"It's the only one I know," An'desha replied ruefully. "It takes a lot more energy than the kind that works like FarSight but I don't have a choice since I don't know that one."
"I'd prefer it even if you did have a choice," Natoli replied, tucking her hair back behind her ear. "With others watching, you have extra sets of eyes and ears to catch what you might miss."
An'desha smiled. "True. Right, well, that's how we'll have the power."
:As for a target, why don't you use the Imperial arms?: Altra said, unexpectedly. :You're not likely to find that anywhere except in the quarters of someone with authority, either on the wall or on documents—we already know from Kerowyn's spies that they've taken the arms off their uniforms.:
"Using the Imperial arms as a target—that's what Altra suggests. Can you do that?" he asked An'desha. "Then we can just observe people to see if they fit what we need."
An'desha looked blank for a moment. "I don't know why I couldn't. Given that, we can decide how we speak with our chosen contact once we actually have him."
:I'll find Talia for you.: Florian "vanished" from Karal's thoughts for a moment. Karal discovered how agreeable it was to be able to use the varied abilities of Companions; normally they would have had to go in search of Talia, but through her Companion Rolan, they were able to "ask" her to come to them in Karal's suite. They couldn't convey anything in detail, however, since Talia, unlike most Heralds, did not have Mindspeech. Rolan could only "send" an image of them and convey a sense of need.
When she finally arrived on Karal's doorstep, she wore an expression of faint annoyance overlaid with curiosity. "I hope this is more important than what I was doing," she said without preamble as Karal let her in.
"I think so, Sun's Ray," he said, calling her by her priestly title. She raised an eyebrow at that, but permitted herself to be coaxed into accepting a chair and a mug of tea. "Natoli will explain what we're up to, and I hope we haven't overstepped our authority."
Ulrich used to say that it is easier to apologize than get permission. I hope he was right.
Natoli did explain, not only their conclusions but the reasoning leading up to them. Talia listened patiently, nodding from time to time, until Natoli was finished.
"You've come perilously close to overstepping your authority," Talia told him, "but you succeeded in staying just on the right side. I'll ask Elspeth, and honestly—I think she'll agree with you. She's become more pragmatic since the mission into Hardorn after Ancar and Hulda than I gave her credit for being."
"I think it was traveling through Hardorn, seeing how the people were suffering then, and knowing that it must be worse now," An'desha suggested. "She might not be in line for the throne anymore, but you can't remove the sense of responsibility that you trained into her."
Talia smiled faintly. "One hopes. Well, let's see what can be done—and I have a suggestion for a place where you can do your scrying. Directly above the Heartstone chamber is a room that mirrors it exactly, right down to having a crystal sphere in the center of a table. You could use that, and it's shielded to a fare-thee-well. We've used it for FarSeeing in the past." She put her mug down on a side table and stood up. "I'm beginning to think that the Queen ought to recognize you lot as a working entity; I'll have a word with her about that as well. You're all adults, you're all responsible, and you're all coming up with ideas, if not actual solutions. We ought to grant you enough authority that you can test out some of your ideas without constantly coming to one of us."
That last had Karal staring at her with an open mouth for a moment.
"Don't get too excited," she said, with a slight hint of a smile. "It won't be a great deal of authority. But you have a fair amount on your own, you know. You and An'desha are aliens on our soil, and do not necessarily have to answer to any authority in Valdemar for your actions so long as you don't break any major laws." She put the mug down decisively. "Now, if I'm going to catch Elspeth alone, I have to go now. I'll send you word through Rolan and Florian."
She walked to the door, and Karal opened it for her again, but just before she left, she turned and looked at him with a peculiar, penetrating stare. "You are something of a puzzle, young priest, she said at last. "You are the only person I have ever encountered that has a Companion speaking with him who was not also Chosen. I wish I knew why."
"So do I, Sun's Ray," he said fervently. "I would sleep better at night if I did."
Inside the scrying room, it was as silent as a cave. Even noises from outside were muffled to the point of vanishment. An'desha settled into his seat, now softened with a down cushion, brought by the ever-practical Natoli who could not see any reason why the four of them needed to get numb behinds from the hard benches when there were plenty of cushions kicking around in the Palace storerooms. The others took their places at equal distances around the table—in Altra's case, on the table, licking his back fur—and waited expectantly for him to begin the spell.
Their initial few attempts had ended in nothing more exciting than warehouses and a few barracks, for the Imperials might have taken their embroidered arms from the tunics of their uniforms, but they still had their battle banners displayed prominently in their barracks and the Imperial mark burned into the sides of crates. One or two had even begun murals including the arms on the walls as well. The trouble with this spell was that once it was set on a target, you couldn't move the point-of-view more than a foot or two from the target without starting over, and he couldn't do that more than two or three times a day. The spell might take most of its energy from the Heartstone, but it still required his personal power to control it.
"You know—I've got an idea. You might try the arms in the form of a seal," Natoli said after some thought. "That might at least get you a place where we can see a clerk in the headquarters. Then you can shift your target to him and set the spell again; sooner or later he's bound to go to someone in authority."
An'desha made a gesture of helplessness. "That sounds like as good an idea as any; we certainly haven't made any other progress."
"We wouldn't say that," Karal objected, speaking for both himself and Altra. "You found Shonar and the Imperial Army—and you didn't catch on to something over in the Empire itself. That's not bad for not having a specific target."
An'desha smiled faintly, and flexed his hands to warm up the muscles before he placed them palm-down on the table in front of him. He stared at a point a little above the crystal ball in the center of the table. and reached for the weighty power seething below him, embodied in the Heartstone of Valdemar.
There was no way of describing just how it felt to him, to seize this incredible energy, a force both ordered and chaotic, and with a rudimentary consciousness of its own. Were other Heartstones like this one? If so, no wonder Falconsbane had wanted to learn the secrets of constructing them! Nodes were powerful, even deadly, but this Heartstone was a hundred times more powerful than any node he had ever encountered. Linking himself in with it was similar to walking the Moonpaths, in that he found himself "somewhere else"; this "somewhere," however, was a crystalline structure thrumming with ordered power. Once there, he was possessed of the strength to do just about anything he chose, if only his control could hold up.