Storm Warning (39 page)

And once again, if the perpetrator was some shiftless ne’er-do-well, who did not have a position, he would find himself in a labor camp, building the roads and the aqueducts, with his pay supplying the needs of the child for which he was responsible. And that responsibility was brought home to him with every stone he set or ditch he dug.

And if a perpetrator were foolish enough to rape
again—then
he underwent a series of punishments both physical and magical that would leave him outwardly intact but completely unable to repeat his act.

Tremane brooded as lightning flashed outside the window.
Compared to life under Ancar, all this should have been paradisiacal. So why the revolt and resistance now?

Perhaps Ancar had not been allowed to operate freely long enough.
There may still be enough people alive who recall the halcyon days of his father’s rule. They may be the ones behind the resistance.

He grimaced.
Too bad they didn’t have the good taste to die with Ancar’s father and spare the Empire all this work!

He would have to revise his plans to include that possibility, though. Somehow, he was going to have to find a way to counter their influence.

But what about Valdemar? The more he looked at it, the more certain he became that
they
were as much behind the resistance as these putative hangovers from an earlier time. But what could he do about them, when he knew next to nothing about them?

Then he gave himself a purely mental shake.
Stupid. I may know nothing now, and it may be very difficult to get current information out, but I have other sources of information.
He was a great believer in history; he had always felt that knowing what someone had done in the past, whether that “someone” was a nation or an individual, made it possible to predict what that someone might do in the future.

There was one rather odd and disquieting thing, however, that might concern the land of Valdemar. In all of the histories of the Empire, from the time of the first Emperor and before, the West was painted as a place of ill-omen. “There is a danger in the West,” ran the warning, without any particular danger specified.

That was one reason why the Empire had concentrated its efforts on its eastern borders, taking the boundary of the Empire all the way to the Salten Sea. Then they had expanded northward until they reached lands so cold they were not worth bothering with, then south until they were stopped by another stable Empire that predated even the Iron Throne. Only
then,
in Charliss’ reign, had the Emperor turned his eyes westward and begun his campaign to weaken Hardorn from within.

Tremane turned away from the window and walked back into his study in silence. The light from his magelamp on the desk was steady and clear, quite enough to give the feeling that no storm would ever penetrate these stone walls to disturb him.
Odd how comforted we humans are by so simple a thing as a light.

There was an initial report on Valdemar from his tame scholars, hardly more than a page or two, lying in the middle of the dark wooden expanse of his desk. He picked it up without sitting down and scanned it over. He didn’t really need to—he’d read the report several times already—but it gave him the feeling that he was actually doing something to pick it up and read the words.

The gist of it was that some centuries ago, a minor Baron of a conquered land within the Empire named “Valdemar” reacted to the abuses of power by
his
Imperial overlord in a rather drastic fashion. Rather than bringing his complaints to the Emperor, he had assembled all of his followers in the dead of winter when communications were well-nigh impossible, and instructed them to pack up everything they wanted to hold onto. Valdemar was a mage, and so was his wife; between them, they managed to find and silence all the spies in their own Court. Then Valdemar, his underlings, their servants and retainers right down to the last peasant child, all fled with everything they could carry. At last report, they had gone into the west, the dangerous west. Valdemar had probably known that the Empire would be reluctant to pursue them in that direction.
Presumably his quest for some land remote enough that he need no longer worry about the Empire finding him bore fruit.
The coincidence of names seemed far too much to be anything else, and according to the scholars, this present “Kingdom of Valdemar” bore the stamp of that original Baron Valdemar’s overly-idealistic worldview.

That was all simple enough, and it could account for the animosity of the current leaders of Valdemar toward the Empire of which they
should
know very little. If they, in their turn, had a tradition of “fear the Empire,” they would react with hostility to the first appearance of Imperial troops anywhere near their borders.

That much was predictable. What was not predictable was the shape that Baron Valdemar’s idealism had taken.
Where in the names of the forty little gods did this cult of

white-clad riders come from?
There was nothing like them inside the Empire or outside of it! And what
were
their horses? His mages all swore to a man that they were something more than mere horseflesh, but they could not tell him what they were, only what they
weren’t.
How powerful were the beasts? No one could tell him. What was their function? No one could tell him that, either. There was nothing really written down, only some legend that they were a gift of some unspecified gods. Were they “familiars,” as some hedge-wizards used? Were they conjured up out of the Etherial Plane? No one could tell him. Nor had the agent unearthed anything; the riders themselves, when asked directly, would only smile and say that this was something only another rider would understand.

That was hardly helpful.

I never liked the idea of employing an artist as an agent,
he thought with distaste.
When they aren’t unreliable, they’re ineffectual
.

Not that he’d had any choice; the agent was an inheritance from his predecessor, and there hadn’t been time or opportunity to get another in place.

White riders and horses were bad enough, but worse had somehow occurred before Ancar took himself out in some kind of insane battle with an unknown mage or mages.

Valdemar had somehow managed to patch up a conflict going back generations with their traditional enemy, Karse. And
how
they had managed to make an ally of that stiff-necked, parochial bitch Solaris was completely beyond him! He wouldn’t have thought the so-called Son of the Sun would ally herself with anyone, much less with an ages-old enemy!

And
where
had all the rest of Valdemar’s bizarre allies come from? He would hardly have credited descriptions, if he had not seen the sketches! Shin’a’in he had heard of, as a vague legend, but what were Hawkbrothers? And who could believe in talking gryphons? Gryphons were creatures straight out of legend, and that is where they
should,
in a rational world, have remained!

His agent’s report credited most of this to Elspeth, the former Heir. Former? When had a ruler-to-be ever lost his position without also losing his life or freedom? Yet Elspeth had abdicated, continuing to work in a subsidiary capacity within the ranks of the white Riders, the Heralds. Elspeth was too
young
to have made alliances with so many disparate peoples! She’d have no experience in diplomacy and very little in governance. In the end he’d simply dismissed the agent’s report as a fanciful tale, doubtless spread about to make the former Heir seem more important and more intelligent than she really was.

He wished he could dismiss the gryphons as more fanciful creations, but there were others who had seen them as well as the agent. The gryphons worried him. They represented a complete unknown; in an equation already overcomplicated, they were a dangerous variable. Were there more of them? A whole army, perhaps? The idea of flying scouts and spies working for the Valdemarans was not one that made him any happier.

He groaned softly and flung himself down in a chair. Useless to ask “why me?” since he knew why all this was happening to him.
I want the Iron Throne. An Emperor must be able to deal with situations like this. If I want the Throne, I must prove to Charliss that I am competent.

Of course, now that he had begun, it was impossible to bow out of this gracefully.

His nearest rival was also his nearest enemy, and if he failed here, or even gave it up and admitted defeat and resigned his position, his lifespan could and would be measured in months or years rather than decades. He
would
be dead, as soon as Charliss gave up the Throne. No new Emperor permitted former rivals to continue existing; the first few years on the Iron Throne were generally nervous ones, and it didn’t make any sense to leave potential troublemakers in a position to make the situation worse.

No, now he must carry this through, or else flee—into the south, into the west, into those barbarian lands beyond even Valdemar, and hope to cover his tracks well enough that no agent of the Empire could find him.

I walk a tightrope above the vent of a volcano,
he thought grimly.
And there is someone shaking the tightrope, trying to make me fall.

Shaking? That was odd.... For a moment it felt as if something had just picked up the building and dropped it; the unsettled feeling in the pit of the stomach an earthquake caused. But there was no earthquake, and this was no physical feeling; this was centered in the magesenses—

—as if something strange, terrifying, and
huge
was looming over him—

Before he could move from his chair, it struck.

All his senses failed; sight, sound, hearing, all gone. He floated in an ocean of nothingness, bereft of any touch with the real world. Mage-energy coursed through him, without truly touching him. Once, as a child, he had gone to the Salten Sea on a holiday. A great wave had come in and picked him up, nearly drowning him, carrying him up onto the shore and leaving him gasping on the sand. This was another kind of wave, but he was just as helpless in its powerful grasp, and now, as then, he did not know if it would leave him alive or drag him under to drown. It tumbled him in dizzying nothingness, disorienting him further. He was lost....

He thought he cried out in terror, but he couldn’t even hear his own voice.

Then it was over. He
felt
the chair he was in again, heard his own harsh gasps for breath as the breath burned in his throat. His body shuddered with the pounding of his heart, and his hands ached as they spasmed on the arms of his chair. For a moment, he thought he was blind, but lightning struck just outside and illuminated the room for a moment, and he realized that the mage-light had simply gone out.

Simply? It was not
that
simple; the kind of mage-light he had created was supposed to endure anything save having the spell canceled!

He blinked. There was light in the next room, dim red light from the fire. He unclenched his hands with a rush of relief; at least he wasn’t left in the dark! Odd. All his life he’d had mage-lights about him; even in a room darkened for sleep there was leakage from lights in the garden, lights in the hallway or the next room. He’d never realized how
dark
a truly dark room could be.

With shaking hands, he felt in a drawer of the table next to him, found a candle, and took it into the next room to light it at the fire there. Some enemy had sent a magical attack at him, surely! Magical assassins had been blocked by the protections he kept constantly in place—or was this meant simply to disrupt his concentration? This attack, if attack it was, certainly hadn’t been very effective! And yet—to cancel a mage-light spell
within
his protections meant that someone had incredible power. He controlled the trembling of his hands and forced himself to think of who might command that kind of power.

That was all he had time for; aides burst in on him, sent by every commander in the camp, all of them carrying messages of varying levels of hysteria.

That was when he realized that the effect of the—whatever it was—had not been targeted solely against him.

 

Somehow he managed to assemble all of his mages within a reasonable time the next day, gathering them all into his councilroom to assess the damage. “So it swept the entire country?” Tremane asked his chief mage, Artificer Gordun. The homely, square-faced man nodded, as he laced his thick, clever fingers together.

“As nearly as we can tell,” Gordun replied. “It was like one of those enormous waves that carries right across the Salten Sea; it came from the east and north, and is traveling into the west and south. We think it also washed over the Empire, but just at the moment, it is impossible to tell. We can’t get messages to the Empire, and I would suspect that the reverse is true.”

Tremane grimaced. Like those great waves, this thing that had come and gone had left devastation behind it, and the more something was connected to magic, the worse the effect was., Every spell suffered damage to a greater or lesser extent. Lines of communication were all gone until the mages found each other again; the Portals were all down, and only the forty little gods knew when they would be reopened. Defenses were gone, or shaken. Little things, like mage-lights, magical cook-fires, weather-cloaks, timekeepers, all the tiny things that made life run smoothly for the troops, were gone, the spells that created them shattered. There would be dark, cold tents and cold meals all up and down the lines tonight, unless the various commanders quickly found nonmagical substitutes.