Storm Warning

by Mercedes Lackey

  "I had hoped so." An'desha smiled tentatively. "But you are stretching yourself very thin, running errands for all of us, transcribing the notes of our meetings for us. I hadn't wanted to ask you."

  "Before this is over, we're all going to be exhausted, so don't worry about it," he told the young mage. At that moment, they reached the door of the tavern, and he paused for a heartbeat on the threshold. "Well, brace yourself. This is not going to be like anything you've ever seen before."

  An'desha did visibly brace himself, but he still winced as the door opened and a steady stream of babbling voices poured out over them.

  But the voices all stopped when people noticed just who it was that was standing in the doorway. Natoli hurried over to them, and Master Tarn was right behind her.

  "We've got notes and charts for you," Natoli began.

  "And I've got notes from the mages' meeting for you," he replied. "And more than that, I've got a mage with me who wants to show you some of how magic works." An'desha clearly wanted to shrink back away from all the people, but only his trembling hands betrayed his nervousness. "An'desha, this is Natoli, and this is Master Tarn. Ladies, this is An'desha; he's both Shin'a'in and Tayledras, and he's one of the mages that works with Lady Herald Elspeth."

  "Very pleased to see you, Master An'desha," Master Tarn said, folding her hands together and bowing a little to him, rather than seizing his hand to shake it. That was a rather tactful gesture on her part, Karal thought. "We badly need someone to help us understand how these magic powers of yours work. Right now, we're in the position of trying to read the wind."

  "I can understand," An'desha replied, so softly that Master Tam had to lean forward to hear him. "I am happy to be of help."

  "Well, come over with us, then. Karal, I think Master Henlin wants your notes so he can have copies made; join us when he lets you go." Master Tarn took charge of An'desha as if she were used to shepherding shy youngsters all the time. Perhaps she was; it occurred to Karal that many of her students might be just as shy and introspective as An'desha. Intelligent children generally got into trouble with their less intelligent peers—it had happened that way to him when he'd been taken by the Priests, after all.

  I only hope none of her students have had half so exciting a life as An'desha. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

  He brought the notes to Master Henlin, who was in the Masters' Room at the rear of the tavern, presiding over a sea of paper, hundreds of sheets of it, covered with figures and diagrams. Then, relieved of his burden, he hurried back out to see if An'desha was still holding up well under the scrutiny of so many strangers.

  He was—in fact, he was deep in a discussion of where magic energy came from.

  "—so some mage-schools have built up reserves, like a cistern or reservoir, and that is what their Master mages can tap into when they need it," he was saying. "It all comes from the same source, though—the energy of life that is all around us. All of us living creatures shed it as we breathe and move."

  "And what about the Adepts you mentioned?" Natoli asked. "Do they use something special? Or are there other reserves only they can use?"

  "There are," the young Adept replied, nodding. "But they are not the reserves that have been built up by other mages. Rather, they are the reserves that exist where two or more natural lines of force meet. These are called 'nodes,' and they are so powerful that only an Adept can control the energy that pools in them. Anyone else trying would either be unable to touch the power, or would be engulfed by it and devoured. Charred."

  One of the boys shivered. "Not a pleasant prospect."

  "No," An'desha replied soberly. "It is not. But you see, now, that this all does respond to natural laws. The power comes from somewhere, and goes elsewhere, like water flowing to the sea. Where it goes eventually, is to a place we call the Nether Planes, where everything is made of chaos and energy. And I suspect that it comes back into our World Plane from there, through the medium of living things."

  "Time to speculate about that when we have the leisure," Master Levy interjected, spreading a map out on the table in front of An'desha. "We've been over every thumblength of ground a half day's ride from Haven, and this is what we've found so far. Transplanted areas are in green, blasted areas are in red, transformed areas are in yellow."

  An'desha bent over the map to study it; Karal whispered to Natoli.

  "Transformed areas?" he asked. "What are those?"

  "Places where whatever was there was changed," she whispered back. "Everything in them is the same as it was, but inside those circles, it's another season. We're in late summer right now; there, it's fall, winter, or even spring. Plants that should be in fruit are blooming, or dormant, insects are dead or in cocoons or eggs, and birds or animals are in winter or courting colors."

  He blinked at her in surprise; she only grimaced. "Don't ask me, I have no notion what could have caused something like that," she told him.

  He turned his attention back to the map, thankful that there were fewer red dots than green or yellow. There definitely was a pattern there—the dots were spaced out at equal intervals, and if you followed a line of them, they would sequence as three greens, a red, and three greens and a yellow. But there didn't seem to be a center to the pattern, or a point of origin.

  "I wonder—" An'desha began, then stopped.

  "Go ahead," Master Tarn urged. "You know magic, and we don't. If you can suggest some kind of meaning or interpretation, I for one would be happy to hear it."

  "Well—I wonder if what has happened is that with the transformed and blasted places, there was too much energy brought to bear, and that is why the damage?" Then he shrugged. "I am grasping at straws."

  "That's no more than we've been doing," Master Levy confessed to him. "Let's follow that theory for a moment."

  Karal couldn't understand more than half of what either of them said, but they seemed to understand each other, and that was the important part. Since An'desha didn't seem nearly as shy of these people as he had when he'd first walked into the room, and since Natoli was immersed in the discussion and ignoring everything else, Karal finally left them and assigned himself to one of the desks where others his age were making copies of the same chart that Master Tarn had unrolled in front of An'desha.

  I can make a copy of this to take back with me; that will save these others from having to make a spare. He helped himself to pens, ink, and paper, and when he had finished that task, he began making copies of his own notes for the other Masters, just as the rest were doing.

  When his tired eyes threatened to unfocus completely, he finished one last page, and rolled up his map and the pages of descriptions of the "magic circles," and went to find An'desha.

  Despite the latter's promises to Firesong, An'desha had been giving demonstrations of mage-craft to the engineers, and he was tired and ready to go back to the Palace. When Natoli declared her intention to defect as well, the whole group broke up, yawning.

  "I'll walk back to the Palace with you," she said, as Karal handed An'desha back his cloak. "I've got a room in the wing where they put some Blues who don't have patrons or aren't highborn, and who also don't live in town. We share it with the Healer—and Bardic-trainees."

  "I'd wondered," Karal admitted, slinging his cloak around his shoulders, as Natoli found hers in the pile of student Blues. "You kept popping up in the Palace and you acted as if you belong there."

  "In a sense, it's the only home I have," Natoli admitted. "Father was Chosen after my mother died of complications of childbirth. No, it wasn't me," she added hastily. "It was a still-birth, and I was about four. He brought me with him to the Collegium since he hadn't any place else to take me, and I've spent all of my life here. When he went out on circuit, one or another of the Heralds would take care of me until he got back."

  Well, it wasn't the worst sort of childhood, though it was nothing like the warm family situation Karal had enjoyed.

  "It sounds lonely," An'desha said ingenuou
sly as Karal opened the door and held it for the two of them.

  Natoli only shrugged as she stepped out into the dark street. "Mostly, it was odd. When Father was here, he made sure I knew he wanted me there, and that he cared about me. For lack of anything else to do, once I got old enough, I took most courses in all the Collegia except the ones in Bardic that had to do with performing and composing, and the ones in Healer's that had to do with really Healing someone. Then one day I realized what I wanted to do, I went to Master Tam and asked to be taken on, and she asked me why I had taken so long to figure out what I was good at."

  "She would," Karal said dryly. "I have the impression that Master Tam would never take an indirect route when there was a direct one available." Other students drifted along behind them, talking quietly to one another, voices murmuring across the otherwise silent street.

  "She does tend to bludgeon things," Natoli replied, but smiled. "Father was just pleased that I'd found my avocation; he granted his leave, and I've been studying with Master Tam ever since."

  "At least you had some choice in the matter," Karal replied, with some envy. "I was quite literally kidnapped by the Priests." He went on to describe his own childhood, while An'desha and Natoli both listened with interest.

  "Odd that of the three of us, I am the one who had the most normal childhood," An'desha mused. "How very strange."

  "Well, you made up for it." Karal slapped him lightly on the back. "Never mind; I've figured out that anyone who is more intelligent than the people around him has troubles as a child. The important thing is not to dwell on those troubles and make them into all you are. You should do what you can with what parts of your life you have personal control over!"

  "That makes good sense," Natoli applauded, and changed the subject. "I wonder what late night food we can gain personal control over?"

  Several days passed, with Karal serving double duty: to the mages and with the engineers. As the days went by, the engineers collected more and more information and added it all to their charts, tables, and maps. Florian passed on a great deal more of what Master Tarn referred to as "data" from other Companions out in the field with their Heralds—all of it was pertinent, and most of it was much more accurate than the information coming from humans. After the third day of this, Karal paused in the midst of his copying, struck by the fear that all this might not be the sort of thing Vkandis would approve of his acolyte doing. After all, he hadn't seen Altra in days. Was the Sunlord annoyed with him?

  At that very moment, Altra wandered through the room, tail waving like a banner in a light breeze.

  Karal froze, and not just because Altra had appeared the moment Karal thought of him, but because it was here, in the middle of a crowd of—well—unbelievers. What were they going to think? Altra wasn't exactly inconspicuous!

  But the others did nothing unusual. The other students and teachers saw him—they avoided trampling him when he was in their path—but they didn't seem to see anything odd about him. He jumped up onto one or two tables and surveyed the figuring and charting going on with aloof interest, and none of them stared at him. He might very well have been a perfectly ordinary tavern cat.

  Considering that he was four or five times larger than any domestic housecat that Karal had ever seen, that was certainly strange!

  But Altra eventually made his way to the back of the room where Karal sat staring at him, and gave Karal an approving wink.

  :They see only what they are expecting to see,: the Firecat said cryptically. :I have more information for you. The same patterns are in Karse and southward. Tell the others. You'll get the maps and so forth that Solaris has sent you in a few days.:

  And with that, Altra strolled underneath a table, and did not come out on the other side. Karal sat there with his pen still in his fingers for a long time.

  Well—at least he approves, Karal thought, dazedly. That was, after all, one less worry.

  But given his current luck, with every worry that he lost, four more rose to take its place.

  A day later—and the half-expected second wave swamped them. It came exactly one day short of a fortnight, and at very nearly the same time of day as the first one.

  This time the areas of disturbance were not as obvious until a few days had passed, and someone noticed that there were places where plants and insects had—changed. They weren't dead, but they certainly weren't the same anymore. The plants in particular had undergone a transformation that made them act like primitive animals. They reacted to the presence of other living creatures, some by shrinking away, but others by reaching toward whatever was near them. Some of the plants were observed trapping and presumably eating insects; others were growing strange new forms of defense; thorns and spikes, saps that had a terrible stench or were outright poisonous. And two days after the storm passed over, when a farmer found his child in a patch of the changed plants, crying hysterically, with hundreds of tiny thorns in her flesh that she swore the plants had flung at her, Selenay ordered that-samples be sent to the Palace and the parent plants be destroyed wherever they were found.

  The mages studied the changed plants without learning much—except that Firesong noted a definite resemblance to some of the dangerous "thinking plants" in the Uncleansed Lands of what Valdemarans called the Pelagir Hills.

  One day short of a fortnight later, the third storm-wave arrived.

  If this keeps up for much longer, I'd better think about growing gills. Karal trudged through yet another nighttime thunderstorm, his cloak already soaked, heading for the Compass Rose. But this time, he felt a little more cheerful than at any time before.

  According to Firesong, this last wave was just a trifle weaker than the previous two. This time virtually no shields had gone down before the onslaught, and although even non-mages had experienced the disorienting effects of the wave, Firesong was positive that this mage-storm hadn't lasted as long as the previous two had. No one had reported in from the area outside Haven yet, but the mages were guardedly optimistic that the worst was over.

  Such good news was more than compensation enough for a long slog through a driving rain, at least to Karal's mind. He couldn't wait until the others heard!

  He opened the door of the tavern and stepped through into warmth and light, only to find virtually everyone clustered around a single table. They were ominously quiet, and when they all turned to see who had entered, there was not a single cheerful expression among them.

  "I've got good news!" he said into the oppressive silence. "Firesong says this last storm was weaker!"

  Their expressions did not change, and he felt his own spirits dropping. "It was weaker, wasn't it?" he faltered. "Firesong said so. We didn't lose any shields this time—"

  Master Levy shook his head slowly. "I'm afraid your Firesong is mistaken," he replied. "Not only was it not weaker, it was actually a little stronger than before. The reason nothing magical was affected was because you've managed to build up good enough shields to protect everything magical that you still retain—and you've pared the number of magical things you need to protect that way to the absolute minimum. Come over here and look at this."

  He gestured to something in a wooden box with a grate over the top of it. Karal couldn't see clearly what was in it, but it sat on the table next to Master Levy and had been the object they had all been clustered around. His mouth suddenly dry with trepidation, Karal edged over to the group and looked down into the box itself.

  It was an animal, but no animal he had ever seen or heard of before. Mad red eyes stared up at him, and long, hairless ears flattened against a viperish skull covered with a thin coat of gray hair. It snarled at him, and he inadvertently backed up a pace.

  "Don't touch it," someone warned. "It just about took Semon's hand off."

  "What is it?" he asked, fascinated and repulsed at the same time. It looked vaguely familiar, somehow.

  "Nearly as we can tell, it was a rabbit." Master Levy looked down at the creature and shook his head. "Or
rather, most of it was a rabbit. We can't tell if this was just a case of several creatures being melded together into something new, or a rabbit that got turned into some sort of meat-eater. That is what your latest wave did; we've sent word to the Palace to warn people out in the countryside. We're just lucky that there generally aren't any large creatures inside those circles of change. I don't know what something as large as a dog would turn into, just as a guess, I'd say our wave of disruption is now powerful enough to affect larger animals."

  "Think what would happen if this hit a cow, or worse, a pig," someone added. Master Levy shuddered, and Karal didn't blame him.

  "Or a human. Another evidence that this wave is stronger is the storm outside," Master Levy put in as an afterthought. "There's always a thunderstorm after the wave passes. This one is worse than the one before, which was worse than the one before that."

  "There's always good news to go with bad news," Natoli said, as Karal finally shivered and turned away from the creature on the table. "With three waves, we have enough information to make some predictions. Now we know when the next wave will come, we know where the affected circles will be, and we know something else. We've been calling these storms 'waves' just as an analogy, but it turns out they really are waves."

  "You can? They are?" The sick feeling in the pit of Karal's stomach cleared. "But that's wonderful! If we can predict these things, we can at least make certain nothing like that thing can happen!"

  "For now," Master Levy said ominously. "The size of the affected circle is growing, too, as the duration of each wave increases with its power—"

  "Wait!" Karal exclaimed. "Don't tell me. You'll have to tell the council of mages—and you ought to come with me and tell them now, while they're still congratulating themselves that Valdemar survived the worst of it and came through all right! They haven't told anyone else yet. We have to stop them before they tell Selenay."

  "He's right," creaked Master Henlin, running a hand over his bald spot. "If we wait until tomorrow, they might not believe us, even with that thing in the box to back us up. Even if they did believe us, they might not want to appear like fools, telling the Queen this directly after telling her everything would be fine. Right. Levy, Norten, Bret; you all go with him. Take all the new charts and the wave-drawing, so they can see for themselves how the waves are acting. Go! We'll all stay here until you come back with word. Maybe now that we know how these waves are acting, we can work out a more effective defense against them."