Storm Breaking

Elspeth shook her head. "Of course," she replied.

:I can't help wondering what Solaris is going to make of this when she finds out about it,: Elspeth added to Darkwind. :Although, in retrospect, it's fascinating, the ways in which gods answered the prayers of their followers—the Star-Eyed creating the Dhorisha Plains for the Shin'a'in who had renounced magic, and granting the Tayledras the power to protect themselves with their magic while they healed the land a bit at a time. And now the Sun Lord, creating a barrier around Iftel—:

Darkwind wondered if He had done something similar for Karse just to hold through the Cataclysm itself. The Karsites were certainly close enough to the source of the Cataclysm to have needed such protection. But wait; the Sun-priests are mages. Maybe the Sun-priests are their equivalents of the Tayledras, and Vkandis gave them access to great power to protect themselves the way the Tayledras did. The greatest dangers after the Cataclysm lay in the monsters that had been created. Could that be where and why the Sun-priests got the ability to summon and control demons so effectively? Now that was an intriguing thought!

There was no way of knowing without having Karal to ask, and even then it might not be canonical information. But Altra was obviously privy to noncanonical truths, and if he was inclined to share them with nonbelievers—

If he is, we might learn more than we ever wanted to know.

But Elspeth had been thinking further ahead than he. As Tremane asked more detailed questions of Tashiketh, she drew Darkwind and Gwena into a close mind-link.

:What are the odds that we can involve gods in all of this?: she wanted to know. :Vkandis, Kal'enel, either or both? The power of a god might save us.:

:Or it might cause a whole lot more trouble than any mage storm, however powerful,: Darkwind warned. :We can't know.:

:But I can ask Florian to ask Altra,: Gwena said. :And perhaps he can ask An'desha as well.:

Darkwind shook his head doubtfully :Don't count on any real help,: he told them :The Star-Eyed is disinclined to interfere, Vkandis may be fundamentally the same. They may be able to help us only after the disaster strikes, and be unable to do anything to prevent it from coming—because we have that power, if only we make the correct choices, and They will not take that right to choose from us.:

Gwena nodded mentally, but Elspeth's mind-voice seethed with frustration. :But how can we make the right choices if we don't know what they are?: she fumed.

:If we knew what to do, then they wouldn't be choices, they would be plans,: Darkwind chided gently.

He didn't blame her, and he didn't have the heart to tell her that the "right" choice, from the point of view of a god, might not be the one that prevented a second Cataclysm. Gods tended to take a much longer view of things than mere mortals, and what they considered to be good in the long run might be pretty horrible for those who had to live through it.

I'm sure that Baron Valdemar's people heartily wished him to the bottom of the Salten Sea during that first winter in the wilderness, he thought soberly. And certainly it was terrible for the last Herald-Mages of Vanyel's time to be the last of their kind. But in the long run, those were good things for most of the people of Valdemar.

This was probably not the time to point this out to her, however.

:All we can do is what we've always done,: he told her with utmost sincerity. :We must do our best. Then, even if things turn out badly, we will know it was not from any lack of trying on our part.:

She sighed. :I do wish you weren't right so often,: she said forlornly. :I rather enjoyed being able to rail against Fate and the Unfairness Of It All.: But she pulled herself a bit straighter and nodded. :Whatever happens, we'll survive it, and we'll build on what's left.: She glanced around, and her mouth twisted wryly. :All our peoples do seem to be rather good at that.:

He squeezed her hand in agreement. :And we will do it together, ashke.: He could not help thinking about the group at center of Dhorisha, picking through the remains of the Tower, without experiencing a feeling of chill. Whatever happened—yes, he, Elspeth, and the others here would probably survive it.

But what of his friends in the Tower? Would they?

As he turned his attention back to the conversation at hand, his stomach gave a sudden lurch, his eyes unfocused for a moment, and he felt very much as if the ground had dropped out from underneath him. Then the world steadied again, but as he looked from Tremane to Elspeth and back, and saw the same startled look in both their eyes turn to sick recognition, he knew what had just hit him.

The mage-storms had begun again. Hints of their building power were beginning to overcome the Counter-Storm. They were not strong enough yet to cause any problems, but it was only a matter of time.

Darkwind understood.

This was the first sign of the coming Final Storm, and their respite before it struck would be measured in, at best, weeks. Their survival was in doubt, and even if they did survive, whether they would prosper afterward was in deep question. There were hundreds of variables, and just as many major decisions. There were key uses of power and defense, solving of mysteries and understanding of connections. Like each segment in a spiderweb, the failure of any of those elements could collapse it all, and cost every one involved—everything.

Nine

"What is wrong with your friend Firesong?" Lyam asked Karal in a whisper, as Firesong went off to a remote corner of the Tower to brood—or as he called it, "meditate"—for the second time that day. "The others are all working together over the notes for the cube-maze, but he keeps going off by himself, he says to think. Is that usual for him? Is he ill, do you think? Or have the frustrations begun to weigh upon his soul?"

"I'm not sure," Karal replied, although this behavior of Firesong's wasn't particularly news to him. Living together as closely as they all were, it, wasn't possible for any of them to deviate from normal behavior without the others noticing. And Firesong was certainly acting oddly—though not with that selfish oddness that made him so dangerous before.

There were several signs that this bout of solitary brooding was far different than the last. For one thing, Aya kept cuddling close to him, tucking his head up under Firesong's chin while Firesong held him and scratched gently under his wings, and it had been Aya's avoidance of his bondmate that had been one sign that his temper and thoughts were tending in dangerous directions. He wasn't tinkering with odd magics either; he was sitting in out-of-the-way corners, staring into space, as if Firesong sought the privacy in his mind that he could not get in the Tower. But those bursts of "meditation" always seemed to end in a sharp and thoughtful glance at Karal, and given some of the past difficulties between them, that didn't make Karal feel entirely easy about his possible thoughts.

"Huh," Lyam said, and scratched the top of his head with a stubby, ink-stained talon. "Well, he doesn't seem to be getting much done, an he's giving me collywobbles with the way he just sits and stares. If he's gotten into a blue funk, maybe one of you ought to shake him out of it."

Karal made a face. "I'm not sure any of us want to shake Firesong out of anything, but I suppose it can't hurt if I talk to him. If there's a problem, maybe Silverfox could help him with it. or something. Or maybe it's a problem he doesn't want to get Silverfox involved with, and maybe I could help him." He made a face. "After all, I'm supposed to be a priest, and that's the sort of thing that priests are supposed to do, right?"

Having said that, he knew he had talked himself into the position where he was going to have to do something about the situation. Lyam nodded encouragingly to him at that last statement, so before he could find a reason to put it off, he got to his feet and trailed off after Firesong.

Altra invited himself along, sauntering casually at Karal's heels. As Karal glanced inquisitively down at him, Altra blinked guileless blue eyes at him. :I thought I'd come along, too, just in case you needed me,: the Firecat said idly. Karal did not ask "for what?" since he knew the answer already. There wasn't a great deal that Altra couldn't shield him against, if Firesong turned angry or dangerous, or both.

He found the Adept in the chamber containing one of the mysterious contrivances (one made of wire, odd plates of some sparkling material, and gemstones) that looked far too delicate to warrant the label of "weapon." Aya was with him, cuddling inside his jacket. Aya's long tail trailed comically down from beneath the hem, as if the cascade of feathers belonged to Firesong. The Adept stared at the softly glowing stones with an intense look on his face. He turned to face the entrance when he heard Karal's deliberate footstep, but he did not seem particularly surprised to see the Karsite.

Karal approached him gingerly, but there was nothing in Firesong's slight smile to indicate anything other than welcome. As he edged around the wire-sculpture weapon, Karal tried to think of a lateral approach to the subject, and failed to come up with a good one. So he decided to go straight to the heart of the matter, and make no attempt at being clever.

"You've been wandering off by yourself for the last couple of days, and we're a little concerned about you," he said bluntly. "It didn't seem right to go behind your back and pester Silverfox to see if you were all right, so I decided to ask you directly. Is there anything wrong?"

"Other than everything?" Firesong asked archly. "We are in a very precarious position here, you know."

"Well, yes, but—" Karal fumbled. "I mean—"

"There's nothing wrong, or rather, nothing wrong with me, Karal," Firesong interrupted, with a smile for his bondbird, as Aya stuck his head out of the front of the Adept's jacket, saw who it was that Firesong was talking to, and tucked himself back inside. "But I'm glad you came to find out, because I have a few questions that really concern only you. Here, sit." He patted the floor beside him, and Karal lowered himself down warily. "Karal, Karse and Valdemar fought a generations-long war, and I can understand that anyone from Karse might feel very negative about certain figures of Valdemaran history, but you are bright enough to reason things through for yourself and not just take everything you are told in without ever examining it. So, given that, here's a history question; what do you know and what do you think about Herald-mage Vanyel Ashkevron?"

Karal stared at him, a bit confused by the abrupt change of subject, for the initial question Karal had asked about Firesong had nothing whatsoever to do with a figure of ancient history like Vanyel Ashkevron.

But it was a very interesting question, given all of the changes Karal's own life and thoughts had been going through. It might, on the surface, seem like the question had no relevance in any way to the situation in the Tower, but he knew Firesong better than that, and Firesong had to have an ultimate purpose in asking it.

"I'm going to have to think aloud, so bear with me," Karal said, finally. "As you probably guessed, according to our history Vanyel Demonrider was absolutely the epitome of everything that was terrible about Valdemar. Every child in Karse used to be told that if he was bad, Vanyel would come and carry him off. He was a Herald, a rider of a demon-horse, and the implacable enemy of all Karse stood for. He was a mage, which was anathema, of course, and he had the audacity to be a very powerful mage, one who could turn back the demons that the most highly skilled Priest-mages could raise, which made him even worse. And if that wasn't bad enough, it is said by some chroniclers of the time that he could break the compulsions that the Priests put on their demons and send them back against their own summoners, which made him the King of the Demons so far as our people were concerned."

"That's your history," Firesong replied, watching Karal with peculiar intensity. "How do you feel about it?"

"I'm getting to that." Karal rubbed the back of his own neck, trying to sort out his thoughts as he loosened tight muscles. "I do think it's supremely ironic that the worst accusations about Vanyel have to do with him riding a demon-horse and being a mage, when our own Priests were mages who summoned demons and controlled them."

Firesong's sardonic smile had a note of approval in it. "No one has ever dared to claim that the causes of warfare and the sources of prejudice are ever rational." He scratched Aya under the chin, and was rewarded by a particularly adorable chirrup. "And religious fervor is often used as an excuse for a great many socially unacceptable behaviors."

"That's religion as an excuse. Sometimes it seems to me that when religious fervor enters the mind, the wits pack up entirely and fly out the ear," Karal replied a bit sourly. "But worst of all is when powerful, ruthless people use the religious fervor of others to further their own greed."

Aya poked his head out of the jacket again, as if he found what Karal was saying very interesting. Altra settled himself at Karal's feet, and there was nothing in the Firecat's demeanor to make Karal think his own religious guide disapproved of anything he had said so far.

"All that is true in my experience." Firesong replied with one of his brilliant, perfect smiles. "Though I'm not that much older than you. So, what do you think Vanyel was really like?"

Karal shrugged. "Of course, I am sure that he must be a very great hero to the Valdemarans; the fact that my people considered him to be such an evil enemy would make that a simple conclusion to come to. Given that he was fighting what I now know to have been very power-hungry and entirely amoral men, most notably one of the worst Sons of the Sun we ever had in all our history, I suppose that he was only doing his duty to protect his people against the rapacious land grabbing of mine. I—cannot say that I like that thought. It fills me with shame, in fact." He paused, and a final thought floated to the surface, one that seemed to define the situation. "I can only say that not even his enemies in Karse ever tried to claim that he led any armies over the border into our land, and the same cannot be said of the Karsite commanders. Now, I can't pretend to tell who was right and who was wrong in those areas where both sides claimed to have been attacked first, or were provoked into attacking, or where magic, sabotage, and assassination were allegedly employed, but I can tell that the Valdemarans never took armies into Karse, but my people certainly waged war up into Valdemar."

"Very even-handed," Firesong replied approvingly. "No side is always in the right. Now, we'll change the subject again. I need a religious opinion from you. What do the Sun-priests have to say about ghosts?"

"As in, what?" he asked. "Unquiet dead? Haunts? Spirits who return to guide?"

"All of those," Firesong said, making a general gesture. "Some religions deny that any such manifestations exist, and some religions are written around them as a form of ancestor worship. What does the Writ of Vkandis say?"

"The Writ says very little." He frowned, trying to think of what it did say. "Now that I come to think of it, what it does say is rather interesting. According to the Writ, no one who is of the Faith, whether the purest soul or the blackest, could possibly become a ghost. Anyone born or brought into the Faith will be taken before Vkandis and judged—'sorted' is the word used in the Writ. And the good shall be sorted from the evil; no spirit shall escape the sorting. The evil will be cast into darkness and great despair, into fear and pain, to repeat their errors until they have learned to love and serve the Light of Vkandis. And the good shall be gathered up into the rich meadows of Heaven, to sing His praises in the everlasting rays, to drink the sweet waters and bask forevermore in the Glory of the Sun. That's the actual quote. There's a great deal more about who shall become what rank of angelic spirit, and what each kind does, but I have a suspicion that all of that is a clerkly conceit. I've got an earlier version of the Writ that doesn't have any of those lists in it."

"Some people even have to have their afterlife ranked, arranged, and organized," Firesong chuckled. "I hate to say this, but being gathered up to lie in a meadow sunbathing and singing for all eternity is not my idea of a perfect afterlife. I should be screamingly bored within the first afternoon."

Karal laughed. "Maybe not for you, but think about the poor shepherds who were the first Prophets, living in the cold, damp hills of Karse, with rain and fog and damn poor grazing most of the time."

"I suppose for them, rich meadows and sun forever would be paradise, wouldn't it?" Firesong raised his eyebrows. "All right, so Karsites can't become ghosts—but what about other people?"

"Well, that's not in the Writ. But there is a tradition that the unblessed dead become the hungry, vengeful ghosts who roam the night. That's why most Karsites won't venture out after dark without a Priest to secure their safety." But Firesong's question had asked about more than mere Karsite tradition, it had been about what Karal himself thought. "As a Priest, I can exorcise ghosts, in theory. I'm supposed to be able to send any unblessed spirit to the sorting even if they aren't of the Faith, if they want to go. The Writ is kind of vague about what happens to heathen who have the misfortune to worship someone besides Vkandis. Most people assume that they'll be sent to eternal punishment, even if they are good people, but the Writ really doesn't say that, it just says that they will be sorted and sent to 'their places.' It doesn't say what those places are. For all I know, those places could be right here on earth."

Tre'valen and Dawnfire are ghosts of a kind, and if what Lo'isha and An'desha have been saying is true, then some of the Kal'enedral are ghosts, too. Or if they aren't ghosts, they certainly aren't physically alive the way Florian and Altra are. So there's no reason why Kal'enel couldn't have "sorted" them Herself, and decreed that their "place" was here.

"Well, what about the Avatars?" Firesong asked, echoing his thoughts. "Do they count as ghosts?"

"If they aren't, I wouldn't know what else to call them," Karal admitted. "And even if they aren't 'blessed' in the Karsite sense, they are anything but evil or hungry. They certainly aren't vengeful either, so there's no reason for me to interfere with whatever they are doing." He thought a bit harder. "The thing about exorcism is that if you want to be exact about it, there are two kinds. One kind just throws the ghost out of whatever it's possessing and bars it from coming back—it can still go possess something else somewhere else. The other kind blesses the ghost, opens a path for it so it can see where it's supposed to be going, and gives it some help to break the last bonds with the world and send it on its way if it's ready. But it has to be ready. Most Priests combine both kinds, hoping that once the spirit is cast out, it will see the Light and realize it shouldn't be here, but I've also seen reports about spirits that just seemed confused about the fact that they were dead, and in that case, the Priest only used the second kind of exorcism."

"All very well, but suppose you were to see something that you knew was a ghost—not an Avatar, or anything obviously under the direction of anyone's god. What would you do about that?" Firesong asked. "Would you feel that you had to do something about it?"

It was a good question. According to some Priests, he would have to try exorcising anything that looked or acted like a ghost, but that would include the Kal'enedral and the Avatars, and he dashed well knew that he wasn't going to even breathe the word "exorcism" around them! "Personally, I suppose I would try to exorcise anything that was harmful, send on anything that was ready, and leave everything else alone."

He still didn't see what relevance any of this had to their current situation, but presumably Firesong had some idea where he was going with all of this.

Firesong appeared to make up his mind about something, for his expression became a bit more animated and less contemplative. "Look," he said, "I've been asking you all these questions because I need your help, yours and Altra's, and there are some religious problems involved. I made the—acquaintance—of some real ghosts, and you wouldn't mistake them for anything else. One of them is an ancestor of mine. Physically, they're bound to a place up north, right up at the northern border of Valdemar."

Oh, no... he must be afraid that when the Final Storm hits, these ghosts of his are going to be destroyed or hurt in some way. Karal interrupted him. "Firesong, I hope you weren't planning on asking me to exorcise them. I mean, I'm sorry that one of your ancestors is physically bound to the earth, and if I could, I would be glad to help him, but I don't think it's possible. I told you, all I would be able to do without the spirits being ready, is to force them out of the place they were bound to. Even so, I doubt I could do anything for them at such a great distance."

Now it was Firesong's turn to interrupt him. "No, Karal, that was not what I had in mind!" he exclaimed, but he seemed more amused at the conclusion that Karal had leaped to than annoyed. "Hear me out. An'desha, Sejanes, and I all agree that we simply need more mages here at the Tower, powerful mages, and we're just not going to get them here to us in time. We need Adepts at the least, and every Adept within physical range of the Tower is needed right where he is. We can't build Gates to bring in human or nonhuman Adepts from farther away, and Altra can't bring in anyone mortal—but what about ghosts?"

Ghosts. One of Firesong's ancestors. North of Valdemar. And an Adept. The trend of the questions suddenly formed into a pattern, and Karal stared at him in mingled horror and fascination. "This ghost—this ancestor—it wouldn't be Vanyel Ashkevron, would it?" he asked, his voice trembling in spite of his effort to control it. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. Discussing Vanyel Demonrider in abstract was one thing. Seriously discussing bringing him here was another!

He wanted to beg Firesong to tell him that it was not Vanyel Ashkevron he was talking about, but one look in Firesong's face told him differently.

:I think it would be a very good idea, Karal,: Florian said diffidently. :Vanyel is an Adept. If it is possible, I think it should be done.:

"I won't ask how this came about," Karal said flatly. "I won't ask how you discovered that Vanyel Demonrider was still... in existence." He closed his eyes and shook his head. "I cannot believe I am hearing this."

:Boy, if you require more votes on this, you have mine,: said the sword Need. :I've met the man, though I doubt he'll recall it. He and Stefen would be a tremendous asset to the group here. They might even give us that edge we need to beat this thing.:

Firesong smirked. "The sword is saying that we need an edge. How appropriate. In any case, the Avatars actually suggested it. There are some things in the cube-maze notes that suggest we're going to need—well, more skilled people than the last time. The only way we can think of to get the spirits down here is to send Altra," Firesong said. "We think that Vanyel, his Companion, and his friend can link themselves to something small enough for Altra to transport."

"We?" Karal asked weakly. "How many of you discussed this?"

"All of the mages," Firesong told him. "That included Need and the Avatars. And we all agreed. We think we're about to find our answer on the cube-maze device, which is our first choice, but we need more help to make it work."

Karal looked down at Altra, who gazed back up at him with interest. "And what do you have to say about this?" he asked the Firecat.

:Seriously? I think it might work, but I don't know for certain. I'm not a mage as you think of one, but the others seem convinced. There is only one consideration, and that is why they wanted to talk to you.:

"So you were already a party to this?" Karal sighed. "I might have known. What's the consideration?"

:A very practical one. This borders on interference; if I were to just do as you ask, I would be exceeding my own authority. In order for me to do this, we would need permission from a higher authority, and I cannot be the one to ask for permission.:

"I have the feeling that you are not referring to Solaris when you speak of needing permission from a higher authority." Karal bit his lip.

:You are correct, and you are the only Sun-priest here,: Altra said calmly :So you are the one who must make the petition. I cannot, and I cannot do such a thing without that permission. I may advise, guide, and run limited errands up to a point, but this is past that point. I hate to sound like a copper-counting clerk, making a fuss about a technicality, but if these spirits were Karsite and not Valdemaran, there would be less of a problem.:

"Because of the old enmity?" Karal asked, surprised. "But it was the Sunlord Himself who ordered truce with Valdemar in the first place!"

:No. Because these spirits were bound where they are for a reason, and I don't know that this reason has been fulfilled. They may not even know that. Now, even if their purpose not yet fulfilled, they could choose to come here anyway, disobeying the One who offered them the task. But without first receiving permission of Vkandis, I cannot choose to help them come without the risk that I would be disobeying as well, and I do not choose to take that risk.:

"I wouldn't ask you to," Karal replied. "I suppose that means I don't have much choice in the matter."

:Judging by the way your friends are staring at you, I would say not.:

Karal looked up, already feeling pressured and guilty, to meet three sets of eyes—

Well, Need didn't have eyes as such, but he sensed her looking through Firesong's, and Florian stood in the doorway, gazing at him with a completely heartrending expression in his huge blue eyes.

The combined weight was too much to bear. "I'll have to go outside," he gulped, and managed not to stagger as he passed Florian.

He remembered somehow to find his coat, heavy boots, and gloves and pull them all on, but the trip up the tunnel was a complete blank in his mind. He knew very well what he had to do; he'd witnessed many petitions offered up by Solaris and her most trusted Priests, and had studied the form as part of his own education in the priesthood. Like many of the core portions of the Sunlord's Faith, a petition to Vkandis was deceptively simple.

The only requirement was that a petition must be made in the full light of day. In the Great Temple, this was accomplished, of course, by virtue of the many windows cut in the upper dome. Here, of course, Karal had only to walk outside. As befitting a religion founded by poor shepherds, who had little but what they could carry on their backs, or perhaps the back of a single donkey, there were no special vestments or vessels, no trappings of any kind. The only vessel needed was the Priest, and the only "vestment" a pure and single-hearted belief that the prayer would be heard. It might not receive a "yes," but it would be heard.

Karal, more than many, had every reason to hold that faith in his heart. He knew that Vkandis would hear him; did he not have Altra with him to prove that? His only question was if he was ready, was worthy, to be answered in any way, even with a "no."

He walked a little distance off into the snow, putting a tall drift between himself and the Shin'a'in camp, until there was no sign of activity but his own footprints trailing behind him. Beside him was the Tower, looming over everything, as it loomed over their lives. All around him was the dazzling whiteness of the snow, no less than knee-deep in some places, and deeper than that in most. This was a thicker snowpack than he had ever seen before.

It was also thicker than the Shin'a'in had ever seen it before, or so he'd been told. This was a terrible winter, and it could so easily get worse—assuming that the Plains themselves survived the Final Storm and what might happen to those ancient weapons still in the Tower.

Even if I'm not worthy, the cause is, he finally decided, and turned his face up to the sun, spreading his arms wide.

Some took great care with each word when they made prayers for a particular purpose, but Karal and his mentor Ulrich had never seen the sense in that. "They are like courtiers, trying to find the most unctuous phrase in hopes that their prince will throw them a bauble," Ulrich had said in disgust. "There is nothing in the Writ about making fine speeches for Vkandis' ear. Vkandis understands us far better than we could ever find words for."

So Karal simply stood with every bit of him open to the light of the sun, the light that stood for the greater Light, and let that Light become all that he was. He kept his petition to the bare facts.

This is how we stand. This is what we have been doing. This is what we need to do. We know that this will not guarantee our success, but we think it is necessary. Will You grant Your permission for Your servants to do this?

This was the first time he had ever made such a prayer alone, and he trembled all over at his own audacity. He made of himself nothing but the question, and waited, like an empty bowl, for the answer.

The sun burned on in the endless blue of heaven, as he struggled to lose himself in the Light. And in the moment that he actually did so, Vkandis showed His face.

The sun blazed up, doubling, tripling in size; he felt the light burning his face even as he held his gaze steady and unflinching.

You can bear the Light. But can you bear the place where there are no sheltering shadows?

The sun split into two, three, a dozen suns, surrounding him in a circle of suns, creating a place where there could be no hint of darkness and nowhere to hide. The suns settled upon the earth around him, dancing upon the face of the snow, but neither melting nor consuming it. Still he waited, all fear burned out of him, empty of everything but faith and the waiting, and he breathed steadily and deeply once for every dozen heartbeats.

You can bear being without shadow. But can you bear being only in Light?

The dozen suns blazed up again, and began circling around him, faster and faster, until they blurred into a solid ring of white light. Then the ring flared and he had to cover his eyes for a moment; and when he looked again, he stood, not in the snow of the Plains, but in the heart of the sun, with light above and below, and all about him, in the heart of the Light and the Light became part of him.

But this, he realized, was not a completely new experience. Although he had not had the memory until this moment, this was what had happened when he acted as a Channel for the release of the great energies of the first weapon they had triggered. The Light had taken away his fears then, and it did so again, then illuminated every corner of his heart. Yes, there were faulty places, poorly-mended places, even spots of faint shadow—Karal saw and acknowledged those, as he renewed a pledge to see them made good. But, he said silently to that great Light, what I am does not matter. This thing that I ask is not for me, nor even for these few who are here with me. This is for all our peoples; and for peoples we do not even know.

The Light answered him with a question of its own. Is this also for those of the Empire?

He replied immediately, and simply.

Yes.

Had he not already pointed out that most of the people living in the Empire had nothing to do with the terrible things their leaders had done? Why should they not be protected?

Even your enemies? came the second question.

He answered it as he had the other. Yes.

If protecting his enemies was the cost of protecting the innocent, then so be it. Fanatics said, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." He would rather say, "Save them all, and let God sort them out, for we have not the right to judge."

There was a timeless moment of waiting, and the Light flooded him with approval.

Then that is My answer, came the reply. Yes.

The Light vanished.

He found himself standing in the snow, his feet numb, his eyes watering, with his entire being filled with the answer.

He was a scintillating bowl full of Yes, and he carried that answer back to the Tower as carefully as an acolyte carried a bowl of holy water.

"You don't remember anything?" Lyam asked, alive with curiosity, as he helped Karal carry a new set of notes up to the storage chamber. Karal shook his head regretfully, and watched where he was putting his feet. The last few steps out of the workroom were worn enough to be tricky.

"All I remember is going out into the snow. After that—nothing, until I woke up again with the answer." He made an apologetic face. "Sorry, I know you'd love to note all of this down, and it's not a priestly secret or anything, but I just can't remember what happened."

The hertasi lashed his tail, perhaps with impatience. "You could have just gone out, come back, and pretended to have the answer," Lyam began. "Not that you would have, but—"

"That wouldn't be as easy as you think. I might have fooled anyone but Florian and Altra, but never either of them," Karal replied firmly. "And I'm not sure it would have fooled Need; I think she was a priestess before she was a sword, and if she was, she'll have ways of knowing when people make up answers they say are from their gods."

"If you say so," Lyam said, though his tone was dubious.

"And it wouldn't ever have fooled the Avatars," he continued forcefully. "How could it? How could you ever fool them about something like that?"

Lyam conceded defeat at that; although he might not be completely convinced of the supernatural nature of Florian, Altra, or Need, he was entirely convinced that the Avatars were something altogether out of his experience. He regarded them with a mixture of his usual intense curiosity mingled with awe and a little uncertainty. Karal found that mildly amusing. He had the distinct feeling that right up until the moment the hertasi first met the Avatars, little Lyam had been something of an agnostic—willing to admit in the reality of something beyond himself, but not at all willing to concede that it had anything to do with him and his everyday world. Like many another historian before him, Lyam was only convinced by verifiable facts. That was what would make him a good historian, rather than someone who was content to repeat all the same old erroneous gossip. The hertasi and his mentor Tarrn believed passionately in the truth, would do anything to find out the truth, and would probably do anything to defend the truth. They might find exonerating reasons for a friend who robbed another of property, but if that friend falsified historical documents or concealed relevant facts, they would show him no leniency.

Karal and Lyam arranged the notes in order with the last batch and sealed up the now-full box and put it with those holding Tarrn's precious chronicles. "If you've got a moment, could you give me a hand?" he asked Lyam. "You're better at handling hot rocks than I am."

"That's because you humans are poorly designed," the hertasi replied with a toothy grin. "You should have nice thick skin on your hands, preferably with a toughened outer hide or scales, so you can pick up things without hurting yourselves."

"Remind me to ask for that option, the next time I order a new body," Karal countered, as Lyam followed him into the bedchamber. "Then again, isn't that why you were created?"

"To make up for your human shortcomings?" Lyam laughed. "Why, yes. Someone besides divine beings needed to. And just try getting some ghost or Avatar to cook a good meal or mend clothing! We're indispensable!"

Karal laughed with Lyam, and had decided, given the sad condition that Altra had been in when he'd come back from delivering the teleson to Haven, that he would be prepared for a similar situation. When Altra returned from the Forest of sorrows, he would find food, good water, and a warm bed waiting for him, already prepared and standing ready. The guess was that Altra could return at any time after two days had passed, so in the afternoon of the second day Karal had arranged for all those things. The moment Altra returned he could eat and sleep without even having to ask for food or a warm bed. Karal kept heated stones tucked into the bed he'd made up, and as the warm, meat-laden broth he prepared got a little thick and past its prime flavor, he was usually able to find someone willing to eat the old while he prepared a new batch.

Lyam had been the latest beneficiary of Karal's cooking, and so he wasn't at all averse to helping Karal place more heated stones into the bedding. "So, what do you think of all this?" the hertasi asked. "Doesn't it seem kind of strange to be bringing in ghosts? I've never even met anyone who'd ever seen a ghost before this, had you?"

"It's no stranger than the Avatars, and they're ghosts, I suppose," Karal replied honestly. "I've never seen a ghost either before I got here, but it really doesn't bother me."

Lyam rolled his eyes with disbelief. "How can you be so calm about this? Firesong is planning on bringing a spirit here, and an ancient hero at that! Why, that would be like—like calling up Skandranon, or—or Baron Valdemar, or—or the first Son of the Sun! Aren't you excited? Or scared?"

Logically, Karal knew he should be both those things, and yet he couldn't manage to dredge up any real feelings about the situation. It just didn't seem real enough to him, or, perhaps it was only as real as he'd gotten used to. It was not that he was precisely numb about these sorts of events, it was just that long ago he had crossed over his threshold of amazement and now things were only a matter of degree. "Vanyel Ashkevron lived a long time ago, Lyam," he said after a long moment of thought. "I know that you're quite passionate about history and to you things that happened hundreds of years ago are as vital as things that happened last year, but honestly, I can't get very emotional about this. Especially not after having met living people who were considered to be very serious enemies of Karse before the Alliance, and discovering that they were really quite like people I knew at home. You know, I'll believe these spirits are going to be here when they arrive, and until then, I don't see any reason to get excited."

"What do you mean, you discovered enemies of Karse were like people you knew?" Lyam wanted to know, as he tried unsuccessfully to juggle three recently-smoking stones. They thudded one by one onto the ground and he scuttled after one that was rolling away, then tucked the last of the hot rocks into Altra's bedding. He flicked his tail as his only comment.

"I actually know people who lost family members to Captain Kerowyn's mercenaries, and then, she turned into one of my teachers when I got to Haven," Karal told him. "I found out that she didn't actually eat babies, and she wasn't any more of a monster than any good military commander. And another one of my teachers was a gentleman called Alberich, who actually deserted Karse and his position as a Captain in the Army. He was Chosen, by a Companion who smuggled himself right into Karse! They called him 'the Great Traitor' before the Alliance, and yet I found out later than he was instrumental in bringing the Alliance about. If you believed everything you heard, he was half demon and half witch and was perfectly capable of any atrocity you could name. He turned out to be a great deal like Kerowyn, except maybe his sense of humor is darker than hers."

"Interesting," Lyam said, his eyes lighting up. "I don't suppose you'd be willing to tell me about all that?"

He reached into the pouch that never left his side and took out a silverpoint and paper as he asked that, and Karal didn't have the heart to refuse him. He told the story of his own journey into Valdemar, which seemed to have occurred a hundred years ago, and to some other person entirely. He answered Lyam's questions as best he could, and as honestly as he could, even when the answers made him look rather stupid. Since Lyam was very interested in the details of his thoughts as his opinion of Valdemar and its inhabitants changed, he was as open as possible.

In many ways, he was a bit surprised at the change in himself as he tried to explain himself to Lyam. The talking and questioning helped to fill the time and allay his anxieties, too, and for that reason alone he would have been glad of Lyam's company.

There was always the possibility that all of this would be for nothing; Altra could go and request help, even present Firesong's personal petition to his ancestor Vanyel, but that didn't mean that the spirits were going to cooperate. For one thing, they might not be who they claimed they were. For another, they might not be very interested in helping old enemies. After all, Altra was a representative of Vanyel's old nemesis—and for Vanyel, what was ancient history to Karal was very much a part of his personal memory. This could all be a plot. They could be constructing a trap to hold the spirits here, far from Valdemar and the border they were supposed to be guarding.

The spirits might also be unwilling or unable to leave what had been their home. They hadn't in all this time, so why would they now? They might simply not be able to help, and why make the long and dangerous journey to the Tower just to sit and do nothing?

They might not be willing to take the chance that this might start out to be a need for their services, but turn into a situation where Karal could eliminate them entirely. After all, once they were here and in his power, Karal might change his mind about them and take it into his head to try an exorcism.

Then shortly after dawn on the third day, Altra returned, and all the doubts were resolved.

Karal was in his bed, and Lyam shook him out of a dark, deep, and dreamless slumber. It took him a moment to understand what the hertasi was trying to tell him.

He scrambled out of his bedroll and pulled on his cloth's from the night before as soon as it penetrated into his sleep-fuddled mind that Altra was back. He filled a bowl with the hot, rich meat broth he had waiting on a little charcoal brazier, and followed Lyam out into the main room.

Not only was every member of their own party gathered around the Firecat, but a goodly number of the Kal'enedral as well. And if Altra had looked worn out when he brought Sejanes and Master Levy in, he looked positively flattened now. He lay on the floor, panting and disheveled, surrounded by people who all seemed to be talking at once. Without paying any attention to anything else, Karal pushed in among the others and placed the bowl of hot broth under Altra's nose. The Firecat cast him a look of undying gratitude and plunged his face into it, taking great gulps of the liquid rather than lapping it up daintily as he usually did.

:They need a physical link to the real world,: he said as if he was continuing an earlier statement. Karal reflected that being able to Mindspeak was a great advantage in mealtime conversation; you could go right on talking and no one would ever accuse you of bad table manners. It was also fascinating to him that Tarrn, Altra, and Florian could all make their thoughts heard even by those, like Sejanes and Master Levy, who did not have the Gift of Mindspeech themselves. :So there it is; and I do wish there had been an easier way to transport that bit of wood here than by having me fetch it. It will take them a bit of time to use it to bring themselves here, so be patient. If I'd had to bring them as well, I would have run the risk of losing them in the Void. Besides, Vanyel doesn't particularly care for Gates, and Jumping is a lot like Gating, especially now.:

"Why wouldn't an Adept care for Gates?" Sejanes wondered aloud when the Firecat's Mindspeech had been related to him.

"Let's just say that I had some unpleasant experiences involving Gates in the past," replied a new voice, a pleasant and musical tenor that had the peculiar quality of sounding as if it came from the bottom of a well, a quality that it shared with some of the Kal'enedrals' voices.

Karal looked where everyone else was looking, but saw no new person there, only an old, decrepit, weather-beaten wreck of a musical instrument. It might at one time have been a lute or a gittern or some such thing; there was no trace at all of its original finish, nor its strings or tuning pegs, and it had probably not been playable for centuries. If this was the physical link that Altra had brought with him, it was certainly a peculiar choice.

"On the whole, I would just rather not have to deal with Gates at all if I have any choice in the matter," the voice continued, and the air above the old instrument began to shiver. "You'll have to give us a few moments here, as my new friend Altra said. None of us are used to drawing our energy from ley-lines and nodes anymore, and we're rather out of practice."

"We're in no hurry, Ancestor, and we have had some interesting experiences involving you and Gates ourselves," Firesong replied calmly, as the hair on the back of Karal's neck began to crawl of its own accord. It had been all very well to tell Lyam that he was neither excited nor afraid when the arrival of these spirits had been an abstract concept, but now...

Now there was an atavistic chill running down his spine, a cold lump in his stomach, and the knowledge that he would really rather be anywhere but here, as the shimmering air developed three glowing forms, which took on substance even as he watched. First, there were only two vaguely human shapes and another, larger one that might have resembled a horse. Then the shapes became more defined and detailed, although they never actually attained the solidity of the Kal'enedral or the fiery substance of the Avatars.

Maybe that was why he was suddenly afraid; the leshy'a Kal'enedral looked just like any of the others, and the Avatars were so exotic as to fit in the same categories as Firecats and other manifestations of the gods. But there was nothing solid about these, nor so alien that he could bear them because they were so new to him.

The first to become really clear was a strikingly handsome man, and if this was Firesong's ancestor Vanyel, it was obvious where he got his beauty. There was no color to any of these spirits, so Karal could not have told if the clothing this spirit had chosen to "wear" happened to be antique Herald's Whites or not, but the cut was like nothing he had seen in his lifetime. The spirit had long hair, though not as long as Firesong's or Silverfox's, and "wore" no jewelry of any kind. He searched the group gathered around him, and his gaze lit on Karal and remained there. In spite of the ghost's smile, Karal was not reassured.

"So this is our young Sun-priest," the spirit said, as Karal froze. "If I ever have the opportunity, remind me to tell you of another young servant of Vkandis that I met, who proved to me that not all of the folk who used Vkandis' Name to justify their actions should be lumped together into a single category." The spirit's smile widened—quite as winsome a smile as anything Firesong had ever produced—and some of Karal's chill melted away. But not, by any means, all of it. For some reason—perhaps simply that these beings looked, acted and sounded exactly like what they were supposed to be—Karal found Vanyel entirely unnerving.

As the second spirit manifested, Karal didn't find him any easier on the nerves, perhaps because he couldn't seem to make up his mind whether to look like a muscular, square-jawed fellow who was a bit taller than Vanyel, or a slight, triangular-faced, large-eyed lad who was shorter and more slender than the Herald-Mage. Just looking at him made Karal feel dizzy, and when the third shape came into focus, it didn't help any, for it wavered between the form of a Companion and that of a determined woman with a firm chin and the look of a hunter about her.

:If you all don't mind, I'd like to see that bed Karal has been keeping warm for me,: Altra said firmly, and when Karal looked down, he saw that the Firecat had polished off every drop of the broth, and was on his feet, swaying a little.

"You go ahead, my friend," Vanyel said genially. "We three need to have our first consultation with the mages, and having too many people trying to explain things at once is not going to get us anywhere. We will try to keep the noise down so you may rest better."

Since Altra did not look at all steady, Karal picked him up bodily and carried him to that waiting bed, with Florian pacing alongside him, offering a shoulder for support. Lyam cleared the way ahead of them, quite authoritative for such a short fellow. Altra was quite limp with exhaustion, and Karal wondered if he should say anything forbidding Altra to make any more Jumping expeditions. Did he have the right to demand such things?

:That's the last. That is absolutely the last,: Altra said weakly as Karal laid the Firecat in his warmed bed. :I know you aren't seeing any physical manifestations of the Storms right now, but believe me, where I have to go, they're there. It was like trying to swim a river in flood, and cats are not particularly suited to swimming, let me tell you. I do not have the strength to try that a second time.:

"Good, because I was going to ask you not to," Karal replied. "I don't think I could stand losing you."

:Well, you won't. That's that advantage of having a Cat instead of a Horse as a partner; we don't go running off to sacrifice ourselves at the sound of the first trumpet call,: Altra said, feebly winking at Karal on the side opposite of Florian. :We're sensible. And right now, my sensible side demands some cosseting. I want sleep:

:Oh, do go right ahead and sleep,: Florian said with mock-indignation. :Don't mind us, we just want to gather worshipfully around your slumbering form and tell stories about your bravery and virtue.:

:Fine, you do that, and about time,: the Firecat replied in the same spirit. :Just don't wake me up.:

And with that, he closed his eyes, his even breathing seeming to indicate that he had fallen straight asleep.

"Well, what do you think?" Karal asked the Companion, certain he was about to get a litany of praise thinly disguised as a lesson in Valdemaran history.

:I think that I'm hoping our latest visitors remain unmanifest most of the time,: Florian replied promptly, his uneasiness quite apparent in his mind-voice. :Yfandes gives me the—what's Lyam's term for it?—the collywobbles, that's it. They're all three dreadfully intimidating.:

"Really?" Karal arched an eyebrow at him. "I didn't think you could be intimidated by anything!"

:I can, and she's it.: Florian was quite serious, and it was Karal's turn to put a steadying hand on his shoulder. :Not even a Grove-Born gives me the urge to kneel and knock my head on the ground the way she does!:

"Well, don't do that," Karal advised. "For one thing, you'll hurt your head. For another, I'm sure you have nothing to feel inferior about."

He knew how Florian felt, though, and he sympathized. Hopefully these newcomers would stay invisible; if he couldn't see them, maybe he wouldn't keep having the urge to do some bowing and scraping of his own.

"Ghosts and spirit-swords, Avatars and leshy'a Kal'enedral—we have more not-mortal things around here than we have mortal ones!" he complained. "And when you add in bondbirds and hertasi and kyree and Companions, the weird creatures outnumber ordinary humans to the point where we're a minority!"

:It could be worse,: Florian pointed out pensively. :This could be a Vale. Or k'Leshya Vale! Then you'd have dyhell and tervardi and gryphons, and I don't know what all else. Only the gods know what weird pets the K'Leshya brought up out of the South with them.:

Karal just sighed and sat beside Altra with his chin on his hand. "The worst part of it is that a mind-talking horse is the most normal of all the folk around here!"

Florian only whickered, and mind-laughed weakly.

* * *

Fortunately for Karal's peace of mind and Florian's sense of profound inferiority, the three newcomers mostly remained "unmanifest" to save energy, and simply tendered advice to Firesong by means of Mindspeech. Karal had the feeling that Vanyel was a little hurt that the Karsite was so nervous in Vanyel's presence, but there was no help for it. Karal himself wasn't entirely sure why Vanyel made him so edgy. It might simply have been that the Herald-Mage was everything that Karal was not, but without the somewhat inflated self-esteem of his descendant Firesong. It might have been unconscious residue from all the "Demon Vanyel" stories he'd been told as a child. And it might only have been that Vanyel was so obviously everything that a Karsite feared about the night, and although Karal had been working with stranger beings, Vanyel's presence was simply the one bit of strangeness that was too much.

He had his own problems that were similar to Florian's—the fact that of all of them, he was really the most ordinary, and aside from his ability as a Channel, apparently the least necessary. He was not brilliant like Master Levy nor a mage like Sejanes or Firesong; he could not translate the ancient texts as Tarrn and Lyam could, nor had he the knack of amusing everyone and helping them see solutions to their problems as Silverfox did.

It was Silverfox, however, who made him realize that the things about him that were the most commonplace were the ones that made him the most valuable in this group of those who were out of the ordinary.

"I'm glad we have you here, Karal," Silverfox said to him the next day, as he shared stew that Altra had not been awake to eat with the kestra'chern.

"Me?" he said with surprise. "Why?"

"Because your strength is that you are forced to handle wildly extraordinary events and people—and you just do it, without complaint. You set the rest of us an example. After all, if you can handle all this, we should certainly be able to."

Karal made a face. "I think I'm being damned with faint praise," he replied ironically.

"It isn't meant to be faint praise," Silverfox said earnestly. "What I mean is that you are finding great strength and grace inside yourself, and you prove to the rest of us that we should be able to do the same." He gazed into Karal's eyes with intense concentration. "You keep us centered, reminding us that there is a world out there beyond these walls. You give us perspective in this rather rarefied company, and help keep us all sane." His smile was just as charming as anything Firesong could conjure. "In your own way, my dear young friend, you are a constant reminder of everything normal and good about the world that we are trying to protect."

Karal blushed; that was all he could do, in the face of words like that.

:He's right, you know,: Altra seconded. :It isn't the great mystics and saints who do the real day-to-day work of keeping people's faith firm, it's the ordinary priest—the good man who goes on being good, no matter what he has to face. Ordinary people know in their hearts that they could never withstand the trials that a saint undergoes, but if they see a person who is just like they are, and watch him bearing up under those trials, they know that they can do it, too. And as for the great ones, when they see an ordinary man bearing extraordinary burdens, they are inspired to take on far more than they might otherwise do.:

Now he was blushing so hotly his skin felt sunburned.

"Meanwhile, we are having to face a crisis," Silverfox continued, his smile fading as he sobered. "And it is coming on us swiftly. Firesong wanted me to tell you that they're going to use the cube-maze, after all."

That cooled his blushes in a hurry, and he nodded. Silverfox reached for his chin and tilted it up, looking deeply into his eyes, then nodded as if satisfied by what he saw there. "You know that this is the best choice of all of them," he stated. "Firesong says that of all the weapons, this offers the most gain." He said nothing about risk, but he didn't have to, for Karal already knew that the risk of using any of those weapons was great, and they really could not know how great until they triggered one.

Karal nodded. "And I knew that it was quite likely I would have to work as a Channel again. It's all right; I'm not afraid this time."

Strangely enough, he wasn't. "He wanted me to tell you, so that you would know he doesn't intend you to have to bear any more than any of the rest of them." Silverfox's ironic expression filled in the rest—things best left unsaid. Karal knew, though, that Firesong would not be able to lie successfully to the kestra'chern, and Silverfox would not allow him to put Karal in for more than an equal share of peril. In a sense, Silverfox was vouching for the Adept.

Karal shrugged awkwardly. "The cube-maze was their first choice the last time, they just couldn't come up with enough information to make it work. I'd rather be channeling for something that is their first choice, rather than their third or fourth."

He didn't pretend to understand half of what the mages were talking about, but the device they called a "cube-maze," which resembled a pile of hollow cast-metal cubes stacked rather randomly atop one another, was supposed to have had a nonliving core to do the channeling. Either Urtho could never get the thing to work correctly in the first place, or else the core was no longer functioning. In either case, there was no one here that was capable of making a device to act as the channel. That meant Karal was the only hope of making this thing work. It might work better with a living channel; that might have been one of the reasons it had failed in the first place. A living channel could make decisions; a nonliving channel couldn't.

Like the other devices here, the cube-maze didn't look anything like a weapon. It was rather pretty, in fact; there was an odd sheen or patina to the blue metal surface that refracted rainbows, like oil on water. One of the truly strange things about all of these weapons was that none of them looked alike. It was difficult to imagine how the same mind could have come up with so many dissimilar devices.

"Karal!" Master Levy hailed him from the main room. "The teleson is free, and Natoli is on it."

Silverfox cut short Karal's attempt at excusing himself politely. "Go, off with you!" the kestra'chern said. "You can talk to me anytime, and I'm not half so pretty as Natoli is."

That last comment made him blush all over again, but this time he didn't care. His long-distance romancing of Natoli appeared to charm everyone. They all stayed discreetly out of the way when he spoke to her, and they all seemed to go out of their way to give him occasions to talk to her on the teleson.

Altra followed on his heels, to act as the facilitator for the conversation. It was amazing that Altra didn't ever tease him about anything that passed between himself and Natoli, but even Altra apparently regarded the growing relationship as a private matter between the two of them, and not for any outsider, not even a Firecat, to intrude upon. No matter what either of the two said to each other, Altra never commented on it, either during the conversation or afterward. In fact, Karal was able to completely forget about Altra's presence most of the time.

But Natoli had disturbing news for him that had nothing whatsoever to do with their personal matters. "Elspeth and Darkwind reported that they are already getting Storms in Hardorn," she said gravely. "They aren't dangerous yet, but it's only a matter of time before things degenerate. We have already started preparations here to handle whatever comes up."

"That's probably why the mages and all finally made up their minds which device to use," he told her. "I suppose Master Levy must have agreed on their choice, since he is the one doing the mathematical modeling for the solution." He hesitated, and looked down at his hands a moment, then looked back up and told her the truth. "I'm going to have to be a Channel again."

She didn't say anything, but her face grew pale and she bit her lip. "Well," she finally managed, "that's what you're there for. You have to do your job, just as I have to do mine." She rallied a bit. "Speaking of my job, I'm in charge of some of the emergency plans. We're going to have to evacuate the Palace at the very least, and maybe even parts of Haven, just in case that node under the Palace goes unstable. All the highborn have gone home, and as of today they've dismissed the Collegia and sent the trainees home as well. Even the Healers have dispersed. The trainees that don't have homes to go to are supposed to go off with their Masters if they're Bards, off to one of the Houses of Healing as Healer-trainees, or riding circuit with full Heralds if they're still in Grays. It's a little crazy around here, since things still have to get done, and it's getting to be that whoever has a pair of hands free just does whatever it takes. They say that the gryphons will stay until the last moment and set spells to keep out looters, then they'll fly away. It'll be a relief when everyone is actually gone."

He didn't have to ask why she was still there; she could not sit back while others were in danger any more than he could. She would probably remain there until the very end because that was what her father would do. Herald Rubrik was in Karse, so perhaps she felt it was up to her to take on the familial duties. "Well," he replied. "You do what you have to, right? If your job is to be there, then you need to do it." Clumsy words, but he hoped they told her what he wanted to say—that he still would never ask her to stop doing what she considered to be her job just to be "safe." If there even was any place "safe" anymore. "I want you to know that I really don't think any of us here are in any more or less danger than you are," he continued, trying to give her reassurance. "The one thing I am concerned about is that after the last time, the others here are all so fiercely determined to protect me that I'm more afraid for them than I am for myself."

She smiled tremulously. "You would be anyway. Just promise me that you'll let them take care of you. Not at the expense of getting the job done, but let them protect you from what they can."

"If you'll do the same," he demanded. "Before you go flinging yourself into exploding boilers, wait and see if someone more suited to that particular job is already doing it! You know, it just might be that, capable as you are, someone else would manage that particular rescue a little better than you!"

"You drive a hard bargain," she retorted, and shook her head, a little of her old humor returning to her eyes. "All right, I promise."

"And so do I," he pledged softly, and basked in her smile.

The wind of a full-scale blizzard howled and whined outside the windows of his suite, and icy drafts forced their way past windows and thick curtains, but Baron Melles didn't care. Enveloped in one of the heavy woolen tunics that had become fashion out of necessity, with a second layer of knitted winter silk beneath that, he brooded pleasantly over the reports of his network of spies within the households of the members of the Court. Virtually every one of those pieces of paper reported a new attitude toward him on the part of anyone of any importance.

Fear. He was delighted at their reaction. They might hate him, they might envy him, they might (rarely) even admire him for his ruthlessness—but they all feared him now, and feared to have even the appearance of opposing him.

He shifted his weight in his chair, and repositioned his feet on the warming pan beneath his desk. His last object lesson was more effective than he had thought it would be, and had spread far beyond the immediate household and friends of his target. Clearly it was much wiser and more expedient to show that the children of his would-be enemies were vulnerable than it was to threaten the enemies themselves. And as for those who had no children, well, there wasn't a single one of them who didn't have some other person for whom they cherished tender feelings. Anyone who would threaten a child obviously would have no difficulty with targeting an aged and infirm parent, or a sibling, or a lover. Even Tremane had dependents he would have been very upset at losing—that old mage, Sejanes, for one.

It was ironic in many ways, for it would have been very easy for any of them to make him or herself invulnerable. There had not been another person besides himself here at Court who had read and understood the lesson old Charliss had given to them in the course of his own life: Trust no one, care for no one, depend on no one. They had all persisted, even in the face of obvious disadvantages, to fall in love, make friendships rather than alliances, and allow themselves the cracks in their armor that relationships made.

Tremane never knew that he made me what I am today, even as he made me his enemy when we were cadets. He betrayed me to the Colonel, and ruined my career in the Army. And for what? Because I was doing what everyone else wanted to do, but didn't have the intelligence or the audacity to try. I trusted him because he said he was my friend, and he betrayed me. Without that, if I had remained in the cadet corps as he did, I would not have seen Charliss' example for what it was.

He had stopped being a sheep that day and had become one of the wolves—as any of them could have. Well, that was all their own fault, and their stupidity, and that was why he was the Emperor's Heir and not one of them.

Not even the memory of that long-ago humiliation of being cast out of the corps could spoil this triumph. He had finally achieved the goal he had set for himself that day—to make anyone of any importance look at him and fear. It was in this mood of unusual good humor that General Thayer found him, and destroyed his mood with a single sentence.

His valet Bors showed the General in; Thayer wore a regulation Army cloak over his uniform tunic, and fingerless gloves to keep his hands warm. Melles greeted him with pleasure, although he did not rise.

But Thayer had not come to make a social call. "Melles, we're in trouble," he rumbled. And as usual, the General came straight to the point without even waiting to take the chair that Melles offered him.

Where had that come from? "How can we be in trouble?" Melles asked, with more than a bit of surprise. "We've got order in the smaller cities, and the larger ones are coming around. Food is getting in, and you're even making a small profit. Rioting has stopped in most places, and the subversives are beginning to be regarded as lunatics. We might have lost the lands Charliss brought under the Imperial banner and some of the provinces, but—"

"But the Army doesn't want you in charge," Thayer replied, bluntly. "That last little trick you played was one too many. The word from the field is that they don't intend to establish order just to put a baby killer on the Iron Throne. Word of your power play has been traveling farther and faster than either of us thought it would. I don't know how, but in spite of everything, virtually everyone I've contacted already knows all about it, and knows that you were the one who put the body in the crib." He scowled. "That was a stupid ploy, Melles. Your average soldier may be a hard man, but the one thing he won't put up with is threatening a baby."

Melles frowned. "But there was nothing to link me with that incident," he objected.

Thayer snorted with utter contempt, as the wind rattled the windowpanes and a draft made the candle flames flicker. "Please. Not everyone is an inbred idiot, especially not in the Army. You're an assassin, however much you pretend not to be; everyone knows it, and everyone knows you're the only one who not only could have done what you did, but who is cold-blooded enough to follow up on the threat if you had to. And I repeat to you; the Army won't support a baby killer, and there's an end to it."

A cold anger burned in the back of Melles' throat, as cold as the howling winds outside. "That's fine sentiment from people who kill for a living," he said with equal contempt. "I'm sure they ask the age of every peasant with a boar-spear who opposes them in the field, and make certain to leave insurgent villages untouched in case they might kill a few children."

Thayer's face flushed with anger, but somehow he kept his temper even in the face of Melles' provocative words. "I could point out that the Army operates under certain laws, and that when a soldier kills someone, he does it openly, under conditions where his opponent has an equal chance of killing him. But that would be specious and we both know it—and it's not the point."

"Oh?" Melles asked sardonically. "And just what is the point?"

"The point is that the average soldier believes all those things," Thayer said, pounding the desk for emphasis. "Whether or not they are true. Truth has no bearing on this, and you damned well know it. The average soldier thinks he is going to defend the honor of the Empire against adult enemies, and that makes him feel superior to any assassin, and vastly superior to someone who not only threatens the safety of a child, but threatens a child of his own people."

"Never mind that this same noble soldier would skewer the children of a rebellious village without a second thought or a moment of hesitation," Melles grumbled, although he saw the logic in Thayer's argument. Thayer was right. The truth didn't matter here, and he, who was a practiced hand in manipulating perception, should have known that. "Very well. What's to be done?"

Thayer sighed, and finally sank into the chair Melles had offered. "I don't know," he admitted. "It's not only the Commanders that are talking rebellion, it's the Generals, and the rank and file, and they aren't amenable to the kinds of coercion you can use on the nobles of the Court. Unless we can do something about this, we're going to loose them, and the moment Charliss becomes a Little God, they're going to put someone of their choice on the Iron Throne and you and me in the ground."

Melles ground his teeth in frustration, for Thayer was right. Although, unlike Tremane, he had never gotten out of the cadets to serve in the military forces of the Empire, he knew the structure and makeup. The Generals were mostly men who had made a career of the military, as had their fathers before them. Their wives were the daughters of similar men, their families all related to other military families. They employed former military men as guards and servants, employed the wives of such men as maids and housekeepers. Their positions were embedded in multiple layers of protection, and they could not be dismissed or demoted out of hand. The High Commanders could be eliminated, for they were mostly nobles like Grand Duke Tremane, but there was no getting rid of the Generals. They were like a wolf pack; you couldn't separate a victim, for none of them stood alone, and if you made a move against one, the whole pack would consolidate long enough to tear your throat out before going back to their own internal jockeying for power.

"You can't touch them, Melles," Thayer warned in an echo of his own thoughts. "If you try, they'll destroy you. They won't put up with that kind of threat, and they'll close ranks against you. Press it too far, and they'll call a coup against you. Not even your personal guard can protect you against an entire Company coming to kill you."

"It's gone right down to the rank and file, you say?" he asked, his thoughts swirling as wildly as the snow outside.

Thayer nodded, and Melles cursed them all in his mind. He couldn't even order every General within reach of the capital to come to a meeting, seal the room, and kill them all at once. If he tried, the entire Army itself would rise up in revolt. It was only when the Generals were corrupt and hated by their men that you could get away with a tactic like that.

"We're only in trouble, we aren't defeated yet," he said at last, as a few ideas began to form out of the chaos. "They might have good communications, but I have better ones. I have a few more throws of the dice coming, and I can pick the dice." He began to smile as he saw how he could completely subvert the entire problem.

Thayer regarded him curiously, and with a certain grudging admiration. "Have you got something up your sleeve that you haven't told me about?"

He nodded. "I'm not even going to try to deny their rumor, instead I'm going to give them something else entirely to think about. I always have more up my sleeve that I haven't told anyone about," he replied smugly. "And you should never underestimate the power of the clerical pen."

"What you can't find, you can manufacture, hmm?" Thayer hazarded. "Just what, exactly, do you have in mind? Are you going to give them a different enemy to concentrate on?"

Melles just laughed. "I won't have to manufacture anything. With enough records to search, I can find just about anything I need, and you know yourself that this Empire creates enough paperwork to fill entire warehouses. Give me a few days and I can find all the right evidence to convince the Army that I'm the one they should be supporting, show them that having a so-called 'baby killer' on the throne is the least of the things they should be worrying about, and in the meantime, I can woo them."

"Woo them? Like reluctant girls?" Thayer made a rude and suggestive noise, but Melles wasn't offended, now that he had the bit in his teeth.

"Wait and see," he responded, plans already growing in the back of his mind that would probably astonish the older man. "Just wait and see."

Thayer was not convinced, but was certain enough of Melles' competence to be willing to buy him some time to work on the schemes that he promised. Thayer stood up, saying so in as many words.

"Just remember that I can't give you too much more time," he warned. "And it's going to take a great deal to overcome the way they feel about the baby incident. I'm still not certain you're taking that seriously enough."

"Just remember what I told you about the common man and what he needs and wants," Melles replied. "Then remember that the Army is composed of those same common men—just with a little more training and a bit of discipline."

"Hmm." Thayer looked thoughtful at that, and took his leave. As soon as he was gone, Melles called in all five of his private secretaries.

They were all men, like his valet, of varied talents and some interesting training. All five of them were so nondescript that no one would ever notice them in a crowd. And all of them were adept at getting into even the most carefully guarded records, simply by knowing how to impersonate virtually any type of clerk in the Empire and how to forge anything but the Imperial Seal. When a clerk arrived with appropriate documentation and a request to see something, or even to carry it away, it took a hardier and more independent soul than existed in the Imperial Civil Service to challenge him.

"You—" he said, pointing to the first in line. "I want you to go over the military pay records, find out all the units with pay in arrears, and who is in charge of their pay." He pointed to the next two. "You and you—go through the records of the units sent to take Hardorn. I want you to match up the requests for supplies and reinforcements with the orders issued to fill those requests. I also want the record of every request that was denied, and on whose authority." He pointed to the last two. "You two get access to Emperor Charliss' private papers, or at least the ones that are in the Archives. I want all the correspondence between Tremane and Charliss from the time he left for Hardorn to his last known message. Go!"

The five clerks departed, scattering like quail before the hunter. He didn't need to give them any further orders about how to get access to those papers; one of the reason that these men were no longer in the civil service was that they had initiative. Neither initiative nor creativity were rewarded in the Imperial Civil Service, and those with both often grew frustrated and looked for employment elsewhere.

Melles next called in his private treasurer.

"You get down to the Imperial Exchequer. I want to know how much out of the military budget can be spared in hard coin and how much in goods. Tell the Exchequer that I suspect the Army's pay has been bollixed up, and we may have to make good in a hurry if we don't want trouble on our hands." He thought for a moment, and dredged up the relevant fact from his memory. "If he balks at telling you, just say something about the road budget; it doesn't matter what, just work it quickly into the conversation."

The man nodded, grinning; every Imperial Exchequer skimmed a certain amount off the top, it was expected, so long as they were clever enough not to get caught at it. But if they were caught, the penalties were severe. Melles knew precisely where the current Exchequer was skimming and even had a rough idea of how much; he had made it his business to know, planning to use the information at the right moment. There could be no better moment than now. A good card was no better than a bad one if you never played it.

The treasurer left, and Melles called in his final choice in this campaign of seduction, one of his odder employees. This rather elegant specimen was ostensibly Melles' personal poet and playwright, but although the man was mediocre creatively, he was an absolute genius at propaganda. Melles didn't use him often, but he was, like the valet, the appropriate scalpel for certain types of surgery. Melles was doubly fortunate in that the man enjoyed the writing of manipulative propaganda almost as much as poetry. He had told his patron once that when he wrote the former, he considered that he was writing a different kind of drama, one in which the words manipulated the actors, instead of the other way around. He enjoyed seeing how his works played out on the larger stage of the real world.

And as a peculiar kind of reward, Melles regularly financed the production of poetry readings in opulent surroundings, seeing to it that the right critics were flattered, fed, and given enough strong and exotic drink to make even the worst drivel seem inspired.

"I hope you aren't in the throes of creation," Melles said cautiously, for this was one individual who could not be coerced, only persuaded. But his loyalty to Melles was based on firm self-interest and was utterly trustworthy. When bought, he stayed bought—and no one aside from Melles himself knew that he was anything other than a peculiar affectation. It was expected that someone of Melles' status patronize the arts in some way, and a poet was the cheapest and least intrusive sort of artist to have on one's staff. "I have a rather extensive job for you," he continued. "I hope you aren't preoccupied."

The man smiled urbanely and crossed his legs with conscious elegance. He was something of a dandy and rather fancied himself as a popular man with the ladies. His salary from Melles enabled him to cut quite a figure of sartorial splendor among not only his peers but also his superiors. "What do you need my skills for? As a repairer of reputation? I've been planning what to do for you since the moment the rumors began to fly." He shook his head, and then waggled his finger in mock-admonition. "My dear patron, you have been very injudicious. This could ruin you yet, if it isn't carefully handled."

Melles did not make the retort he felt hovering on his tongue. The man was worth his weight in gold, and was arrogant enough to be quite aware of it. Instead, he got right to the point. "It isn't the Court I'm worried about; they're ineffectual enough, and like sheep, they'll follow anyone with the right bell around his neck. No, it's the Army that's giving me trouble." He leaned forward over his desk, to emphasize how serious he felt the situation was. "They've decided they don't care for the idea of someone with my ethics on the Iron Throne."

The poet pursed his lips. "That could be troublesome. I don't know quite how to handle the Army—unless you already know what you want to say?"

"I do. Believe it or not, I want you to report the exact truth." Melles smiled thinly at the poet's surprise. "We're going to concentrate on the plight of my old rival, Tremane," he continued lightly. "I want you to spread the story of how he and his command were abandoned out beyond the farthest reach of the Empire. Be creative; go on about the horror of being sent off to die in utterly unknown lands. Find the right words to convince people that I had nothing to do with the abandonment of Tremane and his men in Hardorn. Then convince them that I had no idea that I would be Charliss' next choice for his successor. Say that I feel that the times are so radically changed that I have changed with them. Say I personally am so busy trying to keep the Empire together that I have no interest in pursuing my old vendetta against Tremane himself."

That last could get him in a certain amount of difficulty with the Emperor if Charliss got wind of it, but he was willing to take that particular chance.

The poet pursed his lips in thought. "It's a novel approach," he admitted. "And it just might distract soldiers from the stories of dead bodies in baby cribs. After all, you didn't actually kill the baby, you only dumped the body of an assassin there. Whereas Tremane and his men were abandoned in Hardorn; that's without a doubt and with no particular reason to leave them out there."

"That's exactly what I'm looking for," Melles encouraged. "And soldiers have more in common with other soldiers than with brats in cribs. They will have empathy for Tremane's forces. Why weren't they called back while it was still possible to construct Portals that worked between the Storms? Don't place any blame yet, but raise as many questions in peoples' minds as you can, particularly in the Army."

"I can do that," the poet said decisively, losing a great deal of his languid pose as his own imagination set to work. "I'm very good at questions. What about answers?"

"I'll give you more to work on when I have facts," Melles promised. "For right now, this will be enough. Get people talking, get their minds on something else besides my little jokes." He signaled that the man could go.

"Gossip and rumor, opiates of the dull, can for the clever be the stuff that dream are made of," the poet said sardonically, as he smiled, standing up as gracefully as he had sat down.

"My dreams, at any rate," Melles chuckled, watching the man's elegant way of walking—elegant, but not at all effeminate. It was rather like a wolf at the stalk, and he made up his mind to copy it.

The first of his seekers came back within hours with an accurate account of the Army pay records. As he had suspected, since every district governor was individually responsible for seeing to it that the units within his jurisdiction actually were paid (even though the pay actually came out of the military budget), there were several instances where pay was in arrears, sometimes significantly. As he went over the figures with his own accountant, the secretary he had sent to interview the Imperial Exchequer also returned.

That gave him his first move in the new game.

He waited until the next day, then descended on the major figures of the Imperial Civil Service, trailing a string of clerks all bearing stacks of paper. With great fanfare and a fine speech written by his pet poet, he "revealed" the terrible injustice that had been done to the loyal soldiers of the Empire.

"But it is not your fault," he continued, before anyone could get angry at having yet more work heaped on him. "You are doing the best you can in terrible circumstances!" He went on at some length, praising the overworked clerks for sticking at their jobs even when they had to wade through blizzards to get to their desks, shiver in the drafts when they arrived, and fight worse weather to go to a cold home with short rations once they returned at the end of a long day's work. "I have brought you the help of my own clerks to see you through this crisis," he said, as his men took over empty desks or any other flat space with a chair. "I am sure you do not want our brave soldiers to suffer, but I do not want you to suffer either!"

With that, he set off a frenzy of paper pushing to get every soldier's records and pay up to date. Some of the pay had to be made in goods rather than coin, but he made certain that the clerks arranged it so the goods in question were more valuable on the gray market than the actual pay they were substituting for.

It was all taken care of in a single morning; not too difficult, when he doubled the existing workforce and had all of them concentrate on the one task, putting all other work temporarily aside. He then formally went to the Commanders and promised to personally make up for the other deficiencies that had cropped up, usually in the way of resupply. He made a great show of embarrassment, as if he had only now discovered these problems. He didn't know if anyone believed him, but he made a point of assigning his own people to make certain that existing problems were corrected and further ones reported to him so that he could see that they were dealt with.

As he had hoped, although there was some suspicion that he was trying to buy the Army's favor, he began to get some grudging acceptance. This was especially true once the stories began to circulate of how he had uncovered all these problems personally.

Then his poet went to work, sending out his insidious little stories and questions, making the ordinary Imperial soldier wonder just what "supposed mistake" could have left Tremane's people out in the cold, so to speak. An added bonus came when he got word back that the rank-and-file had a few other, unanticipated questions. Such as—a question of whether the late pay was really just bureaucratic bungling, or if Certain Parties had ordered the pay held back as a form of punishment. After all, if Grand Duke Tremane and all his men could be abandoned, what was a little delay in paying out wages?

But the crowning touch to the entire plan finally went into effect when Melles' clerks found that correspondence between Charliss and Tremane. And he could not have manufactured a better final letter than the one that arrived for the Emperor's personal perusal just before the Portals went down and stayed down.

It was bad enough that Tremane had begged, over and over again, for critical supplies that were never sent, for more men, and especially for more mages. But it was the final letter that made Melles positively gleeful both from the standpoint of seeing his old enemy brought low, and for the strength of the "ammunition" it gave him.

For in that letter, which was accompanied by strategic maps, Tremane begged the Emperor to allow his men to retreat, vowing that he himself would remain behind and attempt to hold what had been taken with a corps of volunteers. He pleaded with the Emperor not to visit punishment upon men who had done nothing to deserve it, and to permit them to escape while it was still possible to hold Portals to the Empire open long enough for them to pass through.

And although Melles himself was no strategist, it was painfully obvious from the maps that Tremane's position was utterly untenable. No one, not even a military genius, could have saved the situation.

In a handwritten directive, the Emperor ordered his secretaries to make no response to this desperate plea, on the grounds that Tremane would have to solve the situation in order to prove his worth, thus condemning Tremane's forces with him. At that point, the best outcome for them was exile—and the worst was massacre.

He took that letter with the note in the margin to General Thayer, who in turn leaked the information to his own Commanders, who sent it on down the line. He managed to conceal his triumph in a show of distress so perfect he even fooled Thayer.

By this time the Army was outraged. The Emperor had betrayed them, betrayed the sacred bond that was supposed to bind the Emperor and the men who served him. The rumors of Melles the "baby killer" were forgotten in this new, and far more personal outrage, and even the lowest private began to recall how it was Melles who saw that the pay was put right, and Melles who made sure the supply wagons got through.

Melles, and not the Emperor. And in that moment, he had them.

That was the point where he got an odd invitation from General Thayer; an invitation to dinner, but not in the Palace. This was to be a private dinner, in an upper room of a very well-known and luxurious inn usually frequented by wealthy bachelors who didn't care to keep staff or cooks.

There were just a few things "wrong" with this invitation—the most obvious being that Melles was not and had never been part of the social circle that made use of this particular facility. The inn itself was suffering some of the privations of every other eatery; the fare now was far from the former standards, and in fact was inferior to anything he could get in Crag Castle. And it was halfway across the city; the mage-storms struck twice a day now, with the result that the weather was utterly unpredictable, and there were often "things" prowling the streets, animals and even humans changed by the Storms into misshapen creatures that bore little resemblance to what they had been. The once-rats were bad enough, but the other creatures required that one travel with an escort of heavily-armed men after dark.

He turned the invitation over and over in his hands, considering it. It could be a trap, of course, designed to get him where he would be vulnerable and eliminate him. But somehow, he didn't think so. To meet in a public tavern in so remote a place suggested a need for secrecy. The private salons of these large inns had separate, outside entrances, so that people could come and go without being seen. This had the earmarks of a conspiracy.

I had better go. If anyone is going to make an attempt on the Emperor—assuming that is why they want me—I had better be in a position to advise them.

It wasn't the best plan, but it was better than allowing them to make an attempt that would fail, and would alarm Charliss. The Emperor was already unstable, and it wouldn't take a great deal to set him off on a campaign to purge the Court.

And if necessary, I can always turn them in myself, proving my loyalty to Charliss. That would be the court of last resort, however, if he could not persuade them to hold off until he was ready. Betraying them to Charliss would cost him so much difficulty once he was Emperor that such a move was not advisable unless there was no other possible course of action.

There was the possibility that this invitation was the setup for an assassination attempt on him, but he didn't think that they would be that stupid. An assassin himself, as they well knew, he would be a very difficult man to take down. Granted, a large number of men could overpower him, but as he had already proved, he was, despite all appearances, still perfectly capable of defending himself and killing or maiming several of them before they managed to kill him. Such an affair would be noisy and leave many witnesses who would have to be silenced or eliminated. He would have his own men with him, who would also have to be silenced or eliminated, and those men would have the superiors they reported to and families of their own who would miss them. It would turn into a nightmare of murder, and be impossible to cover up. They had to be aware of all of that.

With great reluctance, he called his valet and ordered clothing for the cold, arranged an armed Imperial escort to take care of the hobgoblins, alerted his personal bodyguard, and ordered a carriage-on-runners; nothing else could handle the icy streets now. People had to step up from their doorsteps to the street instead of down, for there was rock-hard, packed snow to the depth of the knee on most of the streets, snow that would not be gone until spring.

He was just glad that he had invested every bit of his mage-craft in shielding; mages who had not done so were in a state of near-collapse every time a Storm passed through. He barely noticed; he got a headache just before each Storm, a bit of disorientation during it, and a touch of nausea afterward. Nothing was bad enough to even interrupt his reading. But another Storm was due about the time he expected to be on the street, and anyone who was likely to be severely affected by the Storms could find himself in deadly danger in a situation of that nature. A person walking alone could collapse and freeze to death, he could be set upon and robbed, and a person riding in a conveyance could still freeze to death without his escort noticing.

He wondered how many marginally Talented mages had been caught and hurt or killed that way. If so, that simply cuts down on the number of idiots with mage-power, he reflected, as he pulled on a second set of gloves over his first set, and worked his feet into heavy sheepskin-lined boots. It was difficult to be both dressed for warmth and for elegance, and he opted, at least in his outermost garments, for the first.

The journey to the inn was something of an unpleasant ordeal, and he wondered at the number of people who still continued to make their daily trips from home to place of employment, went out shopping, or indeed, did anything that took them out of doors. The weather was hideous, as it was more often than not now. There was the usual blizzard blowing, driving snow deep into the fabric of one's clothing, making it impossible to see the linkmen bearing lanterns who lit the way for the driver, if they got more than a few paces ahead of the carriage. And yet there were other people out on the street, including some women, which amazed him. His escort changed places regularly, so that some rode while others walked.

When they were about a third of the way to his destination, a pack of hobgoblins attacked—hairy things that scrabbled through the snow on all fours, drooling and howling with hunger, their ribs clearly prominent even through their heavy brindled coats of fur. This time, it appeared that they were Changedogs, rather than Changechildren, which made it a bit easier on the escort; the men had a difficult time killing things that cried like babies and had human eyes or faces. It wasn't too difficult to beat the pack back, leaving a few bleeding, furcovered bodies in the snow. So far, Changed creatures were routinely less intelligent than the creatures they had been changed from, and Changedogs were probably the most stupid of them all; they kept charging straight ahead even when that tactic clearly did not work. The exception was Changerats, which were more cunning and vicious, and swarmed in packs of several hundred. There were laws about Changed animals and people now; if your pet or relative was Changed, the only way to keep it (or him) was to take it to an Imperial examiner who would verify that it was no danger to humans or livestock. There were few Changechildren being kept and sheltered by relatives. Most were actually killed by their own families the moment they Changed, for the horror stories circulating about the bloodbaths some of the Changed had wrought in their own households did not encourage compassion. A few who found themselves Changed had killed themselves. Most of the Changechildren who roamed the streets as hobgoblins had come from the streets—were beggars, thieves, and other street people who had no relatives to eliminate them and no interest in anything other than survival.

The rest of the journey was spent nervously watching for another pack of attackers. When they finally did arrive at the inn, it was fully dark, and in the interest of keeping his employees satisfied enough to keep their mouths shut, he distributed a generous purse among them so that they could entertain themselves in fine style in the common room while he met with Thayer and Thayer's guests in the private room above.

His men entered the common room at the side entrance; he entered the main entrance, stepping out of the screaming wind and snow into a sheltering foyer, softly lit and blessedly warm and attended by a discreet footman. Music played faintly somewhere; a full consort of wind and string instruments. The footman directed him up a staircase to the right to another foyer, this time attended by one of Thayer's personal servants, who took his snow-caked outer clothing and directed him inside the door behind him.

He was not at all surprised to see that besides Thayer, virtually every other important military leader in the area of the capital was there already, waiting, with an excellent supper (as yet untouched) set up on a sideboard. All eyes were on him as he entered, and the murmur of talk that had been going on stopped for a moment, then resumed.

He took his place beside Thayer, was introduced to those he did not know personally, and Thayer's servants proceeded to serve all of the guests. He watched them carefully, and noted that they only served him food from dishes that everyone shared, and only after stirring up the contents within his sight, so that there could be no "special" little spot that had been prepared for him with poison. He kept his approving smile to himself, and pretended not to notice. Dinner conversation was not precisely light, since a great deal of it had to do with the roving packs of hobgoblins and suggested means of eradicating them, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with politics. There was another peculiarity of Thayer's servants; they never handled knives themselves, deferring to Thayer for carving of meat, and they were unarmed. As for Thayer's guests, they were conspicuously unarmed. Everything that could have been done to reassure a professional killer that he was safe among them had been done.

So. it wasn't to be an assassination attempt after all. That meant it was a conspiracy.

And the moment that the meal was over, the dishes cleared away, the wine poured and more left in decanters on the table, and the servants sent off, the conspiracy was revealed.

They wanted to be rid of Charliss before he did any more damage, and they were perfectly willing to send him on to Godhood a little sooner.

He listened to them with great patience, making no comments, only nodding occasionally when they seemed to require it. They were understandably angry at many of the things that had been going on, and his revelations concerning Tremane had essentially been the trigger for all their pent-up frustrations. They were quite prepared to eliminate the Emperor themselves, and had a good, solid plan for doing so. He told them as much, and commended them for having a plan that took care of almost every aspect of the situation.

"Almost," he repeated with emphasis. "But I would be remiss if I did not point out the major flaw in your plan. And I do not blame you gentlemen for not considering the aspect I have in mind."

"'Which is what, exactly?" asked General Thayer, who was acting as the primary spokesman.

"Magic." He held up a hand to forestall any objections. "I know that, given how your own mages are acting with the increasing severity and frequency of the mage-storms, that mages seem an insignificant aspect to you. Please believe me; they are not. You have determined that the spells binding the Imperial Guard to Charliss are broken and have not been replaced; that is good news, but those are not the only magics you need to worry about. Charliss himself is a powerful mage, and his power is augmented by an entire corps of lesser mages whose minds have been his for many years. They spend themselves to ensure his continued prosperity, and that is what you are not seeing in dealing with your own mages, who would do no such thing. Surely you gentlemen recall seeing Charliss' mages before—that group of rather blank-eyed individuals who trail about after him like so many adoring, mindless maidens trailing about after a handsome warrior?"

He looked around the table, and saw to his satisfaction that although there was disappointment in their faces, there was reluctant agreement there as well, and nods all around.

"At the moment, Charliss is only moderately inconvenienced by the Storms, as opposed to the vast majority of mages, who are prostrated by them." He steepled his fingers together thoughtfully, and considered his next words. "As a mage myself, let me explain to you, if I may, the true effect the Storms are having on mages—and that is primarily in our choice of actions. The choice for a mage at the moment is simple: Preserve all of your own power for shields, or work other magics and have each Storm that passes send you to your bed for hours, recovering." He saw more nods, as the Generals recognized the effects he had just described. "Because Charliss is using the power from his corps of mages, he can shield and work other magics, and not suffer. That is what makes him dangerous, still. You might well get past his guards, even past his personal bodyguards; you might get past the protections put in by his personal mages, but by then he will be alerted and you will never get an assassin past his own defenses."

There were still a few of the generals who were not convinced; Melles saw it in their closed expressions.

"There is one more factor to be considered here, and that is what would happen afterward," he continued. "The old man still retains the loyalty of too many people—including most of the truly powerful mages of the Empire—who consider me to be an upstart. As it happens, most of them favored Tremane, who was a personal favorite of the mages who taught him, many of whom are now quite influential. I do not know if the truth of what happened to poor Tremane would turn their opinion against the Emperor, but if you remove him now, you will not give that truth a chance to work in their minds."

Now he had all of them; the last of the skeptical looks was gone, replaced with resignation.

"Please wait," he said, at his most persuasive. "The Emperor has made no attempt to say or do anything about the truths that are spreading about his treatment of Tremane. I suspect this is because he is living in a very narrow world of reasoning at the moment. He wants revenge on Tremane for 'betraying' the Empire, and he may believe that people assume he cut Tremane off after that 'betrayal' rather than before. The Hundred Little Gods know that by now he may even believe that himself!"

A couple of the oldest of the Generals pursed their lips and looked just a touch regretful; some of the youngest only looked smug. Both expressions were probably prompted by the same thought—how far the Emperor has fallen! The old were thinking that Charliss' mental deterioration could easily be something they would experience if they were unlucky; the young were thinking only that it was terrible for someone that old, in that state, to still be in power.

Melles continued, seeing that he was bringing them to the line of thought he wanted them to follow. "Charliss looks physically worse with every day that passes. He may die soon on his own; his life is sustained by magic, and that is eroding no matter how desperately he shores it up. Let things take their natural course." He allowed himself a small, modest smile. "After all, I am the one who is really holding the reins now; Charliss is too busy concentrating on survival. Waiting will harm nothing in the long run. With time, I may be able to persuade those same mages that Charliss is using them with no regard for the cost to them, and no regard for the real enemy we face—the Storms."

Thayer looked around the table, and seemed to take some kind of unspoken consensus from his colleagues. "Very well," he said. "We will hold our hands. We agree that the real danger to the Empire is the mage-storms and the continuing refusal of the Emperor to adequately deal with them. You must see what you can do to convince the mages that Charliss is no longer capable of dealing with the true priorities of this situation."

He sat back in his chair and nodded. This was exactly how he wanted everything to fall out, and he relished the moment even as he relished a single sip of wine. If he were to prosper as Emperor, the Empire itself must survive and prosper; in order for that to happen, he must redirect the energies and attention of the Empire on the Storms and their effects. Just now, the energies and attentions of the Empire were seriously divided between one selfish old man who had outlived his usefulness, and the struggles to survive through worsening conditions. Either Charliss must go, or the Empire, for only one would survive through the Storms.

"I will deal with the mages, and believe me, we must have them," he said. "Remember, Tremane is our key. Even as the Army realized that Charliss had betrayed and abandoned one of their own, I believe that with time, I can persuade the mages of the same."

"Good." Thayer held out his hand. "Strange times make for strange allies, but sometimes those are the best. The Army is with you."

"And I," Melles pledged, with no sense of irony, "am with you as well. It is a pity that poor Tremane did not have as many firm allies."

Elspeth had just finished describing the latest results from the group in the Tower, as relayed from Rolan to Gwena, when Tremane's face suddenly went white. "Gods," Tremane said through gritted teeth. "Here comes another one."

He meant another mage-storm; he felt them first, as they traveled over the face of Hardorn. They made him tremble all over, churned his stomach, and muddled his head. But that gave Elspeth, Darkwind, and Tashiketh time to brace themselves before the onset of the Storm hit them as well. At the moment, the effects were still not too bad, although every mage endured some unpleasant physical symptoms in direct proportion to how powerful he or she was. But the circles of changed soil had already begun to appear again, and it could not be too much longer before the weather shifted back to the terrible blizzards that had ravaged the countryside, and before more "boggles" appeared as living creatures were changed by wild magic. They were just glad they had the formula to predict where those circles would appear.

Elspeth grasped the arms of her chair and clenched her own jaw; it didn't help, it never did, but at least it gave her something to do while the Storm rolled over her. Meanwhile, Father Janas watched them all with worried, wondering eyes, for he was no mage, and felt nothing when the Storms came.

This was a short, intense Storm. When it was over, she let out the breath she had been holding, let go of the arms of the chair, and put her head down on her folded arms on the table.

"Oh, I do not like that," Tashiketh sighed. "I do not know how you bear it."

"You bear what you must," Darkwind replied philosophically. "And there are worse things to contemplate than having one's lunch jump about in one's stomach."

"And that brings us back to the topic we were discussing," Tremane said, his clenched hands slowly loosening as color returned to his face. "I do not wish to cast aspersions upon the ability of your friends, Lady Elspeth, but I feel we must assume that the party in the Tower will not find a solution to the Final Storm. My concern is and must be for this land and these people; how am I to protect them? Is there any way that I can take in the damage myself, instead of having it come upon the land? Can I use earth-magic and the earth-binding to instruct the land to heal itself and to prevent the creatures here from being twisted out of all recognition? Have you any ideas at all?"

Father Janas shook his head. "You could take the ills of the land upon yourself, my son, but not for long before it killed you. You cannot bear what the land could and live."

"We don't have any ideas yet, but we have several kinds of magic that we can incorporate," Elspeth mused aloud. "Tremane, I don't think the damage to the land is going to be that terrible, but what I am afraid of is that the nodes are going to—go to a critical point where they cannot be controlled. That they are going to become rogue. I'm very much afraid that the Final Storm is going to turn them into something like the rogue Heartstone that Darkwind and I dealt with."

"That is my concern also," Tashiketh agreed. "I fear that is precisely what may occur, and such a thing would be very like having a continual Storm in one place. As power fed into it, it would continue to grow. This would be a very bad thing."

"Shelters, shields," Darkwind muttered, frowning and glaring at nothing. "The trouble with such things is that they are going to fail; I don't know how we could possibly make them strong enough to survive what is coming."

Elspeth got up and paced restlessly beside the windows. The weather in Hardorn had deteriorated again, but it was not yet as foul as it had been before the last protection went into place. They were currently between snowstorms, and the sun shone down with empty benevolence on the dazzling fresh snow. Elspeth was not looking forward to the resumption of blizzards, but at least the increase in the number of snowstorms was keeping the number of curiosity seekers down. Virtually everyone who could come in himself to pledge to Tremane had, and a few days ago, their old friend Father Janas appeared with another casket of earth, collected from all of those who wished to pledge themselves and their land to their new King and could not come in person. Now Tremane "felt" virtually every part of his realm, which was both an advantage and a disadvantage. He knew where every trouble spot was, and when a Storm began its march across the face of Hardorn, Elspeth was personally quite glad that it was Tremane who experienced the sickness of his land, and not her.

But now the system of signal-towers was fully functional again, and at least warning could be sent out when something did go wrong out in the hinterlands. The precise locations of where the circles of altered land would fall were sent out well in advance of the Storms by means of the towers. If things were not precisely under control, at least they were in a better state than they had been. There was one authority in Hardorn again, and resources were not being wasted on warfare. A few skirmishes with Tashiketh's gryphons had put an end to further fighting.

There was still the pressing problem of how to protect the nodes and the Tayledras Heartstones. She was all too conscious of the Heartstone right under the Palace at Haven; if that went rogue, it could very well destroy the Palace, all the Collegia, and perhaps a good section of Haven as well. The loss of life would be horrendous. The Palace complex had been partially evacuated, but with mixed results and quite a bit of ongoing confusion. She had seen enough magical destruction in the capital of Hardorn; she had no trouble envisioning the same level of destruction visited on her own home.

She started to shake, just thinking about it, and turned her gaze to look out the window for a moment so that no one in the room would see her face and the expression she wore. As so often happened these days, her timing was just right. She was the first to see and recognize the latest arrival to Tremane's court.

The procession was just entering the courtyard as she glanced down at the gates, and the glitter of the sun on shining metal and blinding gold and white trappings caught her eye first. Then she saw the standard, and who rode beneath it, and she gasped, catching the attention of everyone else.

"Oh, gods—" she said, feeling as if she had just been struck a numbing blow to the head and had not yet felt the pain. She wondered wildly for a moment if she was hallucinating; there was no way that she should be seeing what she saw out the window. "Oh, ye gods, this cannot be happening! This is too strange even for me."

"Elspeth?" Darkwind said, catching the timbre of her voice without knowing what caused it. "Ashke, what's wrong?" The chair legs grated on the wooden floor as he hastily shoved his seat back. He got up and hurried to her side; unable to speak, she simply pointed out the window.

His eyes widened, and he choked, completely unable to get even a word of exclamation out.

"King Tremane," Elspeth managed to say as Darkwind was struck dumb, "You have a very important visitor, and I think you had better get down to the courtyard now."

"Why?" he asked, a little resentfully, for he had gotten rather tired of meeting so many delegations in the cold over the past several weeks.

"You should just—do what she says," Darkwind managed to croak.

Tremane looked skeptical. His tone took on an edge of sarcasm. "Who's here? The Emperor?"

"No," Elspeth replied. "Solaris, High Priest of Vkandis and Son of the Sun and her entourage." She glanced down again. "And the Firecat Hansa," she added.

Behind her, there was a muffled curse, and the sound of a chair clattering against the floor as it fell over, and by the time she had turned to see what Tremane was doing he was already gone.

"We'd better go down there, too," Darkwind finally managed to get out. "We should be there to welcome her." She nodded, and gestured to the fascinated gryphon to accompany them.

By the time they reached the courtyard, however, Tremane had already given Solaris as respectful a welcome as anyone could have wished, even the Son of the Sun and the Mouth of Vkandis, given that she had arrived with no warning. And she in her turn had remained polite, which was all that Elspeth could have hoped for, given the circumstances.

"I have been traveling for many days at the express orders of Sunlord Vkandis," Solaris was saying, as Elspeth got within earshot. "It was, I believe, at precisely the moment when you were bound to the land of Hardorn that—"

Then she caught sight of Tashiketh—who had reared up on his hind legs and was holding his foreclaws extended in a peculiar manner that was obviously a ritual salute. And Solaris stared at the gryphon with a look of shock and complete disbelief on her face, her hands automatically moving to form a similar salute.

That's odd; she's seen gryphons before. So why is she looking at Tashiketh as if he were some new kind of creature?

As she stared at him in complete disbelief, Tashiketh intoned something in that odd gabble that Elspeth thought sounded like Karsite. Evidently, so did Solaris, who blinked and stammered something back. It was the very first time that Elspeth had ever seen the Son of the Sun taken aback by anything.

:Evidently Vkandis has a streak of the practical joker in Him after all,: Darkwind commented with a touch of amusement. :Otherwise, He would have warned her.:

:Perhaps this is meant to be an object lesson. That just because she is the Mouth of Vkandis, she doesn't necessarily know everything about the Sunlord,: Elspeth answered.

Tashiketh replied, and Solaris responded. Evidently they were going through a set series of greetings and responses. Finally the little ritual came to a close; Tashiketh dropped back down to all fours again, and made a very courtly bow.

She looked from Tremane to Tashiketh and back again. "How long, sir, have you had this gentleman at your Court?" she asked very carefully.

"Since a few days after I was bound to the earth," Tremane replied. "Tashiketh informed us that he and his entourage were sent because of that particular event."

"As was I," Solaris murmured, still staring at Tashiketh. "And now I know why I was sent here, rather than being told to send representatives as I did to Valdemar."

:I have the feeling that it wasn't just to consult with Tremane,: Darkwind said wryly. :Now she knows that her God has been sharing his attentions. This could be rather amusing.:

The Firecat Hansa, who was sitting very patiently on the front of Solaris' saddle, reached out and patted her on the shoulder with his paw. :We are about to have a blizzard descend, Sunborn,: he said politely. :If you would all be so kind, good people, it would be best if we could move inside.:

As with his compatriot Altra, Hansa could apparently make himself "heard" in Mindspeech even to those who did not share that Gift. Elspeth saw startled looks all over the courtyard, as even Tremane's guards experienced someone talking inside their minds for the first time in their lives.

"I beg your pardon, Sir Hansa, of course we can," Tremane said instantly, and with commendable aplomb. "Allow me to conduct you to appropriate quarters myself." At that moment, to confirm Hansa's prediction, the warning horns blew from the walls, signaling that a physical storm was moving in quickly from the west.

And Tremane did escort them, probably thanking his Hundred Little Gods that he had set up one of the towers as guest quarters for important folk and their followers. The last set of guests had just vacated the premises; the tower was clean and waiting for the next set. It was a matter of moments to take them there, turning over the entire tower to Solaris and her relatively small entourage. Although Darkwind excused himself, Elspeth went along as the official representative of Selenay, and because she was anxious to talk to Solaris if she could. Solaris' escort consisted of a few very professional and tough-looking guards, and several Sun-priests. Just as the last of their baggage came up from below, the blizzard Hansa had warned was coming did indeed descend, and Tremane took his leave of them to see that the usual precautions were in place.

The moment he left, Solaris dropped some of her detached and "official" manner. Looking at Elspeth and Tashiketh, she raised an eyebrow in an inquiring manner. "Would you care to remain while my people get us settled in? I should be glad of the company; it has been a stressful trip."

"I think we would both be pleased to remain, Holiness," Elspeth said carefully, and Solaris laughed, tossing her cloak aside and removing the heavy gold collar she was wearing. A robed attendant took both and carried them away.

"Just 'Solaris,' little sister," the High Priest replied. "There are few enough who can call me by that name, and you are certainly one who has that right." She removed a few more pieces of regalia and set them aside, then sank down in the chair nearest the fire while the wind shook the walls. Hansa immediately leaped into her lap and settled there. "Do take a seat, Elspeth," Solaris continued. "Sunborn Tashiketh, I am not certain what to offer you."

"The floor will do, Most Holy," the gryphon said with careful courtesy, and settled himself there as Elspeth chose another chair. "I hope you will forgive me, but how is it that you did not know that Vykaendys was—"

"Was watching over both our lands? I suspect it is partly because that knowledge was lost while corrupt Priests held the Sun Throne. As to why Vkandis did not choose to reveal this fact to me until now—" She spread her hands wide. "The God moves in His own way, and in His own time. Presumably He had a reason for sending me here to be hit over the head with this revelation."

"I suspect that He sent you here for more than that reason, Most Holy," Tashiketh replied respectfully.

"If you are here, who is holding the Sun Throne?" Elspeth blurted, unable to restrain her curiosity. "I thought you couldn't leave for any length of time, that there were still those you did not entirely trust."

"Oh, that is a tale in itself, and some day I will tell you all of it, but in short, I am here because Vkandis Himself sits on the Sun Throne at this very moment," Solaris said. As Elspeth started with surprise, Solaris nodded. "I mean that quite literally. It is the second great Miracle of my reign; the great statue of Vkandis came to life again during a Holy Service over which I was presiding, then ordered us all to follow and walked out of the Temple, shrinking as He moved, until He reached the throne room, where He took the throne."

Solaris spoke so matter-of-factly that she might have been discussing the terrible blizzard outside, rather than something that was, quite clearly, a miracle in every sense of the word. Elspeth was as fascinated by her attitude as by what had happened. She saw no reason to doubt anything that Solaris told her, for Solaris would not have left Karse without a compelling reason and an unshakable guarantee that her Throne would be waiting for her when she returned.

"When He had seated Himself, He let it be known that I was traveling into Hardorn on a life-or-death mission at His behest, and that in token of the fact that I was His true-born Son, He would be holding the Sun Throne until I returned," she continued. "He swore His protection to Karse against the Storms. At that point, the statue became a statue again except, of course, it was literally rooted to the Sun Throne. It wasn't an illusion either; the great statue is quite gone from the pedestal, and the smaller version in place on the Throne. And in addition, there is a peculiar barrier around Karse itself. People can come and go through it, but it is quite visible, and it seems to resemble the barrier around Iftel that Karal described to me." She smiled a bit wryly. "Now it seems clear why it resembles that barrier. The Sunlord has had practice."

Solaris might seem to be matter-of-fact, but as Elspeth listened and watched, she realized that Solaris was profoundly moved and awed. Elspeth found this a great deal easier to understand; how could anyone not feel awe at such an occurrence?

"I doubt that anyone will have the temerity to claim your place, given that particular demonstration," Tashiketh said dryly. "'And so Vykaendys directed you here?"

"Precisely, and it was not the easiest journey I have ever undertaken, though not the worst either. Our robes earned us respect and safe passage, though no one really recognized us as Sun-priests." One corner of her mouth twitched. "I will admit it came as something of a shock to learn that Tremane had been Bound to Hardorn. That puts him on an equal basis with me, in some ways, and it was not what I would have expected to see happen. Still, it is probably good for Hardorn." She laughed softly. "I also have a confession that I might as well make to you both. I am taking a certain amount of sadistic pleasure in this. He is going to suffer physical discomfort, even terrible pain from time to time, he agreed to this, he even volunteered for it, and I think that between this and his geas of Truth-speaking, he just might be able to atone for his actions in the past."

"He spoke to me in private of what he had done, sending the assassin," Tashiketh admitted. "I believe he regrets his actions more with every passing day."

"Well, he should," Solaris said firmly. "I cannot even begin to describe the anguish he caused, not only to myself and Karal, but to those who knew and cared for all of his victims. But although I am not prepared to forgive him yet, I am willing and ready to work with him. I am an Adept of a peculiar bent, as I suspect you have guessed. I think we may be able yet to find ways to protect ourselves through this crisis."

"I hope so," Elspeth said fervently. "I hope so."

"With Vykaendys' help," Tashiketh replied with absolute certainty, "we shall."

Ten

Firecats had a real cat's ability to make a person feel as if she was a particularly stupid student and the cat was a teacher fast losing patience. :Vkandis' protection is temporary,: Hansa said firmly, looking for all the world precisely like the Cat statue at the feet of Henricht, the first Son of the Sun. Poor Henricht, even as a statue, looked singularly unprepossessing; the Cat, however, looked as if he should have been sitting on the Sun Throne. :It cannot last through the Final Storm. The nodes in Karse are as vulnerable as any. The protection is only meant to prevent people and beasts from Changing, and to prevent the greater part of the priesthood from falling ill twice and thrice a day.: He bent his head then, and washed a paw with great daintiness. :You and your priests will have to do your share like everyone else. If nodes go rogue, you will be dealing with the unfortunate results.:

Solaris sighed, but not with disappointment. Elspeth thought that her sigh sounded more like someone who had just heard unpleasant news she had nevertheless expected.

"Shields," Darkwind muttered, pacing, as Vree followed his movements with interest from his perch in the corner. "That has to be the key. But how do we create a shield that will hold through even the Storms we have now?"

Elspeth pummeled her mind for something she remembered out of—a Chronicle? No, it was a story that Kerowyn had told about one of the mages her grandmother had trained. "Why only one shield?" she asked. "Why not layered shields, shields within shields? Kerowyn told me about something like that; the mage layered lots of weaker shields instead of one strong one, and kept replacing them from the inside as they were taken down from the outside. If you could do that, keep replacing the innermost shield every time the outermost was destroyed—"

"Interesting, and yes, it has been done before, and quite successfully," Darkwind said, knitting his brows in thought. "Multiple shields are more effective than one strong shield. But we can't put a mage beside every node, and if we don't, how could we keep replacing shields as they came down? You can't shield from the outside once the initial shield is up, and how would we do it from the inside? That is the problem of course, and a spell—or series of spells—would have to be crafted for that."

"If we could. How would we continue to supply the energy to create the shields in the first place?" Tremane objected. Solaris gave him a withering look. "You would be sealing the perfect energy source within the shield," she replied, with an unspoken "fool" hanging off the end of the sentence. "that would be the least of our problems. And if the energy were to be exhausted and all the shields fail, well, an exhausted node would be no more dangerous than no node. If there's no power to act upon, there will be nothing to go rogue."

"Apologies, but things work somewhat differently where I am from, and we did not handle magic wells that way," Tremane offered. Tremane did not take offense at her manner, perhaps because she was at least participating in these experimental sessions and demonstrating that she was not going to take out her animosity toward him on Hardorn and its people in general. He grimaced as if he was getting a headache. "Then if we could simply find a way to keep a node spawning its own shields until the energy ran out—"

"This is all very nice in theory," Elspeth pointed out impatiently. "But even if we could do that, we haven't the time or the resources to run about the countryside slapping a shieldspell over every node!"

"Well, actually, we wouldn't have to do that, at least not here—" began Tremane.

"There are Priests enough in Karse to shield every node there," said Solaris at the same time.

"And that works for Hardorn and Karse." Elspeth frowned. "But what about Valdemar? And the Pelagirs? And elsewhere?"

"Hmm," Tashiketh rumbled, moving his gaze from Solaris to Tremane and back again. "There is an answer to that question already in our hands."

Hansa and Father Janas switched their gazes between the two rulers also, as Solaris and Tremane exchanged a very peculiar look.

There was something rather odd going on there, and Elspeth hadn't a clue to what it was all about, but the tension between those two suddenly increased a hundredfold.

"I do not like you," Solaris burst out, as she abruptly got to her feet and stood, glaring at Tremane. "I do not like you at all! Ever since you and your heathen army came here, you have stood for everything I find detestable—expediency above honor, craft above wisdom, guile above truth, self-reliance above faith! I do not like you!"

And with that, she gathered her robes about her and swirled out, Hansa padding in her wake. The heavy silence that followed her outburst made even their breathing seem loud.

"What in hell was that all about?" Elspeth asked, bewildered. She had never seen Solaris lose control like that before.

Tremane looked at the door that Solaris had closed—not slammed—behind herself. "I'm not sure," he replied, "but it might have to do with a solution that involves a personal compromise on the part of the Son of the Sun." He appeared to make up his mind about something and stood up. "If you four can work on the problem of a self-renewing shield-spell that can take power from a node-source without the intervention of an Adept, I will go and speak with Solaris, and see if my guess mirrors actuality rather than just an outburst of frustration."

He nodded at all of them, and left as well.

Darkwind snorted. "A self-renewing shield-spell that takes power from a node without an Adept. At least he was only asking the impossible!"

But Elspeth wasn't so certain. "Don't Tayledras Heartstones do self-renewing spells, like the Veil? And they don't need an Adept around to make them work."

Darkwind started to object, then got a thoughtful look on his face. Tashiketh rested his beak on his foreclaws, looking expectant. "They do," Darkwind replied slowly. "And I was about to say that nodes aren't Heartstones, but Heartstones are a kind of node. Let me think about this one for a moment."

Father Janas simply shrugged. "I haven't the least idea of what you're all talking about," he said cheerfully. "Tremane asked me to sit through this because I know how the earth-binding and earth-magic works. Other than that, my friends, I'm fairly useless. But it does seem to me that for your controlling factor, you could use earth-energy, the very slow and subtle energies that underlie everything, the ones even hedge-wizards and earth-witches use. Those are fundamentally unaffected by the Storms."

Tashiketh raised his head and nodded eagerly; Darkwind looked at Father Janas as if he had unwittingly uttered something profound.

Elspeth had come late to magic and thus undergone a forced-growth process like a hothouse plant. She had never actually worked with such primitive energies as Janas described. But the theory seemed reasonable to her, and both Tashiketh and Father Janas obviously were familiar in detail with how those magics operated. "Well, why don't we just pursue that particular hare until we either catch it or it goes to cover?" she asked decisively.

"It is these energies with which Vykaendys created the Shield-Wall," Tashiketh said thoughtfully. "This is why there is less magical energy to spare within Iftel itself than there is in other lands. It is constantly going to renew the Shield-Wall. If this works, there will be little energy to spare in any of the lands when the Final Storm has passed."

"And the alternative?" Elspeth replied. "I don't think any of us want to contemplate that. Most of us have been doing without a great deal of magic ever since the Storms started, and I doubt that it is going to be too much of a hardship."

"Except for the Vales," Darkwind sighed. "But as you said, the alternative is a great deal less pleasant." He regarded the three of them with an expression so mournful that it almost made Elspeth want to laugh. "I will need your help in asking me very stupid questions, for we will somehow have to unravel the processes by which Tayledras make Heartstones and link them into spells like the Veil. I am so used to being able to do such things that I cannot tell you how I do them. This," he concluded with resignation, "is going to be a very great deal of difficult work, all of it mental."

He was right; it was. They were still only in the earliest stages when Solaris and Tremane returned, and Darkwind remarked via Mindspeech to Elspeth that since there were neither knife wounds nor signs of violence on either of them, the talk must have gone well. Neither of them said anything, and both of them acted as if they did not particularly wish to discuss what had occurred.

The group was not able to get beyond the most basic of understandings that day, nor for several more days, although they all worked feverishly to put together their solution. Only Tremane did not spend every waking hour of the day deep in research and testing; Solaris remarked cryptically that he didn't need to, since his presence was only necessary when they had a solution ready to try. Whatever had passed between them had cleared the air considerably, for Solaris had stopped making her acidic comments and was even distantly friendly to him at times.

Perhaps, not so ironically, it was the discipline and methodology they had learned from Master Levy and the other Master Artificers that enabled them to dissect magic logically, apply the laws they had learned, and find the fundamentals that allowed the magic to work in the first place. Finally, they had all the pieces of a solution; thanks to Darkwind, they all knew how to make a node behave like a very weak Heartstone and how to tie one into a self-sustaining spell. Unlike a Tayledras Heartstone, nodes could only support one such spell, but one was all they would need. They knew how to use earth-energy to power the second spell that would control the first, triggering the spawning of a new shield when the outermost collapsed. Now came the question to which they had no answer, unless Solaris and Tremane already knew it—how to reach every node at the same time.

Then, at last, Tremane rejoined the group.

"Earth-binding," he said succinctly. "Every Tayledras Vale will be able to control the nodes in the territory of that Vale; Solaris will be able to reach the nodes in Karse, the King in Rethwellan the nodes in his land, and so forth. Those leaders will have to undergo the ritual, but the gods know it's simple enough, and once they do, they can immediately protect their nodes."

Elspeth looked askance at him, but Father Janas nodded. "I thought so," he said with satisfaction. "This is one of those few times when the King can affect the land, rather than vice versa."

"I am not looking forward to this," Tremane added bitterly. "When we take this to the next level and involve the entire country, it is going to be extremely unpleasant. But it isn't going to kill me, and I would rather spend a week recovering from the aftereffects of this than have my people face a single node gone rogue. So, let us test our theory on the nearest node to Shonar, and if it works, we will then make all of Hardorn into our second test."

Something about his tone made Elspeth think that the effects of the full-country test were going to be something worse than merely "extremely unpleasant;" she had the feeling that this was going to require every bit of courage Tremane possessed. But there was nothing she could do about it, and she knew very well that her mother would have willingly sacrificed herself in the same cause, as would Solaris, or any other good ruler.

The test on the single node was far less difficult than Elspeth had envisioned; first the controlling-spell was set in place, then the node itself was altered to allow for the linkage of a shield-spell directly to it. This was the part that only an Adept could do, so it was up to Darkwind as the most practiced of all of them in this particular kind of magic, while Solaris "watched" with single-minded intensity.

Then, when everything was in readiness, Darkwind triggered the spell, just before the next Storm came through.

If Elspeth had not been "watching" at the time, she would never have believed that it was possible, for between one moment and the next, the node disappeared, and in its place was a shielded spot into which ley-lines fed but nothing came out. Then the Storm swept in, and they all waited out the effects.

When they had recovered and were able to "look" again, the node was exactly as it had been before the Storm, shielded and safe.

Tremane looked very much like a man who has received both incredibly good news and incredibly bad news at the same time. "Well, he said, "we know it works."

"How soon do you want to try protecting all of Hardorn?" Father Janas asked him gently.

"Now," he said decisively. "We have until late tonight before the next Storm comes in, and I don't want to be able to sit and brood on this."

Solaris sat straight up and looked him in the eyes. "Tremane Gyfarr Pendleson of Lynnai, don't you dare sit there and pretend to be a martyr! What you are about to endure, I will also have to, and Prince Daren of Valdemar, and Faramentha of Rethwellan, and whoever it is in Iftel—"

"Vykaendys-First Bryron Hess," Tashiketh said helpfully.

"The Son of the Sun in Iftel, and a half-dozen Hawkbrothers and at least one Shin'a'in," Solaris concluded.

:Not to mention as many other leaders we can reach as we think will have lands in jeopardy,: Hansa added helpfully. :There will be a great many leaders with dreadful headaches before this is all over.:

"Exactly! You will not be alone in this, and although you may feel fear because of the justifiable guilt you bear for your other actions in the past, I can assure you that the land will not let you die!" She rose to her feet, full of anger and some other emotion that Elspeth could not put a name to. "If you are afraid, then be a man and admit it, and let us help you through it! You should know that if you are too afraid, the land will resist what we are about to do. We may not be able to overcome that resistance, for the land takes its cues from you."

:That's Solaris talking, but it's also something else,: Darkwind said, in Mindspeech tightly focused and tense. :I wonder if Tremane realizes it?:

:Vkandis?: Elspeth asked, but even as she said it, she knew that it was the wrong answer.

:Since when does a male use all of someone's names to scold him?: Darkwind asked, a little of the tension ebbing. :No, Solaris is acting as a Mouth for a different power, and I suspect that if you asked Father Janas, he'd be very familiar with it. Probably her annoyance with Tremane and her familiarity with being a Mouth opened her up to acting as an inadvertent channel for it.:

Elspeth sent silent agreement, after casting a quick glance at the priest, who was watching the little scene with a faint smile on his lips. Darkwind was right. Only a woman—a mother—would scold someone using every one of his names. And wasn't the earth often referred to as Mother? Looked at in that light, there were some subtle physical changes in Solaris that gave more clues. For one thing, she looked more—feminine—than Elspeth had ever seen her.

The scolding did what it was supposed to do, which was annoy him enough to make him willing to admit to a weakness; and in a way Elspeth could feel very sorry for poor Tremane, who hadn't asked for any of this, and had borne up very well under it all. He stiffened his back, looked up into Solaris' eyes, and said, with quiet dignity, "You are right, Solaris. I am terrified. I am accustomed to using power, not having it use me, and the prospect of giving up control over myself to anything gives me the horrors. Doing it with the lives of thousands of innocents in the balance is terrible beyond my ability to articulate."

Whatever had Solaris let her go, and the anger faded as she sat down. "It isn't so bad, being used by this kind of power," she said softly. "You will be exhausted when it is over; perhaps a little ill, though I don't think it will be very bad. I think the power will use you gently, if you don't resist it. Sometimes giving up control in a greater cause is the noblest thing one can do in one's life." She hesitated a moment longer, then it looked as if some wall inside her gave way. Her expression changed completely. "Perhaps you are rightfully afraid that some of us, who have grievances with you, may not protect you with a whole heart. You would have been correct in fearing that not very long ago; I might not have moved to help you if I saw that you were in danger." She took a deep breath and plunged on. "That is no longer true; I forgive you, Tremane of Hardorn, and if it is any more comfort to you, young Karal, who has greater cause to hate you than I, forgave you before I did. The man who loosed the assassin that murdered our friend was an Imperial Commander, subject to the orders and whims of an Emperor with no morals and no scruples, and you are no longer that man." Now she looked shamefaced for a moment. "The Sunlord himself told me that I must forgive you if we were to succeed, but until this moment, I could not."

Tremane looked at her with astonishment, and offered her his hand; she took it in a firm handclasp that said far more than words could have. "Thank you for that; I know what it cost you," was all he said.

Then he released her hand and looked at the others. "Well? Shall we begin?"

As far as Elspeth was concerned, there was very little for her to see or do, other than to feed mage-power to Darkwind, who in his turn did things with it that she could neither see nor follow, although she knew in theory what he was doing. She was what they all called the "anchor" and she brought in the power, directed, and refined it. Tremane searched for the node, and "held" them all there when he found one. Darkwind built the node into a matrix that would permit a single spell to be linked into it. Father Janas constructed the controlling spell that triggered the main spell, using the loss of a shield as the guide for activation. Solaris built the main spell, which created the nine nested shields using power from the node, and Darkwind linked it in. Then, once that node "disappeared" because it was now shielded, Tremane moved their viewpoint on to the next node. In the end, by the time they were done, Tremane was so completely exhausted that he could not even move, but as Solaris had promised, he was neither ill nor in pain. They had worked through him to reach every node in Hardorn and replicate the same shields and spells they had tried on the first node. This was the only way they could have reached all of the nodes without going to them physically; in a sense, since Tremane was bound to all of Hardorn in a very physical fashion because of the blood and soil he had ingested, they actually were working there physically.

They completed their work just as the next Storm came through, and had the satisfaction of seeing their work hold. And Tremane got a small reward out of it after all; since the nodes were no longer being battered by the energies of the Storm, he was suffering only about half of the physical effects he had been enduring with every Storm-wave. This made him feel half again better.

"That in and of itself made this all worth while," he said weakly, but with a smile, and then they sent him off to bed.

"He feels as though he will sleep for a week, but it won't be more than a day or so," Father Janas said with weary satisfaction. "He'll be back on his feet and hard at work shortly. Now do you need anything to alert the peoples in your homes?"

"I will send two of my fastest flyers—mages both—back with the exact instructions in the morning," Tashiketh rumbled, his eyes alight with pleasure at their success. "And if you will permit me, Most Holy, more will convey you and Hansa back to your own land to save you as much time as possible; as many of your escort as care to remain here can, I suppose, and the rest can follow you at their own pace."

Solaris gave him a puzzled look. "I would appreciate it no end, but how do you intend to do this?" she asked. "I assume you mean me to fly with them, but I can't imagine how that could work properly."

"A basket, suspended between them. It is perfectly safe," Tashiketh assured her. "There are some minor spells on the basket to make it and the contents light; you can renew these easily enough, and the only thing you will need to take care with is that you go to ground during Storms."

"Our gryphons use the same means," Darkwind seconded. "It's safer than you'd think. You'll be able to cross into Karse within a few days, even with having to land twice or three times a day as a Storm passes."

"Then I thank you, for I will have to seal off the Temple as well as our nodes, and whether or not Tremane will believe that, it will be a harder task than this." Her words were still a little sardonic, but she smiled, and Elspeth sensed that Solaris would no longer be able to say in truth that she hated Tremane of Hardorn.

"And you?" Father Janas asked Elspeth and Darkwind. Darkwind answered for both of them.

"It is already accomplished," Darkwind said, his voice heavy with tired content. "Gwena has sent the word to Rolan; Rolan has sent it on to Skif's Cymry, who will detail it to the Kaled'a'in of k'Leshya Vale. They will see to it that Tayledras and Shin'a'in alike have the information, and our nodes and Heartstones will be protected within days. Messages will go from Valdemar to every White Winds mage in every land, and from there—wherever the word needs to go."

"Your Companions are useful friends," Father Janas said with envy. "Perhaps there will be room for them in Hardorn in the future." He looked shyly at Solaris. "And there should be room for Temples to the Sunlord as well, I should think. When it all comes down to it, what is done for the cause of Good is done in the name of every Power of the Light."

She smiled; the first open, unshadowed smile that Elspeth had seen on her face since she arrived here. "And on that very optimistic note, I shall thank you and beg leave to go to bed myself," she said, getting to her feet. "Hansa and I have a long journey in the morning."

"Room for everyone," Darkwind echoed, as he and Elspeth walked slowly to their own quarters. "That is not so bad a way to conduct one's land."

"I know," she replied saucily. "We've been doing it that way in Valdemar for some time now."

And now, at least, we have some assurance we will continue to be able to, she thought. And now we can spare some prayers and energy for Karal and the rest where they are. May all our gods help them, for we cannot.

Emperor Charliss sat in, not on, the wooden Throne in his private quarters, and plotted revenge, for revenge was all he had left to hold him to life. His mind was clear, despite the hellish mix of drugs his apothecary had concocted on his orders, to dull his pain and sustain his failing body. That was because the mix included drugs to keep his mind from becoming clouded. Outside his quarters, a physical blizzard raged, as it had raged for the past three weeks. The mage-storms, too, passed through Crag Castle several times every day, leaving most mages shuddering with the aftereffects. He wasn't suffering from that difficulty, though; or if he was, it was insignificant in the light of the degeneration of his body.

Although he did not appear to take any notice of what was going on outside this suite, such was not the case. He knew very well what Melles was up to; discrediting the Emperor even with the Imperial Army, spreading truths, half-truths, and lies to make it appear that only Baron Melles had the welfare of the Empire in his heart. He was also quite well aware that Melles was doing a fine job of holding the Empire together, even if it was with devious and dubious means. He knew that Melles was using the Emperor's treatment of Tremane as a weapon to bring the feuding political factions of the Empire together under Melles' control. It was a ploy that would not have occurred to Charliss, but in retrospect, given that Melles was detested by at least a quarter of the Great Players in the game of Empire, and feared by another quarter, the only way he could have united them was to find a common enemy they could hate worse than him.

None of that mattered, for he no longer cared what Melles or any other living man did. His priorities were different, and much more personal.

The spells that kept his worn-out body going, that reinforced failing organs, were themselves failing. Each time a Storm came through, he lost more of them and was unable to replace all the spells that were lost.

He saw no way of being able to save himself; he was dying, and he knew it. He could no longer move under his own power anymore; his servants carried him from bed to Throne and back again, all within the confines of his private quarters. The long, slow decline he had anticipated had accelerated out of all recognition.

He was not afraid, but he was angry, with the kind of calculating, all-consuming anger only a man who had lived two centuries could muster. He had been cheated of the last, precious years of his life, and he knew precisely where to lay the blame for it.

Valdemar.

He had sent his scholars on a search for that benighted land and its origin, and had learned things that gave him all the more reason to assume that it was Valdemar that had unleashed these Storms across the face of the land. Valdemar had been founded centuries ago by rebellious subjects of the Empire who had escaped into the wilderness too deeply to follow. But time and distance were no barriers to revenge, as he himself very well knew. The rulers of Valdemar had probably been plotting this attack against the Empire ever since their land was founded. A plot such as this one would have taken centuries to mature, centuries to gather the power for. These Storms could not have been generated by anything less than the most powerful of Adepts working together in concert; such a weapon was fiendishly clever, diabolically complicated.

In the end it might have been his own actions in reaching for the land of Hardorn that triggered the long plots of Valdemar and gave them the opportunity to destroy those who had driven them out of their homes so long ago. He should have read the return of his envoy from Hardorn, dead, with the blade belonging to Princess Elspeth between his shoulders, for the serious warning it really was. You're too close, and we'll finish you; that had been the real message. Like a nest of bees, he had ventured too near, and now the insects would swarm him and destroy him.

It didn't really matter what the cause for their actions was, nor did it matter whether he could have done anything to prevent this. The Storms had been unleashed, he was dying, it was all the fault of Valdemar, and he was going to see to it that Valdemar didn't outlive him—at least, not in any form that the Valdemarans themselves would recognize. Like a wild bear making a final charge, in his death throes he would destroy those who were destroying him.

He had everything he needed; all of the magic of the local nodes, plus all that of his coterie of mages, plus a great deal he had hoarded in carefully-shielded artifacts. Every Emperor created magical artifacts, or caused them to be created; he could drain every one of them. Every mage he had ever worked with, whether he was one of Charliss' private group or not, had a magical "hook" in him, one that tied him back to Charliss. The moment Charliss cared to, he could pull every bit of that mage's personal power and use it as if the mage was one of his personal troupe. The smartest of the mages had, of course, discovered and removed that hook—but most of them hadn't, and Charliss could use them up any time he cared to.

But his own time was rapidly running out. The shields protecting those hoarded objects weren't going to last through too many more Storms, nor were the resources of his mage-troupe, nor of the mages he had hooks in. If he was going to use this power, it would have to be soon.

He sat supported by the tall back and heavy arms of his mock Throne, and contemplated the methods of vengeance. What could he do to finish them, these upstart Valdemarans? What form should his attack take? He wanted it to be appropriate, suitable—and he wanted it to do the most damage possible.

What would the best allocation of his resources be? It's obvious. Release all the power at once, he decided. Release it as the wave-front of the Storm passes, and use it to augment what the Storm does. Make it the worst Storm that the face of this old world has ever seen.

The results of that should be highly entertaining, and since he would release it as the Storm passed from east to west, most of the Empire would be safe.

But Valdemar—ah, Valdemar would have no idea that the blow was coming. The results of such an enormous release of power would be devastating—and amusing, if he lived to watch it, and to collect his information.

Everything from Hardorn to far beyond Valdemar, and from the mountains in the North to the South of Karse, would erupt with Nature driven mad. The weather was already hideous; this would make it unbelievably worse. Earthquake—there would be earthquakes in regions that had never known so much as a trembler, as the stresses in the earth built to beyond the breaking point. Fire—volcanoes would erupt out of nowhere, pouring down rivers of molten rock on unsuspecting cities. Physical storms would spawn lightning that in turn would ignite huge forest fires and grass fires. Blizzards would bury some areas in snow past the rooftops, while floods would wash away the country elsewhere, and mudslides make a ruin of once-fertile hills. Mountains would fling themselves skyward, and the earth would gape as huge fissures opened underfoot. Processes that normally took millennia would occur in a single day or less. There would be no place that was safe, no place to hide. And when the wrath of Nature was over, the Changed creatures would descend on the demoralized and disorganized survivors.

It would be everything he could have wished for. He just wished he was going to live long enough to properly gloat over it; once the energy was released, Charliss would have no more magic to sustain him, and he would die. But so would most of his enemies. Anyone and anything that lived through it all would probably wish for death before too very long.

Tremane would be caught in all of this, of course. which would give him revenge on the faithless traitor—revenge that Melles had been too cowardly or too lazy to take. Lazy, probably; Melles never had been one to pursue targets that were out of his immediate reach; he could always manufacture excuses to obviate any need to do so.

Well, he would take matters into his own hands, then.

It was possible that the extra energy released wouldn't just wipe Valdemar off the world—it might rip through the Empire and its allies as well. The chaos he was about to unleash could have far-reaching effects.

He didn't care. He was long since over caring about things that meant no immediate improvement in his well-being.

Why should my Empire outlive me? he asked himself, seething with resentment over the fact that the Empire as a whole was not willing to make the sacrifices to sustain him. I gave them my life and my attention—my entire life. Was I appreciated? Beloved for being stern with them? No. Not at all. They took and took. Now they pay for their greed. They should have thought ahead and appeased me.

And there was no reason to make life any easier for Melles either. Let him patch something together from what was left, if, indeed, there was anything left. Let Melles see if he could actually do something with the crumbs and shards. It would serve that effete bastard right.

He smiled slowly, thinking of how Melles would react. The Baron had been progressing so well in imposing order on the chaos left in the wake of the Storms. He must feel so proud of himself, and be so certain that he had everything under control now. It would be delicious to see how he crumbled as everything he had worked so hard for vanished before his eyes.

Revenge; on Valdemar, on Tremane, even on Melles for daring to succeed—that was all Charliss had left, and he would take it. By the time he was finished, the known world would be driven down to the level of cave-dwelling, nomad-hunter survival. If Melles reclaimed anything at all as an Empire, it would be an Empire no bigger than this city.

I will destroy it all. His hands clutched the arms of his chair, and he felt his dry lips cracking as his smile widened. When he set off the final cataclysm, when he ignited nations to form his funeral pyre, he would prove he had been the greatest and most powerful Emperor to ever live.

No one would ever surpass him as he burned the world to light the way to his grave, and the darkness that followed would be a fitting shroud.

Karal felt peculiarly useless at this moment in time, although in a little while he would be just as important as anyone else in the Tower. He watched the others making last-minute preparations, and wished wistfully that he could use the teleson to talk to Natoli; it might have relieved his nerves. He sat quietly where he'd been told to sit, immersed in a peculiar mixture of terror, resignation, and anticipation. He knew he could do what they were going to ask of him, but he couldn't think past that. Even when he tried, he was unable to imagine a single moment after their task was done. Was that only because he was frightened, or because once it was over it would be over for them, forever?

He was still acting as the Channel for this "weapon," but this time he would not be in the physical center of the group. This time the main participants—himself, Firesong, An'desha, and Sejanes—would stand in square formation around it, and it didn't seem to matter what direction each stood in, so long as they were spaced equally around it.

There was another difference this time. Each of the "mortal" participants would be shielded by those who were not. Karal had Florian and Altra; An'desha would be protected by the Avatars, Firesong by Need and Yfandes, and Sejanes by Vanyel and Stefen. Yfandes had attached herself to Firesong without comment, perhaps, so that each of the participants would have two protectors. Aya was to be kept strictly out of the way, in the care of Silverfox, with the rest of those who were not participating. They would all be in the workroom below, with the hatch closed. Firesong and Sejanes had determined that the shields on the workroom were as much purely physical as magical. There were properties in the stone that insulated from magical energy. The workroom had been cleared of anything remotely magical in nature, and stocked with tools, food, and water, so that if the worst happened and the survivors were sealed inside, they had a chance to dig themselves out.

The cube-maze was the exact opposite of whatever device was used to unleash the Cataclysm in the first place, and the Adepts had surmised that it had been created as a fail-safe. As they now understood it, all of Urtho's magic had been released at once when he dissipated the bonds of all of the spells on everything that was not inside the specially shielded areas of the Tower. At the same time, a similar device had done the same to all of Ma'ar's magic in his stronghold, thus creating the Cataclysm as the two reacted together in violent and sometimes unexpected ways. They had partly replicated that when they set up the Counter-Storm.

This time, if their research and planning paid off, they were going to reverse that; they were going to open up something that would swallow all of the magic energies converging on this spot and send it all out into the Void. At least, they hoped that was what would happen. They didn't know what was going to happen at the other original release point, but Ma'ar had not been the tinkerer that Urtho had been, and had not been known for having workshops to experiment in. There were probably not any of the dangerous devices there that there were here—and in any case, the site was at the bottom of Lake Evendim. Whatever happened there would take place under furlongs of water, and far from any populations of human or other beings.

No one knew what would follow when they closed the device as the last of the energies were swallowed up. They all had some theories. Master Levy insisted that since no energy could be destroyed, it would all go elsewhere; his suggestion was that it would become a kind of energy-pool in the Void that mages could all tap into. He also warned that resistance to energy flow usually manifested as heat, and there was a very real possibility that despite their best efforts all here would be charred to death partway through. This earned the mathematician a few sour looks, which were returned with an apologetic smile. Both Lo'isha and Firesong were of the opinion that all the energy would come right back into the "real" world, as if a flood was swallowed up and came back out of the sky as rain, like the water in a fountain, endlessly cycling from pond to air and back again.

Whatever happened, the only certainty was that all the old rules of magic would go flying right out the window. No one even knew if all of this energy was ever going to be accessible anymore. They might end up with a world that was fundamentally without magic, though that was fairly unlikely.

As Urtho had said in the placards that he had left, this would have been a suicidal device to use as a weapon; once it was opened, it would have proceeded to swallow all the magic in its vicinity—in fact, it was quite likely to drain all the rest of the weaponry in here dry—and it might even have swallowed up the mages who opened it. But with the tremendous energies of this Storm breaking over it, the device would probably have all the energy it could possibly handle.

The plan was to take down the Tower shields and open it as the Final Storm hit, feed it all the energy of the Storm until it couldn't take any more or melted down, and close it again under control if it was still active.

Storms were coming in all the time now, and although the Tower shields were still holding, they had been forced to evacuate the remains of the Shin'a'in camp some days ago as a blizzard like none of their hosts had ever seen before raged across the Plains. Similar weather ravaged Valdemar, Karse, Hardorn, the Vales—

Probably everywhere else, too, Karal thought, listening carefully. And it's supposed to be spring out there. If he paid very close attention, he could ignore all the sounds coming from inside the Tower, and was able to pick out, very faintly, the howling of the winds outside. You couldn't even stand out there, the wind would knock you to the ground in a heartbeat. It was a good thing that they had evacuated the Plains weeks ago; tents wouldn't take this kind of pounding, and no horse, sheep, or mule would survive exposed to a storm like this.

As for the Vales—Firesong said that the Tayledras were incorporating the magic that shielded nodes with the one that formed the Veil that protected each of their Vales. Hopefully, these would hold; if not, they would have to live as the scouts did from now on, exposed to the elements, without their little lands of artificial summer.

Karal wished he knew what was going on in Karse; Altra would only say that Solaris had the situation well under control, and that most of the people were being well cared for. He hoped that his family was all right, though since they were living in a fairly prosperous village, they should be. The ones in real danger would be the remote farmers and shepherds who, isolated and alone out in the hills and mountains, might not have gotten warning in time to get to adequate shelter.

He hadn't thought about his family in a long time; the Karal that had helped his father in the inn's stables was another person entirely, and he knew that if his mother or father were to pass him in the street, they would not recognize him. And he would have nothing whatsoever in common with them. He had always expected to change as he grew up—but not this radically.

He tucked up his legs and rested his chin on his knees, thinking wistfully about all he had left behind—all he would leave behind if this effort failed. When it came right down to it, there were only a handful of people who would actually miss him if he didn't come out of this, and most if not all of them would recover quickly enough. Natoli probably wouldn't exactly recover, but she would manage, and go on to make something good out of her life. And meanwhile, he would have done something important with his life, and there weren't too many people who could actually say that. The thought, though bleak, was curiously liberating.

He had made his good-byes to everyone except those who were still in the Tower itself, down in the workroom; he still had time, and this might be the moment to take care of that little detail.

He got to his feet and slipped down the stairs, hoping to find Tarrn and Lyam alone. He was lucky; Lo'isha, Master Levy and Silverfox were still up above, with the handful of Shin'a'in who were still here, wedging doors to other weapon rooms open and helping to drag the cube-maze out of its little room into the main one. No matter what else happened here, they were at least going to accomplish one thing Urtho could not; they were going to render every other weapon in the Tower inactive.

Their industry left the workroom mostly untenanted. Only Aya sat nervously on a perch in the corner, while Lyam and Tarrn puttered about, storing things away more efficiently.

He stood uncertainly on the stairs, and it was Tarrn who noticed him first. :Well, young one, it is nearly time,: the kyree said, looking unusually solemn.

"I know," he replied, sitting down on the bottom steps. "I came to tell you both that I'm very glad I knew you, and I learned a lot from both of you."

They left what they had been working on to join him. "I am very pleased to have been your friend, Karal," Lyam said earnestly, taking Karal's hand in his own dry and leather-skinned claw-hand. "I hope we will be able to continue that friendship after Tarrn and I have gone back to k'Leshya."

:And you figure prominently in my Chronicles, young scholar,: Tarrn said gravely, with a slight bow of his graying head, giving Karal what the young Karsite knew were the two most important accolades in the kyree's vocabulary—being called a scholar and being told he had a prominent place in the history Tarrn was writing. :In days to come, cubs will be astonished that I actually had the privilege of your friendship.:

An awkward silence might have started then, but at that very moment, Silverfox came trotting down the stairs, followed by all the rest. "It's time, Karal," the kestra'chern said, and gave Karal a completely unself-conscious hug. "They're waiting for you."

"Good luck, boy," Master Levy called, and cracked an unexpected smile. "Don't disappoint Natoli; she's expecting you to take careful notes and tell her all your observations."

Lo'isha only clasped his hand warmly and looked deeply and gravely into his eyes, and the rest of the Shin'a'in paused long enough to give him the nod of respect they normally only accorded to Lo'isha.

Each of them in his own way was saying farewell—giving him what encouragement they could—without doing anything that might unnerve him or shake his confidence. He knew that, and knew that they knew it as well. And he knew that he should be afraid, but somehow all his fear had passed away as he made those farewells, as if each of them was taking a little bit of it with them, so that he could be freed to do his task.

He walked quickly up the stairs; Firesong and An'desha waited up there to lower the hatch down into place, once again sealing it behind shields both magical and physical. The cube-maze was the first thing he saw as his head came up out of the hatchway; placed in the center of the room, it was curiously dwarfed by the sheer size of the place.

It looked very pretty, a piece of abstract art, gleaming with blue and purple reflections in the light from overhead. Sejanes was already in his place, flanked by the two wisps that were Vanyel and Stefen. Dawnfire and Tre'valen, looking far more solid, waited on either side of An'desha's position, and another white wraith stood beside the place where Firesong would stand. Firesong already had Need in a sheath on his back, and as he took his stand, he drew the mage-sword and held her.

An'desha moved to his place between the two Avatars, a closed-in expression on his face, as if already concentrating on what he was going to do. Sejanes had his eyes closed and his hands cupped in front of him. As Karal took his own place, flanked by Florian and Altra, Firesong made a little movement that caught his attention, and as he glanced at the Hawkbrother, Firesong gave him a wry grin and a one-handed sign for encouragement. Somehow, that made him feel better than he had all day, and he set his feet with more confidence.

As the terrible energies broke over them, Firesong was to open the device, and hold it open; next to being the Channel, his was the most dangerous task. An'desha and Sejanes were to act as funnels and control the energies as they converged on Karal, keeping a steady flow. Surges would be particularly dangerous; if a surge of power overwhelmed Karal, he might block the flow. If that happened, it would feed back on all of them. It was also the job of Sejanes and An'desha to "homogenize" the incoming energies by mixing them, for a flood of only one kind might do the same thing. Karal would actually transmute them before feeding them into the device.

"Are we ready?" Firesong asked, looking around the circle at all of them. Each of them nodded, and Karal saw for a moment, in each of their faces, the same resignation that he himself felt.

They all think in their hearts that they are going to die. They're putting on a brave face for the rest of us.

And he did the same. Despite all their care and planning, this could go horribly wrong, and if it did, it wouldn't just be one of them that would take the brunt of the punishment, it would be all of them.

:Here it comes,: warned Altra, and then there was no time to think of anything else.

Charliss waited, tense with anticipation as he had not been in decades. This would be perhaps the most powerful spell that had ever been cast in the history of the world since the Cataclysm; it would certainly be the most powerful spell ever cast in the history of the Empire. And for all that, it was such a deceptively simple thing—just a spell that released all of the energy of every magical object and person within Crag Castle that Charliss had any control over. This would probably kill all of his mages. If it didn't, it would certainly leave them disabled for many weeks, and might well destroy their minds. That had a certain piquant pleasure to it, for this spell would definitely kill its caster, and Charliss was not at all averse to taking an escort with him when he died.

The only emotion within his breast now was rage; it left no room for anything else. It really left no room for any thought but revenge.

He might well be the last Emperor, and that thought had the sweetness of revenge. More so since no one would ever know that he was the one who had done this—those few who knew he was spell-casting thought it was of the usual sort, that he was trying to extend his life a little longer.

They would probably blame Melles for this, since the mages who would die would all be mages closely allied with Charliss. That was even sweeter. Melles would have all the blame as the man who had destroyed the Empire, and Charliss would acquire the virtues that Melles did not have in contrast. Melles would be the terrible villain, and Charliss the saint that he destroyed.

What a subtle revenge!

The only thing that would make it better would be to know for certain that he was taking Tremane down with him. But never mind. One couldn't have everything—and if Tremane didn't actually die in the catastrophe that Charliss unleashed, he might well be among those who wished he had.

Charliss gathered the threads of his power in his hands, and waited for the Storm to break.

* * *

It was a strange little gathering, here in the Great Hall of Tremane's manor. Tashiketh and the four gryphons that were left with him, part of Solaris' escort of Sun-priests that had remained behind to help, Elspeth and Gwena, Darkwind and Vree, Brytha the dyheli, all of Tremane's mages, the two old weather-wizards from Shonar itself, and Father Janas, all arranged in concentric circles around Tremane. Anyone with even the tiniest bit of Mage-Gift was here, and they would all be working on a single task; to create and hold a shield. If they could hold it over Shonar, they would—if that proved impossible, they would try to hold it over the castle, and if that failed, just over themselves.

The scene looked and felt unreal and dreamlike, but Elspeth was doing her best to control a fear that was as deep and all-pervasive as the fear in a nightmare. For once, the menace looming over Elspeth was invisible, implacable, and faceless. There was no villain, no Ancar, no Falconsbane; only a terrible thing that had been loosed millennia ago and was now coming home, too ancient, impersonal, and powerful to grasp, yet too real not to terrify.

Nevertheless, the danger was real enough, and it would be worse if the group in the Tower failed. There had been a blizzard howling across the face of Hardorn for the past three days, the strangest such storm that Elspeth had ever seen. Greenish lightning somewhere up above the solid curtains of snow illuminated the entire sky in flashes, yet revealed nothing but white. There were reports of whirlwinds, and of spirits riding the wind, strange creatures blowing before it. None of these reports had been verified, but Elspeth would not discount any of them.

Every time that Storms came through, the effect was worse—although every one of the node-shields held with no apparent problems. But this Storm was going to be worse, much worse, than any of the previous lot. This was the return of the initial blast that had caused all of the storms, so long ago.

As for what would happen if the group at the Tower failed—no one could predict that, except that it would be terrible. Nature already raged out of control; could they deal with years of this?

Never mind. It was out of her hands, and that was what felt the most unreal of all. She had never been in a position where she was utterly helpless to do something about her own peril before, never been in a case where she had no control over what was going to happen. She felt demoralized and impotent, and she didn't like it one bit.

Darkwind squeezed her hand, and Gwena rubbed her soft nose against Elspeth's shoulder. Well, at least she wasn't facing this alone; no one else in this room had any more control over the situation than she did.

"It's time," Tremane said hoarsely. "it's coming."

And now it was too late to think about anything but joining mind, heart, and power with the others, disparate as they were, and shield and hold with grim determination...

"Now," Firesong said between his clenched teeth, as the Storm broke over them. Around them, the stone of the Tower rumbled and groaned, like a carriage-spring being twisted beyond its ability to return to normal. This time was unlike all the previous experiences with the energy of the Storm, in that it had a distinct sound—a hollow, screaming roar accompanied by a steady increase in air pressure. Firesong held Need up between himself and the cube-maze, spoke some apparently private words to the sword, and did something to the taut fabric of magic that Karal half-saw, half-felt—

Then the cube-maze scattered motes of light along its surfaces, toward the apex of the topmost cube, and a ring spread outward to the farthest edges of the device—and all inside that ring vanished, and in its place was what could only be described as a great Darkness. The Void. The Pit.

Karal sensed it pulling on him and let it; Florian and Altra held him anchored as he let some inner part of himself meld with that awful darkness in the center of their circle. Then there was nothing but Light and Dark; the Pit in the center, and a coruscating, scintillating, rainbow-hued play of light and power all about it. Karal felt part of himself opening to it, sensed that he had become the conduit to send that power down into the Pit, which swallowed it hungrily but did not yet demand more than he could feed it.

All of his attention was on the Pit before him; he sensed explosions of energy behind and to all sides, and the energies around him oscillated furiously.

He tried to contain them and shove them into the dark maw, but the Pit had reached the limit at which it could accept them.

He heard shouting; it sounded like An'desha's voice, but he couldn't make out what the Shin'a'in was trying to tell him. Off to his right, a shining shape emerged from the chaos of swirling, flashing light, growing brighter with every moment.

It was Firesong, with Need glowing white-hot in his hands. He trembled in agony but refused to give in to the obvious pain of his blistering flesh.

Melles paused outside the Emperor's doorway—for once unguarded, thanks to the complicity of the Emperor's personal guard. With the geas binding them in loyalty to the Emperor now quite gone, they were all of them able to think for themselves, including Commander Ethen, who had replaced the now nerve-shattered Commander Peleun. In the past several weeks, they, too, had seen and heard enough—not quite enough to take things into their own hands, but enough to make them willing to leave their posts for a carefully staged "emergency."

There was no sound in the white-marble corridor except for the ever-present screaming of the wind. Even sheltered inside their glass chimneys, the candle flames that had taken the place of mage-lights flickered in icy drafts strong enough to have earned the name of "breeze." But these gusts were no zephyrs, and the blizzard out there wasn't half as powerful as the Storm now breaking over them was likely to make it.

The Emperor was going to be utterly engrossed in his spellcasting; over the past several days, Melles had made a point of going in and out of the Emperor's chambers and the Throne Room on one pretext or another during a Storm, and he knew that Charliss was completely oblivious to everything around him when he was spell-casting.

If the Emperor had put half the effort on holding his crumbling Empire together that he was spending on maintaining his crumbling body, Melles would not have felt so impelled to remove him now.

If he had done so, Melles would not have half the allies he now had either.

He walked boldly into the Emperor's quarters, as he had any number of times over the past few days, as if in search of an official paper or something of the sort. He ignored the unconscious mages sprawled over the furniture in the outer room, taken down either by the Storm itself or the Emperor's ruthless plundering of their energies.

The Emperor would not be here or in his bedroom; Melles already knew that Charliss had ordered his servants to carry him into the empty, cavernous Throne Room and placed him in the Iron Throne itself. He made a tiny hand-sign to the two bodyguards standing on either side of the door, a pair of bodyguards from his own retinue, inserted into the Emperor's personnel with the collusion of the Guard Commander. They acknowledged his presence with a slight nod and stood aside. He opened the door to the Throne Room carefully, a fraction at a time, as he sensed the Storm building to an unheard-of fury and a new and oddly-flavored spell building inside the room in concert with it.

He wasn't certain why the Emperor had taken to casting his magics while in the embrace of the Iron Throne, wearing the Wolf Crown, but it made his own task easier. There would be no witnesses and a dozen entrances through which a murderer could have made his escape, assuming that there were even any murmurs of foul play. He frankly doubted that would be the case. People were far more likely to point to all of the loyal bodyguards on duty, each within eye- and ear-shot of the next pair, and believe the report of suicide.

Despite the roaring fires and a half-dozen charcoal braziers around Charliss' feet, the room was icy, but not still. Charliss could already have been a wizened corpse, hunched over in the cold embrace of the Throne, eyes closed, white, withered hands clenched on the arms. only the yellow gem-eyes of the wolves in the Crown watched him, and he fancied that there was a look of life in those eyes, as they waited to see what he would do. But wolves protected only cubs and territory and they had no interest in protecting individuals once those individuals were detrimental to the welfare of the pack. They would not hinder Melles in what he intended to do.

There was a tightly-woven, furiously rotating spell building up around the Emperor, a spell somehow akin to the Storm outside. Did Charliss think to tap the power of the Storm now to bolster his failing magics? If so, he was mad.

The spell neared its peak. After years of watching Charliss spell-cast, Melles knew the Emperor's rhythms and patterns. If he was going to strike, he had better do so now. He slipped a sharp dagger, pommel ornamented with the Imperial Seal, out of the hem of his heavy, fur-trimmed tunic. He had purloined this very dagger out of the Emperor's personal quarters two days ago; it was well known to be one of Charliss' favorite trophy-pieces and virtually every member of the Court would readily identify it as his and no one else's.

Now. Before Charliss woke from his self-imposed trance, realized his danger, and turned all that terrible energy on him.

As only a trained assassin could, Melles flipped the dagger in his hand until he held only the point between his thumb and forefinger, aimed, and threw.

The dagger flew straight and true, with all the power of Melles' arm and anger behind it. With a wet thud, it buried itself to the hilt in Charliss' left eye. The Emperor was killed instantly, left with a slack-jawed version of his self-absorbed expression.

But the spell he had been about to unleash did not die with him.

For one instant, Melles felt the chill hand of horrified fear clutch his throat, as it had not in decades, and he waited to be pounded to the earth as the rogue spell lashed out at him.

The gathered energies, with no direction, and no controls, whirled in a vortex of light around the Emperor's body for a moment, obscuring him. Rays of light shot upward, punching holes through the darkness, leaving scorched spots in the ceiling. Other sparks jumped and careened, arcing back to the sword points arrayed in ominous fans behind and around the Iron Throne. The crackling sparks disappeared with a flash and a soft sizzle. Then suddenly, the vortex stilled, and a moment later, the gathered energy invested itself in the Iron Throne, leaving it glowing for a moment before returning—apparently—to its original state.

Melles let out his breath in a hiss, walked tentatively over to Charliss, and reached for the Wolf Crown. He touched it for just a moment, and he could have sworn that the pack-leader on the front of the crown grinned at him.