The White Order(2)

Cerryl lowered his eyes to the spotless stone floor.

“How did you spy that glass?”

“I saw its reflection on the side of the toolshed. I had to look. I just looked.”

“Aye, and that was because yer aunt was there afore you could do more, I’d wager, young fellow.”

Cerryl remained silent.

“You men, even young. Syodor . . . even he . . .” Nall broke off the words abruptly and looked at Cerryl. “No sense in that. What be done be done.” She pointed to the stool by her kitchen table. “Well, leastwise you can help. You’re careful enough with the roots.”

Cerryl climbed onto the stool and looked at the handful of bedraggled golden turnips. His eyes flicked to the open shutters of the single window and the other tailing piles, then back to the turnips.





II




ALL LIFE COMPOSES itself of chaos and order. Yet too many forget that without chaos there is no life. Far within the earth, chaos abides, giving warmth and life to the depths beneath the lands and oceans.

The very light of the sun is white chaos, and it, too, brings life. Within the very sunlight are all the colors of white, the pure chaos from which springs all life . . .

The sun can be seen but by solely its own light, and thus all that is under the sun can only be because of the chaos of the sun. Even the wisest of mages cannot perceive any portion of all that exists on and under the earth itself except through the operation of chaos.

To claim that order is the staff of life, as some acolytes have done since the ancient heretic Nylan, is not only false but folly, for the sole perfect order in life is death.

Even a blade or a shield must be forged through the heat of chaos and wielded by a man whose very lifeblood is heated by chaos.

Chaos is the foundation of power and strength. Mastering chaos is the first step in controlling power. Power is the foundation of all lands and towns that would prosper, and those who would have their homelands free of invaders and devastation must then seek the mastery of chaos . . .

Colors of White

(Manual of the Guild at Fairhaven)

Preface





III




IN THE CORNER where the hearth fire spilled light onto the floor, Cerryl looked at the book, eyes straining at the incomprehensible black symbols on the aged tan page. He turned the page. The symbols on the next page looked the same.

“Cerryl?” Nall continued to place the rolled-out biscuits in the battered tin baking pan on the table at her left.

“Yes, Aunt?” He did not turn, fearing she might see the book, afraid she might see the tears of frustration in his eyes.

“Your uncle be a-coming up the south path soon. Would you be fetching another pail of water?”

“Yes, Aunt Nall.” He slipped the ancient tome inside his ragged tunic and forced his face into composure before standing and turning.

“And a cheerful face would be good. Days been hard for Syodor lately,” she added. “Specially after he found that cursed white bronze . . .” The after-statement was whispered to herself, but Cerryl heard it as clearly as though she had spoken loudly.

He only nodded, knowing she would not want him to know what she had said, and walked quickly across the threshold, stopping by his pallet and slipping the book inside it before continuing and picking the ironbound wooden pail off the long peg set into the cross-timber behind the door. His bare feet carried him out the door and off the stoop and toward the path leading to the stream uphill and in back of the house.

He wished they could use the stream where it wound in front of the old house, but there it had turned orangish from the tailings. And it smelled like brimstone, sometimes rusty like iron as well. Cerryl’s nose twitched at the thought of the odor as he trudged up the path toward the spring from which the smaller stream flowed.

A sharp terwhit slashed through the early dusk—a bird hidden somewhere in the scrub junipers that sprouted willy-nilly in the areas untouched by tailings or the orange leachings. Cerryl glanced to his right, in the direction of the stone arched tunnel with a foreboding name carved in the rock over the beams. While he couldn’t read the name, he could sense that something left better alone lay deep in the tunnel. Still, the dusk that strained Nall’s eyes, or his uncle’s, was as bright as dawn just before the sun rose—something he’d tried not to let them know.

The bird did not call again, and the chirping of insects rose in the dusk. Cerryl wondered if they were crickets or something else. He shrugged. Insects had never been that interesting. He turned westward, heading up the foot-packed clay toward the spring.

The faint gurgling of the brook did not rise over the insects’ chirping until he reached the end of the spring itself, dark silver waters nearly still, except where they flowed over the rock dam created years back and covered in thick green moss.