Storm Warning (47 page)

“I can understand,” An’desha replied, so softly that Master Tam had to lean forward to hear him. “I am happy to be of help.”

“Well, come over with us, then. Karal, I think Master Henlin wants your notes so he can have copies made; join us when he lets you go.” Master Tam took charge of An‘desha as if she were used to shepherding shy youngsters all the time. Perhaps she was; it occurred to Karal that many of her students might be just as shy and introspective as An’desha. Intelligent children generally got into trouble with their less intelligent peers; it had happened that way to him when he’d been taken by the Priests, after all.

He brought the notes to Master Henlin, who was in the Masters’ Room at the rear of the tavern, presiding over a sea of paper, hundreds of sheets of it, covered with figures and diagrams. Then, relieved of his burden, he hurried back out to see if An’desha was still holding up well under the scrutiny of so many strangers.

He was; in fact, he was deep in a discussion of where magic energy came from.

“—so some mage-schools have built up reserves, like a cistern or reservoir, and that is what their Master mages can tap into when they need it,” he was saying. “It all comes from the same source, though—the energy of life that is all around us. All of us living creatures shed it as we breathe and move.”

“And what about the Adepts you mentioned?” Natoli asked. “Do they use something special? Or are there other reserves only they can use?”

“There are,” the young Adept replied, nodding. “But they are not the reserves that have been built up by other mages. Rather, they are the reserves that exist where two or more natural lines of force meet. These are called ‘nodes,’ and they are so powerful that only an Adept can control the energy that pools in them. Anyone else trying would either be unable to touch the power, or would be engulfed by it and devoured. Charred.”

One of the boys shivered. “Not a pleasant prospect.” “No,” An’desha replied soberly. “It is not. But you see, now, that this all
does
respond to natural laws. The power comes from somewhere, and goes elsewhere, like water flowing to the sea. Where it goes eventually, is to a place we call the Nether Planes, where everything is made of chaos and energy. And I suspect that it comes back into our World Plane from there, through the medium of living things.”

“Time to speculate about that when we have the leisure,” Master Levy interjected, spreading a map out on the table in front of An’desha. “We’ve been over every thumblength of ground a half day’s ride from Haven, and this is what we’ve found so far. Transplanted areas are in green, blasted areas are in red, transformed areas are in yellow.”

An’desha bent over the map to study it; Karal whispered to Natoli.

“Transformed areas?” he asked. “What are those?” “Places where whatever was there was changed,” she whispered back. “Everything in them is the same as it was, but inside those circles, it’s another season. We’re in late summer right now; there, it’s fall, winter, or even spring. Plants that should be in fruit are blooming, or dormant, insects are dead or in cocoons or eggs, and birds or animals are in winter or courting colors.”

He blinked at her in surprise; she only grimaced. “Don’t ask me, I have no notion what could have caused something like that,” she told him.

He turned his attention back to the map, thankful that there were fewer red dots than green or yellow. There definitely was a pattern there; the dots were spaced out at equal intervals, and if you followed a line of them, they would sequence as three greens, a red, and three greens and a yellow. But there didn’t seem to be a center to the pattern, or a point of origin.

“I wonder—” An’desha began, then stopped.

“Go ahead,” Master Tam urged. “You know magic, and we don’t. If you can suggest some kind of meaning or interpretation, I for one would be happy to hear it.”

“Well—I wonder if what has happened is that with the transformed and blasted places, there was
too much
energy brought to bear, and that is why the damage?” Then he shrugged. “I am grasping at straws.”

“That’s no more than we’ve been doing,” Master Levy confessed to him. “Let’s follow that theory for a moment.”

Karal couldn’t understand more than half of what either of them said, but they seemed to understand each other, and that was the important part. Since An‘desha didn’t seem nearly as shy of these people as he had when he’d first walked into the room, and since Natoli was immersed in the discussion and ignoring everything else, Karal finally left them and assigned himself to one of the desks where others his age were making copies of the same chart that Master Tam had unrolled in front of An’desha.

I can make a copy of this to take back with me; that will save these others from having to make a spare.
He helped himself to pens, ink, and paper, and when he had finished that task, he began making copies of his own notes for the other Masters, just as the rest were doing.

When his tired eyes threatened to unfocus completely, he finished one last page, and rolled up his map and the pages of descriptions of the “magic circles,” and went to find An’desha.

Despite the latter’s promises to Firesong, An’desha
had
been giving demonstrations of mage-craft to the engineers, and he was tired and ready to go back to the Palace. When Natoli declared her intention to defect as well, the whole group broke up, yawning.

“I’ll walk back to the Palace with you,” she said, as Karal handed An’desha back his cloak. “I’ve got a room in the wing where they put some Blues who don’t have patrons or aren’t highborn, and who also don’t live in town. We share it with the Healer- and Bardic-trainees.”

“I’d wondered,” Karal admitted, slinging his cloak around his shoulders, as Natoli found hers in the pile of student Blues. “You kept popping up in the Palace and you acted as if you belong there.”

“In a sense, it’s the only home I have,” Natoli admitted. “Father was Chosen after my mother died of complications of childbirth. No, it wasn’t me,” she added hastily. “It was a still-birth, and I was about four. He brought me with him to the Collegium since he hadn’t any place else to take me, and I’ve spent all of my life here. When he went out on circuit, one or another of the Heralds would take care of me until he got back.”

Well, it wasn’t the worst sort of childhood, though it was nothing like the warm family situation Karal had enjoyed.

“It sounds lonely,” An’desha said ingenuously as Karal opened the door and held it for the two of them.

Natoli only shrugged as she stepped out into the dark street. “Mostly, it was odd. When Father was here, he made sure I knew he wanted me there, and that he cared about me. For lack of anything else to do, once I got old enough, I took most courses in all the Collegia except the ones in Bardic that had to do with performing and composing, and the ones in Healer’s that had to do with really
Healing
someone. Then one day I realized what I wanted to do; I went to Master Tam and asked to be taken on, and she asked
me
why I had taken so long to figure out what I was good at.”

“She would,” Karal said dryly. “I have the impression that Master Tam would never take an indirect route when there was a direct one available.” Other students drifted along behind them, talking quietly to one another, voices murmuring across the otherwise silent street.

“She does tend to bludgeon things,” Natoli replied, but smiled. “Father was just pleased that I’d found my avocation; he granted his leave, and I’ve been studying with Master Tam ever since.”

“At least you had some choice in the matter,” Karal replied, with some envy. “I was quite literally kidnapped by the Priests.” He went on to describe his own childhood, while An’desha and Natoli both listened with interest.

“Odd that of the three of us, I am the one who had the most normal childhood,” An’desha mused. “How very strange.”

“Well, you made up for it.” Karal slapped him lightly on the back. “Never mind; I’ve figured out that anyone who is more intelligent than the people around him has troubles as a child. The important thing is not to dwell on those troubles and make them into
all
you are. You should do what you can with what parts of your life you have personal control over!”

“That makes good sense,” Natoli applauded, and changed the subject. “I wonder what late night food we can gain personal control over?”

 

Several days passed, with Karal serving double duty: to the mages and with the engineers. As the days went by, the engineers collected more and more information and added it all to their charts, tables, and maps. Florian passed on a great deal more of what Master Tam referred to as “data” from other Companions out in the field with their Heralds—all of it was pertinent, and most of it was much more accurate than the information coming from humans. After the third day of this, Karal paused in the midst of his copying, struck by the fear that all this might not be the sort of thing Vkandis would approve of his acolyte doing. After all, he hadn’t seen Altra in days. Was the Sunlord annoyed with him?

At that very moment, Altra wandered through the room, tail waving like a banner in a light breeze.

Karal froze, and not just because Altra had appeared the moment Karal thought of him, but because it was here, in the middle of a crowd of—well—unbelievers. What were
they
going to think? Altra wasn’t exactly inconspicuous !

But the others did nothing unusual. The other students and teachers
saw
him—they avoided trampling him when he was in their path—but they didn’t seem to see anything odd about him. He jumped up onto one or two tables and surveyed the figuring and charting going on with aloof interest, and none of them stared at him. He might very well have been a perfectly ordinary tavern cat.

Considering that he was four or five times larger than any domestic housecat that Karal had ever seen, that was certainly strange!

But Altra eventually made his way to the back of the room where Karal sat staring at him, and gave Karal an approving wink.

:They see only what they are expecting to see,:
the Firecat said cryptically.
:I have more information for you. The same patterns are in Karse and southward. Tell the others. You’ll get the maps and so forth that Solaris has sent you in a few days.:

And with that, Altra strolled underneath a table, and did not come out on the other side. Karal sat there with his pen still in his fingers for a long time.

Well
—
at least he approves,
Karal thought, dazedly. That was, after all, one less worry.

But given his current luck, with every worry that he lost, four more rose to take its place.

 

A day later—and the half-expected second wave swamped them. It came exactly one day short of a fortnight, and at very nearly the same time of day as the first one.

This time the areas of disturbance were not as obvious until a few days had passed, and someone noticed that there were places where plants and insects had—changed. They weren’t dead, but they certainly weren’t the same anymore. The plants in particular had undergone a transformation that made them act like primitive animals. They reacted to the presence of other living creatures, some by shrinking away, but others by reaching toward whatever was near them. Some of the plants were observed trapping and presumably eating insects; others were growing strange new forms of defense; thorns and spikes, saps that had a terrible stench or were outright poisonous. And two days after the storm passed over, when a farmer found his child in a patch of the changed plants, crying hysterically, with hundreds of tiny thorns in her flesh that she swore the plants had flung at her, Selenay ordered that samples be sent to the Palace and the parent plants be destroyed wherever they were found.

The mages studied the changed plants without learning much—except that Firesong noted a definite resemblance to some of the dangerous “thinking plants” in the Uncleansed Lands of what Valdemarans called the Pelagir Hills.

One day short of a fortnight later, the third storm-wave arrived.

 

If this keeps up for much longer, I’d better think about growing gills.
Karal trudged through yet another nighttime thunderstorm, his cloak already soaked, heading for the Compass Rose. But this time, he felt a little more cheerful than at any time before.

According to Firesong, this last wave was just a trifle weaker than the previous two. This time virtually no shields had gone down before the onslaught, and although even non-mages had experienced the disorienting effects of the wave, Firesong was positive that this mage-storm hadn’t lasted as long as the previous two had. No one had reported in from the area outside Haven yet, but the mages were guardedly optimistic that the worst was over.

Such good news was more than compensation enough for a long slog through a driving rain, at least to Karal’s mind. He couldn’t wait until the others heard!

He opened the door of the tavern and stepped through into warmth and light, only to find virtually everyone clustered around a single table. They were ominously quiet, and when they all turned to see who had entered, there was not a single cheerful expression among them.

“I’ve got good news!” he said into the oppressive silence. “Firesong says this last storm was weaker!”

Their expressions did not change, and he felt his own spirits dropping. “It was weaker, wasn’t it?” he faltered. “Firesong said so. We didn’t lose any shields this time—”

Master Levy shook his head slowly. “I’m afraid your Firesong is mistaken,” he replied. “Not only was it not weaker, it was actually a little stronger than before. The reason nothing magical was affected was because you’ve managed to build up good enough shields to protect everything magical that you still retain—and you’ve pared the number of magical things you need to protect that way to the absolute minimum. Come over here and look at this.”