Hell's Gate-ARC

by David Weber

Neshok turned on his bootheel and started toward the fort without another word.

  "If there'd been any more warmth in that greeting," Shaylar murmured to Jathmar in Shurkhali, "the air would've frozen solid."

  "I'd say that was a bit of an understatement," Jathmar agreed. "And frankly, after what Gadrial told us about this mul Gurthak, I find that disturbing. I hope she was right about how hard it would be for anyone to take us out of Jasak's custody!"

  "Yes. Mother Marthea, yes," Shaylar replied fervently, but her attention wasn't on Neshok. She was looking at two men who stood well back in the little crowd beside the hard-packed dirt road leading from the dragonfield to the fort's gates. Most of the men in that crowd were soldiers, but not the two who'd drawn her attention. They stood out because they weren't in uniform, and because they were also older than the soldiers standing around them.

  Jathmar followed her eyes and frowned.

  "Wonder who they are?" he muttered under his breath.

  "So do I." The edge in Shaylar's voice surprised Jathmar. She'd wrapped both arms around herself as though still warding off the chill of flying across the mountains, and her reaction worried him.

  He turned his attention back to the two unknowns. Both were in their forties or fifties, at a glance, and although Jathmar knew nothing of Arcanan fashions, their clothing was clearly made of high-quality material. It looked custom-tailored, too. That kind of garment wasn't what he'd expected to see in a frontier fort, and they looked even more out of place than he felt.

  According to Jasak and Gadrial, Arcana's exploration of virgin universes was conducted by the military. So who were these two civilians? And what were they doing out here among the trees, mosquitos, and swamps, wearing tailored garments made of what looked like silk?

  Government functionaries of some kind, perhaps. Or could they be independent businessmen intent on opening trade routes? He knew there wasn't much point in speculating in the dark, but something about them compelled his curiosity. There was a hardness in their eyes, or perhaps a hooded look of speculation, that made him intensely uncomfortable. He'd grown used to seeing fear, or at least anxiety, as the rumors of the Sharonians' "demonic weapons" traveled up the transit chain ahead of them. But these men weren't looking at Shaylar and him fearfully. There was something measuring, watchful . . . calculating about them.

  He couldn't put his mental finger on just what it was about them that bothered him any more accurately than that, but it was enough to raise his hackles, and he put his arm around Shaylar as they walked past the silently watching civilians.

  Neshok led them up the road toward the new fort, and Jathmar abruptly found the two civilians displaced from the forefront of his concerns. The landing field was literally ringed with dragons. There were dozens—possibly even scores—of the beasts, and their path led them directly past half a dozen of them.

  Skyfang, the dragon which had transported them here from Fort Wyvern, had shown no sign of Windclaw's ferociously hostile initial reaction to Shaylar. Jathmar had concluded that she'd been right in her suspicion that it was her attempt to use her Voice which had set the original transport dragon off. Now, as they headed across in front of six of them, he found himself hoping fervently that they'd both been correct after all.

  Most of the beasts ignored them completely, but one of them raised its head abruptly. The predominately crimson and gold beast was smaller than any of the dragons Jathmar had previously seen, but that scarcely made it tiny. Its head was still longer than his body, much less Shaylar's, and the spikes protecting its throat and head were sharper looking, and proportionately longer, than Windclaw's had been.

  It cocked its head, like some huge falcon, turning to fix its knife-sharp gaze upon Shaylar, and its mouth opened, showing carnivore fangs the size of serving platters and a long, shockingly red forked tongue. Then its forefeet thrust at the rain-slick ground, shoving it half-upright, and it hissed like a Trans-Temporal Express locomotive venting steam.

  Shaylar went white. She closed her eyes, trembling, and Jathmar felt her desperate effort to completely close down any hint of Talent. Even the marriage bond was abruptly muted, almost impossible to feel, and his arm tightened around her.

  The dragon's reaction hadn't escaped Jasak or Gadrial. As if they'd been the telepaths, the two of them moved as one, in perfect coordination, to interpose their own bodies between the clearly agitated beast and Shaylar. And Gadrial, Jatham realized with sudden shock was abruptly outlined by a literal corona of light. Fire seemed to crackle in midair, three inches from her skin, her hands rose in an odd, intensely graceful posture which reminded him of some sort of martial artist, and he felt a sudden, ominous, ozone-breathing pressure radiating from her. It was like knowing he was standing directly in the path of a lightning bolt, a corner of his mind gibbered, and for the first time since they'd met, he was actually afraid of her.

  Neshok, on the other hand, didn't even seem to have noticed. He'd halted, but he was staring with obvious perplexity—and what looked like quickly growing suspicion—back and forth between the dragon and the two Sharonians, not at Jasik or Gadrial.

  "What—?" he began, but Jasak overrode his questions savagely.

  "Get us out of here—now!" he barked. Neshok turned his head to glare at him, and Jasak snarled. "Now, godsdamn it! Unless you want a massacre on your hands!"

  Fury tightened the other hundred's expression, but then he glanced at Gadrial, and his eyes widened. He'd opened his mouth as if to say something more, but it snapped shut as more fire began to crackle at the tips of her fingers. That and the look on Jasak's face—and the fact that a second dragon was beginning to rouse—seemed to get through to him. He barked orders to the escort, and the entire party moved into a half-run.

  The agitated dragons began to calm once more as soon as Shaylar was forty or fifty yards away. The one who'd roused up first looked after her with one last almost querulous hiss. Then it, too, settled back into its original position and laid its fearsome head on its forelegs.

  "It wasn't me, Jasak! It wasn't! It couldn't have been me! I wasn't doing anything!" Shaylar cried, and Jasak looked down at her as she hastened along between him and Jathmar.

  "I believe you," he said, laying his own hand on her shoulder, but he also shook his head. "I just wish I knew why those two reacted that way, when none of the transport dragons have since Windclaw."

  "What are you talking about?" Neshok demanded harshly. He was glaring at Shaylar, his eyes flinty, and he didn't seem to be very much happier than that with Jasak. "What does she mean, she 'wasn't doing anything'?"

  "The transport dragon that airlifted my wounded out reacted violently to Lady Nargra-Kolmayr's presence." Jasak's voice was level, his expression calm, but Shaylar could sense his emotions through the hand still on her shoulder. He wasn't at all happy about broaching this entire subject, she realized. "We didn't have any problems with the dragon from Fort Wyvern, though. I'd hoped it was just a fluke the first time."

  "That still doesn't answer my question," Neshok said flatly, stopping in the road now that they were far enough away from the dragons and glaring at Jasak. "What did she mean about not doing anything?"

  "Lady Nargra-Kolmayr," Jasak said, and Shaylar realized he was deliberately stressing the Andaran title he'd suddenly assigned her rather than use her first name, "has what her people call a Talent. It's an ability to communicate with others using her mind, and we think some of the dragons may be reacting to it."

  Neshok's eyes flared wide in sudden alarm, and Jasak shook his head quickly.

  "It's very much like our Gifts, Hundred," he said. "In fact, you could just think of it as a different sort of Gift. It doesn't turn her into some kind of magic mindreader, nor can she influence your thoughts or communicate with her own people from this far away."

  "And just how do you know that?" Neshok demanded, his face dark with anger.

  "I know because she told me so," Jasak said flatly. "And because if there'd been any way for
her to use her Talent effectively against us, she'd certainly have done so, and she hasn't."

  "Because she told you so!" Neshok repeated in a scathing tone, completely ignoring Jasak's second sentence. "The woman's a prisoner of war, and you expect her to tell you the truth? Are you a complete idiot? She's going to lie with every breath she takes! I ought to put a bolt through her right now—or throw her back to the dragons!"

  Jathmar stiffened, his hands closing into fists. Neshok was speaking too rapidly, and too angrily, for Jathmar to completely follow the conversation, but he'd understood enough. He started to step in front of Shaylar, but before he could move, Gadrial's hand—no longer limned in fire, thank the gods!—closed on his elbow. He looked down at her, then looked back up . . . just in time to see Jasak step in front of his wife.

  Jasak was a good three inches taller than Neshok, and much broader across the shoulders, but it was his expression and his body language, not his size, which made the other hundred abruptly step back a pace.

  "I'm getting tired of explaining this to pigheaded, pea-brained, bigmouthed excuses for Andaran officers who frigging well ought to know better," Sir Jasak Olderhan said very, very softly. "But I'll try one more time, and I advise you to listen to me very carefully, because I'm not going to repeat myself again. Lady Nargra-Kolmayr and her husband are my shardonai. Any insult, any injury or threat, offered to them is offered to a member of my family. Perhaps you'd care to reconsider that last sentence of yours."

  His hand hovered in the vicinity of the short sword at his hip, and Jathmar's tension clicked up yet another notch as Jugthar Sendahli and Otwal Threbuch quietly stepped out on either side of Jasak, facing Neshok and his detail. The Second Andaran Scouts, Jathmar abruptly remembered from Gadrial's explanations, were the hereditary command of the Dukes of Garth Showma. Apparently, he realized, that relationship extended rather further than he'd assumed it did.

  None of them actually touched a weapon. But none of them had to, either.

  "Very well," a white-lipped Neshok grated after a moment. "I withdraw the last sentence. But shardonai or not, how can you be so sure they're telling you the truth? For that matter, how can you be sure you didn't decide to make them shardonai in the first place because she somehow influenced your mind?"

  "Because she was three-quarters unconscious with a concussion when I made my decision," Jasak said almost contemptuously. "And because after three weeks in their company, I've discovered that unlike certain Arcanans I could mention, these are both people of honor who understand the mutual obligations of a baranal and his shardonai. They may not volunteer information, and they may even refuse to answer questions, but they won't lie to me, Hundred."

  Neshok's angry, frightened expression didn't change. He was obviously not convinced, but equally obviously he couldn't think of a way to continue the argument without edging back into potentially dangerous waters. That was when Gadrial spoke up unexpectedly.

  "Lady Nargra-Kolmayr is as clear as glass, Hundred Neshok. It's not in her nature to lie! God above, man—all you have to do is look at her to know that!"

  Gadrial's outburst had drawn Neshok's angry eyes back to her. Now those eyes softened with an expression of pity.

  "Magister Kelbryan, your work with Magister Halathyn vos Dulainah is renowned, even out here on the frontier. I can't imagine the grief and shock you must have experienced after his murder by these—" his glance flicked once more toward Shaylar and Jathmar, hardening again "—barbarians."

  White-hot fury exploded suddenly inside Shaylar made even worse by the lingering echoes of the terror she'd felt when the dragons began to hiss, and she jerked free of Jathmar's arm. She took a long, angry stride towards Neshok, stepping around Jasak. The Fort Wyvern officer towered above her, but the mantle of her anger made her a giant.

  "Barbarians?" she hissed in his face. "Don't you dare call us barbarians! Don't you dare use the word 'murder' after what your soldiers did to us! We were civilians, damn you—civilians! And if you don't believe that, look what happened when your soldiers finally had to face ours. You kill civilians—use weapons that burn civilians alive!—but you call me a barbarian?

  "My country is four thousand years old—four thousand years of civilization, art, science, and literature! Sharonian civilization is over five thousand years old. Five thousand years of recorded history—how many do you have?"

  Neshok looked like a man who'd picked up his boot and suddenly discovered a cobra in it.

  "We're not the ones who've acted like barbarians, but don't think for a moment that we don't know how to respond to barbarians! My mother is a Shurkhali ambassador! Do you think she, or any of our countries, will ever forgive you for what you've done? They think—she thinks—that I'm dead, curse you!"

  She stood there in a puddle of utter silence, glaring up at Neshok, and naked shock had detonated behind his eyes. Even Jasak seemed stunned.

  "Your mother is an ambassador?" he asked hoarsely, and she turned on him with flaming eyes, too shaken by the encounter with the dragons to contain the pain and rage Neshok had roused.

  "Yes! What? You thought our people were too primitive, too violent for something that civilized?"

  "No, Shaylar," he said, deliberately taking both her hands in his so that she would know. "I never thought that. Any civilization that could produce you is worthy of respect. But your mother's status makes this whole situation even more difficult, more complicated."

  Shaylar bit down on a hysterical laugh as it tried to break loose in her throat.

  "You don't have the slightest idea how much more," she told him. "You don't have any concept of how the Shurkhali honor code is going to react to what's happened."

  "No, but I'm trying to understand, for your sake, as well as because it's my duty. And it's also," he flicked a cold glance at Neshok, "just one more reason to treat Lady Nargra-Kolmayr and her husband with courtesy."

  His eyes locked with Neshok's, and a muscle jumped in the other man's jaw.

  "The Two Thousand is waiting," he half-snapped after a moment and turned on his heel one more to march toward the fort.

  Some people, Shaylar thought, couldn't be forced to see reason, even at gunpoint. But Neshok's reaction to Halathyn's death—not to mention his instant, unthinking attitude towards her and Jathmar—only underscored how dark the future had become.

  She could scarcely imagine how Sharona must have reacted to the belief that she was dead. She'd never been a vain person, but she'd been embarrassedly aware for years of the way the Portal Authority had used her face, her image, in its public relations campaigns. She knew how all of Shurkhal, even the men who'd harbored the most reservations about her choice of career, had taken a fierce and possessive pride in her accomplishments. If Darcel had relayed everything she'd transmitted over their link before she was injured, then all of Sharona had probably been swept by a fury it hadn't seen in centuries, if not longer. As for how Shurkal must have reacted—!

  Now Neshok's attitude gave her some idea of how Arcana was going to react to news of Magister Halathyn's death. And the fact that he'd been killed by an Arcanan soldier, not by Sharona, wasn't going to matter a bit.

  Her shoulders slumped as an abrupt, crushing weariness crashed down across her. She wanted to curl up someplace sheltered and private, someplace she could hide. Someplace where men like Neshok didn't exist, where monstrous weapons didn't threaten Sharonian lives, and where no unnatural creatures could crawl inside her mind.

  "We'll settle you into your quarters and let you rest," Jasak promised her quietly. "I can see how shaken you are. Jathmar will help you, all right? It shouldn't be too far now."

  She just nodded, and he released her hands. Jathmar slid his arm back around her, taking some of her weight, and met Jasak's gaze levelly.

  "When we leave this place," he said in a low voice, "would it be too much to ask to have those murderous beasts moved someplace else?"

  "That's a very reasonable request," Jasak said, and turned
a cool glance on Neshok. "And a damned good idea from a security standpoint. Not only is it my duty to protect my shardonai, but I somehow doubt the Commandery would appreciate losing Lady Nargra-Kolmayr to dragon attack."

  "They'll be moved," Neshok snapped without even turning his head. "Satisfied?"

  "For now," Jasak said coldly. "In the meantime, if you'll escort us to our assigned quarters, I'll see my shardonai—" he emphasized the noun deliberately "—settled in, and then pay my compliments to the Two Thousand. Will he want to debrief Magister Kelbryan or Lady Nargra-Kolmayr and her husband?"

  "If he does, he'll send for them. This way."

  If anyone thought the confrontation between Neshok and Jasak was over, they were speedily disabused of the notion when they reached the fort and Neshok tried to lock Shaylar and Jathmar into the cell beside vos Hoven's.

  It was not a wise decision on his part. The exchange between him and Jasak was short, ice cold, and bitter, with Neshok taking spiteful refuge in the instructions he'd received from Two Thousand mul Gurthak. He insisted that he was merely following mul Gurthak's explicit orders—orders he lacked the authority to countermand.