Storm rising

by Mercedes Lackey

  That last had Karal staring at her with an open mouth for a moment.

  "Don't get too excited," she said, with a slight hint of a smile. "It won't be a great deal of authority. But you have a fair amount on your own, you know. You and An'desha are aliens on our soil, and do not necessarily have to answer to any authority in Valdemar for your actions so long as you don't break any major laws." She put the mug down decisively. "Now, if I'm going to catch Elspeth alone, I have to go now. I'll send you word through Rolan and Florian."

  She walked to the door, and Karal opened it for her again, but just before she left, she turned and looked at him with a peculiar, penetrating stare. "You are something of a puzzle, young priest, she said at last. "You are the only person I have ever encountered that has a Companion speaking with him who was not also Chosen. I wish I knew why."

  "So do I, Sun's Ray," he said fervently. "I would sleep better at night if I did."

  Inside the scrying room, it was as silent as a cave. Even noises from outside were muffled to the point of vanishment. An'desha settled into his seat, now softened with a down cushion, brought by the ever-practical Natoli who could not see any reason why the four of them needed to get numb behinds from the hard benches when there were plenty of cushions kicking around in the Palace storerooms. The others took their places at equal distances around the table—in Altra's case, on the table, licking his back fur—and waited expectantly for him to begin the spell.

  Their initial few attempts had ended in nothing more exciting than warehouses and a few barracks, for the Imperials might have taken their embroidered arms from the tunics of their uniforms, but they still had their battle banners displayed prominently in their barracks and the Imperial mark burned into the sides of crates. One or two had even begun murals including the arms on the walls as well. The trouble with this spell was that once it was set on a target, you couldn't move the point-of-view more than a foot or two from the target without starting over, and he couldn't do that more than two or three times a day. The spell might take most of its energy from the Heartstone, but it still required his personal power to control it.

  "You know—I've got an idea. You might try the arms in the form of a seal," Natoli said after some thought. "That might at least get you a place where we can see a clerk in the headquarters. Then you can shift your target to him and set the spell again; sooner or later he's bound to go to someone in authority."

  An'desha made a gesture of helplessness. "That sounds like as good an idea as any; we certainly haven't made any other progress."

  "We wouldn't say that," Karal objected, speaking for both himself and Altra. "You found Shonar and the Imperial Army—and you didn't catch on to something over in the Empire itself. That's not bad for not having a specific target."

  An'desha smiled faintly, and flexed his hands to warm up the muscles before he placed them palm-down on the table in front of him. He stared at a point a little above the crystal ball in the center of the table. and reached for the weighty power seething below him, embodied in the Heartstone of Valdemar.

  There was no way of describing just how it felt to him, to seize this incredible energy, a force both ordered and chaotic, and with a rudimentary consciousness of its own. Were other Heartstones like this one? If so, no wonder Falconsbane had wanted to learn the secrets of constructing them! Nodes were powerful, even deadly, but this Heartstone was a hundred times more powerful than any node he had ever encountered. Linking himself in with it was similar to walking the Moonpaths, in that he found himself "somewhere else"; this "somewhere," however, was a crystalline structure thrumming with ordered power. Once there, he was possessed of the strength to do just about anything he chose, if only his control could hold up.

  That was the real key, control, and it was what required so much of his own strength. If I were riding an unbroken war steed that happened to like me, and had decided to permit me to sit on her back, it might be like this. There is a sense that at any moment I might be thrown and trampled. "Ordered" does not mean "tame."

  Once he had the reins of power in his hands, he dropped his gaze into the crystal itself, setting the patterns and sigils written only in the invisible fire of magic to burn about it. He knew the moment it was all complete; the ring of power fused into an unbroken whole, and the "setting" sat empty, waiting for the target object.

  This was the only purely mental part of the spell; he concentrated on the Imperial arms in the form of a wax impression, a seal such as he had often seen on other documents of importance. This is what you want, he silently told the spell as he set that image within it. Go and find it, and bring us the picture of where it is.

  Distance meant very little to this spell if it had the power it needed to reach as far as it had to. He felt the spell straining to be off, a restive hound with the quarry in view, pulling at the leash.

  He let it go, and immediately sensed power flowing from the Heartstone, through him, and into the set-spell. Oh, it was sweet. Now all he had to do was control the flow of power so that it was even, and sit back and watch the crystal with the others.

  A red blur formed in the heart of the crystal, transparent, but three-dimensional. It could have been a reflection of something on the table, or something one of them was wearing; except that they all saw it, for they all leaned forward at the same time.

  The haze of red solidified, the blurring focused, and the indistinct image became a clear, sharp picture, a blob of red sealing wax, centered by the now all-too-familiar arms of the Eastern Empire. The image showed him nothing more, because that was all that the spell had been set for; it did not even show the document the seal was on.

  That was just fine, for now that he had his target, he could widen the parameters of the spell.

  He seized more power from the Heartstone and wove it into new patterns, ones that told the spell to broaden its "gaze" and to open its "ears." Round about the crystal he set the new patterns, weaving them in and out of the old ones, until once again the energies fused into a whole.

  The image changed; the blob of red wax grew smaller, down to a mere pinpoint, as it seemed to recede into the middle distance. It became a dot of red on a sheet of yellow-brown parchment; the document lay on a desk, on top of a stack of similar documents. Behind the desk sat a man in a sober and severely cut tunic and trews of that no-nonsense styling that says "military," both of which had the familiar look of the Imperial uniform. The desk itself was the only piece of furniture in a very small room, lit by a single lantern suspended from a chain above the desk. The top of the desk was littered with papers, inkwells, and all the paraphernalia of a clerk.

  "Yes," Karal hissed under his breath. An'desha did not bother with self-congratulations; this part of the spell manipulation was too delicate. He rotated his viewpoint, slowly, taking it down and around until at last his "eyes" were in the middle of the desktop, staring up at the clerk working so diligently there.

  There was no sound but the scratching of the clerk's pen and the hiss of his breathing—and, occasionally, a sniff as he took a moment to rub his nose with the back of his hand. An'desha stared intently into his surprisingly young face, a very earnest face, and one showing a fierce concentration on the work at hand. It was not a particularly memorable face for all that it was young; the clerk was very much of a "type." His brown hair was cut short, and from the precision of the style, An'desha guessed it was probably a regulation haircut. His brown eyes were neither very large nor very small, neither deepset nor bulging, neither far apart nor set too near the bridge of the nose. His forehead was not too broad or too narrow. His cheekbones were neither prominent nor flat nor buried in fat. His nose was neither hawklike nor pugged, neither thin nor spread, absolutely average in length and shape. His mouth was neither thin nor generous, his chin neither square nor pointed, rounded nor prominent. It would have been very difficult to pick him out in a crowd, but he did have one tiny scar crossing his left eyebrow and another marring the otherwise average chin. An'desha con
centrated fiercely on those two flaws, branding the man's face in his mind.

  Once he was sure he had the clerk as firmly in his mind as possible, he broke the spell, shattering the brittle energies with a single burst of power. He sagged down on the table for a moment as the shattered remains dissipated; feeling his own strength melting away with it.

  Natoli and Karal were both ready for that moment; instantly they were each at his elbows, Natoli with a cup of something sweet and hot, Karal with cheese and bread. The moment of weakness did not last long. He had the Heartstone to draw on, after all, and he was soon sitting up again and restoring his physical strength while his magical energies slowly rose to near the level they had been when he began.

  "Looks to me as if we got an Imperial clerk, one with enough status to handle important documents," Karal said, as An'desha drank the restorative brew and nibbled on the cheese.

  "I hope so," An'desha said, doubt now creeping into his mind. "I don't know about that office, though. Would someone with any status be shoved away into that cramped little closet?"

  But Karal only laughed. "Oh, certainly," he said, with the surety of one who has been a clerk himself. "First of all, this man wasn't wearing a heavy cloak or even a particularly heavy tunic—that means wherever he is it's warm. We know that Shonar didn't have a Great Lord, so the manor that the Imperials took over isn't going to be huge—and the Commander has consolidated all of his officers there. As many of them as can will be in the manor, not the barracks. His mages are probably in there, too. That's a lot of people to be crowded into one smallish manor house; any clerk that has his own office, and a warm office at that, must be of a fairly high rank."

  An'desha nodded; that made good sense. "Well, I'm ready to try for him again if you are," he said. "If I can, I'm going to put a magical 'link' on him, so that it won't be as difficult to get him in the future."

  Natoli nodded but also sighed. "We're likely to be doing a lot of watching before he goes in to see whatever official he reports to."

  He shrugged. "There's no escaping that. I'd rather be watching him than watching the men in the barracks play dice and scrub floors."

  Natoli laughed at that, since she had been the first to complain about watching the floor scrubbers and gamers. "I don't even know who to bet on!" she had protested. "That would at least make it a little more interesting!"

  Once again, An'desha set the spell, this time with the face of his chosen clerk as the target. Once again the power settled into the familiar patterns, the energies drained through him, and an image formed in the heart of the crystal.

  This time, he changed the point-of-view to one just above the clerk's shoulder, so that they were looking down at what the man was doing. "Another lesson in Imperial script?" Karal asked dryly.

  An'desha didn't bother to answer, since Karal was the one who had suggested they use these opportunities for just that. They'd all learned what they could from one of Kerowyn's agents, and now from their various vantage points they were polishing and adding to what they'd learned. Predictably, Karal was the best at picking up the language; Natoli and An'desha were about even in their lower level of proficiency.

  It was harder to concentrate on the spell and read than it was to do so and listen. An'desha soon gave up. "What's it say?" he asked Karal.

  The Karsite licked his lips and narrowed his eyes as he peered into the crystal. "Something about snow—oh, it's a report about the last blizzard they got. I wish I knew what their measures meant, I'd have some idea how deep it is. Deep enough that he's writing orders to the barracks commanders to build arches out of snow blocks and turn the paths between the buildings into tunnels so the men don't have to keep digging themselves out."

  An'desha whistled. "Sounds pretty grim."

  "Huh." Karal was already on to something else. "Well, if Kerowyn is still counting on 'General Winter' to starve them out, she's in trouble. The supplies are holding up very well; they even have a warehouse full of frozen meat. Oh—I've got the name of the man in charge of the whole army, it's "Grand Duke Tremane." That's a name we've heard a time or two."

  Indeed it was, and usually it was with something complimentary attached to it. The men of the Imperial Army had both a competent and a popular commander, and that wasn't always the case.

  "Let's not tell Kerowyn unless we find out we can't make any headway with our idea, shall we?" Natoli suggested delicately. "I don't want her to try something that might make the Imperials nervous. I'd rather they weren't nervous as long as Solaris keeps attending Grand Council meetings."

  An'desha nodded vigorously, and so did Karal. "Solaris keeps trying to get me accepted as her trusted representative, but I'm still too young for most of the Council members to think of as a real envoy. And as long as they are thinking that way, she's either going to have to find someone to replace me or keep showing up here herself." He sighed. "I'm tempted to think that she likes getting away. Maybe she does; she doesn't get out of the High Temple grounds anymore, so maybe this is a nice change of scene for her."

  They watched the man write out several more copies of the same set of orders, until Karal and Natoli were cross-eyed with boredom and An'desha felt his control slipping with fatigue. Finally, he let the image dissolve and broke the spell.

  "That's all for now," he said. "We'll have to try again tomorrow."

  The next day, with their scrying session sandwiched in between other duties, was just as boring and disappointing as the first in many ways. But on the other hand, they soon learned that the orders being copied were actually straight from the hand of Duke Tremane himself—and in An'desha's opinion, they showed a remarkable amount of that sense they were all looking for in a contact. Dared he hope that Duke Tremane would prove to be the man they needed?

  Finally, very late on the third day of their vigilant watching, the clerk was summoned out of his tiny office. They followed his image through hallways and up staircases, until he was stopped by a pair of well-armed guards outside a door. An'desha held his breath; the clerk identified himself and the guards let him pass. There didn't seem to be any kind of checks for someone spying by the means that they were using!

  At long last they were about to see the Enemy himself, the author of so many of their troubles, Grand Duke Tremane—

  That's him? That's the enemy?

  "That can't be Tremane," Natoli said in an astonished voice that reflected her disbelief. "No. That's some other clerk."

  But their target saluted the unprepossessing man behind the desk as "Commander Tremane, sir," and there was no doubt. No matter how much like one of his own clerks the man looked, he was Grand Duke Tremane.

  "How can that be him?" Karal wondered aloud. "I expected a monster like Falconsbane, or some rock-faced hulk in armor. This man looks like—like—"

  "Like a petty bureaucrat," Natoli supplied. "Like the man who makes out requisitions, the man who sees to it that you never have exactly what you need, or who demands to know how you could go through a dozen pens in a month."

  "Exactly!" Karal replied. "How could anyone who looks like that have done what he did?"

  "That's precisely why he could have," An'desha said slowly. "Because to a clerk, people who are not immediately around him are nothing but numbers. They aren't people, and it doesn't matter if you just ordered their deaths, because you don't know them and you never will—all you are interested in is that a certain result is achieved. The most evil people in the world might be such clerks, because everything is just another number to the ones who don't consider the implications of what they are doing, who concentrate only on making the numbers add up the right way." He shivered as old, old memories drifted through his mind. "Dying soldiers don't matter—they're 'acceptable losses.' Burned crops don't matter—they're 'denying resources to the enemy.' People starving and homeless don't matter—they're 'non-taxpayers.' All that does matter is getting the numbers to come out your way, no matter what it takes."

  Both Karal and Natoli glanced a
t him with odd expression of interest. "How did you figure that out?" Karal asked warily.

  "Ma'ar," he replied shortly. "Ma'ar thought like that—as an apprentice he was also his mage-master's petty clerk and he learned to think like that. Worse, he learned how to make other people think that way, how to reduce the enemy to a faceless, dispassionate number." He shook his head, and shook the memories away at the same time. "Well, that's how Tremane could order terrible things on a regular basis—but that doesn't mean he has. He can't have slipped as far into that way of thinking as Ma'ar or he wouldn't be as popular with his men. At least, I hope I'm right in that—give me some time to study him so I can switch the spell."

  While the clerk was absolutely average, Tremane was not. He was not handsome by any means, and certainly was not An'desha's idea of the way a leader should look, but it was possible to remember his face very clearly without having to strain to find tiny flaws or other marks of identification.

  Just as their clerk was dismissed, An'desha felt he had Tremane's face adequately in mind, and broke the spell.

  The moment he did, exhaustion overcame him so suddenly that he actually blacked out for a moment, and came to just in time to catch himself falling face-first into the table.

  He would have done exactly that if Altra hadn't made a leap across the crystal ball and inserted his body between An'desha's face and the marble table. He got a mouthful of fur, but not the crack to the head he would have if it hadn't been for Altra.