Storm Rising Read Online Free

why it made his skin flush with rage.
    The men would certainly understand it, though, when they finally deduced the truth for themselves and then worked through their natural impulse to assume that anything so
wrong
could not be
true.
And at that point—
    At that point they will cease to be soldiers of the Empire.No, that’s not true. They will be soldiers of the Empire, but they will cease to serve Charliss.
    He sat down in the nearest chair, all in a heap, as the magnitude of that realization struck him. Revolt—it had not happened more than a handful of times in the entire history of the Empire, and only
once
had the revolt been against an Emperor.
    Was
he
ready to contemplate revolt? Unless he did something drastically wrong, it was to him that the men would turn if they revolted against Charliss. Was he prepared to go along with that, to take command of them, not as a military leader, but as the leader of a revolt?
    Not yet. Not … yet.
He was close, very close, but not yet prepared to take such drastic action.
    He shook his head and ordered his thoughts.
I must keep my initial goals very clearly in mind. I must not let anything distract me from them until the men are secured to face this coming winter. That is my duty, and what the Emperor has or has not done has no bearing on it.
He set his chin stubbornly.
And to the deepest hells with anyone who happens to get in my way while I am seeing to that duty!
    He rose and went directly to his desk. The best way to ensure total cooperation among the men was to make things seem as normal as possible. So—to keep them from thinking too much about the silence from the Empire, he should keep up military discipline and structure the changes he planned to make to the military pattern.
    He wrote his officers’ orders quickly but carefully. He had already recruited a half-dozen literate subalterns to serve as scribes and secretaries since it was no longer possible to replicate written orders magically—and they would have to be able to read his handwriting in order to copy it. Now he was grateful for the “primitive” but effective and purely mechanical amenities of this manor. Nothing here had been affected by the storms. His lights still burned; his fires still heated. His cooked food arrived at the proper intervals from the kitchen. The jakes performed their function, and thesewage tunnels carried away the result without stinking up the manor. Somehow he was going to have to find men who could manage these same “primitive” solutions for an entire army.
    We need men who don’t need magic to get things done. Leather workers, blacksmiths—farmers, even—break all the work of running the camp down into what is and isn’t done by magic, then scour the ranks for those who know how to do those jobs with ordinary labor.
Now, how to see to it that these men were given the appropriate recognition so that they would volunteer their abilities …? Well, that was a simple problem to solve.
Promote them to “specialist” rank, with the increase in pay grade.
There was nothing like an increase in pay to guarantee enthusiastic cooperation.
    He put the cool, blunt end of his glass pen to his lips for a moment, and felt his lips taking on a wry twist.
Money. There isn’t much in the coffers at the moment. Well, that makes the plan that much more important.
Money was the other constant in the Imperial Army, and had been, from time immemorial.
Small wonder, given that our history claims we began as a band of mercenaries.
Regular pay was the foundation of loyalty when it came to the individual Imperial fighter. Troops had been known to rise up and murder commanders who shorted their pay; an Emperor had been dethroned for failing to pay the army on time and another had been put in his place because he had made up pay and even bonuses for the men directly under his command out of his own pocket.
    Of course, there had never been a situation like this one, with troops abandoned so far