Storm breaking

by Mercedes Lackey

  "I get the point, all too clearly," Tremane interrupted dryly. "Seeing as I am the one blessed with this particular application of 'primitive' magic, and now am prisoner in an all too clear way." He rubbed his head with his hand, absently. "No disrespect to you, Darkwind k'Sheyna, but speculation about the origin of this bit of religious arcana is moot, and it can probably wait until the happy day when everything is settled again and you and Janas can argue about history to your hearts' content."

  Darkwind was not at all embarrassed. In fact, he graced Tremane with the expression of a teacher whose student has missed the point of the lesson. But all he said aloud was, "Duke Tremane, if you wish to know how and why a magic works the way it does, you must learn or deduce its origin and purpose. In complex spell-work, the causes, triggers, paths, and effects are not always obvious, and are often fragile. In more primal spell-work, the variables may be fewer, but they are not necessarily any more obvious. You cannot unmake a thing—supposing you should choose to do so—without knowing how it is made."

  "Supposing I should choose to do so..." Tremane's voice trailed off, and he stood up to go look out the window. "I am not, by nature, a religious man," he said, with his back to them.

  "We rather gathered that, sir," Elspeth put in, her tone so ironic it made Tremane turn for a moment to give her a searching look.

  "There is not much in the Empire that would make one believe in gods, much less that they have any interest at all in the doings of mortals," he said, looking straight into her eyes. "Tangible effect is the focus in the Empire. Results and tasks of the day take a distinct precedence over thoughts of divine influence or the spirit world. The closest thing to a religion of state is a form of ancestor veneration, which takes its higher form as the honoring of previous Emperors and their Consorts, who are collectively known as the Hundred Little Gods. Not that there are exactly a hundred, but it's a nice, round figure to swear by."

  "I'd wondered about that," Darkwind murmured.

  "Nor have I in the past been one to put credence in either predestined fate or omens. Nevertheless," he continued, "since arriving here, I have been confronted, time and time again, with situations that have literally forced me into the path I am now taking. I find myself beginning to doubt the wisdom of my previous position regarding destiny."

  Elspeth could not resist the opportunity. "If you would care for some further proof that your previous position on the divine is faulty," she offered, "I am sure that High Priest Solaris would be happy to arrange for a manifestation of Vkandis Sunlord."

  It was wrong of her, but after all that Tremane had been responsible for, she could not help but take a certain amount of vengeful pleasure in the way that his face turned pale at the mere mention of Solaris' name.

  "That won't be necessary" he said hastily.

  "As you wish," she murmured, with an amused glance at Darkwind.

  :Well, talk about fire to the left and torrent to the right—not only does he have Solaris' curse of truthfulness on him, but the Hardornen earth-binding.: Gwena sounded unbelievably smug, but for once, Elspeth was in full agreement with her. :I do believe that Grand Duke Tremane is going to be very cooperative with the Alliance from now on—because if he isn't, he hasn't got the option to escape and he knows it.:

  :And I just thought of another good reason for putting the earth-binding on your King,: Darkwind Sent silently, as Tremane turned back to the window. :If you bind him to a place so that he can't escape from it, he has to rule well, because he certainly can't ignore what he is immersed in.:

  :Let's hope that's one of the things he's thinking about right now,: Elspeth replied. :He is a skilled leader and an intelligent man, and he is certainly a pragmatic one. It should dawn on him soon just how deep in he is right now, and then he will have to accept it and deal with the tasks at hand. For the sake of the Alliance as well as of Hardorn, I want him to know he has no other option but to rule wisely and honestly. We can't afford anything less.:

  Six

  Paper rustled quietly, the only sound in the cold, cavernous room. Baron Melles read the last page of Commander Sterm's report with a smile of satisfaction on his lips. Jacona, the throne city, was now effectively secured. Although the capital of the Empire was not precisely under martial law, his soldiers shared the streets and the patrols with the city constables, and both were happy to have the situation that way. He had tried his plan out here, where everything was directly under his careful supervision, and his ideas had all worked. They had not worked perfectly, but he had never expected perfection; they had worked well enough that he and Thayer were both pleased.

  As he had predicted, the price of staple food supplies had increased as the availability had decreased, to the point where the average person either could not find or could not afford two out of three meals. That was enough to trigger food riots, his first shoot-to-kill order, and his second tier of plans. Jacona was already divided into precincts, with an elected official, the precinct captain, responsible for arranging local matters such as street repair with the city. That made organization much easier. The citizens of Jacona were now under strict rationing, with so many ration chits per commodity per week each, as arranged and administered by their precinct captains. Price controls went into effect with the rationing. No one was starving, and prices, while high, were no longer as extortionate as they were. Food supplies from the surrounding countryside had been assured, and those ration chits guaranteed that everyone would have access to a minimum diet. The chits did not cover luxury items, only staples, permitting those with higher incomes the ability to buy what they chose.

  Naturally, there would be some citizens who would choose barter away their own chits and even those of members of their families for cash or other commodities, such as alcohol. And naturally, the Empire officially took no stand on this, so long as those who were involved were adults.

  A child was different, and precinct captains were on orders to watch for children begging for food. If they found a child starving, and if its parent could not produce its ration chits or enough food to cover the household, the child (and its ration allocation) would be taken away and put in an Imperial orphanage.

  That would be the end of that; once taken away, a parent could not retrieve a child, and it became the ward of the State. Once it turned fourteen, if male it would go into the Army; if female, underdeveloped, or sickly, an Army auxiliary corps or a workhouse—unless it showed extraordinary ability and qualified for higher training. But that was child welfare, and had nothing to do with rationing.

  Naturally, there were luxuries and larger rations available for cash, and the Empire took no stand on this, either, so long as the commodities for sale on the gray market were not purloined from Imperial stores. Meals and services continued normally in the homes of the wealthy, although household expenses had doubled in the past few weeks. From what Melles had learned from his agents, prices on the gray market had stabilized, which meant that the wealthy would simply have to work a little harder to maintain their wealth. Many of them had already begun investment in coal, wood, and other fuels, or speculation in food items. There were a few with new-built fortunes in the city, because they had seen the trend of things and had moved accordingly. There were a few who were ruined, because their stock-in-trade consisted of small items that depended on magic, or because they were dealers in items like Festival costumes that no one wanted to buy under the current conditions. But so far as Melles could see, aside from these few unlucky or clever individuals, nothing much else had changed.

  There were no more riots after the first serious one that gave Melles the excuse to issue his shoot-to-kill order, and which had resulted in the death of a dozen fools who happened to be leading it. There were occasional demonstrations, and a great many speeches on street corners, which were officially ignored. There were also no more collapsing buildings, or loss of service because magic had failed. This was because there were no more services left—or buildings still standing—that depe
nded on magic.

  There was plenty of work, though, and the one large change was that unemployment simply did not exist anymore. Those who demonstrated or made speeches did so when their working hours were over—unless. of course, they happened to be one of the few wealthy eccentrics who did not need to work to have an income. Where magical aqueducts no longer supplied water, and there were no communal wells, brigades of otherwise unemployed citizens with buckets brought fresh water from reliable sources to fill newly-constructed below- or above-ground cisterns. An entire newly-formed corps of citizens with handcarts now collected garbage, cinders, and ashes from fires, and animal waste from the streets and yards. Fortunately, the sewers were nonmagical in nature, and still functioned reliably.

  Life in the city was not back to the way it had been, and never would be again until these mage-storms were over, but the ordinary citizen went to work, received his pay, ate regular meals, and slept securely at night. If he was colder this winter than last, or a little hungrier, well, that was the case for all of his neighbors, too. But not only were his streets kept clear of dangerous riots, they were also kept clear of vagrants and beggars—for vagrants and beggars swiftly found themselves in Imperial workhouses or work gangs, cleaning the streets and carrying water for the good of the ordinary citizen. This made the ordinary citizen happy. What made him even happier was the fact that Imperial workers were toiling day and night to find ways to restore more of the things that he had come to take for granted in the days of reliable magic. Already some things had been replaced—safe stoves that could burn a variety of fuels, from dried dung to coal, were now being made available at a moderate price from Imperial workhouses. Imperial bathhouses and laundries had been established, so that if a man could not afford to heat water for regular baths and laundry, he could still have those baths and get his clothing clean for a few copper bits. The average citizen could look forward to eventually regaining the kind of comfortable life he had lost.

  And if he had to give up some of his freedom to get that life back, well, all but a few malcontents thought that was an acceptable loss. Some folk even welcomed these new workhouses and work gangs, and were happy to see soldiers patrolling the streets and sweeping up those with nothing better to do than to make trouble. It was true that crimes like assault, robbery, rape, and burglary had dropped to almost nothing after the deadly-force patrols had been deployed on the street level.

  Well, assault, robbery, rape, and burglary by citizens against citizens have dropped to almost nothing. No one in his right mind is going to report a soldier or constable for such a crime. And if there is no report, there is no crime, and hence officially no problem.

  So far, everything that he had set in motion in Jacona was working well or would be with a few slight adjustments. Now was the moment to plan the next steps. He put both elbows on the desk, tented his fingers together and rested them lightly over his lips, thinking.

  He stared at the flame in the oil lamp on his desk that replaced the mage-light that had once burned there. The desk itself had been placed near to the antiquated fireplace, which held a better, more improved version of the official stove, a contrivance of ceramic and steel that burned coal rather than wood. More Imperial cleverness, that; coal fires burned hotter and longer than wood, and although the smoke coming from them was dirtier and might cause a problem one day, this new "furnace" invention would get them through the winter. All the fires in the Palace and in most of the homes of the noble and wealthy had these furnaces, and the coal mines, which once produced only fuel for the smelting furnaces for the metal trade, now sent huge wagonloads into the city on daily deliveries. A variation on this furnace heated the boilers that once again delivered hot water into the bathing rooms of Crag Castle and other edifices—and also supplied the hot water for the Imperial bathhouses and laundries. Interestingly enough, this entire situation was proving to be surprisingly profitable for the Imperial coffers, for not only was the Empire collecting more tax money, since taxes were based on profits, but the Empire was also something of a merchant, selling heating- and cook-stoves and the services of the bathhouses.

  Theft of coal was punishable—like all theft—by being sent to a work gang. So were the crimes of inciting to riot, participating in a riot, looting, chronic public drunkenness, vandalism, vagrancy, and delinquency. Any crime against property rather than against a citizen now bought the perpetrator a stint in hard labor rather than jail or the Army. The new policy made for quiet streets.

  Tremane would never have ordered all of this; Tremane didn't have the vision or the audacity, and perhaps not even the intellectual capacity to mastermind such sweeping plans on such a broad scale at such short notice.

  Melles continued to stare at his lamp flame, but nothing in the way of inspiration occurred to him. He reached for another, much shorter report, and leafed through it again. Perhaps before he thought more about the next stage of his plans, it was time to deal with his covert operations.

  All in all, once the food riots were quashed, there had been fewer complaints than he had anticipated, and very little civil unrest. That came as something of a surprise, because he had assumed there would be a higher level of resistance to his new laws than there actually was.

  So, all that meant was the good citizens of Jacona were being very good, going where he led like proper sheep.

  There were, of course, a few wild goats out there still—the inevitable underground "freedom" movement, which he had also anticipated. How could there not have been? There were always those who would not be hoodwinked into accepting restrictions on their freedom, no matter how one disguised those restrictions.

  The Citizens for Rights group correctly identifies you as the source of all of the new edicts and punishments, the report, written by the head of his network of low-level agents in the city, read. They assume that the Emperor knows nothing, and that with enough work they will be able to draw his attention to your abuses and have you ousted. Failing that, and assuming that you somehow have the Emperor under your personal control, they plan on a general citizens' uprising to overthrow the entire government.

  That was also precisely what he had anticipated; not only did it not alarm him, he was actually rather pleased that he had predicted the development so accurately. His agent was not particularly worried, but he wanted more instructions about what to do now that he had identified the movement, its goals, and its members.

  He picked up a pen and took a clean sheet of paper from the tray at the side of his desk. He wrote in code without having to think about the translation; he'd had enough experience at it that he could write directly to any of his agents in the correct code. This was a content-sensitive code, rather than an encoded letter; to all appearances, this missive was a perfectly ordinary letter about commonplaces, from a servant in the Palace to a relative in the city.

  What it really said, however, was something else entirely.

  Do nothing to openly disrupt the movement against me. As for the general citizens, continue to feed them misinformation; concoct tales of my helplessness in the face of the Emperor's growing tyranny. Make them think that I am trying to stem the Emperor's excesses and that Charliss himself is directly responsible for everything they object to. What I want is to hear that even the members of the Movement are starting to call me "The Peoples' Friend." Continue to identify all new members of the Movement, and if any really effective leaders emerge, identify their weaknesses and find ways to handicap them without actually removing them. Keep me informed at all times.

  He started to seal up the envelope, then thought of something else and added a second page.

  There are always bureaucratic mistakes; men taken up in a street-sweep who were actually on their way to work, outright victims of some soldier's personal feud. These people will know of each and every one—send me the particulars so I can arrange for investigations and turn a few loose with restitution. If any of them have young children suffering hardship without their father, mark them
especially.

  Now he sealed and addressed the letter and put it in the tray for his house agent to take to the appropriate drop. That last addition was nothing less than inspiration; all he would have to do would be to have one of the clerks deal with the paperwork to free the man, and send the family a little money, some luxury food items, and a basket of sweets for the children, and Melles would be a hero on the street. And he needn't trouble himself about petitioners plaguing him either. Now that he was officially the Emperor's Heir, the layers of bureaucracy between him and the citizen on the street were so many, so complex, and so labyrinthine that the average citizen would die of old age before he completed all of the paperwork required for an audience with him. This would only generate a little more work in the way of petitions, and there were plenty of low-level Imperial civil servants to take care of additional petitions.

  Perhaps another man might have sent soldiers to arrest every member of the Movement—but another man did not have the depth of experience that Melles did. As long as he knew who belonged to these organizations, who were the real leaders and workers, and what their failings were, he was better off leaving them all in place. In times like these, insurrectionist movements were like cockroaches; squash one and a hundred more would hatch behind the wallboards. Rebels actually tended to thrive on a certain level of persecution, since persecution validated their cause in the eyes of others. In fact, many of them absolutely required feeling persecuted—and speaking loudly of it—in order to validate their own meager existence, since obviously only a Great Good would be opposed by a Great Evil. What made this even funnier, in a cripple-pitying sort of way, was that they would only proclaim their oppression to those peers least likely to disagree with them.