The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [208]
I shivered. I really wasn’t sure I wanted to be there. In fact, I knew I didn’t, but I’d backed myself into my own particular corner. How could I not try to stop Antonin after all I had said and seen? How I could possibly succeed was another question.
After another shiver, I looked down at the castle.
No doubt about it—the structure was impressive, but it was small, smaller than I would have thought for a chaos-master of Antonin’s standing, and simple. No towers, just a sheer wall jutting out from the flat cliff rising behind it, pierced by a single visible gate. A narrow ravine, too deep to see the bottom from the entrance road where I sat upon Gairloch, and too raw to have been naturally caused, separated the castle and its walls from the more recently created wizards’ road that I had followed from the original wizards’ way.
Beside the newer road that led from the sharp-cleft rock passage and the castle gates ran a narrow brook, and a few patches of grass sprouted here and there. I dismounted, not wanting to bring Gairloch into that castle. Again, I could not explain why. I did not unsaddle him, but left him free to browse in the shaded area by the brook.
Then I took the staff and began the walk along the sunlit road between the two hills and down toward the castle.
Once I was halfway down the hill, I could see a simple railed and wooden span crossed the ravine, a span scarcely more than a rod in length. It was not a drawbridge, but a plain wooden structure, probably of heavy pine that could be easily fired with chaos-energies.
The castle itself could have been taken within a few days by a competent army—provided the castle’s master were not a chaos-master, and provided that any army could have been coaxed into the Westhorns to begin with.
I shivered. The whole place was even more forbidding than Frven, more desolate than the patch of desert created between Gallos and Kyphros by Antonin’s reckless use of chaos supposedly on behalf of the prefect, but clearly for Antonin’s own benefit.
Not a single banner flew from the white castle. Not a single plume of smoke drifted from the eight chimneys, yet the heavy white-oak gate was open and the road ran straight from the gap in the hills to the ravine and the bridge to the castle.
Like a perfect painting, the castle sat framed by the high cliff and the ravine.
I shivered again, wondering why I was even trying. Then I thought of the nameless outlier, with her blasted face, and the beheaded blond soldier on the prefect’s wall, the fountain of chaos, and, more important, the smugness of the Brotherhood, building isolated order, using Antonin as he used Justen.
There was one other factor—I had been used, just as Justen had. It was the only thing that made sense. By fighting the prefect, my attempts at order had led to greater disorder and greater conflict between Gallos and Kyphros. No wonder I had been unmolested until I left. I had done exactly what Antonin wanted. I almost retched right there on that dry and barren road, wondering at the same time why I had to have been so damned slow and stupid.
Instead, I straightened my steps and marched onward toward the ravine and the bridge across it, guessing that the longer before I had to raise a shield, the better. I did let my perceptions sense the area around me, to alert me if Antonin should begin to mass forces against me.
I had thought about ringing the castle with a balance barrier, but traveling the ravine and climbing the hill would have been difficult without using order-mastery to bridge some of