"Yes, but you'll be using more of the heat from the furnace," his man pointed out. "And you can burn dung without smelling up the inside."
"I don't see anything to object to," the Chief Chirurgeon said judiciously. "Other than the fact that it will be darker than the eighth hell in there without windows, and I'm bound to warn you that will have an effect on the men's morale and health."
"Better dark than freezing," one of the others muttered, which only confirmed Tremane's own thought.
"Health you can deal with in their diet; sprouted beans and the rest of that stuff you chirurgeons are so fond of," he replied. "And as for morale—since they'll be on duty outside most of the daylight hours, I don't see a problem—but wait a moment, though," he added, as something odd occurred to him.
The chirurgeons hadn't listed a single complaint or difficulty since they made a permanent camp here. "You people aren't having any problems with the mage-storms affecting you. Isn't that laying-on-of-hands healing that you do a kind of magic?"
One of the lesser Healers choked behind his hands; the Chief Chirurgeon, a tall, thin, balding fellow with an attitude of aristocratic arrogance, favored him with a frosty smile. "Firstly, although the uninformed think of healing as a kind of magic, it is not the sort of magic that you mages are accustomed to using," he replied, in a lofty, superior tone of voice that made Tremane grit his teeth in response. "Mind you, I am a surgeon; my skills are in the excising of diseased flesh with the knife, in the stitching of damaged tissue with needle and gut-thread. However, I have made certain that I am educated even in those healing arts that I am not equipped to perform."
As you should have been, his tone seemed to imply. Tremane simply schooled his features into mild interest and nodded. He had learned long ago to keep his temper under more trying circumstances than this. Strangling the man would accomplish nothing.
Except to make me very happy...
"So just how does this differ from the magic that I, as a mage, am familiar with?" he asked with exact politeness.
"In the first place, it is performed entirely with the mind," the Chief Chirurgeon lectured. "The only difference between a self-taught or untaught Healer and one who has gone through training is in the recognition of how to heal things besides obvious broken bones or wounds. The Healer's mind convinces the patient's body to restore itself to the perfect state it had before the injury or illness. That is why they cannot correct those who are born with deformities." He smiled smugly. "That is something only those with my skill can do."
"All right, but I still don't understand why you aren't encountering interference from the mage-storms," he persisted.
"Because the Healers don't work during a storm, when the disruptions in energy are the only things that could interfere with their talent," the Chief Chirurgeon replied, as if to an idiot. "Accelerated healing only takes place when the Healer is actively working. The rest of the time, the patient is simply doing what he would under ideal circumstances. Under ideal conditions, our bodies would always repair themselves and throw off disease; the Healer simply reminds the body of what it should be doing."
"Oh." He had some vague notion that, basically, the reason the Healers were unaffected was that they were essentially working very small, limited magics of extremely limited duration and at very close range, but he doubted that the Chief Chirurgeon would agree with his particular definition.
Evidently his subordinate didn't even care for his expression. "Healing just is not magic as you understand it," the man persisted. "There's an old term for healing and a number of other abilities all lumped together: mind-magic. No one these days ever bothers with most of the other abilities, except a few practitioners of some of the odder religions."
Mind-magic? Where have I heard that term used before? There's something very familiar about that term. "What are those other things that were lumped in with healing?" he asked, out of a feeling that the answer might be important.
"Oh," the chirurgeon waved dismissively. "They're hardly important, things many educated people think are mostly delusional. Speaking mind-to-mind without the assistance of a teleson-spell; moving objects or even people with the power of the mind alone and no Portals involved; seeing and speaking with spirits of the dead; communicating directly with deities; seeing into the distance, the past, or the future without benefit of a mirror-spell; and imposing one's will upon another." He shrugged. "Most folk in the Empire are rather skeptical about those sorts of things. It is very easy to pretend to powers that are only in the mind, and thus very subjective."
He'd been speaking in Hardornen, though whether it was out of politeness for the company or simply because he'd forgotten to switch back to the Imperial tongue, Tremane couldn't have said for certain. The locals, who had been listening to his speech with some interest, laughed uproariously at that last statement. The chirurgeon glared at them in annoyance.
"I fail to see what was so amusing," he said acidly. "Perhaps you would care to enlighten me?"
"You people wouldn't be so skeptical if you'd ever met a Herald out of Valdemar," was the reply. "They don't use your 'real' magic over there, or they didn't until just lately. Everything they do is with mind-magic, and they think yours is poppycock and fakery."
Affronted, the chirurgeon turned his own underlings; the Hardornen builders got involved in a discussion of the best "furnaces" and other devices to heat the barracks, and whether or not the walls really needed to be piled with earth. There seemed to be a brotherhood of builders, of stone and wood and metal, that transcended nationalities.
That left Tremane with an interesting tidbit to mull over. The Valdemarans did everything with mind-magic? That must have been where he'd first heard the term.
So Heralds must be the people born with these abilities; somehow they have a way of testing for them, I suppose. Then they get herded up the way the Karsites collect children with Mage-Talent, and sent off for training. Clever, to put them all in service to the Crown; the Empire could do with that policy regarding mages. And they aren't used to using real magic; it's new to them, so they don't rely on it. Fascinating.
No wonder they weren't having the kind of problems with mage-storms that he was having! They simply didn't have things that would be disrupted by the storms!
There are plenty of folk in the Empire who would call that a barbaric way of life—but they can heat their homes and move their goods and we can't.... So who has the superior way of life now?
Heating homes... all very well to heat the barracks with cow dung, but what was he going to cook with? "Wood," he said aloud. "We have a problem; trees don't grow as quickly as wheat, and I don't intend to denude the countryside to keep my people warm if I can help it. Have any of you any suggestions?"
The Hardornens exchanged glances, and one of them finally spoke up. "Commander Tremane, you know as well as we do the state of things here. Half the people of Hardorn are gone. Whole villages are wiped out just because some lieutenant of Ancar got offended over something someone said, farms were abandoned when the last able-bodied person gave up or was carried off. We were going to suggest that once the harvest was over, your folk and ours go out together on foraging expeditions."