The Road to Hell - eARC (36 page)

The
garthan
manufactories and boarding houses hugged the earth out of sight of their betters. A
garthantri
carrying a filleted pigfish destined for dinner paused for an obeisance before continuing on his run from the butchery to the roasting house. Vos Sidus favored the servant with a nod and the man immediately deepened his bow at the honor of being so noticed. Had he not been carrying food meant for a
shakira
’s table, the
garthantri
would have fully abased himself from the first, but one made allowances to ensure an unpoisoned meal.

The
Book of Secrets
taught that remnants of old curses seethed invisible in the very soil, so the pure ate only of clean food prepared by the hands of the washed. The
Book
told of many other things besides, but that one was permitted to be known by
garthan
and was spoken of so widely that even children in Andara and Ransar practiced the ablutions of health before preparing and consuming their meals.

The
garthantri
held the pigfish high so not even the tail touched the ground as he stopped again for another obeisance at the drake nursery pool. This time the man bowed only once, vos Sidus noted with pleasure. His youngest sister had outgrown her habit of speaking with every
garthantri
she saw, an unfortunate legacy of a brief fosterage with an Andaran family now corrected.

The raising of a
shakira
was a complex art with far more challenges than arose in educating
garthan
children. Vos Sidus was proud to have had a youth of his immediate family selected by the Line Lord as precocious enough to build lines of false obligation with outsiders before even her Mythal Falls novitiate induction. Already little Bre received letters from Andaran girls signed “sister.”

Vos Sidus himself had passed through novice, journeyman and magister training at Mythal Falls Academy with fine marks several years past and then been assigned his lifework by the Line Lord. But as a trained Mythlan magister of good family, it was only natural he would also take up a hobby.

He had. His passion was for the biggest and strongest drakes, known for their stunning ocean gladiatorial contests. It was quite incidental that Andarans mistook that hobby for his true work.

Seasprite, his current favorite, lifted a long gray-green head and nuzzled at his cheekbones with the exquisite delicacy required of a creature nearly ten times human size. Her other two heads remained submerged in the pool snapping and gulping the farmed fishes his family’s
garthan
servants raised for her feed. These animals had less financial use than their more lucrative flying cousins, but the Sidus family had always enjoyed expanding the scope of the possible with their breeding programs. The hobbies had been mistaken for a family business for quite some time now.

They’d proved with one of Seasprite’s great grand dames that all three heads could be made fully functional. Certain Ransaran magisters had argued it could never be done. And they were undoubtedly right about their own abilities, but no Mythlan
shakira
had so little faith in the power of magic.

The practical issues of a three-headed beast
had
presented some formidable challenges, however.

For example, when the originally vestigial secondary heads became equally capable of controlling the body after the prime head was loped off it did create certain control issues. Then there was also the difficulty of controlling the bleeding. But any drake put into the arena these days wore specialized spellware tourniquet collars, so very few of the powerful beasts were lost to head amputation injuries, and crystals embedded in the center of each of the three foreheads controlled which mind dominated. Training varied by beast of course, but Sidus drakes usually had two fighting styles and a third mind trained for docile transport and feeding.

Passivity wasn’t usually a desired setting among any of the families that chose to buy seadrake young, but vos Sidus enjoyed having the beasts entirely calm and nearly puppy like for transport. The best money to be had was for the pit fighters, to be sure, and for those, all three heads needed to be as vicious as possible. Other drakes, with shepherd training and control spellware, were used to corral the pure fighters and move them from training pits into arena-bound slidercages.

A clear sky with brilliant sunlight pouring over the ocean surf marked this morning as a very good one for the day’s fight, and float-bespelled spectator palanquins were just beginning to jostle for position around the distant island.

The Sidus VI breed was being tested against a new Vacus line. They’d captured and bred a kind of shark creature that breathed through gills instead of lungs. Vos Sidus thought it might have some small use as a guard fish around prisons and the like, but the gladiatorial sales would be miserable. The beasties were smaller and tended to clutter the view of carnage with blood and entrails. If it were only the entrails, many
shakira
would enjoy watching, but put too much blood in the water and even the clearest pools suddenly showed nothing but boring red.

Breeding a special kind of prey fish that didn’t cloud up the waters had been tried, but the interesting fights were always the ones that involved humans in some way. Vos Sidus’s aunt had tried bringing in the great whales for fights, but those fights were too dull. Some pleasure boats still went whale hunting—which was to say they followed behind a pair or a small nest of seadrakes and watched as they found and devoured the larger cetaceans—and vos Sidus had been on a few of those pleasure cruises as a child. Aunt Kellbok had pointed out the
garthan
ship captains’ maneuvers to set the drakes against only the very largest and toughest of the whales, but he’d agreed with his aunt: cetacean prey wasn’t tough enough for a drake. Whales lacked sufficient intelligence and cunning for a decent fight.

Sometimes, when Aunt Kellbok had used just one drake and set up an ocean arena around a full pod of masked whales—the ones with the black and white coloring that hid so well in the water—she’d entice cetacean combatants to perform a show worthy of a
shakira
audience. But even then, she’d had to send in a drake youngling bloodied from an earlier fight. When it got dull—because it
would
get dull—she’d signal the show master to release the mother drake to empty the seas as a grand finale.

The best argument vos Sidus had seen for cetaceans having some modicum of intelligence—more than, say, that of a barnyard cat—was that the larger whales all avoided the Mythlan coasts. That the masked whales still came said something else, but Aunt Kellbok insisted insanity had entertainment value.

Universes beyond Arcana Prime allowed for more varied open ocean shows. In New Mythal, there were still oceans where native creatures didn’t know to swim for their lives the moment they tasted drake blood in the water or heard the bellows of a hunting drake reverberate across the ocean bottom.

Of course Union law forbade the release of drakes into the wild, but a breeder couldn’t truly know his training held until it was tested. The Seadrake Owners’ Association understood that, so from time to time vos Sidus could fill his slidercages and transport a nest of seadrakes to a preserve on New Mythal owned by a cousin of Aunt Kellbok’s.

Sometimes training failed. In those cases, he’d make a discreet report to the Seadrake Owners’ Association and send in a troop of
garthan
for cleanup. If the team was too slow, a few ships would be crushed or a crew might be eaten, but the accidental fodder were generally
garthan
of low value, with few years of service left, and the SDO paid well for the use of the land. Every
shakira
with property near by knew when tests were scheduled to be run and would remove their persons and
garthantri
well in advance. But there was no point trying tell that to an Andaran or a Ransaran! They didn’t understand that acquiring true wisdom required a certain amount of…breakage along the way.

Every monument worth building killed a few
garthan
in its construction. That might be unfortunate for the
garthan
involved, but better a dozen
garthan
lost than a single
shakira
maimed, and even the Ransarans understood the value of experience. “A burned hand is the best teacher.” That was one of their own proverbs, although they turned their noses up at the Mythlan equivalent, of course. “Blood buys true value,” as the great vos Hardyna had observed thousands of years ago, and it was true. It was
always
true, and if the barbarians thought it applied solely to
garthan
, that only showed how stupid they truly were. Vos Sidus had memorized every proverb in the
Book of the Shakira
at Aunt Kellbok’s knee before his tenth birthday—most non-Mythlans were still playing at learning their sums at that age—and he knew that proverb applied to
all
Mythlans. Even the blood of a thousand
shakira
was nothing to the honor due a Line Lord.

Non-Mythlans didn’t understand context. The SOA used only drake males for arena events outside Arcana Prime for that precise reason. An escaped drake gone feral in Delkor had devastated a fishing community for several decades before a passing magister put the beast down as a favor to a
shakira
cousin. But when a breeding pair had escaped on New Mythal, it had taken a full company of magisters over a month to hunt down the creatures and all their offspring. If it happened again, the Union of Arcana would expect exactly that second level of effort, even if it were just to clean out the oceans of a wilderness world hardly worth preserving. These annoyances were the cost of working with the uninitiated, but one day every Arcanan would bow to a Line Lord and hold the teachings of the
Book of Secrets
more valuable than their own hearts.

That would be a lifework worthy of Line Lords. Emm vos Sidus had his own small part to play in the great glory of Mythal, and in the between times he had the drakes. All too often, he found himself wishing he could uncage a nest of seadrakes in the Garth Showma Falls Basin and remake the Union in a bloody baptism, but that, sadly, was not his assignment.

The sand-in-silk frustration that annoyed him the most was that the Andarans had never recognized the military power inherent in the proper use of seadrakes. He blamed their focus on land. Sure people lived on land, but any fool could see over a third of the Arcanan-discovered frontier universe transits required ocean passage to reach the next portal—not to mention that two of the five newly taken portals were on those universe’s equivalents to the North Mythal River and the Evanos Ocean. Now that war with these Sharonian barbarians was afoot, perhaps it was time to finally put together a multiverse nautical power with more teeth than the Union of Arcana Navy. Let the Andaran Army struggle with the arcane logistics of a cross portal war with “gun”-carrying Sharonians. The Mythlan Navy could save them all with a simple seadrake barricade.

And slipping drake mating pairs into hostile universes’ oceans could do wonderful things for the destruction of their economies, vos Sidus reflected dreamily while he petted Seasprite’s long neck.

The great benefit of the seadrake’s amphibious nature was that these beautiful creatures didn’t just hunt the oceans. They claimed the beaches and seaside cities as well…and if Sharonians were anything like Arcanans, more than eighty percent of their population lived on ocean coasts and riverways.

Any trained Arcanan with the right spells could control a drake, but Sharonians didn’t use magic. Every single one was
garthan,
and their ignorance made them nothing more than walking meat for the seadrakes’ triple rows of teeth.

Vos Sidus scratched the underside of Seasprite’s vestigial wing and she lifted all three heads to hiss in pleasure. Then the dexter side head suddenly snapped to the right, the whole drake launched across the pool, and the delicate plantings screening the handler station broke instantly.

Vos Sidus shook his head in resignation and waited for the gurgling scream to stop before he keyed the spell to force the docile head to resume control. The new servant hadn’t worked out. Seasprite went through handlers faster than his other drakes, but then she also cost less to feed. Unless one started counting the cost of a
garthan
against her food bill, which he was beginning to seriously consider. These weren’t his valued servants, of course. He used only pit drake handlers on Seasprite. That kind of
garthan
one bought by the dozen from the prison system, with special care taken to ensure no past members of one’s own estate were included in the lot.

He held Seasprite bespelled with no backup handler for three full minutes, patting her noses, and using her scrub brush to get the worst of the carnage off her faces. Then he stepped back through the bars of her enclosure and retreated across the white sand circle that marked the far edge of her bite reach. Just beyond the line, he released her. The timbre of her hiss changed, but not one of the three heads made a lunge for him. Seasprite knew her range.

A pair of
garthantri
with long tongs worked from the opposite side to withdraw the remains of the body. Seasprite watched their progress coldly with her sinister head while the other two quite reasonably remained fixed on the magister who’d most recently held control of her minds.

When the
garthantri
finished retrieving the corpse, one made the sign of Mithanan and spat on the body. Emm couldn’t hear what the other said, but neither showed any care when they dumped the parts into a wheelbarrow and trundled it off to a convict’s pit. Funeral pyres were reserved for honorable servants.

He shrugged mentally, dismissed the
garthantri
from his attention, and turned back to his original train of thought.

Anyone could operate the pre-charged spells to control a seadrake, he reflected, although few demonstrated the persistent, careful attention required to become a veteran handler. Yet if the Sharonians lacked not only magisters but also even the most rudimentary understanding of the principles of magic, nests of drakes could be sent in entirely handlerless. The Mythlan Navy could never do that in a war against a civilized nation, because the opponent’s magisters or even ground troops armed with spellware would simply take control of the drakes. But Sharonians might not even realize it was
possible
. This kind of opportunity had never existed before.