have to. With all the men we'll have here, we can build purely physical fortifications. Abandon the front line; the Emperor is hardly in a position to find out what we're doing right now, anyway.'
Oh, if only the Empire is suffering the same effects that we are! he prayed. Chaos there will save the situation for me here. Chaos there will convince the Emperor that I am not exaggerating my troubles to cover my own incompetence. And if this is something that Charliss unleashed on me, on his own loyal soldiers—
He did not finish that thought; it would be treason, no two ways about it. He was not ready for treason.
Not yet.
'But what about supplies?' one of the commanders asked. 'How are we going to keep such a huge force fed?'
'I don't know yet; I'll have an answer for you when we finally bring them all in,' he promised. 'I have supplies here for the whole Army for about two weeks before we'd have to go on lean rations. Meanwhile, there are rebels out there, and they are still picking at us; we're better off with all the men in one place, rather than stretched out along a line that reaches across half this benighted country. I don't want to lose any units by having them cut off from me.'
That put some spine back in them; with firm orders to carry out, his commanders were a lot more comfortable. And with a march ahead of them, followed by the physical labor of building fortifications, the men should remain tractable until the work ran out.
Better get the engineers to work on designing a wall using only the materials on hand, and mostly hand-labor. And after that, well, if I have to, I'll march the whole damned lot all the way back to Imperial soil, he thought grimly, dismissing his commanders. He turned his attention to the reply to last night's urgent request for information from his tame scholars. He'd literally ordered them out of their beds, and set them to work all night. I may go down in disgrace, but I won't leave these men to be picked off two and three at a time by a pack of barbarians.
At least he'd transported his whole library here before everything went to hell. Somewhere, some time, something like this must have happened in the past. He'd ordered his scholars to abandon their search for information on Valdemar and concentrate on looking for just that. He was, by the gods, going to find out when there were disruptions like this, where they occurred, and most important of all, what the people back then did about it!
My lord; the letter read—the Chief Historian had been impressed enough by the salty language of his order to keep his report concise and omit all the flowerly nonsense usually pasted into such documents. Then again, the Chief Historian was now working without mage-lights, mage-fires, running water, or any of the other comforts he was used to. That alone must have impressed him that the situation was urgent. These disruptions that we are now experiencing were unusual enough that we were able to eliminate most of the texts in your library immediately. I and my three colleagues are familiar with the history of the Empire, and we knew that there would be nothing in the Official Chronicles—which meant that we began our search in the copies of texts we had that predated the foundation of the Empire itself.
Well! Tremane sat back in his chair, taken aback. He knew that the fact that he actually owned copies of pre-Imperial texts was something of a fluke, and due only to his own interest in history. Most people didn't own anything nearly so old; he'd paid a healthy sum in bribes above and beyond the cost of the books to get some of those books, too, and now he was very glad that he had.
First, I must caution you that these texts are a jumble of many archaic tongues, and it is going to take some time to translate them precisely. We have all agreed on the general gist of what we found, however.
Second, the texts themselves are the personal papers of a mixed group of ancient warriors. Some were—we think—mercenaries, and others were liegemen to a Great Lord of some kind.
Well, that certainly fit in with the official history of the Empire. Tremane cupped his chin in his hand and read on.
We have gathered from the papers that this group was part of a much larger force; that they were cut off from the rest when their enemy gained an unexpected and decisive victory. They were warned by their Lord that they must flee as far and as fast as they could, by means of a Gate.
Interesting. That was not part of official history, which stated that the group had marched off on its own to carve out conquest for themselves.
Why they fled, we do not yet know; our guess, and it is only a guess, was that the Great Lord intended his enemy's victory to be an empty one, and meant to ensure his enemy claimed only ashes by destroying everything before he actually took it. Be that as it may, it is clear that they did build a Gate to reach a location they knew was relatively safe, far eastward of the place where they had retreated after being cut off. Then something happened as they were passing through the Gate, and a catastrophe of—we believe—a magical nature, flung them farther away than they had ever intended to go. This landed them in completely unfamiliar territory—territory that became, as you have probably anticipated, the heart of our Empire. In the days that followed, a series of disruptions that one writer terms 'magic-quakes' occurred; another writer describes them as 'aftershocks.' These disruptions seem on first blush to match the kinds of troubles we are experiencing now.
This was exactly what he had been hoping to find! Elation built in him—
