Storm Rising (11 page)

All this, obviously, meant that the Seneschal, the Lord Marshal, the heads of the three Circles, and any other Valdemaran official that normally sat on the Council often ended up attending double meetings when the Grand Council met. And any other Valdemaran functionary who wanted to look important (or actually felt he might be needed) helped to round out the field. This, of course, meant that every single meeting since the breakwater went up consisted of one person after another pontificating on how he and his special interests had been affected, what would probably happen next, and what
he
thought should be done about it. Typically, those with the most important and relevant information generally said the least.

There should be a way of cutting this nonsense out. It’s taking up time. Maybe a maximum word count, enforced by cudgel?

Karal really would have preferred to be off doing something constructive, even if all he was doing was making copies of energy-flow maps for the artifiers. At least that would be accomplishing more than just sitting here trying not to fall asleep, a job that grew more difficult as the time crawled by.

So far today, at least eight people had made long speeches that were only variations on “as far as my people can tell, this breakwater business is working and everything is back to normal,” and the one currently droning on was the ninth. He was the particular representative of dairy farmers—and
only
dairy farmers—and they had already heard from grain growers, shepherds, vegetable farmers, fruit growers, professional hunters, the fisher folk of Lake Evendim, and poultry farmers. Each of them had gone on at length about why
his
particular group had suffered more than any other from the mage-storms, though what this was supposed to accomplish, Karal didn’t know.

Why can’t the farming folk find one person to represent them all? And why can’t he be someone who’ll give us hard information instead of whining?

He cupped his hands a little tighter around his tea and resolved to find out where Firesong had gotten the footstool with the heated brick in it.

They can tell the people who sent them that their complaints and troubles are on record, I suppose
, he thought vaguely.
As if that makes any difference to this group. I suppose it must make people feel better to know that someone at least
knows
that they are having hard times
. It would have been much more useful for all these farmers and hunters and herders to have compared the damages this year with those of previous bad years—during the time when Ancar’s magic in Hardorn was causing ruinous weather all over, for instance. Then all the foreign envoys would know how things stood here in comparison to the way they
should
be, and could offer advice or even help-in-trade if it looked as if help really was needed. They could
all
compare notes on the damages across the region, and see if there were any differences. The plans being worked out by Master Levy’s artificers and the allied
mages were all based on information mainly gathered in Valdemar. They were all assuming that patterns in Valdemar were similar to patterns outside Valdemar. But what if they weren’t?

He’d tried suggesting that, but the people he’d suggested it to had said that gathering such information was going to take a great deal of time, and could he justify such an undertaking? He’d tried to point out why it would be useful, but no one seemed to find his arguments convincing.

Finally, the man stopped droning. It took Karal and the others a few moments to realize that he had actually ended his speech, rather than simply pausing for breath as he had so many times before.

Prince Daren nobly refrained from sighing with relief, as he consulted his agenda. Though still as handsome as a statue of a hero, the Prince was showing his age more and more lately; there were almost as many silver hairs among his gold as An’desha sported. The stress of the past several years was beginning to tell on both of Valdemar’s monarchs. There were strain lines around his eyes that matched the ones around the Queen’s. Like the Queen, since he was also a Herald, he wore a variation on the Herald’s Whites.

“Herald Captain Kerowyn, I believe you are next,” the Prince-Consort said, and although the gentlemen and ladies now seated about this square table were too well-trained to show relief in their expressions, people did begin sitting up a little straighter, and taking postures that showed renewed interest. Kerowyn at least was not going to stand there and drone about nothing; whatever she reported was going to be short, to the point, and relevant.

Kerowyn, who was the same age as Daren, nevertheless remained ageless. Her hair, which she always wore in a single long braid down her back, was already such a light color that it was impossible to tell which hairs were blonde and which were silver. And any new stress lines she had acquired would be hidden by the weathered and tanned state of her complexion, for Kerowyn was not one to sit behind a desk and
“command” from a distance. She had begun her military career as a mercenary scout in the field, and that was where she felt most at home. There was not a single pennyweight of extra flesh on that lean, hard body, and every Herald-trainee knew to his sorrow that she was in better physical shape than any of them. When she wasn’t drilling her own troops, she was drilling the Herald-trainees in weapons’ work, and heaven help the fool who thought that because she was a woman, she would be an easy opponent. She had been sporadically training Karal, and he knew at firsthand just how tough she was.

She stood up to immediate and respectful silence from everyone at the table, Valdemaran or not.

With one hand on her hip and the other holding a sheaf of papers, she cleared her throat carefully. “Well, I don’t need to go into the obvious. What we’re calling the breakwater is obviously working. The mages tell me that what’s happening is that rather than reflecting the waves of force as they come at us to somewhere else, this business they’ve set up is breaking them up and absorbing them to some extent. That’s good news for us, but Hardorn is still getting the full force of the waves.”

Chuckles met that, and she frowned. “As a strategist, I don’t think that’s particularly good for us, my friends. If the situation in there was bad before—and it was—it’s worse now. We may see the Imperial forces in Hardorn getting desperate, and desperate people are inclined to desperate acts. I might remind you that they may be blaming
us
for all these mage-storms. They’ve made one attempt to break up our Alliance. They may decide to act more directly.”

The pleased looks around the table evaporated. Even handicapped, the Imperial Army was vastly larger than anything the Alliance could put together, and everyone here knew it. The members of the alliance had been fighting the renegade King Ancar of Hardorn, separately and together, for years before the Eastern Empire came onto the scene, and their forces were at the lowest ebb they had ever been. The attrition rate had
been terrible on both sides, for Ancar had been perfectly willing to conscript anything and anyone and throw his conscripted troops into the front lines under magical coercions to fight. He had intended to take Valdemar and Karse, even if he had to do it over a pile of his own dead a furlong high. Ancar was gone now, but….

“Now, one way to make sure they don’t come after us is to take the fight to them,” Kerowyn continued matter-of-factly. “You know what they say about the best defense being a good offense. My people tell me that the Imperials pulled everything back and they’ve concentrated in one spot, around a little town called Shonar. Looks as if they are making a permanent garrison there. That makes them a nicely concentrated target. Their morale is bad, and it looks as if they’ve been cut off from resupply and communication with the Empire. They depend on magic; right now, they don’t have any. My best guess is that they’re doing their damnedest just to get dug in to survive the winter. The questions I have for all of you, are—do you think we should take advantage of that, and are you prepared to back a decision to go on the offensive when that means taking what troops we have right into Hardorn?”

Half of the people at the table began talking at once; the other half sat there with closed expressions, clearly thinking hard about what Kerowyn had just said. It was fairly typical that the people who had begun babbling were the ones who were the least important and the least knowledgeable so far as a decision like this one was concerned—representatives of farmers and herders, tradesmen and Guilds, priests and the like. The rest—the actual envoys, the Lord Marshal, the Seneschal—were the silent ones, and Karal was among them.

On the other hand, he was inclined to think—
why not?
Why
shouldn’t
we hit these people while they are in trouble? The Shin’a’ in envoy, Jarim shena Pretara’sedrin, began to speak as Karal was considering that.

“This is our chance,” he said fiercely. “Let a few bad winter storms take their toll, then let us strike
while they are freezing and starving! Let us wipe them from the face of the world! If we destroy this army now, the Empire will never again dare to send a force against us. Let us take our revenge, and let it be a thorough one!”

And for once, on the surface and at first impulse, Karal was inclined to agree with him.
They murdered Ulrich
, he thought angrily.
They murdered Ulrich and poor Querna, they injured Darkwind and Treyvan and others, and they didn’t even come at us as honest enemies! They sent an agent with vile little magic weapons to assassinate whoever happened to be in the way, with no warning and no provocation. Don’t they deserve to be squashed like bugs for that? Don’t they deserve to be treated the way they treated us—as insignificant and not even worth a fair fight? Doesn’t Ulrich’s blood cry out for revenge?

But it was that last thought that stopped him because
revenge
was the last thing Ulrich would have wanted. What was being proposed meant that vengeance was enacted, not upon the perpetrator, but upon people—soldiers—who had no idea what evil had been wrought here. Ulrich had once commanded demons—and gladly renounced that power when Solaris decreed it
anathema
. The demons were the next thing to mindless, and too often, like a hail of arrows loosed at random, they killed those who were innocent along with those who were guilty.

These soldiers, far from home and desperate, were not the real enemy. The real enemy was the one who had commanded those magical weapons, and the one who had sent the assassin. They had caught the original assassin, after all. What would be the point of going after anyone else now—unless, perhaps, they in their turn specifically targeted the commander of these forces, assuming he had been the one who had ordered the assassin to strike in the first place.

Others joined Jarim in calling for action, or opposed him, cautioning that it might be better to let the full force of winter take its toll before acting. But Karal sat and clasped cold fingers before him, wondering what
had happened that he was no longer able to see things involving humans as day or night, good or evil.

He knew when it had begun; something had changed when he entered the barrier at the border with Iftel, and it had continued to affect him in the days he had spent recovering from the experience. He had the feeling, always humming in the background like the blood in his veins, that he had been welcomed by something extraordinary. Karal lived in a time of wonder and strangeness, yet the feeling he had was not, at any time, that of being a spectator. He was a
part
of it all, an active player in whatever game the fates set the board for, and that feeling itself was beyond anything he’d prepared for.

I can’t help it; present me with a situation, and I have to think about both sides of it. I can try to suppress it, but I cannot shut off the way I think. Once knowledge is gained, there’s no going back to ignorance. I think about what the other feels. I can’t stop it, and I don’t think Vkandis Sunlord, Solaris, or Altra would want me to. Or Ulrich, far away in Vkandis’ arms
.

Ironically enough, it had been Ulrich himself who had planted the seeds of this change, back when he and his mentor had first crossed into Valdemar. Ulrich had asked a slow but steady progression of perfectly logical questions that had ultimately forced him to see his former enemies as people, and not as a faceless horde. Because of Ulrich’s patient coaching, he now knew, at the deepest level of pure reaction, that the impersonal and evil army of nameless demons that lay across the border of Karse was nothing of the sort. It was Heralds and Companions, farmers and townsfolk, soldiers of the Queen and ordinary citizens; people very like those he had known all his life.

Now he could no longer see an enemy impersonally. The great and mindless “they” were nothing more nor less than people, and he saw them that way. While the others spoke of wiping out the Imperial Army,
he
saw ordinary fighting men, suffering unseasonable cold and demoralizing doubt, wondering if they would ever see
home again. He even imagined faces, for the faces of fighters came to look much alike after a few seasons in the field: tired, unshaven, with lines of suppressed fear and dogged determination about the eyes and mouth.

“They” were just doing their jobs. They didn’t know anything about Valdemar. Conditions in Hardorn had been so dismal when they first crossed the border, they had been welcomed as liberators. Ancar had abused his people to the point that they were happy to see even a foreign invader, if that meant that Ancar would be deposed. Now the Imperials were probably wondering why the welcome they’d gotten had turned so sour. Things they had come to depend on were no longer working, and by now word must have filtered down that no one had any contact with their headquarters back home. Strange and misshapen beasts had attacked them, and they had seen a “weapon” at work that no one understood.

If any of them had the slightest notion that their superiors had assassins working in Valdemar, a few of them might even be horrified. Certainly, since the professional soldier generally had the deepest contempt for the covert operator, they probably would be a bit disgusted. But it was unlikely that any of them knew or even guessed what had happened in Valdemar’s Court, that one of their leaders had assassinated perfectly innocent people.