Storm Rising

'I have to, you know,' Karal said quietly. 'I had the feeling it might come to something like this. Altra kept saying he wanted me along for 'contingency'; I think he must have meant that there was an equal chance you'd have been able to use one of the other devices.' A soft sigh. 'The ForeSeers all said that the futures were so tangled they couldn't see past us getting here. There was always a chance that something else might have worked out.'

'Maybe. If we had more time to study them. If I wasn't reasonably certain the wave front of the next mage- storm was going to get in here as well as everywhere else—this is the origin-point, after all. Hellfires! Where else would the energy go but here! And this place can't keep taking a battering without at least one of these devices going on its own!' He' stopped pacing and turned to look into Karal's white and, strained face. 'I do not want you to do this!'

'I know,' Karal told him.

'But if you're going to insist—by your gods and mine, I'm not going to stand around outside this place and leave you to do it alone.' In this much, at least, he could assuage his own conscience. 'I'll shield you—'

'We'll all shield him,' An'desha said, coming up behind Karal. Firesong started to protest, then shrugged. It was their choice, too.

All right.' He took a deep breath and tried to reckon the time passed. 'How much time do we have left? I know it can't be much.'

'About half a day.' Karal sounded steady enough. Maybe he could do it. 'I've been keeping very careful track. Every mark we delay means the closer the wave front will be to Haven and the Heartstone there. Tremane's people can weather one more storm, maybe two—'

'But the shielding on the Stone might go down, not to mention all the other Vale Stones, I know, I know.' He suppressed a wave of irritation at Karal for restating the obvious. He let his irritation show as he answered in a growl. 'All right, then, if that's the way you all want it, who am I to argue?'

An'desha looked for a moment as if he might retort, but only turned back to the main room. Karal followed him, leaving Firesong to trail behind, feeling as if he had somehow lost an argument, even though there hadn't really been one.

They spent their remaining time in rehearsal for the moment. Aya chittered at him from atop the pack as Firesong rummaged deep into the side pocket. He noticed that he was not alone in surreptitiously going to his belongings for stimulants to keep him wide awake and alert; such things were dangerous and they would all pay later—if they survived this—but every mage knew there would be times when there were not enough hours to rest before a vital working and carried a packet or two of such things. He even caught the shaman chewing a mouthful of something with an expression of distaste that told him it was not dried meat.

Tayledras stimulants had the peculiar quality of setting everything emotional at a distance, enabling Firesong to focus on the purely intellectual project at hand. The mental exercises that sharpened the mind came to him naturally, like a musician practicing his fingerings quicker and quicker. Diagrams of light shone against his lids as he concentrated, eyes closed—symbols for Vale, Veil, Heartstone, ley-line, shield, absorber, deflector, suspensor, buffer-current and anchor, circle and square, star and sphere—they all appeared and interwove. And it occurred to him, as soon as he felt that distancing of his inner turmoil, that there was a reason for that pattern in the floor of every storage chamber. The compass rose.

In his peculiarly exalted state, he leaped straight from flash of intuition to a plan, with no conscious reasoning in between.

'Look at this!' he said, as they entered the chamber for a final rehearsal. 'Look, the device is in the exact middle of that inlaid compass rose—it can't be by accident! This is a shielding-circle!'

An'desha tilted his head to one side and frowned. 'It doesn't look like anything in my memory—' he said tentatively.

'Of course it doesn't,' Firesong interrupted impatiently. 'Your memories are all of Urtho's arch rival, and if there was a way to do something the opposite of Urtho, you can be certain Ma'ar took it! The positioning is perfect, and I'll bet there's an amplification-effect when we set ourselves up and begin the shielding. Look here—the angle from point to point is a factor of eight, with eight points, and sixty-four marker triangles point in. Look at the cupping of those scallops around the center—I'll bet you all my silk that they're collectors. Check the angles of deflection from point to point, and they'll all line up to buttress each other.'

An'desha looked at Treyvan and Hydona for confirmation. The female gryphon wagged her head from side to side. 'It could be,' she admitted. 'Sssuch thingsss arrre known. Urrrtho wasss known forrr being rrresssourcsseful enough forrr sssixty men, beforrre brrreakfassst. It would be in hisss ssstyle to put sssuch thingsss herrre.'

'Then you two—take North and South,' he ordered, feeling as if this must be the proper configuration, though he did not know why. 'Florian and Altra, East and West.' That put all the nonhumans on cardinal points, which made a certain sense given what the gryphons had told him about Urtho and how he cherished his nonhuman creations. 'Karal, stand in the center with the pyramid. An'desha, you go between Altra and Treyvan in the Northeast. An'desha, I'll be opposite you—'

But here he stopped, for there were only Lo'isha and Silverfox left, and both were shaking their heads. 'I know nothing of shielding,' the Shaman began—

Then, with a sigh and a rush of wings on a wind that existed somewhere other than here and