were proportioned to make it look as if it were twice the size it actually was, and since the stone walls were a handspan thick, they let in very little light. The 'ladders' here were an interesting cross between a ladder and a staircase with alternating steps, made so that they could be climbed by someone with both hands full. Not that Elspeth would want to, but the gardeners scampered up and down them all day without thinking twice about it.
There was more light from the open hatch to the roof, and that made the last of their climb a bit easier. They poked their heads up through the open hatchway cautiously, just as a couple of fat drops fell with identical splats onto the wood beside their heads.
'You are in good time, younglingssss,' Treyvan said. 'You have ssssaved usss frrrom needing to worrk in the wet.' The male gryphon took up half of the roof space; the rest was occupied by two youngsters in trainee Grays, and three adults in Whites. Elspeth didn't recognize any of them. Of the three adults, one could not have been more than twenty at most; the other two were somewhere around thirty. The young one was blond and had the look of a Northerner about him; the other two, male and female, both with brown hair, had the stocky build of the folk on the Rethwellan border. The two trainees were probably in their last year; one was thin and very dark, the other plump and fair.
'I will make introductionsss when we arrre finissshed,' the gryphon added hastily, as another set of raindrops joined the first. 'Ssstudentsss, you may begin.'
Elspeth was a little surprised to see, as they looked at each other and immediately meshed their powers, that he must have directed them to work as a group rather than separately. On the other hand, since the object was not just to train these people, but to actually do something about a bad situation with the weather, his strategy made sense.
The older of the two trainees handled the wind; he began to leech energy away from the weather system that had created this storm in the first place, an odd knot in the sky to the east of Haven. Elspeth couldn't quite see the point of this particular tactic; the wind did begin to die down, but that left the storm simply sitting there, right over the capital itself, ready to dump rain on them at any moment. But then the youngster passed the energy he had taken to the oldest of the Heralds, and that lady, rather than trying to change the direction of the existing wind, used the power to start another system north of Haven. Elspeth closed her eyes, and saw what they were Seeing, a 'landscape' of weather, exactly like the sculptured terrain in a sandtable. The trainee was taking 'sand' from a 'hill' in the east and giving it to the woman. She was putting that 'sand' in the south, creating another hill, there, while the second trainee began to scoop 'sand' from the north and pass it along to the woman as well. The air made a kind of thin 'liquid' flowing over the sand, too light to move it, but forced to move according to the way it had been sculpted. Where there was a slope, it 'flowed' downhill, picking up force. So now there was a new wind that blew in from the south, heading north -
Which, by all reliable reports, could really use the rain that had been dumped uselessly on the capital for the past several weeks. Two more of the Heralds added something else, sculpting the 'sand' further, one pulling the air to the north, and one pushing, out of the south. But these two had added something new, to create that push and pull. The one in the north was making things cool and wet, and to the south warm and dry. Elspeth opened her eyes, and saw that the storm really was moving in a new direction; by concentrating, she Saw that 'sandtable' as an overlay on the 'real' world.
When she had finished making her depression, the second trainee simply held the water in the clouds until they began to move into the north and west and, finally, out of sight.
Firesong smiled; Elspeth 'watched' what they were doing using her Mage-Sight and 'outer eyes' at once, completely enthralled by the clever way they were accomplishing their goal together. Now she saw why Firesong didn't want to work any weather-magic without knowing the land around them. It was something that could all too easily go wrong.
On the other hand, this was an application of fairly minor Gifts with major results, and she could well imagine what kind of havoc such weather control could wreak on or before a battle. Bring in a really major storm, and dump a month's worth of rain at once on a battlefield, and you created a quagmire. Force the enemy to come to you across it, and he was exhausted before he reached your lines.
'Well done!' Treyvan said, as the last of the clouds disappeared into the north, leaving behind a warm, cloudless blue sky without even the scent of rain. With a sigh of relief, the five new mages released their hold on the storm, certain now that it was going to behave, and turned to their strange teacher with glowing faces full of the pride of accomplishment. They deserved that glow; even among the Tayledras, Elspeth had never seen mages work together that well. That alone was an accomplishment of major proportions.
'Very well done,' Firesong put in. 'Fine control, good judgment, and the systems you set up should hold long enough for the rain to travel to where it should have gone in the first place. You are learning quickly. That you work together is a wondrous thing - all of you together can do far more than one of you alone.'
One of the Heralds, clearly quite exhausted, sat down on the coping around the edge of the roof. 'I'll admit that I was disappointed when my Mage-Gift proved to be just as minor as my FarSight, but now,' he shook his head, 'I'm not certain I'm ever going to call any Gift 'minor' anymore. The idea of actually steering a storm around the sky - in the wrong hands, something like that could be devastating. I don't want to think of someone hitting fields before harvest with hail. You could starve the whole country that way.'
'You're right, and think about hitting a line of foot-soldiers with hail, while you're at it. FarSight and Mage-Gift are a good pairing,' Elspeth told him. 'You can use the first to make certain you don't dump a storm where it can harm someone, or at least someone on your own side, and just now you saw what you can do with the second.'
