The Order War (58 page)

Hsssttt!

The sun-blade dimmed as Gunnar’s shields deflected the firebolts, then flared back to brightness and slashed at an angle through a squad of lancers. Screams mixed with the hissing that resembled the vent of a massive steam engine.

Where the light-blade had passed, white ashes swirled and drifted snowlike, falling on the clay beside the road, on the glass-hard melted stone of the road itself, and across the glassy parts of the shoulder that had once been sand.

Horses reared, those that were left, screaming as they tried to plunge away from the rain of ash, and from the blackened heaps that had been men and horses merely brushed by the
light blade. In the dimness, the white banners fluttered against the growing wind from nowhere, their muffled crackling adding to the swell of sound.

Hssstttt!

Justen winced as the heat of the firebolt seemed to blister his face.

Another roll of drums sounded, and the crimson-trimmed gray banners headed uphill toward the balloon—and toward Gunnar and Martan. The Iron Guard horse trotted forward to lead the next advance, and the foot began to quickstep.

Martan’s arrows shifted to the gray-clad troops, but no longer did the shafts explode and strew bodies. The Guards fell, but they fell one at a time, and there were far fewer shafts than Guards, even as the marine’s arms seemed to blur with their speed. That blur stopped for a moment as Martan pulled an arrow from the fleshy part of his shoulder and then, almost without losing his rhythm, released yet another black shaft, and another. But the wave of gray troops surged uphill, ever nearer to Martan and Gunnar.

Ssssstttttt…

With his thoughts, Justen swung the beam across the line of the White forces, trying to slow the advance. The blade played back across the hillside, cutting a blackened gash across the turf, flinging scattered bits of flaming debris out and away from the line of sun-fire.

“Aeeeeiiii…” Only a few cries rose from the Iron Guard.

Heavier gray smoke curled from the burning grass. The smell of scorched turf and the odor of burned flesh—human and animal—permeated the lower hillside. But the Iron Guard closed ranks, and the crimson-trimmed gray banners continued uphill.

Hssstt!

Another firebolt flashed below the balloon; the wicker of the basket crackled with the heat, and the balloon bounced.

Justen forced the sun-blade back toward the Iron Guard, but the line of fire crossed the road and the White lancers behind the stone wall. The remnant of the lancers broke and curled away. Horses foamed and screamed, some hurling riders onto the road.

“Form up! Follow the Guard!”

Another drum-roll sounded, not quite in cadence, and the remnants of two squads of lancers began to trot up the hillside road, almost as if following Justen’s light-blade.

Higher on the hillside, nearer the land engine and the tethers of the balloon, at least half of the Iron Guard—half foot, half horse—continued to march, more slowly but steadily, uphill toward Martan and Gunnar.

From the White Wizards on the road there swelled a growing pressure: pure chaos, so deep that it was more red than white.

Hhhsttt! Hhhssstt!

Hssstttt! Hsssttt!

From the host of fireballs flaring toward Justen, one slammed past him and into the balloon. The basket rocked, and a faint hissing began. Trying to maintain his concentration, Justen grabbed the basket with one hand, but the light-sword from the fire-eye slewed away from the White forces and across a row of houses at the edge of Fairhaven.

One of the houses with a thatched roof exploded into flame, an instant torch, and smoke poured skyward. Another structure’s tile roof cracked and splintered, sending hot masonry across down the street like red-hot arrows. A tall stone house slumped like a fat wax candle caught in full summer sun, or a baker’s oven, oozing out in all directions, the molten stone creating a ring of fire that caused nearby trees and garden plants to erupt in flame.

The sounds of steaming vegetation, screaming people, and panicked animals melded into a low roar that in turn merged with the hissing of the light-sword itself.

Hhsssttt! Hsssttt!

The twin firebolts fell short, but Justen could sense the growing mass of chaos building in the White Wizards.

Trying to hold back his horror at the results of the sun-blade, Justen struggled to get his balance in the rocking balloon basket and to swing the sun-blade back toward the Iron Guard, which advanced inexorably toward Gunnar and Martan.

Martan continued to loose arrows, his right sleeve damp with blood, and Gunnar struggled with the high and mighty
winds, trying to keep the sky clear for Justen.

Ssssstttt…

Justen wrenched the sun-blade back below him, playing it across the advancing ranks of the Iron Guard, trying to ignore the greasy smoke and the screams.

Still the Guard advanced, now no more than a hundred cubits from where Martan stood and let fly his arrows.

Justen coughed, and the blade slewed wildly, flashing back toward the horizon and slagging a corner of the traders’ market into molten white stone.

Again the White Wizards focused their will, and another huge swell of chaos flared. Sensing the chaos, Justen slewed the sun-blade across the firebolts.
Hhhsttt! Crummpptt!

With the impact of chaos and order, the sky seemed to explode. Black stars and deep, blinding-white flares intersected, flashing through each other and dwindling into nothingness as the wind built. The balloon bounced so wildly that Justen, even with both hands on the basket, was thrown against the coal pan and half over the side. The smell of singed hair again filled his nostrils.

The light-blade flared northward, and the park in the traders’ square flashed into flame. Cinders and ashes spewed skyward. Even while Justen struggled upright and brought the blade back to bear on the Iron Guard, the trees in the traders’ square burned like bright candles through the artificial twilight, haze, and ever-thickening smoke.

“That’s it,” muttered Justen to himself. “Meet chaos with order…”

He spit out blood and forced his thoughts back onto the light-blade, focusing it on the front ranks of the Iron Guard, playing it back across infantry and troopers alike, ignoring the white agony that welled from soldiers whose bodies exploded in steaming fury instants before they became piles of ash.

More chaos fire flared around the balloon.

Hssssttt!! Hsssttttt!

The balloon bounced again, but braced, Justen kept swinging the blade across the Iron Guard, reduced now to less than a score of horsemen charging toward Martan and Gunnar.

Justen slammed the blade along a line between the two and the Iron Guard, and still trying to hold on to the Balance between chaos and order, stretched his light-gathering net to cover the sky as far as he could reach. He needed to gather an ever-wider sweep of light.

Below, Martan hacked an Iron Guard off his horse and then mounted it, swinging a stolen sabre and charging the half-squad of Guards remaining—as if to push or pull them away from Gunnar and Justen.

More firebolts flashed past Justen, and the hissing of the balloon grew louder, a sound that Justen sensed more than felt since his ears were deafened by the shrieking of the light-blade, the roaring of the firebolts, and the rushing of the winds that yanked the balloon to the ends of its tethers.

Below, the sabre flew from Martan’s hands as one of the last three Iron Guards slashed from his blind side.

Almost sobbing as he mentally grabbed at the increased order-energy from his wider capture net, Justen threw the sun-blade at the three Iron Guards before Martan. Still weaving and focusing, Justen directed the growing flow of order that was like a river from the heavens, even as a darker force seemed to gather beside it, welling from the earth beneath.

Ignoring that dark force, Justen flung the wider light-blade back along the hillside, throwing bodies everywhere, burning through the turf and melting stone outcrops, trying to keep the Guards, those three remaining, from Gunnar and Martan, although he could no longer sense the marine, only Gunnar’s will across the skies.

Then a long wave wrenched the earth beneath the valley, rolling from the hill and to the north. The undulating motion ran back through the tethers, rocking the balloon, but that rocking was muted because the tethers were slackening as the balloon had begun to sink.

To the north, the massive landquake rippled along the highway, lifting the twenty-stone paving blocks and dropping some of them back into disjointed positions, others into cracked and shattered fragments.

Houses—those not already fused, charred, or exploded into fragments—heaved like boats in the surf as the solid ground around them turned into liquid and shook like jelly.
One swell followed another, and timbered walls bent, and bent, and snapped apart like twigs. Stone and masonry walls shivered, and shivered, and sprayed outward in cascades of brick and stone.

Waves of white-red destruction, of lost and sundered souls, poured back toward Justen, and in desperation, he turned the light-knife on that misty white, slashing through it as if to shield himself, to shield Gunnar, even to shield distant Dayala.

The grinding sound of stonework collapsing and the distant, almost hissing, screams of survivors, of innocents dying under flame, stone, and churned earth, were all but lost behind the searing heat and boiling edge of the order-chaos blade that Justen turned back down across the handful of White lancers who had followed the Iron Guard uphill and had nearly reached a spot almost directly below the balloon.

Sssssstttt…
No screams followed the wave of light. Only a blast of white pain rocked through Justen with the deaths so close below, and the slope on the Fairhaven side of the hill glistened like glass. Lumps—like the remnants of the shepherd’s hut—protruded from the shimmering surface.

Justen, nearly blind with the white agony, tried to rebalance his forces, to turn them and the order-chaos blade back toward the remaining White Wizards.

Hhhsssttt…

With the continuing barrage of firebolts, most of them held at bay by Gunnar’s efforts in pulsing order-shields and holding the clouds away, the balloon and basket bounced again. The hissing overhead grew louder, and the basket swayed, sinking even closer to the ground. Justen squinted, trying to concentrate, trying to remain ordered and calm even as the order-chaos blade bounced around the chaos-shield of the High Wizard.

The blade shivered and slashed across the center of Fairhaven, somehow held together by a web of white. With the collision of the light-blade and the white web, stonework melted. Ancient trees exploded into flames before falling like charcoaled logs against rubble and melted stone. Stone avenues flowed like white-lava rivers.

Even in the balloon the air was hotter than midday in the
Stone Hills, filled with the odor of scorched vegetation, charred flesh, and ash and cinders and more ash. Like an oven, the valley baked in the light-blade-forged twilight, where those few buildings that remained became ovens that baked their inhabitants.

The only sun in the sky was the light from the order-chaos knife wielded by Justen, and yet that light gave no cheer, only heat and agony.

Another pulse of chaos flared into the sky and arced toward Justen—a massive firebolt propelled by the will of desperate White Wizards, held tightly by the High Wizard himself, whose broad shoulders and sweating face seemed to fill Justen’s mind.

Hsssstttt…

Again Justen wrestled the order-chaos blade and the energy gathered from the skies of Candar back toward the High Wizard, focusing it not only on the shield, but around the shield. Another land wave shivered the ground, rocking the balloon through the tethers, and Justen was forced to grab onto the basket to avoid being pitched out.

The ground around the shielded wizards bubbled as though it boiled, and steam gouted up in pillars, even through the stones of the wizard-protected section of the road.

Another firebolt flared past Justen and into the balloon, burning through one cable holding the balloon to the basket. The balloon slewed wildly, and Justen tightened his grasp on the basket, trying still to force the order-chaos blade back upon the White Wizards.

Sssstttt…

The trees across the road and behind the wizards flared like black rockets before collapsing into charcoal, which in turn was covered by molten rock oozing down from the melted stone of the road.

Hsssttt!

Lashing back against the firebolts, Justen forced the order-chaos blade toward the White Wizards, where he again played it against the High Wizard’s shield.

“That’s…it. Keep it centered…” he grunted, trying to
force ordered-light squarely against the lines of focused chaos wielded by the High Wizard.

Sssstttt! Cruummppttt!

The ground seemed to buckle and explode simultaneously, spewing order and chaos into the skies and deep into the earth. Lines of dark fire and rays of flame heat arced across the glowering sky that abruptly flared sun-white in brilliance.

On the southwestern side of the White Wizards’ shield, the light-blade gouged a pit so deep that what had been a raised stone road melted into a glass-lined pit.

Hhhssttt!

Justen mentally walked the order-chaos beam back toward the High Wizard. Yet that tight shield held…and held…even though it pulsed against the violence Justen directed against it, each pulse throwing Justen’s light-sword back across the valley.

With each flash across the valley that had held the White City, more stonework slumped into waxlike heaps until the entire valley seemed to be in ashes—black, gray, and white—out of which reared shiny, once-molten stone, as though the bones of the burned corpses showed through more clearly with each pass of the fire-sword of the skies.

Hanging on to the wicker, Justen made a last effort to swing the wildly spinning order-chaos light-sword back onto the shield of the High Wizard.