The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [172]
Wheeee…eeee
I patted his shoulder. “I know. You don’t like the darkness. Neither do I.”
It was well past full night, and moonless, before we turned onto the south highway. The section we traveled was empty, but the dust bore the traces of horses—another cavalry troop, I thought, headed toward Kyphros.
I did not see any trace of coach tracks, nor sense any lingering odor of chaos, but I kept my ears open for the drumming of hooves as Gairloch bore me southward, past farm cottages faintly lighted by single candles or lamps, past darker clumps of sheep behind railed fences, past the occasional howling dog.
Some sort of insects whirred and chirped and buzzed. And I rode steadily onward into the night.
In time, we came to another river, spanned by a stone bridge, a bridge well-mortared and solid, the sort of bridge that would resist any chaos-master’s efforts.
A thought occurred to me, and I grinned. The bridge was solid, and over running water, which might help.
So while Gairloch drank, I studied the bridge, finally drawing from the calmness around me a greater sense of order, and of purpose, and infusing it into the stones. Lying there on the long fall grass, I thought long and hard, trying to recall more from the book, knowing there was more I wanted to do.
But I waited, letting my mind drift through what I had learned until the knowledge returned to me.
Then I tuned the bridge to the order underlying the superficial chaos of the river, and to the order of the deep stones underneath.
I almost whistled as I remounted Gairloch, except I was tired again. Using order was work. The hard white cheese that Brettel had packed helped restore me, as did the water from the canteen I had filled at the river.
That bridge was going to cause Antonin, or at least the prefect’s chaos-washed troops, some trouble.
By the time the crescent moon had appeared, both Gairloch and I were tired, and took refuge in a copse of trees—a woodlot, really—not too far from the road. I did set wards before I collapsed on the bedroll.
Again, I dreamed of a black-haired woman, but the details eluded me, and that bothered me. Were my dreams pushing me toward Krystal because she was from Recluce, or for better reasons?
A bright gray sky woke me, sunlight diffused through high thin clouds. That, and the extraordinarily cheerful sound of some bird I did not know and wanted to strangle.
After stowing my bedroll and saddling Gairloch, I rode until we crossed another stream, where we had breakfast. By now we were in the flattest of the low rolling hills between Fenard and the Little Easthorns, that not-quite-mountain range that ran nearly three hundred kays north and south to connect the Westhorns with the proper Easthorns.
In her generally boring lectures on geography, Magistra Trehonna had noted in passing that the Little Easthorns were contrary to normal geology and might well represent a very early attempt at geological chaos-mastery. If so, the perpetrator probably had not survived the attempt, one way or another.
I doubted the theory, especially considering the effort it took me to accomplish generally minor tasks like neutralizing chaos fountains and order-trapping bridges.
Theory or not, we had another day or two of travel and more than a few bridges to cross before we reached Kyphros…and I had more than a few questions I needed to ask myself. More important, I needed answers for myself, and I was the only one who would find them. That was all too clear.
LVIII
AFTER TWO DAYS of riding through the boring rolling hills of Southern Gallos, two days of avoiding towns, and two days of dried fruit, travel bread, and hard cheese, and stream water, I was ready to leave Gallos.
Only twice had we had to leave the road to avoid the hard-riding troops of the prefect. In both cases, the cavalry detachments were headed toward Kyphros, not back to Fenard. On one other occasion, we caught up with three wagons filled with