The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [168]
I would have liked to hear more, but what he said would have made no difference, and attacking the palace, in my own way, would force Antonin and the prefect to look within the palace, rather than in Fenard—at least for a while.
Karflis looked around in confusion. “Hersil!”
Click!
“He just fell asleep as I was talking.”
The two guards had crowded inside the room, their swords drawn on the captain, and the officer who had been outside followed, barely a step behind.
Like the marshall, the two guards were lost to order, and I put them to sleep as well. While it was only temporary, a little confusion would not hurt.
The other officer gaped as his guards sagged into sleep. “Wizardry! There’s a wizard around here! Call Tallian—”
Putting him to sleep took longer, because I was already tired.
I sat down on the thick plush carpet whose color I could not determine from my sense of place alone, and thought. What I was doing wasn’t going to work.
Out of five men, four were beyond redemption. While I could easily have removed the chaos from their souls, that chaos was so much of their being that they would have died, or been mindless idiots. And besides, destruction was destruction, at least according to the book.
I shook my head.
Karflis stood there, also shaking his head, confusion over his own mental state warring with confusion over the collapse of the marshall and the three others.
A thought occurred to me, and I let my feelings reach for the sleeping young officer, trying to see if I could determine the source of that chaos. Only a hint, but it pointed, if pointing was the right word, to something else, that something I had sensed in entering the palace.
I got up, as silently as I could, and walked over one guard’s sleeping figure and through the now-open door and back into the outer office, leaving one still-puzzled captain behind.
Back down the marbled corridors, past three or four sets of guards until I could sense that deadly fountain of chaos—a tumbling stream of white. My hands were trembling…so I sat down again in a corner, where anyone passing would not trip over me, wondering what in hell I was doing wandering the corridors of the prefect’s palace.
After a time, and with a silent sigh, I stood, feeling like a mouse in a house full of cats, or dragons, assuming such beasts existed somewhere. Slow step by slow step, I neared the chaos pool. Except it was just a fountain in the courtyard, a simple fountain to the eyes. The courtyard was paved in granite and the walls just simple stone walls. The fountain was a jet of warm water coming from a man-sized stone vase.
The courtyard was not even guarded, but then again, it didn’t need to be.
Even for me, it was like walking against the ice storm on the plains of Certis, of battling the heart of a thunderstorm, or worse.
A fountain of warm water, that seemed all, but the warmth came from deep below, fueled by some sort of chaos, and twisted by something beyond, like a mighty lock of something insubstantial.
With my thoughts I could trace the twisted patterns, but that did no good, because they weren’t patterns. They were chaos. Each time I tried to follow a line of force, it seemed to dissolve.
Then, I remembered a passage from the book, the one about bringing order from chaos—about creating a mirror of order. The reflection of chaos as order would either order it or destroy it—if the mirror of order were stronger than chaos. If not…
I didn’t want to think about the consequences. So I summoned up my own strength and began to create a sort of mirror around the fountain, a pattern like what I could sense, but ordered. I struggled to reflect the odd twists, turning them into a deeper harmony, substituting order for chaos, in equal shape and force, and it was strangely like working out the pattern of a chest or a writing-desk.
My eyes blurred, though I could see nothing.
My legs trembled,