Storm Rising (2 page)

Yes, the one question none of us will ask. What if the mage-storm changes not only beasts, but men?

He smiled a little, and his officers relaxed. “Now, as it happens, this is actually working in our favor. My operatives in unsecured areas tell me that the Hardornens are just as demoralized as our men. Perhaps more so; they are little used to seeing the effects of magic close at hand. And certainly they are not prepared for these misshapen monsters that spring up as a result of the storms. So, on the whole, they have a great deal more to worry about than we do—and that can only be good news for us.”

In point of fact, active resistance had evaporated; it had begun to fade even before the last mage-storm had struck. He watched his officers as they calculated for themselves how long it had been since a serious attack had come from the Hardornen “freedom fighters” and relaxed minutely as he saw
them
relaxing.

“Now—that is the situation as it stands,” he concluded, with relief that his speech was over. “Have any of you anything to add?”

Gordun stood. “Following your orders, Your Grace, we are concentrating all our efforts on getting a single Portal up and functioning. It will not remain functional after the next storm, but we believe we can have it for you within a few days, with all of us concentrating on that single task.”

May the Thousand Little Gods help us. Gordun by himself could have created and held a Portal before these damned storms started. Will we find ourselves wearing skins and chipping flint arrowheads next?

He nodded, noting the faintly surprised and speculative
looks his officers were trading. Did any of them have an inkling of what he was about?

Probably not. On the other hand, that is probably just as well.

Finally, at long last, it was the scholar’s turn; he did not even recognize the timid man urged to his feet by the sharp whispers of his fellows, which argued for more bad news.

“W-we regret, Y-your G-grace,” the fellow stammered nervously, “there is n-nothing in any r-records to g-give us a hint of a s-solution to the s-storms. W-we l-looked for hidden c-ciphers or other k-keys as you asked, and there was n-nothing of the s-sort.”

He didn’t so much sit down as collapse into his seat. Tremane sighed ostentatiously, but he did not rebuke the poor fellow in any way. Even if he’d been tempted to—the man couldn’t help it if there was nothing to find in the records, after all—he was afraid the poor man would faint dead away if the Grand Duke even looked at him with faint disapproval.

These scholars are hardly a robust lot. Or perhaps it is just that they are neither fish nor fowl—neither ranked with the mages nor bound to the army, and thus have the protections of neither.

Odd. That wasn’t anything he would have taken much thought for, in the past. Perhaps because he knew they were on their own, he was taking no man for granted, not even a scholar with weak eyes and weaker muscles.

“Gentlemen,” he said, even as those thoughts were running through his head, “now you know the worst. Winter is approaching, and much more swiftly than any of us thought possible.” As if to underscore his words, the shutters that had been rattling were hit by a sudden fierce gust that sounded as if they’d been struck by a missile flung from a catapult. “I need your help in planning how we are to meet it when it comes. We need shelter for the men, walls to protect us, not only from the Hardornens, but from whatever the mage-storms may conjure up. We cannot rely on magic—only what our resources, skills, and strength can
provide.” He cast his eyes over all of them, looking for expressions that seemed out of place, but found nothing immediately obvious. “Your orders are as follows; the engineering corps are to create a plan for a defensive wall that can be constructed in the shortest possible time using army labor and local materials. The rest of you are to inventory the civilian skills of your men and pool those men whose skills can provide us shelter suitable for the worst winter you can imagine. Do not neglect the sanitation in this; we are going to need
permanent
facilities now, something suitable for a long stay, not just latrine trenches. Besides shelter, we will need some way to warm that shelter and to cook food—if we begin cutting trees for the usual fires, we’ll have the forest down to stumps before the winter is half over.” Was that enough for them to do? Probably, for now. “You scholars, search for efficient existing shelters, ones that hold heat well, and some fuel source beside wood. If you find anything that looks practical, bring it to my attention. Mages, you have your assignment. Gentlemen, you are dismissed for now.”

The men had to wait to file out of the great double doors at the end of the hall, suffering the cold blasts penetrating the hall as one of the shutters broke loose and slapped against the wall. The Grand Duke was not so bound; his escape was right behind the dais, in the form of a smaller door at which his bodyguard waited, and he took it, grateful to be out of that place. The short half-cape did nothing to keep a man warm; he wanted a fire and a hot drink, in that order.

The guard fell in silently behind him as he headed for his own quarters, his thoughts preoccupied with all the things he had not—yet—told his men.

The mages probably guessed part of it. They were not simply cut off, they had been
abandoned
, left to fend for themselves, like unwanted dogs.

The Emperor, with all the power of all the most powerful mages in the world at his disposal, could (if he was truly determined) overcome the disruptions caused by the mage-storms to send
some
kind of message.
Tremane had never heard of a commander being left so in the dark before; certainly it was the first time in his own life that
he
had no clue what Charliss wanted or did not want of him.

There could be several causes for this silence.

The most innocent was also, in some ways, the most ominous. It was entirely possible that the mage-storms wreaking such havoc here could be having an even worse effect within the Empire itself. The Empire had literally been built on magic; distribution of food depended upon it, and communications, and a hundred more of the things that underpinned and upheld the structure of the Empire itself. If that was the case—

They’re in a worse panic than we are here. Civilians have no discipline; as things break down, they’ll panic.
He was enough of a student of history himself to have some inkling what panicking civilians could do.
Rioting, mass fighting, hysteria … in a city, with all those folk packed in together, there would be nothing for it but to declare martial law. Even then, that wouldn’t stop the fear or the panic. It would be like putting a cork on a bottle of wine that was still fermenting; sooner or later, something would explode.

Tremane reached the warm solitude of his personal suite, waving to the bodyguard to remain outside. That was no hardship; the corridors provided more shelter from the cold drafts than half of the rooms did. Fortunately,
his
suite was tightly sealed and altogether cozy. He closed the door to his office with a sigh. No drafts here—he could remove his short winter cloak and finally, in the privacy of his quarters, warm numb fingers and frozen toes at a fire.

The second possibility that had occurred to him was basically a variation on what he, himself, had just ordered. The Emperor
could
have decreed that literally everything was to be secondary to finding a way for the mages to protect the Empire from these storms. There would be no mages free to try and reopen communications with this lost segment of the army. The Empire itself might be protected, but that might very well be all the mages could manage.

But the Empire would hardly spend such precious resources as Imperial mages on the protection of client-states. No, only the core of the Empire, those parts of it that were so firmly within the borders that only scholars recalled what names they had originally borne, would be given such protection.

Which means
, he mused, feeling oddly detached from the entire scenario,
that the client states are probably rearming and revolting against Charliss. If the Empire itself is under martial law, all available units of the army have been pulled back into the Empire to enforce it. They won’t be spending much time worrying about us.

No, one segment of the Imperial Army, posted off beyond the borders of the farthest-flung Imperial Duchy, was not going to warrant any attention under conditions that drastic.

But no one born and raised in the Imperial Courts was ever going to stop with consideration of the most innocent explanations. Not when paranoia was a survival trait, and innocence its own punishment.

So, let us consider the most paranoid of scenarios. The one in which our enemy is the one person who might be assumed to be our benefactor.
It was entirely possible that these mage-storms were nothing new to Emperor Charliss. He could have known all along that they were going to strike, and where, and when. In fact, it was possible that these storms were a weapon that Charliss was testing
on them.

Tremane grew cold with a chill that the fire did nothing to warm.

This could be a new terror-weapon
, he thought, following the idea to its logical conclusion, as his muscles grew stiff with suppressed tension.
What better weapon than one that disrupts your enemy’s ability to work magic, and leaves land and people beaten down but relatively intact?

There was even a “positive” slant to that notion. Perhaps this was a new Imperial weapon that was
meant
only to act as an aid to them in their far-distant
fight, and it simply had a wider field of effect than anyone ever imagined.

But far more likely was the idea that, since no one knew precisely what the weapon was going to do, it was tested out here, in territory not yet pacified, so that any effect on Imperial holdings would be minimal. Tremane and his men were nothing more than convenient methods by which the effectiveness of the weapon could be judged—

Which would mean that they are watching us, scrying us, seeing how we react and what we do, and whether or not the locals have the wit to do the same.
This lack of communication was a deliberate attempt to get them to react without orders, just to see what they would do.

If
this happened to be the true case, it ran counter to every law and custom that made the Army the loyal weapon that it was. It would be a violation of everything that Imperial soldiers had a right to expect from their Emperor.

For that matter, being left to fend for themselves was almost as drastic a violation of that credo.

In either case, however, this would
not
be above what could be done to test a candidate for the Iron Throne. Other would-be heirs had been put through similar hardships before.

But not
, his conscience whispered,
their men with them.

That
was what made him angry. He did not mind so much for himself; he had expected to be tested to the breaking point. It was that the Emperor had included his unwitting men in the testing.

There was no denying that, for whatever reason, Charliss had abandoned them. There had been time and more than time enough for him to have sent them orders via a physical messenger. This silence was
wrong
, and it meant that there was something more going on than appeared on the surface. It was the Emperor’s sworn duty to see to the welfare of his soldiers in times of crisis, as it was their sworn duty to protect him from
his enemies. They had kept their side of the bargain; he had reneged on his.

It would not be long before the rest of the army knew it, too. In a situation like this, they all were aware they should have been recalled long ago. Since there was no way that a Portal could be brought up that was large enough to bring them all home, Charliss should have sent in more troops to provide a corridor of safety so that they could
march
home. And he should have done all this the moment the mage-storms began, when it became obvious that they were getting worse. Then they would not only have been safely inside the Empire by now, they would have been on hand to deal with internal turmoil. That meant a kind of double betrayal, for somewhere, someone was going shorthanded, lacking the troops he needed to keep the peace because the Emperor had decided to abandon
them
here.

Or rather, it was more likely that he had opted to abandon
Tremane
and, with him, his men. He had probably written Tremane off as the potential heir because he had not achieved a swift victory over Hardorn, and had chosen this as the most convenient way to be rid of him.

And if I cannot contrive a way to bring us all safely through the winter, they will suffer with me.

That was the whole point of his anger. He had been schooled and trained as an Imperial officer; he had been an officer before he ever became a Grand Duke. This callous abandonment was counter to both the spirit and the letter of the law, and it made Tremane’s blood boil. It represented a betrayal so profound and yet so unique to the Empire that he doubted anyone born outside the Empire would ever understand it, or why it made his skin flush with rage.

The men would certainly understand it, though, when they finally deduced the truth for themselves and then worked through their natural impulse to assume that anything so
wrong
could not be
true.
And at that point—

At that point they will cease to be soldiers of the Empire.
No, that’s not true. They will be soldiers of the Empire, but they will cease to serve Charliss.

He sat down in the nearest chair, all in a heap, as the magnitude of that realization struck him. Revolt—it had not happened more than a handful of times in the entire history of the Empire, and only
once
had the revolt been against an Emperor.

Was
he
ready to contemplate revolt? Unless he did something drastically wrong, it was to him that the men would turn if they revolted against Charliss. Was he prepared to go along with that, to take command of them, not as a military leader, but as the leader of a revolt?