Storm breaking (65 page)

In the end it might have been his own actions in reaching for the land of Hardorn that triggered the long plots of Valdemar and gave them the opportunity to destroy those who had driven them out of their homes so long ago. He should have read the return of his envoy from Hardorn, dead, with the blade belonging to Princess Elspeth between his shoulders, for the serious warning it really was.
You're too close, and we'll finish you
; that had been the real message. Like a nest of bees, he had ventured too near, and now the insects would swarm him and destroy him.

It didn't really matter what the cause for their actions was, nor did it matter whether he could have done anything to prevent this. The Storms had been unleashed,
he
was dying, it was all the fault of Valdemar, and he was going to see to it that Valdemar didn't outlive him—at least, not in any form that the Valdemarans themselves would recognize. Like a wild bear making a final charge, in his death throes he would destroy those who were destroying him.

He had everything he needed; all of the magic of the local nodes, plus all that of his coterie of mages, plus a great deal he had hoarded in carefully-shielded artifacts. Every Emperor created magical artifacts, or caused them to be created; he could drain every one of them. Every mage he had ever worked with, whether he was one of Charliss' private group or not, had a magical "hook" in him, one that tied him back to Charliss. The moment Charliss cared to, he could pull every bit of that mage's personal power and use it as if the mage was one of his personal troupe. The smartest of the mages had, of course, discovered and removed that hook—but most of them hadn't, and Charliss could use them up any time he cared to.

But his own time was rapidly running out. The shields protecting those hoarded objects weren't going to last through too many more Storms, nor were the resources of his mage-troupe, nor of the mages he had hooks in. If he was going to use this power, it would have to be soon.

He sat supported by the tall back and heavy arms of his mock Throne, and contemplated the methods of vengeance. What could he do to finish them, these upstart Valdemarans? What form should his attack take? He wanted it to be appropriate, suitable—and he wanted it to do the most damage possible.

What would the best allocation of his resources be?
It's obvious. Release all the power at once
, he decided.
Release it as the wave-front of the Storm passes, and use it to augment what the Storm does. Make it the worst Storm that the face of this old world has ever seen.

The results of that should be highly entertaining, and since he would release it as the Storm passed from east to west, most of the Empire would be safe.

But Valdemar—ah, Valdemar would have no idea that the blow was coming. The results of such an enormous release of power would be devastating—and amusing, if he lived to watch it, and to collect his information.

Everything from Hardorn to far beyond Valdemar, and from the mountains in the North to the South of Karse, would erupt with Nature driven mad. The weather was already hideous; this would make it unbelievably worse. Earthquake—there would be earthquakes in regions that had never known so much as a trembler, as the stresses in the earth built to beyond the breaking point. Fire—volcanoes would erupt out of nowhere, pouring down rivers of molten rock on unsuspecting cities. Physical storms would spawn lightning that in turn would ignite huge forest fires and grass fires. Blizzards would bury some areas in snow past the rooftops, while floods would wash away the country elsewhere, and mudslides make a ruin of once-fertile hills. Mountains would fling themselves skyward, and the earth would gape as huge fissures opened underfoot. Processes that normally took millennia would occur in a single day or less. There would be no place that was safe, no place to hide. And when the wrath of Nature was over, the Changed creatures would descend on the demoralized and disorganized survivors.

It would be everything he could have wished for. He just wished he was going to live long enough to properly gloat over it; once the energy was released, Charliss would have no more magic to sustain him, and he would die. But so would most of his enemies. Anyone and anything that lived through it all would probably wish for death before too very long.

Tremane would be caught in all of this, of course. which would give him revenge on the faithless traitor—revenge that Melles had been too cowardly or too lazy to take. Lazy, probably; Melles never had been one to pursue targets that were out of his immediate reach; he could always manufacture excuses to obviate any need to do so.

Well, he would take matters into his own hands, then.

It was possible that the extra energy released wouldn't just wipe Valdemar off the world—it might rip through the Empire and its allies as well. The chaos he was about to unleash could have far-reaching effects.

He didn't care. He was long since over caring about things that meant no immediate improvement in
his
well-being.

Why should my Empire outlive me?
he asked himself, seething with resentment over the fact that the Empire as a whole was not willing to make the sacrifices to sustain him.
I gave them my life and my attention—my entire life. Was I appreciated? Beloved for being stern with them? No. Not at all. They took and took. Now they pay for their greed. They should have thought ahead and appeased me.

And there was no reason to make life any easier for Melles either. Let him patch something together from what was left, if, indeed, there was anything left. Let Melles see if he could actually do something with the crumbs and shards. It would serve that effete bastard right.

He smiled slowly, thinking of how Melles would react. The Baron had been progressing
so
well in imposing order on the chaos left in the wake of the Storms. He must feel so proud of himself, and be so certain that he had everything under control now. It would be delicious to see how he crumbled as everything he had worked so hard for vanished before his eyes.

Revenge; on Valdemar, on Tremane, even on Melles for daring to succeed—that was all Charliss had left, and he would take it. By the time he was finished, the known world would be driven down to the level of cave-dwelling, nomad-hunter survival. If Melles reclaimed anything at all as an Empire, it would be an Empire no bigger than this city.

I will destroy it all
. His hands clutched the arms of his chair, and he felt his dry lips cracking as his smile widened. When he set off the final cataclysm, when he ignited nations to form his funeral pyre, he would prove he had been the greatest and most powerful Emperor to ever live.

No one would ever surpass him as he burned the world to light the way to his grave, and the darkness that followed would be a fitting shroud.

Karal felt peculiarly useless at this moment in time, although in a little while he would be just as important as anyone else in the Tower. He watched the others making last-minute preparations, and wished wistfully that he could use the teleson to talk to Natoli; it might have relieved his nerves. He sat quietly where he'd been told to sit, immersed in a peculiar mixture of terror, resignation, and anticipation. He knew he could do what they were going to ask of him, but he couldn't think past that. Even when he tried, he was unable to imagine a single moment
after
their task was done. Was that only because he was frightened, or because once it was over it would
be
over for them, forever?

He was still acting as the Channel for this "weapon," but this time he would not be in the physical center of the group. This time the main participants—himself, Firesong, An'desha, and Sejanes—would stand in square formation around it, and it didn't seem to matter what direction each stood in, so long as they were spaced equally around it.

There was another difference this time. Each of the "mortal" participants would be shielded by those who were not. Karal had Florian and Altra; An'desha would be protected by the Avatars, Firesong by Need and Yfandes, and Sejanes by Vanyel and Stefen. Yfandes had attached herself to Firesong without comment, perhaps, so that each of the participants would have two protectors. Aya was to be kept strictly out of the way, in the care of Silverfox, with the rest of those who were not participating.
They
would all be in the workroom below, with the hatch closed. Firesong and Sejanes had determined that the shields on the workroom were as much purely physical as magical. There were properties in the stone that insulated from magical energy. The workroom had been cleared of anything remotely magical in nature, and stocked with tools, food, and water, so that if the worst happened and the survivors were sealed inside, they had a chance to dig themselves out.

The cube-maze was the exact opposite of whatever device was used to unleash the Cataclysm in the first place, and the Adepts had surmised that it had been created as a fail-safe. As they now understood it, all of Urtho's magic had been released at once when he dissipated the bonds of all of the spells on everything that was not inside the specially shielded areas of the Tower. At the same time, a similar device had done the same to all of Ma'ar's magic in his stronghold, thus creating the Cataclysm as the two reacted together in violent and sometimes unexpected ways. They had partly replicated that when they set up the Counter-Storm.

This time, if their research and planning paid off, they were going to reverse that; they were going to open up something that would swallow all of the magic energies converging on this spot and send it all out into the Void. At least, they hoped that was what would happen. They didn't know what was going to happen at the other original release point, but Ma'ar had not been the tinkerer that Urtho had been, and had not been known for having workshops to experiment in. There were probably not any of the dangerous devices there that there were here—and in any case, the site was at the bottom of Lake Evendim. Whatever happened there would take place under furlongs of water, and far from any populations of human or other beings.

No one knew what would follow when they closed the device as the last of the energies were swallowed up. They all had some theories. Master Levy insisted that since no energy could be destroyed, it would all go elsewhere; his suggestion was that it would become a kind of energy-pool in the Void that mages could all tap into. He also warned that resistance to energy flow usually manifested as heat, and there was a very real possibility that despite their best efforts all here would be charred to death partway through. This earned the mathematician a few sour looks, which were returned with an apologetic smile. Both Lo'isha and Firesong were of the opinion that all the energy would come right back into the "real" world, as if a flood was swallowed up and came back out of the sky as rain, like the water in a fountain, endlessly cycling from pond to air and back again.

Whatever happened, the only certainty was that all the old rules of magic would go flying right out the window. No one even knew if all of this energy was ever going to be accessible anymore. They might end up with a world that was fundamentally without magic, though that was fairly unlikely.

As Urtho had said in the placards that he had left, this would have been a suicidal device to use as a weapon; once it was opened, it would have proceeded to swallow all the magic in its vicinity—in fact, it was quite likely to drain all the rest of the weaponry in here dry—and it might even have swallowed up the mages who opened it. But with the tremendous energies of this Storm breaking over it, the device would probably have all the energy it could possibly handle.

The plan was to take down the Tower shields and open it as the Final Storm hit, feed it all the energy of the Storm until it couldn't take any more or melted down, and close it again under control if it was still active.

Storms were coming in all the time now, and although the Tower shields were still holding, they had been forced to evacuate the remains of the Shin'a'in camp some days ago as a blizzard like none of their hosts had ever seen before raged across the Plains. Similar weather ravaged Valdemar, Karse, Hardorn, the Vales—

Probably everywhere else, too
, Karal thought, listening carefully.
And it's supposed to be spring out there
. If he paid very close attention, he could ignore all the sounds coming from inside the Tower, and was able to pick out, very faintly, the howling of the winds outside. You couldn't even stand out there, the wind would knock you to the ground in a heartbeat. It was a good thing that they had evacuated the Plains weeks ago; tents wouldn't take this kind of pounding, and no horse, sheep, or mule would survive exposed to a storm like this.

As for the Vales—Firesong said that the Tayledras were incorporating the magic that shielded nodes with the one that formed the Veil that protected each of their Vales. Hopefully, these would hold; if not, they would have to live as the scouts did from now on, exposed to the elements, without their little lands of artificial summer.

Karal wished he knew what was going on in Karse; Altra would only say that Solaris had the situation well under control, and that most of the people were being well cared for. He hoped that his family was all right, though since they were living in a fairly prosperous village, they should be. The ones in real danger would be the remote farmers and shepherds who, isolated and alone out in the hills and mountains, might not have gotten warning in time to get to adequate shelter.

He hadn't thought about his family in a long time; the Karal that had helped his father in the inn's stables was another person entirely, and he knew that if his mother or father were to pass him in the street, they would not recognize him. And he would have nothing whatsoever in common with them. He had always expected to change as he grew up—but not this radically.