Hell's Gate-ARC

by David Weber

  "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 his 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 in as much 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 along 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.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  They left the fort at dawn.

  Shaylar knew something terrible had happened, but no one would tell them what. No one even tried. Jasak had escorted her and Jathmar from Gadrial's quarters to their own the afternoon before, but he'd barely spoken, and Shaylar hadn't been able to touch him, so she had no idea what had happened. Whatever it had been, it had obviously been bad, because they'd spent the night locked in their quarters, with one armed guard at the door, another at the window, and for all they could tell, another on the roof.

  Now they crossed the open parade ground in total silence and found Gadrial waiting for them at the fortress' barred water gate. Her haggard appearance shocked Shaylar. The circles under her eyes were so dark they looked bruised, her eyes themselves were swollen and red from prolonged weeping, and an exhausted, defeated look clung to her. It was one Shaylar recognized from her own recent, bitter experience.

  "Who—" she started to ask, then realized she didn't know the word for "died." Not that it really mattered. Gadrial didn't answer her partial question, didn't even look at her. In fact, nobody was looking at them—not directly. People's glances sort of sidled past them, without ever coming to rest on them, and she and Jathmar exchanged baffled, worried looks.

  The fort was built so that the wharf extending out into the harbor was a virtual extension of its walls. The only way onto or off of the long, narrow dock was through the fort itself, and other people were waiting at the water gate, as well. One of them was a tall man, with iron-gray hair. He stood ramrod straight, staring at absolutely nothing, and Shaylar vaguely remembered him from that first ghastly day, after the battle at the clearing of toppled timber. She hadn't seen him since, though, and that made her frown.

  If he'd been with Jasak Olderhan the day Jasak's men had slaughtered her crew, where had he been in the meantime?

  The likeliest answer terrified her, because he had the tough, no-nonsense look of a professional soldier. A good one. The sort of experienced noncom a good officer might detach for some important independent duty . . . like a reconnaissance mission. Had he been to their portal? Shaylar knew nothing about Jasak's and Gadrial's people, nothing about the extent of their knowledge of this region. If they'd already known about the portal cluster, then the logical thing for Jasak to have done would have been to send someone to check the ones they already knew about the moment his men stumbled across Shaylar's crew, just to see if anything and changed. And if he had, that grey-haired man would have found plenty.

  Like Company-Captain Halifu's fort. And if Company-Captain Halifu had sent someone to look for them . . .

  She glanced at Jathmar, who'd picked up some of what she was thinking, or more precisely, feeling, through the marriage bond.

  "I think they know about our entry portal," she said in a low voice.

  "You may be right. Something big's happened, at any rate. If I had to guess, I'd say they've tangled with our military out there. And I don't think they'd enjoyed the experience."

  "Then Company-Captain Halifu did send someone to look for us."

  "Or to find out if anyone had survived what you transmitted." Jathmar nodded grimly. "You said they left most of their lightly wounded to walk the whole way back to their swamp base camp when they flew us out. That would have left a trail a child could follow, leading straight back to their portal."

  Shaylar nodded, but fresh worry tightened her mouth. She had no doubt that Darcel Kinlafia would have accompanied any rescue force Halifu might have sent out. And if the other Voice had managed to make it to this side of the swamp portal, he would undoubtedly have done his best to contact her. But he hadn't succeeded, and neither had she managed to contact him, despite making the attempt again and again, especially at their normally scheduled contact times, since they'd Healed her head injury. Not that she'd ever had much hope that she'd be able to. She still didn't know exactly how fast a dragon could fly, but she was virtually positive that the long dragon flight from the swamp portal to their present location had taken her well outside her own contact range from the portal, and hers was much longer than his.

  Without knowing about these people's flying creatures, and given the way the swampy terrain would hamper any sort of ground-based movement, Darcel wouldn't have any reason to believe that she could have been transported out of his range from the portal in no more than a week. Which meant that when he'd tried to contact her and gotten only silence—and hadn't heard anything from her, either—he'd undoubtedly assumed that it confirmed his worst fears.

  But there was nothing she could do about that, and so she did her best to put the thought behind her. Instead, she considered what Jathmar had said from another perspective.

  "Gadrial's in a state of shock," she said very quietly into Jathmar's ear. "She's lost someone—someone precious to her."

  Jathmar glanced at
her sharply, then his nostrils flared.

  "That man at the camp," he said softly. "The one who looked Ricathian."

  "The one with the words in the crystal, and the fire rose." Shaylar nodded. "Gadrial was close to him, emotionally. I could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice. They'd known each other long enough for that easy bantering between good friends, and then she had that fight with him just before they left. Her and Jasak both, now that I think about it. You don't suppose . . . ?"

  "I don't know," Jathmar said, still softly. "But I'd hate to think anything happened to that fellow."

  Shaylar blinked, unable to conceal her surprise. The marriage bond made it impossible for her to be unaware of Jathmar's feelings where all of their captors were concerned. But that same bond made it impossible for him to misunderstand her surprise, and he shrugged.

  "It's obvious he wasn't a soldier, any more than she is." He nodded slightly in Gadrial's direction. "Neither of them wore uniforms. And, well, I don't know how to say it. There was something about him . . ." He shook his head, unable to find exactly the right words. "I hope Grafin blew the rest of them into an Arpathian hell, but I'd be sorry to learn that that particular man had been killed. What was his name?" He frowned. "It started with an 'H,' didn't it?"

  Shaylar glanced at the others, then leaned even closer to her husband.

  "Halathyn," she said in a half-whisper, and he nodded.

  "Yes. That was it." A regretful sigh escaped him. "I suppose they'll tell us, eventually. Or maybe we can ask. But not yet. I really don't think now's a good time at all."

  Shaylar glanced from Gadrial's tear-swollen eyes to Jasak's thin-lipped, pale silence, and then at the big, grey-haired soldier's clenched jaw and strangely disturbed eyes.

  "Right," she agreed firmly. "We ask later. Much later."

  Then the massive wooden bar at the gate rattled and clanked as the sentries unfastened it and it creaked ponderously open. They didn't open it all the way—just far enough to let Jasak, Gadrial, and the soldier whose name she didn't know pass through the opening more or less abreast. She and Jathmar went next, followed by several other soldiers, including one in chains.

  The sight of one of Jasak's soldiers in manacles and leg irons startled her into staring. She hadn't noticed him while standing at the gate, but she recognized him. Not by name, of course—she had no idea who he was, or what his duty might have been—but she'd seen him that first ghastly day, as well. He was dark-skinned, like Halathyn, and to Shaylar's eyes he looked like a Ricathian. But only physically. All resemblance to any Ricathian Shaylar had ever known ended with the color of his skin and the look of his hair.

  Despite his chains, he walked with his spine ramrod straight, and he wore an expression of unmistakable aristocratic disdain. His lip curled in the way she'd seen occasional aristocrats sneer back home, particularly those from Othmaliz, who felt they were superior to pretty much everyone else on Sharona simply because their ancestors had retained possession of Tajvana. She'd had to deal with one or two of that sort, and she'd never enjoyed the experience, although not even the most haughty Othmalizi noble had wanted to cross swords with a fully accredited Voice of her stature.

  But there was more than simple arrogance to this man. The look the chained prisoner sent Jasak Olderhan as Gadrial and the officer stepped past him contained such malice, such lethal hatred, that Shaylar's breath caught for just a moment. Then another soldier spoke sharply to him, and he stalked through the gate in turn, as though he were some great lord making his way through a gaggle of filthy beggars despite the jingle of his chains.

  "I wonder who he thinks he is?" Jathmar murmured.

  "Good question," Shaylar agreed.

  "I'm not sure I like the idea of sailing on the same ship he does," her husband growled under his breath, gripping her hand tightly.

  Since they didn't have most choice in the matter, Shaylar found herself hoping that these people had good locks on their doors. Then she shivered at the thought, since she and Jathmar would be held behind locked doors, as well. Gods' mercy, surely they wouldn't put her and Jathmar in the same cell as that fellow? She shivered again, wondering what he'd done.

  The roughly built wharf looked almost rickety, but it was reassuringly solid underfoot, and Shaylar turned her attention to the ship tied up alongside it. Partly, she admitted, she was interested in anything which might distract her from the thought of being confined in the other prisoner's company. But the ship itself was more than enough to claim her attention in its own right, for it was, without reservation, the oddest vessel Shaylar had ever seen, and Jathmar was staring at it in just as much perplexity as she was.

  "What on earth makes it go?" he wondered aloud.

  Shaylar could only shake her head in bafflement. It wasn't a huge ship, although it was clearly large enough to tackle the open ocean. It was actually a bit bigger than she'd thought it was on the day of their arrival. Of course, she hadn't been in very good shape for making detailed observations at the time, not before their healers had gone to work on her.

  This ship was somewhat smaller than the standard Voyager-class ships the Trans-Temporal Express had developed to cross the water gaps in its inter-universal transportation system, but not by very much of. The Voyagers were about four hundred feet long and had a beam of about fifty-five feet, and Shaylar, like everyone who'd ever served in a portal survey crew, was thoroughly familiar with them. They were certainly serviceable craft, if not especially speedy, but they'd been designed primarily as cargo vessels, and their passenger accommodations left much to be desired. On the other hand, in the Voyager, the TTE had produced a design which lent itself to modular construction and mass production. The freighters were literally shipped across intervening stretches of dry land in pieces, carried on huge, special freight cars, and assembled once they reached their destinations.

  But if this ship was of roughly the same dimensions, that was about all it had in common with the TTE design.

  First, it appeared to be built of wood. That wasn't really all that surprising, in a lot of ways. Wooden hulls were more common than steel hulls for locally produced Sharonian shipping, after all. The TTE's modular designs were one thing, but for most people, it was far simpler to import a gang of shipwrights and the men needed to fell timber to build ships than it was to import enough infrastructure to build steel-hulled vessels in barely explored universes.

  But the fact that this one was built of wood did seem odd considering the second obvious difference between it and the Sharonian ships with which she was familiar, because it was a far sleeker design. Whereas a Voyager had a straight, almost vertical stem, this ship's bow was sharply raked, and the hull flared gracefully as it approached deck level. Shaylar was no sailor, but she'd had the opportunity—or misfortune, depending upon one's viewpoint—to experience heavy weather aboard more than one of the TTE ships, and she suspected that this vessel would have provided much more comfortable transport under the same circumstances. It looked far more . . . modern, for want of a better word, which made its wooden construction one more of the endless anachronisms she'd observed since her capture.

  The third thing she noticed was the size of the superstructure, and the fourth was the absence of anything remotely resembling a Sharonian ship's smokestacks. It had only a single mast, which carried no sails, so it had to have some sort of propulsive system, but she couldn't imagine what it might be.

  But the fifth thing she noticed was a row of three-foot-wide ports which ran down the entire length of the superstructure right at deck level. At the moment, those ports were closed by hatches, but she didn't think they were access ways for ventilation or trash chutes. There were eight of them on the side of the ship closest to the wharf, and she assumed there was a matching row on the ship's outboard side.

  She and Jathmar followed Jasak and Gadrial down the wharf towards the waiting ship, and she found herself wondering uneasily how far from Jasak's home universe they were . . . and what it might say
about these people if this universe wasn't close to their home base. This vessel was obviously a warship, or at least armed for self protection, and no TTE design she'd ever seen had carried actrual weapons. It was also far too large for any sort of coastal patrol craft. No, this was a ship designed for blue-water combat—at need, at least—which argued that it had been constructed by a fiercely militaristic society. Who else would send actual warships to a raw frontier?

  That thought carried her clear to the boarding gangway, which proved to be much flimsier than she'd expected. Jasak said something to Gadrial, speaking much too quickly for Shaylar's very limited Andaran to follow. The other woman looked at him, managed a wan smile, and shook her head. Then she stepped onto the steeply inclined gangway, gripping its rope rail firmly, and started up it to the deck towering above them in the cool morning light. Jasak watched her for a moment, then turned to Shaylar and surprised her by producing a wry smile, despite the visible weight on his shoulders.

  "Women go first," he said in careful, slow Andaran, holding out his hand, and Shaylar actually flushed, embarrassed that his courtesy had, as a surprise. Despite all of the obvious care he'd taken to protect her and Jathmar, she'd still allowed herself to expect a lack of consideration from him.