by David Weber
"Yes, sir." Haimas stepped out of the private office and began giving crisp, clear instructions to Limana's staff. While she did that, the First Director turned back to Kinshe.
"However this plays out, I'm counting on your support. Yours is very nearly the only moderate voice Fyysel will listen to, my friend. Given Shaylar's nationality, Shurkhal's going to be overrun with reporters asking questions about Shurkhali honor and blood vendetta. The last thing we can afford is to have the King of Shurkhal throw that burning black oil of yours on the kind of fire this will ignite."
Kinshe grimaced, able to picture his monarch doing that only too clearly.
"I'll do my best, Orem, within the confines of my own honor. But it may not be enough. It's worse than just our normal sense of honor, you realize? The Shurkhali people, from King Fyysel down to the lowest stable boy, have invested tremendous national pride in Shaylar. Even those who don't approve of her doing a man's job have taken pride in the fact that a Shurkhali woman was first. The King isn't the only Shurkhali male we'll have swearing vendetta. Trust me on that."
"You give me such cause for hope," Orem muttered.
"It won't be pretty." Kinshe' eyes narrowed as another thought occurred to him. "Not anywhere. You realize Uromath will cause trouble? And what happens when the Arpathian Septenates get word—" He shook his head. "It'll take some fast talking to keep them from sending every warrior above the age of fourteen through the portals for the chance to ride in the battle against the godsless heathen."
"You think I don't know that?" Limana growled. "Gods and demons, this is going to be an unholy mess!" He blew out a deep breath and added, "From where I'm standing, Ternathia looks to be our best bet. And you know how that will play in certain quarters."
"Only too well," Kinshe said with a wince. "I'm not even sure you'll be able to convince Ternathia," he added, but Limana snorted harshly.
"Zindel chan Calirath's no fool," he said grimly. "He won't want it, but he's Ternathian. That'll tell, if nothing else will, and I think he's smart enough to know what our other options will be."
"You've got our whole future mapped out," Kinshe observed with a tight smile, "and the Conclave hasn't even been called yet."
"Care to place a friendly wager on the ultimate outcome?" Limana responded.
"Not on your life. You're too seldom wrong to throw my money away," Kinshe growled, and the corner of Limana's lips twitched.
"Hah! At last you admit it!" The flash of humor faded quickly, though. "We'll just have to do the best we can. If you think up any bright ideas on how to contain the rage—or at least channel it into something that won't worsen the situation—I'm all ears."
"If I do, you'll be the first to know."
"Good." Limana drew a deep breath. "Don't bother going back to the Board meeting. Go home and pack. I'll send a carriage to pick you up an hour from now, drive you to the ETS station. A senior Voice will meet you there. If that train isn't ready by the time you hit Sethdona, I'll have some railway official's guts for zither strings."
"I have every confidence," Kinshe said, his voice as dry as the sands of his homeland. "I'll take my leave, then." He gripped Limana's hand. "Don't let them do anything stupid while I'm gone."
"If it looks bad, I'll have my Voice flash yours to take your proxy vote. May the gods speed your journey, my friend."
Kinshe strode through the Portal Authority' imposing stone headquarters, his heels clicking against the marble, his attention tightly focused on what would have to be done to meet the crisis each step of the way between here and a distant Shurkhal. One thing he already knew, though, without any doubt whatever. It would take an act of the gods themselves to persuade King Fyysel not to send several thousand riflemen and an artillery division out to commit blood-vengeance genocide.
Chapter Twenty-Two
"Dear, you've hardly touched your breakfast."
Andrin Calirath looked up at the sound of her mother's gentle voice. Empress Varena wasn't the sort of parent who nagged, and she wasn't nagging now, really. That didn't keep Andrin from feeling as if she were, but the look in her mother's eyes stopped any protest well short of her vocal cords.
"I'm sorry, Mother," she said instead, and managed a wan smile. "I'm afraid I'm just not very hungry."
The Empress started to say something else, then stopped, pressed her lips together, and gave her head a tiny shake. Her brain had already told her there was no point trying to get Andrin to eat. That the attempt would only make things worse, by pointing out that she'd noticed something her daughter was desperately trying to pretend wasn't happening. But what her mind recognized and her heart could accept were two different things.
She looked at her husband, sitting at the head of the table, and he looked back with a sad smile and eyes full of the same shadows which haunted Andrin. The smile belonged to her husband, her daughter's father; the shadows belonged to the Emperor of Ternathia, and not for the first time in her life, Varena Calirath cursed the crushing load the Calirath Dynasty had borne for so many weary centuries.
Andrin peeked up through her eyelashes, acutely aware of her parents' exchanged looks. She wished desperately that she could comfort her mother, but how could she, when she couldn't even explain her terrifying Glimpses to herself? Her father would have understood, but she didn't need to explain to him. It was painfully evident that he was experiencing the same Glimpses, and she refused to lay the additional weight of her own fears, the terror curdling her bone marrow, on top of the other weights he must already bear.
Unlike her, he had to deal with all the crushing day-to-day burden of governing Sharona's largest, oldest, wealthiest, and most prestigious empire despite his own Glimpses. He didn't need a whining daughter on top of that!
She used her fork to push food around on her plate, trying to convince herself to try at least one more bite. There was nothing wrong with the food itself. Breakfast had been as delicious as it always was; it was simply that a stomach clenched into a permanent knot of tension couldn't appreciate it.
Almost a week, she thought. A week with the bumblebees crawling through her bones, the nightmares which woke her and skipped away into the shadows before she could quite grasp them. A week with visions of chaos and destruction, the outriders of heartrending grief to come, of loss and anguish. No wonder she couldn't eat! She knew she was losing weight, and she'd seen the shadows under her eyes in her morning mirror, and that didn't surprise her one bit, either.
She'd had other Glimpses in her life, some of them terrible beyond belief. The Talent of the Caliraths was . . . different. Unique. Precognition wasn't actually that uncommon. It wasn't one of the more common Talents, but it wasn't as rare as, say, the full telempathic Healing Talent.
But precognition was limited primarily to physical events and processes. A weather Precog could predict sunshine and rain for a given locale with virtually one hundred percent accuracy for a period of perhaps two weeks. Longer-range forecasts of up to two months could also be extremely accurate, although reliability tended to begin falling off after the first month or so, and the level of accuracy degraded rapidly thereafter. Other Precogs worked for forestry services, predicting fires. And along the so-called "crown of fire" around the Great Western Ocean, they watched for volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. They'd saved countless lives over the centuries with their warnings, like the one they'd issued before the island of Juhali in the Hinorean Empire—and its analog in every explored universe, for that matter—had blown up so devastatingly thirty-seven years ago.
Yet those events were all the results of physical processes. Of the movement of unthinking masses of air and water, the random strike of lightning bolts, the seething movement of magma and the bones of the earth. The Glimpses of the House of Calirath dealt with people.
Quite often, they also dealt with natural disaster, because people were trapped in them. But those disasters would have happened whether there'd been anyone there to witness them, or not. What Andrin and her fathe
r and their endless ancestors before them had seen in those cases was the human cost of the disaster. The impact on the lives of those trapped in its path.
There had been times when a Calirath Glimpse had been enough to divert or at least ameliorate the consequences of cataclysm. Andrin was grateful for that. She herself had saved possibly thousands of lives with her Glimpse of the Kilrayen National Forest fire in Reyshar before high winds had sent it sweeping over the town of Halthoma like a tidal bore of flame. She'd Seen the flames leaping the firebreaks, cutting the roads, consuming the town, burning women and children to death. It had been that human element—the terror and pain and despair of the people involved—which had generated her Glimpse . . . and her father's frantic EVN message had warned the Reyshar government in time to evacuate and thwart that very Glimpse. She treasured that memory, despite the nightmares of the disaster only she had Seen, which still came back to her some nights. And she was only too well aware from her history lessons of how often in Ternathia's past it had been a Glimpse, the Talent of the imperial house, which had plucked victory from defeat, or turned mere survival into triumph.
But there were times—like today—when all those accomplishments seemed less than a pittance against the cost of her Talent.
If only she could make it come clear! If only she could take it by the throat, choke it into submission. But it didn't work that way. Glimpses could be of events from next week, or next month, or next year. Some had actually been of events which had not occurred until the person who had Glimpsed them was long dead. Sometimes, they never came to pass at all, but usually they turned out to have been terrifyingly accurate . . . once they were actually upon you. And one thing the Caliraths had learned over the millennia was that the closer the event came, the stronger the Glimpse grew.
Which was the reason her stomach was a clenched fist and there were shadows under her eyes. This was already the strongest Glimpse she had ever endured, far stronger than the Halthoma Glimpse, and it was still growing stronger. The images themselves were growing sharper, even though she still lacked the context to place them, and she felt as if she were a violin string, tuned far too tightly and ready to snap.
"Andrin," her father said calmly, "I've been thinking that this afternoon, perhaps you and I might drop by the stables, and—"
He stopped speaking abruptly, and his and Andrin's heads turned as one, their eyes snapping to the breakfast parlor's door an instant before the latch turned. Andrin felt herself go white to her lips, and her father's hand tightened into a fist around his napkin, as the door opened and Shamir Taje stepped through it.
"Your Imperial Majesties," the First Councilor of the Ternathian Empire said, bowing first to Zindel and then to Varena and the rest of the imperial family, "I apologize for intruding on you."
Varena Calirath held her breath as she saw Zindel's face. His entire body had gone deathly still, and she bit her lip as she realized that whatever he—and Andrin—had awaited appeared to be upon them.
"I'm sure you had an excellent reason, Shamir." Her father's voice was amazingly calm, Andrin thought, when he had to feel the same jagged lightning bolts dancing along his nerves.
"It's an urgent message, Your Majesty," Taje said formally, and Zindel nodded.
"Very well." He glanced down into Varena's eyes. "I beg your pardon, my dear. Children," he added with an apologetic smile, then glanced at Taje again. "Will I be back shortly, Shamir?"
"I . . . doubt it, Your Majesty."
"I see." Zindel kissed each of his daughters in turn, beginning with little Anbessa and leaving Andrin until last. He gripped her hands for a moment, meeting the worry in her eyes with a steady gaze as she stood to kiss him back, and she actually managed to summon a smile for him.
"I'll let you know what I can," he said quietly, and she nodded.
"If you can't, I'll understand."
"Yes." He brushed a lock of hair from his tall, straight daughter's brow. "I know."
He gave her another smile, then turned briskly and stepped back through the door with Shamir Taje, and she discovered her knees were trembling. She all but fell back into her chair, not even bothering with proper deportment, but her mother didn't scold. She just bit her lip and tried to smile in a brave effort that didn't fool Andrin.
A moment later, the door opened again, and Andrin's head whipped back around. Her father stood there, pale as death, staring straight at her.
"Zindel?" the Empress' voice sounded breathless, frightened.
"I'm sorry, dear. I didn't mean to alarm you." His eyes met hers, held for an instant, then moved back to his eldest daughter. "Andrin, I'm afraid you have to come with me. It's essential that you join the Privy Council's deliberations.
Andrin heard someone gasp and wasn't sure if the sound had come from her mother, or from her. She tried to rise, then paused to take a deeper breath, and made it to her feet on the second attempt.
"What is it, Father? What's happened?"
"It's just a precaution, Andrin, but it's necessary. I'll brief you with the rest of the Council."
Andrin saw the flicker in his eyes, the tiniest of speaking glances at her baby sisters, and swallowed down a throat gone dry.
"Of course, Father." She bent to press a kiss on her mother's suddenly cold cheek. "I'm sorry, Mama. Will you convey my apologies to Aunt Reza for missing my lesson this morning?"
"Of course, dearest."
Andrin followed her father into the passage, suddenly wishing her fears could remain nameless, vague, however terrifying. This morning, all she'd wanted was their resolution; now she harbored a terrible suspicion that the truth would be far worse than anything she'd yet imagined.
The walk to the Council Chamber seemed endless, yet it was also far too short, and Andrin drew a deep breath and straightened her spine as the doors finally opened before them. She'd never actually been inside the Privy Council Chamber, which wasn't as surprising as someone else might have thought, since Hawkwing Palace, the imperial Ternathian residence in Estafel, was the largest structure on the entire island of Ternath. The ancient palace in Tajvana had been substantially larger, and more opulent, just as the ancient empire had been larger and, for its day, even richer. But Andrin had difficulty imagining a building more immense than her birthplace, since the palace was a small city in its own right.
Nearly five thousand people lived and worked in Hawkwing Palace, which ambled across twenty acres of land, including the stables, kennels, and formal gardens. If one added the vegetable gardens and greenhouses, the palace and its grounds ate up nearly thirty acres in the heart of Ternathia's capital city, which boasted the most expensive real estate on the island. Or, for that matter, in the entire sprawling Empire as a whole. She'd never seen all of it, and probably never would. Those who governed—or were related to those who did—had no need to visit the vast kitchens, or the hothouses where vegetables were grown in winter and fruit trees were coaxed to produce fruit year round.
She'd been to the Throne Room, of course, but the chambers where her father consulted, planned, worried, and governed were alien territory, and she discovered that the Privy Council Chamber made a distinct contrast to the vast and ornate Throne Room. The Throne Room's function was to remind visitors of the power, magnificence, and ancient lineage of the Empire; this chamber, by comparison, was an almost cozy room, more than large enough to hold the entire Privy Council, yet small enough to feel almost intimate. Walls of the same grey stone used to build the entire palace had been left bare, rather than faced with marble, but ancient, beautifully polished woodwork lent the stone a softening accent, and colorful banners decorated two walls, representing the various nations and peoples who comprised the Empire.
A third wall was devoted almost entirely to a hearth, where a cheerful coal fire drove away the autumn chill when she stood close to. The mantle was simple, compared with other fireplaces in the palace, and served mostly as a place to put clocks. At first, she thought it was an echo of her mother's lov
e for bric-a-brac. But then she tipped her head to examine them more closely, and discovered one clock for each of the time zones within the Empire.
Andrin forgot the tension of the moment as she stared in delight at the simple but effective way to determine at a glance what time it was in any given city of the Empire. Each clock was labeled with the names of the major cities within its zone, and she even found clocks at the far end of the mantle that showed time zones in the rest of Sharona.
That discovery led her eyes to the map hanging across the far end of the room, where she could trace the familiar coastlines and pair them up with the mantle clocks.
The island of Ternath, itself, shown by the mapmakers as a vibrant green jewel, was the westernmost land bordering the rolling expanse of the North Vandor Ocean. Just to the east of Ternath lay Bernith Island, which stretched farther north and south than Ternath and was wider, as well. Beyond Bernith, with its landmark white-chalk cliffs, past the chilly waters of the Bernith Channel, lay the great continent of Chairifon, where most of Ternathia's empire sprawled across Sharona's northern hemisphere, two thousand and more miles from east to west, and fifteen hundred from north to south.