Storm Breaking

it might only have been that Vanyel was so obviously everything that a Karsite feared about the night, and although Karal had been working with stranger beings, Vanyel's presence was simply the one bit of strangeness that was too much.

He had his own problems that were similar to Florian's—the fact that of all of them, he was really the most ordinary, and aside from his ability as a Channel, apparently the least necessary. He was not brilliant like Master Levy nor a mage like Sejanes or Firesong; he could not translate the ancient texts as Tarrn and Lyam could, nor had he the knack of amusing everyone and helping them see solutions to their problems as Silverfox did.

It was Silverfox, however, who made him realize that the things about him that were the most commonplace were the ones that made him the most valuable in this group of those who were out of the ordinary.

'I'm glad we have you here, Karal,' Silverfox said to him the next day, as he shared stew that Altra had not been awake to eat with the kestra'chern.

'Me?' he said with surprise. 'Why?'

'Because your strength is that you are forced to handle wildly extraordinary events and people—and you just do it, without complaint. You set the rest of us an example. After all, if you can handle all this, we should certainly be able to.'

Karal made a face. 'I think I'm being damned with faint praise,' he replied ironically.

'It isn't meant to be faint praise,' Silverfox said earnestly. 'What I mean is that you are finding great strength and grace inside yourself, and you prove to the rest of us that we should be able to do the same.' He gazed into Karal's eyes with intense concentration. 'You keep us centered, reminding us that there is a world out there beyond these walls. You give us perspective in this rather rarefied company, and help keep us all sane.' His smile was just as charming as anything Firesong could conjure. 'In your own way, my dear young friend, you are a constant reminder of everything normal and good about the world that we are trying to protect.'

Karal blushed; that was all he could do, in the face of words like that.

:He's right, you know,: Altra seconded. :It isn't the great mystics and saints who do the real day-to-day work of keeping people's faith firm, it's the ordinary priest—the good man who goes on being good, no matter what he has to face. Ordinary people know in their hearts that they could never withstand the trials that a saint undergoes, but if they see a person who is just like they are, and watch him bearing up under those trials, they know that they can do it, too. And as for the great ones, when they see an ordinary man bearing extraordinary burdens, they are inspired to take on far more than they might otherwise do.:

Now he was blushing so hotly his skin felt sunburned.

'Meanwhile, we are having to face a crisis,' Silverfox continued, his smile fading as he sobered. 'And it is coming on us swiftly. Firesong wanted me to tell you that they're going to use the cube-maze, after all.'

That cooled his blushes in a hurry, and he nodded. Silverfox reached for his chin and tilted it up, looking deeply into his eyes, then nodded as if satisfied by what he saw there. 'You know that this is the best choice of all of them,' he stated. 'Firesong says that of all the weapons, this offers the most gain.' He said nothing about risk, but he didn't have to, for Karal already knew that the risk of using any of those weapons was great, and they really could not know how great until they triggered one.

Karal nodded. 'And I knew that it was quite likely I would have to work as a Channel again. It's all right; I'm not afraid this time.'

Strangely enough, he wasn't. 'He wanted me to tell you, so that you would know he doesn't intend you to have to bear any more than any of the rest of them.' Silverfox's ironic expression filled in the rest—things best left unsaid. Karal knew, though, that Firesong would not be able to lie successfully to the kestra'chern, and Silverfox would not allow him to put Karal in for more than an equal share of peril. In a sense, Silverfox was vouching for the Adept.

Karal shrugged awkwardly. 'The cube-maze was their first choice the last time, they just couldn't come up with enough information to make it work. I'd rather be channeling for something that is their first choice, rather than their third or fourth.'

He didn't pretend to understand half of what the mages were talking about, but the device they called a 'cube-maze,' which resembled a pile of hollow cast-metal cubes stacked rather randomly atop one another, was supposed to have had a nonliving core to do the channeling. Either Urtho could never get the thing to work correctly in the first place, or else the core was no longer functioning. In either case, there was no one here that was capable of making a device to act as the channel. That meant Karal was the only hope of making this thing work. It might work better with a living channel; that might have been one of the reasons it had failed in the first place. A living channel could make decisions; a nonliving channel couldn't.

Like the other devices here, the cube-maze didn't look anything like a weapon. It was rather pretty, in fact; there was an odd sheen or patina to the blue metal surface that refracted rainbows, like oil on water. One of the truly strange things about all of these weapons was that none of them looked alike. It was difficult to imagine how the same mind could have come up with so many dissimilar devices.

'Karal!' Master Levy hailed him from the main room. 'The teleson is free, and Natoli is on it.'