Storm Warning

Instead, Tremane laid out only the Imperial counters, and dispassionately observed what happened to them.

By the time he had played out the reports right up to today's, he knew why the Imperial army, trained and strictly disciplined, was failing. It was there for anyone to see, if they simply observed what was happening, rather than insisting it couldn't happen.

The Imperial troops were failing because they were trained and strictly disciplined.

If there was any organization in the enemy resistance at all, it was a loose one, and one which allowed all the individual commanders complete autonomy in what they did. The enemy struck at targets of opportunity, and only when there was a chance that their losses would be slim. The Empire was not fighting real troops—even demoralized ones. It was fighting against people who weren't soldiers but who knew their own land.

Disciplined troops couldn't cope with an enemy that wouldn't make a stand, who wouldn't hold a line and fight, who melted away as soon as a counter-attack began. They couldn't deal with an enemy who attacked out of nowhere, in defiance of convention, and faded away into the countryside without pressing his gains. The Hardornens were waging a war of attrition, and it was working.

How could the army even begin to deal with an enemy who lurked behind the lines, in places supposed to be pacified and safe? The farmer who sold the Imperial cooks turnips this morning might well be taking information to the resistance about how many turnips were sold, why, and where they were going! And he could just as easily be one of the men with soot-darkened faces who burst upon the encampment the very same night, stealing provisions and weapons, running off mounts, and burning supply wagons.

And as for the enemy mages—his mages were convinced there weren't any. They found no sign of magic concealing troop-movements, of magical weapons, or even of scrying to determine what their moves might be. But he had analyzed their reports as well, and he had come to a very different conclusion.

The enemy mages are concentrating on only one thing—keeping the movements of the resistance troops an absolute secret. That was the only way to explain the fact that none, none of his mages had ever been able to predict a single attack.

They weren't keeping those movements a secret by the 'conventional' means of trying to make their troops invisible, either. They didn't have to—the countryside did that for them. There were no columns of men, no bivouacs for Tremane's mages to find, no signs of real troops at all for FarSeeing mages to locate. That meant it was up to the Fore-scryers to predict when the enemy would attack.

And they could not, for the enemy's mages were flooding the front lines with hundreds of entirely specious visions of troop movements. By the time the Imperial mages figured out which were the false visions and which' were the reality, it was too late; the attack was usually over.

In a way, he had to admire the mind that was behind that particular plan. There was nothing easier to create than an illusion which existed nowhere except in the mind. It was an extremely efficient use of limited resources—and an effective one as well.

Whoever he is, I wish he was on my side.

The only way of combating such a tactic was to keep the entire army in a combat-ready state at all times, day or night.

And that is impossible, as my enemy surely knows.

Try to keep troops in that state, day after day, when nothing whatsoever happened, and before long they lost so much edge and alertness that when a real attack did come, they couldn't defend effectively against it. They would slip, drop their guard, grow weary—and only then would the attack come. There was no way to prevent such slips, either; people grew tired.

The enemy wasn't using mages to predict when troops had gone stale; he didn't have to. The very children playing along the roads could do that.

Perfectly logical, a brilliant use of limited resources. The only problem was, it fit the pattern of a country that was well-organized, one with people fiercely determined to defend themselves against interlopers, not a land ravaged by its own leaders and torn by internal conflict.

He turned away from the tactics table and faced the window, staring into the teeth of the storm. We never move in until and unless conditions inside the country we wish to annex are intolerable. The arrival of our troops must represent a welcome relief—so that we can be seen by the common people as liberators, not oppressors. King Ancar certainly created those conditions here!

In fact, if half of what he had read in the reports was actually true and not rumor, Ancar would have had a revolt of his own on his hands within the next five or ten years. When Imperial troops had first crossed the border, in fact, they had been greeted as saviors. So what had happened between then and now to change that?

It can't be the tribute, we haven't levied it yet. Imperial taxes amounted to sixty percent of a conquered land's products every year—and the conscription of all young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. But none of that had been imposed yet; it never was until after all of the benefits of living within the Empire were established. By the time the citizens had used the freshwater aqueducts, the irrigation and