Storm rising

by Mercedes Lackey

  This was no longer an armed camp, it was an armed holding.. He was allocating the men to serve both camp and town. He was planning for the mingling of both. He was planning for a future that included married soldiers, children, families.

  Less and less of what he had learned as a military leader would apply, and more and more of what he had learned as the manager of his own estate.

  If they all survived the mage-storms and the winter.

  He pulled his mind and his planning back to the present. One thing at a time. First, the walls, the barracks, and the harvest. Then worry about what comes next.

  * * *

  Sandar was evidently overjoyed at the list of barter goods; late in the afternoon his messengers returned from town with answers from the Mayor and Master Kerst. The note from Sandar was good news, but the one from the Master Guildsman was even better. Master Kerst had two stonemasons and their journeymen and apprentices, four brickmasons and theirs, and a Master Builder and his. There were also assorted plasterers, woodworkers, a furniture builder or two, and others that Master Kerst felt might be useful....

  Might be useful? Tremane very nearly did a dance around his desk, which would have either scandalized or terrified his aides, depending on whether they thought he was drunk or mad. He'd resigned himself to rough-finished walls in the barracks and the crudest of appointments; the men would certainly have seen worse in their time. Having skilled craftsmen available meant there would be real walls, a floor of something besides pounded earth, real bunks and mess tables for the men. And the answer from Sandar meant he was going to have all this without touching the stores of coin he'd taken from the Imperial coffers!

  I wonder if you'd thought about bathhouses or a substitute for latrines? Kerst's note continued. We have men who not only can advise you on both, but who have an idea or two You might want to consider.

  Bathhouses and latrines? He scribbled off a note in semiliterate Hardornen to Kerst directly.

  Instead of the quiet dinner he usually had, he sat down that night with a tableful of men whose conversational topic was not usually considered appropriate over food.

  By now, in order to deal with the locals efficiently, both his staff of chirurgeons and his builders had learned Hardornen, so the conversation was held in the local tongue. That was just as well. It was somehow easier to eat and listen to a conversation about latrines at the same time, if it was held in another language.

  "—mix with wood ash and ground cob or chopped leaves, then you spread what you get out on drying racks," said one of the locals earnestly. "Depending on the weather, in a day or so you get something dry enough to bag, and that's what we've been selling to the farmers to put on their fields."

  "You just need sewers and the treatment site, don't need sewage tanks see?" finished his coworker. "Let the sand, gravel, and the rest of it purify the liquid, let it percolate through all the purifying layers, and you don't run the risk of poisoning our stream or our wells."

  His own men nodded wisely. "We've been doing something like this in the cities and on the large estates, but you need magic," one of them said. "I've heard some people had a less sophisticated system on their estates because they didn't have a house mage. This will work."

  "Well, it gets better," the first man said, grinning. "Bet you didn't know if you use the same system on cow dung, minus the wood ash and adding dried wood chips or sawdust, or ground woody plant waste, like heavy stalks, you can burn it."

  "You have to compress it, make it into bricks, but it burns," the second confirmed. "Now, normally they'd take that cow dung and put it on their fields, but if you offered to trade them weight for weight for your dried sludge, they'll take it, and you'll have fuel you didn't have before. See, our stuff don't smell; it's dry and easier to handle than what comes off of a muck pile. They'd rather have ours. And we get fuel."

  That got Tremane's interest. "Not for indoor fireplaces, surely—" he objected.

  The two Hardornen sewage experts shook their heads. "No, and not for cooking—unless you like your soup to have that particular flavor."

  "But we don't need open fireplaces to heat the barracks!" one of his own men suddenly exclaimed. "In fact—Commander, that would be a wasteful use of burnables. I just thought of an old design used in some of the houses up north—look—"

  Tremane had already supplied the table with old documents taken from the depot and plenty of pens; his man seized one of each and began sketching on the back of an old pay roster while the rest leaned over each others' shoulders, peering down with interest.

  "Look, you have your—your furnace here, below the level of the floor, and fed from outside, with a tiny little iron door. Above it, you have a huge mass of brick riddled with tiny chimneys. This works like a kiln, you heat the brick, the brick heats the barracks." He sucked on the end of the pen for a moment. "Put the door to the barracks here, on the far end of the wall, fill up the rest of the end wall with the brick arrangement, and there you are. Two sides sheltered by the earth, two with brick furnaces. Or only one furnace, if you want a barracks kitchen with ovens and a cooking fireplace at the other end."

  Tremane looked the drawing over; it looked and sounded feasible. Put the sleeping quarters near the furnace, the common rooms in the middle, the kitchen at the other end. "It'll still have to have some arrangement like a smoke hole," he pointed out, "or all the smoke from lanterns and candles will just build up in there."

  "Yes, but you'll be using more of the heat from the furnace," his man pointed out. "And you can burn dung without smelling up the inside."

  "I don't see anything to object to," the Chief Chirurgeon said judiciously. "Other than the fact that it will be darker than the eighth hell in there without windows, and I'm bound to warn you that will have an effect on the men's morale and health."

  "Better dark than freezing," one of the others muttered, which only confirmed Tremane's own thought.

  "Health you can deal with in their diet; sprouted beans and the rest of that stuff you chirurgeons are so fond of," he replied. "And as for morale—since they'll be on duty outside most of the daylight hours, I don't see a problem—but wait a moment, though," he added, as something odd occurred to him.

  The chirurgeons hadn't listed a single complaint or difficulty since they made a permanent camp here. "You people aren't having any problems with the mage-storms affecting you. Isn't that laying-on-of-hands healing that you do a kind of magic?"

  One of the lesser Healers choked behind his hands; the Chief Chirurgeon, a tall, thin, balding fellow with an attitude of aristocratic arrogance, favored him with a frosty smile. "Firstly, although the uninformed think of healing as a kind of magic, it is not the sort of magic that you mages are accustomed to using," he replied, in a lofty, superior tone of voice that made Tremane grit his teeth in response. "Mind you, I am a surgeon; my skills are in the excising of diseased flesh with the knife, in the stitching of damaged tissue with needle and gut-thread. However, I have made certain that I am educated even in those healing arts that I am not equipped to perform."

  As you should have been, his tone seemed to imply. Tremane simply schooled his features into mild interest and nodded. He had learned long ago to keep his temper under more trying circumstances than this. Strangling the man would accomplish nothing.

  Except to make me very happy...

  "So just how does this differ from the magic that I, as a mage, am familiar with?" he asked with exact politeness.

  "In the first place, it is performed entirely with the mind," the Chief Chirurgeon lectured. "The only difference between a self-taught or untaught Healer and one who has gone through training is in the recognition of how to heal things besides obvious broken bones or wounds. The Healer's mind convinces the patient's body to restore itself to the perfect state it had before the injury or illness. That is why they cannot correct those who are born with deformities." He smiled smugly. "That is something only those with my skill can do."

  "All right, bu
t I still don't understand why you aren't encountering interference from the mage-storms," he persisted.

  "Because the Healers don't work during a storm, when the disruptions in energy are the only things that could interfere with their talent," the Chief Chirurgeon replied, as if to an idiot. "Accelerated healing only takes place when the Healer is actively working. The rest of the time, the patient is simply doing what he would under ideal circumstances. Under ideal conditions, our bodies would always repair themselves and throw off disease; the Healer simply reminds the body of what it should be doing."

  "Oh." He had some vague notion that, basically, the reason the Healers were unaffected was that they were essentially working very small, limited magics of extremely limited duration and at very close range, but he doubted that the Chief Chirurgeon would agree with his particular definition.

  Evidently his subordinate didn't even care for his expression. "Healing just is not magic as you understand it," the man persisted. "There's an old term for healing and a number of other abilities all lumped together: mind-magic. No one these days ever bothers with most of the other abilities, except a few practitioners of some of the odder religions."

  Mind-magic? Where have I heard that term used before? There's something very familiar about that term. "What are those other things that were lumped in with healing?" he asked, out of a feeling that the answer might be important.

  "Oh," the chirurgeon waved dismissively. "They're hardly important, things many educated people think are mostly delusional. Speaking mind-to-mind without the assistance of a teleson-spell; moving objects or even people with the power of the mind alone and no Portals involved; seeing and speaking with spirits of the dead; communicating directly with deities; seeing into the distance, the past, or the future without benefit of a mirror-spell; and imposing one's will upon another." He shrugged. "Most folk in the Empire are rather skeptical about those sorts of things. It is very easy to pretend to powers that are only in the mind, and thus very subjective."

  He'd been speaking in Hardornen, though whether it was out of politeness for the company or simply because he'd forgotten to switch back to the Imperial tongue, Tremane couldn't have said for certain. The locals, who had been listening to his speech with some interest, laughed uproariously at that last statement. The chirurgeon glared at them in annoyance.

  "I fail to see what was so amusing," he said acidly. "Perhaps you would care to enlighten me?"

  "You people wouldn't be so skeptical if you'd ever met a Herald out of Valdemar," was the reply. "They don't use your 'real' magic over there, or they didn't until just lately. Everything they do is with mind-magic, and they think yours is poppycock and fakery."

  Affronted, the chirurgeon turned his own underlings; the Hardornen builders got involved in a discussion of the best "furnaces" and other devices to heat the barracks, and whether or not the walls really needed to be piled with earth. There seemed to be a brotherhood of builders, of stone and wood and metal, that transcended nationalities.

  That left Tremane with an interesting tidbit to mull over. The Valdemarans did everything with mind-magic? That must have been where he'd first heard the term.

  So Heralds must be the people born with these abilities; somehow they have a way of testing for them, I suppose. Then they get herded up the way the Karsites collect children with Mage-Talent, and sent off for training. Clever, to put them all in service to the Crown; the Empire could do with that policy regarding mages. And they aren't used to using real magic; it's new to them, so they don't rely on it. Fascinating.

  No wonder they weren't having the kind of problems with mage-storms that he was having! They simply didn't have things that would be disrupted by the storms!

  There are plenty of folk in the Empire who would call that a barbaric way of life—but they can heat their homes and move their goods and we can't.... So who has the superior way of life now?

  Heating homes... all very well to heat the barracks with cow dung, but what was he going to cook with? "Wood," he said aloud. "We have a problem; trees don't grow as quickly as wheat, and I don't intend to denude the countryside to keep my people warm if I can help it. Have any of you any suggestions?"

  The Hardornens exchanged glances, and one of them finally spoke up. "Commander Tremane, you know as well as we do the state of things here. Half the people of Hardorn are gone. Whole villages are wiped out just because some lieutenant of Ancar got offended over something someone said, farms were abandoned when the last able-bodied person gave up or was carried off. We were going to suggest that once the harvest was over, your folk and ours go out together on foraging expeditions."

  He considered this for a moment. "Do I take it that there is a reasonable chance that such expeditions will be left alone by the—the loyal Hardornen forces?"

  The man snorted. "The loyal Hardornen forces aren't 'forces' at all. Most of them will be getting their harvests in, if they can. They're battling time and weather just as we are, and they won't have the extra men we will."

  He nodded; that confirmed his own ideas. "How is the harvest looking?" he asked, thinking that this man just might be honest enough to tell him.

  "That's another reason for foraging," the fellow told him frankly. "The harvest isn't bad, but some of us aren't sure it will hold the town over the winter. Sandar wants to send out foraging parties to some of the farms that have been abandoned and see what we might be able to get out of the fields, or even the barns and silos." He grinned. "There's sure to be stuff good enough for your thatching straw, if nothing else."

  "You'd prefer to have some of my forces along, I take it." He made that a statement; another bizarre killer-beast had been taken today, after it had attacked one of the harvesting parties. This time no one was killed, and only a few men were hurt, but no one was going to forget that these things were still out beyond the nearly-completed walls. "So what do my people get out of this?"

  "We find out just who's left—after Ancar, the Empire, and the mage-storms," the man said bluntly. "You get a census of who's around here, and where. You know who's got boys or men that might be tempted to make things difficult for your men in the name of Hardorn. Some of these farmers may have extra food to trade for. We find out what the storms have done to the land. If they're changing animals, what else are they leaving behind? And when we find abandoned farms, deserted villages, your people can move in and tear down the buildings. At the worst, you've got fuel. At the best, you've got fuel and building supplies. And—well, Sandar may be hoping for too much, but he thinks if we find any camps of the men from our side, we might be able to persuade 'em that you Imperials aren't the devils they think you are. Maybe we can get you a truce, if nothing else."

  Tremane kept his face expressionless, his tone noncommittal. "I'll think about it," he said, and turned the subject back toward his barracks and the improvements the locals were suggesting.

  But when everyone had cleared away, and he was back in his own room with another cozy fire going, he had to admit that the proposals didn't sound bad.

  Provided, of course, that this wasn't just a way to lure him and his men out where the rebels could pick them off or ambush them.

  Oddly enough, he didn't think it was. The idea of harvesting abandoned fields, rounding up and butchering half feral livestock, and tearing down vacant buildings was a good one. With locals as guides, he would not have to send out sweep searches for such places, and run the risk of incurring the wrath of farmers who had not abandoned their holdings.

  "I never thought I'd find myself in a position like this," he said aloud into the quiet night air.

  His assignment had been to pacify Hardorn. He had never counted on his pacification force becoming the equivalent of the local government, yet that was precisely what was happening.

  There would be no more battles; the worst he could expect would be skirmishes against men who were increasingly short of supplies and resources. In any other circumstances he would have laughed at the idea he could
trust the people of Shonar to make and hold a truce with their fellow Hardornens. He would never have believed the half-promises made to him tonight.

  But although nothing had been stated openly and baldly, it was very clear to him that these people no longer regarded him and his men as the enemy. Instead, they represented the one source of safety and order in an increasingly disordered country. They looked at their own men, ragtag bands of "freedom fighters" who were ill-armed and untrained; they looked at the strange monsters created in the wake of the mage-storms. They turned their eyes on the Imperial forces, well-armed, well-trained, and prepared to defend not only themselves, but the town of Shonar. It did not take a master scholar to figure the odds on which ones they would trust their safety to.

  There would be no more reports to the Emperor; the agents still with Tremane would not take long to assess their own position here. Not that his ambitions regarding the Iron Throne were anywhere on his list of current priorities. No, he was past the point of thinking in terms of "acceptable losses." There was no loss that was acceptable now, and any deaths in his ranks would be avenged swiftly and with finality.

  Now came the time for concentration on the minutiae that would save them all; the heroes of the winter would be the best managers, not the best generals.

  He had pestered his clerks until his office was stuffed with papers, box after box of them, rank after rank of dossiers. He had the equivalent of the sheaf of papers that followed every Imperial citizen through his life for every man in his forces, three copies. One set of files was arranged, not by military rank or specialty, but by civilian specialty; what the man had done or been trained as before he joined the army. The second set was arranged more conventionally, in alphabetical order within each company. The third set was arranged by military specialty; all the scouts, all the infantry, all the cavalry, and so on.