Storm Rising

'You have to compress it, make it into bricks, but it burns,' the second confirmed. 'Now, normally they'd take that cow dung and put it on their fields, but if you offered to trade them weight for weight for your dried sludge, they'll take it, and you'll have fuel you didn't have before. See, our stuff don't smell; it's dry and easier to handle than what comes off of a muck pile. They'd rather have ours. And we get fuel.'

That got Tremane's interest. 'Not for indoor fireplaces, surely—' he objected.

The two Hardornen sewage experts shook their heads. 'No, and not for cooking—unless you like your soup to have that particular flavor.'

'But we don't need open fireplaces to heat the barracks!' one of his own men suddenly exclaimed. 'In fact— Commander, that would be a wasteful use of burnables. I just thought of an old design used in some of the houses up north—look—'

Tremane had already supplied the table with old documents taken from the depot and plenty of pens; his man seized one of each and began sketching on the back of an old pay roster while the rest leaned over each others' shoulders, peering down with interest.

'Look, you have your—your furnace here, below the level of the floor, and fed from outside, with a tiny little iron door. Above it, you have a huge mass of brick riddled with tiny chimneys. This works like a kiln, you heat the brick, the brick heats the barracks.' He sucked on the end of the pen for a moment. 'Put the door to the barracks here, on the far end of the wall, fill up the rest of the end wall with the brick arrangement, and there you are. Two sides sheltered by the earth, two with brick furnaces. Or only one furnace, if you want a barracks kitchen with ovens and a cooking fireplace at the other end.'

Tremane looked the drawing over; it looked and sounded feasible. Put the sleeping quarters near the furnace, the common rooms in the middle, the kitchen at the other end. 'It'll still have to have some arrangement like a smoke hole,' he pointed out, 'or all the smoke from lanterns and candles will just build up in there.'

'Yes, but you'll be using more of the heat from the furnace,' his man pointed out. 'And you can burn dung without smelling up the inside.'

'I don't see anything to object to,' the Chief Chirurgeon said judiciously. 'Other than the fact that it will be darker than the eighth hell in there without windows, and I'm bound to warn you that will have an effect on the men's morale and health.'

'Better dark than freezing,' one of the others muttered, which only confirmed Tremane's own thought.

'Health you can deal with in their diet; sprouted beans and the rest of that stuff you chirurgeons are so fond of,' he replied. 'And as for morale—since they'll be on duty outside most of the daylight hours, I don't see a problem—but wait a moment, though,' he added, as something odd occurred to him.

The chirurgeons hadn't listed a single complaint or difficulty since they made a permanent camp here. 'You people aren't having any problems with the mage-storms affecting you. Isn't that laying-on-of-hands healing that you do a kind of magic?'

One of the lesser Healers choked behind his hands; the Chief Chirurgeon, a tall, thin, balding fellow with an attitude of aristocratic arrogance, favored him with a frosty smile. 'Firstly, although the uninformed think of healing as a kind of magic, it is not the sort of magic that you mages are accustomed to using,' he replied, in a lofty, superior tone of voice that made Tremane grit his teeth in response. 'Mind you, I am a surgeon; my skills are in the excising of diseased flesh with the knife, in the stitching of damaged tissue with needle and gut-thread. However, I have made certain that I am educated even in those healing arts that I am not equipped to perform.'

As you should have been, his tone seemed to imply. Tremane simply schooled his features into mild interest and nodded. He had learned long ago to keep his temper under more trying circumstances than this. Strangling the man would accomplish nothing.

Except to make me very happy...

'So just how does this differ from the magic that I, as a mage, am familiar with?' he asked with exact politeness.

'In the first place, it is performed entirely with the mind,' the Chief Chirurgeon lectured. 'The only difference between a self-taught or untaught Healer and one who has gone through training is in the recognition of how to heal things besides obvious broken bones or wounds. The Healer's mind convinces the patient's body to restore itself to the perfect state it had before the injury or illness. That is why they cannot correct those who are born with deformities.' He smiled smugly. 'That is something only those with my skill can do.'

'All right, but I still don't understand why you aren't encountering interference from the mage-storms,' he persisted.

'Because the Healers don't work during a storm, when the disruptions in energy are the only things that could interfere with their talent,' the Chief Chirurgeon replied, as if to an idiot. 'Accelerated healing only takes place when the Healer is actively working. The rest of the time, the patient is simply doing what he would under ideal circumstances. Under ideal conditions, our bodies would always repair themselves and throw off disease; the Healer simply reminds the body of what it should be doing.'

'Oh.' He had some vague notion that, basically, the reason the Healers were unaffected was that they were