The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [200]
When the two were out of earshot, the sub-officer looked at me. “You’re more dangerous than you look.” But she was almost smiling.
I shrugged. “I can’t not tell the truth, and that makes it difficult.”
“You can’t?”
“Not without paying for it somehow.”
She was the one to shake her head. “I’m glad I’m just a leader.”
As I reclaimed Gairloch and fed him some corners of a grain cake, I thought about what she said. I had to agree with her. The more I learned and the more I could do, the more complex it got.
LXIII
KYPHROS WAS BIGGER than I thought. The way the Westhorns angled westward as they marched south meant that we had to ride two days to reach the foothills that almost matched the Little Easthorns in size.
I had guessed that at some point the road, since it was an older road, would cross the wizards’ road for which I searched. I didn’t know that, but it seemed right.
The first night we actually stayed in a small inn in a town—Upper River. Why it was called Upper River, no one knew, and Yelena’s maps showed neither Lower River, nor even a stream called Upper River. The inn was clean. That was about all. Dinner was overcooked goat steaks smothered in a strong cheese. The beds sagged, and I shared a room with Weldein, who by then was scared stiff of me, although I had said nothing, and who snored loudly.
The second night we stopped in a place called Quessa. Lodging was in one of the soldiers’ way stations there, but staffed only by a couple. I could guess where the soldiers were. The dinner meal was another spicy casserole, followed by a huge fruitcream pie—much better fare than at the inn at Upper River.
Quessa itself was fair-sized for the relatively isolated area in which it stood, with more than a score of houses and stores serving the surrounding farms and orchards. The people were still what I thought of as Kyphran stock, with dark skin, darker hair, and broad smiles. They also talked and talked.
I retreated to the large guest room, the one that Tella and Bardon insisted I must have, and closed the door. The lamp by the double-wide bed was bright enough to read by, and I had some reading to do.
It didn’t take long, and all that I found was what I had remembered, a single paragraph, not even a long one. The key words were simple: “Order cannot be concentrated in and of itself, not even within the staff of order, and no man can truly master the staff of order until he casts it aside.”
Except the words were wrong, somehow. No matter where my staff was, it still gathered order and repulsed chaos. For a long time, I looked through the pages of the book, but nothing else shed light on that paragraph.
After I replaced the black-covered and well-thumbed pages in my pack, I stared into emptiness. The pieces were there—that I knew. How they fit, I didn’t. The white wizard had died when my staff had touched his fingertips, or at least when it had gotten close. The staff had been nearly as close to other sources of chaos without that violent a reaction, and if a simple staff could destroy a chaos-wizard someone would have gone against Antonin long before. Unless there were reasons to maintain chaos…
I didn’t like that thought at all.
So I tried to sort out my feelings about Deirdre, Krystal, and Tamra, but the thought of sorting out those three was enough to exhaust me on the spot, and I blew out the lamp and slept, sort of, until the gray of dawn crept through the window.
The next day brought more talking over breakfast. The trip carried us into wilder countryside, with the end of the orchards and fenced fields. The clouds had dissipated, but the chill remained, and we rode in a bright chill toward the unseen Westhorns. By mid-morning, the road straggled through underbrush that had begun to reclaim the less time-trampled edges of the road, and the lands beyond the road that had once been grazing lands were dotted with mature trees and scattered