Faro and Ware simultaneously threw her to the ground and threw themselves down beside her. She had just enough wit to curl into a ball and try to protect her head and neck with her hands. Then there was no more time-for the whirlwind was upon them, roaring like a waterfall, shrieking like a legion of the damned, howling like a hundred thousand mindless monsters- -and the world came apart.
It seemed to take forever, and it was over in moments. When the thing had passed on its inexorable way, there was nothing left standing of any of Xylina's conjurations. The stones of the palisade were flattened-those that were still there. As for the rest, the whirlwind had picked them up and danced them about, then carried them off, somewhere. The shelter she had conjured so hastily was completely gone, and only the flat hearth-stone remained of the encampment.
Xylina, Ware, and Faro prized themselves off the rock, and stared about in the flickering lightning-and even Ware seemed completely dumbfounded. Horn and Hazard remained clinging to the rock, unable to move or even open their eyes. Xylina sat up slowly, the rain plastering her hair to her head and back, and tried to put together a single coherent thought. Faro simply sat and shook like a bush in a high wind. Ware tried several times to say something, then shrugged, and gave up. Finally, he managed a single word: "Light." She knew what he meant, of course, and after several tries she succeeded in conjuring a glowstone large enough to guide any other survivors toward them. Of the men, less than half returned, soaked and shaken to the core, plodding back through the soaked and flattened grass to what little was left of the encampment, shreds and shards and the occasional recognizable object.
Somehow she, Faro, Ware, Horn, and Hazard had managed to cling to the stone while the whirlwind sucked up rock and wood and reduced them to splinters. As if the storm were satisfied, the whirlwinds moved off into the distance, the wind and lightning died, and even the rain faded away to little more than a drizzle. When she stopped shaking, Xylina's first thought was to give her men some kind of comfort, so she created another shelter and made a bonfire beneath it for Ware to light. The five of them sat huddled about it in thick swaths of conjured fabric, joined by others, staggering in one at a time. One of them, Xylina was relieved to see, was Pattée, sadly bedraggled but whole. Xylina put her arm around the woman and conjured warm material to surround them both. Theoretically one was a member of the ruling elite and the other a foreign whore who couldn't conjure; those had become meaningless distinctions.
Gradually, all those men that could, returned. When the roll was taken, they were down to a total of eleven, including Ware, Xylina, and Faro. Horn and Hazard survived; the other five were all fighters-Tron, Steel, and Jerig of the experienced men, and Pol and Ren of the men that had not had any previous campaigning. Even those three experienced campaigners were shaken to the bone by what they had just lived through. Tron had actually seen one of the others sucked up off his feet into the maw of the whirlwind, and hurled into the sky, screaming helplessly. He could only speak about what he had seen in broken fragments, augmented by gestures. "Never seen nothin' like it," he mumbled, over and over. "Not never..."
"First that terrible headache, then this," Pattée murmured.
So she had felt it too, while the men had not. That suggested that something strange had happened, but Xylina wasn't sure what to make of it.
They sat about the fire, glumly, and no flame or blanket could warm the chill in their hearts. Xylina was too numbed even for tears, and Faro still shook with tremors that came and went and had nothing to do with the cold. Finally, after long silence, Ware spoke.
"That was no natural storm."
He knew this place; somehow he must have recognized something about the whirlwinds that none of the others could have guessed. Xylina and the men looked at him expectantly, and waited for him to continue.
Ware stared off into the darkness, and his face was frozen into a cold mask that made Xylina shiver. "That was a mage-storm," he said at last. "It was created by a weather-wizard. There is only one tribe here that practices such magic. The Julamites know we are here; they somehow thought we were challenging them, and this was their answer."
He paused for a moment, and then turned to Xylina, his face now full of sorrow. "I did not know there was a weather-wizard this powerful in existence," he said to her, with mournful desperation. "If I had known, I would have warned you. I thought the worst the Julamites could produce would be lightning-I thought we would have plenty of warning of their storms. I never thought they would deign to bother with an expedition as small as ours."
The men stared at him, expressions of accusation beginning to form on their faces. But Ware was more than apologetic; he took the responsibility for what had happened on himself. The sorrow in his voice, and the despair in his eyes, were as moving as anything she had ever heard, and she felt impelled to answer them.
"How could you have known? And even if you had known, what could we have done about it?" she asked, softly, trying to keep her own fear and borderline hysteria out of her own voice. "No one could run away from something like that! And nothing I built could have withstood it! If these Julamites were determined to slay us with their storm, I fear that there was nothing we could have done to prevent what happened. I know of no conjurer who could match that kind of power, not even Queen Adria."
Accusations died unspoken, and slowly the men nodded a grudging agreement. Ware shook his head slightly, but said nothing-only his own bleak face told her that he did not consider himself to be any less at fault. She felt a strange pity for him; he was so alone among them, and he was so accustomed to being the authority, that this failure to anticipate disaster must come doubly hard to him.
He turned his gaze from the darkness to the flickering fire. "If the Julamites are this strong, I must assume that the other tribes of this land have become just as strong," he said, finally. "The only good news I can offer is that I do not think we will be troubled by another mage-storm. It takes particular conditions to enable a weather-wizard to turn an ordinary storm into a mage-storm, and it is very draining on the wizard himself. And I know the Julamites cannot have more than one weather-wizard of such strength; they are an ambitious people, and a powerful wizard would not permit any rivals."
Like the Queen, Xylina thought, but did not say aloud.
"Then what can we expect?" Faro asked after a moment. He cast a glance past Ware's shoulder at the east. "You said yourself these people are all likely to be hostile. It's almost dawn; surely we're in for some other surprises." Faro seemed to be recovering his strength and his wits, and Xylina was grateful. She had hated to see him sitting there, trembling.
"I wish I could tell you," Ware replied helplessly, shrugging. "I am sorry, but since I was last here a few months ago, many things have changed that I did not expect to change. For that matter, I did not expect to find this realm here; it was much farther to the east when last I traveled. There are a score of tribes in this realm, and all of them have different wild magics. I know I saw the ur-birds of the Lgondians above us yesterday, but I do not know whether they will attack us, or whether their masters will. If the Julamites are so strong-have the other tribes become weaker, or stronger? I simply do not know!"
"Well, give us a starting point at least!" Faro snapped. "Give us a plan! We can change the plan, if need be, but at least we will have one. You are the only one who knows anything about this place."
Ware opened his mouth as if to retort angrily-then closed it. He nodded slowly. "I apologize," he said. "You are right. We must do something other than sit here on a rock. We will have to try to travel stealthily-and Xylina will have to conjure everything we need, from this moment on, save for food and drink. We must try to be unobtrusive, unchallenging, and if the fates are with us, the tribes may think us too weak to bother with. That is the only way that we will succeed in passing through here, now that our company is so decimated."