He turned and pulled open the door to the roof, hurrying back down to the escort of guards waiting.
"Bad storm coming," he said to them.
"We heard the alarm, Commander," the leader told him. "Is there anything you want to assign us to?"
He thought for a moment. "Just to be on the safe side, once you leave me at my office, go down to the chirurgeons and see what they'd want in the way of a snow-rescue kit and put one together for them. I don't believe there's anyone of ours likely to get caught out there, but you never know, and that's one thing I forgot to look into."
The leader of his guards saluted, and once the escort left him at the door to his office, they hurried off to follow his orders.
He walked back to his desk and sat down but restlessness was on him and it was hard to just sit there and wait while the windows darkened and the alarm call rang out, muffled by stone and glass. The one thing he could not do in a case like this, however, was to run off and see what was going on. If there was an emergency, he needed to be where people expected to find him.
Search parties... if I need to send out search parties, how can I keep them together, and prevent their getting lost? How can you set a trail in a blinding snowstorm?
As long as they weren't searching a forest, the men could go roped together like a climbing party. That would prevent them from getting separated. But what about a trail back to safety?
If it's still daylight... sticks? Red-painted sticks? It was too late to go painting sticks—No, wait, we still have all the sticks from surveying the walls and a lot of chalk line. He made a note to get both out of storage. You might see lanterns through thick snow. Another note. Bells. You might hear bells. Weren't there ankle and wrist bells with those dancers' costumes that no one in town wanted to trade for? He noted down the bells as well. The chirurgeons would know best what a half-frozen victim would need; he'd leave that part of the kit up to them.
I wish there was a better way of getting around in snow besides walking. Well, there wasn't and that was that. But if they're looking for someone who's half-buried in snow, perhaps they ought to have walking sticks to probe the snow for a body. Blunt spear shafts would do, and they might make walking easier. Wait, I'd better insist on every two men staying very close together, one to probe and one to guard, the Hundred Little Gods only know what's out there and a storm will give those howling things lots of cover for an attack.
He tried to think of anything else that rescue parties might need and failed to come up with anything else. Putting his notes into a coherent form, he called in one of his aides and sent the young man down to ferret out all the disparate rescue objects and lay them out on the floor of the manor armory.
By now it was too dark to see without a light; it might as well have been dusk rather than just after noon—except for the weirdling flashes of lightning, a strange and disconcerting greenish color, that illuminated the office in fitful bursts. He lit a twist of paper at the fire and went around his office, lighting all his candles and lanterns himself. He waited until he had finished his rounds to look out the window, and when he did, he was astonished.
He couldn't see a thing beyond the thick curtain of snow, and the snow itself slanted obliquely. The wind driving that snow howled around the chimney of his fireplace, and vibrated the glass of the window. No wonder he couldn't hear thunder now; the wind was drowning it out. The lightning strikes were not visible as bolts; instead everything lit up in unsettling green-white for a moment.
Now I know what they mean by a "howling blizzard." And I'm glad we designed the barracks around those furnaces, rather than fireplaces. It'll be harder for the wind to steal the heat from the fires. That was always a problem with a true fireplace; in a high wind most of the heat went right up the chimney. He couldn't afford that to happen in his barracks. They'd use up most of their fuel in no time.
One by one, his officers brought their reports, and he lost a little of his tension. Everyone was accounted for; the hunting and wood-gathering parties had returned before the blizzard hit, in fact they had returned even before the alarm went up. All the barracks were provisioned for a long storm; ropes had been strung between the buildings, barracks, and manor so that no one would get lost.
"You can get lost out there, sir," one of the last of the officers said, as he brushed at snow that had been driven into the fabric of his uniform coat. "Make no mistake about it. You can't see an ell past your feet once you're out of shelter. I've never seen the like."
"Well, there'll be plenty of fresh water at least," Tremane remarked, initialing the report. "Just melt the snow."
The officer nodded, then paused for a moment. "Sir, you did know most of the men in my barracks are from the Horned Hunters, didn't you?"
Since the Imperial Army made an effort to integrate all of the recruits into a single culture rather than cater to individual cultures, Tremane didn't know a thing about it until that moment. "Actually, no—wait, they ought to be used to this sort of weather, shouldn't they?"
He had an obscure notion that the Horned Hunters were a nomadic tribe from land so far to the north in the Empire that they never saw summer. "Don't they herd deer and travel by sled?"
"You're thinking of the Reindeer People, sir. My lot are a sect, not a tribe. Shamanistic, animal spirits, that sort of thing." The officer coughed and looked a little embarrassed. "They sent me with a request, since we're all going to be confined to barracks for a while. They want permission to turn a corner of the barracks into a sweat house permanently. I don't see anything wrong with it, but I told them I had to have your permission."
"I believe this comes under the heading of Article Forty-Two—'the Empire shall not restrict the right of a man to worship—' and so on." Tremane smiled slightly. "I don't see the harm so long as they understand there won't be any ritual fasting without special permission, and if they want to undergo any prolonged dream quests, they'll have to apply for and use their leave days to do it."
The officer sighed and looked relieved. "That was the one thing I was worried about, sir, and using leave-days takes care of the problem. Very well, sir, I'll tell them. I doubt they'll have any trouble with it."
"I certainly don't have any difficulty with it," Tremane told him. "And if we get multi-day storms like this all winter well, I might even make concessions on the leave-days. If you're cooped up in the barracks, you might as well send your spirit out for a little stroll, hmm?"
The officer laughed. "May I tell them that, too, Commander? I think it would appeal to their sense of humor."
He shrugged. "I don't see why you shouldn't. If they know I'll let them have their proper rites, it'll probably keep them more content."
The officer saluted and headed back down to return to his men. Tremane toyed with a pen and wished he had an outlet for pent-up energies for all of his men that would match the Horned Hunters' dream quests. If this storm went on for too long, there'd be fights as the men got on one another's nerves. While many commanders did not like having the odder, shamanistic cults going on among the men, Tremane had never minded; provided you made an effort to understand what they wanted and see that they got it, they were generally easier to please than the "civilized" men.