Hell's Gate-ARC

by David Weber

  "And, third, I believe you." He saw both of his prisoners' taut spines relax ever so slightly, and shook his head. "I believe what you've told me is the truth. That doesn't mean I believe you've told me the entire truth."

  They stiffened again, but he continued calmly.

  "In your places, I certainly wouldn't tell my captors anything which would help them against my people unless I absolutely had to. I've seen enough of both of you by now to realize you won't, either. But you're also both highly intelligent. That means you know that sooner or later you're going to be very thoroughly questioned. Questioned by professional interrogators who know how to put bits and pieces together and learn things you never even realized you were telling them. For the moment, however, and speaking for myself, I'm going to operate on two assumptions. First, that what you've told me up to this point is true. Secondly, that I have your parole."

  Not even Shaylar recognized the last word, and he smiled crookedly.

  "Your 'parole' is your word—your promise—that you won't attempt to escape, that you won't hurt anyone else except in direct self-defense, and that you will refrain from hostile actions so long as you're treated humanely and with respect. And—" he continued, looking directly into Jathmar's eyes as the Sharonian stiffened with an expression of borning outrage "—I believe that if you're honest with yourselves, you have no choice but to acknowledge that you have been treated both humanely—and with respect—by both Gadrial and myself. I can't undo what happened that day in the forest, but I've done the very best I could to see to it that you were treated well afterward."

  Jathmar inhaled, but before he could speak, Shaylar squeezed his hand hard. He turned and looked into her eyes for several heartbeats, then turned back to Jasak.

  "You want us to promise to be . . . obedient prisoners," he said in his slower, more halting Andaran. "What about our duty to escape?"

  "Escape to where, Jathmar?" Gadrial put in gently from her chair. He looked at her, and she smiled sadly. "Even if you could escape custody, where could you go? How could you ever possibly hope to get home on your own?"

  "Gadrial is right," Jasak said as Jathmar looked at her mulishly. "Trust me, however much any of us may regret it, you aren't going to be able to escape, no matter what you do. Unless, of course," his smile turned even more crooked, "your 'Talents' are quite a bit more . . . useful than I've just agreed to assume they are."

  "If escape is so impossible, why should we promise not to?" Jathmar challenged.

  "Because it will affect the precautions I have to take as the officer responsible for you," Jasak replied unflinchingly.

  "But how much longer will you be the officer 'responsible' for us?" Shaylar asked. "I said I trust you, Jasak, and I do. As much as I'll ever be able to trust any Arcanan, at least. But what about that other man—that Hundred Thalmayr? What about all of the other soldiers and officers I've seen glaring at us? Sooner or later, someone senior to you is going to be the one 'responsible' for us. How do we trust him? And why should any promise we make to you affect how he treats us?"

  "Because of that point I told you I'd come back to," Jasak said. "Because I was in command when your people were killed. That makes me responsible for what happened to them, and for everything that's happened to you since."

  "But I know you ordered that other officer not to shoot!" Shaylar protested.

  "Yes, I did. And I doubt very much that even with your Talent you can understand how much it means to me that you realize that. But the officer who opened fire was one of my subordinates. I ought to have ignored the letter of the regulations and relieved him before we ever caught up with your people. I didn't, and after he was killed, after the shooting had become general and I had men down all over that clearing—wounded, dying, dead—I assumed tactical command of the battle. I fought that battle, not Shevan Garlath. And I'd do it again, exactly the way I did it then, under the same circumstances and given what I knew at the time."

  He met the Sharonians' eyes levelly.

  "I had no choice at that point, but that doesn't change the fact that it was my command which attacked you, or that you were civilians who were simply defending yourselves. My men destroyed your lives as surely as they killed your companions, and that leaves me with an honor obligation towards you."

  "Honor obligation?" Jathmar repeated carefully, and Jasak nodded.

  "Among my people—Andarans, not Arcanans as a whole—there's something called shardon. It's the term we use to describe the act of taking someone under your own and your family's shield. You and Shaylar are my shardonai. As the commander of the troops who wronged you and yours, I'm obligated to protect you as I would a member of my own family. In fact, under Andaran law and custom, a shardon is legally a member of the family of his baranal."

  "Which means what?" Jathmar asked.

  "Which means I'm honorbound to refuse to surrender you into any other officer's custody, regardless of our relative ranks. It means my family and I are obligated to see to it that you're treated well, that no one abuses you, and that you're assured of all the personal safeguards any other member of our family would receive. It means that even though you and Shaylar are Sharonian, not Arcanan, any children born to you on Arcanan soil will be Arcanan citizens and entitled to all of the rights and protections of citizenship. No one can take them from you, no one can use them against you, and no one can violate their civil rights. The sole difference between you, as my shardonai, and my sisters or my parents is that the protections which we can extend to you continue to apply only so long as you voluntarily remain under my protection."

  "In your custody, you mean." Jathmar's tone was more cutting than it had been as he made the correction, and Jasak nodded.

  "For all practical purposes, yes," he said unwaveringly. "I'm sorry, but no one can change that. Not now."

  "And how long is your government going to be willing to leave us in your custody?" Shaylar asked tautly.

  "For as long as I, any member of my family, or either one of you is alive," Jasak said flatly.

  The two Sharonians looked at him in obvious disbelief. Then Gadrial cleared her throat.

  "I've lived among Andarans for years," she told them. "There are a lot of things about them and about their honor code that I still don't pretend to understand, but I do know this much. If Jasak tells you his family will protect you, they will protect you."

  "From the entire army? Your entire government?" Jathmar couldn't keep the incredulity out of his voice . . . assuming that he'd tried to.

  "I think you may not fully realize just who Jasak's family is," Gadrial said with a slightly crooked smile. They looked at her, and she shrugged. "Jasak is Sir Jasak Olderhan. His father is Thankhar Olderhan, who happens, among other things, to be the Duke of Garth Showma . . . and the planetary governor of New Arcana. There may be one other Andaran nobleman with as much personal political and military power as His Grace. There couldn't possibly be two of them, though. And under the Andaran honor code, the entire Olderhan family and every one of its dependents and liegemen will die before they allow anyone to harm an Olderhan shardon."

  "And the rest of your government, of your politicians, would allow them to do that?" Shaylar demanded as she and Jathmar looked at Jasak with completely new expressions.

  "Some of them won't like it," Jasak admitted. "Some of them will try to get around it, probably especially among the Mythalans. And there may well be some—especially among the Mythalans—who attempt to step outside the law and justify it on the basis of 'national security.' But," he added in that same flat, inflexible, rock-ribbed voice, "they won't succeed."

  Shaylar and Jathmar looked at one another, then back at him, and as he looked into their eyes, he realized that at last they believed him.

  "All right," Jathmar said finally.

  He tried to keep his voice level, his tone normal, but it was hard. Partly, that was because of the enormous relief flowing through him. He'd had no idea Jasak might come from such a prominent, p
owerful family, nor had it even crossed his mind that the protection of that family might be extended to him and Shaylar. But relieved as he was, grateful as he might be, he couldn't forget that the price tag of that protection amounted to a lifetime as prisoners. He told himself that they'd have been prisoners under any circumstances, that this shardon relationship offered them the chance to live as human beings, anyway. He even knew it was true. But that didn't change the fact that its protection had been extended to them by the very man who acknowledged he was responsible for the massacre of their friends and their own capture in the first place.

  He could feel Shaylar's reaction through the marriage bond, and knew her emotions were far less . . . conflicted than his own. But Shaylar was Shurkhali. She'd been brought up in that culture, that society, and its acceptance of an honor code which had obvious resonances with the one Jasak and Gadrial were describing. Jasak had finally found something Shaylar understood. A rock she could grasp, use as an anchor, and Jathmar was grateful for that, as well. Yet he couldn't quite suppress his resentment of that, either. Of the fact that it was Jasak, her captor—and not her husband—who had provided her with that almost painful sense of an understood security at last.

  "All right," he said again. "We accept that we're . . . shardonai, and that you—and your family—will protect us to the very best of your ability. On that basis, we're willing to give you our 'parole,' but only as long as we to remain with you and under your protection."

  "Thank you," Jasak said softly.

  He sat without saying anything more for the better part of a minute, then he gave himself a shake and looked at Shaylar intently.

  "As a part of your parole, Shaylar," he said, "I need to know how close you have to be to another Voice for him to hear you."

  Shaylar froze. Then she darted an agonized glance at Jathmar. Her husband looked just as startled as she felt, and she kicked herself mentally. They'd already known Jasak was keenly intelligent. Obviously, he'd put two and two together and come up with exactly the answer she'd hoped he wouldn't reach, and she should have realized he would.

  She started to say something. She didn't know what, and it didn't matter, because Jasak's raised hand cut her off before she began.

  "I know you're tempted to lie," he said. "I don't blame you for that. And I won't try to compel you to tell me if you refuse to. But honor obligations cut both ways, at least in Andara. Refusing to answer is one thing; lying to your baranal is another."

  "And if she doesn't answer?" Jathmar asked, bristling with fresh suspicion.

  "If she doesn't answer, then I'll be forced to assume the worst. In that case, my responsibility as an officer in the Army of the Union of Arcana will be to ensure that she isn't in communication with anyone from Sharona. Or, at least, that she has no access to information useful to Sharona. In accordance with the first possibility, I'll ask Gadrial and her colleagues at the Institute to attempt to devise spellware which will permanently shut down Shaylar's 'Voice.' Frankly, I don't know if that would be even remotely possible, however, or how we could test to be sure it was actually working if they did. In the absence of that sort of guarantee, my responsibility then would become preventing her from learning anything useful about Arcana. I'd do so as gently as I possibly could, but the consequence would be effectively close confinement. You would be almost totally isolated. I would vastly prefer to avoid doing that, but the obligations of my officer's oath would leave me no alternative."

  Jathmar began a hot answer, but Shaylar touched his shoulder.

  "Wait, Jath," she said softly in Shurkhali. He looked at her, and she grimaced. "I'm the one who let the cat out of the bag," she said. "I didn't mean to, but he's obviously even sharper than we were afraid he was. And, be honest—is what he's saying really all that unreasonable? If you had a prisoner who had the potential ability to communicate—tracelessly, silently—with an enemy, would you give her access to potentially useful information?"

  "Well . . ." he began, and she shook her head.

  "These people don't have Voices at all, Jath. That means they can't have anything like our Voice Protocols to cover a situation like this. Even if I wanted to tell them how to temporarily disable my Voice, they wouldn't have anyone who could do it!"

  "So you want to tell them the truth? All of it?"

  "They've obviously already figured out I was the one who got word back to Darcel. That's going to give them a minimum range figure, no matter what. But should we try to exaggerate my range or to minimize it?"

  Jathmar thought furiously, trying to keep his expression from showing the depth of his concentration. He wished passionately that they had longer to think about this—or that he'd been smart enough to insist that they think about it in advance. But they hadn't, nor did they dare to hesitate too long before they came up with some sort of answer now. Given what Jasak had said about the difference between lying and simply refusing to divulge information at all, the security offered by the shardon relationship might well disappear if Jasak decided they were lying.

  And, he thought unwillingly, Jasak's right about honor obligations cutting both ways. If we're prepared to accept the protection this relationship offers, then we should damned well accept that we're duty-bound to meet our obligations under it. Besides, if we don't, it might just go away completely, and then what happens?

  "Tell them the truth," he said after a long moment, this time in Andaran.

  "All right," Shaylar said in soft Shurkhali, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Then she looked at Jasak.

  "We're well outside my maximum Voice range," she said unflinchingly, admitting that she was the one whose warning to Darcel Kinlafia had brought the savage counterattack down on Jasak's men. She saw his recognition of that fact flicker in his eyes, but he only nodded, and his voice remained calm, almost gentle.

  "How great is your range?" he asked. "And what sorts of messages can you send?"

  "Range varies with the Voice," she replied. "My range is a bit over eight hundred miles, but even if it were greater than that, no Voice can transmit through a portal. As for messages—" She shrugged. "I can send—could send, if another Voice were in range—any message you could give me. Or, I could link deeply enough with another Voice that he or she could literally see through my eyes, hear through my ears. In that sort of link, the two Voices—"

  Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr sat back on the bed in Gadrial Kelbryan's cabin, holding her husband's hand, looking into the eyes of the man whose honor was all that stood between her and a hostile universe's enmity, and willed for him to recognize her honesty as the ship about her carried her towards a lifetime of captivity.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  "So, have you considered my suggestion?"

  Darcel Kinlafia turned his head and cocked one eyebrow at the towering young man riding beside him. He had to admit that Prince Janaki had become steadily more impressive, not less, in the days they'd spent together. It wasn't just the young man's magnetic personality and obvious intelligence, either. He looked like a crown prince—improbably tall (even for a Calirath), athletic, broad shouldered, and handsome—and the magnificent horse under his saddle and the hawk riding on the frame attached to it only added to that perfection of imagery. With that new sense of awareness, that self-image of himself as a possible political animal, Janaki's suggestions had awakened within him, Kinlafia had come to realize that Janaki chain Calirath was an imperial publicist's dream come true.

  Of course, the prince's horse had never come from a standard PAAF string of mounts, the Voice thought. No doubt the crown prince's sheer size would have made him difficult to mount under any circumstances, but the House of Calirath had been dealing with that particular problem for centuries. Janaki's blue roan—one of a matched pair whose full sibling was trotting along with the column's remounts—was a Ternathian Shikowr, a breed that had been carefully, lovingly developed in the lush, green paddocks and meadows of Ternathia in a breeding program whose stud book had been opened well over t
wo thousand years ago.

  Named after its founding stallion—who, in turn, had been named for the ancient Shurkhali cavalry saber the Empire had adopted for its own mounted troops following their resounding initial defeats at the hands of Shurkhali horsemen—and with careful infusions of Shurkhali bloodlines, as well, the Shikowr was a large, powerful breed. It had a characteristic stance, with the front end thrust forward and the hindlegs straight out behind, and a remarkably smooth gait for a horse which could reach seventeen hands in height. In fact, the Shikowr was unique in that it had no trotting gait at all. Instead, it had two four-beat gaits which allowed it to cover a huge amount of ground in a short time, and instead of trotting, it simply moved directly from its fast marching gait into a smooth canter. The Shikowr was as tall as most heavy draft horses, though it was less heavy, and it was renowned for its combination of speed, intelligence, and sheer endurance.