“Careful…”
“I’m just listening.” Even without straining he could sense the order/chaos pulse of the forest, so strong that he felt like some sort of insect creeping around a giant.
“It makes you feel that way,” Ayrlyn noted.
“You’re doing it again.”
“So? You could tell I feel that way, if you wanted. We’ve been through this before.”
He did not answer, instead trying to sense not only the forest, but Ayrlyn.
Ayrlyn-flame, banked, who felt what? Awe, fear, and yet who knew that the forest held the key.
Nylan wished he had her faith.
The shoots got thicker and thicker, but not any closer together, and grew in a pattern of sorts that seemed more defined the closer they rode up toward the older growth that towered into the gray sky.
Abruptly, the mare sidestepped again, turning away from the dark line of the older trees. Nylan reined up.
“Mine won’t either,” announced Ayrlyn.
“Hmmmm…” Nylan dismounted, and handed the mare’s reins up to Ayrlyn. “I don’t see anything. There’s not that much undergrowth here.” He took several steps toward the older trees of the forest, then paused, looking back at Ayrlyn and the mounts.
The redhead shrugged.
He walked another ten cubits and paused, looking down at a knee-high growth of creepers that extended both east and west as far as he could make out. Between the leaves he could see scattered traces of white-some form of stone.
“There was a wall here,” he called back softly.
“I can feel it.”
Slowly, Nylan stepped over the low barrier, scanning the area around, listening with ears and senses. While the sense of looming dark order and pulsing white chaos was fractionally stronger, nothing changed. In a way, that bothered him as much as if something had changed.
Abruptly, he turned and walked back to Ayrlyn.
“Let’s head back and think about this.”
She nodded.
They both understood. Merely looking and physically searching wasn’t going to yield what they sought.
CXVII
Two officers in white uniforms, with green sashes, stood in the small room that contained little more than a flat wooden table, five wooden chairs, and several easels with maps upon them.
“Angels…riding in the direction of the Accursed Forest.” Majer Piataphi-handed the scroll back to the marshal. “Ser…I cannot tell that to His Mightiness. I cannot tell him that three of them, just three, destroyed a local patrol and vanished.”
“You are a lancer officer, under my command, Majer,” Queras stated flatly.
“As such, ser, I must offer my best judgment. This is not a good idea. I am not in charge of the border patrols or the local patrols.”
“You are under my command, Majer.” Queras’s voice turned chill. “All Mirror Lancer officers are. You will follow my commands.”
“You can only execute me for failing to carry out an order-and then you will have to reveal what that order was.” Piataphi smiled bitterly. “The way His Mightiness feels about me…I would be turned into flame before him. After he flamed me, or if he did not flame me, ser, how would he feel about your trying to divert responsibility? Remember what he did to the officers of the Eighth?” Piataphi’s words were level, and he did not blink as he regarded the senior officer.
“Brave you may be, Majer,” said Queras as he finally shook his head, “but wise you are not. You defy me, and you lost an entire command, and allowed the barbarians to drive you from our lands. Our lands. That shows little wisdom.”
“Yes, ser. That is why I must be honest. I have little left but that. I know the white mage stands by Lord Lephi, and he would know if I deceived.”
Queras’s eyes raked over Piataphi.
“Follow the Emperor’s commands,” added the majer. “Do not tell him nor return until we are ready to march.”
“And the angels, O wisest of unwise lancers? How, pray tell, would your unwisdom address them?”
“If we prevail against the barbarians, then there will be time to deal with them and the forest. Even the white mages have left the Accursed Forest to deal with the grassland hordes.” Piataphi smiled again, tightly. “And if we fail…then we have no worries.”
“I am certain we will have no worries. Very certain. You will lead every charge.”
“Yes, ser.” Piataphi nodded fatalistically.
CXVIII
The two angels sat on the grass before the bushes that screened the front door. The clouds had broken the day before, and the unfamiliar stars glittered brightly in the early night.
Weryl snored inside, and the faint odor of some form of vegetable soup being undertaken by Sylenia seeped from the house, mixing with the damp and subtle fragrances drifting from the forest.
“Pleasant,” Nylan said. “First time in I don’t know how long that we haven’t been running or fighting or-”
“Peaceful.” Ayrlyn leaned her head against his, her hair still damp from washing.
“Almost like we’re under the shelter of a huge unseen mountain.”
“A growing mountain. There are shoots in the back now, all around the house and shed.”
“It’s been waiting a long time,” he pointed out.
“Either that or sleeping.”
Nylan yawned, as a dreaminess passed across him, and he could feel that Ayrlyn experienced it, too.
“Just feel it,” she whispered.
He took a slow and deep breath, then another, and could feel…he would have been hard-pressed to describe the sensation, although the images carried by the flows of that unseen power were clear.
Vivid images…almost rising before them, yet ancient images, images of a distant past…that also was somehow obvious. A history?
A green spark, a living spark, with light and dark entwined, grew within a forest, and from that came other sparks, all linked, and the sparks spread, ever so slowly, until they carried flows, flows of light and darkness, order and chaos, that held the forest, that were the forest, as ever so slowly all the trees took on the sparks, the light and the darkness.
The rain fell, and under the green-blue sky, the trees grew, and died, and the deer roamed, and grew and died, and so did the tawny cats, and the tree rats, and the wide purple blossoms, and the ugly-snouted lizards.
The dark flows of blackness and the white chaos were mixed and twisted-and balanced. The trees grew and grew, and some died and fell, but always for all the changes, the white and darkness turned in and out, but balanced…until the heavens shivered, and the ground trembled.
Then…lines of fire flickered, white lines, force fluxes like a chaotic power net, firebolts white-infused and red-shaded like those thrown by the wizards who had tried to storm Westwind…and the white unbalanced forces lashed across the forest, across the grasslands to the north and west, across the stony hills beyond the grasslands.
White lines of fire, fire that reflected light and darkness, burned through the forest, and the gray ashes fell like rain.
The forest struggled, and sent forth new shoots, and the white fires slashed across the shoots, twisting the flows, sending shudders through the ground itself, creating heat and tangled fires deep beneath Candar.
The rivers heaved themselves out of their banks, and the white mirror fires turned their waters into steam. Metal mountains grumbled across the water-polished stone hills and smoothed them, ground them, and suffocated them beneath strange new soil, and grasses that had never been.
Green shoots struggled through the ashes, and were turned into more ashes, and the ground heaved and trembled.
Lines of white stone slammed down like walls, pinning the trees behind lines of force that burned…and burned, burned somehow because the force of the ordered chaos that prisoned the trees was backward, because chaos bound order.
A sense of timelessness followed, inaction behind white stone walls, until the heavens shivered again, and the white walls cracked, and crumbled, and lines of white fire and darkness cascaded from ice-tipped peaks.