Storm rising

by Mercedes Lackey

  He ground his teeth in frustration and stared at a lamp hanging from the ceiling. At this point it was just a dark round shadow against the lighter ceiling. Soon he would have to light the lamps, if he didn't want to have to stumble around in the dark.

  So what am I supposed to do now? Am I doomed to lose him? Can't he see how I feel about him? It's not as if I haven't obviously been courting him. At least, I think I've been obviously courting him. It was a frustrating position to be in, since he'd never had to court anyone's attentions before; he'd always been on the other end of the courting, and others had always labored to catch and hold his attention.

  Now, here he was, with the situation reversed. He was turning himself inside out trying to catch and hold An'desha's interest, and it wasn't working. Now I know how it must have felt to Rainbird when I was oblivious to his overtures. The problem is, just what am I going to do about it? How am I going to get him back?

  He knew one thing that he was very good at that might work. Besides magic, of course. I could certainly launch a seduction that would completely overwhelm him; I'd have him so swamped with sensuality that he wouldn't have the energy to even think about anything or anyone else.

  It would be a very successful seduction, too—for a while.

  Unfortunately, I know precisely how long that particular tactic can work from personal experience, he thought glumly. The "spell" of seduction only lasts as long as the seducer has energy. And the seducer is going to run out of energy before the seduced does.

  Besides, An'desha wasn't stupid, nor was his nature centered on sex or sensuality. The trouble, as far as Firesong's ambitions went, was that An'desha's mind was awake now and growing. It wasn't going to just "go to sleep" again, and a mind like An'desha's needed more than an overwhelming of the senses to occupy it for very long.

  That led to another temptation entirely. Firesong was not—quite—a Mind-Healer, but he had many of the same skills, and one of his minor Gifts was that of Empathy. He knew enough that he could, if he chose, tamper with that too-awake mind and put it to sleep again, or paralyze it. Oh, it would be so easy to take what I know and begin manipulating him. I know all of his weaknesses, all of his fears, everything that make him twitch, everything that makes him feel good about himself. Yes, it would be so easy to twist An'desha around—

  It was so tempting—but—

  His stomach twisted, and he grimaced. Oh, that's no answer either. It's wrong, and I know it. Father would have a cat, and Mother—I know what she'd have to say if she knew I'd even thought about doing something like that to another person. He shuddered; he had faced monsters, mage-storms and Mornelithe Falconsbane, and none of them had frightened him as much as the prospect of facing his mother with a guilty conscience.

  He grimaced again, this time at his own foolishness. I don't care what anyone else thinks about me, but may the gods help me if Mother found that out.

  And besides his mother—oh, gods. What if my dear ancestor Vanyel got wind of this? He shuddered again; he definitely did not want to have to deal with that. Although, given the two of them, he'd rather be forced to deal with an angry ghost than his mother in a state of righteous wrath.

  He sighed, and threw his arm over his eyes, feeling as if it wouldn't be such a bad thing to be a Falconsbane and not have to worry about angry mothers or guilty consciences.

  That's why their way is easier, I suppose. Well, I've got a conscience and I'm stuck with it. He couldn't use his mind and his magic on An'desha to make him pliable again. Besides being wrong, it would be stupid. No matter what he did, if he played with An'desha's mind, what he would have when he had finished wouldn't really be "An'desha" anymore. So what would be the point to all the work? If he wanted someone to be his toy, he could pick someone at random, a stable-boy or page, anyone. That wouldn't be right either, and it still wouldn't be An'desha.

  He swallowed with difficulty. So where does all this leave me? The odd man out, with An'desha spending more and more time away from me. And I'll have to smile and pretend everything is fine.

  It looked as if he was going to have a great deal of uncomfortable time to fill as An'desha drifted farther and farther from him. But what else could he do? The single course that was open to him was confrontation, and that would only drive An'desha away faster.

  He was not prone to depression, but now he tried to swallow a hard and uncomfortable lump of despair that seemed to have gotten lodged in his throat. I thought I had finally found someone I could spend the rest of my life with, and once again it comes to nothing. He felt so loaded down with melancholy he might never be able to rise again. No one understood. They looked at him, saw how handsome he was, how Gifted a mage he was, how intelligent he was, and thought that everything always fell into his hands. They didn't know, they couldn't guess, how hard it was for him to make and keep friends, much less lovers—never dreamed just how lonely he was. it was easy to find people who would fill his bed; impossible to find anyone who would fill his heart. Temporary lovers were easy to come by, but reliability was rarer fare.

  I suppose the best thing I can do is to work, he thought dully. If I keep my mind occupied, my heart generally leaves me alone. That always worked in the past, and the gods knew that they had enough troubles now, trying to come up with the next solution after the breakwater.

  I should go make myself available to Darkwind, Elspeth, and the Valdemaran artificers. That was what he should do, all right; it was the logical direction. But that was what An'desha was doing, which would only serve to put him in An'desha's company. An'desha might like the artificers, but they made Firesong think of bees or ants—logical, well-coordinated, but without souls. Their "magic" was a thing of gears and clockwork, regular and completely artificial.

  Besides, Darkwind and Elspeth are much, much better than I am at this new approach to magic. It obviously doesn't feel artificial to them.

  No. No, I cannot learn to like these artificers. I cannot learn to think the way they do, or to admire the way they think. Their odd, mechanical approach to what he still felt, deep down inside, was a process that was part instinct, part art, and part improvisation, robbed magic of all the beauty and the thrill he had found in it when he first began to make use of his Gift. Without beauty, what was the point anyway?

  They've taken poetry and reduced it to a mathematical formula, that's what they've done. But knowing the formula doesn't mean you can produce poetry; it only means you can produce well-crafted doggerel.

  The more he thought about it, the more he rebelled, soul and heart. He had tried to work with them before, and in the end, neither he nor they had been comfortable.

  They keep trying to find ways to measure things that should be felt, not measured. You can't take a ruler to a love affair, you can't holdup a gauge to weigh sorrow, and you shouldn't try to find a way to measure magic!

  Melancholy had weighed him down a moment before; now irritation drove him to his feet again. He pushed himself up off the couch with a muttered curse, and flung his power around the room recklessly, lighting the wicks of every lamp within the walls with an ostentatious flare. Aya started, uttered an unmusical squawk of annoyance, and settled down on his perch with all of his feathers fluffed, glaring at his bond mate through a slitted blue eye.

  Firesong ignored him, although he sensed Aya's own irritation in the bond bird mental mutterings. Well, that was as much a reflection of his own unsettled emotional state as Aya's peevishness. When his emotional state was negative, so was the firebird's.

  Maybe he'd better get out of Aya's way for a while, before their mutual irritation started to get out of hand.

  A hot soak, perhaps. If nothing else, soaking in the hot pool in the garden below would unknot some of his tension-knotted muscles. If he didn't get them relaxed, he'd have a headache before morning.

  Abruptly he turned and took the spiral staircase down to the ground floor of the ekele. Here, frosted glass lamps like little moons placed among the foliage displayed the wonder
s of a Hawkbrother Vale in miniature. Luxuriant plants spread their leaves in every part of the room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows comprising all four sides. Firesong had landscaped with rocks and plants until it was impossible to tell—particularly at night—that this was a little corner of Companion's Field in Valdemar, and not a private corner of a real Vale. Finally, after much forced growth, vines covered the uprights between the windows, the trees and bushes hid the glazing, and a canopy of leaves concealed the ceiling. As he had leisure, he added tiny spots to the ceiling that absorbed sunlight by day and emitted it at night, mimicking stars.

  The centerpiece of the room was the soaking-pool, fed by a hot spring brought up from deep beneath Haven by Firesong's power—the heat source was partly natural, partly magical, and shielded as well as the Heartstone under the Palace. With all of the strange effects of the mage-storms about, the last thing Firesong wanted was to discover his spring gone either boiling-hot or cold as ice.

  He stripped off his clothing as he walked, leaving a trail of discarded garments until he reached the side of the pool and dropped into it. It was too bad that there were no hertasi here; he would have to pick up after himself. But just at the moment, he didn't feel like being careful.

  According to legend, it was Urtho, the Mage of Silence, who had first discovered the way to create these pools.

  Hah. According to legend, Urtho is also responsible for first discovering the wheel, taming the horse, and cooking meat. Firesong sank up to his chin in the hot water, cynically reflecting on the many legends surrounding the last of the Great Mages. Obscure legends even claimed that Urtho had achieved much of his power by inventing ways to measure magic and to use it efficiently!

  As if Urtho were some sort of Mage of Artifice! I don't think so. Urtho has become whatever the speaker wants him to be at the time.

  That was the argument the gryphons had last used on him—that if Urtho had used ways to measure and ration magic, couldn't Firesong?

  Of course, if anyone would know whether or not the claim was true, it would probably be the gryphons and the Kaled'a'in. They alone held actual records of the Mage-Wars and the time immediately preceding the Cataclysm. The people who had become the Shin'a'in and Tayledras had both escaped without any such things. Clan k'Leshya, the Clan that had welcomed outsiders, that had supported and cared for the gryphons, that had held both Urtho's trusted chief of wizardry and his chief kestra'chern, had been entrusted with the care of all of Urtho's records during the escape to safety.

  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.