Hell Hath No Fury (47 page)

He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

You're an officer in the Union Army, godsdamn it, he told himself despairingly. You can't just stand here, whatever Iftar said! If you don't take a stand for something, then what the fuck use are you?

There was a sickness spreading through the garrison of the captured Sharonian fort, radiating from the man who'd been placed in command, and Ulthar was afraid. Afraid of where it would end, who might find himself added to the list of Hadrign Thalmayr's "enemies." Someone had to do something, yet Ulthar was only one man, and a man Thalmayr obviously dustrusted as much as he loathed him.

You don't even have a platoon anymore, Therman, he thought, and it was true. He had exactly five men, the other Andaran Scout wounded POWs who'd been left behind here with him and Thalmayr, under his

"command." Thalmayr had been careful not to assign him to anything which might have required more men, and Ulthar knew exactly why that was.

He also knew all five of them would have followed him into any open confrontation with Thalmayr … for all the good it would have done.

I can't take them with me, he told himself yet again. I don't have that right. But, gods, I've got to do something!

At least the Healers Five Hundred Vaynair had left behind were refusing to go along with Thalmayr. No doubt the other prisoners didn't understand, but if Thalmayr had had his way, the Healers would have repaired the damages he inflicted on a daily basis … so that he could inflict fresh damages on a daily basis. But they'd refused. They couldn't stop him from torturing his prisoners, but they could refuse to become his accomplices by helping him do it.

Ulthar snarled in frustration. How pathetic was it when the best he could find to say was that the Healers wouldn't heal someone?

Something snapped down inside him at that thought. The iron self-control he'd forced himself to exert slipped, and he spun on his heel and started stalking across the parade ground towards the office block, unsnapping the retaining strap across his short sword as he went.

"Fifty Ulthar?"

The voice reached him even through the red haze of his fury, and he paused, looking over his shoulder.

He didn't really know the man who'd called out to him. He'd seen him around the fort, but he wasn't an Andaran Scout, and Ulthar had been too focused on what Thalmayr was up to to pay him much attention.

"Yes?" Ulthar's one-word response came out sounding strangled and strange, even to his own ears, and the other man grimaced.

"I think we need to talk, Fifty Ulthar," Commander of Fifty Jaralt Sarma said.

Commander of Two Thousand Mayrkos Harshu sat in his tent at the foot of the precipitous cliffs and pushed the last few bites of his supper around the bowl with a spoon. A glass of wine sat largely untasted at his elbow, and his expression was unusually grim.

The sentry outside the tent called out a challenge to someone, and Harshu raised his head, looking towards the entrance. A moment later, the sentry lifted the flap and looked in at him.

"Thousand Toralk is here, Sir. He says you're expecting him."

"I am, Sword. Send him in, please."

"Sir!"

The noncom snapped a salute and disappeared. A moment later, the flap rose again, and Klayrman Toralk came through it.

"You wanted to see me, Sir?"

"Yes, please. Have a seat."

Harshu gestured at the camp chair floating on the far side of the table, and Toralk settled himself onto it.

The thousand never looked away from Harshu as he sat, and Harshu smiled sourly.

"I've just received some … interesting dispatches, Klayrman."

"Sir?" Toralk's eyebrows rose as Harshu paused.

"One set is from Carthos," the two thousand said. "That's the good news, such as it is. He's detached Hundred Helika's strike. We should see Helika in about three more days. The only bad news from him is that I'd asked him how much transport he needed to move his prisoners to the rear. If I were the Sharonians and I had the capability, I'd try pushing down the secondary chain before I tried to fight my way down these cliffs. I don't think they do have the capability, but if it turns out they do, there's no way we can reinforce Carthos enough to hold against a serious attack. The best we can do is to keep the approaches picketed and make sure they don't manage to get past him and sneak up on us undetected from the rear. So I thought to myself we should send his POWs back to Five Hundred Klian so he could move quickly, without any encumbrances. Fortunately, we don't have to worry about that."

"What do you mean, Sir?" Toralk asked, his expression unhappy, when Harshu paused once more.

"I mean he doesn't have any prisoners. Not one. Apparently-" Harshu met Toralk's eyes levelly across the table "-every single Sharonian died fighting rather than surrender."

Klayrman's Toralk's belly muscles tightened. It wasn't really a surprise, of course. And a part of him couldn't help feeling a sudden surge of fury directed not at the distant Thousand Carthos but at Two Thousand Harshu. It was just a bit late for Harshu to be feeling upset with anyone over violations of the Kerellian Accords after he'd sown the seeds for everything Carthos had done by what he'd allowed Neshok to do!

Something of the thousand's emotions must have shown in his face, because Harshu's jaw tightened. But then the two thousand inhaled deeply and made himself nod.

"You're right, Klayrman. It is my fault. And if I'd listened to you in the beginning, it wouldn't have happened. But it has, and it's going to be a hell of a lot harder to stop it than it would have been simply too never let it start."

He shook his head, then leaned back in his chair with a smile that was even more sour than before.

"Of course, there's always that second set of dispatches to help distract me from the Carthos situation."

"Second set, Sir?" Toralk asked cautiously.

"Oh, yes. The set from Two Thousand mul Gurthak."

"From Two Thousand mul Gurthak?"

Surprise startled the repetition out of Toralk. Mul Gurthak had been oddly silent ever since the Expeditionary Force began its advance. In fact, as far as Toralk was aware, he hadn't sent Harshu a single message in all that time.

"Indeed," Harshu told him. "It would appear that Two Thousand mul Gurthak is most distressed over the way in which I have misinterpreted his desires and grossly exceeded his intentions."

Toralk's eyes went wide. He couldn't help it. He'd read most of the official instructions and memoranda mul Gurthak had sent forward to Mahritha before Harshu launched his attack.

"But, Sir, that's rid-" he began.

"Don't say it," Harshu interrupted. Toralk closed his mouth with a click, and Harshu grimaced. "Given a couple of things he said in his dispatches, Klayrman," he said very quietly, "I think he probably has his own eyes and ears out here, keeping him informed. It might not be very wise to … express your opinion overly freely in front of anyone besides myself, if you take my meaning."

It was Toralk's turn to sit back, and his jaw muscles tensed as the implications began to percolate through his brain.

"That's better," Harshu told him. The two thousand picked up his almost forgotten wineglass and sipped from it, then set it back down again.

"According to Two Thousand mul Gurthak, it was never his intention for us to advance beyond Hell's Gate. And, in fact, he always regarded the use of force to retake even Hell's Gate as an action of last resort."

"Sir," Toralk said, despite Harshu's warning, "I don't see how any reasonable individual could have interpreted his instructions to mean anything of the sort. Certainly not in light of the verbal briefings he gave both of us before he deployed us forward!"

"Klayrman," Harshu said chiding way, shaking a finger at him, "you're letting your opinions run away with you again."

Toralk clamped his mouth shut, and Harshu snorted harshly.

"The interesting thing is that if you read his written instructions without those verbal briefings of his, they can actually be interpreted exactly the way he's interpreting them at the moment. While I would never wish to imputes duplicity to a superior officer, I find that I can't quite shake the suspicion that the discrepancy between his current very clearly expressed views and what you and I understood his instructions to be isn't … accidental, shall we say?"

"Sir, I don't like what you seem to be saying."

"I'm not overjoyed with it myself. In fact, the thing that bothers me most right now is that I can't decide whether mul Gurthak is simply trying to cover his own ass now that the shit's hit the fan, or if he deliberately set us up-well, set me up, at least-from the start. Did he simply shape his written instructions this way so he'd be covered if something went wrong, or did he want us to do exactly what I went ahead and did, but clearly-for the record, at least-without his authorization?"

Toralk started to open his mouth again, but Harshu's raised finger stopped him. Not, the Air Force officer reflected a second later, that it was really necessary for him to say what he was thinking.

But why? Why would mul Gurthak want us to start a shooting war out here "without his authorization"?

He's still the senior officer in command, even if he did delegate the field command to Harshu.

Ultimately, surely the Commandery is going to hold him responsible for what happens in his command area. So why go to such elaborate lengths?

The thoughts flashed through his brain. He had no answers for any of the questions, but he was sinkingly certain that if he'd had those answers, he wouldn't have liked them.

"Of course," Harshu continued in a lighter tone which fooled neither of them, "Two Thousand mul Gurthak is not yet aware that we've managed to kill the heir to the Ternathian Crown, is he? That's going to be just a bit unexpected, I imagine. As is the way the Sharonians are going to respond to it."

He showed his teeth in a smile which contained no humor at all, and Toralk winced. Unlike Harshu, he'd actually met the senior Sharonian officers at Fort Salby. There wasn't much question in his mind about how the Ternathian Empire, at least, was going to respond.

He looked across the table at Mayrkos Harshu and wondered if he looked as sick as he felt.

Rof chan Skrithik stood stiffly to attention as the haunting bugle notes of Sunset, the call the Ternathian Empire's military had used to close the day for almost three thousand years, floated out under the smoldering embers of a spectacular sunset.

It was a beautiful bugle call, with a sweet, clear purity that no soldier ever forgot. And it was also, by a tradition so ancient no one even knew when it had begun, the call used at military funerals.

The last sweet notes flared out, and chan Skrithik inhaled deeply, gazing out across the neat rows of graves. At least a third of them were marked with the triangular memorial symbol of the Triad. Others showed the horsetails of Arpathia, or the many-spired star of Aruncas of the Sword.

And out there, in the midst of the men who had died to hold Fort Salby, was the young man who had died to save Fort Salby.

Chan Skrithik reached up, gently stroking the falcon on his right shoulder. For millennia, since the death of Emperor Halian, the House of Calirath's tradition had been that when one of its own died in battle, he was buried where he fell. Buried with the battle companions who had fallen at his side, and with his enemies. Chan Skrithik would have preferred to send Janaki home to his mother. To let him sleep where he had earned the right to sleep, beside Erthain the Great. But like Halian nimself, Janaki chan Calirath would rest where he had fallen, further away from Estafel and Tajvana than any other Calirath.

And where he slept would be Ternathian soil forever.

"It doesn't seem right, Sir."

Chan Skrithik turned. Chief-Armsman chan Braikal stood beside him, looking out across the same cemetery.

"What doesn't seem right, Chief?"

"It doesn't seem right that he's not here, Sir." Grief clouded the chief-armsman's voice. "None of us would be here without him, and-"

Chan Braikal broke off, and chan Skrithik reached out and touched him lightly on the shoulder.

"It was his choice, Chief. Remember that. He chose to die for the rest of us. Never let anyone forget that."

"No, Sir. I won't." Chan Braikal's wounded voice hardened. "And none of us will be forgetting how he died, either."

Chan Skrithik only nodded.

Division-Captain chan Geraith's entire First Brigade had marched past Janaki's body. Every surviving man of the fort's PAAF garrison had done the same, and Sunlord Markan had personally led his surviving Uromathian cavalry troopers past the bier in total silence, helmets removed, weapons reversed, while the mounted drummers kept slow, mournful time.

Janaki chan Calirath's death had done more than save Fort Salby. Rof chan Skrithik already understood that. Janaki had been added to the legend of the Caliraths, and the fighting men of Sharona would never forget that the attack which had killed him had been launched in time of peace by the very nation which had asked for the negotiations in the first place.

He wasn't the only victim of their treachery. In fact, chan Skrithik never doubted that Janaki would have been dismayed-even angry-if anyone had suggested anything of the sort. Yet it was inevitable that the young man who would one day have been Emperor of all Sharona should be the focal point for all the grief, all the rage-all the hate-Arcana had fanned into a roaring furnace.

"I stand between," chan Skrithik thought. Well, you did, Janaki. You stood between all of us and Arcana.

And you stood between me and the gryphon that killed you. It's a hard thing, knowing a legend died for you. But that's what Caliraths do, isn't it? They make legends. They become legends, and, gods, the price they pay for it!

Taleena made a soft sound on his shoulder, and he reached up and stroked her wings once again.

"I know, My Lady," he said gently. "I know. I miss him, too."

Taleena touched the back of his hand very gently with her razor-sharp beak, and chan Skrithik looked across at chan Braikal once more.