"You look tired," Regiment-Captain Namir Velvelig observed dryly, tilting back his head to regard the enormous young officer who'd just dismounted from the magnificent blue roan Shikowr.
"Thank you, Sir," Platoon-Captain chan Calirath replied with exquisite politeness. "Somehow that had escaped my notice."
Velvelig's lips twitched. For the hard-bitten Arpathian, that constituted the equivalent of anyone else's deep belly laugh, and Prince Janaki smiled. He'd been attached to Velvelig's command for just over six months before being sent forward to New Uromath when Company-Captain Halifu appealed for help covering the vast new frontiers the Chalgyn Consortium had been so unexpectedly opening up back in those ancient days—all of two months ago—before everything had gone straight to hell. During that time, he'd developed a deep respect, even admiration, for the shorter, squarely built regiment-captain, and in turn, Velvelig had made it clear that he intended to treat young Platoon-Captain chan Calirath like any other junior officer . . . within limits, of course.
"I didn't expect to see you back so soon, Platoon-Captain," Velvelig said now, his voice lower, as Janaki handed his reins to an orderly and stepped up onto the wooden veranda which fronted the administrative block of Fort Raylthar.
No, he reminded himself, it's Fort Ghartoun now.
He'd noticed the new name on the signboard outside the fort's main entrance, and he wondered whose idea it had been to rename Raylthar. From what he knew of Velvelig, he rather suspected what the answer was. The regiment-captain was as immune to fear and as implacably determined as any Arpathian stereotype, but there was a warm and caring human being down inside all that armor.
The fort itself lay on the eastern flank of New Ternathia's Sky Blood Mountains, barely ten miles from the deep, beautiful waters of Snow Sapphire Lake and within twenty miles of the legendary Sky Blood Lode, probably the biggest silver deposit in history. The discovery of this portal was going to make the Fairnos Consortium, which had first surveyed it, unbelievably wealthy once the railhead steadily advancing from Fort Salby reached it. Although the portal and the fort which covered it were located at little more than forty-five hundred feet of altitude, the Sky Bloods' higher peaks between Ghartoun and Snow Sapphire rose to almost ten thousand snowcapped feet. Their lower flanks were heavily forested, although Ghartoun itself got precious little rain or snow, even in the winter, and the lower mountains and foothills east of the fort were drier and far less hospitable. Still, Janaki preferred Fort Ghartoun's normal climate to the soggier environs of Company-Captain Halifu's post. This late in the year, the temperature was dropping close to freezing at night, but it was no more than pleasantly cool during the day, with just enough nip to make a boy from Estafel feel refreshed and vigorous. For the last two weeks, Janaki had been looking forward to spending at least a day or so out on the lake, but Velvelig's remark reminded him of why he'd really returned to Ghartoun.
"I didn't expect to be back so soon, Sir," he said now, his expression turning grimmer. "Then again, a lot of things no one expected have been happening lately, haven't they?"
"That they have, Platoon-Captain," Velvelig agreed. He looked up at Janaki for another few seconds, then twitched his head at the admin block door. "Come into my office."
"Yes, Sir."
Janaki followed Velvelig into the administration building, down the short, rough-planked corridor to the regiment-captain's office, and through its door. He closed it behind himself and started to brace to attention, but Velvelig shook his head impatiently.
"Forget that nonsense," he said briskly. "Consider yourself already reported on-post."
"Yes, Sir. Thank you."
"Don't start thanking me yet," Velvelig snorted. Janaki quirked an eyebrow, and the regiment-captain seated himself in the swivel chair behind his desk with a grimace.
"May I ask why I shouldn't thank you, Sir?" Janaki asked after a moment.
"Because I'm pretty sure you were hoping to spend at least a day or two resting up before heading on up-chain to Failcham."
"Ah." Janaki nodded slowly. "I take it that's not going to happen, Sir?"
"You take it correctly . . . Your Highness."
Both of Janaki's eyebrows went up at that, and Velvelig leaned back in his chair and sighed.
"I know you specifically asked not to receive any special treatment when you reported to me eight months ago, Janaki," he said, "and overall, I thought you were right. Still do, in fact. I'm not Ternathian myself, of course, but I've always thought the Ternathian tradition that the heir to the throne ought to have military experience—real military experience, not just a token version of it—makes a lot of sense. That's why I went ahead and deployed you forward to New Uromath when Halifu needed reinforcements. But I'm sure you're aware of how things have changed out here in the last month or so."
He paused, his head cocked slightly to one side, and Janaki shrugged.
"Of course I am, Sir," he said quietly. "And I also understand why I was detailed to escort these prisoners to the rear. I don't say I like it, but I understand it. But if you'll pardon me for saying so, you sound as if you've got something even more specific in mind."
"I do." Velvelig turned his chair just far enough to one side to be able to gaze out his office window at Fort Ghartoun's parade ground. "You don't have a Voice assigned to your platoon, do you?" he asked.
"No, Sir." Janaki was a bit puzzled by the question. "Company-Captain chan Halifu considered sending one along with us, given the prisoners we're escorting. But we're short along this entire chain, especially with all the troop movements going on. Certainly too short to start assigning Voices to mere platoons. Besides, the company-captain knew Darcel Kinlafia was coming with us, so we were covered. Until he . . . went on ahead, of course."
"I know." Velvelig chuckled slightly. "Kinlafia came through here a week and a half ago like his horse's tail was on fire. For that matter, he looked like a man whose arse was on fire, too! But he didn't even stay to soak his saddle sores." The regiment-captain appeared to be studying something on the empty parade ground with great intensity. "Seemed to be in quite a hurry, now that I think about it. Had a note from you, too, I believe."
"Yes, Sir. I, ah, felt it was advisable to get him home to make a firsthand report as quickly as possible."
"You did, did you?" Velvelig glanced back at the crown prince. "Well, maybe you were right about that. But my point is that you've been more or less out of communication since you left Brithik."
"Yes, Sir."
The long overland march from Fort Brithik had taken the next best thing to three weeks. He'd been able to make better time (until, at least, he'd hit the mountains between Brithik and Salby) after leaving the majority of his wounded prisoners, in no small part because there were actual roads between Brithik and Fort Ghartoun. Several small towns—little more than a handful of roughly constructed buildings clustered around Portal Authority remount stations and Voice relay posts—had been strung along those roads like beads when Janaki and his platoon originally deployed forward from Fort Raylthar. On the journey back, many of them had been deserted, except for the Voices and Authority personnel still manning the remount stations.
Although he'd left the majority of the wounded at Brithik, he was still accompanied by half a dozen ambulances. It was far simpler to load the prisoners onto the vehicles rather than try to find individual mounts for them . . . and accept the additional security problems which would have gone with it. A single mounted Marine with a Model 10 at the ready could guard an entire ambulance full of prisoners quite handily, and none of them was in the position to make an individual break for freedom. And, because he'd had to bring the ambulances along anyway, he'd also brought along Commander of One Hundred Thalmayr.
He hadn't wanted to do that, for several reasons. One was the fact that he continued to hold the idiotic Arcanan officer responsible for the massacre of Thalmayr's own command. Janaki had had more time now to think over what Thalmayr had done, and the more he'd thought about it, even after allowing for the unknown nature of Company-Captain chan Tesh's weapons, the stupider he'd realized the man had to be. But he was honest enough to admit that the main reason was that Thalmayr reminded him entirely too much of a zombie in his present state. Petty-Captain Yar had, indeed, "shut him down" completely, and Janaki hadn't made sufficient allowance for how . . . creepy he was going to find that totally expressionless, blank-eyed face whenever he was forced to look at it.
Unfortunately, Petty-Captain chan Rodair, the Fort Brithik Healer, had insisted that Thalmayr be taken on to what had been Fort Raylthar. From his own examination of the captured Arcanan officer, chan Rodair believed that Thalmayr's paralysis might be the result of pressure on his spinal cord, rather than actual damage to the cord itself. If that were the case, then surgical intervention might restore the Arcanan's mobility, but chan Rodair wasn't trained as a surgeon. Company-Captain Golvar Silkash, Velvelig's post Healer, was a school-trained surgeon, and a good one. In addition, Silkash's assistant, Platoon-Captain Tobis Makree, was not only a trained surgeon in his own right, but also a powerfully Talented Healer. Given that—and especially given Makree's unusual combination of skills and Talent—chan Rodair had argued that Thalmayr's best chance for an actual recovery lay at Fort Raylthar.
Personally, Janaki had decided that he didn't give much of a damn one way or the other whether or not Hadrign Thalmayr ever walked again. He didn't much like admitting that, but there was no point lying to himself about it. And whether he cared about it or not didn't affect his duty to see to it that the man had the best chance for recovery he could provide, even if rank stupidity was one of the two most unforgivable sins of which any officer could be guilty. So, rather against his will, he'd delivered Thalmayr to the renamed Fort Ghartoun.
"I did manage to check in once, about . . . eighteen days ago, Sir," he said now. "May I ask why the fact that I couldn't do so more frequently is significant?"
"Because," Velvelig said with a crooked smile, "about twelve days ago, your father stood up on his hind legs at the Conclave and informed the assembled heads of state of Sharona that they were sitting there with their thumbs up their arses while people were being shot at out here. He, ah, suggested that they might have better things to do than debate fishing rights on Sharona. Suggested it rather forcefully, as a matter of fact. If you'd care to hear what he had to say for yourself, I believe my senior Voice could replay the Voice broadcast of the session for you."
"Oh . . . my," Janaki said after a moment, and, Arpathian impassivity or no, this time Velvelig laughed out loud at the crown prince's expression.
"I'd heard rumors about the emperor's temper before," the regiment-captain said, shaking his head, once he'd stopped laughing. "Apparently they actually fell short of the reality."
"Father is one of the most patient people in the universe . . . as long as the people around him are at least trying to do their jobs," Janaki replied. "He drives himself harder than he ever drives anyone else, too. But may the gods help anyone he thinks is shirking his responsibilities to others."
"That's about what I'd gathered. In this case, according to the SUNN reports we've been getting over the Voicenet, he was more than justified. In fact, most of the Conclave seemed to feel that way. Which explains why he's been nominated as the first planetary emperor of Sharona."
For a moment, Janaki just looked at the regiment-captain. He'd known from the beginning that his father and his family were going to have a prominent part to play in whatever decisions the Conclave ever came to, but he'd never expected anything remotely like what Velvelig appeared to be suggesting.
For several seconds, it simply refused to sink in. Then it did, and his first reaction was that he couldn't think of anyone on Sharona who could possibly do the job better than Zindel chan Calirath. His second reaction was that it had been extraordinarily thick-witted of him not to see this coming. And his third reaction was a stab of sheer, unmitigated terror as he realized who would someday have to succeed his father in that role, if it was confirmed.
Which, he thought a moment later, might just explain why I wasn't about to let myself think about this particular possibility!
Velvelig watched the implications sink home in the broad-shouldered youngster sitting across his desk from him, and he was impressed by what he saw. Very few people would have realized what the sudden, slight widening of Janaki chan Calirath's eyes represented. Velvelig did, and he watched those broad shoulders come a fraction of an inch further back as Janaki's spine straightened and he drew a deep breath.
"That's . . . quite a bit to take in, Sir," he said.
"Oh, it gets even better," Velvelig assured him. "You see, there were two candidates for the nomination. Your father . . . and Chava Busar."
The eyes which had widened a moment before abruptly narrowed and went very cold, Velvelig observed. That, too, pleased him immensely. There were very few Arpathian septs which didn't have at least one bone to pick with Emperor Chava, and Velvelig's sept—what was left of it—nursed long and homicidal memories of the debt it owed the Busar Dynasty. Which, although he'd never actually explained it to Janaki, was one of the reasons Namir Velvelig had been so pleased when Platoon-Captain chan Calirath reported to him for duty.
"I can see where that could get ugly, Sir," Janaki said after a moment. "Still, I suppose it was inevitable. Who else could possibly put together an opposition candidacy?"
"It wasn't much of a 'candidacy,' " Velvelig demurred. "As nearly as I can tell from the reports we've gotten so far—and remember, they're a week old—your father buried him in the voting. It wasn't even close. Unfortunately, Chava's refused to accept that the Conclave's decision is binding upon him. Which, since the Conclave is a purely voluntary association, is probably a not unreasonable position," the regiment-captain conceded unwillingly.
"He's flatly refused to accept the outcome of the vote, then?"
"No, not quite. But he's put forward an incredible shopping list of demands which he insists have to be met before he'll even contemplate the possibility of 'surrendering Uromathia's sacred sovereignty to a foreign crown.' " The regiment-captain made a face. "The Conclave is considering those demands now. Personally, I don't see any way he can genuinely expect to get ninety-nine percent of them, but he seems perfectly prepared to go on arguing about them forever."
"Which means he is going to get at least some of them," Janaki said grimly. "He may be willing to go on burying his head in the sand while the tide comes in, and he may be perfectly willing for everyone else to drown with him rather than give in, but the rest of the Conclave isn't going to be that capricious."
"That's my reading of the situation, too," Velvelig agreed. "Since the only two options are to give him at least some of what he wants or to start a second war between Uromathia and the rest of the planet to force him to submit, I'm guessing he'll probably end up settling for two or three concessions. Which, I'm sure I hardly need to point out to you, are going to be the ones he figures are best calculated to hamstring your father's ultimate authority over him."
Janaki nodded, and Velvelig shrugged.
"That's why you're not going to get a rest stop here after all, Janaki," he said quietly. "I'll take the rest of the wounded off your hands, and we'll provide you with additional teams for your ambulances so that you can make better time with the unwounded prisoners, but I want you back in Sharona as quickly as I can get you there. Whatever Chava's up to, your father doesn't need his heir universes away at a time like this. In fact," he looked sympathetically at the younger man, "I'm afraid your days in uniform are over. We can't afford to have anything happen to you now."
Janaki wanted to protest. In fact, he started to, then stopped as an echo of the Glimpse he'd had of Kinlafia and Andrin rippled through the back of his mind. It remained frustratingly unclear—probably because he himself wasn't in it—but something about what Velvelig had just said had waked that echo. He knew that much, even if he had no idea at all what it had been. And whatever it was, Velvelig was undoubtedly correct. What had been an acceptable risk in peacetime for the heir to the Winged Crown was not an acceptable risk in wartime for the man who might be about to become heir to the crown of all Sharona.
"I understand, Sir," he said finally, and Velvelig nodded in approval. He'd seen the protests fluttering in the backs of Janaki's eyes, and he'd also seen the Calirath sense of duty which kept those protests silent.
"I know you do," the regiment-captain said quietly. "And for what it's worth—and it may not feel like it's worth very much at this particular moment—I think it's a damned shame. About the uniform, I mean. There are some people who simply wear it without ever learning what it really means. You already knew that when you arrived. I think you would have been one of the really good ones."
"Actually, that means quite a lot coming from you, Sir," Janaki replied. He inhaled again, then stood. "With your permission, Sir, I'd better go and alert the platoon that we won't be staying over after all. At least everyone ought to have time to get a hot bath and a sitdown meal in a proper mess hall before we hit the road again."
"Of course." Velvelig stood as well, then reached across the desk to offer his right hand. "Good luck, Your Highness. And I hope you won't object if a heathen Arpathian spends the odd night hour praying for you and your father." He smiled crookedly as the prince clasped his hand firmly. "After all, it could hardly hurt, could it?"
Petty-Armsman Harth Loumas sat in the hot patch of shade cast by the small canvas tarp and tried to ignore the insects whining around his ears. He told himself that, despite the bugs' irritation quotient, he couldn't really object to his present duty. Or, he shouldn't, anyway; obviously he could, because he was. All the same, he knew that most of his fellow PAAF troopers would willingly have exchanged places with him. For one thing, he did get to sit in the shade, which was more than they got to do. He knew that, and in an intellectual sort of way, he actually agreed. But that wasn't exactly the same thing as saying that he actively enjoyed sitting here sweating.
He checked his watch, then closed his eyes again and reached out with his Talent. Loumas had extremely good range for a Plotter, but he was still limited to no more than four miles, and he had to concentrate hard, at any range beyond about two miles, if he wanted to separate human life essences from those of other animals. It took him a good twenty minutes to sweep the total area he could See from his present location, and the portal itself created a huge blind spot in his coverage. Since no Talent could operate through a portal, he had to move physically around to its far aspect in this bug-infested swamp if he wanted to See around it. That was why he was parked at one end of the portal with Tairsal chan Synarch, Company-Captain chan Tesh's senior Flicker. They were outside both the sandbagged outer picket posts and the main defensive position chan Tesh had thrown up on the Hell's Gate side of the portal, but they could shift to the other aspect of the portal by simply walking around it in this universe, which took all of fifteen minutes.
It also meant that if anything did turn up, chan Synarch could nip around to the Hell's Gate side of the portal and Flick a message straight back to chan Tesh and Company-Captain Halifu in a handful of seconds.
Loumas and chan Synarch changed positions every hour on the hour, moving around to the far aspect, in order to maintain a three hundred sixty-degree watch. It was, quite frankly, boring as hell, but it was also necessary. No one had any idea where the enemy troops—the "Arcanans," as they called themselves—had come from. Platoon-Captain Arthag had led sweeps a full fifteen miles out in every direction without finding any sign of human habitation. He'd lost one man and two horses to the local crocodiles in the process, and Company-Captain chan Tesh had decided there was no point in sweeping farther out. No officer worth his uniform liked losing men for no return, and if there'd been any evidence of where these people had come from, or how they'd gotten here, some indication of it should have turned up inside that thirty-mile circle. Besides, he hadn't wanted Arthag and any of his men that far out from the field fortifications he'd thrown up here at the portal itself.
Frankly, Loumas was beginning to wonder if there might actually be anything to the wild rumors about flying beasts. He wasn't certain where they'd started. The Arcanan prisoners had all been sent farther back, safely beyond the possibility of any attempt to rescue them. Loumas would have preferred for at least some of them to have been kept closer to hand, where the local garrison might have been able to begin learning their language and possibly conduct some useful interrogations. On the other hand, he understood just how vital an intelligence resource those prisoners were, and he could hardly blame Company-Captain chan Tesh or Company-Captain Halifu for wanting to make sure nothing happened to them.
But if none of the prisoners had been spreading ridiculous stories about huge, winged creatures, Loumas had no idea where they might have come from.
Probably a combination of sheer boredom and the fact that we don't know diddily about these people—except that they've got some fucking dangerous weapons!
He snorted in what he wanted to be amusement but which was tinged with something entirely too much like fear for comfort. He reminded himself that the other side obviously didn't know anything more about Sharona and the capabilities of Sharonian weapons than he did about their weapons. The way they'd tried to defend this very portal was proof enough of that! But that didn't make him—or anyone else—any happier about confronting the completely unknown, and the eerie way these people had somehow managed to establish their base camp here without anything remotely like roads or leaving a single boat behind didn't make it any better.
Well, at least they won't be sneaking up on us, he told himself firmly. It may be boring, but I'm damned sure not—
His thoughts froze and he stiffened, focusing in tightly. Then he swore aloud.
Damn! I wish we had a decent Distance Viewer! he thought.
His Talent would let him spot living creatures, but what he Saw of them was always . . . fuzzy. The creatures themselves were clear enough, but exactly what they might be doing, or exactly what their surroundings were, was often almost impossible to discern. Half the time, he had to extrapolate, and like most Plotters, he was fairly good at that. But extrapolation depended on some sort of familiarity with what the people he was Plotting were likely to be doing, and who the hells knew what these people were likely to be up to? If he'd had a Distance Viewer to team with, he'd have been able to coach the other Talent into finding the proper distance and bearing, and the Distance Viewer would have been able to See exactly what was happening.
Loumas closed his eyes, concentrating hard, then punched chan Synarch's shoulder.
"Huh?" The wiry Marine snorted awake. His head snapped up, and his eyes cleared almost instantly as he looked a question at Loumas.
"We've got an incoming contact," Loumas said crisply. "I think it's a small boat, headed in from the east."
Chan Synarch nodded sharply and reached into the cargo pocket on his right thigh and extracted a pad of paper and pencil.
"Shoot," he said tersely, pencil poised.
"It's not as clear as I'd like," Loumas admitted, knowing chan Synarch would understand why that was. "They're about four miles out. I can't get much of a feel for the boat, but it's moving damned fast—I make it at least twenty-five or thirty miles an hour, whatever that is in the 'knots' or whatever it is you Ternathian swabbies use."
The two of them grinned tensely at each other, and he continued.
"There's three of them. One of them's in some kind of uniform, but it doesn't look like anything we saw here. I don't think he's wearing a helmet, and his tunic or jacket is red, not the camouflage pattern they had." His hand stabbed in the direction of the wrecked Arcanan fortifications and camp. "I think the other two are in civilian clothes. Doesn't look like any uniform I ever heard of, and they aren't dressed alike. I don't See any weapons on any of them. None of those tube things, and no crossbows anywhere I can See, either." Loumas grimaced. "A Distance Viewer could probably tell us more, but that's all I've got right now."
"Understood." Chan Synarch had been writing quickly and clearly in the shorthand every Flicker was trained to use while Loumas talked. Now he read back what he'd written, and Loumas listened carefully, then nodded.
"That's it," he agreed.
"Then I'd better get it off," chan Synarch said. He ripped off the sheet on which he'd written, folded it, put it into one of the metal carrier cartridges on his belt, and trotted briskly around the edge of the portal until he crossed over into the cool, forested depths of Hell's Gate and had a clear line of sight to Company-Captain chan Tesh's HQ bunker. As soon as he did, he Flicked the message cartridge directly to the company-captain's orderly.
"Sent," he reported laconically to Loumas as he jogged back around to the swamp side, and the Plotter nodded. He was still tracking the incoming boat. In the three minutes it had taken him and chan Synarch to get the message off, the boat had covered almost another mile and a half. It was going to be here in another three minutes—four, tops—and—
A bugle awoke suddenly from the far side of the portal, sounding the "Stand-To," and Loumas exhaled the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. He watched men double-timing towards their assigned actions stations, and his lips skinned back from his teeth in a tight smile.
I might have missed some kind of super weapon in their frigging boat, he thought, but they aren't going to take us by surprise with whatever it is.