Storm Warning v(ms-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  That was hardly helpful.

  I never liked the idea of employing an artist as an agent, he thought with distaste. When they aren't unreliable, they're ineffectual.

  Not that he'd had any choice; the agent was an inheritance from his predecessor, and there hadn't been time or opportunity to get another in place.

  White riders and horses were bad enough, but worse had somehow occurred before Ancar took himself out in some kind of insane battle with an unknown mage or mages.

  Valdemar had somehow managed to patch up a conflict going back generations with their traditional enemy, Karse. And how they had managed to make an ally of that stiff-necked, parochial bitch Solaris was completely beyond him! He wouldn't have thought the so-called Son of the Sun would ally herself with anyone, much less with an ages-old enemy!

  And where had all the rest of Valdemar's bizarre allies come from? He would hardly have credited descriptions, if he had not seen the sketches! Shin'a'in he had heard of, as a vague legend, but what were Hawkbrothers? And who could believe in talking gryphons? Gryphons were creatures straight out of legend, and that is where they should, in a rational world, have remained!

  His agent's report credited most of this to Elspeth, the former Heir. Former? When had a ruler-to-be ever lost his position without also losing his life or freedom? Yet Elspeth had abdicated, continuing to work in a subsidiary capacity within the ranks of the white Riders, the Heralds. Elspeth was too young to have made alliances with so many disparate peoples! She'd have no experience in diplomacy and very little in governance. In the end he'd simply dismissed the agent's report as a fanciful tale, doubtless spread about to make the former Heir seem more important and more intelligent than she really was.

  He wished he could dismiss the gryphons as more fanciful creations, but there were others who had seen them as well as the agent. The gryphons worried him. They represented a complete unknown; in an equation already overcomplicated, they were a dangerous variable. Were there more of them? A whole army, perhaps? The idea of flying scouts and spies working for the Valdemarans was not one that made him any happier.

  He groaned softly and flung himself down in a chair. Useless to ask "why me?" since he knew why all this was happening to him. I want the Iron Throne. An Emperor must be able to deal with situations like this. If I want the Throne, I must prove to Charliss that I am competent.

  Of course, now that he had begun, it was impossible to bow out of this gracefully.

  His nearest rival was also his nearest enemy, and if he failed here, or even gave it up and admitted defeat and resigned his position, his lifespan could and would be measured in months or years rather than decades. He would be dead, as soon as Charliss gave up the Throne. No new Emperor permitted former rivals to continue existing; the first few years on the Iron Throne were generally nervous ones, and it didn't make any sense to leave potential troublemakers in a position to make the situation worse.

  No, now he must carry this through, or else flee—into the south, into the west, into those barbarian lands beyond even Valdemar, and hope to cover his tracks well enough that no agent of the Empire could find him.

  I walk a tightrope above the vent of a volcano, he thought grimly. And there is someone shaking the tightrope, trying to make me fall.

  Shaking? That was odd.... For a moment it felt as if something had just picked up the building and dropped it; the unsettled feeling in the pit of the stomach an earthquake caused. But there was no earthquake, and this was no physical feeling; this was centered in the mage-senses—

  —as if something strange, terrifying, and huge was looming over him—

  Before he could move from his chair, it struck.

  All his senses failed; sight, sound, hearing, all gone. He floated in an ocean of nothingness, bereft of any touch with the real world. Mage-energy coursed through him, without truly touching him. Once, as a child, he had gone to the Salten Sea on a holiday. A great wave had come in and picked him up, nearly drowning him, carrying him up onto the shore and leaving him gasping on the sand. This was another kind of wave, but he was just as helpless in its powerful grasp, and now, as then, he did not know if it would leave him alive or drag him under to drown. It tumbled him in dizzying nothingness, disorienting him further. He was lost....

  He thought he cried out in terror, but he couldn't even hear his own voice.

  Then it was over. He felt the chair he was in again, heard his own harsh gasps for breath as the breath burned in his throat. His body shuddered with the pounding of his heart, and his hands ached as they spasmed on the arms of his chair. For a moment, he thought he was blind, but lightning struck just outside and illuminated the room for a moment, and he realized that the mage-light had simply gone out.

  Simply? It was not that simple; the kind of mage-light he had created was supposed to endure anything save having the spell canceled!

  He blinked. There was light in the next room, dim red light from the fire. He unclenched his hands with a rush of relief; at least he wasn't left in the dark! Odd. All his life he'd had mage-lights about him—even in a room darkened for sleep there was leakage from lights in the garden, lights in the hallway or the next room. He'd never realized how dark a truly dark room could be.

  With shaking hands, he felt in a drawer of the table next to him, found a candle, and took it into the next room to light it at the fire there. Some enemy had sent a magical attack at him, surely! Magical assassins had been blocked by the protections he kept constantly in place—or was this meant simply to disrupt his concentration? This attack, if attack it was, certainly hadn't been very effective! And yet—to cancel a mage-light spell within his protections meant that someone had incredible power. He controlled the trembling of his hands and forced himself to think of who might command that kind of power.

  That was all he had time for—aides burst in on him, sent by every commander in the camp, all of them carrying messages of varying levels of hysteria.

  That was when he realized that the effect of the—whatever it was—had not been targeted solely against him.

  Somehow he managed to assemble all of his mages within a reasonable time the next day, gathering them all into his councilroom to assess the damage. "So it swept the entire country?" Tremane asked his chief mage, Artificer Gordun. The homely, square-faced man nodded, as he laced his thick, clever fingers together.

  "As nearly as we can tell," Gordun replied. "It was like one of those enormous waves that carries right across the Salten Sea; it came from the east and north, and is traveling into the west and south. We think it also washed over the Empire, but just at the moment, it is impossible to tell. We can't get messages to the Empire, and I would suspect that the reverse is true."

  Tremane grimaced. Like those great waves, this thing that had come and gone had left devastation behind it, and the more something was connected to magic, the worse the effect was. Every spell suffered damage to a greater or lesser extent. Lines of communication were all gone until the mages found each other again; the Portals were all down, and only the forty little gods knew when they would be reopened. Defenses were gone, or shaken. Little things, like mage-lights, magical cook-fires, weather-cloaks, timekeepers, all the tiny things that made life run smoothly for the troops, were gone, the spells that created them shattered. There would be dark, cold tents and cold meals all up and down the lines tonight, unless the various commanders quickly found non-magical substitutes.

  "It was a mage-storm, that much we are certain," Gordun continued. "Although it is not like any such storm we have ever encountered before. The storm itself did not last for more than a heartbeat or two. Mages encountered a physical effect, as you no doubted noted yourself. Non-mages experienced nothing."

  "That was enough," Tremane muttered. "It's going to take days to set up all the spells it knocked down, and more time to inspect anything that survived for damage and repair it."

  "That isn't all, my lord Duke." The thin, reedy voice came from the oldest mage wit
h Tremane's entourage, his own mentor, Sejanes. The old man might look as if he was a senile old stick, but his mind was just as sharp as it had been decades ago. "This mage-storm has affected the material world as well as the world of magic. Listen—"

  He picked up the pile of papers on the table before him, with hands that were as steady as a surgeon's. "These are the reports I have from messengers I sent out on horses to the other mages in the army. The tidings they returned with were not reassuring. From Halloway: 'There are places where rocks melted into puddles and resolidified in a heartbeat, sometimes trapping things in the newly-solid rock.' From Gerrolt: 'Strange and entirely new insects and even higher forms of life have appeared around the camp. I cannot say whether they were created on the instant, or come from elsewhere in the world.' From Margan: 'Roughly circular pieces of land two and three cubits in diameter appear to have been instantly transplanted from far and distant places. There are circles of desert, of forest, of swamp—even a bit of lake bottom, complete with mud, water-weeds, and gasping and dying fish.'" He waved the papers. "There are more such reports, from all up and down the lines, and from behind them as well. You are well beyond my needing to prompt you, Tremane, but this cannot have been an act of nature!"

  "And it isn't likely that it is residue from King Ancar's reckless meddling, either," Tremane agreed.

  "I cannot see how," Sejanes replied, dropping the papers again. "Ancar was not capable of magic on this scale. There is no mage capable of magic on this scale. I can only assume that it must have been caused by many mages, working together. Perhaps that would account for the variety and disparity of its effects."

  Tremane racked his memory for any accounts of anything like this "mage-storm," and came up with nothing. Oh, there were mage-storms of course, but they all had purely physical effects, and were caused by too much unshielded use of magical energies. Those storms were real storms, weather systems, very powerful ones. This was not like any mage-storm he had ever seen, and yet the term was an apt one. It had struck like a storm, or a squall line; it had passed overhead, done its damage, and passed on.

  And there was only one place this storm could have come from.

  "There is only one place this storm could have originated from," Sejanes said, echoing his own thoughts. "Despite the fact that it began east of us—well, any fool knows that the world is a ball! What better way to surprise us than by sending out an attack to circle the world and strike from behind?"

  "You're saying that Valdemar sent this against us," Tremane replied slowly.

  Sejanes shrugged. "Who else? Who else has access to strange allies from lands we never even heard of? Who else uses magics we don't understand? Who else has reason to attack us from behind?"

  "Who else indeed," Tremane echoed. "They lose nothing by making life miserable for the Empire and the Imperial allies, and they could have warned their friends to erect special shields. Except that—according to all of you, Valdemar has the absolute minimum in the way of magic!"

  He cast an accusatory glance around the table. Most of the mages cringed and averted their eyes, but Sejanes met him look for look.

  "We still don't know what those horses are," Sejanes pointed out acidly. "And we don't recognize their magics. So how could we tell what they had and didn't have? We made our best guess based on the fact that they simply do not use magic in their everyday lives. There are no mage-lights or mage-fires—they have only candles, lanterns and torches, and physical fires. There are no Constructors; they build contrivances with no magic at all to haul water, grind grain. There are no Replicators; all documents are copied by hand, or printed with much labor. Messages are sent by those crude mirror-towers, or by human messenger. So what are we to think? That they have no magic, of course."

  "But if they have no magic in daily use," Tremane pointed out, thinking out loud, "then they will not suffer from this attack as we have."

  Sejanes nodded, his head bobbing on his thin neck like a toy on a spring. "Precisely. As if they used this kind of attack all the time. As if they planned for this kind of attack to be used against them."

  It made sense. It more than made sense. If you expected someone to hurl fire at you, you built your fort of stone. If you expected catapults, you built the walls thickly. If you expected to be deluged with mage-caused thunderstorms, you built truly good drainage.

  And if you expected to be attacked by something that twisted and ruined your spells, you didn't use any. Unless, of course, it was the spell intended to twist and ruin all other spells.

  "But where did this come from?" he asked, thinking aloud again.

  Sejanes shrugged, and the rest of the mages only shook their heads. "It passed roughly east to west, and at a guess I would say that if it came from Valdemar as we think, it truly did circle the whole world to get here. That is logical, and in line with the notion that it originated in Valdemar. Frankly, if I had such an attack, I would use it that way, because it would be at its weakest when it finally got back to me. It was certainly strong enough to wreak havoc for us when it reached us!"

  That made sense, too. "You're saying you can't find a point of origin, though," he persisted. "If you could, we would know where their best mages were." And that useless artist could find out who they are. Then we could neutralize them.

  "Not a chance," Sejanes said flatly. "At the moment, we're lucky to find the mages in the other camps, much less a point-of-origin for this thing. We are fundamentally disarmed at this point, and we'd better hope that neither the rebels nor the Valdemarans have anything planned for us, because we're so disorganized that we'll be lucky to hold the ground we've got."

  The others chimed in with more tales of woe—he had already heard from his military commanders by now, and he was simply glad that so many of them were used to working under primitive and uncertain conditions. They had found substitutes for the magics that weren't working, but there was no substitute for the lack of communication. That was the worst.

  Tremane was just grateful that he had called a halt to the attempt to advance before all this happened. If he had been in the midst of a military maneuver, it could have been a disaster.

  Sejanes was the only one who really had anything useful to say, and what he had was all too meager. The rest simply floundered, out of their depth.

  "I can only see one thing useful at this point," Tremane said at last. "Repair the damages, and armor the repairs against a repeat of this attack. Communications, first. Then the Gates; if this goes on too much longer, we'll be short of supplies in a week. Shield and reshield everything you do. Then check back with me; I'll determine what is most important."

  Tremane finally dismissed his mages back to their work of repairing the damages after a little more exhortation, and slumped back into his chair, his temples throbbing. He hoped that he was the only one suffering from a headache, that it was caused more by stress than by the mage-storm; if all his mages were working under the burden of an aching head, they'd only be about half as effective as they were normally.

  He rang for a page and called for strong wine. He seldom drank, but at this point he needed at least one cup of fortification.

  He stared at the polished surface of the table and turned the cup around and around in his hands. One question was uppermost in his mind: How did they do this?

  It was not just that the attack was like nothing he had ever seen before. It was not only the sheer size and scope of the attack. It was the randomness of it all.

  Insane. Absolutely insane. Not even Ancar had been crazed enough to have developed a spell like this one.

  And the effects—what possible use was there in an attack that ripped up circles of land and planted them elsewhere? Were the Valdemarans simply hoping that there might be strategic targets inside those circles? Or were they just striking for the effect on mind and morale?

  Was there a meaning behind it at all? Or was the chaos really the meaning? Was this representative of how Valdemarans thought? If so, they were more ali
en than the gryphons they courted!

  If they can do this, he thought to himself, sipping the bitter, dark wine, what else can they do? Have I taken on even more than Charliss himself could handle? Or is this another of Charliss' little tests?

  That, too, was possible. Charliss and the Empire were in the east, and the storm had come from the east. The Emperor could be testing him under fire, to see how he handled such an attack.

  It still could have been one of his enemies who had sent this; or more likely, several of his enemies working together.

  As he reached the bottom of the glass, another thought occurred to him, one even more bitter than the wine, and more frightening than the mage-storm.

  What if Charliss wanted to be rid of him? How better than to embroil him in a conflict he could not win?