Storm Breaking

descended. 'I suppose you'll want to go tell all this to Sejanes.…'

He did, but he also didn't want to go, even though he didn't really have anything to say. The silence lengthened and became more strained. She glanced to the side, and her expression lightened a little with relief even while it darkened with disappointment. 'Oh, here's someone for Master Levy. If Altra will hold the teleson open while you get him—'

'Of course!' he said, feeling both emotions himself. 'Natoli, take care of yourself! And I—I miss all of you.'

He didn't dare say that he missed only her, but he hoped she got that impression from his hesitation. 'I—we miss you too,' she replied, with a smile more shy than usual, and vanished from the crystal. Karal ran to get Master Levy, who nodded and hurried to the device carrying a sheaf of notes as if he had been expecting to be summoned back.

Karal glanced around and couldn't find Sejanes in the upper rooms; he listened carefully and heard the old mage's voice coming thinly from the workshops below. He hurried down the stairs to find Sejanes chatting away comfortably with Lyam, though Tarrn was nowhere in sight.

'Sir!' he called, 'I've got the most amazing news about Duke Tremane!'

'Well,' Sejanes said, chuckling softly. 'Well, well, well.' He was inordinately pleased with Karal's news, and Karal could not help but wonder why.

That's an odd way to react, considering that Tremane has acted quite unlike a proper Imperial officer. 'I thought you might be upset, sir,' he ventured, tilting his head to one side. 'Aren't you?'

'Upset? No, this is rather good news, all things considered,' Sejanes replied, and chuckled again. 'It seems that my former pupil has learned at long last that there are things that do not always answer to his logic. I am quite glad to hear this, truth be told. This is going to be a very good thing for everyone concerned.'

Karal kept his inquisitive expression, hoping to prompt more information from the mage, and Sejanes enlarged on his statement.

'I am pleased for Hardorn, for that sad, maltreated land could not have found a better caretaker.' He blinked, and his eyes fixed on some distant point beyond Karal. 'I am pleased because Tremane could not have found a better trust than Hardorn. He was wasted on the Empire; he has the misfortune to be that rarest of Imperial creatures, a man of high rank who still maintains a shred or two of integrity and compassion. That is not to say, at all, that the military is composed of heartless men; far from that, in fact. He might have done well had he remained within the military, but as Emperor, he would have been a victim of one of three unpleasant fates—eaten alive by those conspiring to use him, murdered, or corrupted.'

'That much I can see,' Karal replied. 'It's quite logical, but...' He faltered, unsure how to ask what he wanted to know without being rude. Imperials were not—quite—irreligious, but they were hardly as devout as even the average Valdemaran. And when compared with the average Karsite, they were positively atheistic!

Sejanes seemed to understand what he wanted to know. 'Not all citizens of the Empire are so immersed in practicality as you think.' His gaze softened and turned inward for a moment. 'Those most likely to become cynical, believers in nothing that they cannot see, are the career courtiers. Those least likely—probably the folk who live nearest the land, and those who live by magic. My young protege was poised between the cynic and the believer, and he could have taken either path. He may be the rarest of all, one who can see the truth in both.'

Karal wanted badly to ask just what Sejanes believed in, but he sensed that Sejanes would not tell him now. He might never. That was his right, of course. And it would be horribly impolite of Karal to ask him. If he ever wanted to tell Karal, he would.

'It is my own opinion, that whatever else has happened, Tremane has discovered that there are those other paths. Perhaps that will open his mind to those other possibilities.' He rubbed his eyes for a moment, as if they were tired. 'And I am pleased that he has an outside governor in this earth-binding, something to—shall we say— keep him from succumbing to other temptations.'

'He is that weak, then?' asked Lyam, with the careless tone of one to whom Duke Tremane and his men were no more real than the folk in the Chronicles of a thousand years ago.

They might not be. The Kaled'a'in are so different from the Imperials that they must seem equally unreal to each other.

'Not weak,' Sejanes amended, and his wrinkled brow knitted, as he searched for words.

He's trying to explain Tremane to a couple of youngsters for whom the Empire is only a name, who cannot even imagine the levels of intrigue that someone like Tremane must negotiate every day. Karal waited for the aged mage to find the right words. And he can't know that the Temple of Vkandis is—or was, anyway—as much a hotbed of conspiracy as any court. I don't think Lyam could ever understand the stresses that Tremane must have been under, but I do. I wonder if Tremane ever got tired of it all, and wished for things to be simpler? 'No, he's not weak.' Sejanes repeated. 'The trouble is that certain habits, certain ways of reacting, become ingrained. It would be all too simple to revert to the ways in which business is conducted in the Empire, without thought for what was good for Hardorn. That, more than anything, would be the temptation; to take the way that is easiest, rather than the one that is best for the people and the land, and doubly so when resources are low.'