Storm Rising (4 page)

Once he had the wording worked out, he dipped his pen carefully in the special ink, and began tracing the glittering letters on the snow-white vellum.

The very act of writing with such ink on such a surface brought back more memories—of overseeing the Imperial scribes, of writing such documents himself during a brief stint as an Imperial scribe, when he had been brought to court by his father at the age of sixteen.

All the discipline drilled into him at that time came back, steadying his hand, and sending his breathing into the calming patterns that enabled the scribes to work, bent over their desks, in a state of meditative concentration for hours at a time. This did not, however, keep him from making mistakes.

An Imperial document would be flawless. There would be
no
mistakes, no blots, no misspelled words. He could not permit the tiniest discrepancy between this document and the genuine ones that would have been presented ever since the depot opened.

He made and destroyed half a dozen copies before he had a perfect one. As he waited for the ink to dry, he threw the rest, and his faint original of the wording, into the fire. He watched them burn, making sure that they were all reduced to ashes before turning back to the next and most difficult part of his forgeries.

Ordinary red sealing wax would become something extraordinary before he was through with it.

He lit the tip of the brittle, gold-dust impregnated wax at his candle and dripped it carefully onto the vellum, at the very base of the document. While it was still hot and viscous, he pressed the Seal into it, and mentally twisted the energies about the Seal and the wax together, activating it. The metal of the Seal grew warm in his hand, and the wax beneath it glowed, first white, then yellow, then the red of iron in a fire.

Carefully, he raised the Seal from the vellum as the glow faded.

Impressed into the wax was something that deceived the eyes, but not the touch. His fingers told him that the wax impression was a sketchy bas-relief, but his
eyes
told him quite a different story.

What he
saw
was the Wolf Crown, rising out of the wax of the seal as if made from that wax, scintillating with gold dust and a hint of rainbow. Was it an illusion? Not exactly. Nor was it exactly reality. It lay somewhere in between the two.

He laid the Seal back in the drawer and sat where he was, catching himself with both hands on the desk as he went momentarily giddy with exhaustion.

He had not expected that, and it took him completely by surprise. Was it the effect of the mage-storms, or only that he was much older, and under much more strain, than he had been the last time he’d used the Seal? There was no way to tell.

And it didn’t matter. If he was lucky, he would never have to use it again.

If I am wise, I will never use it again!

Nevertheless, luck and wisdom had very little to do with the traps Fate might hold for him. He put the Seal back into its hiding place, and put his forgery in with several other, perfectly genuine “contingency” documents that the Emperor had supplied him with when he traveled out here. No one knew exactly what documents he had, nor how many of them there were. When he took this one out of the stack, there would be no way that anyone could say that this one had not been among them originally.

He rested a while after that; no point in unlocking
the door directly; someone might sense that magic had been at work here, and he wanted to wait for those energies to fade. Besides, it gave him a badly-needed chance to rest.

Only when the last of those energies had dissipated past
his
ability to detect them did he rise, unlock the door, and tell his bodyguards to summon his escort.

While there was still daylight left, it was time to make one of his periodic rounds of inspection, and survey his small and desperate kingdom.

Tremane never walked out of his personal stronghold without an escort of half a dozen strong, superbly-trained bodyguards. Of course, at least one of these men was in the pay of the Emperor. He didn’t let it bother him, but rather set himself to winning, if not their complete loyalty, then at least a moment’s hesitation when the time came for them to raise the assassination knives.
That
was his best defense against Imperial agents among those he was required to trust.

As he had told his generals, the preliminary defensive wall, a wood-and-daub palisade, had just been completed a few days ago. This palisade contained not only the Imperial camp, but the entire town within its protection. The local populace was
quite
happy to have them here now, although they had not been too pleased to see them at first. A few attempted incursions by what creatures the mage-storms had left behind had shown them that they could not possibly defend themselves against these weirdling beasts, so bizarre and unpredictable.

The palisade had been easy enough to construct; dead trees had provided the framework, which was filled in with wickerwork and then covered with a particular mix of mud that hardened to a rocklike state when dried. The wall was about a hand’s breadth thick, and able to withstand a certain amount of punishment in the way of direct mass impact. It was enough to keep out “dumb” beasts, but Tremane was not about to take the chance that it would have to stand up to more than that. If conditions in the area outside the palisade
worsened, there could be mobs of people roaming the countryside, looking for loot, food, or shelter. Tremane was not about to risk the lives of his men against a mob when a well-made wall would take all the risk out of the situation.

Nor were unruly mobs the only possible danger. The war-monsters of ancient legend had been able to take down simple palisades—or go over them—and those war-monsters had been created by magic. With more magic loosed in the land, it was possible that chance could recreate something like them. While it was still possible to build before real winter struck, his men were building; building a
real
wall, one that was constructed of sturdier, and less flammable, materials.

Normally they would have erected a second palisade of wooden tree trunks behind the wicker-and-daub construction, but the sheer size of the camp and the fact that the town was part of the camp made that notion prohibitive. He did not want to denude the countryside of trees, which was what such a palisade would require.

However, there was an abundance of limestone and other materials for making cement, so that was precisely what his walls were being made with. In one huge shelter the men cast molded bricks of cement and put them aside to dry and cure. When they were ready, they were taken to the perimeter for the next step.

Two brick walls were under construction there, behind the “protection” of the wickerwork wall. Construction proceeded in stages, with a team of men devoted to each section of the new wall. When the two brick walls were much taller than the tallest man in the ranks, rubble and earth were packed down between them, and a brick “cap” built over the rubble filling.

It would take an organized force to get over that, but Tremane wasn’t done with his project even then. He planned for a curtain wall to be built on top of that, giving his men a protected walkway to use to patrol the perimeter, a protection only real siege engines could breech. Emotionally, he would have liked for the walls to be taller, but practicality told him that there
was no real need for them to be that tall. No mere beast, however twisted by magic, could possibly come over the single-story wall—and if anything else came at them, it would be the men and their weapons that kept it back, not a wall.

Still, he found the three-story wall around his confiscated manor very comforting, and he would have liked for that same comfort to be shared by his troops.

Four out of every five of the men were working on the walls, and even with the wretched weather they had been enduring, they were making good progress. There was certainly no shortage of hands for what would ordinarily have been a very labor-intensive job. He’d broken up the long stretch into a hundred sections so that each team of men could see real progress being made. It gave them heart, gave them a reasonable goal to reach.

He took a tour of the brickworks, then went out to where the men were laying a course of bricks. Those who were real masons supervised the trickier bits; the rest laid bricks and spread mortar, bending to the work as if they, too, realized they might be grateful for such protection before long.

But even if Tremane had not personally felt a need for this wall, he would have had the men out doing
something
constructive. The best way to keep them from getting into trouble was to keep them busy—too busy to make up rumors and spread them, too busy to think of anything other than the good, hot meal waiting for them at the end of the day, and the warm bed to follow that.

The duties varied, and the men were rotated out through all of them unless their skills were particularly needed on one specific job. Those not actually laying bricks or making them were cutting stone, building molds, crushing stone, carrying bricks, or mixing cement and mortar.

And when the wall was complete—which looked to be sooner than he had hoped, for the men worked with a will and a speed he had not expected—he would put them to building winter quarters as soon as the design
was determined. That could not come soon enough, and he hoped that somewhere among all of the books he had dragged with him on this journey there would
be
a design. Something that could concentrate and hold heat, something to take a winter a hundred times worse than any he had endured. He had to plan for the worst, then assume that his imagination was not up to the reality and add to his plans.

Perhaps—I wonder if I can’t build the kitchens onto the barracks, and use the waste heat from the ovens and stoves to heat the barracks….

The thin, gray light filtering through the clouds made everything look faded and washed out, as if all the life had been leeched out of the world. Although there was no wind, the air was chilly and damp, and he was glad of his uniform cape.

There was a certain nervousness in the way the men moved, nervousness that had nothing to do with the inspection. Perhaps rumors were spreading about the newest monstrous creatures showing up in the countryside. If that happened to be the case—the men could be even more eager to see the wall completed than their commander was!
I would not be unhappy if they acquired a sense of urgency on their own. Fear is a powerful motivator, and the more motivation they have, the faster the walls will go up.

He made a point of watching the men work at each section and complimenting the team leaders on their effort. At least the Hardornen rebels were no longer a factor. Where they had gone, Tremane had no firm answer, but he had some guesses and one of them was probably very close to being correct.

The rebels were, in the main, Hardornen farmers; the rest were young hotheads playing at being virtuous heroes. The former had crops to get in, and the latter were not numerous enough to make a head-on attack on a fortified town.

That was his optimistic guess. His pessimistic projection was far different, and he could not even begin to guess how probable it was.

There might be something out there that had eluded
his own patrols; something that was concentrating on the Hardornens, who were not as well armed or armored, and not as accustomed to fighting eldritch creatures as the Imperial forces were. The Imperials were ensconced in one place, behind a wall; the Hardornen rebels had been in concealed camps scattered everywhere. It would be much easier for a clever, powerful creature to take men in a series of scattered camps than to pry the Imperials out of their protections.

On one hand, even the pessimistic guess allowed for a certain relief. If mage-warped creatures were out there picking off the Hardornens, then neither the Hardornens nor the monsters were attacking
his
men. But if that
was
the case and it was not simply that now that the Imperials were bottled up in one place, soldiering farmers had gone back to their farms, then sooner or later Tremane and his men would have to deal with whatever it was that was giving the natives trouble.

He hoped the reason for their current state of “peace” was just the harvest and the coming winter. He truly did. One thing that his scholars
had
managed to unearth was a series of chronicles and fragmentary tales from something called the “Mage-Wars.” He did
not
want to have to face some of the creatures described in those faded pages. Even the names were ominous—makaar, cold-drakes, basilisks….

Perhaps some of those stories, which had thoroughly rattled his scholars, had leaked out to the men. That would account for the nervous haste—and yet the careful attention to detail—with which the wall was going up.

Try not to think of it for now. Wait until you have a chance to talk to those scholars. Perhaps there are physical defenses against those creatures suggested in the chronicles.

He only hoped that the defenses did not prove to be chimeras. Any defense that required more magic would be useless.

He completed his inspection and moved on to the troops on active patrol duty. There were always patrols
coming in and out through the newly-constructed east gate; in spite of the fact that the walls were not yet up, he wanted them to be in the habit of coming and going by that route.

He was just in time to see one of his speculations made flesh.

Shouting and excited cries at the gate in one of the completed portions of the wall drew everyone’s attention. Men ran toward the gates, where the shouting took on a tone of alarm; more men dropped their tools and ran to see what the matter was.

Tremane did not hasten his pace, however. The alarm trumpets had not sounded, so whatever it was that was causing the uproar, it was not an attack, and it would wait until he got there. The Commander did not,
must
not run, unless there was an attack in progress. No matter how he felt personally, he must maintain the dignity of his position, must show through his calm that he was in command of every situation. Panic, and even the appearance of panic, was contagious.