"Browf!" the Firecat grunted as An'desha's face hit the cat's side. Karal was beside him a moment later, pulling him up and then forcing his head down between his knees. Once he was in that position, his dizziness began to clear. Eventually he was able to sit up again.
"Th-thank you, Altra," he said as the Firecat stared at him with real concern. "I nearly knocked myself out!"
:You're welcome,: the Firecat replied in his mind, and followed the words with a swipe of a rough, wet tongue across his nose. :I hate having to clean up blood, and you'd have split your forehead wide open if you'd hit the table.:
He took the inevitable mug of tea from Natoli and sat there sipping it while he assessed his own condition and tried to make up his mind about what he should do next.
"I want to do another, while I still have Tremane fresh in my mind," he said after a moment.
Natoli frowned. "Is that wise?" she asked sternly.
"No," he admitted, "but it's necessary. And the two of you can catch me if I pass out again. I want Tremane; I want him before he has a chance to slip out of my mind. Once I've put a link on him, it won't be too hard to get him again."
Karal studied his face. "You think Tremane might be our man, don't you?"
He hesitated a moment before answering. "I think if he isn't our man, he'll take us to someone who is," he replied, after that pause to think. "I'm torn. I'd like to believe that he is for a great many reasons, and that's why I don't want to trust my judgment alone on this. It would be so much easier if we were able to work with the man on the top, for one thing. But I have the feeling that if I don't establish a link to him now, we might lose him."
"All right," Karal said, after a long pause of his own. "You're an adult; you have the right to decide what you're going to do for yourself. You certainly know what you're letting yourself in for if you exhaust yourself."
"Mostly one demon of a headache," An'desha told him candidly. "What I'm doing just isn't that dangerous."
In that, he was stretching the truth—or rather, not telling the whole truth. It isn't that dangerous providing that Tremane doesn't have magical protections against little scrying attempts like mine. That was the one thing that worried him. It was possible that his faint was due to brushing up against such protections. Actually touching them—
He didn't know. It wouldn't be fatal, not after the batterings such shields would have taken during the mage-storms. But it probably wouldn't be pleasant.
On the other hand, he had learned to trust his intuition about magic—knowing very well that in his case, "intuition" was really the result of an unconscious analysis of many lifetimes of accumulated memories, few of them directly available without an effort.
His "intuition" said that he'd better establish that link quickly. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with Tremane—maybe it's because of the mage-storms. The links seem to hold up well as the storms pass through, but the ability to scry past the breakwater might not hold up immediately after a storm if I don't also have a link.
The paths that magic took were seriously disrupted after a mage-storm and it took time to reestablish them. Perhaps because he was Shin'a'in, the reason seemed clear enough to him. One of the effects of the storm was to "wash" everything away ahead of its cresting power, exactly like a wave of floodwater washed away things in its path. And, like on the floodplain, when the water receded, the roads and markers that had been there before the flood were gone. You had to build them all back up again.
At least, it made sense that way to him. He'd tried to explain it to Master Levy but the artificer had only shaken his head. "If I could 'see' your magic, I could tell you if your analogy works past the surface into manipulation," he said frankly. "But I can't, and I can't test it, so I'll take your word for it. If I work out a way to test the analogy, I'll let you know. Who knows? It might give us another clue to solving our predicament."
Our predicament. It all sounds so ordinary when he calls it by that term.
He steadied himself, and when he placed his hands on the table, they were quite still, not trembling at all. "I think I must do this," he said quietly. "I know that I can with such friends standing by to help me."
Again, he established the spell, then the target; Tremane's face and upper torso appeared in the crystal, but he had someone with him other than the clerk. An'desha quickly widened his view. It was a middle-aged, ordinary woman, dressed roughly, but not poorly; she looked like a farmer's wife. There were no women with the Imperial Army, and this woman did not have the look of a camp follower about her.
The woman in question was absolutely hysterical, wringing her hands as tears poured down her face. She spoke so fast that An'desha, with his limited command of Hardornen, could not make out what was the matter.
Nor, it seemed, could Tremane. After several embarrassed and abortive attempts to calm her, he finally walked over to the door and called something An'desha did not catch.
A moment later an old man shuffled in, a man dressed in several layers of rich woolen robes. "...see if you can't get her to calm down enough to explain where she thinks the children might have gone, will you, Sejanes?" Tremane said in an undertone as they passed into the area of the spell's influence. "I can't make head or tail of what she's babbling, and nothing I do makes her anything other than hysterical."
The old man chuckled. "Boy," he said, in the Imperial tongue, "you never could manage a woman. Leave her to me."
Indeed, in a few moments, the old man did have her calmed down, in spite of the fact that his Hardornen was extremely limited and horrendously accented. He patted her shoulder and made soothing noises, and extracted information in usable bits between her bouts of sobbing.
Evidently she was a farmer, as An'desha had guessed. After the fright of seeing one of the mage-born monsters on the prowl, she had brought her family to the town to spend the winter. Restless at being more confined than they were used to, her children had taken it into their heads to make off somewhere outside the walls of Shonar. She thought they might have tried to go home, to their farm; several of them had left toys or wild animals that had been made into pets that either had been left behind in the packing or were considered to be too much of a nuisance to deal with in town. But she didn't know, because they had somehow slipped out without anyone noticing. She begged "Lord Tremane" to send men out to find them before the "boggles" did.
"Lord Tremane" sighed.
"Take her off and feed her, Sejanes. I know how the brats probably got out; I'd bet they left with the children tending the flocks or herds. The guards wouldn't notice a few more children with the animals than usual. Tell her we'll see to it; I'll take a party out to question the herding children, and we should have our hands on her wandering brats before dark."
The old man took the weeping woman off, and to An'desha's surprise, Tremane went to the next room and began pulling on heavier clothing, boots, and weapons. "Come on, boys!" he shouted out as he struggled to fit boots over two pairs of heavy socks. "Get me more volunteers, we've got some lost children again! I'll meet them in the armory, as usual."
"And thanks be to the Hundred Little Gods," he muttered as he stamped to get the boots comfortable. "At least this time it's not during the height of a blizzard."
"Unbelievable," Karal breathed, as the Commander of all the Imperial Forces, Grand Duke Tremane, trotted down the stairs to the armory to personally organize a rescue party. And not just any rescue party, but one chasing after a handful of lost Hardornen peasant children. "Solaris wouldn't do this. I don't even think Kerowyn would."
"Maybe he just appreciates the excuse to get outside," Natoli said cynically, as Tremane led his group down snow walled and -roofed tunnels. It was light enough in there; light came right through the thick snow, illuminating the interior in a blue twilight. Still, it could get very claustrophobic.
But just at that moment, Tremane's little troop got outside the walls of Shonar, and into the hard, diamond-bright sunlight, and confronted the brut
al, snow-covered wilderness beyond. The only tracks were those made by the herds he had mentioned, tracks cut through snow up to the waist of a grown man with drifts going higher than his head. Moving dots off in the distance might represent the herds he had mentioned, browsing on the ends of branches and whatever greenery they could get at under the shelter of the trees. The men themselves adjusted scarves wrapped around their faces to stave off frostbite before they trekked across the snow after their leader.
"Firesong should see this," An'desha remarked. "He thinks our weather is bad; this is brutal!"
Before he forgot, and while the man's concentration was elsewhere, An'desha reached out tentatively and laid his "link" very carefully on the Grand Duke himself.
He was jolted back in his seat by the reaction of Tremane's shields. Energy backlashed painfully through him for a fraction of a heartbeat, setting every nerve screaming.
In the next moment, it was over, though Natoli and Karal were at his elbows supporting him anxiously. His head throbbed in time with his pulse, and he knew he was going to have that appalling headache he had mentioned, but otherwise he was untouched.
"I'm all right," he assured them, checking the crystal to see that the spell had not been broken.
It hadn't; what was more, Tremane did not appear to have noticed his meddling. The link was in place, and he would be able to scry the Grand Duke no matter what havoc the next mage-storm wrought among the Planes.
"Do we need to see anything more?" he asked them. Natoli shrugged, and Karal shook his head. He broke the spell and let his weight sag into their hands.
That was all—and it was certainly enough—for one day. He let them assist him back to his room and make a fuss over him; they were rather charming about it, actually. If his head hadn't hurt so much, he would actually have enjoyed it.
The next two days proved equally enlightening. The Hardornen townsfolk appeared to have adopted Tremane as their new liege lord, and were perfectly happy with the situation. And as for Tremane himself, the man was taking equal care with the town as he was with his own men. He sat in on meetings of the town Council, his own Army Healers were serving the townsfolk, and townspeople were working to help finish the interiors of Tremane's barracks. Things were not working with absolute smoothness—there were conflicts to be resolved all the time—but Shonar was not rejecting the Imperials, and Tremane was not riding roughshod over Shonar.
Even Florian remarked through Karal that Grand Duke Tremane had all the earmarks of an excellent commander in anyone's forces.
There was no doubt in An'desha's mind that the man they needed to communicate with was none other than the leader himself. He was sensible, he seemed sensitive to the needs, not only of his own people but of these who had adopted him as their leader. He was a man inclined to reason and reasonableness.
There was only one small problem.
By watching and listening they had learned one thing further from the man's own lips. He, and no other, had been the one who had ordered the assassinations that had killed Karal's beloved Master, the Karsite Sun-priest Ulrich.
Nine
Firesong burned with incoherent outrage. Someone was meddling with the power of his Heartstone! Granted, it wasn't much power being drained off, but still, no one had asked him for permission to tap into it directly, and he might need that power for his experiments!
He hadn't been able to get past Silverfox to visit the Heartstone chamber in days, but that didn't matter as far as keeping track of what was going on with the Stone itself. He could tell what was happening to the Stone even at a considerable distance, and he caught the unmistakable traces of meddling although he could not identify the meddler. It wasn't Elspeth or Darkwind; he knew the signatures of their power. It wasn't the gryphons either, although he hadn't thought either of them were keyed to it. There were no other Valdemaran mages powerful enough to tap into the Heartstone directly. Initially, he suspected the new mages from k'Leshya, but one by one he eliminated them as he ascertained that they had not been linked into the Stone yet either.
Finally, this very afternoon as he was waiting for Elspeth and Darkwind to arrive for a consultation in the hot spring, he realized who it was—who it must be. The obvious answer had been right in front of him, and yet it was not really obvious at all.
An'desha. It had to be An'desha.
He was an Adept, and it would not have been at all difficult for him to persuade Elspeth or Darkwind to give him access to the power of the Valdemar Stone. He had been helping the artificers and Karal with the practice and theory of magic. One or the other had probably come up with some idea that required so much power that only that of the Heartstone would do.
And, of course, none of them deigned to ask him about it!
Of course not. Why should they? I'm only the most experienced Adept here! An'desha may think he has experience, but all of it is tainted, slanted Falconsbane's way. What's more, he has no experience in any form of working with a Heartstone. But naturally, Karal has convinced him that he doesn't need me anymore. He thinks he has everything he needs to go sailing off on his own, I'm sure. He wasn't ready to work alone, and he wouldn't be ready for years! There is no way he could possibly be ready to work alone, especially not with Heartstone power! But Karal has probably told him the opposite—made him believe he doesn't need any help just when he needs it the most.
He paced back and forth angrily, forgetting that he was expecting visitors, as Aya fluttered and chirped in distress on his corner perch. The firebird began to send out false sparks with every flutter of his wings, trails of brilliant motes of light that cascaded from the bird's feathers like dust. Firesong ignored those signs of growing tension in favor of his own anger.
Rage seethed unchecked inside him. Karal! That's who's to blame for this! By the gods, I should do something about him, the interfering fool boy! The Alliance doesn't need him anymore, not with Solaris coming here. An'desha certainly doesn't need his brand of advice! Karal was the cause of all his problems—Karal was dangerous! He was meddling in things he couldn't even begin to understand, and he was encouraging An'desha to do the same. How long before he coaxed An'desha to try something more dangerous than just tapping into Heartstone power? How long before he encouraged An'desha to try to change it? Wasn't that how the k'Sheyna Heartstone had gone rogue in the first place? Pure primal rage colored everything scarlet, and his pulse sounded in his cars like the beat of a drummer gone mad. I ought to get rid of him—I have to get rid of him, before he ruins everything!
A high-pitched sound of ripping punctuated his murderous thoughts, and a decorative drape tore away from the wall. It shimmered with the side effects of the power he was projecting, falling slowly into progressively smaller shreds.
I should be doing that to Karal, that indolent, wet-eared whelp in diapers....
Firesong ground his teeth, letting the anger grow into a fury, not even concerned about the damage it was doing to his ekele. Let it happen! It didn't matter. The sound of splitting wood was reassuring—that was what breaking bones sounded like, and right now, wishing bodily mayhem on everyone who hadn't appreciated him enough felt very good.
The wooden legs of the serving table split lengthwise, in halves and thirds, twisting the surface this way and that before finally pitching sideways in collapse. The mugs and plates that slid off shattered before reaching the floor.
It is far and away past time I woke up!
At that moment, Aya gave an ear-shattering shriek of absolute terror, and a corner of the ekele burst into flame.
Firesong whirled, howling with anger at Aya's idiocy. The firebird leaped from his perch and fled into the corner to cower in fear under the last almost-intact table. Firesong snarled, deep in his throat, and willed the flames to go out—go out now! The fire only surged brighter when he directed his rage-edged power toward it. It engulfed the tattered wall hangings in a bright yellow sheet, producing an even thicker gout of smoke. He attempted to fling a blanket on the flame
s to smother them, and succeeded only in burning both his hands in the process. The pain only made his anger worse. He couldn't even think clearly.
Finally he clenched his burned fists and screamed at the fire.
"I said stop!"
The smoke belching out from the fire froze, and then receded back into the fire, flattening against it, smothering it, leaving the walls coated in the black of charred tinder. Finally, all that was left was a sweat-soaked, shaking Firesong, splinters of destroyed furniture, the haze of smoke, and a terror-filled firebird.
Firesong took a deep breath through his tight jaw, and his gaze darted around until he found Aya. He opened his scorched fists and lunged at Aya. The firebird fled.
He chased Aya around the room as the firebird hid under broken furniture, screaming in fear of Firesong. "You damned bird!" Firesong shrieked. "You miserable bird! How dare you!" His words degenerated into incoherent growls. Still shouting with anger that had built beyond his ability to control it, he cornered the firebird and prepared to strike Aya where he cowered, every feather shivering.
"Don't!"
The shout from the stairs made him pause—and that moment was all it took for Elspeth and Darkwind to bracket him.
"Firesong, that is your bondbird," the Tayledras scout said angrily. "Your. Bond. Bird. Are you out of your mind? Don't you realize that you are to blame? All he did was reflect what was wrong with you!"
"Get out!" Firesong spat. "This is my home and my bird, and I'll—"
"This isn't a home, it's a funeral pyre, Firesong. Strike Aya down, and you'll follow him," Darkwind warned, tapping a rhythm pattern with one foot that Elspeth quickly picked up—a pattern Firesong recognized vaguely from the containment spell they had all worked to confine the power of the rogue Heartstone of k'Sheyna. "I'm not bluffing, Firesong We can counter anything you can throw at us, and we'll drive it right back into your teeth. It won't be pretty."
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