Chief Sword Otwal Threbuch moved through the darkness like a ghost.
He felt like a ghost must feel—cold, empty inside, and incredibly ancient. He shouldn't have been alive, and after what he'd seen, there was a part of him which wished he wasn't. He told himself that was exactly the kind of thinking he'd spent decades hammering out of raw recruits who'd heard too many stupid heroic ballads, but that did nothing to soften the pain. Or his sense of guilt.
He'd lain on that limb, watching, helpless to intervene as the portal defenders were cut to pieces. He'd been as surprised as anyone when the enemy artillery opened fire through the portal, and he had no doubt that the shock of that totally unanticipated bombardment explained how quickly Charlie Company—his company—had been slaughtered. But it wasn't the full explanation, and deep in his heart of hearts, Otwal Threbuch cursed Hadrign Thalmayr even more bitterly than he had Shevan Garlath.
He'd known what was coming the instant that idiotic, incompetent, stupid excuse for a hundred opened fire on someone obviously seeking a parley. He'd recognized Thalmayr, of course, and the moment he'd seen the other hundred, he'd also recognized the answer to his questions about Hundred Olderhan's apparent lapse into idiocy. Not that his relief over the fact that Sir Jasak's brain hadn't stopped working after all had made what had happened to Threbuch's company any less agonizing.
Every ounce of the chief sword's body and soul had cried out for him to do something as the debacle unfolded. But the steel-hard professionalism of his years of service had held him precisely where he was, because there'd been nothing he could do. Nothing that would have made any difference at all to the men cursing, screaming, and dying in front of him. It might have made him feel a bit better to try, might have spared him from this crushing load of guilt at having survived—so far, at least. But that was all it could have accomplished, whereas the information he already possessed might yet accomplish a great deal, if he could only report it. Besides, as far as he knew, he was the only uncaptured survivor from the entire company, which meant he was also the only chance to report to Five Hundred Klian what had happened.
He clenched his jaw, eyes burning, as he reflected on everything he had to report, including the death of Emiyet Borkaz.
Borkaz had been unable to force himself to sit out the fight. When the desperate survivors had launched their hopeless charge in a despairing bid to get their own support weapons to this side of the portal, Borkaz had left his cover and run madly towards them, screaming and cursing. He'd managed to get most of the way through the trees before he was spotted, and Threbuch thought he'd managed to kill at least one of the enemy on the way through (which was more than Threbuch had managed), as well. And then at least three of those hideous thunder weapons had struck him almost simultaneously. He must have been dead before he hit the ground, Threbuch thought grimly.
But at least the enemy could make mistakes, too. The fact that Borkaz had obviously come from behind them ought to have set off a search for whoever else might be behind them, as well. On the other hand, perhaps he was being too hard on them. Given the nature of the terrain, they might not realize where Borkaz had come from at all. They might think he'd come from the swamp side of the portal and simply gotten farther than any of the rest.
The chief sword froze abruptly. Something had moved, and he stood motionless, straining his eyes and ears. There!
The enemy sentry hadn't moved very much at all. Probably nothing more than easing a cramped limb. But it had been enough, and Threbuch slid silently, silently to his right, giving the other man a wider berth.
Part of him was intensely tempted to do something else. His arbalest would have been all but inaudible under cover of the night wind sighing in the trees. For that matter, he probably could have gotten close enough to slit the other man's throat. It was something he'd done before, and the thought of managing at least that much vengeance for Charlie Company burned within him like a coal. But his job wasn't to kill one, or two, or even a dozen enemies, however personally satisfying it might have been. His job was to get home with the most deadly weapon in any universe—information—and if he left any dead bodies in his wake, the enemy would know at least one Arcanan had gotten away. They'd also know how important his report might be, and a dead sentry would set off a relentless search he might well fail to evade.
He felt the moment of transition as he belly-crawled across the portal threshold, moving instantly from autumnal chill into steamy tropical heat, and he fought down a sudden sense of release, of safety. Any soldier with an ounce of competence—which, unfortunately, these bastards certainly appeared to have—would have sentries on both sides of the portal.
He kept going, easing forward, working his way cautiously through the dense swamp grass and mud at one edge of the portal and praying that he didn't startle some nesting swamp bird into sudden, raucous flight.
Somehow, he managed to avoid that, and to creep silently behind the one additional sentry he did spot on the swamp side of the portal, silhouetted against the moon. It took him almost three hours to cover a total distance of little more than another eight hundred yards, but he made it. And once the wrecked base camp was a quarter-mile behind him, he rose to his feet at last, got out his PC, activated the search and navigation spellware, took a careful bearing on Fort Rycharn, and started walking. The thought of hiking seven hundred-plus miles across snake- and croc-infested swamp, without any rations at all, was scarcely appealing, but he couldn't think of anything better to do.
Just over an hour later, Threbuch stiffened in astonishment. He froze instantly, listening to the night, and looked down at his PC. The crystal's glassy heart glowed dimly, its illumination level deliberately set low enough to keep anyone from seeing it at a distance of more than a very few feet, and the chief sword's eyes widened as he saw the small, sharp-edged carat strobing at one side of the circular navigation display.
He stood very still for several more moments, watching, but the carat was equally motionless. After a moment, the noncom turned towards his right, rotating until the strobing carat and the green arrowhead indicating his own course lined up with one another. Then he moved slowly, cautiously, forward through the currently knee-deep swamp.
The carat strobed more and more rapidly, and then, abruptly, it stopped blinking and burned a steady, unwinking green.
Threbuch stopped, as well, standing in a dense, dark patch of shadow in the lee of a cluster of scrub trees growing out of the swamp. The combination of moonlight, shadow, and swamp grass rippling in the wind created a wavering sea of eye-bewildering movement, and he cleared his throat.
"Who's there?" he asked sharply.
"Chief Sword?" a hoarse voice gasped. "Gods above, where've you been?"
"Great thundering bollocks—Iggy?"
"Yes, Chief."
Threbuch watched in disbelief as Iggar Shulthan crawled cautiously out of the scrub trees. The other Scout's silhouette looked misshapen, and Threbuch's eyes went even wider as he realized what Shulthan had strapped to his back.
"Gods!" the chief sword half-whispered in the reverent voice of the man who'd suddenly discovered there truly were miracles. "You've got the hummers!"
The company's hummer handler reached out. Threbuch extended his hand, and Shulthan gripped it so hard the bones ached. The younger noncom's face was muddy, and even in the uncertain moonlight, Threbuch could see the memories of the horror Shulthan had witnessed in his eyes. Or perhaps he couldn't, the chief sword reflected. Perhaps he simply knew they had to be there because he knew they were in his own eyes.
"I-I ran, Chief." Shame hovered in the javelin's voice. "I grabbed the hummers, like Regs said, and ran with 'em. I ran, Chief!"
Tears hovered in Shulthan's voice, and Threbuch released his hand to grip both of the younger man's shoulders hard.
"Son, you did exactly the right thing," he said. "Don't you ever doubt that! Those regulations were written for damned good reasons. You're the Company's link with the rest of the Army. When the shit hits the fan, and the bottom falls out, somebody's got to get word back. The hummer handler's the only man who can do it."
"But the hundred never gave me the order," Shulthan whispered, blinking hard. "He went down so fast, and they were dropping us like flies, and—"
"I know, Iggy," Threbuch said more gently. "I was trapped on their side of the portal. I had to sit there and watch it all, because my recon report for Five Hundred Klian is every bit as critical as yours." Threbuch found it abruptly necessary to swallow hard a few times. "That was the hardest thing I've ever had to do—ever. So don't think for a minute I don't understand exactly what you're feeling right now, Iggy."
The younger man nodded wordlessly, and the chief sword gave his shoulders another squeeze before he released them, stood back, and cleared his throat roughly.
"So, do you think anyone else got out?"
"No, Chief." Shulthan shook his head. "I haven't seen anyone. Not even them."
"I haven't seen any signs of pursuit, either," Threbuch said with a nod, although that wasn't exactly what he'd asked. He'd already known Shulthan was alone. Unlike the hummer handler's PC, the chief sword's carried specialized spellware which could give him the bearing to any of his company's personnel within five hundred yards. Bringing up the S&N spellware had automatically activated the locator function, thank the gods! But because of that, he'd known none of their other people were within a quarter mile of his current location. He'd simply hoped—prayed—that Shulthan might have seen someone else get out. Someone else who might be hiding out here, beyond the spellware's reach, trying to make his own way back to the coast.
"Where's Borkaz, Chief?" Shulthan asked after a moment, and Threbuch's jaw tightened.
"Didn't make it." He shook his head and started to explain, then stopped himself. Shulthan's anguish at having cut and run while his friends died behind him was only too obvious. He didn't need to be told how Borkaz had died running in the "right" direction. Not, at least, until he had enough separation from his own actions to realize just how stupid Borkaz's had been.
"All right," the chief sword continued after a moment. "Have you already sent back a hummer?"
"No, Chief." Shulthan shook his head. "I've just been running and hiding," he admitted in a shamefaced tone.
"Don't think I've been doing anything else since it happened," Threbuch said, shaking his head. The chief sword looked at the sky. The night was at least half over, he reflected.
"We need to send one back now, though," he continued. "It's going to take the rest of the night just to reach the coast, and we need to let Five Hundred Klian know what's happened. Come to that, we need to set up an LZ for them to pull us out of here, too."
"Yes, Chief."
Threbuch looked down at his PC again, trying to decide on the best spot. He didn't want a dragon within miles of the base camp. Gods alone only knew how far those bastards could throw whatever they'd used for artillery!
His empty stomach rumbled painfully while he was thinking, and he glanced at Shulthan again.
"You wouldn't happen to have anything to eat on you, would you, Iggy?" he asked, and blinked as Shulthan actually chuckled.
"Matter of fact, Chief, I managed to grab my whole pack. I've got a couple of blocks of emergency rats."
"Iggy, it's too bad you're not a woman," Threbuch said with the fervor of a man who hasn't eaten in well over twenty-four hours. "Or maybe it isn't. If you were, I'd have to marry you, and you're ugly as sin." The chief sword looked back down at his PC, picked the coordinates he needed, and then glanced back up at Shulthan. "Let's get that hummer on its way. Then lead me to those rations and stand back."
"Is a . . . unicorn," Shaylar said in slow, carefully enunciated Andaran.
"Yes, exactly!" Gadrial replied in the same language with a broad smile. She leaned closer to the breathtakingly lifelike image displayed above the gleaming crystal on her tiny desk and indicated the booted and spurred man standing beside the beast in an anachronistic-looking steel breastplate. "And this?"
"Is a war-rider," Shaylar said firmly. Gadrial nodded once more, and Shaylar smiled back at her. Then she glanced at Jathmar, sitting beside her on the unused bed in the quarters which had been assigned to Gadrial, and felt her smile fade around the edges as she tasted his reaction to the imagery Gadrial was showing them through the marriage bond.
The coal-black creature Gadrial had just informed her was called a "unicorn" was unlike anything either of them had ever seen before, yet it was close enough to familiar to make it even more disturbing than something as totally alien as a dragon. The beast was roughly horse-sized and shaped, except for the legs, which were proportionately too long, and the improbably powerful looking hindquarters. But no horse had ever had those long, furry, bobcatlike ears, or that short, powerful neck, or the long, deadly-looking tusks—like something from some huge, wild boar—and obviously carnivorous teeth. Or the long, ivory horn which must have been close to a yard in length. And then there were the eyes. Huge green eyes with purple irises and catlike slitted pupils.
Jathmar, she decided, had a point. Compared to that bizarre, opium-dream improbability, the half-armored cavalry trooper standing beside it with his lance and saber looked downright homely.
"Your words?" Gadrial asked, and Shaylar looked back at the images and shrugged.
"No word," she said, pointing at the 'unicorn' and grimacing. Then she pointed at the man standing beside it. "Cavalryman," she said, and watched the squiggles of Gadrial's alphabet appear briefly under the image.
"Good. Thank you," Gadrial said, and touched the small wandlike stylus in her hand to the crystal-clear sphere of her "PC." The image changed obediently, and this time it showed something Shaylar and Jathmar recognized immediately.
"This," Gadrial said "is called an 'elephant.' "
Gadrial watched her "students" studying the floating picture of the elephant and tried to keep her bemusement at their rate of progress from showing.
She'd almost forgotten that she had the language spellware package with her. It wasn't something she'd ever used before, but it had come as a standard component of the "academic" package an enterprising vendor had managed to sell the Garth Showma Institute a year or so before. Gadrial had been perfectly happy with the previous package's general capabilities—most of the spellware she used in her own work was the product of her own department at the Academy, or at least so highly customized that it bore very little relationship to its original form—but the Academy had insisted on providing the new and improved spellware to all its faculty members. She'd been more than mildly irritated at the time, since she probably would never use more than twenty percent of the total applications and the changeover had required her to become familiar with the new package's idiosyncrasies (which were, as always, many). But she'd long since learned not to waste energy fighting over the little things, and it wasn't exactly as if the bundled spells providing all the useless bells and whistles she'd never need were going to use up a critical amount of her PC's memory.
Over the last four days, though, she'd actually found herself deeply and profoundly grateful for the white elephant with which the Academy's administration had lumbered her. She'd thought she remembered something in the manual about language and translation spellware. After their arrival at Fort Rycharn, she'd hauled out the documentation and, sure enough, she had a comprehensive translation spell package, capable of both literal and figurative translations between any Arcanan languages. More importantly, under the circumstances, it also included what she thought of as a "Learn Ransaran in Your Spare Time" spell platform for people who preferred to master those other languages for themselves, rather than relying upon magical translations. Of course, it couldn't simply magically stick another language inside someone else's head, but it was well designed to introduce that language to a new student in a carefully structured format. The people who'd put it together had assumed—not unreasonably—that their students would speak at least one of Arcana's languages, which created quite a few problems of its own, but it had still provided her with an invaluable basis from which to begin teaching Shaylar and Jathmar Andaran.
She hadn't even considered teaching them Ransaran, for several reasons. First, even though it sometimes irked her to admit it, Ransaran wasn't an easy language to learn. There were those, especially in Mythal, who were wont to refer to Ransaran as a "bastardized mongrelization," and she couldn't really dispute the characterization. Ransaran was riddled with irregular verb forms, homonyms, synonyms, irregular spellings, nonstandard pronunciations, and appropriations from every other major language. One of her friends at the Academy had a T-shirt which proclaimed that "Ransaran doesn't borrow from other languages. It follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them on the head, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." Over the centuries, Gadrial cheerfully admitted, Ransaran had done precisely that . . . which was why it was unparalleled for concision, flexibility, and adaptiveness. Indeed, she'd heard it argued that the notorious Ransaran flexibility and innovativeness stemmed directly from the semantic and syntactic responsiveness of the Ransaran language.
But it was a difficult language to learn, even for another Arcanan.
Andaran, on the other hand, was a very easy language to learn, although she'd always found its tendency to create new words by compounding existing ones rather cumbersome compared to the Ransaran practice of simply coining new words . . . or stealing someone else's and giving them purely Ransaran meanings. It had virtually no irregular verbs and very few homonyms, and a completely consistent phonetic spelling. If you could pronounce an Andaran word, you could spell it correctly.
And it was the official language of the Arcanan Army. Not surprisingly, she supposed, given that seventy to eighty percent of the Arcanan military was also Andaran.
Gadrial had actually become quite fond of Andaran during her years in Garth Showma with Magister Halathyn. It might not be the most flexible language imaginable, but it was far more flexible than the various Mythalan dialects. Actually, Mythalan was probably the most precise of any of the Arcanan language groups, which lent itself well to the exact expression of nuance and meaning required by high-level arcane research. But its very precision made it inflexible. It didn't lend itself at all well to improvisation or adaptiveness, which Gadrial had often thought had a lot to do with the preservation of Mythal's reactionary, xenophobic society and its caste structure.
Andaran was much less . . . frozen than that, and she had to admit that it had a rolling majesty all its own, well suited to oratory and poetry. In fact, it was quite beautiful, and she'd become a devotee of ancient Andaran literature. There were still plenty of things about Andara that she found the next best thing to totally incomprehensible. The entire society was, after all, a military aristocracy—or perhaps it would actually be more accurate to say military autocracy—with strict codes of honor and lines of responsibility, obligation, and duty, while she was one of those deplorably individualistic Ransarans. Most of the Andaran honor code continued to baffle her, but the ancient heroic sagas often brought her to the edge of feeling as if she ought to understand Andara.
In this instance, however, the fact that it was the Union of Arcana's official military language carried more weight than any other single factor. Eventually, as she was certain Shaylar and Jathmar were well aware, the military was going to insist on talking to them.
Despite the unanticipated advantage the language spellware provided, Gadrial had expected the teaching process to be clumsy and time-consuming, at least at first. Shaylar, however, had an almost uncanny gift for languages. Her accent was odd, lending the sonorous Arcanan words and phrases a musical overtone that was as pleasant to the ear as it was unusual, but her ability to pick up the language was astounding. She was clearly much better at it than Jathmar, and although it was still going to be some time before she started building complex sentences and using compound verb forms, her basic ability to communicate was growing by leaps and bounds.
In fact, Gadrial had come to the conclusion that there was more than a mere natural ear for language involved in the process. It had become abundantly clear to her that Magister Halathyn had been correct in his initial assessment that Shaylar and Jathmar's people had never even heard of anything remotely like magic. And yet there was something about Shaylar . . .
Gadrial hadn't forgotten that bizarre moment on Windclaw's back, when she'd understood beyond any possibility of doubt that Shaylar was begging her to get the dragon "out of her head." When Gadrial added that to the tiny woman's obvious and exquisite sensitivity to the moods and emotions of those about her, plus Shaylar's breathtaking language skills, the only explanation she could come up with was that Shaylar truly did have some strange talent—almost the equivalent of a Gift, perhaps. Gadrial wasn't prepared even to speculate on how that "Gift" might work, and she'd kept her suspicions about it to herself, but she'd become more and more firmly convinced that whatever it was, it existed.
And she was taking advantage of it for more than one purpose. Not only was she teaching Shaylar and Jathmar Andaran, but she was simultaneously building up a vocabulary of their language, as well. They understood exactly what she was doing, and they clearly weren't exactly delighted by the thought, but they equally obviously understood—and accepted—that it was inevitable.
Somewhat to her own surprise, Gadrial had found the language lessons a soothing distraction while she and Jasak awaited Chief Sword Threbuch's return. What didn't surprise her a bit was that she needed that distraction, and not just because of Threbuch. She still couldn't stop fretting about Magister Halathyn and his obstinate refusal to show enough common sense to accept that he had no business at all that close to the swamp portal under the present circumstances. She'd told herself repeatedly that she was probably being too alarmist, but she'd also recognized the self-convincing tone of her own mental voice whenever she did.
"All right," she told her students, shaking herself free of her gloomy thoughts and bringing up the image of a slider chain and indicating the third car in it. "This is called a 'slider car,' and it's—"
She broke off as someone tapped on the frame of her open door. She turned towards the sound, and her eyebrows rose as she realized it was Jasak Olderhan who had knocked. Then she stiffened as his appearance registered. He was standing in the doorway like a man awaiting an arbalest bolt, and his face was bone-white, his shoulders rigid.
"Magister Kelbryan," he said in a desperately formal voice, "Five Hundred Klian begs a few minutes of your time."
"What's wrong?" She came to her feet, nearly dizzy with fear, her eyes on his face as his body language and expression sent spikes of apprehension hammering through her, but he shook his head.
"Not here," he said, and that was when she noticed the other men with him. The Gifted healer who'd healed Shaylar stood behind him, and behind him was an armed guard.
"What is it?" she repeated, and heard her own voice go thin, almost shrill. Jasak obviously heard it, too. She saw it in his face and eyes, and he swallowed.
"News from the portal," he said hoarsely. "Please, come with me," he added, making it a plea a rather than a command. "These gentlemen will stay with Jathmar and Shaylar."
She realized she was wiping damp palms against her trousers. She looked at him for a moment longer, then turned to Shaylar, who was proving the faster of the two at absorbing her language lessons.
"I go, Shaylar," Gadrial said, speaking carefully and slowly. "With Jasak. I'll be back soon. Understand?"
The other woman nodded, and her eyes were dark with concern.
"Gadrial?" She held out one hand, touched Gadrial's arm gently in that concerned, almost tender way that seemed habitual with her. "Is there . . . trouble?" she asked. She clearly had to search for a moment to come up with the second word, and Gadrial gave a helpless shrug.
"I don't know," she admitted. Shaylar bit her lower lip, then nodded. Jathmar was staring at the armed guard, eyes hooded and lips thin, and Gadrial turned to the healer . . . and the guard.
"If you don't mind, please leave the door open. It distresses them less, to leave the door open."
Something moved in the guard's eyes—something dark and dangerous, almost lethal. What in Rahil's name had happened at the portal? She felt a chill chase its way down her back as she asked herself the question . . . and remembered who had stayed behind.
"Please," she added, catching and holding the guard's eye. "They're civilians." She stressed the word deliberately. "Frightened, bewildered civilians whose lives we—" she indicated herself and Jasak "—smashed to pieces. Whatever's happened, none of this was their fault."
The guard's jaw muscles clenched, but he gave a stiff nod.
"As you wish, Magister. I'll leave the door open." And I'll watch them like a gryphon looking for a meal, his eyes and body language virtually shouted.
Gadrial held those hard, dangerous eyes for a moment, then nodded and followed Jasak into the corridor. A moment later, they were outside, where the stiff sea breeze ruffled her hair and carried her the clean scent of salt water while afternoon sunlight poured golden across the open parade ground. Then she noticed the gates; they were closed. The massive wooden locking beam had been dropped into its brackets, and sharp-eyed sentries manned the parapet, weapons in hand, while field-dragon gunners stood ready behind the relatively small number of artillery pieces Five Hundred Klian had retained when he sent the rest forward to Hundred Thalmayr.
What in hell had happened?
Jasak walked beside her in total silence, nearly as ramrod-straight as the sword at his hip. She studied his profile, trying to understand the complex emotions seething just below the surface of the rigidly formal mask his face and voice had become. There wasn't time to decipher it, though, before they had crossed the parade ground and entered the fort's central administrative block.
Sarr Klian's clerk practically leapt from his chair, coming to attention with a sharply snapped salute.
"Sir! The Five Hundred is waiting for you, Sir!"
The one, quick look the clerk shot at Gadrial left her insides quaking, and then Jasak rapped sharply on the five hundred's door.
"Enter!" Klian's voice called almost instantly, and Jasak opened the door, holding it for her as he gestured her into the room ahead of him. She started forward, then caught sight of Chief Sword Threbuch and the company's hummer handler, waiting for them.
"Chief Sword!" she cried, smiling and hurrying forward to grasp his hands in sudden delight. "We were so worried about you! I'm so glad you made it back safely."
The tall, powerfully built North Shalomarian was visibly taken aback by her greeting. His normally immaculate uniform was filthy, she realized, and his face was heavily stubbled. It was also gaunter and thinner than she remembered, and much older looking. The obvious signs of weariness and privation sent a pang of sympathy through her, but then his expression truly registered. He wore that same desperately formal mask which had transformed Jasak's features into marble. That was bad enough, but something flickered behind it as he looked back at her. Something that turned Gadrial's joy at seeing him into abruptly renewed fear.
"What's wrong?" Her voice was sharp, urgent. "Something dreadful's happened, hasn't it?"
Pain flared deep in Threbuch's eyes. His jaw tightened, but he didn't speak. He just turned back toward the five hundred and waited for Fort Rycharn's commandant to answer her terrified question.
"Magister Kelbryan," Klian said in a heavy, almost exhausted voice. "Please sit down. Please," he repeated.
He's afraid I'm going to collapse when he finally tells me what's going on, she realized with a pang of icy dread.
"It's Magister Halathyn, isn't it?" she whispered as she sank into the chair opposite the five hundred's desk. "Something's happened to Magister Halathyn."
The officer's eyes actually flinched. Then he drew a deep breath.
"Hundred Olderhan," he began, "urged me to recall our forces from the swamp portal to minimize the risk of another violent confrontation between our forces and Shaylar and Jathmar's people." He cleared his throat. "I should have listened, but I thought the risk was far less than it actually was. I also hoped—assumed—that any powerful military response on their part would take much longer to mount. But the chief sword has confirmed Magister Halathyn vos Dulainah's belief—and yours—that the portal our prisoners came through was at least a class seven. In fact, it's almost certainly a class eight, judging from the chief sword's reconnaissance . . . and there's an enemy fort smack in the middle of it."
Gadrial's breath caught savagely.
"It appears to be understrength, still under construction," Klian continued. "But the chief sword watched the arrival of a relief column which had evidently moved ahead by forced march. They had more of those weapons you and the hundred here, encountered. And other weapons, as well, with tubes that were—"
He glanced at Threbuch.
"How large again, Chief?"
"They were about six feet long, Sir," Threbuch replied. "Looked like they were probably four and a half or five inches across, with fairly thin walls. They had four of the damned things covering my aspect of the portal, but according to Javelin Shulthan here, there were at least two or three more covering the other aspect. And they had something else, too. I don't know what to call it. It was another tube, shorter and not as big across, mounted on a tripod, almost like an infantry-dragon. But it wasn't a dragon. It had a . . . crank on the side, and a long belt of those cylinder things we found at their camp went into it. When they turned the crank—" He swallowed, his lips tight. "It was like those shoulder weapons of theirs, Sir," he said, turning to look directly at Jasak. "But instead of firing just one shot at a time, it fired again and again, so fast together that it sounded like one, long, single shot. It must've fired hundreds of times a minute, Sir."
He stopped speaking abruptly, and a line of sweat trickled down his brow.
He saw it used, Gadrial realized, going even colder.
"They attacked the portal." Her voice was a thread. "Our portal—didn't they?"
"They did." Five Hundred Klian gave her a jerky nod. Harsh, full of pain and anger. "After asking—asking by name, mind—for Shaylar."
Gadrial's breath hissed and she paled as she instantly recognized what he was implying. If they'd asked specifically for Shaylar, did that mean they somehow knew she'd survived the initial battle? It must! But if they did . . .
She turned to stare at Jasak.
"How? My God, how could they have gotten a message out? Your men searched for any sign of a runner, both at their camp and at the clearing."
"Yes," Jasak said through clenched teeth. "We searched—damned thoroughly. No messenger went out, unless he went up the river before he headed for their portal. But however it happened, they got a message through . . . somehow. And somehow damned quick, too. According to the chief, here, the head of their initial scouting column passed him long before anyone could have gotten back to their portal on foot to summon them even if they did manage to get a runner out."
Gadrial touched her own cheek with fingers which had gone icy chill.
"But that's—" She broke off. Clearly, it wasn't impossible, since they'd obviously done it. "They must have something like hummers," she said instead, aware her intellect was grasping at straws, seeking any excuse, any distraction, to avoid hearing the rest of the doom they were about to pronounce.
"Something," Klian agreed. "And we're hoping you can find out what. Shaylar, at least, seems to trust you, to a certain degree. If you can find out how they warned their people, you'll give us information that will save lives. Possibly a lot of lives. We need every advantage we can possibly get to deal with their people, Magister, because they've just demonstrated a frankly devastating military superiority.
"Granted," he added in a harsh voice, "we made mistakes which made it even worse. I did, for example, when I failed to listen to Hundred Olderhan's warning, and Hundred Thalmayr made several serious mistakes of his own that proved costly. At least one of those was probably my fault, too, because I'm the one who ordered him to position himself on our side of portal. I intended that to apply only to his fortifications and main position, not to his sentries. It's standard procedure to picket both sides of any contested portal in a threat situation, and I expected him to follow SOP in applying my orders. Apparently, however, he interpreted my instructions to mean he was to do otherwise."
Fort Rycharn's commander paused again, his face tight and grim.
"I'm afraid, though, that however much Thalmayr's mistakes—and mine—may have contributed to the disaster, there was an even more terrifying factor involved." He looked directly into her eyes, his own appealing, almost desperate. "Somehow, these people can fire artillery through a portal, Magister."
He stopped, and Gadrial stared at him. No wonder he was staring at her that way, pleading with her to explain how it might have happened. But she couldn't. No spell could be projected through a portal interface! That had been established two centuries ago. It was an absolute fundamental of portal exploration, and—
Her yammering thoughts stopped abruptly, as a truly terrifying possibility occurred to her. No, a spell couldn't be projected through a portal . . . but from Shaylar's reaction to Magister Halathyn, these people didn't even know what sorcery was! Their weapons obviously relied on totally nonarcane principles; she and Jasak had already figured that much out. But if that was true for their shoulder weapons, why shouldn't it be equally true for their artillery weapons? And if their artillery fired physical projectiles, like the ones their shoulder weapons fired, then—
"I don't have any idea what makes their weapons work, Five Hundred," she said frankly. "Not yet, at least. But one thing I do know is that they don't rely on any magical principles with which I'm familiar. Which means the limitations we're familiar with probably don't apply, either."
She saw fresh, even worse fear in his eyes, and shook her head quickly.
"Whatever they are, however they work, I'm certain they have limitations of their own," she said. "Any form of technology does. We simply have to figure out what limitations apply to theirs. For the moment, though, I think we're going to have to assume that instead of projecting a spell the way our weapons do, they launch a physical projectile which actually carries the spellware, or whatever it is they use. If that's the case, then they can fire them anywhere any physical object could pass. Like through a portal interface."
Klian and Jasak looked at one another, their faces tight, and then the five hundred looked back at her.
"However they did it, Magister, it was devastating. I'm sure Hundred Thalmayr never expected it, any more than I would have, and it turns our entire portal defense doctrine on its head. We're going to have to come up with some answer, whether it's a way to stop them from doing it, or a way of figuring out how to do the same thing ourselves."
Gadrial nodded, and a part of her brain truly was even then reaching out, looking for some sort of solution. But it was only a tiny part, for most of her mind refused to let her hide any longer from what she most dreaded.
"How badly—" She had to stop and clear her throat. "How badly did they hit us?"
For a moment, no one spoke, and she cringed away from their silence. Then Fort Rycharn's commander inhaled deeply.
"The only men left from the swamp portal detachment are in this fort, Magister." His voice was harsh with emotion that not even years of Andaran military discipline could disguise. "Of the men actually stationed at the portal at the time of their attack, including the wounded we hadn't yet evacuated, only Chief Sword Threbuch and Javelin Shulthan made it back. All the rest are either dead or prisoners."
Gadrial felt her hands clench into white-knuckled fists on the arms of her chair. Despite all they'd already said, all her own efforts to prepare herself because of what she'd seen in their eyes, the sheer scope of the disaster hit her like a hammer. And behind that was the regret, the pity, burning in Sarr Klian's eyes as he faced her squarely.
She couldn't speak, literally couldn't force the words past her lips to ask the question that would confirm what her heart and mind already knew. She tried, but nothing happened, and then it was no longer necessary.
Chief Sword Otwal Threbuch went to one knee in front of her chair. The man who was so strong, so professional, in such command of his own emotions that she'd privately concluded that he'd been chiseled from granite. That man knelt in front of her chair and took her icy fingers in his, and even through her pain she felt a distant sense of surprise as his own fingers actually trembled.
"My lady," he said in a choked voice, "I'm sorry. There wasn't anything I could do. Nothing at all. I was trapped on the wrong side of the portal, couldn't even get to our camp, let alone get to Magister Halathyn."
She started to cry, silently, because she was unable to draw a deep enough breath to sob aloud.
"How?" she whispered, the sound thin as skeletal fingers scratching on glass, and his eyes flinched.
"I wish to every god in heaven I could tell you the enemy killed him, Magister. One of their soldiers had pulled him out of his tent, was questioning him. About Shaylar, I think, because Magister Halathyn was pointing toward the coast, toward this fort. Then one of our field-dragon crews—"
"No!" The word was ripped from her. Jathmar's ghastly burns swam before her eyes, and the picture her mind's eye painted of Halathyn, caught in a dragon's fireball, was too horrifying to face.
"No, Magister!" Threbuch said urgently. The chief sword reached out, caught her chin in one hand, forced her to look into his eyes and see the truth in their depths. "I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't a fireball! The gods were at least that merciful. He didn't suffer, I swear that, My Lady! The lightning caught them both, killed them instantly—"
The sobs which had been frozen inside her broke loose. She sensed people moving, heard their voices, but couldn't make sense of the words. Threbuch's hands let go of hers, then someone else crouched in front of her, tried to hold and comfort her. But she jerked back in her chair, wanting to hate these men for not forcing Halathyn to leave the swamp portal with her.
"Gadrial, please." Jasak's voice reached her at last, hoarse and filled with pain. "Let me at least help you."
She opened her eyes, staring at him through the blur of her tears, and even from the depths of her own dreadful pain she saw the anguish in his ravaged face. And as she saw it, she realized that Sir Jasak Olderhan had just lost nearly every man of his command. Men he'd cared about, felt responsible for, had grown to know—even love—in that mysterious male way of soldiers: formal and distant, at times, yet as close as brothers. But he was also Jasak Olderhan, with all that name implied, captive to all those Andaran honor concepts she couldn't understand. Unlike her, he couldn't weep for his loss, for his dead. Shame stung her cheeks, punching through the wild rush of grief, and she shook her head.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "You cared about him, too. About all of them . . ."
He merely nodded. The movement was jerky and stiff, but that was because there were witnesses, both men he had commanded and the man who commanded him.
"I'm sorry," she said again, louder, looking this time at Otwal Threbuch. "You must think I'll hate you," she continued, trying desperately to steady her voice. "I'm trying not to."
His eyes flinched once more, and she bit her lip.
"I'm trying not to blame any of you. Trying not to blame myself. He was so stubborn—"
She broke off, gulping hard to maintain control, and looked Threbuch squarely in the eye.
"You were on their side of the portal, Chief Sword. I know that, and I've seen what their weapons can do. You couldn't possibly have reached him." Her voice was hoarse, cracking, but she forced it onward. "Nobody could have, I know that. Not through that kind of fighting. It's just such a terrible—"
She did break down again, then, but this time she let Jasak put an arm around her shoulders. There was great comfort in leaning against the strength of his broad shoulder, in the warmth soaking into her, helping her rigid muscles relax. She was mortified, at one level, to have broken down so completely and deeply, having wept in front of these men like any other helpless female. But losing Magister Halathyn for any reason, let alone this way . . .
"Would you like to go back to your quarters?" Jasak asked gently.
She nodded, and he helped her stand up, steadied her, let her lean on his forearm. She tried to say something to Five Hundred Klian, but her throat was locked. She turned a helpless look on Otwal Threbuch, but her throat remained frozen, so she reached out one hand, instead, and gripped his fingers in silence. Then Jasak was guiding her across the room. He opened the door for her, slipped an arm around her shoulders when they stepped outside, and steadied her carefully as her knees went rubbery on the low wooden steps down to the parade ground.
They were almost to her quarters when she remembered and went stiff and stumbled to a halt.
"What is it?" Jasak asked urgently.
"Shaylar. And Jathmar. They're in my room."
She didn't think she could face them yet. They hadn't done anything themselves to kill Halathyn—or the others—but her mentor, the man who'd been her second father, was dead because soldiers from their universe had come looking for them. Gadrial couldn't—just couldn't—face them yet. Not while the shock was so raw.
Jasak swore under his breath, then changed direction and led her to his own quarters, in the building reserved for officers, not civilian technicians. His room was neat, tidy, and very nearly empty. The gear he'd brought back from the field was stored in orderly fashion, and his personal crystal sat on his desk, glowing lines of text visible where he'd obviously been interrupted in the middle of something when Chief Sword Threbuch had arrived with the news.
He guided her to the bed, rather than the chair.
"Lie down and rest for a while," he murmured, easing her down.
The bed, like all military bunks in frontier forts, was a simple cotton bag stuffed with whatever the regional commissary had been stocked with: feathers, cotton wadding, even hay. This one, like her own, had feathers inside, soft and comforting as she curled up on her side atop the neatly tucked-in blanket. He opened the window, letting in a cooling breeze, then looked back down at her.
"Just stay here for a while, Gadrial. I'll come back for you later, all right?"
His kindness in not mentioning the names of the people he was about to remove from her room left her blinking on salty water once more. She heard his feet cross the bare plank floor, then the door clicked softly shut behind him and Gadrial lay still, listening to the wind rustle through the room, the distant sound of men's voices, the occasional cry of seabirds high above the fort, and remembered.
She remembered a thousand little details. Her first day at the Mythal Falls Academy, an awestruck young girl from the windy empty plains of North Ransar, still short of her fourteenth birthday. How she'd gaped at the ancient stone buildings, stared in amazement at the thunderous roar of Mythal Falls, one of the two largest waterfalls in any universe, plunging into its deep chasm. The very air, and the ground under her feet, had been so pregnant with latent magic that her skin had tingled and her bones had buzzed, and yet even that had been almost secondary beside an even greater sense of wonder.
She—Gadrial Kelbryan—had scored so highly on the standard placement tests that Magister Halathyn vos Dulainah himself had offered her a place at the Academy.
It wasn't possible. She hadn't even known her Ransaran teachers had sent her exam results to the Academy, hadn't guessed how truly outstanding those scores had been. Not until the message crystal had arrived with Halathyn's personal invitation recorded in it. And then, impossibility piled on top of impossibility, he'd personally met her that first day, taken the unknown, timid teenaged girl from Ransar—the only non-Mythalan student in the renowned academy's entire student body, and one of the three youngest students ever admitted to it—under his wing. And he'd taken her out to the Falls themselves, shown them to her, and spoken quietly about the reason her body had buzzed so strangely there.
"Magic," he'd said in that almost childlike way of his, filled with wonder at the unending delights the universes—all of them—had to offer. "Magic gathers in places like these." He'd waved a dark-skinned, elegant hand at the roaring cataract below their feet. "Or, rather, magic bursts free at such places. There are other locations where the forces we call 'magic' well up in great concentrations: all great waterfalls, certain mountains, some deep caverns, places where lines of force cross. But this place, where the Mythal River plunges into this great chasm, where the entire continent is slowly pulling apart along the Rift—this is the most potent place in all Arcana."
Gadrial had stared at the tall, lean, imposing man she was actually going to be permitted to study with, if only she could overcome her own awe of him, and blinked.
"Mythal is pulling apart?" she'd asked. She'd felt incredibly stupid the instant the words were out of her mouth, but he'd only chuckled gently.
"Oh, yes. That's not common knowledge, mind you. Most people would be terrified to learn that the ground under their feet is actually moving. It's incredibly slow, of course—something on the order of a fraction of an inch a year. But it's definitely moving. Have you never wondered why the great continents, particularly Mythal and Hilmar, look like pieces in a child's puzzle? Pieces which obviously ought to fit together?"
"Yes, Sir." She'd nodded. "I had noticed it."
"Of course you had. You're bright, not just Gifted, or you wouldn't be here." He'd waved at the ancient stone buildings. "But it never occurred to you that those continents might look like that because they'd once been one solid piece of land?"
This time she'd simply shaken her head, and he'd smiled.
"Well, that's hardly surprising, either. Generally speaking, logic doesn't suggest that the ground under you is actually moving across the face of the planet, does it? But it is. We've confirmed it here." He'd cleared his throat. "Ahem. That is to say, my research unit confirmed it."
Gadrial had found herself grinning at his tone and his expression. Then she'd clamped both hands over her mouth, horrified at her slip in manners, but he'd just chuckled.
"Before your course of study is complete," he'd promised, "I'll teach you to sense it yourself."
And he had. He'd opened up her world to such wonders that she'd felt giddy most of the time, hungry in her very soul for new knowledge, new understanding of the world around her and the forces that only she and others with Gifts could sense and touch and use to accomplish the things that made Arcana's civilization possible.
Over the next three years, he'd given her the wondrous gift of teaching her how to really use her Gift. And then he'd stood like a fortress at her side when the other magisters—aided and abetted by her fellow students—had torn that precious gift of education from her shocked hands. Had expelled her on grounds so flimsy a sharp glance would have torn them to shreds. On the day when she'd stood wounded and broken, like a child whose entire universe had just been willfully, cruelly shattered.
On the day when Halathyn vos Dulainah had laid into his most senior, most renowned colleagues with barracks-room language in a white-hot furnace of fury which had shocked them as deeply as it had shocked her.
"—and shove your precious godsdamned, all-holy Academy—and your fucking, jewel-encrusted pedigrees—up your sanctimonious, lying, racist, hemorrhoid-ridden asses sideways!" he'd finished his savage tirade at length, and his personal shields had crackled and hissed about him like thinly leashed lightning. Sparks had quite literally danced above his head, and the Academy's chancellor and senior department heads—indeed, the entire Faculty Senate—had sat in stunned disbelief, staring at him in shock.
"We're leaving, Journeywoman Kelbryan," he'd said to her then, turning to face her squarely in the ringing, crackling silence singing tautly in his incandescent attack's wake.
"We?" she'd asked dully, her throat clogged with unshed tears. "I don't understand, Magister."
For just an instant, he'd glared at her, as if furious with her for her incomprehension. But then the anger seething in his brown eyes had gentled, and he'd taken both her hands in his.
"My dear child," he'd said, ignoring the Academy's still stupefied leadership, "the day this Academy expels the most brilliant theoretical magic adept it has ever been my privilege to train for 'insufficient academic progress' and 'attempts to violate the honor code by cheating' is the last day I will ever teach here."
Someone else had made a sound, then. The beginning of protest, she'd thought, but Magister Halathyn had simply turned his head. The fury in his eyes had roared up afresh, and the chancellor had shrunk back in his chair, silent before its heat.
"I resign from this faculty—immediately," he'd said.
"But you can't!" she'd cried, aghast. "You can't throw away your career over me! I'm just one more journeywoman, Magister, and you're . . . you're—"
He'd laid a gentle fingertip across her lips, ignoring the men and women who had been his colleagues and peers for so many years.
"You are anything but 'just one more journeywoman,' " he'd told her, "and this . . . this farce is only the final straw. I should have done this years ago, for many reasons. You're not to blame, except inasmuch as what these sanctimonious, closed-minded, willfully ignorant, arrogant, bigoted, power-worshiping, stupid prigs have just done to you has finally gotten me to do what I ought to have done so long ago. If they choose to wallow in the muck of their precious supposed shakira superiority to all around them, then so be it. I have better things to do than squat here clutching handfuls of my own shit and calling it diamonds! Besides," his sudden, delighted grin had shocked her speechless, "I've been offered a new position."
One of the other department heads had straightened in his chair at that, leaning forward with an expression of mingled suspicion, chagrin, shock, and anger. Magister Halathyn had caught the movement from the corner of his eye, and he'd turned to face the other man and his grin's delight had acquired a scalpel's edge.
"As a matter of fact, my dear," he'd continued, speaking to her but watching the other magisters' faces like a duelist administering the coup de grace, "I've been offered the chance of a lifetime. I'm going to set up a new academy of theoretical magic on New Arcana, under the auspices of the military high command. And you, Journeywoman Kelbryan, have just become its first student."
The protest had begun then. The shouts of outrage, the curses—the threats. But Magister Halathyn had ignored them all, and so had Gadrial, as she'd stared up into his eyes. Eyes so kind and so alive to the wonders of life, so passionate to see justice done. She'd met those eyes and burst into fresh tears, but not of despair. Not this time. Not ever again.
Until now, almost twenty years and God alone knew how many universes away from that moment.
Halathyn was gone forever. Stupidly. Cruelly. For nothing. A reckless, crazy shot by a dragon gunner too blinded by fear and the need to hurt the other side to notice that the greatest magister Arcana had ever produced was in his line of fire. Or—even worse, and just as likely—by a gunner who hadn't cared as long as his weapon's blast took down one of the men killing his company, as well.
Gadrial Kelbryan turned her face into Sir Jasak Olderhan's pillow and cried like a lost child.