Well, so what if he was a superior Artificer Adept? Why should I change my ways of working—ways that have served me very well until now!—just to emulate someone dead millennia ago? For that matter, didn't my way of working take down his ancient enemy when he failed to do so? He smiled into the steam, for the first time today feeling both smug and superior. So, there's a great deal to be said for intuition and creativity! I'll wager none of these artificers could have figured a way to safely shut down k'Sheyna's rogue Heartstone either!
Let Elspeth and Darkwind hare off after this "new thinking." Let even An'desha take to it with a speed that left Firesong gaping at him. Time would show which was the better way. The ways of a so-called "golden" ancient time may not necessarily be better than the ways we have developed since. "Golden Ages" are often nothing more than fool's gold, or merest gilding over dross.
He closed his eyes and leaned back against the sculpted stone of his seat. His shoulder and neck muscles were finally relaxing in the heat. and something else occurred to him. The one thing that did impress An'desha now was skill and competence. That was why Karal and the Master Artificers were currently high in his esteem. Karal had evidently proved his mettle at the border, and the Master Artificers had convinced the Shin'a'in that there was a cold beauty—and certainly there was logic—in their formulae and numbers.
But if Firesong could come up with an answer that superseeded the breakwater, wouldn't he get An'desha's attention back?
Of course I would! He knows the ways that Falconsbane and all the rest worked, but he has never had formal Tayledras training in magic, except for the little he's gotten from me so far! And if I can prove that my way is the better way, he'd be panting at my heels to learn from me again! I'll have his fullest attention and his admiration!
Now that was an answer!
He'd seen the new water-table anyway, and it was obvious even to an idiot that the reflections within it were going to be too complicated to analyze. The artificers were setting themselves up for failure.
Maybe I shouldn't even try to work with that; it might be setting myself up for the same failure, to deal with a situation so complicated. Maybe I should just let the breakwater fail, then put my own solution in place, between mage-storms. Certainly the original problem had been much simpler to deal with, and the difference would only be a matter of degree. More frequent, more powerful mage-storms, that's all. Did An'desha say something about Falconsbane-Ma'ar anticipating the original set of mage-storms and envisioning something to hold them back?
When An'desha came back tonight, could he somehow coax his lover into talking about that? That wouldn't make very good pillow talk, considering how he feels about Falconsbane....
In a strange way, Firesong actually admired Falconsbane—or rather, he admired the level of craftsmanship of which Falconsbane was capable in his rare moments of sanity.
Well, that wasn't precisely true; Firesong admired those abilities in Ma'ar, in which they had been the purest and the closest to sanity. Certainly Ma'ar had been able to create. He'd come up with his own forms of fighting-creatures, although he had sacrificed elegance for expediency and grace for brute power. The makaar hadn't been without intelligence, though; they couldn't have been stupid, or they wouldn't have survived a heartbeat in the air against the gryphons.
And as for Ma'ar's secret of immortality—in its way, that was the most elegant of all, although An'desha was hardly likely to agree with that assessment.
He does have the best right in the world to have an opinion on the subject, Firesong reflected sardonically. But he's also not precisely unbiased on the subject. Of all the people alive in the world at that very moment, there were only two who knew exactly how Ma'ar had lived long past his own death—and how every "incarnation" after that had managed to live long past the natural span without actually "dying" and being "reborn." There were drawbacks to that particular system, after all.
For one thing, it places your soul in the hands of the Powers Above, and if you've been naughty, you really don't want that to happen. For another, it seems that damn few people who undergo that particular process remember their previous lives. And last of all, so far as I know, you don't get a choice about who or what you return as.
Of course, if you were a good and virtuous person, none of these things would bother you. However, Ma'ar was a very naughty boy, and he only got worse with each successive body he possessed. He had to remember who and what he was, otherwise he'd waste years relearning all he'd learned about magic. He had to have a choice about who he took over, or the body wouldn't have the ability to handle magic. And he certainly wanted no part of the Powers Above.
That, at least, was Firesong's assessment. An'desha, of course, would know Falconsbane's full motivation, but Firesong doubted that An'desha would want to talk about it.
It was a clever—no, brilliant—scheme, though. And I'm in a position to recognize just how brilliant it was. Only he and An'desha knew how the scheme had worked; An'desha because he had seen it from the inside, and Firesong because he had destroyed the very foundation of the scheme.
Ma'ar-Falconsbane had avoided the hand of Fate by creating a stronghold for his spirit and personality in the Void, that place between Gates where neither the spirit nor the material could be told from one another. He had avoided real death by using the tremendous energy released by the violent death of his own bodies to catapult himself into that stronghold and seal himself inside until someone of his own direct bloodline matched a very rigid set of criteria and made his first attempt at the spell to create fire. That triggered the release of the spirit from the stronghold and flung it, with almost all of the original energy, into the new body.
An'desha said he couldn't find a single incarnation where Falconsbane hadn't either suicided or, been murdered. Feh. The man must have been a masochist as well as a sadist. Either death would release shattering amounts of energy, quite enough to accomplish the trick with power to spare.
Firesong was as intimately familiar with the process as An'desha because he was the one who had tracked Falconsbane's spirit to that stronghold, ravaging the stronghold then destroying Falconsbane, utterly and completely, shredding the Dark Adept's spirit to atoms and scattering them across the Void. Presumably the Powers Above could put the scattered spirit back together again—but if They did, it would be for Their purposes, and Falconsbane would likely see rebirth in a form that would horrify even him.
Say, as a helpless, impoverished cripple, unable to move without assistance, deaf and blind, utterly without magic or mind-magic, who spends every waking moment in pain. Or perhaps as a slug, a dung beetle, or a cloud of gnats.
That wasn't Firesong's business. What happened to what had been Falconsbane was of no concern to him, so long as the Dark Adept couldn't work the trick that had kept him turning up like a clipped coin, over and over, across the decades.
Still, the trick was a clever one, and that much Firesong could admire.
And in a way—if Falconsbane hadn't been what he was, it wasn't likely that Firesong would ever even have met An'desha.
For a moment he amused himself with the paths of might-have-been trying to figure out what he and An'desha would have done—
Well, I might have met him, but he'd have been the age of my parents, and I never did care for older men. I keep forgetting that his apparent age and his chronological age are vastly different.
The Shin'a'in and Tayledras Goddess, in the persons of Her Avatars, had literally given An'desha back the body that Falconsbane had stolen away. They had returned his body to the state it had been when he had been possessed, at the age of seventeen or eighteen; perhaps a little younger, certainly no older.
By the same token, An'desha had spent so much of that time in hiding, in a kind of limbo within his own mind, that he didn't have the personal experience to match that chronological age. Emotionally, he was as young as he appeared.
Or he was, anyway.
Firesong licked salty
sweat from his upper lip as he debated getting out of the hot pool. Maybe a little longer. The longer I stay in here, the less likely it will be that my muscles will knot up again with tension as soon as I get out.
He should be thinking—if he thought about Falconsbane at all—about those fugitive memories of Ma'ar's, and the "solution" that the Dark Adept had contrived to keep his own land safe from the mage-storms that were going to occur when Urtho died. That was where, if it was anywhere, the germ of their own solution would lie.
But his slippery thoughts kept coming back to that elegant little pattern of stronghold—possession—stronghold. It was just so very clever! And no one would have ever guessed what was going on if An'desha hadn't found a way to survive the possession.
I wonder what the other criteria were for possession, besides Adept-potential. I would think they would have to be solitary sorts, or his "new" personality would have given the signal that something was wrong.
If one could somehow assure that one returned in an ethical fashion, there wouldn't have been anything wrong with the entire scheme. Yes, but just how would one displace another's spirit in an ethical fashion, hmm?
Still, he kept coming back to that, as he climbed the stairs to the living area of the ekele. If only there was a way—
Well, infants were not ensouled, to the best of his knowledge, until the actual birth; it happened with the first breath. What if one arranged to slip in just before that critical moment?
It would mean a certain tedious time spent maturing, but that could begotten around, I expect. At least, I could shorten that time, although it would certainly startle the parents. I can accelerate plant growth, so why not my own? It would only be one more application of the same thing Falconsbane used to change his own body.
He combed his wet hair with his fingers as he walked, pulling it forward over his shoulder. All his adult life he had cherished a secret longing, born when he had learned about his ancestor Vanyel and the love and lifebonding that had lasted through time and across the ages with his beloved Tylendel-Stefen. As foolishly romantic as it was, he had longed to find someone, a lifebonded, a soul-mate. He had really thought that person was An'desha.
Unfortunately, it didn't seem that An'desha shared that conviction, and if there was one thing that Firesong was sure of, it was that those who were lifebonded were both aware of the bond to the point of pain if they were apart or at odds with one another. They could not be lifebonded and be having the kind of personal problems they were now.
He searched through his wardrobe for something appropriate to his mood—black—and winced when his hand brushed across one of An'desha's Shin'a'in tunics. He's reverting more and more to the Shin'a'in. That in itself should have told him this was no lifebond. Lifebonded couples tended to dress more alike, even without thinking about it. Look at Heralds Dirk and Talia—who always chose the same color when they were off-duty. Or Sherrill and Keren, who dressed like a pair of twins, even though Sherrill tended to prefer elegant lines and Keren to dress entirely in riding leathers whenever possible! An'desha seemed to be choosing clothing as opposite that of Firesong's elegant robes and tunics as possible, wearing the bright—not to say gaudy and clashing—embroidered vests, and tunics and trews trimmed in the bands of colorful wide braid that the Shin'a'in loved.
He sighed as he pulled a long, silken robe of unrelieved black over his head. No, he was going to have to admit it. This was no lifebond And the bond he did have was, quite frankly, falling apart.
Lifebonds were incredibly rare. The chances of ever finding one's lifemate were remote, no matter how much one looked.
He paused with his hand still on the wardrobe door as he was closing it when the inescapable thought occurred to him. True, the chances of finding one's lifemate were remote, if one only lived a single lifetime.
But what if you lived for several lifetimes?
What if you had a way to return, over and over, fully as yourself?
What if you managed to find that ethical way to return the way Falconsbane had? You could search as long as you needed to in order to find your lifebonded. And then?
Then, perhaps you could find a way to stay together forever. Vanyel and Stefen had.
And wasn't that a fascinating thought?
Four
Grand Duke Tremane looked out of the window in his office, gazing down through the bubbly pane of its poor-quality glass at the row after row of tents sheltering supplies down in the courtyard of his fortified manor. Security. That's what lies down there, made tangible and visible. The tents themselves were from the supplies he had appropriated; as soon as his clerks had found them in the records and his supply-sergeants had identified the crates they were in, he'd had them unpacked and set up to hold everything that could tolerate cold and didn't need to be under guard.
The courtyard was full of tents, with scarcely room to move between them. There were more tents lined up between the manor and the camp. Some of the supplies had already been distributed. Every man in his army now had triple bedding, triple clothing, double harsh-weather gear. They could survive a hideous winter now without barracks, although there would be sickness, frostbite, and other cold-related problems if they were forced to. That was more than they'd had before; if the worst predictions had come true, many would have died in the cold and snow.
He still couldn't believe that he had actually succeeded with his raid on the supply depot, and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams! All the men were current in their pay, including the bonuses he'd promised for odd or hazardous duty, and morale had taken an upswing, despite the fact that the drizzly weather hadn't broken for weeks. The extras that he had rationed out to them in the way of clothing and bedding hadn't hurt either; when he'd made a night inspection after lights-out, he'd seen the men were already making use of what he'd given out. Every tent contained a cocoon of blankets, with nothing visible of the man inside it but his nose, and the snores emerging from those cocoons had sounded very content.
The gold and silver entering the local economy wasn't hurting the morale of the townsfolk either, though he was glad he'd established a policy regarding double-pricing back when he'd first occupied this place. Any merchant found charging one price to a native and a higher price to a soldier—provided, of course, that the price difference wasn't due to the soldier being a poor hand at haggling—was brought up before his own fellow merchants and fined four times the difference in the price, half of which went to the Merchant's Guild, one quarter to the Imperial coffers, and one quarter to the fellow who was cheated. With all this new money flowing, his men could have been robbed blind without such a policy already in place.
Now his primary concern was to use his new stock of lumber to get warehouses up to shelter all the foodstuffs he'd looted. Everything else could stay under canvas, but the food needed real protection. That was keeping those of his men not robust enough to work on the walls quite busy. Even some of the clerks were taking a hand, since there wasn't as much need for them without all the Imperial paperwork to keep up with.
We have some space to breathe. That's the biggest factor. A great deal of the tension is gone.
The unspoken feeling of threat that was driving the work on the walls was still there, and certainly the men were thinking about the foul weather, looking at their tents, and wondering if a little canvas between them and a blizzard was going to be enough. Nevertheless, now no one was looking at his ration at mealtimes and wondering when those rations would be cut; no one was counting arrows, lead shot, or vials of oil for lamps and heating stoves. They all had been given a reprieve, and they all sensed it.
The mages were going about their new assignment—finding a way to shield them from the effects of the mage storms—with a renewed optimism about their own ability. The walls were going up faster than before.
And a small, select group of mages was working on a new project—to find the source of the storms.
He turned away from the window, but instead of going ba
ck to his desk and the welter of papers lying there, he took a seat in a comfortable chair before his fireplace. I never felt the cold and damp so intensely before, he thought, as he winced a little when he flexed stiff fingers in the warmth of the flames. Is it age, I wonder, or is the weather affecting me that much?
He gazed deeply into the flames and gave thought to the latest report from that smaller group of mages, a report that tended to confirm some of his own uneasy speculations. In it, they expressed severe doubt that Valdemar was the source of the mage-storms, and their evidence was compelling.
Valdemar's few mages have only begun working in groups, and are not, in our view, coordinated enough to have developed or produced these storms. If anyone knew about working group-magic, it was Sejanes. The old man had multiplied his own personal power far and above that of any single mage, simply by finding enough compatible minor mages to work with him, and by being careful that they never felt exploited, and so were not inclined to leave him. If Sejanes felt the Valdemarans were too new to group-magic to be effective at it, Tremane was going to accept that estimate without a qualm.
Valdemar has been feeling the same effects that we have, and it would be suicidally stupid to unleash a weapon that would work the same damage to you as it does to the enemy. Well, he'd already figured that one out, so it hardly came as a surprise.
Valdemar has never unleashed uncontrolled area-effect magic, and their overt policy, at least, would preclude such a weapon. He couldn't exactly argue with that, either; he'd studied their past strategies, and there was nothing of the sort in any of them. In fact, right up through the war with Ancar they had plied purely defensive tactics.
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