Storm Breaking

:Mages and those with earth-sense have known for centuries that this is the reason why the countryside blooms after a war,: Gwena observed dispassionately. :It isn't just that things seem better, and it isn't just that the people are ready to greet any positive signs with enthusiasm. It's because the lives lost go back to the land, and when the war is over, the land can use them to heal itself.:

'We can at least be grateful that Grand Duke Tremane is apparently more interested in allowing the land to heal than in using that power for his own means,' Darkwind replied, as he turned for a moment to stare off into the east. He said nothing more, and Elspeth thought she knew why.

They had only the word of three youngsters and Tremane's own people that he was to be trusted at all. Just at the moment, apparently was the only word any of them could use with regard to the leader of the Imperial forces. Those few facts that they had about Tremane were not much comfort.

Tremane had been sent by his master, Emperor Charliss, to conquer a weak and chaotic Hardorn for the Empire of the East. This assignment was to prove him worthy (or not) to be the Imperial Heir. The Imperial Army had taken roughly half of Hardorn before it stalled, held in place by Hardornen fighters, in mostly uncoordinated groups ranging in size from tiny bands to small armies, united only in their determination to oust the interloper. Since they were fighting on their own ground, they had the advantage once the front lines stretched out and the Imperial forces were thinned by distance. Nevertheless, if nothing had changed, Tremane would probably have been able to reorganize, regroup, and complete the conquest, possibly even carrying it into Valdemar.

But things did change, and in a way that no one could have foreseen; the change had come from a direction no one would have looked, for it had come out of the distant past.

We never do consider the past, do we? But we should have. Wasn't Falconsbane a revenant of that past? And shouldn't that have warned us to turn our eyes and thoughts in that direction? But then again, how can we truly plan for everything, every possibility? Even if we knew all of the threats at any one moment, the defenses for half of them would negate the preparations for the other half. We are better off being resourceful than omniscient, I think.

Once, before there had ever been a Valdemar, in a time so distant that there were no records and only the vaguest of hints about it in the great library of the Heralds, ancient wars had ended in an event known only as the Cataclysm. And until Elspeth had met with the Tayledras of legend, the Shin'a'in of the Dhorisha Plains, and the last, lost Clan of the true Kaled'a'in—progenitors of both the Hawkbrothers and the Shin'a'in—that was all those in Valdemar had known. Now, though, with the help of histories both arcane and mundane, the full story had been put together.

Elspeth considered that story as she did every time she had the leisure to do so, intent on extracting the least bit of useful information from it. Despite the huge amounts of power involved, there were still human motives and actions behind what had happened so long ago. Even madmen would act according to their needs, so the more that one considered events of history the more one could deduce what those needs had been—and once one understood the needs and motivations of the people involved, one could expound upon what else might have happened, or realize that an obscure detail was actually something significant in context.

There had been two Adepts back then, perhaps the most powerful that the world had ever known, called Urtho and Ma'ar. Ma'ar, the scion of barbarian nomads, had been infected with the mania for conquest, at first for noble reasons of uniting clans to keep them from annihilating each other. Urtho, the epitome of civilization and scholarship, had resisted him. But despite the best efforts of civilization, Ma'ar, Adept and Blood-Mage, had triumphed—

But only for a moment. In the very hour of Ma'ar's victory a dying Urtho had brought defeat to his very door, with a pair of devices that released the bonds on all magic within their spheres of influence. One he triggered in his own Tower; one was sent to Ma'ar. The devices acted within moments of each other, and the results were both devastating and utterly unpredictable.

When it was over, there were two enormous craters where Urtho's Tower and Ma'ar's palace had stood. The first became the Dhorisha Plains; the second, Lake Evendim. And the interaction of the two series of shock waves created terrible mage-storms that had raged over the land for a decade or more, raising mountains and flattening them, disrupting magic, causing living creatures to change and warp out of all recognition, even transplanting entire sections of countryside from one part of the world to another.

Eventually the Storms faded, to be forgotten in the ensuing centuries, assumed by all to have been gone forever. But the forces released by the Cataclysm were stranger and stronger than anyone guessed, and now the mage-storms had returned, echoing back across time from the other side of the world, growing stronger with every new occurrence.

That was what had changed the situation Tremane had walked into, changed it out of all recognition. The situation in Valdemar had been bad, but not a complete disaster. Valdemar had only newly rediscovered true-magic, and did not depend on its power for anything. The other effects of the mage-storms, the vicious and unpredictable weather, the warping of living creatures, and so forth, could all be dealt with in one way or another. But for Tremane's forces, dependent on magic for everything from communication and supply lines to the means to scout the enemy and cook their food, it was a disaster as they found themselves completely cut off from the Empire, effectively blind and hungry as a fighting force. As for what was going on in the Empire itself, that was anyone's guess. Tremane had initially assumed that the Storms were a new weapon unleashed by the Alliance of Valdemar, Karse, Rethwellan, and the Shin'a'in/Tayledras clans. He had reacted accordingly—and in a direction entirely typical of the Empire, where treachery and assassination were so commonplace that children were given bonded bodyguards as cradle-gifts. He had sent an assassin to break up the Alliance.

That was the single act that Elspeth and any other Valdemaran found so difficult to think past. Valdemar had not attacked Imperial forces. Neither Valdemar nor any of her allies had shown any sign of aggression other than increasing the guard on the borders and covertly helping to supply the Hardornen loyalists. Tremane had no reason—except for the obvious fact that Valdemar was not suffering from the Storms as badly as the Imperials were—to think that this was an attack by Queen Selenay or her allies. Nevertheless, he had treated it as one, and had sent a covert operative armed with magic weapons to kill anyone of any importance at or in