The Road to Hell - eARC (35 page)

They names of the dead and news of their loss had, of course, out paced the arrival of their ashes. And while Sathmin’s routine visits to the bereaved were no less necessary, in some cases they were significantly less welcome when the shock of loss turned to anger. Worse, sometimes the family chose to blame the Andaran Army—especially in the absence of the official dispatches which might have explained
why
the young men they’d loved had died—since there were no Sharonians at hand. And through that tenuous contact, the fury made its mad connections to direct itself at Andara’s highest commanders including the Duke of Garth Showma and thus also his wife, Sathmin.

“I understand, Otwal,” she said. “Then you’re welcome to stay with us, and I shall ask Cook to do her very best to tempt you to stay for just as many meals as you can possibly manage.” She turned to Trooper Jugthar Sendahli. “And a very fine welcome to you also Trooper. I’m sorry I’m not acquainted with your family, but the same offer applies to you. We can speed you or your way or host you with us in whatever way makes you feel most comfortable.”

Trooper Sendahli executed a deep bow that caused Gadrial’s brow to furrow. Sathmin recognized it, too, as the greeting of a lowest
garthan
to a high caste
multhari
shakira
.

“Oh please my friend, none of that! I’m an Andaran woman. If you start treating me like a Mythlan I’m sure I’ll mess up all the ritual responses.” That wasn’t even remotely true, but it was the response she needed to make. Both the trooper and the magister relaxed immensely to hear it, and Jugthar Sendahli even gave her a tentative smile. Sathmin reached out and clasped his forearm, entirely giving herself away by using the
garthan
to
garthan
welcome between friends with a purely Andaran nod to complete the motion.

Gadrial’s laugh was music to Sathmin’s ears. She hadn’t totally failed the first introductions at least, and she ushered the party in for lunch after ascertaining that Trooper Sendahli didn’t mind staying to eat and that his family was, as she’d guessed, not housed anywhere near Portalis anyway. It would be here or the temporary barracks for him, and she had every intention that it would be here.

After the court took Sendahli’s testimony, he’d be assigned to a local garrison, and she also intended to ensure that any duties that might naturally be assigned to a visiting trooper were kept flexible enough to allow him a week or two off to visit his family on the far side of the continent.

If army commitments wouldn’t allow that, she’d try to arrange for some of Jugthar Sendahli’s family to visit Garth Showma as her guests. Those invitations were easy enough to arrange between Andarans, but her interactions with
garthan
ancestry Mythlans were hit and miss. A wrongly phrased invitation could be too easily confused with a Mythlan
shakira’s
order for a
garthan
peasant to become a house servant, and Sathmin had no desire to inspire fear. A family recently escaped from Mythal might have any number of psychological wounds she didn’t want to open.

Sathmin danced through the polite social forms carefully. It wasn’t easy—not when Jasak held his shoulders lower than she’d ever seen and had aged more in the last year than he should have from a strict counting of calendar days. And the unease in Shaylar and Jathmar’s faces cried out to her heart, however bravely they tried to hide it…and not just because they were her son’s
shardonai
. But that, at least, she could do something about, she hoped.

She personally showed the Sharonians to the green suite and offered other rooms to Threbuch and Sendahli. For Gadrial Kelbryan there was a lady’s retiring room and a suite as well, but she expressed a desire to stay at her own home on the Institute grounds. Sathmin had half-expected that and tried not to push as she insisted the offer would remain open.

“If you’d ever like to stop by or perhaps visit for a bit, a tea, a meal, you’re always welcome.”

“Thank you.” Gadrial said. “That was a formal summons from the Commandery wasn’t it?”

Sathmin nodded, grim.

“I’d hoped we could all have one night’s rest first,” Gadrial’s tone was harsh, “but I suppose the military’s waited long enough for us to get here.” She paused. “I saw the red uniform through the doorway when Jasak went in after the duke. Is it an inquiry or a court-martial?”

“Formal summons to a court of inquiry. But—” Sathmin couldn’t leave the magister with false hope “—there will be a court-martial too. Thankhar will have to call for it if no one else does.”

“Of course. An officer does the best he can in a horrible situation, and his supervisors have to dissect his every decision the instant he returns home.” Gadrial laughed with an edge of bitterness. “Welcome to Portalis.”

Sathmin grabbed the magister’s hand. “He has us. We’ll get him through. And his father will ensure he’s treated fairly. Portalis is an odd mix of Mythal, Ransar, and Andara, but there’s honor here. And the Union has to learn
why
it was horrible out there. You were there and I wasn’t, but it doesn’t sound like everyone else was trying to do their best.”

“No.” Gadrial agreed. “They certainly were
not
. And I’ll be testifying to that if I have to enchant the doors of court myself to gain an entry.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” Sathmin assured her as she walked the magister out.

Chapter Nineteen

January 9

Emm vos Sidus hated Portalis. He hated the crowds of people, the racket, the disgusting mélange of Gifted and non-Gifted, and the need to pretend he
didn’t
hate all that. Even the pristine magic source of the falls emitted a frost-coating mist instead of proper humidity.

The high-climbing city structures were filled with offices and manufactories, with not a palace in the lot. Portalis, on either side of the portal, hardly deserved the name of city. Even the Duke of Garth Showma’s own family had little apartments in the city. A
shakira
with that demesne would level the mess of trees, build a proper villa with orderly plantings and garden the grounds. Emm would add a few dragon breeding fields and set
garthan
to working fields and livestock across the larger duchy to support the elite in the city, but Thankhar Olderhan did nothing so useful.

Instead the duke had his sizable living quarters in a corner of the Garth Showma demesne quite a ways distant from Portalis, leased property to merchants and army clerks, and allowed the masses to harvest deadfall timber from his private woods. The Olderhans didn’t even stock the forests with predator game animals.

The Duchy of Garth Showma could be bearable in the summer months, when the wet of the falls cooled the skin instead of freezing to it. Not so in midwinter. Pretending to like Garth Showma’s Snowfall Night festivities was yet another thing Emm hated about Portalis.

As a member of the
shakira
sent to treat with the upper crust of Andara, he had to lodge in what passed for elegance in a hotel near Garth Showma Institute. The lobby’s wide windows proudly showed the falls choked by ice and snow with only a few of the base station chargers online to repower accumulators. Winter always affected the falls…yet another reason the flawed diamond of Andara could never compare to the brilliance of Mythal.

The Andarans grouped their hotel rooms in squads, small cramped rooms all of a size circled a common room. The clerks assumed a senior officer would share the same quarters and provisions as his men, and that any business traveller with his staff would likewise imitate Andaran military customs.

Andarans were idiots.

Emm vos Sidus took a full grouping. His staff were
garthantri
, drawn from the subclass who’d demonstrated personal loyalty to their betters for at least three generations. They were as magicless as all
garthans
but the very the best of their kind and they would adjust the place to better suit his needs while he took a leisurely lunch with an old friend. The common area would be his main chamber with most of the quartering spaces to become holding areas for his clothing, personal necessities, and bathing room. The lot of them would take turns sleeping in the remaining pair of rooms and use the bath down the hall.

They wouldn’t bother him with the details, so vos Sidus put it from his mind. He was
shakira
. His task was the work of magic and those small duties assigned to him by his seniors., and his job today was a lunch, so a lunch he would have.

The “old friend” in question was a contact and not actually a companion in any true sense, but Emm vos Sidus did what his superiors asked, even if that meant taking up a friendship with an only barely gifted Andaran. And Nosak Urrihan
had
risen to the highest ranks of the Andarans now. It was only appropriate, vos Sidus agreed, for a person with some magic ability to be placed over so many with absolutely none, but if the man had been Mythalan he would have been carefully ringed all round by a cohort of many-generations-loyal
garthantri
. And probably with an equally carefully selected tutor.
Someone
needed to turn Nosak Urrihan’s dabblings into something approximating competence, anyway.

The thought wasn’t entirely fair. Back in his youth, when his duties had been limited to riding dragons, Urrihan might even have been a capable officer, but now the man was retired from military service and held a political appointment in the Andaran Air Force: Undersecretary, Office of Dragon Warfare. Urrihan could be relied on to fly his favorite old dragon breeds every chance he had. For everything else—policy making, the organization of branches and forces—he wasn’t just uninformed, he was actively disinterested in ever becoming more knowledgeable or remotely capable. That made him an exceptionally useful idiot.

Emm vos Sidus made it a point to visit Urrihan at least once a quarter to maintain the fiction of their long-time friendship. Mostly they spoke of dragons. Emm’s family bred the seadrakes, which Urrihan disdained as not true dragons, but since Urrihan didn’t really consider transport dragons worthy of being called true dragons either, it was a friendly old argument.

And the shared luncheons and dinners weren’t
that
terrible, either, since Andarans made a point of serving their troops good hearty meals whenever possible. Urrihan always made that observation, and Emm vos Sidus always agreed. And he actually meant it. Some truly excellent cuisine was available at this heart of Andaran power. They didn’t serve the exquisite delicacies of Mythal, but there was something to be said for being able to dispense with a taster and enjoy the pantomime play that came with a trip outside his family estates.

In Garth Showma, vos Sidus pretended all people were equal and that he didn’t even notice the poor quality of the spellware hanging about or that those who would have been trained up as
garthan
in a proper household were to be found here and there begging on street corners. In Portalis, some of the magicless pretended to be artists and played off-key music for coins in a hat and Urrihan seemed to enjoy hearing military marches butchered by street players, so vos Sidus even tossed the savages coins himself now and then.

Mostly he made charitable little gestures in Urrihan’s company, but just in case someone in the Andaran’s extended family ever smartened up enough to run some kind of inquiry, he did it while on his own as well. His duties outside the home estate were clear: make contacts, keep them at a distance, and plant servants in their households.

The girl he’d placed overtly with Urrihan was doing well. No complaints at all. In fact Urrihan was effusive in his praise and a little concerned that her period of study might end too soon, calling her back to Mythalan Falls Academy and leaving a hole in his staffing.

There was no notice at all of the others placed in the man’s employ or the handful vos Sidus recruited among the
garthan
Mythlan immigrants living in the town. Those were utterly unreliable, since they’d abandoned their original lords and selfishly destroyed the trust their families had spent generations building, but a few words here and there via his own staff would always get them to feed him what he wanted to know.

Combine enough independent semi-reliable sources and a reasonably accurate piece of general intelligence could emerge. Currently he was interested in the mood of the city, and it was leaning strongly against the war.

The common people were horrified by the reports they were hearing. But they were still Andarans at heart, so they supported the soldiers: their brothers, sons, and grandsons in the forward universes. That meant the discontent had to go somewhere else, and it was beginning to focus on the Andaran Army’s senior officers. That was too soon for the plan, but there’d always been a certain flexibility to the schedule, and no one could have anticipated the boon of the encounter with the Sharonian barbarians. Indeed, it seemed likely a good dose of fury towards the Sharonans would help spice everything up…and the Duke of Garth Showma’s own son had brought back two Sharonan prisoners under the odd Andaran honor code.

Emm vos Sidus considered.
Yes. Yes. That should do nicely…and I won’t even actually have to do a single thing!

That was good. It would require no extension of his assets or risk exposing anything. The natural fury of an untrained mob of
garthan
was about to hit the lords of Garth Showma.

The High Lords would be very pleased. Vos Sidus would make the suggestion in his report and then ensure he was nowhere near Portalis in the next few months, when all this came to a head. He’d seen a rough report of the events at the front—as an Andaran handler he was entitled to that information—and the news that currently riled the Andaran people wasn’t going to get any better. Oh no, not by a long shot.

Emm vos Sidus boarded the transport dragon for home content with the multiverse…and pleased with the hell about to rain down on his Line Lord’s enemies.

* * *

The salt and foam of the Strait of Tears lifted her easily while the porpoises played about her. Whale song ran out at a distance, and Cetacean Ambassador Shalassar Brintal-Kolmayr floated with an ease that belied her inner turmoil.

Her ocean guardians didn’t notice the distress. A pod of porpoises crested and dove with the waves around her. The peaceable, friendly creatures were clearly taking turns swimming beside her in case she grew tired and needed a tow back to shore. They were mostly younger ones who hadn’t yet decided who they were with enough conviction to select adult names, and Shalassar floated with the waves, reaching out and listening to the many others speaking and singing in the oceans today.

The cetaceans were discussing things she thought had been decided absolutely a long time ago. The topic at hand was whether or not to consider Arcanans sentient. It was clear that all of the speakers knew beyond any doubt that Arcanans could think, but a more fundamental question was at stake.

The orca wanted it formally agreed that the Arcanans could be eaten freely. Most of the dolphins agreed quite readily with the idea of the Arcanans being eaten, but given their digestive preferences did not intend to actually bite the bad human flesh themselves. Most of the various whale types were somewhat less accepting of the idea.

The discussion hinged on the interpretation of how a finned creature would know if a particular stranded human flailing about at sea was of the Sharonan pod or of the Arcanan pod.

Shalassar listened with growing horror as some of the orca, who had multiple representatives instead of just a single primary, provided detailed descriptions of the taste, crunchiness, and texture of human meat that could be compared with any samples of Arcanan meat if it were ever tasted. Teeth Cleaver, newly elevated to hunter-scout within the pod for his week in the aquarium car, swam a careful distance from these toughest of orca.

One of the porpoises nudged Shalassar gently and informed her that humans hadn’t been intentionally killed or eaten even by the orca in a very long time. Shalassar reminded herself of the cetaceans’ long memories and oral tradition of passing down all knowledge without screening out distasteful bits of history in the way human cultures tended to do. The cetaceans had no paper records to hold the details of things that had happened but which the current generation preferred not to think on too much. For a cetacean everything was either remembered in living minds and passed on via song to the young ones or else it was entirely forgotten.

The cetacean Remember Talent made it possible for those mammalian histories to keep their vivid accuracy over centuries. They had none of the telepathic component of a human Voice Talent, but the ocean’s transmission of sound carried their songs through the deeps just as well as Voice transmission might and no psionic Talent was needed to hear the Rememberer’s song.

And so Shalassar heard in detail about the taste of humans and how the orca used to hunt fishing vessels and overturn them to get at the meat of the large floating clams. The details about breaking the boats and only taking the ones that had drifted out of sight of the others suggested a full understanding that the creatures they’d been eating were thinking beings who could retaliate if allowed to know just what had been hunting them. The orcas weren’t the ocean’s finest hunters by accident. The ease with which they’d once hunted man without humanity managing to notice gave her a chill.

It was also highly informative, however, and Shalassar couldn’t help filing the information away as an explanation for why the orca in particular had never taken offense at the human history—ancient records from before the emergence of Talents—when humans had blithely slaughtered intelligent cetaceans. And the larger whales whose ancestors had been the primary targets of those genocides had also not complained so very much either. The singing thunder-fluke reached an interlude about using a strong tail to destroy boats too tough in construction for an orca pod to take apart, and it occurred to her—not for the first time—how lucky humans were to have developed Talents and to have chosen to stop preying on the cetaceans. There’d been a war, and the humans hadn’t even known they were losing it.

The old history made the water feel colder than the sun’s warmth should have made it. Enough so that for a long moment she even felt uncomfortable floating in the deep waters with these cetaceans she’d been talking with and listening to for years.

The deeper side of this discussion was the absolute certainty the cetaceans had that they would be involved in the portal wars. These weren’t idle plans. The cetaceans fully expected to meet Arcanans one day, to fight alongside Sharonan warships and feast on the flesh of their enemies. The dolphins and porpoises planned to pull away the Sharonans and leave the Arcanans for the orca. The great whales wanted the details of Arcanan ship design so they could break open the hulls more efficiently. They even suggested the Sharonans might build mock-ups for them to practice with. The cetaceans were preparing for war.

Shalassar hoped by the Double Triad that war would never come so far as the Sharonan home universe. The cetaceans hummed their throaty agreement…and sang of portals, great tanks, and traveling out universe.

* * *

Emm vos Sidus had always loved the sea. High waves crashed against the good Mythlan rock as the two natural powers of stone and sea warred against each other, and the native magic soothed his very blood. At home everything felt right. The sea salt flavored each breath, and in the distance his youngest sister could be heard squealing with glee over the frolicking of the newborn hydra seadrakes. It was good to be back on the family estate.