The Chaos Balance

CVII

Nylan bolted upright on the bedroll in the dim light of dawn. He was sweating, despite the light breeze. His mouth and lips were dry, and his heart raced. For a moment, he sat there, breathing deeply and looking down the gentle incline to the flat and dark green waters of the brine lake.

“Another dream?” On the bedroll beside his, Ayrlyn rolled onto her side facing him.

Nylan rubbed his temples with the fingers of his right hand, then squinted, finally nodding.

“About the forest?”

“You had it, too?” Nylan’s mouth was dry and felt cracked, as if he had trudged through a stone desert. He glanced to his left, but Weryl still snored, his mouth partly open. Beyond Weryl, Sylenia lay motionless, her face toward the south and away from Nylan.

“I think so. It was about trees and earthquakes and white lightnings and dark clouds.” Ayrlyn kept her voice low, barely above a whisper.

“Chasing me.” He coughed, then glanced to the east, but the horses grazed quietly, still all on the tieline. “Symbolism.”

“It’s getting harder to tell the difference between reality and symbolism.” Ayrlyn rolled into a sitting position, brushing her short red hair back off her ears.

“Isn’t it? It’s getting a lot clearer-no, it’s not at all clear-but it’s feeling more important that we reach this enchanted forest, except I don’t think it’s exactly enchanted.”

Ayrlyn took a deep breath. “We’re going to have the entire armed forces of Cyador pushing over the Grass Hills as soon as they can-or as soon as they find out about the mess at the mines.”

“Do we know that for sure?”

“You’re asking that now?” She shook her head. “Given the way rulers and empires work, and the fact that almost all people resort to force when they have it, a full-scale armed invasion’s about as sure a thing as you could bet on without actually standing in front of a bunch of charging lancers. Even Fornal thinks so.”

“And we’re riding through hills and dust to find a forest we’re not sure exists except in our dreams?”

“It exists.”

Nylan tried to lick his lips again, and couldn’t. He reached for the water bottle he had left by his head, uncorked it slowly, and sipped. “I don’t even know how or if it will help find a way to stop the Cyadorans.” He took another sip. “But nothing else will.” He shrugged.

Surprisingly, Ayrlyn grinned. “I’m game.” She reached for the water bottle.

Nylan handed it to her. “What?”

“For the first time in seasons, you’re not the cold, logical engineer. You’re not calculatedly whittling away at a superior force. You’ve said, ‘This is what I feel.’ It makes sense.”

“It does?” Nylan wasn’t all that sure it did. He tried to clear his throat.

“Enough. We need to eat.” Ayrlyn sat up straighter and reached for her boots, shaking them out before pulling them on. “I hate living in my clothes, and that’s all we do.”

“Ooooo…” Weryl rolled onto his side.

Nylan followed the redhead’s example and pulled on his own boots, then turned toward his son. Nylan’s smile faded as his nose wrinkled. “You smell. I’ll be glad, I think, at least in certain ways, when you can take care of some things all by yourself.”

Weryl’s smile vanished, and the boy turned toward Sylenia. “Enyah?”

“Your father be right, child.” Sylenia shook her head as Nylan lifted Weryl and carted him down toward the lake.

By the time he had lugged the boy a good distance down the shore and cleaned him off-first using the salty water, and then using some desalted water that left him with a headache-and returned, Ayrlyn had biscuits and cheese laid out for them.

The yellow brick cheese was hard enough that Nylan almost had to use his belt dagger like a saw to hack off chunks small enough to chew.

Weryl promptly spit out the fragment he had been offered.

“Manners, Weryl,” said Nylan wearily, rubbing his forehead.

“Wadah, pease.”

Sylenia proffered a water bottle.

All four ate slowly, silently, as the white-orange sun peered over the eastern hills.

“We ought to get moving pretty soon,” Ayrlyn said. “Before it gets too hot.”

“I wish we knew more,” Nylan said after swallowing the last crumbs of a too-dry biscuit. “Like exactly where we’re headed. A map would help.”

“The Cyadorans don’t leave those lying around,” mumbled Ayrlyn, trying to swallow her own dry biscuit crumbs.

“The white wizards use a glass to see,” pointed out Sylenia. “Could you not do that? I have a small flat glass.”

Nylan shivered. The thought of using that twisted white energy for anything-anything at all…he just couldn’t do it.

“That might be difficult,” Ayrlyn said.

“Can you not do something?”

The engineer frowned. Lasers…lasers had a parallel in the order forces, and he’d used that parallel in smithing. The glass was parallel to electronics. Nagging thoughts chased through his mind…piezoelectrics…glass, what was glass? Silicon, and what was silicon? Sand? Order out of chaos? Sand was chaotic enough, but you could make glass, mirrors, lasers, mirrors, mirror shields…

“Frig…I should have seen it!”

“What?” asked Ayrlyn.

“So obvious…”

“What?” Ayrlyn’s voice carried an exasperated edge.

“The mirror shields. You don’t keep traditions unless they serve a purpose. I assumed-maybe you did, too-that those reflective shields were half practical, half traditional.”

“Oh…” Ayrlyn nodded. “They’re protection against lasers-and white wizards’ firebolts. They don’t have any lasers left, but-”

“Right. What else do they have?”

“There was a mention of fire cannon in the scrolls. Lasers?”

“Could be. Or it could be something like a flamethrower.”

Nylan frowned.

“Antique weapon. You shoot jets of flammable liquids at people and things and light it. If you keep the pressure up, it doesn’t come back and burn you…something like that.” Ayrlyn took a sip of water, then stood and stretched. “Sitting on the ground isn’t my idea of comfort.”

“Flamethrowers…we can deal with. White magic lasers would be another thing,” Nylan said.

Weryl climbed up Sylenia’s shoulder to a standing position, then tottered toward Ayrlyn, flinging his arms around her trousered leg. “Ahwen…ahwen.”

“You are an imp.” Ayrlyn smiled, but lifted the silver-haired child and hugged him.

Nylan corked the water bottle and stood. Despite the wind that blew out of the north, he could still smell the brackish salty water below. Salt and sand and grass hills and enchanted forests and white empires…

“What are you thinking about?”

“Maps, glasses, forests…you name it.” The smith rubbed his temples. That was the problem with thinking. The more he thought, the more problems and ramifications he discovered-and each had more complexities than the last.

He pursed his lips. Could he create a map, an image? Well…if he tried and failed, it cost nothing, unlike tampering with white chaos energy. Sands, granules of sand-he walked slowly toward the burned-out fires of the salt-collectors.

“No…Weryl, let your father think for a moment.”

Ayrlyn’s words almost drifted around him as he reached the nearest of the old stone fire rings. He scuffed the ground with his boot. Was it sandy enough?

After a moment, he walked back down along the dried-out section of the lakeshore. At the north end, where a stream had once flowed into the brine lake, or still did seasonally, perhaps, he found a depression less than three cubits across filled with sand.

A map, he thought, a map.

Nothing happened, except that he had the faintest twinge in his skull.

Piezoelectric crystals, order flows, how do you get a map from that? Flows…chaos flows, patterns?

The second time he abandoned the idea of maps, instead concentrating on the flows of order and chaos.

The sands swirled, darker grains appearing until a pattern appeared.

“Well…it’s something…” The silver-haired angel squinted at the sandy pattern, then sat down abruptly beside it. His heart was racing again, and his knees were weak.

Ayrlyn and Weryl appeared behind him at the edge of the dry stream.

“Are you all right?”

“Takes…energy.”

Her eyes went to the sands. “You did it!”

“Sort of. It doesn’t look like much to me.”

Ayrlyn pointed. “Could that be Westwind, and the river and Lornth here, and that border there, the reddish sands-isn’t that the outline of Candar itself?”

“Maybe.” There weren’t any large-scale maps of Candar, not that the engineer had seen, and his view of the continent had been limited to the brief time when he’d been jockeying an unstable and overloaded lander through a turbulent atmosphere. There was a definite resemblance between his sand map and what he thought he’d seen-but did that really mean anything?

He hauled himself to his feet.

“And this dark splotch here-that has to be the forest, and we’re here…it’s not all that far.”

Nylan hoped not, even as he followed Ayrlyn’s explanation. Now they were reduced to real faith in the unprovable-magic, sorcery, or whatever-following their instincts, the sun, and a map created by subconscious manipulation of sand. And he’d thought the U.F.F. High Command had been screwy!