Storm Rising

manipulation,' he said frankly. 'But I can't, and I can't test it, so I'll take your word for it. If I work out a way to test the analogy, I'll let you know. Who knows? It might give us another clue to solving our predicament.'

Our predicament. It all sounds so ordinary when he calls it by that term.

He steadied himself, and when he placed his hands on the table, they were quite still, not trembling at all. 'I think I must do this,' he said quietly. 'I know that I can with such friends standing by to help me.'

Again, he established the spell, then the target; Tremane's face and upper torso appeared in the crystal, but he had someone with him other than the clerk. An'desha quickly widened his view. It was a middle-aged, ordinary woman, dressed roughly, but not poorly; she looked like a farmer's wife. There were no women with the Imperial Army, and this woman did not have the look of a camp follower about her.

The woman in question was absolutely hysterical, wringing her hands as tears poured down her face. She spoke so fast that An'desha, with his limited command of Hardornen, could not make out what was the matter.

Nor, it seemed, could Tremane. After several embarrassed and abortive attempts to calm her, he finally walked over to the door and called something An'desha did not catch.

A moment later an old man shuffled in, a man dressed in several layers of rich woolen robes. '...see if you can't get her to calm down enough to explain where she thinks the children might have gone, will you, Sejanes?' Tremane said in an undertone as they passed into the area of the spell's influence. 'I can't make head or tail of what she's babbling, and nothing I do makes her anything other than hysterical.'

The old man chuckled. 'Boy,' he said, in the Imperial tongue, 'you never could manage a woman. Leave her to me.'

Indeed, in a few moments, the old man did have her calmed down, in spite of the fact that his Hardornen was extremely limited and horrendously accented. He patted her shoulder and made soothing noises, and extracted information in usable bits between her bouts of sobbing.

Evidently she was a farmer, as An'desha had guessed. After the fright of seeing one of the mage-born monsters on the prowl, she had brought her family to the town to spend the winter. Restless at being more confined than they were used to, her children had taken it into their heads to make off somewhere outside the walls of Shonar. She thought they might have tried to go home, to their farm; several of them had left toys or wild animals that had been made into pets that either had been left behind in the packing or were considered to be too much of a nuisance to deal with in town. But she didn't know, because they had somehow slipped out without anyone noticing. She begged 'Lord Tremane' to send men out to find them before the 'boggles' did.

'Lord Tremane' sighed.

'Take her off and feed her, Sejanes. I know how the brats probably got out; I'd bet they left with the children tending the flocks or herds. The guards wouldn't notice a few more children with the animals than usual. Tell her we'll see to it; I'll take a party out to question the herding children, and we should have our hands on her wandering brats before dark.'

The old man took the weeping woman off, and to An'desha's surprise, Tremane went to the next room and began pulling on heavier clothing, boots, and weapons. 'Come on, boys!' he shouted out as he struggled to fit boots over two pairs of heavy socks. 'Get me more volunteers, we've got some lost children again! I'll meet them in the armory, as usual.'

'And thanks be to the Hundred Little Gods,' he muttered as he stamped to get the boots comfortable. 'At least this time it's not during the height of a blizzard.'

'Unbelievable,' Karal breathed, as the Commander of all the Imperial Forces, Grand Duke Tremane, trotted down the stairs to the armory to personally organize a rescue party. And not just any rescue party, but one chasing after a handful of lost Hardornen peasant children. 'Solaris wouldn't do this. I don't even think Kerowyn would.'

'Maybe he just appreciates the excuse to get outside,' Natoli said cynically, as Tremane led his group down snow walled and -roofed tunnels. It was light enough in there; light came right through the thick snow, illuminating the interior in a blue twilight. Still, it could get very claustrophobic.

But just at that moment, Tremane's little troop got outside the walls of Shonar, and into the hard, diamond- bright sunlight, and confronted the brutal, snow-covered wilderness beyond. The only tracks were those made by the herds he had mentioned, tracks cut through snow up to the waist of a grown man with drifts going higher than his head. Moving dots off in the distance might represent the herds he had mentioned, browsing on the ends of branches and whatever greenery they could get at under the shelter of the trees. The men themselves adjusted scarves wrapped around their faces to stave off frostbite before they trekked across the snow after their leader.

'Firesong should see this,' An'desha remarked. 'He thinks our weather is bad; this is brutal!'

Before he forgot, and while the man's concentration was elsewhere, An'desha reached out tentatively and laid his 'link' very carefully on the Grand Duke himself.

He was jolted back in his seat by the reaction of Tremane's shields. Energy backlashed painfully through him