The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [98]
I didn’t know whether to be pleased at his acknowledgement of my strength, or irritated at my gullibility.
“Will and understanding are the keys, Lerris. Not just to mastering order, but to mastering anything.” Justen leaned back as he finished the cup of stew.
“I take it we’re not going on to Weevett this afternoon?”
“You’ll collapse in three kays, and I couldn’t even get on Rosefoot. Does traveling seem like a good idea?”
Put that way, it didn’t.
“Besides, you need to do some reading.” He was holding out The Basis of Order. “Trying to teach you by showing you could end up making me permanently old, or killing you.”
I reached for the book.
“After you clean up. At the least you owe me that.”
Back to the brook I trudged, still wondering why I trusted the gray wizard. Every time I thought about that whiteness where he had almost entrapped me, I wanted to shudder. Yet I could tell that he hadn’t particularly wanted to put me there. And he had paid a greater price than I had—twice.
That left his reasons untouched.
No answers came as I used a damp cloth to wipe the cups clean after having rinsed them in water so cold that it hurt my hands to the bone.
Justen was stroking Rosefoot’s nose as I walked back to the wayfarers’ hut, and providing the pony—both ponies—with something they ate from his open palm. I didn’t want to talk to him right then and kept walking.
Inside the hut, I could see the book laid on my folded bedroll, but I set the damp cups on one end of the bench to dry. Then I put another log on the fire, picked up the book, and sat on the bench where Justen had been.
With not a little resentment, I opened to the first page.
Order is life; chaos is death. This is fact, not belief. Each living creature consists of ordered parts that must function together. When chaos intrudes…
Fine. That I knew, if not expressed precisely that way.
Order extends down to the smallest fragments of the world. By influencing the smallest ordered segments to create a new and ordered form, an order-master may change where land exists and where it does not, where the rain will fall and where it will not….
In contrast, control of chaos is simply the ability to sever one ordered element of the world from another…focused destruction…
My head was aching after less than two pages, and I closed the book. How did the philosophy I had just read have anything to do with escaping the whiteness in which Justen had attempted to trap me?
Closing my eyes, I tried to reason it out.
First, when I wasn’t thinking clearly, either in Frven or when Justen offered me answers, I could be tempted. And temptation meant letting my mind open to someone. Whoever controlled a body’s thoughts, then, must control the body.
But…if that were so, anyone could take over anyone else, and that didn’t happen.
So…it took talent…but that talent could be blocked or thrown out…
I opened my eyes and looked for Justen. He wasn’t in the hut, but outside brushing Rosefoot. With a sigh, I closed the book and trudged back outside.
The wind had died down, and a hole in the clouds to the south let in a stream of sunlight on the hills to our left.
Justen had stopped brushing and was watching the light play on the gray and brown and white of the hills.
“Justen, is self-knowledge the same as stonework, good stonework, when it resists chaos?”
He nodded. “There are dangers.”
I must have frowned.
“Not even Antonin can control a poor shepherd who fiercely resists, but his power is great enough to destroy him or her.”
“But you said that Antonin could control me?”
“Through temptation.” Justen kept brushing Rosefoot as he talked. The gray wizard’s hair was now mostly dark, with only traces