then tightened his lips. He didn’t even want to think about what Kadara would say. Or what his latest mistake might do to his already slender chances of avoiding exile.

He kept walking.

When he got back to the training area, he went straight to the study used by the duty mages. It was closed, and Kadara was nowhere in that part of the building. He tried the mess, then the canteen. He was headed for the infirmary, and then to the weapons-training hall when he saw the magistra on a path south of him.

“Magistra!”

Kadara turned, stopped, and waited.

Rahl hurried across the grass between paths to her.

“You might have taken the walks, Rahl. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m sorry, Magistra Kadara…I was trying to follow your advice…and I did something wrong.”

“You did something wrong?” The magistra sighed. “What?”

“I think I undid all the order-links in a part of the black wall. The western end where it meets the walk.”

“Did it fall down?”

“Ah…part of it exploded.”

Kadara looked at Rahl intently, then asked, “Can you ride?”

“Not really.”

“You’re about to learn, and it’s likely to be another lesson you won’t enjoy. Follow me.” She turned and marched along the walk, turning onto another stone walk that ran southeast.

Rahl almost had to run to catch her.

Before long, he found himself bouncing on the back of a mount that the training center duty ostler had assured him was as “gentle as an old dog in front of a fire.” That might have been, but Rahl spent more than a little effort holding on to the rim of the saddle as he followed Kadara along a riding trail through the meadow grasses, seemingly halfway between the stone walkway he had followed earlier and the black wall.

When she reached the end of the riding trail-which ended a good hundred cubits short of the end of the wall and the paved space with benches-Kadara just continued riding through the grass until she reached a point a few cubits short of the benches. There she reined up, but did not dismount. She just studied the ruined end section of the wall for a time. Rahl could sense her order-probing the stones and the ground beneath the wall.

Finally, she turned in the saddle. “Tell me, as well as you can, exactly what you did.” Her voice did not sound angry, but tired, almost resigned, and that disturbed Rahl far more than anger would have.

“I was sitting on the bench there.” He pointed. “I could feel both the breeze and the sunlight, and I was thinking about how The Basis of Order said that sunlight was chaos with a structure. The black wall had a lot of order in it, and it felt sort of like the description of sunlight. I was sitting on the bench, and I was just trying to feel how it was all put together, and…then everything came apart, and I was thrown into the grass. When I managed to get up and look at things, the wall was like it is now.”

“You didn’t try to unlink or take anything apart?”

“No, magistra. I was just trying to figure out how the links worked. You and Magistra Leyla had both told me that I needed to look more into things and try to figure them out for myself.”

Kadara studied Rahl. She shook her head. “You’re lucky you don’t have to think about shields. Otherwise, you’d be dead. Look at all those stone fragments around the benches. Do you see that arc?”

Rahl did.

“Your shields stopped them. That’s the pattern.” She turned her mount. “We might as well head back. Tomorrow morning, you’ll need to meet with all of the mages at the training center.”

Rahl managed to get his mount turned and headed back behind Kadara, thinking that her calm and resigned words were far more frightening than had been the sentence of exile to Nylan handed down by the Council.