Storm Rising by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page A

Valdemarans had been working frantically on a way to block out the mage-storms themselves.
    He hadn’t thought much about the report at the time he’d first read it, but now as he reread it, he began to wonder about some of his earlier assumptions.
    I was so certain that they were the source of the storms
, he mused, staring at the fire in his small fireplace and listening with half an ear to the sounds of his men drilling in the courtyard below his office window. He found that sound rather comforting in its ordinary familiarity.
I was so certain that this was some strange new weapon that Valdemar had unleashed upon us. But according to this
, they
have been suffering as badly as we have. Their Queen doesn’t have the reputation for being ruthless that Charliss has. So would she turn something like this loose on her own people just to eliminate us?
    She might, of course. Just because Selenay did not have a reputation for being ruthless, it didn’t follow that she was
not
ruthless. She might simply be a very good actress. She could be mad, too; that was hardly a novelty among royalty.
    What was more, Valdemar did not depend on magic for anything. It didn’t even
have
magic as Tremane knew the art. So the only hardships that Valdemar was suffering were those caused by the storms interacting with the physical world—
    But there, his reasoning broke down, as he thought about the creature his men had brought in.
Only? Not a good choice of words. There was nothing “only” about that monster.
    And as a counter to the rest of his arguments, there was the entirely random nature of the storms and their effect. Why would
anyone
who was sane—and he had seen no reason to think that Queen Selenay was insane—unleash something whose effects were so completely unpredictable? If you had a weapon and you knew what it did, of course, you used it. But if you had a weapon and you had
no idea
what it was going to do—well, there was no sane reason to use it, not when it could harm you as badly as it harmed your enemies.
    Now his head hurt, and he rubbed his temples with the heels of his hands. He hadn’t
liked
sending that assassin in to destroy the alliance Valdemar was making. Something had told him at the time that he might be making a mistake, but he had persisted in order to make the mage-storms stop.
    But they didn’t stop, did they? In fact, they got worse.
    Could he have made a major error in judgment? Granted, the alliance hadn’t been disrupted, but at least one of the more important mages had been eliminated. Since the storms hadn’t started until after that Karsite priest had arrived in Valdemar, it made sense that he was one of the prime forces behind the mage-storms,
if
they were indeed originating from Valdemar. With him gone, they should have stopped.
    What if Valdemar was not perpetrator, but fellow victim?
    His head hurt worse than before. If he’d had better spies—but he didn’t. He’d done his best to break up the alliance with Karse, and it hadn’t happened. He’dtried to scatter them, leaving them as disorganized as a covey of quail scattered by a beater. But they
weren’t
disorganized, and his assassin hadn’t even made an appreciable difference in their level of efficiency. Furthermore, and this was the important point, the mage-storms continued, increasing in frequency and in power.
    So what if I was wrong?
    He brooded on that for a while, feeling sicker and sicker the longer he thought about it. If that was the case, he had ordered the assassinations of people who could have been his allies against the storms.
    Nothing like burning your bridges
before
you reached them.
    I haven’t heard from the assassin, and that fool of an artist would contact me if he thought he was in the tiniest danger.
He shifted his position in the chair as his back began to ache and his legs to twitch restlessly.
The fool must have gotten caught, though I can’t imagine how. He’s probably dead by now. Even the