“Why—” Cerryl broke off his question.
“Better this way.”
“Thank you.”
Lyasa smiled. “There will come a time . . .”
Cerryl nodded. He would pay his debts.
They turned. The ridge was a sea of swirling smoke and dark heaps. To the west, Cerryl could see a handful of riders in purple, moving slowly. On the ridge line remained only the white lancers—perhaps two thirds of them.
Jeslek sat exhausted on the road wall, his face so red that Cerryl could see the color from more than a hundred cubits away. Anya sat beside the overmage, her back to Cerryl and Lyasa.
Kochar stepped up beside the two student mages and looked at the charred corpse of the last lancer. “Oh, you two did stop him.”
“We managed,” Cerryl said. “I needed some help from Lyasa.”
“At least he admits it . . .” Fydel’s words drifted with the wind and the smoke from the intermittently burning grass and low brush toward Cerryl. The bearded mage also sat on the road wall, leaning forward, forehead resting in his hands.
Cerryl swallowed, trying not to smell the odor of smoldering brush and burnt flesh, wondering what and how much he would have to keep hidden in order to survive.
“Let’s look at that arm,” demanded Lyasa.
Cerryl glanced at his arms, first one, then the other. His sleeves were smudged with dirt, soot, and grime, but he didn’t think he’d been wounded. He felt stupid as he realized Kochar had been hurt, and he watched as Lyasa lightly bathed the slash in chaos—one of Broka’s techniques, he recalled—and then bound it.
Around them, white lancers began checking corpses for weapons and coins.
Cerryl looked at the last lancer he had killed.
“Go ahead,” said Lyasa. “His purse is yours.”
Cerryl forced himself to cut the thongs and take the purse, only lightly burned. It held two silvers and three coppers. Was that the worth of a man’s life?
He put the coins in his own wallet, trying not to shake his head. He glanced upward. Was it midafternoon already?
Behind them, Fydel slowly stood and walked westward, toward Jeslek and Anya.
“I don’t understand.” Kochar checked the dressing on his arm. “About Jeslek. He can raise mountains, but those Gallosians, they almost got us.”
“It’s simple.” Lyasa sighed. “Chaos-fire is pure chaos—it’s concentrated chaos. It takes more effort. When Jeslek raises the hills, he’s moving and directing a lot of chaos in the ground that’s already there. When you cast a firebolt, you have to separate the chaos from the world and force it somewhere. That’s harder.” She looked at Kochar. “How do you feel right now?”
“Like horse droppings,” admitted the redhead.
“Look at all three of them.” She gestured toward the section of road wall where the three mages sat, talking in low voices. “I couldn’t raise a chaos-fire ball the size of my fingernail. I’ll bet they couldn’t either.”
Cerryl kept his mouth shut, just nodding. “Maybe we should join them.”
The other two walked alongside him as the three made their way toward the full mages.
XCVI
IN THE GRAY of dawn, Cerryl finished his cheese and biscuits with a swallow of water. Then he walked down to the drainage way, where a thin stream of water flowed and refilled the bottle, concentrating on channeling chaos heat into the water until it boiled. The heat wasn’t the hard part. Wrapping the bottle in order to keep it from breaking was.
He couldn’t drink the water until it cooled, and he walked back to where the chestnut was tethered, easing the bottle into the straps.
A faint orange glow filled the sky above the newly raised hills to the east, but the morning was silent—only the scattered chirping of insects. The light wind carried the odor of death, and Cerryl was glad that they would be traveling on, but worried. How long before the prefect decided to sacrifice more men?
Cerryl was well aware that twice as many Gallosians might have carried the skirmish or battle, and he wondered if Jeslek had understood that also.
A hundred cubits or so west of Cerryl, Jeslek stood beside Klybel, and the two talked in low voices. Klybel nodded, reluctantly, and turned. He mounted his horse and rode past Cerryl, back to where the lancers had camped.
“Cerryl?” called the overmage.
Cerryl walked quickly toward Jeslek.
The older man’s face was shadowed, and lines radiated from his eyes, lines of age that Cerryl had not seen before. His sun-gold eyes still glittered, and the dullness had left the white hair.
“You saw how the Gallosians received us yesterday?”
“Yes, ser.”
The overmage cleared his throat, then fixed Cerryl with his eyes. “Cerryl, all students must undertake a task—a thing to be accomplished alone—before they are accepted into the Guild. The task is set before each in a manner to ensure that the mage-to-be indicates utterly his devotion to the Guild.”