Another door? Could it be possible that this depot was a complex of warehouses?
He ran across the dusty floor and wrenched the door open. Enough light came from the torches behind him to show him a sight to make his heart leap.
Grain. Tin barrel after barrel of grain—meant for horses, for cavalry, but perfectly edible by humans.
And here was the answer to the dilemma of how to keep both town and garrison alive. This would buy him the loyalty of the town, especially if the winter ran long and hard and supplies ran short. The farmers had been complaining that the weather had been bad and the harvest poor, and he had been assuming their complaints were nothing more than the usual. Every farmer he had ever known had complained about the weather and the harvest—they always did, and never would admit to having a good year.
But what if this time the complaints were genuine? He had seen the weather and the state of the fields for himself. How could he have thought that the harvest would be normal?
Because I didn't dare think otherwise, or I would have given up.
Quickly he hailed half of the men over to this new storehouse, telling them to haul the grain but leave the hay bales that would also be here for the very last. Hay was not a priority, but if there was time, why not take it, too?
I need more men. It was a risk, bringing still more men—men who had not been checked beforehand—across an unstable Portal, but the gain was worth the risk. Almost certainly some of these would arrange to be left behind. There would be agents among them. He didn't care.
He ran out to the Portal and sent a message across with one of the guards; Sejanes was no fool and he should know how many more would be safe to send across.
He went back to the men—but now it was to join them in a frenzy of hauling. He joined the line, working side-by-side with one of his own bodyguards and a man whose name he didn't even know for certain. When the man cursed him for clumsiness when he dropped a box, and cursed him again for being slow, he kept silent. It was more important to get one more box across that Portal than it was to maintain the distinction of Commander and subordinate. He sensed, rather than saw, more men making a second line; at the time he had his own hands full and sweat running into his eyes.
He had never done so much hard physical labor in his life. His muscles and joints begged him for the mercy of a rest, his lungs burned, and his throat and mouth were as parched as if he were crossing the desert. There was no rest; his line was down to transporting the lumber at the back of the warehouse, but the other line still had grain to move.
There was light outside now; at some point dawn had arrived, and he had missed it. How had Sejanes managed to hold the Portal up so long? The poor mages would be only semiconscious for a week after this!
His line broke up at that point; there was nothing more to move. Half of them went to the sides of the warehouse to try to get the few large objects—dismantled siege engines—that could not be hauled by a single man. The rest joined the grain line, but now the grain line was actually hauling hay bales!
At just that moment, a whistle shrilled from the Portal; the signal that the mages had held it as long as they could. Tremane had drilled his men in this, too; every one of them dropped what he was holding and sprinted for the Portal at a dead run. The new men who had not been drilled took their cue from the rest. He joined them; as they reached the outside they formed into four running ranks, since the Portal was only large enough for four abreast to cross at once. Those four ranks continued to race for the stone arch that marked this side of the Portal.
Despite his care, he knew that when he called for more men, he had allowed many agents to cross over, and now some of the men would deliberately lag behind, to remain when the Portal collapsed. There would be agents of the Emperor and of his own personal enemies among them. That would be fine; no one else knew that his orders were forged.
In a way, he wished them no ill, for if this Imperial depot had been left so completely on its own, that did not speak well for conditions in the Empire as a whole. They would have to somehow find transportation, work their way across several client states, and only then would they reach anything like solid Imperial territory. Faced with such a situation, he would give up and find a place to wait out the situation; they might well do the same.
And as for the rest who lagged behind—they had worked with a will, and he could not find it in his heart to condemn them for snatching the chance to stay on home ground. Without a doubt, the Empire would need them as much or more than he would.
And every man who stays here is one less mouth to feed—as well as one less agent that might turn to sabotage in the absence of other orders.
He was one of the last men through, and the instability in the Portal was directly reflected in the effect the crossing had on him. He landed on the other side in a tumble, unable to stand, his head reeling, his stomach racked with nausea. He lay on his side in a helpless heap for a moment until someone dragged him clear.
He opened his eyes and regretted doing so; the courtyard was spinning around him and the bright sunlight lanced into his skull like a pair of knives thrust into his eye sockets. He closed his eyes again, hastily, and simply lay where he was, waiting for the sickness to pass.
"It's coming down!" someone shouted, voice hoarse with exhaustion.
"Let it go—we can't wait any longer!" That was Sejanes' voice; the old man must have counted noses and come up short. "They'll be all right over there—drop the pattern, before it burns us all away!"
He opened his eyes again, just in time to see the Portal collapse, folding in on itself until it was a single point of bright, white light that burned for a moment, then crackled out.
The illness had passed enough to let him rise; he found that he was in a corner, dragged there by some wise soul on this side of the Portal. That was a help, for with the aid of the wall he was able to get to his feet and lean against firm support until the rest of his equilibrium returned.
Finally, when he thought he could present a reasonable front, he walked slowly out into the courtyard full of collapsed men, collapsing mages, and heaps of supplies.
The guards he had left here were still standing; he sent one of them off for help. "Stretchers and stretcher bearers," he directed. "Everyone down should be taken to his own quarters and given full sick leave for at least one day. Have the Healers look at them." He looked around the courtyard at the supplies still there, and frowned. They had emptied two warehouses—why wasn't this courtyard stuffed with supplies?
The guard correctly interpreted that frown. "As soon as things started coming across, Sejanes sent for more men to move the supplies by wagon out to storage, Commander," the man said. "They'll be back shortly."
Tremane's frown cleared. "Good. And the clerks are making inventories?"
"Yes, sir. Everything is as you ordered, Commander, except—" the guard could no longer suppress his grin, "—except that Sejanes held the Portal open longer than even he thought possible. Commander, you did it!"
Now, for the first time in weeks, he relaxed enough to reply to the guard's grin with one of his own. "Now, let's not tempt the Unkindly Ones with our hubris. We were lucky. We have no idea how long those supplies sat there, or what condition they're in. Half of them could be useless."
The guard nodded sagely. "Indeed, Commander. Shall I send for your sedan chair as well as the litter bearers?"
Tremane was about to refuse—he had scarcely used his sedan chair a handful of times in the past year—but a sudden wave of dizziness made him reconsider quickly and nod. "Do that. I'll be over by Sejanes."
He managed to get as far as his old mentor before needing to sit down, and he succeeded in seating himself on a box without making it look as if he had collapsed. The old man was in about the same shape as Tremane—which in itself was remarkable, given the strain under which the mages must have been laboring. Sejanes lay flat on his back on the cobblestones, and acknowledged Tremane's presence with only a wave of
one hand.
"Well, old man," Tremane said, "we did it." He was rewarded by a thin smile and a weak twinkle in the old mage's eyes.
"We did. We've bought the time you needed, my boy. And I hope you're prepared to reward your hard-working mages—"
"I'm having you all moved into the best quarters this place affords," he interrupted. "There's no reason for you to be bivouacked with your units anymore when your units can't use your services. And to head off any question of favoritism, I'll make it known that after the great personal sacrifice you have all made in this effort, you've all been rendered invalids, or the next thing to it. Therefore, you need special consideration."
"You won't be far wrong, boy," Sejanes replied seriously. "We won't be up to much but bed rest for days."
"Then bed rest is what you'll get," Tremane promised. After a few silent minutes, the haulage crew returned, and with them, his aides. He hailed his chief aide Cherin over and put him in charge of the mages.
"Put them in the infirmary for now," he said. "And find a way to reshuffle my officers so that we can get quarters in the manor for every mage who worked on the Portal. I want them all moved in before the end of the week. They're going to be invalided out of field service for now."
Cherin looked at the mages, still lying where they had collapsed, and seemed more than convinced. "There're some store rooms could be made into barracks, Commander," he offered. "We could take your bodyguards, put 'em in there, shuffle the pages and messengers into their barracks, put the aides in the little rooms the boys have been in, and that'll give you rooms for each mage and still let the aides have private quarters."
"And it puts the boys back in a common room where the page-sergeant can keep an eye on them. That's good," Tremane agreed, with a wry yet appreciative smile. "Those little imps have been unnaturally good lately, but I don't have faith that the spell is going to last. See to it."
The aide saluted. "Sir!" he replied and marched off to begin the shuffling.
"You're a good lad, Tremane," Sejanes said gruffly, and closed his eyes.
At about that time, the sedan chair and its four carriers arrived, and Tremane decided it was time to let his aides do the work of getting everything organized. He gave each of them assignments and ordered them to have reports on his desk when he woke up. He climbed stiffly to his feet and took his place in his chair. The four carriers raised their poles to their shoulders and marched off to his suite as he lay back and closed his eyes.
I would like to sleep for a week. He wouldn't, though. He'd wake up as soon as his body had recovered enough to allow him to function. By then he would have some idea of what, precisely, they had looted from that depot.
He did know this much; even if, as he said, fully half of what they'd taken proved useless, he still had enough to see his men through a winter out of a Northman's nightmares. His men—and possibly even the town as well.
The future looked a hundred times brighter than it had yesterday. And as dark as things were at the moment, that was enough.
Two
A stable was hardly the place one normally took lessons in protocol, but neither Karal of Karse nor his adviser were precisely "normal" as an ambassador and his tutor.
It was a cold gray day; the sky was a solid sheet of low-hanging clouds. On the whole, the stable was not an unpleasant place to be on such a day, especially not for a young man who had begun life as a horse boy. It was no ordinary stable either. This was the foul-weather shelter for all Companions now resident at the Herald's Collegium and Palace at the Valdemar capital of Haven. The stalls were mostly empty; those that were filled were preternaturally silent, since Companions seldom acted or sounded much like horses.
But in every other way, this building, as no other place in all of Haven, reminded Karal of home. The warm scent of hay, the dusty aroma of grain, the rich odor of leather (as much a taste as a smell); all those comforted him and made him relax. Although the air outside was cold, inside, sitting next to a huge brown-tiled stove, Karal was as comfortable as he would have been in his own room.
"All right," Karal said, rubbing his tired eyes. "Explain to me how the followers of all these religions manage not to slaughter each other over their differences one more time."
That warm fire behind the iron door of the stove at his back crackled cheerfully, and the relative gloom of the stable was actually rather restful to his aching eyes. It was too bad Florion wouldn't fit into his suite at the Palace, though. A hot cup of tea would have been very nice right now.
Of course, a hot cup of tea might have put him to sleep, which was not a good idea at the moment.
His adviser shook his white head until his mane danced. :It's really very simple, Karal. The single rule that each of them must obey if they wish to continue practicing in Valdemar is "live and let live." You can proselytize as much as you wish, but you may not persecute, harass, intimidate, or otherwise make a nuisance of yourself. The secular laws of Valdemar take precedence over the dictates of every religion. No matter how deeply your religious feeling is offended by something allowed according to the religious practices of your neighbor, you have no right to force him to live by your rules, and no right to try to. If you can't live, by that, then you are escorted to the border and left there.:
Karal tried to imagine something like that being effective in Karse and failed utterly. His people would simply ignore the law and revel in their holy and God-given right to persecute, harass, intimidate, or even murder those who did not agree with them. If their God, in their own narrow interpretation of His Writ and Rules, said that something was wrong, then it was wrong for everyone, whether or not anyone else agreed even with that particular interpretation. Karsites had been cheerfully slaughtering each other over interpretations of the Writ and Rules almost as long as they had been killing those outside their borders and religion. Things had been different once, as he had found from his reading, but the current state had been holding for generations. Since Vanyel's time, in fact. Or, as Ulrich would have pointed out—since the time that the Son of the Sun had been elected by the Sun-priests and not by Vkandis Himself. "It seems too simple to work," he replied wearily.
Florian scraped a hoof on the floor, which Karal had learned was the equivalent of a shrug. :I suppose it works largely because it was established as a law back when there were fewer people in Valdemar and all of them were of the same religion. At that point, of course, no one saw any reason why such a law shouldn't be in effect. If you plant a tree early so that it has time to grow, the roots are too deep for a later storm to tear it up.:
A cat from the stables strolled by—a perfectly ordinary black-and-white and not one that bore the vivid markings of a Firecat. Karal held out his fingers to the mouser, but his majesty had other things on his mind.
"That sounds like another Shin'a'in proverb," Karal observed, turning a little so that his right side could benefit from the warmth of the stove. Was it his imagination, or was it too early in the autumn for it to be so cold? "You've been tromping around An'desha too long."
Florian "chuckled"—more of a whicker. The fact that Karal was talking to a blue-eyed white horse might seem very odd to anyone from beyond the borders of Valdemar. The fact that he was talking to a Companion—or, as he would have said a year ago, a "cursed Valdemar Hellhorse"—would have been sheer blasphemy to many still in his own land of Karse. But Karal had learned more about Heralds and their Companions in that last year than he had ever dreamed possible, and now he relied on Florian's advice in the ways of Valdemar as surely as he relied on his friend An'desha's advice in the ways of magic. Both were equally opaque to him although he was familiar with the effects of magic if not the practice of it. As for the ways of Valdemar—they were all as odd as this surface congeniality among religions.
"I guess I'd be safe to assume that any time I have to deal with a priest from Valdemar that they're going to tolerate me, even if they don't like me." At Florian's nod, he shrugged. "At least, that's easier than
waiting for holy assassins to waylay me in the hallway."
:Holy assassins are going to come from outside Valdemar, if they come at all, and Kero has had a particular watch out for that sort for some time.: "Kero," of course, was Herald Captain Kerowyn, the only Herald in all of the history of Valdemar who was also the Captain of a mercenary Company. She was in charge of Valdemar's less conventional defenses—the ones that the Lord Marshal did not want to know about officially. She was also one of the—former—Great Enemies of Karse, and had been rumored to eat Karsite babies on toast for breakfast.
Karal could vouch for the toast, and Kero swore she didn't touch babies, Karsite or otherwise, before lunch at the earliest.
Florian did not actually "speak" to him; the Companion's "voice" echoed inside Karal's head. They called it "Mindspeaking" here. The locals took it for granted that Heralds and Companions talked to each other just like two human friends. One Herald could mention an appointment with a thought, and his Companion would round the corner a moment later, to bear the Herald on his way. It was odd, still, to see a Herald and Companion walk by, and witness the Herald suddenly breaking up in laughter at some silently-shared joke while the Companion whickered merrily. Heralds spoke with their minds and Companions answered, and none of it was considered the least bit unusual.
This was a magic that Karal had never even known existed before he came here—largely because in the past the Sun-priests did their best to eradicate children "Gifted" with such things. "Witchery," they called it, and hunted it out ruthlessly until Solaris took the Sun Throne.
Other Heralds had the ability to talk with each other as they did with their Companions. Some could move things without touching them, or see things at a distance. Others could see into the future or the past, and some had even stranger abilities.
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