He laid the Seal back in the drawer and sat where he was, catching himself with both hands on the desk as he went momentarily giddy with exhaustion.
He had not expected that, and it took him completely by surprise. Was it the effect of the mage-storms, or only that he was much older, and under much more strain, than he had been the last time he'd used the Seal? There was no way to tell.
And it didn't matter. If he was lucky, he would never have to use it again.
If I am wise, I will never use it again!
Nevertheless, luck and wisdom had very little to do with the traps Fate might hold for him. He put the Seal back into its hiding place, and put his forgery in with several other, perfectly genuine "contingency" documents that the Emperor had supplied him with when he traveled out here. No one knew exactly what documents he had, nor how many of them there were. When he took this one out of the stack, there would be no way that anyone could say that this one had not been among them originally.
He rested a while after that; no point in unlocking the door directly; someone might sense that magic had been at work here, and he wanted to wait for those energies to fade. Besides, it gave him a badly-needed chance to rest.
Only when the last of those energies had dissipated past his ability to detect them did he rise, unlock the door, and tell his bodyguards to summon his escort.
While there was still daylight left, it was time to make one of his periodic rounds of inspection, and survey his small and desperate kingdom.
Tremane never walked out of his personal stronghold without an escort of half a dozen strong, superbly-trained bodyguards. Of course, at least one of these men was in the pay of the Emperor. He didn't let it bother him, but rather set himself to winning, if not their complete loyalty, then at least a moment's hesitation when the time came for them to raise the assassination knives. That was his best defense against Imperial agents among those he was required to trust.
As he had told his generals, the preliminary defensive wall, a wood-and-daub palisade, had just been completed a few days ago. This palisade contained not only the Imperial camp, but the entire town within its protection. The local populace was quite happy to have them here now, although they had not been too pleased to see them at first. A few attempted incursions by what creatures the mage-storms had left behind had shown them that they could not possibly defend themselves against these weirdling beasts, so bizarre and unpredictable.
The palisade had been easy enough to construct; dead trees had provided the framework, which was filled in with wickerwork and then covered with a particular mix of mud that hardened to a rocklike state when dried. The wall was about a hand's breadth thick, and able to withstand a certain amount of punishment in the way of direct mass impact. It was enough to keep out "dumb" beasts, but Tremane was not about to take the chance that it would have to stand up to more than that. If conditions in the area outside the palisade worsened, there could be mobs of people roaming the countryside, looking for loot, food, or shelter. Tremane was not about to risk the lives of his men against a mob when a well-made wall would take all the risk out of the situation.
Nor were unruly mobs the only possible danger. The war monsters of ancient legend had been able to take down simple palisades—or go over them—and those war-monsters had been created by magic. With more magic loosed in the land, it was possible that chance could recreate something like them. While it was still possible to build before real winter struck, his men were building; building a real wall, one that was constructed of sturdier, and less flammable, materials.
Normally they would have erected a second palisade of wooden tree trunks behind the wicker-and-daub construction, but the sheer size of the camp and the fact that the town was part of the camp made that notion prohibitive. He did not want to denude the countryside of trees, which was what such a palisade would require.
However, there was an abundance of limestone and other materials for making cement, so that was precisely what his walls were being made with. In one huge shelter the men cast molded bricks of cement and put them aside to dry and cure. When they were ready, they were taken to the perimeter for the next step.
Two brick walls were under construction there, behind the "protection" of the wickerwork wall. Construction proceeded in stages, with a team of men devoted to each section of the new wall. When the two brick walls were much taller than the tallest man in the ranks, rubble and earth were packed down between them, and a brick "cap" built over the rubble filling.
It would take an organized force to get over that, but Tremane wasn't done with his project even then. He planned for a curtain wall to be built on top of that, giving his men a protected walkway to use to patrol the perimeter, a protection only real siege engines could breech. Emotionally, he would have liked for the walls to be taller, but practicality told him that there was no real need for them to be that tall. No mere beast, however twisted by magic, could possibly come over the single-story wall—and if anything else came at them, it would be the men and their weapons that kept it back, not a wall.
Still, he found the three-story wall around his confiscated manor very comforting, and he would have liked for that same comfort to be shared by his troops.
Four out of every five of the men were working on the walls, and even with the wretched weather they had been enduring, they were making good progress. There was certainly no shortage of hands for what would ordinarily have been a very labor-intensive job. He'd broken up the long stretch into a hundred sections so that each team of men could see real progress being made. It gave them heart, gave them a reasonable goal to reach.
He took a tour of the brickworks, then went out to where the men were laying a course of bricks. Those who were real masons supervised the trickier bits; the rest laid bricks and spread mortar, bending to the work as if they, too, realized they might be grateful for such protection before long.
But even if Tremane had not personally felt a need for this wall, he would have had the men out doing something constructive. The best way to keep them from getting into trouble was to keep them busy—too busy to make up rumors and spread them, too busy to think of anything other than the good, hot meal waiting for them at the end of the day, and the warm bed to follow that.
The duties varied, and the men were rotated out through all of them unless their skills were particularly needed on one specific job. Those not actually laying bricks or making them were cutting stone, building molds, crushing stone, carrying bricks, or mixing cement and mortar.
And when the wall was complete—which looked to be sooner than he had hoped, for the men worked with a will and a speed he had not expected—he would put them to building winter quarters as soon as the design was determined. That could not come soon enough, and he hoped that somewhere among all of the books he had dragged with him on this journey there would be a design. Something that could concentrate and hold heat, something to take a winter a hundred times worse than any he had endured. He had to plan for the worst, then assume that his imagination was not up to the reality and add to his plans.