Nytral does not return the smile. “Could be, ser.”
Lorn laughs, gently. “I know chaos, firelances, and blades. I don’t know lancers and barbarians, and you do, or you wouldn’t be a squad leader assigned to a green officer. I also don’t know what supplies we should have, and what we might get shorted. You do.”
Nytral’s lips crinkle slightly. “There be that, ser.”
“More than that, I’m sure.” Lorn laughs self-deprecatingly. “Do you know where I draw a mount? And how we can find out about just what our replacement lancers are like?”
“Wouldn’t be much good to you, if’n I didn’t, ser.”
“Let’s start with finding my room so I can drop off this kit, and then look for the kind of mount that will be best for Isahl.” Lorn smiles. “Lead on.”
Nytral gestures toward the three-story, narrow, barracklike building in the northeast corner of the compound. “There.” He walks out of the shade across the white paving stones of the courtyard. “Front entrance there is to the officer’s rooms. You can take whatever one you want on the top level. Stables are out back, beyond the wall ….”
Lorn matches steps with the squad leader, listening, and yet studying the compound, trying to memorize where everything is.
XX
AFTER HAVING SELECTED a mount, and getting a tour of the rest of the Mirror Lancer compound from Nytral, Lorn finds himself yawning more and more as they walk back from the armory, a heavy-walled and squat building located inside another set of walls in the northwest corner of the compound. Lorn’s boots are scuffing the stone as well.
“Ser … begging your pardon, but best you get some sleep afore you eat with the senior officers tonight.” Nytral glances at Lorn.
“Because they’ll be sizing up the new undercaptain? You’re probably right, and there’s not too much more I can do until tomorrow anyway.” Lorn yawns again. “I’ll see you in the morning, and we can go over the supplies and everything.”
“Yes, ser.”
Lorn turns and walks back to the quarters building, and up two long flights of steps. His room is stark-one narrow pallet bed, a small table by the bed with an oil lamp, a single armless wooden chair, and a set of wooden pegs on the wallfor hanging uniforms. The single window bears ancient glass, and the shutters are inside the casement.
After slipping the latch bar in place behind him, Lorn levers off his boots and strips to his small clothes. By then he is struggling to keep his eyes open.
Despite his fatigue, Lorn wakes in mid-afternoon, in a chill. As he was sleeping, someone had been screeing him, and it had not been his father. But why? To see that he was indeed where he had been sent?
He rolls upright and rubs his eyes. Since he is awake, he rises and then uses the cold shower in the semi-communal bathing chamber in the middle of the uppermost floor. After drying and dressing in a clean set of lancer whites, he heads back to the outpost support building where some discreet inquiries of Chorin locate the officer’s laundry service, set, obviously, in the rear of the ground floor level of the quarters building.
Lorn returns to his room and carries his soiled whites down to the small room where a gray-haired and bare-footed woman in gray stands over a wash tub, swirling the wash with a wooden paddle. A second thigh-high tub stands to her right. The odors of warmish water and soap fill the barewalled space.
Lorn waits, but the woman does not turn in his direction. Finally, he clears his throat.
She looks up, then steps toward him. “Ser … ser … those I cannot wash until tomorrow.”
“That’s fine.”
“A copper for each uniform, you know.”
Lorn nods. “There is just one.”
She bobs her head and takes the uniform. “Tomorrow night.”
“Thank you.” Even before he finishes his words, the washerwoman has set his whites on a table by the tub and is back at work with the wooden paddle. He steps outside, into a gentle, but unseasonably warm breeze for winter in Syadtar-that is what he feels. He checks the white garrison cap, although the breeze is scarcely strong enough to worry about.
There is time before dinner. So he walks around the compound, studying more carefully what Nytral had shown him earlier. Under grayish-green tiled roofs, the buildings are of clean-lined granite and sunstone, the granite for the main walls, and the sunstone for the minimal trim and arches. Both types of stone have been bleached out by time and the residual impact of the chaos-chisel cutting used to shape the stone blocks. With the late afternoon sun glinting on the windows of Thiataphi’s headquarters, Lorn can see that some of the window panes are clearer than others, by the reflection of both light and the chaos within the sunlight. The window casements are all of stained and weathered white oak, but barely visible, since all the shutters in the compound are inside the windows.
The outpost building, although old, has been added to the compound later.
Lorn smiles as Chorin hurries out the door and scurries toward Thiataphi’s headquarters.
“ … two, three …”
At the sound of cadence-calling, Lorn turns to watch a line of men in white marching along the west wall of the compound, just outside the shade.
“ … have to march before you ride … two, three … keep the chaos on your side … two, three …” calls a burly squad leader, breaking the cadence to add, “You’re not tough, and the barbarians will eat you like honeycakes … pick it up in the rear!”
Hoofs clatter on the stones, and a Mirror Lancer in white, wearing the red sash of a messenger, rides up to the hitching post outside Thiataphi’s headquarters, dismounts, hurriedly ties his mount, and rushes inside carrying a white leather dispatch pouch.
As Chorin eases out through the stone archway, the Lancer clerk’s head turns as if he is trying to hear what the messenger might be saying or what he brought.
Lorn smiles, watching.
When Chorin sees Lorn, he begins to walk quickly backto the outpost building, without looking back at the junior officer.
At the sound of the fifth bell of afternoon, Lorn turns back toward the quarters building. By the time he reaches the dining area, a small hall with a table long enough for a score and a half, and folds his garrison cap and tucks it in his belt, there are already a number of officers gathering within the sunstone finished room. The fireplace behind the head of the table is dark, and the walls are bare, except for a series of miniature mirror shields on the north wall, each with a design color-etched into the polished cupridium. The cupridium catches the indirect early evening light coming through the windows on the south wall, enough so that light plays across the shields.
From the rank insignia he can see, he is the only undercaptain, with six captains, two overcaptains, one sub-majer, and one majer standing at places around the table, and with the gray-haired Commander Thiataphi himself at the head of the table.
As the other officers seat themselves, Lorn watches, then moves so that he is at the very foot of the table on the left side.
Each place has a brown platter and a heavy glass wine goblet-glass, not crystal nor metal. The servers are lancers, but each wears a green overtunic. On the serving platter first presented to the commander are slices of beef, covered with a brown sauce. The second platter is heaped with yellow noodles, and four large baskets of dark bread are set at intervals along the table. Then comes a deeper dish filled with something green.
Lorn waits and takes as much as he dares of the beef, noodles, bread, and ackar, a bitter leafy vegetable he had seen far too much of as a boy. The server fills his goblet with a maroon wine.
Commander Thiataphi lifts his goblet, and the other officers begin to eat. Lorn follows their example, listening to their conversation as he does.
“White mounts handle the sun better … chaos-colored, you know, and the white reflects better ….”
“ … darker coats shield them better …”