Storm Rising Read Online Free PDF

work, bent over their desks, in a state of meditative concentration for hours at a time. This did not, however, keep him from making mistakes.
    An Imperial document would be flawless. There would be
no
mistakes, no blots, no misspelled words. He could not permit the tiniest discrepancy between this document and the genuine ones that would have been presented ever since the depot opened.
    He made and destroyed half a dozen copies before he had a perfect one. As he waited for the ink to dry, he threw the rest, and his faint original of the wording, into the fire. He watched them burn, making sure that they were all reduced to ashes before turning back to the next and most difficult part of his forgeries.
    Ordinary red sealing wax would become something extraordinary before he was through with it.
    He lit the tip of the brittle, gold-dust impregnated wax at his candle and dripped it carefully onto the vellum, at the very base of the document. While it was still hot and viscous, he pressed the Seal into it, and mentally twisted the energies about the Seal and the wax together, activating it. The metal of the Seal grew warm in his hand, and the wax beneath it glowed, first white, then yellow, then the red of iron in a fire.
    Carefully, he raised the Seal from the vellum as the glow faded.
    Impressed into the wax was something that deceived the eyes, but not the touch. His fingers told him that the wax impression was a sketchy bas-relief, but his
eyes
told him quite a different story.
    What he
saw
was the Wolf Crown, rising out of the wax of the seal as if made from that wax, scintillating with gold dust and a hint of rainbow. Was it an illusion? Not exactly. Nor was it exactly reality. It lay somewhere in between the two.
    He laid the Seal back in the drawer and sat where he was, catching himself with both hands on the desk as he went momentarily giddy with exhaustion.
    He had not expected that, and it took him completely by surprise. Was it the effect of the mage-storms, or only that he was much older, and under much more strain, than he had been the last time he’d used the Seal? There was no way to tell.
    And it didn’t matter. If he was lucky, he would never have to use it again.
    If I am wise, I will never use it again!
    Nevertheless, luck and wisdom had very little to do with the traps Fate might hold for him. He put the Seal back into its hiding place, and put his forgery in with several other, perfectly genuine “contingency” documents that the Emperor had supplied him with when he traveled out here. No one knew exactly what documents he had, nor how many of them there were. When he took this one out of the stack, there would be no way that anyone could say that this one had not been among them originally.
    He rested a while after that; no point in unlockingthe door directly; someone might sense that magic had been at work here, and he wanted to wait for those energies to fade. Besides, it gave him a badly-needed chance to rest.
    Only when the last of those energies had dissipated past
his
ability to detect them did he rise, unlock the door, and tell his bodyguards to summon his escort.
    While there was still daylight left, it was time to make one of his periodic rounds of inspection, and survey his small and desperate kingdom.
    Tremane never walked out of his personal stronghold without an escort of half a dozen strong, superbly-trained bodyguards. Of course, at least one of these men was in the pay of the Emperor. He didn’t let it bother him, but rather set himself to winning, if not their complete loyalty, then at least a moment’s hesitation when the time came for them to raise the assassination knives.
That
was his best defense against Imperial agents among those he was required to trust.
    As he had told his generals, the preliminary defensive wall, a wood-and-daub palisade, had just been completed a few days ago. This palisade contained not only the Imperial camp, but the entire town within its protection. The