Storm Warning (40 page)

“It was a mage-storm, that much we are certain,” Gordun continued. “Although it is not like any such storm we have ever encountered before. The storm itself did not last for more than a heartbeat or two. Mages encountered a physical effect, as you no doubted noted yourself. Non-mages experienced nothing.”

“That was enough,” Tremane muttered. “It’s going to take days to set up all the spells it knocked down, and more time to inspect anything that survived for damage and repair it.”

“That isn’t all, my lord Duke.” The thin, reedy voice came from the oldest mage with Tremane’s entourage, his own mentor, Sejanes. The old man might look as if he was a senile old stick, but his mind was just as sharp as it had been decades ago. “This mage-storm has affected the material world as well as the world of magic. Listen—”

He picked up the pile of papers on the table before him, with hands that were as steady as a surgeon’s. “These are the reports I have from messengers I sent out on horses to the other mages in the army. The tidings they returned with were not reassuring. From Halloway: ‘There are places where rocks melted into puddles and resolidified in a heartbeat, sometimes trapping things in the newly-solid rock.’ From Gerrolt: ‘Strange and entirely new insects and even higher forms of life have appeared around the camp. I cannot say whether they were created on the instant, or come from elsewhere in the world.’ From Margan: ‘Roughly circular pieces of land two and three cubits in diameter appear to have been instantly transplanted from far and distant places. There are circles of desert, of forest, of swamp—even a bit of lake bottom, complete with mud, water-weeds, and gasping and dying fish.’ ” He waved the papers. “There are more such reports, from all up and down the lines, and from behind them as well. You are well beyond my needing to prompt you, Tremane, but this
cannot
have been an act of nature!”

“And it isn’t likely that it is residue from King Ancar’s reckless meddling, either,” Tremane agreed.

“I cannot see how,” Sejanes replied, dropping the papers again. “Ancar was not capable of magic on this scale. There is no mage capable of magic on this scale. I can only assume that it must have been caused by many mages, working together. Perhaps that would account for the variety and disparity of its effects.”

Tremane racked his memory for any accounts of
anything
like this “mage-storm,” and came up with nothing. Oh, there were mage-storms of course, but they all had purely physical effects, and were caused by too much unshielded use of magical energies.
Those
storms were real storms, weather systems, very powerful ones. This was not like any mage-storm
he
had ever seen, and yet the term was an apt one. It had struck like a storm, or a squall line; it had passed overhead, done its damage, and passed on.

And there was only one place this storm could have come from.

“There is only one place this storm could have originated from,” Sejanes said, echoing his own thoughts. “Despite the fact that it began east of us—well, any fool knows that the world is a ball! What better way to surprise us than by sending out an attack to circle the world and strike from behind?”

“You’re saying that Valdemar sent this against us,” Tremane replied slowly.

Sejanes shrugged. “Who else? Who else has access to strange allies from lands we never even heard of? Who else uses magics we don’t understand? Who else has reason to attack us from behind?”

“Who else indeed,” Tremane echoed. “They lose nothing by making life miserable for the Empire and the Imperial allies, and they could have warned their friends to erect special shields. Except that—according to all of you, Valdemar has the absolute minimum in the way of magic!”

He cast an accusatory glance around the table. Most of the mages cringed and averted their eyes, but Sejanes met him look for look.

“We still don’t know what those horses are,” Sejanes pointed out acidly. “And we don’t recognize their magics. So how could we tell what they had and didn’t have? We made our best guess based on the fact that they simply do not use magic in their everyday lives. There are no mage-lights or mage-fires; they have only candles, lanterns and torches, and physical fires. There are no Constructors; they build contrivances with no magic at all to haul water, grind grain. There are no Replicators; all documents are copied by hand, or printed with much labor. Messages are sent by those crude mirror-towers, or by human messenger. So what are we to think? That they have no magic, of course.”

“But if they have no magic in daily use,” Tremane pointed out, thinking out loud, “then they will not suffer from this attack as we have.”

Sejanes nodded, his head bobbing on his thin neck like a toy on a spring. “Precisely.
As if they used this kind of attack all the time.
As if they planned for this kind of attack to be used against them.”

It made sense. It more than made sense. If you expected someone to hurl fire at you, you built your fort of stone. If you expected catapults, you built the walls thickly. If you expected to be deluged with mage-caused thunderstorms, you built truly good drainage.

And if you expected to be attacked by something that twisted and ruined your spells, you didn’t
use
any. Unless, of course, it was the spell intended to twist and ruin all other spells.

“But where did this come from?” he asked, thinking aloud again.

Sejanes shrugged, and the rest of the mages only shook their heads. “It passed roughly east to west, and at a guess I would say that if it came from Valdemar as we think, it truly
did
circle the whole world to get here. That is logical, and in line with the notion that it originated in Valdemar. Frankly, if I had such an attack, I would use it that way, because it would be at its weakest when it finally got back to me. It was certainly strong enough to wreak havoc for us when it reached us!”

That made sense, too. “You’re saying you can’t find a point of origin, though,” he persisted. “If you could, we would know where their best mages were.”
And that useless artist could find out who they are. Then we could neutralize them.

“Not a chance,” Sejanes said flatly. “At the moment, we’re lucky to find the mages in the other camps, much less a point-of-origin for this thing. We are fundamentally disarmed at this point, and we’d better hope that neither the rebels nor the Valdemarans have anything planned for us, because we’re so disorganized that we’ll be lucky to hold the ground we’ve got.”

The others chimed in with more tales of woe; he had already heard from his military commanders by now, and he was simply glad that so many of them were used to working under primitive and uncertain conditions. They had found substitutes for the magics that weren’t working, but there was no substitute for the lack of communication. That was the worst.

Tremane was just grateful that he had called a halt to the attempt to advance
before
all this happened. If he had been in the midst of a military maneuver, it could have been a disaster.

Sejanes was the only one who really had anything useful to say, and what he had was all too meager. The rest simply floundered, out of their depth.

“I can only see one thing useful at this point,” Tremane said at last. “Repair the damages, and armor the repairs against a repeat of this attack. Communications, first. Then the Gates; if this goes on too much longer, we’ll be short of supplies in a week. Shield and reshield everything you do. Then check back with me; I’ll determine what is most important.”

Tremane finally dismissed his mages back to their work of repairing the damages after a little more exhortation, and slumped back into his chair, his temples throbbing. He hoped that he was the only one suffering from a headache, that it was caused more by stress than by the mage-storm; if all his mages were working under the burden of an aching head, they’d only be about half as effective as they were normally.

He rang for a page and called for strong wine. He seldom drank, but at this point he needed at least one cup of fortification.

He stared at the polished surface of the table and turned the cup around and around in his hands. One question was uppermost in his mind:
How did they do this?

It was not just that the attack was like nothing he had ever seen before. It was not only the sheer size and scope of the attack. It was the randomness of it all.

Insane. Absolutely insane. Not even Ancar had been crazed enough to have developed a spell like this one.

And the effects—what
possible
use was there in an attack that ripped up circles of land and planted them elsewhere? Were the Valdemarans simply hoping that there might be strategic targets inside those circles? Or were they just striking for the effect on mind and morale?

Was there a meaning behind it at all? Or was the chaos really the meaning? Was
this
representative of how Valdemarans thought? If so, they were more alien than the gryphons they courted!

If they can do this,
he thought to himself, sipping the bitter, dark wine, what else can they do?
Have I taken on even more than Charliss himself could handle? Or is this another of Charliss’ little tests?

That, too, was possible. Charliss and the Empire were in the east, and the storm had come from the east. The Emperor could be testing him under fire, to see how he handled such an attack.

It
still
could have been one of his enemies who had sent this; or more likely, several of his enemies working together.

As he reached the bottom of the glass, another thought occurred to him, one even more bitter than the wine, and more frightening than the mage-storm.

What if Charliss
wanted
to be rid of him? How better than to embroil him in a conflict he could not win?

Had he been set up to fail from the beginning? Tremane ground his teeth as he pursued that thought. He had been under the impression that he was the Emperor’s own choice for successor. Charliss could have been lying, or he could have changed his mind between now and when he had left. He could not ignore the possibility that Charliss now favored one of his enemies.

Could Charliss realistically get rid of him if he succeeded, against all odds and the Emperor’s own opposition?

Probably not.
A victory here would make him too popular to get rid of. Charliss would be forced to name him as his successor.
And once I am back in Court, at his side, I think I can repair any damage that was done while I was gone.

That left him with new problems, though.
I am going to have to assume that there will be interference with my orders and requisitions once the orders reach the Empire. Supplies will come in slowly, not at all, or not enough. Reinforcements may not come in time. So I will have to assume the worst and issue my orders well in advance, for more than I think I will need, once our communications are back.

And if communications could not be restored? That was another possibility.

Well, what had made them able to turn the tide against Ancar? What was enabling them to hold their own now?

If this
was
their doing, where had the magic come from?

He ran his finger around and around the rim of the empty goblet. The new allies—that was how Valdemar was holding her own. So find a way to make those alliances fall apart, and Valdemar would probably have enough trouble at home to prevent any more interference in the situation in Hardom.

He grimaced again, but this time with distaste. He used spies, he gathered unsavory information, but there was one aspect of this game of empire that he hated. Nevertheless, to buy himself time, he would use it, because he must win the game or die. It was not only his own life that lay in the balance of whether he won or lost, but the lives of all of those who had linked their fortunes with his. If he fell, his family and all their retainers fell as well.

He rang the bell that summoned one of his servants. There was one certain way to ensure that the tentative alliance of Valdemar, Karse, and Rethwellan melted away like snow in the summer, and that was to put one of his own agents into play. It was time for his Spymaster to go to work.

It was time for his Spymaster to make use of those little copies of that souvenir of Valdemar that had come into the Emperor’s possession.

“Send me Lord Velcher,” he said to the man when the servant arrived. “Tell him that I finally have need of his
particular
services.”

Karal sat quietly on his bed, his legs crossed beneath him, waiting. His eyes were closed and his breathing was steady.

Ulrich would have said he was “meditating,” of course; in fact, that was precisely what most of his teachers would say he was doing. Karal felt uncomfortable with that word. It implied that he was trying to touch the Sunlord in some way. It also implied a certain quality of “holiness” he felt equally uncomfortable with.