No, now he must carry this through, or else flee—into the south, into the west, into those barbarian lands beyond even Valdemar, and hope to cover his tracks well enough that no agent of the Empire could find him.
I walk a tightrope above the vent of a volcano, he thought grimly. And there is someone shaking the tightrope, trying to make me fall.
Shaking? That was odd.... For a moment it felt as if something had just picked up the building and dropped it; the unsettled feeling in the pit of the stomach an earthquake caused. But there was no earthquake, and this was no physical feeling; this was centered in the mage-senses—
—as if something strange, terrifying, and huge was looming over him—
Before he could move from his chair, it struck.
All his senses failed; sight, sound, hearing, all gone. He floated in an ocean of nothingness, bereft of any touch with the real world. Mage-energy coursed through him, without truly touching him. Once, as a child, he had gone to the Salten Sea on a holiday. A great wave had come in and picked him up, nearly drowning him, carrying him up onto the shore and leaving him gasping on the sand. This was another kind of wave, but he was just as helpless in its powerful grasp, and now, as then, he did not know if it would leave him alive or drag him under to drown. It tumbled him in dizzying nothingness, disorienting him further. He was lost....
He thought he cried out in terror, but he couldn't even hear his own voice.
Then it was over. He felt the chair he was in again, heard his own harsh gasps for breath as the breath burned in his throat. His body shuddered with the pounding of his heart, and his hands ached as they spasmed on the arms of his chair. For a moment, he thought he was blind, but lightning struck just outside and illuminated the room for a moment, and he realized that the mage-light had simply gone out.
Simply? It was not that simple; the kind of mage-light he had created was supposed to endure anything save having the spell canceled!
He blinked. There was light in the next room, dim red light from the fire. He unclenched his hands with a rush of relief; at least he wasn't left in the dark! Odd. All his life he'd had mage-lights about him—even in a room darkened for sleep there was leakage from lights in the garden, lights in the hallway or the next room. He'd never realized how dark a truly dark room could be.
With shaking hands, he felt in a drawer of the table next to him, found a candle, and took it into the next room to light it at the fire there. Some enemy had sent a magical attack at him, surely! Magical assassins had been blocked by the protections he kept constantly in place—or was this meant simply to disrupt his concentration? This attack, if attack it was, certainly hadn't been very effective! And yet—to cancel a mage-light spell within his protections meant that someone had incredible power. He controlled the trembling of his hands and forced himself to think of who might command that kind of power.
That was all he had time for—aides burst in on him, sent by every commander in the camp, all of them carrying messages of varying levels of hysteria.
That was when he realized that the effect of the—whatever it was—had not been targeted solely against him.
Somehow he managed to assemble all of his mages within a reasonable time the next day, gathering them all into his councilroom to assess the damage. "So it swept the entire country?" Tremane asked his chief mage, Artificer Gordun. The homely, square-faced man nodded, as he laced his thick, clever fingers together.
"As nearly as we can tell," Gordun replied. "It was like one of those enormous waves that carries right across the Salten Sea; it came from the east and north, and is traveling into the west and south. We think it also washed over the Empire, but just at the moment, it is impossible to tell. We can't get messages to the Empire, and I would suspect that the reverse is true."
Tremane grimaced. Like those great waves, this thing that had come and gone had left devastation behind it, and the more something was connected to magic, the worse the effect was. Every spell suffered damage to a greater or lesser extent. Lines of communication were all gone until the mages found each other again; the Portals were all down, and only the forty little gods knew when they would be reopened. Defenses were gone, or shaken. Little things, like mage-lights, magical cook-fires, weather-cloaks, timekeepers, all the tiny things that made life run smoothly for the troops, were gone, the spells that created them shattered. There would be dark, cold tents and cold meals all up and down the lines tonight, unless the various commanders quickly found non-magical substitutes.
"It was a mage-storm, that much we are certain," Gordun continued. "Although it is not like any such storm we have ever encountered before. The storm itself did not last for more than a heartbeat or two. Mages encountered a physical effect, as you no doubted noted yourself. Non-mages experienced nothing."
"That was enough," Tremane muttered. "It's going to take days to set up all the spells it knocked down, and more time to inspect anything that survived for damage and repair it."
"That isn't all, my lord Duke." The thin, reedy voice came from the oldest mage with Tremane's entourage, his own mentor, Sejanes. The old man might look as if he was a senile old stick, but his mind was just as sharp as it had been decades ago. "This mage-storm has affected the material world as well as the world of magic. Listen—"
He picked up the pile of papers on the table before him, with hands that were as steady as a surgeon's. "These are the reports I have from messengers I sent out on horses to the other mages in the army. The tidings they returned with were not reassuring. From Halloway: 'There are places where rocks melted into puddles and resolidified in a heartbeat, sometimes trapping things in the newly-solid rock.' From Gerrolt: 'Strange and entirely new insects and even higher forms of life have appeared around the camp. I cannot say whether they were created on the instant, or come from elsewhere in the world.' From Margan: 'Roughly circular pieces of land two and three cubits in diameter appear to have been instantly transplanted from far and distant places. There are circles of desert, of forest, of swamp—even a bit of lake bottom, complete with mud, water-weeds, and gasping and dying fish.'" He waved the papers. "There are more such reports, from all up and down the lines, and from behind them as well. You are well beyond my needing to prompt you, Tremane, but this cannot have been an act of nature!"
"And it isn't likely that it is residue from King Ancar's reckless meddling, either," Tremane agreed.
"I cannot see how," Sejanes replied, dropping the papers again. "Ancar was not capable of magic on this scale. There is no mage capable of magic on this scale. I can only assume that it must have been caused by many mages, working together. Perhaps that would account for the variety and disparity of its effects."
Tremane racked his memory for any accounts of anything like this "mage-storm," and came up with nothing. Oh, there were mage-storms of course, but they all had purely physical effects, and were caused by too much unshielded use of magical energies. Those storms were real storms, weather systems, very powerful ones. This was not like any mage-storm he had ever seen, and yet the term was an apt one. It had struck like a storm, or a squall line; it had passed overhead, done its damage, and passed on.