And there was only one place this storm could have come from.
"There is only one place this storm could have originated from," Sejanes said, echoing his own thoughts. "Despite the fact that it began east of us—well, any fool knows that the world is a ball! What better way to surprise us than by sending out an attack to circle the world and strike from behind?"
"You're saying that Valdemar sent this against us," Tremane replied slowly.
Sejanes shrugged. "Who else? Who else has access to strange allies from lands we never even heard of? Who else uses magics we don't understand? Who else has reason to attack us from behind?"
"Who else indeed," Tremane echoed. "They lose nothing by making life miserable for the Empire and the Imperial allies, and they could have warned their friends to erect special shields. Except that—according to all of you, Valdemar has the absolute minimum in the way of magic!"
He cast an accusatory glance around the table. Most of the mages cringed and averted their eyes, but Sejanes met him look for look.
"We still don't know what those horses are," Sejanes pointed out acidly. "And we don't recognize their magics. So how could we tell what they had and didn't have? We made our best guess based on the fact that they simply do not use magic in their everyday lives. There are no mage-lights or mage-fires—they have only candles, lanterns and torches, and physical fires. There are no Constructors; they build contrivances with no magic at all to haul water, grind grain. There are no Replicators; all documents are copied by hand, or printed with much labor. Messages are sent by those crude mirror-towers, or by human messenger. So what are we to think? That they have no magic, of course."
"But if they have no magic in daily use," Tremane pointed out, thinking out loud, "then they will not suffer from this attack as we have."
Sejanes nodded, his head bobbing on his thin neck like a toy on a spring. "Precisely. As if they used this kind of attack all the time. As if they planned for this kind of attack to be used against them."
It made sense. It more than made sense. If you expected someone to hurl fire at you, you built your fort of stone. If you expected catapults, you built the walls thickly. If you expected to be deluged with mage-caused thunderstorms, you built truly good drainage.
And if you expected to be attacked by something that twisted and ruined your spells, you didn't use any. Unless, of course, it was the spell intended to twist and ruin all other spells.
"But where did this come from?" he asked, thinking aloud again.
Sejanes shrugged, and the rest of the mages only shook their heads. "It passed roughly east to west, and at a guess I would say that if it came from Valdemar as we think, it truly did circle the whole world to get here. That is logical, and in line with the notion that it originated in Valdemar. Frankly, if I had such an attack, I would use it that way, because it would be at its weakest when it finally got back to me. It was certainly strong enough to wreak havoc for us when it reached us!"
That made sense, too. "You're saying you can't find a point of origin, though," he persisted. "If you could, we would know where their best mages were." And that useless artist could find out who they are. Then we could neutralize them.
"Not a chance," Sejanes said flatly. "At the moment, we're lucky to find the mages in the other camps, much less a point-of-origin for this thing. We are fundamentally disarmed at this point, and we'd better hope that neither the rebels nor the Valdemarans have anything planned for us, because we're so disorganized that we'll be lucky to hold the ground we've got."
The others chimed in with more tales of woe—he had already heard from his military commanders by now, and he was simply glad that so many of them were used to working under primitive and uncertain conditions. They had found substitutes for the magics that weren't working, but there was no substitute for the lack of communication. That was the worst.
Tremane was just grateful that he had called a halt to the attempt to advance before all this happened. If he had been in the midst of a military maneuver, it could have been a disaster.
Sejanes was the only one who really had anything useful to say, and what he had was all too meager. The rest simply floundered, out of their depth.
"I can only see one thing useful at this point," Tremane said at last. "Repair the damages, and armor the repairs against a repeat of this attack. Communications, first. Then the Gates; if this goes on too much longer, we'll be short of supplies in a week. Shield and reshield everything you do. Then check back with me; I'll determine what is most important."
Tremane finally dismissed his mages back to their work of repairing the damages after a little more exhortation, and slumped back into his chair, his temples throbbing. He hoped that he was the only one suffering from a headache, that it was caused more by stress than by the mage-storm; if all his mages were working under the burden of an aching head, they'd only be about half as effective as they were normally.
He rang for a page and called for strong wine. He seldom drank, but at this point he needed at least one cup of fortification.
He stared at the polished surface of the table and turned the cup around and around in his hands. One question was uppermost in his mind: How did they do this?
It was not just that the attack was like nothing he had ever seen before. It was not only the sheer size and scope of the attack. It was the randomness of it all.
Insane. Absolutely insane. Not even Ancar had been crazed enough to have developed a spell like this one.
And the effects—what possible use was there in an attack that ripped up circles of land and planted them elsewhere? Were the Valdemarans simply hoping that there might be strategic targets inside those circles? Or were they just striking for the effect on mind and morale?
Was there a meaning behind it at all? Or was the chaos really the meaning? Was this representative of how Valdemarans thought? If so, they were more alien than the gryphons they courted!
If they can do this, he thought to himself, sipping the bitter, dark wine, what else can they do? Have I taken on even more than Charliss himself could handle? Or is this another of Charliss' little tests?
That, too, was possible. Charliss and the Empire were in the east, and the storm had come from the east. The Emperor could be testing him under fire, to see how he handled such an attack.
It still could have been one of his enemies who had sent this; or more likely, several of his enemies working together.
As he reached the bottom of the glass, another thought occurred to him, one even more bitter than the wine, and more frightening than the mage-storm.
What if Charliss wanted to be rid of him? How better than to embroil him in a conflict he could not win?
Had he been set up to fail from the beginning?