Storm Rising

time. 'Well, that's how Tremane could order terrible things on a regular basis—but that doesn't mean he has. He can't have slipped as far into that way of thinking as Ma'ar or he wouldn't be as popular with his men. At least, I hope I'm right in that—give me some time to study him so I can switch the spell.'

While the clerk was absolutely average, Tremane was not. He was not handsome by any means, and certainly was not An'desha's idea of the way a leader should look, but it was possible to remember his face very clearly without having to strain to find tiny flaws or other marks of identification.

Just as their clerk was dismissed, An'desha felt he had Tremane's face adequately in mind, and broke the spell.

The moment he did, exhaustion overcame him so suddenly that he actually blacked out for a moment, and came to just in time to catch himself falling face-first into the table.

He would have done exactly that if Altra hadn't made a leap across the crystal ball and inserted his body between An'desha's face and the marble table. He got a mouthful of fur, but not the crack to the head he would have if it hadn't been for Altra.

'Browf!' the Firecat grunted as An'desha's face hit the cat's side. Karal was beside him a moment later, pulling him up and then forcing his head down between his knees. Once he was in that position, his dizziness began to clear. Eventually he was able to sit up again.

'Th-thank you, Altra,' he said as the Firecat stared at him with real concern. 'I nearly knocked myself out!'

:You're welcome,: the Firecat replied in his mind, and followed the words with a swipe of a rough, wet tongue across his nose. :I hate having to clean up blood, and you'd have split your forehead wide open if you'd hit the table.:

He took the inevitable mug of tea from Natoli and sat there sipping it while he assessed his own condition and tried to make up his mind about what he should do next.

'I want to do another, while I still have Tremane fresh in my mind,' he said after a moment.

Natoli frowned. 'Is that wise?' she asked sternly.

'No,' he admitted, 'but it's necessary. And the two of you can catch me if I pass out again. I want Tremane; I want him before he has a chance to slip out of my mind. Once I've put a link on him, it won't be too hard to get him again.'

Karal studied his face. 'You think Tremane might be our man, don't you?'

He hesitated a moment before answering. 'I think if he isn't our man, he'll take us to someone who is,' he replied, after that pause to think. 'I'm torn. I'd like to believe that he is for a great many reasons, and that's why I don't want to trust my judgment alone on this. It would be so much easier if we were able to work with the man on the top, for one thing. But I have the feeling that if I don't establish a link to him now, we might lose him.'

'All right,' Karal said, after a long pause of his own. 'You're an adult; you have the right to decide what you're going to do for yourself. You certainly know what you're letting yourself in for if you exhaust yourself.'

'Mostly one demon of a headache,' An'desha told him candidly. 'What I'm doing just isn't that dangerous.'

In that, he was stretching the truth—or rather, not telling the whole truth. It isn't that dangerous providing that Tremane doesn't have magical protections against little scrying attempts like mine. That was the one thing that worried him. It was possible that his faint was due to brushing up against such protections. Actually touching them—

He didn't know. It wouldn't be fatal, not after the batterings such shields would have taken during the mage- storms. But it probably wouldn't be pleasant.

On the other hand, he had learned to trust his intuition about magic—knowing very well that in his case, 'intuition' was really the result of an unconscious analysis of many lifetimes of accumulated memories, few of them directly available without an effort.

His 'intuition' said that he'd better establish that link quickly. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with Tremane—maybe it's because of the mage-storms. The links seem to hold up well as the storms pass through, but the ability to scry past the breakwater might not hold up immediately after a storm if I don't also have a link.

The paths that magic took were seriously disrupted after a mage-storm and it took time to reestablish them. Perhaps because he was Shin'a'in, the reason seemed clear enough to him. One of the effects of the storm was to 'wash' everything away ahead of its cresting power, exactly like a wave of floodwater washed away things in its path. And, like on the floodplain, when the water receded, the roads and markers that had been there before the flood were gone. You had to build them all back up again.

At least, it made sense that way to him. He'd tried to explain it to Master Levy but the artificer had only shaken his head. 'If I could 'see' your magic, I could tell you if your analogy works past the surface into