Storm Rising

The courtyard was full of tents, with scarcely room to move between them. There were more tents lined up between the manor and the camp. Some of the supplies had already been distributed. Every man in his army now had triple bedding, triple clothing, double harsh-weather gear. They could survive a hideous winter now without barracks, although there would be sickness, frostbite, and other cold-related problems if they were forced to. That was more than they'd had before; if the worst predictions had come true, many would have died in the cold and snow.

He still couldn't believe that he had actually succeeded with his raid on the supply depot, and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams! All the men were current in their pay, including the bonuses he'd promised for odd or hazardous duty, and morale had taken an upswing, despite the fact that the drizzly weather hadn't broken for weeks. The extras that he had rationed out to them in the way of clothing and bedding hadn't hurt either; when he'd made a night inspection after lights-out, he'd seen the men were already making use of what he'd given out. Every tent contained a cocoon of blankets, with nothing visible of the man inside it but his nose, and the snores emerging from those cocoons had sounded very content.

The gold and silver entering the local economy wasn't hurting the morale of the townsfolk either, though he was glad he'd established a policy regarding double-pricing back when he'd first occupied this place. Any merchant found charging one price to a native and a higher price to a soldier—provided, of course, that the price difference wasn't due to the soldier being a poor hand at haggling—was brought up before his own fellow merchants and fined four times the difference in the price, half of which went to the Merchant's Guild, one quarter to the Imperial coffers, and one quarter to the fellow who was cheated. With all this new money flowing, his men could have been robbed blind without such a policy already in place.

Now his primary concern was to use his new stock of lumber to get warehouses up to shelter all the foodstuffs he'd looted. Everything else could stay under canvas, but the food needed real protection. That was keeping those of his men not robust enough to work on the walls quite busy. Even some of the clerks were taking a hand, since there wasn't as much need for them without all the Imperial paperwork to keep up with.

We have some space to breathe. That's the biggest factor. A great deal of the tension is gone.

The unspoken feeling of threat that was driving the work on the walls was still there, and certainly the men were thinking about the foul weather, looking at their tents, and wondering if a little canvas between them and a blizzard was going to be enough. Nevertheless, now no one was looking at his ration at mealtimes and wondering when those rations would be cut; no one was counting arrows, lead shot, or vials of oil for lamps and heating stoves. They all had been given a reprieve, and they all sensed it.

The mages were going about their new assignment—finding a way to shield them from the effects of the mage storms—with a renewed optimism about their own ability. The walls were going up faster than before.

And a small, select group of mages was working on a new project—to find the source of the storms.

He turned away from the window, but instead of going back to his desk and the welter of papers lying there, he took a seat in a comfortable chair before his fireplace. I never felt the cold and damp so intensely before, he thought, as he winced a little when he flexed stiff fingers in the warmth of the flames. Is it age, I wonder, or is the weather affecting me that much?

He gazed deeply into the flames and gave thought to the latest report from that smaller group of mages, a report that tended to confirm some of his own uneasy speculations. In it, they expressed severe doubt that Valdemar was the source of the mage-storms, and their evidence was compelling.

Valdemar's few mages have only begun working in groups, and are not, in our view, coordinated enough to have developed or produced these storms. If anyone knew about working group-magic, it was Sejanes. The old man had multiplied his own personal power far and above that of any single mage, simply by finding enough compatible minor mages to work with him, and by being careful that they never felt exploited, and so were not inclined to leave him. If Sejanes felt the Valdemarans were too new to group-magic to be effective at it, Tremane was going to accept that estimate without a qualm.

Valdemar has been feeling the same effects that we have, and it would be suicidally stupid to unleash a weapon that would work the same damage to you as it does to the enemy. Well, he'd already figured that one out, so it hardly came as a surprise.

Valdemar has never unleashed uncontrolled area-effect magic, and their overt policy, at least, would preclude such a weapon. He couldn't exactly argue with that, either; he'd studied their past strategies, and there was nothing of the sort in any of them. In fact, right up through the war with Ancar they had plied purely defensive tactics.

It was hard to believe, but the Valdemarans were something Tremane had never expected to see in his lifetime: people who were exactly what they appeared to be, employing no deceptions and very little subterfuge.

Which means I misjudged them, and I sent in an assassin for no reason. Ah, well. He wasn't going to agonize over it. He had done what he thought he had to at the time, with his own best assessment of the situation. Expediency. We are ruled by it.... He had enough now to worry about with the welfare of his own men, and if a few Valdemarans and their allies had gotten in the way of his agent's weapons, well, that was the hazard of war.

At least, that was what he'd always been taught.

Never mind. But as for the mages, I might as well order them to stop chasing that particular hare and go after more promising quarry. If not Valdemar, then where are these things coming from? And why now?