Hell's Gate-ARC

by David Weber

  Pain flickered through the magister's dark eyes. More pain than mentioning Halathyn usually caused her, Shaylar thought. But whatever its cause, she brushed it off quickly, almost angrily, and continued in that same level tone.

  "No one—especially a magister like me—can fail to respect the work Mythal Falls has carried out over the centuries. But it's unfortunately true that Mythal developed a very different society from the rest of Arcana, one based almost entirely on whether or not the members of that society are Gifted. In fact, I've often thought that they developed their society as a result of their single-minded focus on the principles of magic.

  "If you're Mythalan and Gifted, then you belong to the shakira caste, or perhaps to the multhari caste; if you aren't Gifted, then you belong to the garthan caste. There are some exceptions, but not very many."

  "Castes?" Shaylar frowned at the totally alien word, and Gadrial sighed.

  "The best way to think of it is that the Mythalans divide their society into three distinct groups, what we call 'castes,' each of which have a specific place. The relationships between castes—and what's permissible behavior within a caste—are defined by ironbound tradition and, in most cases, statutory law, as well. For the most part, the caste you belong to—shakira, multhari, or garthan—depends on whether or not you were born Gifted, and there's nothing you can do about that.

  "As I say, the shakira are the Gifted caste. They're the small percentage of the total population, no more than twenty percent or so, at best, who form the tip of the social pyramid. They control the wealth and political power of the entire society, and they think of themselves as extremely enlightened because they practice a form of direct democracy no other Arcanan nation practices. Of course, the only people who get to vote are members of the shakira and traditional multhari families. That's one reason they can use direct democracy; they've got so few voters that the system actually works.

  "Next in power and prestige after the shakira are the multhari, the traditional Mythalan military caste. You might think of them as the Mythalan equivalent of Andarans, although there are tremendous differences between them. Not least because one of the multhari's primary responsibilities is to keep the garthan's neck firmly under the shakira's heel. Some of the multhari—many of them, in fact—are also shakira, and the enlisted ranks of the Mythalan military have always contained quite a lot of garthan, although all of its officers are multhari.

  "In Mythal, most garthan who end up in the army are conscripts. Traditionally, the shakira who entered the army could usually expect to attain high rank, especially if their families were also part of the traditional multhari hierarchy. Since the creation of the Union, there isn't any official Mythalan Army these days, and the integration of the multhari into the Union armed forces hasn't always gone smoothly. They've tended to carry a lot of that traditional shakira sense of superiority and automatic privilege around with them, and they seem to resent the fact that they have to compete with the non-Gifted—and non-Mythalans—on an equal basis for promotion. Their resentment when they don't get it has had a tendency to be . . . fairly evident, let's say, and that's created a lot of friction between them and, say, Andaran or Ransaran personnel.

  "For the last forty years or so, Mythal appears to have been trying to overcome some of those problems. More multhari have been attending the Army Academy at Garth Showma before joining the army, which appears to have smoothed down at least some of the rough edges. For that matter, some of the younger shakira from outside the multhari have actually been signing up for at least a tour or two in the enlisted ranks. They're being encouraged to do so by their caste-lords, on the grounds that whether their caste agrees with the rest of us or not, they're stuck with the terms of the Accords, and they have to learn to get along with those restrictions if they ever want to reduce the traditional friction between their own people and the rest of us.

  "It's at least a pragmatic idea," Gadrial admitted a bit grudgingly, "and I suppose they may actually be sincere. Unfortunately, their 'solution' doesn't come without problems of its own. For example, the soldier you were talking about, Shaylar—vos Hoven—belongs to the shakira. That's what the 'vos' in his name indicates. But Sendahli belongs to the garthan caste. He fled Mythal and enlisted in the Union Army as a way to escape the limited, second-class future which was all he could expect at home. And the reason vos Hoven is under arrest is that Jasak caught him brutally beating Sendahli to extort Sendahli's pay out of him."

  Jathmar frowned deeply and quickly. He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Gadrial continued.

  "The reason he was doing that—and the reason Sendahli was letting him do that, despite the fact that he could have broken vos Hoven's neck any time he wanted to—is that under Mythalan custom and law, garthan have no legal rights in any dispute with a shakira. They can't even testify in court against a shakira defendant. Up until the formation of the Union of Arcana, garthan were legally property. They were required to belong to someone from the shakira caste, and they were denied the right to own property, the right to vote, or the right to choose their own trades and professions . . or to any income they might have earned from that trade or profession. In many cases, they were denied even the right to choose who they married, and even today, Gifted children of garthan parents are taken from their birthparents by the courts and placed for adoption by shakira families."

  "That's barbaric!" Shaylar burst out, and Gadrial nodded.

  "That's exactly what it is," she agreed grimly. "I'm Ransaran. My people believe in the fundamental equality of all human beings. We're the dangerous, humanistic, liberal part of the Union, and there's been a fundamental hostility, almost a hatred, between us and the Mythalans for as long as anyone can remember on either side. Jasak, on the other hand, is an Andaran, and they're as different from us as the Mythalans are. Their entire culture is bound up in concepts of mutual obligation and duty, of responsibilities that define who they are. They believe in the rights of the individual, but they also believe that those rights have to be earned by meeting all of those obligations and responsibilities, and they have no sympathy for anyone who fails to measure up to their standards of honor.

  "Yet they despise the Mythalans as much as we Ransarans do, because of the Mythalan attitude towards the garthan—that the mere fact that people like Sendahli aren't Gifted makes them less than human in the eyes of their own rulers. It turns them into something which exists solely for the convenience of their natural superiors, the shakira. If an Andaran like Jasak considered the non-Gifted as truly inferior—which he never would—his cultural obligation would be to protect and defend them, not to abuse them. When he came across vos Hoven beating Sendahli, he ordered vos Hoven off . . . and vos Hoven tried to kill him."

  Jathmar shook his head in a combination of dismay and disbelief, and Gadrial smiled humorlessly.

  "I'm sure there are people back home in Sharona you wouldn't exactly be proud to be associated with, Jathmar. Maybe not anyone as bad as the Mythalans, but I can't imagine your people are that different from ours, Talent or no. Unfortunately, we Ransarans and Andarans had no choice but to include Mythal in the Union. Partly, because whether we like them or not they do live on the same planet we do, which I suppose gives them at least some inherent right to share in the exploitation of the portals. But, frankly, mostly because when the first portal appeared on Arcana, it sparked the most terrible war in our history. The weapons that were developed were devastating, so terrible we barely managed to stop short of our own complete destruction."

  Jathmar and Shaylar froze, their faces suddenly tight with fear.

  "Andara and Ransar realized the situation was about to spin totally out of control," Gadrial continued grimly. "We proposed the creation of the Union as a world-government to ensure that every Arcanan nation had the same opportunities to profit from the existence of the portals, and the Andarans supported us strongly. It was only our united front which forced Mythal to accept the proposal, and the
Mythalans held out for a much greater degree of local autonomy—essentially the protection of their own social system within their own territory—than any of the rest of us wanted to give them. Unfortunately, they'd been the leading researchers for the weapons which had been used in the Portal Wars. They had more of them them, and better ones, than the rest of us, and they refused to destroy them unless we accepted their terms in that regard."

  Shaylar's face was white as she absorbed the implications of magical weapons capable of destroying an entire planet's civilization. Jathmar looked equally horrified, and Gadrial faced them squarely.

  "I know what you're afraid of, and I don't blame you. But I will tell you there are severe limitations on even the most deadly weapon, when it's applied to inter-universal warfare. For one thing, no spell can be cast through a portal, so you'd still have to physically assault each portal and establish a bridgehead on the other side before you could deploy any sorcerous weapon. That wasn't a factor in the Portal Wars, because they were fought entirely on Arcana, over who'd end up with possession of the portal in the first place.

  "For a second thing, those weapons were outlawed two hundred years ago. As part of the Union Accords, all signatories were required to destroy all weapons of mass destruction and the spellware and research which had supported them. Several other particularly nasty spells were outlawed at the same time, and an inspection process was set up to ensure that there were no holdouts and that no one was doing fresh research in the proscribed areas."

  "But if things get nasty enough, your people could always change the law, couldn't they?"

  "Yes, Jathmar, we could," Gadrial said very, very quietly. "And the people most likely to push for doing just that are going to be the Mythalans. They're xenophobic to an almost crippling degree, even with their fellow Arcanans. I don't even want to think about how they're going to react when they find out about your people. Especially," she smiled wanly, "because they're going to think they're looking at an entire worldwide civilization of Ransarans."

  Shaylar and Jathmar looked at one another, and Gadrial leaned forward in her chair to take Shaylar's hand. Shaylar's eyes stung with tears as she realized the other woman was deliberately giving her the opportunity to read her emotions, her honesty.

  "The Andarans and Ransarans would never stand for the resurrection of those hideous weapons," she said flatly. "Not unless your people were foolish enough to convince us that our only other alternative was our own complete destruction. From what I've seen of the two of you, I don't think that's ever going to happen. I can't promise that, obviously, but I truly, truly believe it."

  She decided—again—not to mention the fact that she'd already received specific instructions from mul Gurthak to program all available data on the Fallen Timbers cluster into the other three prototypes of the portal detector she and Halathyn had come out here to field test. She could think of only one reason he might want those, and while she had to agree, however unwillingly, with the logic, she doubted that Shaylar or Jathmar would find the news reassuring.

  "Still, you need to be aware that Mythalans share neither my own people's belief in the inherent rights of the individual—especially not of non-Gifted individuals—nor (to anyone outside their own caste, at least) Jasak's people's ironclad belief in honor obligations and an individual's overriding obligation to meet them. You need to be careful—very careful—what you say to any of them, and you have to be aware that if one of them thinks he sees an opportunity to get around Jasak's protection, he may well try to seize it.

  "That's the bad news. The good news is that seventy or eighty percent of the entire Arcanan army is Andaran, just like Five Hundred Grantyl. Even if they don't like what Jasak's done, they'll respect it, and they won't like it one bit if some Mythalan dishonors all of Andara by harming you in any way."

  Shaylar thought about that conversation three days later as their transport dragon circled above yet another fortress. This one was even bigger than Fort Wyvern, and unless she was very much mistaken, it lay in what would have been east Farnalia back home in Sharona. Endless ocean waves of coniferous forest spread out in every direction, and the flight over the sharp-spined mountains between Fort Wyvern's portal and this new fort—Fort Talon—had been just as freezingly cold as Jasak had warned them that it would be.

  It had also required them to fly so high that the dragon's pilot had issued each of his passengers a small cylinder of oxygen attached by a tube to a tightfitting mask which had covered mouth and nose. Shaylar had huddled down in her thick, fur-lined flying garments and leaned against Jathmar's back as the dragon carried them through the ice-cold, crystal-clear gulfs of the heavens. Despite her protective clothing (and another one of those unnatural seeming little spells which had actually heated her furs), she'd never been so cold—nor felt so far from Shurkhal's beloved, sunstruck warmth—in her entire life, and she'd been almost prayerfully thankful when they landed on the western side of those towering mountains.

  The total flight from Fort Wyvern had taken almost a full three days. She and Jathmar had been rather relieved to realize there were some real physical constraints on the Arcanans' uncanny capabilities. Dragons could fly at preposterous speeds, but their endurance clearly wasn't unlimited. They appeared to be capable of perhaps a thousand miles or a bit more in a single day, but the greater exertion of crossing those high mountains had taken its toll. Their dragon had required additional rest after they finally landed, and Jasak and the pilot had agreed to take an extra day at the small, bare-bones dragonfield.

  But they were here at last, descending through a drizzling rain towards their next destination. Their next interim destination, she reminded herself grimly, smearing moisture away as she wiped her protective goggles and recalled what Gadrial had said about the distance between them and New Arcana.

  Fort Talon's portal rose out of the forests behind it. It was larger than Fort Wyvern's, and the terrain on the other side of it looked like the flat sweep of Jathmar's native New Ternath's midwestern plains. She could see a small river, but it was late night on the far side, and she didn't have much time to consider details before the dragon planed gracefully down. She was still trying to get used to how suddenly and abruptly the huge beasts decelerated when they landed, and her arms tightened around Jathmar's waist as they hit the ground.

  Then they were down—once again in one piece—and she drew a huge breath of relief.

  I'm going to have to get over this fear of landing, she told herself firmly. Of course, given how far we've got to go, I should have plenty of time for it.

  The thought made her chuckle sourly, and then they were once again climbing down for yet another brief stay.

  Aside from her, Jathmar, Jasak, and Gadrial, they were accompanied only by Jugthar Sendahli, Otwal Threbuch, Javelin Shulthan, and Bok vos Hoven. That left a lot of unused passenger space aboard the dragon, and Shaylar was just as happy that it did. vos Hoven was a brooding, hate-filled presence, and she was relieved that there was enough room for him to be kept well away from her and Jathmar. Not that the Mythalan was likely to pose much of a threat, given his manacles and the eagle eye Threbuch kept trained upon him. Shaylar was reasonably certain that nothing would have pleased Threbuch more than for vos Hoven to try something which, regrettably, ended up with the prisoner plunging several thousand feet to his doom after a brief, desperate struggle with his guard. From vos Hoven's attitude, he probably thought the same thing.

  A uniformed reception committee waited for them on the edge of the dragonfield hacked out of the virgin forest which rose like green walls around it. None of them were Mythalans, and all of them looked remarkably young, certainly not much older than Jasak. Apparently the fort's commander couldn't be bothered to greet the new arrivals in person, and she saw what looked like a hint of irritation far back in Jasak's eyes.

  "Hundred Olderhan," their baranal said, with one of his people's crisp, clenched-fist salutes, "en route to New Arcana with Magister Kelbryan and party."


  "Commander of One Hundred Neshok," the officer Jasak had greeted responded in a cool voice. "You're late, Olderhan. Five Hundred Klian's hummer message told us to expect you three days ago."

  "We had a weather delay at Fort Wyvern," Jasak replied in a level voice. "And the pilot and I agreed that the dragon needed some extra rest after clearing the mountains."

  "I see." Neshok's tone made it perfectly clear he did nothing of the sort, Shaylar thought, holding Jathmar's hand tightly. The Fort Wyvern hundred gazed at them for a second or two, then looked back at Jasak.

  "The Commander of Two Thousand will see you shortly. Follow me."