Wellspring of Chaos (26 page)

Kharl looked down at the pier, and then out at Ruzor. A glass had passed since he had taken the deck watch, and the cotton factor’s wagons had come, been loaded, and departed. Two long and heavy wagons remained on the pier, and the deck crew was finishing the off-loading of tin ingots. Kharl walked slowly in a circle, around the quarterdeck—that ill-defined area on the main deck immediately inboard of the head of the gangway down to the pier.

The late-afternoon wind had picked up, and the sun had dropped behind the bluffs to the west of Ruzor so that the Seastag and the pier sat in shadow, chilled further by the wind out of the northeast. Glad that he had kept his winter jacket and was wearing it over the carpenters’ grays, Kharl stopped pacing and stood by the railing, looking down and across at the metal factor’s men placing the tin ingots in the second wagon. The only movements on the pier were those of the loaders, and the only ones

Kharl could see on the Seastag were the winch crew, although he knew some of the deckhands were down in the hold loading the heavy canvas slings.

“Last ingots!” came the call from the hold.

“Last load,” Furwyl relayed from where he stood on the forward section of the poop.

The metal factor, a solid figure in a heavy brown work jacket, raised his arm in acknowledgment. The heavy sling rose out of the hold and then swung out to the pier and down onto the stone beside the wagon. The cotton had been loaded directly into the wagons, but the ingots were not. Was that because they were so much heavier that the wrong placement on the wagon could bend or snap an axle? By the time the dock loaders had placed the last ingots on the wagon, the boom was secured in its stowed position and the deck crew was folding up the sling and replacing the hatch cover.

“Winch and deck crew, you can knock off.” Bemyr’s voice cut through the afternoon.

“For what?” mumbled someone. “Nowhere to go.”

“You heard the captain. No shore leave here. More shore leave in Southport. It’s warmer there, anyway.”

“Yeah…”

“… except the women…”

“You couldn’t get a woman here, either, Sonlat.”

“… and the ale’s flat… flat as the women…”

“Men aren’t any better,” cracked one of the women riggers.

A series of laughs followed as the men and the two muscular women drifted into smaller groups.

Kharl turned his attention back to the now-empty pier, a long stretch of gray stone, tinged with pink in some places and the green of algae in others. The only other vessel at the pier was an old fishing schooner. The sunlight falling on the harbor waters to the south and east of the Seastag suggested that sunset was still a glass or so away.

“Quiet so far, carpenter?” asked Furwyl, easing up to the quarterdeck.

“Yes, ser.”

“I’ll be checking the manifests with the captain. Let us know if you see anything strange.”

“Yes, ser.”

As the first crossed the deck, Kharl glanced at the cudgel set against the railing forward of the gangway, then back to the pier. He looked farther west, toward the town. Was that someone on the harbor road? He scanned the pier and harbor, but his eyes kept going back to the road, and before too long he could see a rider moving at a quick trot toward the squarish heavy-timbered building that held the portmaster and the customs enumerator. The traveler neared the port building and tied his mount outside.

Kharl kept looking back toward the port building, but it was about a quarter of a glass later before the rider emerged and vaulted into his saddle. The rider was in uniform, probably a lancer of some sort, and he was continuing along the road bordering the harbor, his mount carrying him past the pier and toward the breakwater—and the fort that squatted on the seaward end.

Kharl did not want to ring the alarm bell, but he did think that either Furwyl or Hagen should know. He glanced around. No one was nearby. He crossed the deck quickly and stepped into the passageway way leading to the mates’ cabins, and that of the captain. The hatch door to the captain’s cabin was ajar, and he knocked.

“Yes?”

“Captain, ser, there’s a lancer riding from the port building to the fort on the end of the breakwater. I didn’t know if you wanted to know, but the second told me that the customs enumerator was not to be trusted…”

“He’s still riding? How do you know—” began Furwyl, turning.

The captain lurched up from behind the table. “On deck, first. Back to your post, carpenter.”

Kharl hurried back to the quarterdeck. From there he watched as Hagen climbed to the poop, a spyglass in hand. The captain only watched for a moment before calling to Furwyl, “Have the engineer go to emergency fire-up!”

“Yes, ser.” Furwyl dropped down the ladder to the engine spaces.

Kharl kept watching both the pier and the breakwater. The lancer had not yet reached the breakwater fort. The carpenter second had not realized just how far out the breakwater was and how much the harbor road wound between the base of the pier and the breakwater. Still, it wasn’t that long before the lancer was on the breakwater road heading to the fort.

As Kharl watched, he could smell coal smoke, and after a few more moments, a thin line of black began to flow from the stack.

Bemyr’s whistle shrilled through the late afternoon. “All hands! All hands! Deck crew, make ready to cast off. Make ready to cast off! Harbor rig! Harbor rig!“

Furwyl appeared beside Kharl. “We’ll leave the midships line in place and the gangway down. You know of anyone who’s left the ship?”

“No, ser.”

“Good.” The first turned, and two of the crew—one burly man and an equally burly woman—dashed down the gangway onto the pier, the woman going forward, the man aft.

“Single up!” Furwyl ordered. “Single up!”

“Singling up!”

“Clear the aft line!”

The seaman by the aft line loosened it, then hurried back up the pier to the gangway, but waited. “Aft line clear.”

“Clear the forward line.”

“Forward line clear.” After undoing the forward line, the woman retreated to the single cleat beside the gangway, where the other sailor joined her. Both forward and aft lines were pulled in.

“Clear the midships line.”

The two unwound the line from the cleat, down to a single loop, then sprinted up the gangway. Kharl watched as the line flowed away and off the cleat as the deck crew reeled it in.

“Up the gangway.”

After the gangway was winched up and back, Kharl locked the quarterdeck railing back in place flush with the fixed railing.

With the cold wind out of the northeast filling the sails, the Seastag swung away smartly from the stone pier. The smoke from the stack thickened, and Kharl could hear a low groaning as the engine began to turn over, slowly, then stop because there wasn’t enough pressure in the boilers yet. Even without the engine, the ship was headed seaward under sail with fair headway.

Kharl glanced from the pier to the fort at the end of the breakwater. From what he could tell, Hagen was piloting the Seastag into the section of the channel closest to the fort. While Kharl knew the captain must have had a reason, he had no idea what that might have been.

The ship was nearing the fort, but was still a good kay away from the closest approach, which Kharl judged to be a kay and a half.

Cruump! Something flew through the forward yards and landed another fifty rods south of the ship. A gout of water gushed skyward.

Kharl realized that the something had been a shell from a cannon in the fort.

Thivup… thwup… Slowly… too slowly, it seemed, the paddle wheels began to turn.

Another shell whistled overhead and landed in the water less than five rods to starboard.

“Hard port!” Hagen ordered.

The Seastag turned port, headed almost directly at the breakwater, losing speed with each rod. Yet another shell slammed into the blue-gray harbor waters, barely off the starboard quarter, and another gout of water erupted skyward. Although the paddle wheels were beginning to pick up a slow and even rhythm, even Kharl could tell that the ship was losing headway and might soon even lose steerageway. He could also see the water ahead lightening as they neared the shallows that sloped up to the breakwater, and the fort.

“Hard starboard!” came the command. “Full power!”

As the Seastag turned back to starboard, and the sails caught the wind nearly full once more, the ship seemed to leap forward—and not a moment too soon. There was the faintest scraping on the port side, as if the hull had run against the edge of a sandbar or a rock, and then another cannon shell exploded into the water less than five rods directly aft of the sternpost.

“Steady on zero nine zero!” ordered Hagen.

Another shell slammed through the rigging, and this time, a rain of debris pattered and clattered down onto the poop deck. Kharl looked up. One of the sails on the starboard side had been ripped loose of the bottom rigging and flapped in the wind. The footlines dangled, and the end gaff was missing.

The paddle wheels turned over a shade faster with each moment, and the ship continued to gain speed. The Seastag had passed the end of the breakwater and was now moving away from the fort at a goodly clip, the open water between the Gallosian fort and the ship increasing.

“Twenty starboard!” ordered Hagen.

Just as the ship settled onto the new heading, another shell struck just off the port quarter, close enough and with sufficient force to throw a spray of water across the forecastle. Kharl could even feel some of the spray from where he stood midships on the starboard side.

Glancing aft, he could see that once the Seastag had cleared the shallower waters seaward from the breakwater, Hagen had turned the ship onto a heading that presented only the stern to the cannon of the fort, keeping the ship’s exposure to cannon fire as narrow as possible. Another shell exploded in the waters aft of the Seastag. Kharl waited for another shell, perhaps to strike the ship itself, but no other shells were fired, not that he could see or hear.

Furwyl took the ladder down from the poop and crossed the deck to Kharl. “Captain thinks we’re out of range now.” He looked at the chunks of wood and line, and several pulleys, that lay across the main deck. “You and Tarkyn are going to be busy replacing gaffs and booms,” Hagen said. “Lucky they didn’t hit either of the masts square.”

“I don’t know as it was luck, ser, was it?”

“Captain did his best, and he’s good, carpenter, but there’s always luck.” Furwyl nodded and headed toward the bosun. “Bemyr! Get a crew here to clean up the mess.”

Kharl looked back into the twilight that was beginning to descend on Ruzor and the squat Gallosian fort on the breakwater. Why were people so vindictive? Hagen had done what was right, and the customs enumerator and the Prefect’s armsmen had tried to punish him and sink the Seastag because they hadn’t gotten their way. Yet they would have been outraged had they been the buyers of the brimstone, and Hagen had sold it to someone else.

He shook his head. The Prefect’s enumerator and Egen were the same sort, wanting things, their own way and vindictive when they were thwarted. Did having power turn people that way?

Kharl laughed. It wasn’t as though he’d ever be tempted in that fashion. Coopers and carpenters never got that kind of power.

Another five days passed before the Seastag made her way into the port at Diehl, the most sheltered harbor that Kharl had seen. A forested peninsula guarded the seaward approach, looming over the deep channel that was less than two kays wide at the harbor entrance. Once past the entry, the Seastag steamed almost due west through a bay more than thirty kays wide, and from the half day that it took to reach the actual port, more than fifty kays in length. Only the Great North Bay at Lydiar had been larger, almost an inland sea, as Kharl recalled.

Kharl had been assigned the morning deck watch the day after the ship had arrived, and Hagen had appeared almost as soon as the carpenter had taken his station on the quarterdeck, opposite the still-empty pier.

“We’ve got the copper to off-load and some of the woolens we picked up in Nylan. Expect their port-mistress anytime, or one of the assistants. Just give me a call or ring the bell twice. I don’t need to tell you, but be exceedingly polite.” With a nod, Hagen had turned and returned to his cabin, leaving Kharl on the deck under high clouds, on the warmest morning Kharl had experienced in eightdays.

As Bemyr supervised the deck crew’s removal of both hatch covers, Kharl studied the port and the land beyond. Diehl itself was the smallest port town Kharl had seen, not that he had seen many, with only two warehouses behind the port-mistress’s structure at the foot of the single pier—a structure of old and heavy timber supported by equally old and massive stone columns. The Seastag was the only vessel tied at a pier large enough for two ocean traders.

The water in the bay was a warm blue, unlike the late-autumn dark blue of the Eastern Ocean or the harbor waters at the Candarian towns and cities where the Seastag had previously ported, and the air was warmer—and moister. Beyond the port area, everything was green— differing shades of green in a canopy of trees that stretched to the horizon in every direction where there was land.

A glass passed before a silver-haired woman walked down the pier toward the Seastag. Kharl had not seen her appear, but he almost nodded to himself, thinking that the port-mistress would probably be older. But as the woman neared, he could see from the unlined face and slender figure that the woman was anything but old. He’d heard that druids were silver-haired, but the druid approaching the ship was the first he had ever seen. He continued to watch, even as he stepped forward to greet her. The silver-haired figure walked up the gangway with a grace that looked youthful and had to be mature. That Kharl knew. Women were almost always the graceful ones, while girls betrayed their age through a myriad of little traits, including a touch of uneasiness and awkwardness with their movements.

“Greetings,” Kharl offered, inclining his head. “Are you here about the cargo?“

The druid studied Kharl before finally speaking. “You are not from Recluce.“

“No. I’m from Brysta.” Kharl almost stepped back from her, so strong was the feeling of her presence… and a swirling linkage of both the whiteness—except it was unlike any whiteness he had sensed before— and a deeper blackness, although that seemed more like what he had felt from the mage in Nylan.

She paused. “Will you be here long?”

“The ship? The captain decides that. We have to off-load cargo, for you. Let me summon him. He wanted to know as soon as you arrived.”

“No… not yet. I will be back with those for the cargoes.” She turned and walked back down the gangway.

Kharl frowned, wondering what he had done wrong—or if he had. “Carpenter? What did you say to her?” Furwyl crossed the deck. “I asked if she were the one we had cargo for, and… she didn’t say, now that I think about it. Then, she asked how long we would be here, and I said that it was up to the captain, but that we would be here until we off-loaded. She said that she would be back with those for the cargo.” At the last words, Furwyl relaxed. “If she said that, she’ll be back. They never tell lies.” He frowned. “I wonder why she came aboard. Haven’t seen that one before.”

“She had deep green eyes,” Kharl said, not knowing quite why he did.

“You leave them alone,” the first mate said, “if you value your life and health. Unless, of course, they ask you. Then, I hear, you’re a lucky fellow.“

Kharl understood. He’d felt the power in the woman, a strange sort of power, an intertwining of golden whiteness with deep blackness.

“I’ll tell the captain that they know we’re here.”

“Yes, ser.” Kharl looked down the pier, but the druid had vanished.

At least another glass passed. Kharl was looking forward to being relieved when noon came. When he scanned the pier, he saw two druids, both with silver hair, walking down the pier toward the ship, accompanied by another figure, a man in gray, with light brown hair.

Furwyl was at the gangway almost instantly, followed by the captain. Kharl stood back, behind them.

The first druid up the gangway was not the one Kharl had met. She was shorter, with amber eyes, and she turned directly to Hagen. “Captain.”

“Port-mistress… I had heard your assistant was here… I hope… we did not offend…”

The druid laughed, the sound warm. “If anything… I am her assistant. Dayala is one of the… she is of the Great Forest. She told me that your watcher”—she glanced to Kharl—“was most well-mannered, and she came to tell me that you bore our cargo. Would you mind if she and her consort have a few words with him?”

“Has he…?”

“No,” answered the druid Kharl had first met. “He is a most honest man. But he was injured, and we would like to see if we could aid him.”

“By all means.” Hagen bowed his head.

“We will talk of cargoes while they talk to your man,” suggested the port-mistress.

The brown-haired man, Kharl realized, was also a druid, with the same interweaving of order and chaos, and he motioned toward the bow. Kharl followed the two up the ladder and forward until the three stood beside the bowsprit.

The man smiled politely. “Dayala said that you’re from Brysta.”

“I am. Are you?” Kharl asked politely.

“No, and it doesn’t matter, not really. I’m from Wandernaught, but you reminded her of someone I used to know.” The druid shrugged.

Kharl could sense clearly the coiled power in the man, power that made the white wizard he had killed seem less than a summer mist in comparison. “I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

The other laughed. “We have not, and I doubt we’ll ever meet again. But one never knows. If you don’t mind, would you answer a few questions?”

“I suppose so.” Kharl was wary.

“Justen… he still suffers from the injuries to his ribs. We should help there first,” suggested Dayala.

Justen shook his head, then laughed, before speaking. “She has the right of it. She usually does. I trust you won’t mind if we repair the rib that hasn’t begun to heal right?”

One of his ribs wasn’t healing right?

“It was broken inside, and there’s…” The man frowned. “Let’s just say that if you got hit again there, you might not live through it.”

“You can do that? Without cutting into me?”

“It will not hurt,” said Dayala. “Why… would you…”

“Because it’s better for us, and better for you. We’ll explain afterward.”

Kharl nodded.

“It’s easier if we touch you. Do you mind?”

“As long as you don’t jab,” Kharl said dryly.

Their touch was so light that the carpenter almost did not feel either of their hands, hers on his wrist, and Justen’s on the back of his neck. What he did feel was a golden warm darkness flowing into his chest, then an easing of a tightness that he had not even realized was there. The two lifted their hands from Kharl.

“Your own order can finish the healing, and that will take time,” Dayala said. “Try not to injure yourself for the next eightdays.” Kharl frowned.

“You can sense order and chaos, can you not?” the woman asked. Kharl looked to her, then to Justen.

“It could be that you haven’t recognized them that way,” Justen went on. “Sometimes, when you see a person, is there a whitish fog or mist around them, one that others don’t see? Or a darkness? The white means that someone is using chaos, the dark that he or she is using order…”

“Like you do?” asked Kharl.

“I’m somewhere between a druid and a gray mage,” admitted the druid. “You seem drawn more directly to order. You work with both wood and iron, do you not?”

“I was a cooper.”

The druid nodded. “You must have been very good, and I daresay that the better you got, the poorer your business became and the more unseen enemies that you gained.”

“Something like that.” Kharl had the feeling that the other could see inside his head, and his feelings. “What do you want with me?”

“Dayala and I don’t want anything from you or with you. She feels that you are an ordered soul who could do much good wherever you go. It’s obvious that you don’t quite understand what has happened to you. Not totally, anyway. It’s simple enough. You want order and what you’d call truth in your life, and you try to create it. Most people have trouble with that kind of directness, and because you don’t understand your power, you haven’t yet figured out how to be direct and ordered with yourself without unintentionally imposing that order on others.”

Kharl was still wary, but he could sense none of the white chaos about the druid. What chaos the druid had was bounded in strips of golden black, or perhaps they were wound together. “Most times when I’ve tried to do the right thing, in recent years, it has not gone well…”

“It is often that way when one such as you discovers himself,” Dayala said. “You must try to learn more about who you are and what you can do…”

“You also need to understand,” Justen added, his tone sardonic, “that order, fairness, and justice, all those things you value, generally are less well regarded than gold, coins, and possessions by most people, and especially by those in power.”

“How do you know so much about me?” asked Kharl. “It is written within you,” answered Dayala. “Your spirit holds the honest darkness of order, and your thoughts the power of chaos. Your back and your ribs bear witness to the cruelty of others. Your captain is a good man, and he thinks well of you.”

“But the sea is not your home,” added Justen, “although it can help you find where you belong.”

“Where might that be?”

Justen laughed. “That’s up to you. But… if you choose to leave where you were born, you will need to return there before you depart to make a new home. Otherwise, both will war within you.”

Dayala frowned.

“Did I say something wrong? Again?” asked Justen.

Kharl looked from Justen to Dayala.

“In time,” she said, “when you are sure, return home, and do what you must do. Do it with care, and with thought, and not with hatred. Hatred will destroy you.”

The two druids looked at each other and nodded, then stepped away.

Kharl felt so dazed that he just watched for a moment, then started to follow them.

From the ladder she was descending, Dayala looked at Kharl. “We all must find ourselves by ourselves. Only after that can we find others.”

Kharl stopped, then waited a time before descending and walking back to the quarterdeck.

Furwyl appeared. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Surprised, a little dazed.” Kharl shook his head. “They did something to my ribs… took away most of the pain.”

The first smiled, wryly. “Lucky man. Most folks they leave alone. Only heard of them healing a few. All of ‘em lived to a healthy old age.” He paused. “Good omen for the rest of the voyage.”

It might be, but was it a good omen for Kharl? The idea of having to return to Brysta—for any reason—wasn’t exactly appealing. Not at all.