The Road to Hell - eARC (41 page)

It went on and on, article after article, lie after lie, distortion after distortion. Shaylar finally lifted wet and streaming eyes to meet Gadrial’s stricken gaze.

“But it’s not true!”

“I know,” Gadrial bit out. “That’s why Jasak and his father are so furious. They don’t even know where the
Times Herald
got its information. There are more facts in those articles—distorted, twisted, and perverted, but still with a kernel of fact—than anyone in the Union
government
’s officially heard even now! The
Times Herald
’s always been one of the journals which feels out-universe exploration should be managed by civilian agencies rather than the military. If the Duke—or anyone else in the current Government—tries to lean on them for their sources, they’ll clam up and refuse to say a word. And if the Duke insists they reveal those sources, they’ll positively
welcome
the chance to be sent to jail until they give up the names. Which they won’t do, of course. The Union’s freedom of the press laws would protect them in the end, and they’d gain a huge amount of prestige for their ‘principled stand.’

“The fact that someone obviously fed the
Times Herald
all this distortion is bad enough, but even if Jasak and the Duke manage to get the
truth
out, it may not help. Worse, without some official news from mul Gurthak or
someone
out-universe from Mahritha, they can’t even tell anyone what the truth
is
because they don’t know what’s happening themselves. Not really. And other journals and news outlets have already pounced on the
Time Herald
’s reportage. It’s spreading like wildfire, all over New Arcana—and probably Arcana Prime and all the rest of the multiverse by now, as well! So in a lot of ways, it doesn’t even
matter
what the truth is. The damage is done, and the Duke doesn’t think it can be undone.”

She paused, her expression miserable, while the stunned Sharonians stared at her. Then she squared her shoulder and bit her lip.

“And I’m afraid there’s more, as well,” she told them in an utterly miserable tone. “Please get dressed, both of you. There’s something else you have to see.”

“
What?
” Jathmar bit out.

“It’s—” Gadrial sighed and shook her head. “The Duchess saw this coming, I’m afraid. Saw the potential for it. That’s why she put you here, in rooms whose windows overlook the garden, rather than the street.”

Those words sent a shudder of fright through Shaylar. What was out there, in the street they couldn’t see? She looked at Jathmar for a moment, and then the two of them returned to their bedroom and dressed in silence.

Gadrial led them through the house, until Jasak and his father met them in a corridor near the front of the vast townhouse. The duke spoke briskly.

“I don’t want you to be too alarmed, when you look out there. The security system is on and armed. Nobody can actually reach the house, not physically and not with a malicious spell. You’re under my protection,” he added, “and I’m serious about that duty.”

He looked back and forth between them for several seconds, his expression hard and determined. Then he motioned courteously for them to follow him, and Shaylar groped for Jathmar’s hand as he led them into a large and beautifully appointed drawing room or parlor. The duchess was already there, standing beside a tall, curved window that overlooked the street at the front of the house. They were a full story above that street, looking down into it, and a mutter of sound reached them, rising and falling like a distant sea. It was too indistinct for Shaylar to determine what it was, but it set her teeth on edge. The sense of danger—and her throbbing headache—worsened drastically, and the duchess turned toward them, her expression grave. She held out one hand.

“Come, stand beside me,” she said gently.

Shaylar and her husband crossed the room. The closer they came to the windows, the louder that sound grew, until they reached it and Shaylar blanched. The street was jammed with people. Thousands of people.
Angry
people. Waving signs and shouting. The low roar was the sound of fury and hatred. She could read some of the signs, while others had been written in languages other than Andaran. The ones she could read chilled her to the bone.

These people wanted to kill her.

“They can’t see us,” the duchess murmured when Shaylar flinched back from the tall window. “We’ve set the defensive spells to block the view of the windows.
All
the windows. The people out there see the windows as they ordinarily look. They can’t see us standing here.”

“Why did that newspaper tell such horrible lies?” Shaylar demanded. Why does someone want
them
,” she pointed at the screaming mob, “to kill us? We’re
helpless
!”

“They’re being manipulated.” Jasak Olderhan’s jaw muscles were bunched and fury crackled in his eyes. “The
Herald Times
is bad enough on its own—I don’t doubt for one minute they’d love to embarrass the Government and Father any way they could—but they wouldn’t go
this
far from the truth unless someone had fed them carefully doctored information. Unfortunately, we don’t know who’s doing it…but we intend to find out.”

“But
why
? From everything you’ve said we would have frightened them, anyway! Why paint us as such monsters?”

“I don’t know,” the duke answered in a voice ribbed with iron, “but as Jasak says, I damned well mean to find out! I started digging into this the moment I saw that journal. It arrived shortly after dinner, which means that collection of crap hit the streets three hours ago. And
that
,” he nodded toward the mob outside in the street, bathed in the double glow of arcane streetlamps and moonlight, “is too big and too organized to be entirely spontaneous. Someone organized the kernel of it; then started spreading the word. Three hours later, we end up with a riot on my doorstep.

“My people have dug out a few facts, already. This so-called story was leaked by someone in the civil government, not the Commandery. Someone very highly placed wants the story told this way, and I suspect whoever that someone is, he’s been sitting on dispatches from the front that have
not
been shared—officially, at least—with anyone in the Army or with the Cabinet. I intend to find out who that person is, but I already know—or suspect—his reasons.”

“For lying?” Jathmar demanded. “For deliberately misleading the public? Inciting them to murderous demonstrations? When my wife rang for a servant to ask for something for her headache, the damned maid who answered was on a hair-trigger edge of killing her!”

The duchess blanched, and the duke scowled even more furiously than before.

“That will be dealt with at once,” he said in a growl that Shaylar trusted implicitly. Then he sighed. “As for the rest…As Jasak says, the
Herald Times
is anti-Government and anti-Army at the best of times. This was exactly the sort of raw meat anyone could predict its editorial staff would pounce on. And once their version of the ‘truth’ hit the street, every other news outlet picked up on it. Some started reporting it and—of course—speculating wildly in the process, but even the more restrained papers had to at least acknowledge it. Partly, it’s just the news industry’s tendency to exaggerate things, to whip up interest amongst their readers and capture new readers. The more details they can offer—even when they don’t
have
details—the more likely people are to buy
their
newspaper, not their competitor’s.”

“You said the story came from someone in government,” Jathmar bit out.

“Yes. It did. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it came from someone engaged in
politics
at the highest level. Someone with contacts and allies—tools—in the government, whether or not he’s actually in government service himself. And that, I’m afraid, leads to several possible scenarios. What better way to unite public opinion than to paint the other side as entirely evil? And the fact that Halathyn vos Dulainah was killed offered a perfect mechanism for implementing that strategy. He
is
dead, after all; none of us can dispute that. If whoever this is can convince the public he was murdered out of hand, it’ll be like applying a flame spell to a haystack!
My
question is one of motive. Was this done purely to unite factions that will be jockeying for control? Or for some more sinister reason?”

“What sort of reason could justify
this
?” Jathmar demanded. The duke’s jaw tightened, but when he responded, his reply seemed curiously oblique…at first.

“Andara’s controlled the Union of Arcana’s military for two centuries,” he said. “That’s not because we’ve snatched the reins of power, either. Primarily it’s because nobody else wanted the job.” He shrugged. “We Andarans enjoy the military lifestyle. Neither the Mythlans nor the Ransarans do. In fact, most of them despise and disdain it. Some
individuals
from Mythal and Ransar enlist, whether from patriotic commitment or—more commonly—as a way to better their stations in life. But nobody else has wanted control of the military.

“The fact that you exist, however, and that we’ve met violently, has changed everything, rather abruptly. Quite suddenly, Mythal and Ransar must face the reality that their survival lies in someone else’s hands. Andaran hands. I know Mythlans and Ransarans,” he glanced apologetically at Gadrial, “well enough to know certain factions of those societies will suddenly discover, despite lifetimes of disdain for the military, that
they
want control over the means of defense. Some of that’s inevitable—when someone feels threatened, of course he wants to be sure he and the ones he cares for are protected the way
he
wants them protected, and Shartahk take anyone who gets in his way.

“But I suspect what’s really driving this—what the manipulators want—goes far beyond that natural reaction. Some people have never been comfortable with the extent of Andaran influence on the military, not because
they
wanted to control it, but because the military’s been a huge factor in stabilizing the Union from the very beginning. Some of them want to rock that stability because the collapse of existing power relationships may let them build new ones more…beneficial to their own interests. Others see the military as the primary support for Andara’s influence within the Union—its power base—and want to break that power base in order to improve their own. And now those manipulators finally see a chance to accomplish their goals.

“There’s just one problem. How does someone take charge of a military whose control is so entrenched in Andaran hands? The easiest—and the one I fear most—is by discrediting Andara. By making Andaran officers appear incompetent. By vilifying the enemy in the worst possible terms, exaggerating the threat, and then howling that the Andarans can’t protect Arcana from that kind of threat. Not when they bungled the first contact so badly that they allowed themselves to be wiped out virtually to the last soldier and couldn’t even protect an inter-universal hero like Magister Halathyn!”

“But that isn’t what happened,” Jathmar protested. “Your son lost only a
third
of his men and that included the wounded, not just the dead. The rest of his men weren’t taken prisoner until the second confrontation. And they certainly didn’t mention that we were civilians—that
we
were the ones brutally slaughtered! They didn’t mention the little detail that your own soldiers killed Magister Halathyn or that Jasak’s replacement tried to kill an unarmed man asking for civilian survivors, either. What kind of government do you have, that would lie so hideously to its own people?”

“This
isn’t
the Government,” the duke said firmly. “As Governor of New Arcana, I’m a member of Speaker Skyntaru’s Cabinet, and I will guarantee you that neither he nor any other member of the Cabinet’s received any of that news about what happened to Skirvon and Dastiri—not through any
official
channel, anyway.
Some
information, like how Magister Halathyn actually died, we’ve known about ever since Jasak’s initial report arrived, and I’ve argued in favor of releasing it in full from the beginning. I can’t argue too strenuously, though, because someone will claim I’m only trying to hand out sketchy, incomplete information in the best possible light to protect Jasak from the consequences of this disaster. So the decision was made to withhold some of the more potentially inflammatory information until we knew more.

“And now we have this.” He jerked his head at the mob beyond the windows, his expression one of disgust. “I’m not saying that someone in the Government—inside the Cabinet—isn’t involved in what’s happening, Jathmar. I’m only saying that it sure as Shartahk isn’t anyone who’s a
loyal
member of that Cabinet. This is directly opposed to the Speaker’s policy! I’ve known Misarthi Skyntaru for thirty years, and believe me, the
last
thing he wants is for this situation to get any worse. He and I have argued for years over how big a chunk of the Union budget the military ‘sucks up,’ as he likes to put it, but he knows how thin we’re really stretched. Even if he didn’t hate the very thought of how many people are likely to get killed, he knows how costly it’s likely to be and how ill-prepared we are for it. He’s been trying to keep a handle on emotions—that’s the real reason he decided to sit one the news of Magister Halathyn’s death—until he could find out what in Mithanan’s name is going
on
out there!”

The fire in Thankhar Olderhan’s eyes could have reduced the entire city of Portalis to ash…without magic.

“Who’s behind this—and why—
will
come out,” he said coldly. “We’ll make damned certain of that. Whether or not the truth will do any good at that point remains to be seen.” He gestured at the crowd and said, “I felt it was important to show you this, so you’d understand what you—and therefore we—are up against, here.”

“Political in-fighting and power grabs are never pretty,” Jathmar muttered. “Innocent people tend to get hurt during them. Or killed.”

“Then Sharona has the same difficulties in that area that we do,” the duke rumbled.