Arms-Commander (21 page)

Ryba and Saryn returned to Westwind late on sixday, and Saryn started working on her own expedition sevenday morning. She assigned Hryessa's fourth squad, two carts, plus the two decent wagons of those that she had brought back from Lornth. Standing just downhill from the smithy, Saryn watched while Huldran, Ydrall, Cessya, and Nunca loaded empty penetrators into the two wagons. Huldran had added a metal loop on each funnel so that the penetrators could be lowered on a rope, as necessary. The two carts were at the powder house beyond the quarry, where the kegs of finished powder were being loaded.

Except for fourth squad, whose guards were getting their gear together, the remainder of the guards were on the arms practice field, sparring. Saryn's eyes drifted across the groups, then stopped on Dealdron and the trio, who were on the section of the field immediately below the smithy. There was something happening there, involving order, but Saryn couldn't sense what it might be. She waited until Huldran and Cessya had lowered another iron funnel and plug plate into the first wagon, then said, “I need to check something. I shouldn't be too long.”

“Yes, ser.”

With that, Saryn eased down the slope, at enough of an angle, she hoped, that it wasn't obvious that she was more interested in the trio and Dealdron than in the newer guards toward whom her steps appeared to be directed. Although Dealdron still wore the heavy splint, he was moving more easily than he had an eightday earlier, and his blocks and parries were much surer. Dyliess was attacking him with her weighted wand, and, as sure as some of the young man's moves were, Dyliess still wove her wand through and around his efforts enough that she struck him on his good thigh once and got a solid crack on his ribs another time.

The use of order wasn't coming from Dyliess, Saryn realized, but from Aemra, who was somehow using it to help Dealdron anticipate Dyliess's attacks. She continued to try to sense what the youngest of the trio was doing, but from what she could tell, somehow Aemra was not so much guiding Dealdron's moves as making him more aware of what Dyliess was doing.

Saryn had never seen order-skills used quite that way, let alone by girls who weren't even properly women yet, but it was clear from the way Aemra was helping the Gallosian that she, and doubtless the other two, had been doing something like that for a time. If they had used that skill among themselves, that did explain why they performed so much better than would have been normal for even skilled junior guards.

Abruptly, Aemra glanced from Dealdron to Saryn, then back to Dealdron, but Dealdron did not falter, even when Aemra stopped helping him. He did get hit again, if by a glancing blow.

Saryn could only obtain the sense that Aemra was measuring something…and that it involved Saryn. What ever heritage they had received from their parents, especially from their father, made it difficult, if not impossible, for Saryn to sense much of what Aemra was feeling, but then she had been able to do so less and less as the three had grown older.

“Aemra…a moment.” Saryn's words were not a question.

“Yes, ser.” The youngest of the trio walked away from the two who continued to spar.

“You were using a touch of order to help Dealdron learn moves.”

“Yes, ser. We had to.” Aemra kept her voice low, so low that Saryn could barely hear her. “He's strong enough, ser, but he doesn't have any sense of where the blades go, where they can strike. We're using a lot less. He's almost got it, now.”

“Why?” asked Saryn.

“It's not like that, ser. He's…”

“Like a clumsy big brother,” added Kyalynn, who had followed Aemra. Her voice was also low and intense, as if she didn't want Dealdron or anyone else but Saryn to hear. “He was going to get himself hurt bad if we didn't help.” She shot a glance at Aemra.

Saryn caught that the look was a warning, but couldn't sense about what Kyalynn was cautioning the younger girl. “Does the Marshal know this?”

“No, ser,” interjected Kyalynn. “Please don't tell her. We're almost done, and you wouldn't want him killed.”

“We helped him enough so he can defend himself against lowlanders,” added Aemra.

Saryn hadn't thought that Ryba would have Dealdron killed, but when order and her daughter were concerned…Still, while Saryn couldn't sense all that much from the trio, two things were clear. There was no love, lust, or romantic attachment involved, and the three really were just trying to give the young man what amounted to a chance at obtaining the skill to be able to defend himself.

“Why?” she repeated.

“Mother says…we need him, and so do you,” replied Aemra. “We were just trying to help, because no one else was.”

“He…he's like a puppy dog,” added Kyalynn.

Saryn wanted to laugh at the efforts the two were making to conceal something, and she probably would have—if she'd been able to determine what they really had in mind. But she could only sense what they didn't have in mind. “What are you two hiding?” The question was worth asking, if only to see their reaction.

“We're not hiding anything,” protested Aemra indignantly. “We're just trying to help you.”

“If we get him so he can defend himself,” added Kyalynn, “then he can do what ever you need him to do.”

Both statements were true, and both girls believed them…but there was more, and Saryn knew she wasn't going to get to what ever else was there. She finally did laugh. “All right. Don't hurt him too badly, and listen to your mothers.”

“Yes, ser.”

Saryn turned away and started back toward the smithy.

“Saryn!”

At the sound of the Marshal's voice, the arms-commander turned again and headed toward Ryba, who was walking over from the east side of the practice field.

“What was all that about?” asked Ryba.

“I wanted to know how they felt Dealdron was coming and if he'd had enough training so that he could spend more time with Siret doing stonework.”

A brief look of amusement crossed the Marshal's face. “He probably does know enough to defend himself. The girls can be quite thorough. How soon before you leave?”

“Another glass or so. We're loading out now.”

“Good. I got another report. Arthanos is still getting supplies, and the scouts think he returned to Fenard. If that's so, we have several days, possibly more, but I'll keep you posted.”

“I'd appreciate that,” Saryn replied politely.

“It would still be good if you placed everything as soon as possible. Then take a position there and wait for us. Take care. I'll see you in about an eightday.” With a nod, Ryba headed back toward Tower Black.

Saryn hurried toward the smithy and the carts, still pondering her exchange with the girls and Ryba's reaction. The Marshal could be most protective of the trio, and yet, for all of Ryba's former doubts and concerns about Dealdron, she hadn't seemed in the slightest worried about the three sparring with the young Gallosian. She'd been amused…but about what? It couldn't just have been about the bruises Dealdron was taking, could it?

Comforting as that might have been, Saryn didn't think so.

Eightday afternoon found Saryn stretched out on rough red rock, peering over the edge of a precipice, a rope fastened tightly around her chest. Some ten yards behind her, toward the center of the mesa, two guards from fourth squad held the other end of the rope. A chill wind whipped her short hair around her face as she tried to see down into a split in the rock a yard and a half in width. On the other side of the split was a stretch of rock some fifty yards in width, and a good two hundred yards from east to west.

Another gust of wind slammed into her, half-inflating the back of her riding jacket. She could feel the pressure of the wind lightening her body, as if trying to pull her away from the rock, but after a moment, the pressure lessened. She understood all too well why the top of the mesa was barren, except for a handful of stunted trees. Wind or no wind, she needed to find where to place the explosive penetrators, not only where they would dislodge the most rock but where she could make sure that the fuses could be lit with the right timing. She edged forward until her head was well out over the opening between the mesa and the spurlike section of rock, trying to see and sense whether the narrow crevice was wide enough to lower the penetrator into it as far as necessary and whether a targeted explosion would break the section loose.

She couldn't see any light farther down in the crevice, but there was a thin line of light halfway down on the north end that suggested that section might be easier to break away. She needed the bulk of the overhang to break loose, but that was the part opposite from where she was stretched out. If that section didn't break away, there wouldn't be enough rock cascading down into the valley below to reach the road with the volume necessary to be effective.

After easing back just a bit, Saryn tried to relax enough to let her senses probe the depths below. At first, she could sense nothing except small creatures she thought might be some form of bat. After a time, she began to sense faint lines, some of them more like dark gray, and others more a pinkish white gray. Below her, and to her right, near where she “felt” the crevice ended and the two sections of rock joined—or split, depending on which way she looked at it—there was a “knot” of both blackness and the faintest whitish red. Was that a vulnerable spot where she could place one of the penetrators? Or was it a stronger area that the chaos could not weaken?

Could she find a smaller area—a much smaller one—somewhere else on the mesa with the same sort of knot where she could experiment to see what the knot was? That would have to wait. She glanced at the sky to the west, which was darkening rapidly as a line of thunderheads began to build, as they often did in the afternoons over the Roof of the World. Finally, she rose to her feet and edged some fifteen yards to the north, until she felt she was standing above the knot. She slipped the charcoal-grease stick from its bag, then knelt and scrawled a large arrowhead, its tip pointing toward the juncture of order and chaos.

As she stood, another gust of wind buffeted her, and she crouched and moved back away from the edge of the cliff, moving carefully over the patches of crumbling rock. She glanced westward again. She had about a glass before the storm reached the mesa, and they needed to be off the exposed surface and back down in the rough rocky shelter they'd put up in the middle of some ancient twisted mountain pines in the saddle between the rise from the lower hills to the west and the mesa. The mounts and the wagons and carts were almost a kay farther down, because that was as far as anything with wheels could go and because there was no shelter at all for the horses any farther up the rocky saddle.

She hurried westward, back along the edge of the crevice another fifty yards or so, followed by the two guards holding the other end of the rope. Then she knelt, close to the middle of the long crevice, and again tried to sense the order below on the sides of the crevice. The dark gray and pinkish gray lines were almost random, and there were no junctures or knots.

She stood and moved back, then walked farther west, where she tried again. This time, she sensed another juncture, slightly less obvious than the first one. She took out the grease stick and marked the stone, then glanced northward. Dark sheets of water engulfed the peaks north of the hills on the other side of the valley. The grease ought to hold the marker in place, but, if not, she could always locate the junctures again, now that she had a fair idea where they were.

Her last attempt was near the end of the crevice, where it was barely a yard in width, but, as she suspected even before she tried to sense any weakness in the rock below, the patterns of darker gray were more defined—stronger, she thought—than those of the pinker gray. She stepped back and motioned to the two guards. “We're heading back down to the shelter.”

“Yes, ser.”

As she walked back toward the west end of the mesa, and the sloping, rocky, ridgelike saddle back down to the upper camp, she stopped. Had she sensed something like another juncture?

“Just a moment,” she called to the two guards, even as she was moving toward the edge of the cliff. Since what she sensed was several yards, if not farther, below the lip of the cliff, she flattened herself and edged forward until she could look partway down. What she had found was an outcropping of rock projecting from the cliff some twenty yards below her. Over the years, the stone around the outcrop had peeled away, leaving a ledgelike formation a few yards long that projected out perhaps a yard and a half.

Saryn's problem was simple enough. She had no way to exert force on that outcropping to see whether the juncture she sensed represented strength or weakness. Although she was personally convinced it was weakness, she couldn't very well go on feelings alone when so much was at stake.

At that moment, several long rolls of thunder echoed across the valley toward the three guards. Saryn glanced northward. The storm was definitely moving quickly toward them.

“Frig…” How could she test her idea?

If the darker gray represented a form of order…could she somehow move it out of the juncture, divert it, smooth its flow into the cliff…and let the pinkish gray dominate?

Another roll of thunder washed over her, and she could sense the concern of the two guards at the other end of the rope. Saryn forced herself to concentrate on the order-chaos knot at the base of the isolated small ledge below her. While it
might
be easier to work on the pink, somehow, that didn't feel right. She took a slow breath, then used her senses to try almost to stroke the grayish order away from the juncture.

Another gust of wind whipped across her, stronger than any of those that had swept the top of the mesa earlier. She kept trying to ease the gray away from the pink, and several smaller strands retreated into the cliff proper…and reformed, as if completing a circuit.

Crack….

Saryn could feel the stone shudder beneath her, and reflexively, she grasped a stone protrusion in her right hand. The ledge slowly leaned out away from the cliff, then, after a second
crack,
dropped away and plummeted toward the scree nearly a thousand yards below. Saryn looked down to follow it…and wished she hadn't. The red chunks of rock at the bottom of the sheer drop looked incredibly distant. She quickly concentrated on easing back from the edge while keeping a firm handhold on the solid outcropping her right hand clutched.

At the same time, she couldn't help but wonder. In both atmospheric and space piloting, she'd had no problem in looking down; but on top of rocks on a planet that had no aircraft, she found being at the top of a cliff incredibly disconcerting.

She pushed those thoughts away as she stood and walked back toward the two guards. They needed to get off the mesa before the thunderstorm finished crossing the valley and swept down on them.

“Any luck, ser?” asked Hoilya, the taller of the two guards and the one closer to Saryn.

“More than I'd hoped for, but we'll have to come back early tomorrow and start positioning the devices.” That would be even more difficult than finding where to place them had been, Saryn suspected.

“We need to hurry,” she added, as another roll of thunder announced the oncoming thunderstorm.

Heading down off the mesa, she couldn't help but wonder if order and chaos could be used like power flows, with variations on current and voltage.
But…order and chaos?