Natural Ordermage (22 page)

“That’s interesting,” noted Zastryl, looking at Leyla. “Until later,” she said, turning and leaving the narrow chamber.

“Since you have a sore arm, and you know something about the truncheon,” Zastryl began, “we’ll start with the staff. Later, you’ll get the basics of handling a blade, mainly defense, and a dagger.” He turned and walked out of the weapons room and into the main area, expecting Rahl to follow.

Rahl did.

Zastryl stopped at one of the racks on the wall, from which he removed two dark wooden staffs. Both were heavily padded on the ends.

On one side of the large chamber, Rahl noticed two solid-looking men in olive black uniforms he hadn’t seen before. Both of them were looking at him.

Zastryl followed his gaze. “Naval marines. We train them, too, and make them go through refresher courses periodically.” After a moment, he raised his voice. “Khaesyn, Stendyl! You aren’t sparring when you’re looking.” He turned back to Rahl. “If you don’t concentrate, the padding won’t help much. Let’s start with your feet…”

Rahl was sweating heavily by the time Zastryl dismissed him in late afternoon. He was also exhausted although he’d never actually crossed staffs with the arms magister, just practiced moves and footwork, time after time.

Leyla was waiting for him when he finished the session. “You were considering picking up one of the blades just to confound everyone, weren’t you?” she asked.

Rahl understood that the question was almost rhetorical. “I thought about it. I decided there wasn’t much point to it.”

“Could you have picked up one of the razor-edged blades?”

“Yes, magistra.” It would have been hard, but he could have.

She nodded. “We need to have a talk, Rahl. A very serious talk.” She looked toward the mess. “It won’t be that long.” ,

Rahl waited.

“It’s early to tell, but you may be one of those mages who can handle a certain amount of disorder and chaos.-This is both desirable and undesirable. It is desirable from your point of view because it makes you less vulnerable to chaos-attacks. It is undesirable because you will attract even more free chaos than a practicing pure black ordermage. In your case, this could prove dangerous or fatal if you do not attempt to learn more about how you use order.” She paused. “Believe it or not, I understand your frustration. You are looking for guidance on how to use order. There’s one problem with that. Order-use cannot be taught. It remains an art that can only be learned by each mage on an individual basis. No two mages use order in precisely the same way. That is one reason why
The Basis of Order
provides only observations and statements about how order and chaos appear in the world and what the results of balanced or unbalanced use may be.”

“But… magistra, in a way, that is true of everything. When I was learning to be a scrivener, my father could not take the pen and move my hand, but he could show me what the letters looked like. He could show me the best way to hold the pen.”

“True,” Leyla acknowledged. “Now… what if you could not see the letters he wrote on the page, and he could not see those you wrote? And the only way in which he could determine how well you copied was by how well someone else read what you wrote? That’s not a perfect analogy, but it should give you an idea of the difference. When you attempt to manipulate order, I can tell that you are doing it. I can tell that you have done it, and I can view the results, but because the means by which you do so are within you, I cannot see or sense what techniques you use.”

Rahl was silent, thinking over what she had said.

“Until you can describe and feel what you are doing with order and how you are doing it,” she went on, “we cannot offer ways in which you might improve your skills.”

“But I don’t really know how.”

“Exactly. And if you can’t say how you are doing it, how do you expect us to offer advice on what techniques might be useful when we cannot see or sense how you do what you are doing?”

Rahl didn’t have an answer to her question, but he still felt that the magisters were being singularly unhelpful.

“Think about it, Rahl. I’ll see you on fourday.”

Rahl watched as she took the walk northward. After a moment, he started toward the mess. He was hungry… and irritated, if not as angry as he had been.

Surprisingly, the entire eightday and more passed smoothly for Rahl. Part of that was because he did not meet with any of the magisters or magistras. He did keep reading
The Basis of Order
, and he found it helped a little to keep in mind what Leyla had said. He tried to understand the book more as just a statement about the world and how order and chaos fit into it, rather than seeking direct answers about how to do something. He also decided to avoid the harbor for a while.

He enjoyed the additional time spent in learning Hamorian, perhaps because he was beginning to be able to talk in complete sentences, if short ones, and because he could instantly tell whether he was saying things ‘ correctly.

On sixday, close to two eightdays after his encounter with the Hydlenese thief, he stepped out of Magister Thorl’s Hamorian class and headed to get something to eat. Despite the breeze and the light summer tunic, even walking from the one building to the mess left him perspiring. As he stepped into the slightly cooler mess, he blotted his forehead. Then he made his way to the serving table.

Fried fish again. As well as it was prepared, he was getting tired of the fish, and the boiled early potatoes weren’t exactly a favorite, either, but with only three coppers to his name, he couldn’t exactly afford to be choosy. He filled his platter and mug and stepped away from the serving tables.

“Rahl!”

At the sound of Deybri’s voice, Rahl turned. The healer was sitting“ alone at one end of a table that had three others at the far end. She motioned for him to join her. With a smile, he carried his platter and mug over and sat down opposite her.

“I haven’t seen you in a while.” He saw the circles under her eyes and sensed her tiredness. “You look like you’ve been working hard.”

“We’ve been busy. A Spidlarian ship had a boiler explosion.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not, but I’d rather not talk about it now. How is your training with the staff coming?”

“Well enough. I hadn’t realized how effective it can be against someone with a blade.”

At that moment, an attractive young woman, a good ten years younger than Deybri, passed the table. She made an effort not to look in Rahl’s direction.

Deybri laughed. “A little obvious.”

“About what?”

“Looking at you while trying not to.”

Rahl couldn’t help but be somewhat flattered but didn’t want to say so. He just shrugged.

“Don’t pretend that you don’t know you’re good-looking.”

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

She smiled. “That means you know it. People who are handsome and know it never have to question whether they are.”

Because her words were so good-natured and the feeling behind them so open, Rahl didn’t bother to hide the wince. He even laughed. “That might be, but I still hadn’t thought about it.”

“You’re too much of a pretty boy,” Deybri added. “Especially now that you’re putting on more muscle from your arms training.”

“Did you mean that as an insult?” Rahl had not sensed any hostility, but more a feeling of amusement from the woman.

“No. If it weren’t for the complications—and that I’m exhausted at the moment—I’d be interested in taking you into my bed, but I’m a forever person. Besides that, I don’t want a child right now, and I don’t have the order-skills to keep from having one, not with you, and you don’t know enough yet to do it either.”

“But…” Rahl was confounded by the warmth and-honesty of her words, and the sudden confusion within Deybri. He finally said, “I barely know anything.”

“That’s the problem. You have great order strength, but not much discipline.”

Rahl sighed. “Deybri… how do I get that discipline? The magisters don’t tell me much except to read
The Basis of Order
and think about what I do before I do it. I don’t even know how I can do what little I can do. And I’ve been trying to puzzle that out.”

Deybri nodded. ‘That’s a problem. I can only suggest a few things. You can probably see well at night, can’t you? Well, try finding your way around with your eyes closed or with a blindfold, then think about the difference between seeing and feeling your way. You also might try sensing how everything around you is put together.“ She paused. ”You have a little time before -you have to go to arms training, don’t you?“

“A little.”

“Come with me to the infirmary. I think you’ll be able to learn something there, too. You might be able to help me as well.”

Rahl hurriedly finished his fish and potatoes, then swallowed the last of the ale. After rinsing off his platter, he walked with Deybri toward the infirmary.

“The boiler in a Spidlarian merchanter exploded, and that filled the engine spaces with steam. Some is high temperature and high pressure, and they breathed it. If they breathed more than a little, slowly they lose the ability to breathe. It’s as if they breathed pure chaos. The ones who were closest have already died, but there’s one who might make it, except that…” She shook her head.

“What?”

“You’ll see. I don’t want to say more yet.” She walked several more paces before adding, “What you’ll see won’t be pleasant. Can you handle that?”

“I’ll handle it.”

Deybri laughed mirthlessly. “Just don’t look appalled.”

Rahl thought he could manage that.

Once they reached the infirmary, Deybri led Rahl past several empty beds. In looking at them, he could sense an aura of… something. Past the vacant beds was an area that was curtained off.

“Here.” She drew back the curtain slightly and held it so that Rahl could step through.

A man lay on the bed, his upper body propped up. The sailor’s eyes were closed. His forearms were swathed in dressings, and his face was swollen, a mass of blistered skin. With each labored breath, his chest shuddered with a gasping sound.

“He’s unconscious. Can you sense something within his chest?”

Rahl tried just to feel. Then he nodded. Within the man’s chest was a mass of whitish redness. It reminded him of both of the men who had attacked him. It wasn’t quite the same, but it was similar.

“He’s just on the borderline.” If… if there were just a little less chaos there. Deybri shook her head. ”I just can’t do any more.“

Rahl looked at her, realizing that she was somehow… frailer. Not in body, but in something. Then he recalled what Leyla had told him about order. Deybri didn’t have any more to give as a healer.

He moved closer to the sailor until he stood almost next to the man. What could he do?

After a moment, he bent over and extended his hands, so that his fingers were almost touching the man’s chest, one set on each side. Then he tried to touch the man with gentle strokes of order across and within his chest.

How long that took he didn’t know, but when he began to feel light-headed, he stopped, then stepped back.

“That’s better,” Deybri said softly. “Can you hear the difference?”

Rahl wasn’t sure that he could. Was the sailor gasping less, breathing more easily? He looked at the man again, trying to sense the chaos. He thought there was less, but he really could not tell.

Deybri stepped back and lifted the curtain. “You’ve done all you can.”

Rahl stepped back beyond the curtain, and she let it fall.

“Thank you.”

“I hope it helped.”

“It did. We’ll just have to see how much.” She paused. “You’d better tell Magister Zastryl that you were helping me heal. You won’t have as much strength for a while.”

“I will.”

After they walked toward the front of the infirmary, away from the injured sailor, Rahl turned to the healer. “Is there a difference between wound chaos and chaos? They don’t seem quite the same to me.”

“They’re not. To me, wound chaos is a little darker and redder.”

“It’s uglier.”

Deybri nodded. “I think that’s because it’s part chaos and part sickness.”

“Couldn’t a white mage help healing by using the chaos to destroy the sickness?” asked Rahl.

“That would take very good control. Pure chaos destroys things. If you’d used chaos on him, you would have destroyed his lungs.”

“Oh…” Rahl shook his head. “Of course.”

“I’ve been told that there have been chaos healers, but they almost have to be gray mages.”

Rahl had never heard of gray mages. “There are gray mages? Who can do both black and white magery?”

“It’s more like some of each,” replied Deybri. “Some say that Cerryl the .Great had to have been a gray mage because he built too much that lasted for it to have been accomplished by a white wizard.”

Rahl really didn’t want to leave, but he was already late for arms practice.

“You need to go, but tell Zastryl what you were doing. He won’t mind.”

Rahl hoped Deybri was right. He smiled at her. “I hope I’ll see you later.”