The Chaos Balance

CXXIII

Nylan glanced at the two horses grazing in the morning light beyond the shed, cropping one of the few flourishing patches of grass. Not a hundred cubits to the west, the same grass had turned brown.

“Do you think it would be safe enough to take Weryl?” he asked.

“To the forest? If we’re careful. You think it’s important?”

Nylan offered a forced and wry smile. “Who’s knows what’s important? It feels right, but I couldn’t say why. Again.”

“Has unaided logic helped you reach an understanding of the forest?”

“I’m still not sure I understand it.”

“Too logical.” The redhead grinned at Nylan. “You have to trust your feelings more.”

“That’s hard when I’ve spent a lifetime repressing them.”

“You’re getting there.” Her grin widened.

“Slowly. Too slowly, it seems.”

“We do what we can do.”

He couldn’t exactly argue with either the words or the sentiment.

Rather than change the brackets from Sylenia’s saddle to his, Nylan put the nursemaid’s saddle on his mare and adjusted the seat for Weryl. For the relatively short ride to the forest, he could handle the smaller saddle.

“You would not take your son to a place like that?” Sylenia asked from the rear door of the dwelling. She lifted Weryl away from the mud puddle beside the rear stoop stone. “No one needs be cleaning you again, young fellow.”

“It’s safe enough, now. As safe as anywhere,” Nylan added as a twinge of light across his eyes reminded him that overstatement was a form of imbalance. Half absently, he wondered if a human society would be possible under the balance constraints of the forest, since most accepted forms of manners involved some degree of deception.

“You are not listening,” Sylenia pointed out.

“Where are you?” asked Ayrlyn softly, and with a smile.

“Thinking about the future of manners if lying isn’t possible.” He bent to tighten the girths.

“That’s getting a little ahead.” Ayrlyn adjusted the chestnut’s bridle, squinting as the mare dropped her head and the morning sun struck the redhead’s face.

“It is not wise to take the boy into that-”

“Probably not, but it’s something I feel.” Besides, as Nylan reflected to himself, if the forest did destroy both him and Ayrlyn, it wasn’t that likely that the Cyadorans would be terribly charitable to Weryl and Sylenia, although, he was forced to add, Sylenia was resourceful and might be able to escape. He frowned. Self-deception continued to get harder.

“Much harder,” observed Ayrlyn.

“You angels. You talk and yet there are no words.”

Nylan took Weryl from Sylenia and hoisted the boy into his seat.

“Oh orsee.”

“Yes, you’re going on the horse.” The engineer fastened the seat straps around Weryl, then checked the blades in the waist scabbard and the shoulder harness. “Ready?”

“As ready as I’ll be.”

“You two.” Sylenia half-lifted the makeshift broom. “You will poke and prod where none should too many times, and then-”

“Probably,” admitted Nylan. “But do you want to live under the Cyadorans?” He eased the mare around and flicked the reins.

“They be even worse than Tregvo.” Sylenia shivered. “Be you wary in the forest.”

“We will,” answered Ayrlyn. “You can come next time.”

“I should think no. Enchanted forests be for angels.”

“You would do as well as any,” Ayrlyn said softly.

Sylenia watched as they rode down the gentle incline and toward the older section of the forest. The young shoots in the flat that had been fields were now closer to head high, and some of the trunks were as thick as the smith’s wrists.

“The forest isn’t wasting much time,” he noted as he guided the mare around a more spreading bush and into what would be a forest lane before long.

“Either way, it wins.”

Nylan understood. If the Cyadoran mages succeeded in subduing Lornth, by the time they returned the forest would have consolidated enough of its expansion that it could never be pushed back without the high technology that the Rat descendants no longer possessed. “Even here, they underestimate nature.”

“That doesn’t mean they won’t defeat Fornal,” Ayrlyn pointed out.

Nylan took a deep breath.

“You don’t want to go back, do you?”

“No. But I don’t see any choice. I don’t want to live alone as a savage here in the new boundaries that the Rats will impose when they win. And-”

“We gave our word.”

“Are we so different from Fornal?” he asked with a laugh.

“In some ways, no…” Ayrlyn reined up in the small clearing that remained near the former white stone wall.

The smith and engineer studied the area, then dismounted, and unfastened Weryl, lifting him out of his seat. “I don’t feel anything.”

“It’s quiet.”

They slipped over the nearly flat green creepers that still worked to reduce the former wall and past the outer guardian trees. Nylan felt like he should be holding his breath. Even Weryl was silent.

“There’s a big cat ahead.”

In a way he could not describe, Nylan could feel Ayrlyn’s perception of the big tawny cat, but the cat seemed almost disinterested in the humans, and was following a large-tailed rodent of some sort.

The angels slowed, letting the predator move away from them.

Nylan stood by the trumpet flowers, holding Weryl, trying to sense…something. The flows of dark order and white chaotic power swirled around them. The smith looked absently at his son as he did at the forest-and his mouth opened. For like the forest, Weryl was order and chaos, less balanced, with faster and stronger swirls of the competing forces. Nylan turned toward Ayrlyn.

She too held both forces, but with more deliberateness, more…majesty.

Balance-did it allow greater use of power? How could he find out? He moved forward, just trying to soak in the feel of the underlying energies.

Several hundred cubits beyond the cleared expanse where they had stopped on their last trip, past another line of guardian trees, was a pond, almost oval, more than two hundred cubits long.

Nylan shifted Weryl from his still-sore left shoulder to his right.

They stood above the eastern end of the pool, at the top of a short grassy slope that led down to the clear green water. A fish of some sort, with orange fins and a brownish and orange-spotted body, glided up to the top of the water and took an insect-a water spider perhaps-with only the slightest of ripples.

“Wadah!” Weryl smiled and jabbed his right hand toward the silver-shimmered and tree-shadowed green surface.

At the far end of the pond, beside a bush with narrow silver-green leaves, a gray loglike object, at least ten cubits long, slipped under the surface, and a line of ripples moved toward the three.

“We’d better-” began Ayrlyn.

“Yes.” Nylan felt the menace of the big lizard. Although the balance constraints would certainly allow him to use the blades against the monster lizard, he had some doubts whether blades would be enough. At the moment, the lizard was merely investigating. That he could feel. With Weryl in his arms, prudence was definitely better. Nylan turned.

“Wadah…” Weryl lurched back toward the pond.

“Some other day. We’d rather not be lizard food.”

“That’s a big lizard, and it’s got some sort of order-chaos storage, like a weapon.” Ayrlyn began to walk quickly to catch up with the other two. “But it’s balanced, like everything in the forest.”

“Outside…all of Candar is unbalanced.” With his senses, somehow extended but passive, on the lizard, Nylan walked quickly back the way they had come, Weryl on his shoulder. They passed another stand of the purple trumpet flowers, one that he did not recall. He could catch the hint of the reiseralike fragrance that drifted into the green canopied amphitheater from somewhere. “That’s what the forest tries to right, except that it’s blind.”

“How will this help us-or Lornth-against Cyador?” Ayrlyn took a deep breath without slowing. “It smells good.”

“Where’s the lizard?”

“Oh…it stopped at the water’s edge. There are two cats prowling around there. One might have been the one we saw earlier. They can feel the order changes, too, I think.”

“Why aren’t they following us?”

“Nylan…whether you recognize it or not, you’ve balanced a tremendous amount of order and chaos in yourself. It makes that lizard look puny. If I were a big cat, I’d be a lot more interested in the lizard.”

“Great…I don’t even know how to use it…not really.” A thought struck him, and he turned and looked at Ayrlyn, seeing what she had described in him in her. He swallowed. “You…”

She shook her head.

He laughed. “You! You’re just the same as me or that lizard.”

“It’s scary,” Ayrlyn admitted, her eyes going back over her shoulder, even though nothing seemed to move in the greenlit forest. “I never thought of myself as powerful.”

“The forest would.”

“Wadah!” interrupted Weryl with a lurch.

Nylan reached up and steadied his son. “When we get to the horses.” His eyes narrowed. “Look…at Weryl.”

“He’s got it, too, that balance.”

“Do you think…?”

“I don’t know.”

Neither did Nylan, but his scarcely more than infant son was somehow instinctively balancing order and chaos. Their ordeal? The forest? He didn’t know.

They kept walking, the only audible sounds those of insects, the rustle of the high canopy, their own breathing, and scattered bird calls.

Once beyond the guardian trees of the old growth, Ayrlyn paused by the chestnut, reins in her hand. “Nylan…what did we learn today?”

“We learned something. It’s like powerfluxes-the greater the potential difference and the better the balance…that’s the key.” He eased Weryl into the seat behind the saddle. “And that it’s easier for children. Or Weryl.”

“It’s still unsettling. We walk in there, and we walk out, and each time we’re a little different, and I can’t quite remember how it happened, but I can sense that it did, and that we’re different.”

“Are we different in a bad way?” Nylan strapped Weryl in place.

“No…I don’t think so. But how would we know, if that’s what the forest wants?”

“That’s why we have to leave.”

“Oh…if we feel that way when we’re beyond its power?”

He nodded. “And if it lets us go-”

“Then it leaves the choice to us.”

“Exactly.”

“Will it?”

“Somehow, I feel it will.” Nylan mounted the mare. “The forest even gives the animals limited free will. The lizard didn’t have to chase us. Nor the cats.”

“It wants something.” Ayrlyn swung into her saddle.

“Of course. Somehow…we’re going to help the forest.” A grim laugh followed his words. “And it will help us.”

“That far from here?” she asked, drawing the chestnut beside his mare.

“The Old Rats took their planoforming equipment and used it to resculpt this part of western Candar, but they sort of overlaid the old topography, and some of it wasn’t necessary. They probably didn’t have enough power to do it right-and they sort of stretched out the marshes and the water and created grasslands over what was almost a desert, and moved streams. It wouldn’t last forever, and maybe it shouldn’t have lasted this long-but there’s a lot of energy there.” He shrugged. “Any time there’s an imbalance…”

Ayrlyn nodded. “But some of this still doesn’t make sense, ecologically. A larger forest would have maintained the grasslands because it would have cooled the whole region.”

“I thought rain forests grew-”

“That’s it! This isn’t a rain forest.”

Nylan waited.

“Rain forests usually develop in areas of thin soil and high moisture. The soil here is comparatively rich, and the normal rainfall would be more temperate.”

“So, healer and ecologist, what’s the jump point?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know…exactly. The Rats didn’t have to slash the forest back into a relatively small square. They could have adopted some form of large alternating bloc agriculture-there aren’t that many towns here, and from what we’ve seen, they’re not overcrowded. That would show that the population pressure was never that great.”

Nylan rubbed his forehead. “You’re assuming that the forest would let them. Look at how fast things are overgrowing the old boundaries.”

“The Old Rationalists weren’t stupid,” Ayrlyn pointed out. “They planoformed scores of planets successfully. This place didn’t even need planoforming, not if the forest were already here.”

“This isn’t just a different place,” Nylan pointed out. “It’s a different universe. Fusactors don’t work here-”

“How did they get the power to transform the land, then?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “They use more of a laser-based technology…always have. Maybe some forms of laser fusion work-or they did.”

“Wadah, pease,” interrupted Weryl.

“I know. I promised.” The smith eased out the water bottle and uncorked it, lurching in the saddle as the mare crossed one of the former irrigation ditches. He held the bottle as his son drank.

“Let’s get back to your point,” said Ayrlyn. “There’s a basic instability surrounding the forest, but not in the forest itself. Why would the Old Rats do that? They knew better. They had to.”

“Power, maybe. We’ve seen the power the forest has, and it’s only a fraction of its former size.” Nylan reclaimed the water bottle and recorked it.

“That means…do you think that the Old Rats actually set up a power imbalance as a power/energy source for the white mages?”

Nylan nodded. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. They’re experienced planoformers, but their conventional power sources failed-or were failing.”

“Surely…they had to know it couldn’t last forever.”

“They probably did-but what’s better? Something that works for centuries-or longer-with the hope that their descendants can work out something? Or condemning themselves and their immediate children to true barbarian or low-tech lives?” He gestured toward the south. “Cyador is the most advantaged and cultured civilization we’ve seen.”

“Advantaged…that I’ll accept. Given the way they treat women-”

“Wouldn’t it have been worse if they’d lapsed into low-tech?”

“That’s too theoretical, worse than engineering speculations.” Ayrlyn cleared her throat. “You’re going to use that force?”

“If I can.”

“If we can,” corrected Ayrlyn.

The smith laughed, less harshly. “I stand corrected…as always. If we can…and we can. I just don’t know how yet.”

“Harnessing that power won’t be as hard as surviving it,” predicted Ayrlyn. “Especially in one piece.”

Nylan feared her assessments were all too correct.

Ayrlyn reined up beside the shed and glanced toward the rear door of the house. As she looked, Sylenia appeared.

“You were not gone that long.”

“You didn’t want us to go at all,” Nylan said.

“If one must do something…”

The smith glanced helplessly at Ayrlyn. While a glimmer of a smile flitted around her lips, she remained silent.

“We probably need to get moving tomorrow,” Nylan said as he dismounted and turned to Weryl.

Ayrlyn pursed her lips.

“Will we learn any more by staying?”

“Probably.” The redhead slipped lightly from the saddle.

“Will we learn it fast enough?”

The redhead frowned. “Probably not…but…”

“I know. It’s risky…everything’s risky.” But do we have a choice? And we did give our word, and…

Ayrlyn nodded sadly…and there’s a tie between keeping a promise and order…

“Unfortunately.”

Sylenia cleared her throat, loudly. Both angels turned to her.

“I have made all the bread we can carry, and dried beans, and even some wasol roots. They were in the garden.” Sylenia beamed. “Much better than cheese and biscuits.”

Nylan would have been surer about their travel fare before she mentioned wasol roots, whatever they were.