by David Weber
He nodded, mouth firming with decision. He couldn't undo what had already happened, but he could at least buy some time, and he intended to do just that. Pulling everyone back from the swamp portal to Fort Rycharn wouldn't be easy with only a single transport dragon available, but it would be one way to dig a hole and fill it in behind them.
If Shaylar's party had summoned a rescue party, it would find only the abandoned camp. Let it hunt through seven hundred miles of virgin, trackless swamp if it wanted to. By the time it could find Fort Rycharn, even that wouldn't do it any good, if Jasak had his way. Not if he could convince Five Hundred Klian to pull all the way back to the Chalar arrival portal and put twenty-six hundred more miles of water between any search party and the route to Arcana.
Time, he thought. That's what we need?time. Time to get word back up the transit chain. Time for someone who knows what the hell he's doing to get back here and handle the next contact with these people. Time to figure out a way to somehow get a handle on this situation before it spins totally out of control.
And the way to get that time was to make sure that anyone from the other side couldn't find a trace of Arcana.
Not until Arcana was good and ready to be found.
Chapter Thirteen
Jathmar floated in the darkness of the still, warm depths, drifting slowly and steadily toward a sunlit surface far above him. The light grew stronger, reaching down towards him, and something stirred in sleepy protest. He reached out to the darkness, wrapping it about himself, like a child burrowing deep into a goose down comforter. He didn't want to wake up, didn't want to leave the safe, still quiet. He didn't remember why he didn't want to wake, but his drowsy mind knew that something waited for him. Something he didn't want to face.
His eyes opened, and he reached out, as automatically as breathing, for Shaylar's familiar touch.
Panic struck like a spiked hammer.
She wasn't there. Where Shaylar should have been, he found only a roaring, pain-filled blackness. The shockwave of loss jolted him into full consciousness with a sharp gasp of anguished terror, and his eyes snapped open.
Sunlight burned down over him, hot and humid. There was no trace of the glorious autumn woods he remembered; all he could see was a vast stretch of muddy water and rank vegetation, heavy with the smell of rot and mold and fecundity. The trees growing at the water's edge, some growing in the water itself, were tropical varieties, heavy with vines, with no trace of the colors of a northern fall. The voices of birds?some raucous, some musical, some like those he'd never heard before?sounded through the hot, dense stillness, huge butterflies drifted over and among the swamp grasses, like living jewels, and the whine of insects hung heavy on the thick, steamy air.
He lay on something simultaneously firm and yet soft-textured, like a folding canvas camp cot, and his thoughts fluttered and twisted, trapped between confusion and the strobing panic radiating from the absence where Shaylar ought to have been. He hung transfixed between seriously broken thoughts. Then voices registered, and movement, as well, close by. He sat up and?
He yelled and scrambled wildly backwards on the seat of his trousers. The "camp cot" under him never even wiggled, but he shot over its edge, sprawling onto muddy ground a full two feet lower than whatever had been supporting him. He panted, groping instinctively for his rifle, for his revolver, even for his belt knife, and his scrabbling hands found nothing but more mud.
The … thing … turned its horror of a head to peer down, down, down at him just as his frantically searching hand closed on a dead branch. The improvised club would be useless against a thing like that, but it was better than blunt fingernails, and he came to his knees, swinging the branch wildly up between himself and it.
The sudden flurry of shouts behind him barely registered. He ignored them, all of his attention fixed on the scaled monstrosity, until a uniformed man with a crossbow stepped in front of him. The soldier shouted and pointed his impossible weapon, but not at the horror looming over them. He aimed it at Jathmar. Then another man appeared, wearing the same uniform and snarling orders?or spitting curses?in a voice of white-hot fury. The first man lowered his crossbow and sent the second a hangdog look with something that sounded like an unhappy apology. The second man?the officer, Jathmar realized?said something else, his tone considerably less sharp but still reprimanding, and the crossbowman came to what had to be a position of attention and saluted oddly, touching his left shoulder with his right fist.
The officer nodded dismissal, watched a moment while the crossbowman marched off to wherever he'd come from, then turned his own attention to Jathmar.
Jathmar clutched his stupid stick, panting and sweating in the supercharged swampy air, and the officer met his gaze squarely. He held it, never taking his eyes from Jathmar's, and issued what was clearly another order.
Another man appeared and shouted at the beast, and Jathmar's eyes snapped back to the towering horror. It looked down at the man who'd shouted, rustled enormous demon's wings, and hissed, but it also moved away. The soft ground sucked at its immense, clawed feet as it slunk off, if anything that size could be said to slink …
"Jathmar."
The sound of his own name whipped him back around to the officer. Aside from a long knife or short sword at his left hip, the other man wore no obvious weapon, but Jathmar had no doubt that he faced the commander of all the other armed men surrounding him and dared make no move at all. Then he frowned.
"How do you know my name?" he demanded.
The other man clearly didn't understand his question. He held up both hands in a trans-universal sign for "I don't have the least idea what you just said." Despite his own panic, despite the terror pulsing through him at the marriage bond's continued silence, Jathmar's lips quirked in bitter amusement. But then the officer in front of him said another word.
"Shaylar."
"Where is she?? Jathmar snarled, any temptation towards amusement disappearing into the suddenly refocused vortex of a panic far more terrible than he could ever have felt for himself. The club came up again, hovered menacingly between him and his enemy, and his lips drew back from his teeth in an animal snarl.
And then memory struck with such brutality he actually staggered, crying out in remembered agony. He was on fire, caught in the withering heat of an incandescent fireball, flesh blazing even as he fought to reach Shaylar, but he couldn't, and?
Someone moved toward him urgently, and the club came back up. A guttural sound clogged his throat, hot and hungry with primeval rage and a berserker's fury. He heard the officer saying something else, something sharp and urgent, and he didn't care. The club came back, poised to strike, and then it froze as his eyes focused on its target.
It wasn't another soldier; it was a girl. A slender, lovely Uromathian girl, taller than his Shaylar, but still small, delicate. She was saying his name, then Shaylar's name, pointing urgently to one side.
Its a trick! his mind shrieked, but he looked anyway.
The tents registered first. There was an entire encampment of them, in orderly rows, and more incongruously armed soldiers swam into view, their crossbows pointed carefully at the muddy ground. Then he saw the glassy tubes, and sweat and terror crawled down his back as he remembered the fireballs.
Then he saw the wounded. The brutal carnage of gunshot wounds registered in a kaleidoscope of torn flesh, shattered limbs, blood splashes on bandages, clothing, and skin. Someone cried out, the sound knife-sharp and piteous, as a wound was re-bandaged. The sights and sounds shocked him, horrified him … gratified him. And while those conflicting emotions hammered each other in his chest, he saw her.
She was literally so close he'd overlooked her, caught by the deeply shocking sights further afield. He fell to his knees beside her, barely aware of his own anguished moan, completely oblivious for the moment to the way her strange "cot" hovered unsupported above the ground.
She was alive, breathing slowly, steadily. But her face … His breath caught. O
ne whole side of her face was a swollen, purple mass of damage. Bruises had nearly obliterated her left eye, and it looked as if her nose might well be broken. Cuts and scrapes along her swollen cheek and brow told their own story, and memory struck again.
The fireball exploded all around them once more, as if it had just happened. He could literally feel himself flying into the tangle of deadwood while his skin and hair crisped in unbearable agony. He groped for his own face, the back of his neck, shocked all over again by a complete and impossible absence of pain. He found no charred skin, no blisters, no burns at all, and that was impossible. His rational mind gibbered?he'd been burned, horribly. He knew it, and his flesh shuddered and flinched from the memory of it. Yet he wasn't burned now, and that simply couldn't be true.
He knelt in the mud beside his wife and literally trembled in the face of far too many things he couldn't comprehend. Then her eyelashes shivered, a soft sound?half-sigh, half-whimper?ghosted from her lips, and he dropped everything. Dropped the club he still held, his vast confusion, even his attention for the enemy, and swept her up in his arms. He folded her close, held her like fragile glass, rocking on his knees, and buried his face in her singed and scorched hair.
"Shaylar," he gasped raggedly. "Shaylar, gods. You're still with me, love!"
The silence in her mind terrified him. He could feel her slender weight in his arms, feel the steady beat of her heart, hear her breathing, but when he reached with his mind, she simply wasn't there. Fresh horror rolled through him as the savagery of her bruised and battered face coupled with the silence of her mind in nightmare dread. What if?
Her eyes opened. They were hazy, at first. Blank with confusion … until she saw him.
"Jathmar!"
Her arms were suddenly around him. Jathmar was no giant. Faltharians tended to be tallish, and he was, yet he was also whipcord thin, built more for speed and endurance than brawn. Shaylar, on the other hand, was tiny, even for a Shurkhali. She was a most satisfactory size for hugging, in his opinion, but she'd always said she felt like a kitten trying to hug a mastiff when she returned the favor. They'd laughed over it for years, but today she clutched him so tightly he knew her fingers were leaving fresh bruises on the miraculously undamaged skin of his back, and it felt good. So good.
She buried her face against his chest, weeping with shocking strength, and he brushed back her hair, smoothed the scorched tresses and tangles which would take shears to put right. When he could finally bear to let go of her long enough to sit back and peer into her eyes, she touched his face, wonderingly.
"Oh, Jath," she whispered, huge eyes still brimming with tears. "You're a miracle, love."
"I?" He swallowed. "I was burned. Wasn't I?"
"Yes." The single word was barely audible, and she nodded. "Their healer came. He?" It was her turn to swallow hard. "You were dying, Jath. I knew you were. But he gave you back to me. He touched you, just touched you, and the burns healed. Like the gods themselves had reached down to make you whole again."
The swamp and even her face wavered in his awareness. No Talent could do something like that. Even the most Talented Healers were limited mostly to healing minds which had been shattered, or encouraging the body to heal itself more effectively. They could work wonders enough, but none that came close to this.
The shiver began in his bones, and he turned his head almost involuntarily to stare at the man who stood watching them. Just watching. Not threatening, not intruding. Their officer looked like an ordinary man, they looked ordinary, and yet …
"I don't understand." He brought his gaze back to Shaylar. "If they could do this for me, why haven't they healed you? Or," he added, his voice turning harsh and bitter, "The men we shot to pieces?"
"I don't know." She shook her head. "None of it makes sense. But these people, Jath, they're not like us. Not at all. I think their Healers are more … more energy-limited than ours are." It was obvious to him that she was searching for words, trying to explain something which had puzzled her just as much as it did him. "I don't think they encourage the body to heal; I think they make it heal. When their Healer was working on you, you glowed, and there was this tremendous sense of energy, of power, coming from somewhere. I think they can do things our Healers could never even imagine, but they can only do so much of it before they … exhaust themselves. And they only have one real Healer, so I think they must be rationing the healing he can do, using it for the most critical cases."
"Or the ones with valuable information," he said bitterly before he could stop himself.
"That's probably part of it," she said unflinchingly, "but I don't think that's all of it. They put you first in line because you were the worst hurt of all."
Doubt flickered in his eyes, and she shook her head.
"I mean it, Jath. The woman with them, Gadrial, she's some kind of Healer, too, but not a very strong one. Or not by these people's standards, anyway. She wasn't strong enough to heal either of us, but …" Shaylar bit her lip. "Without her, you would have died before their real Healer ever got to you."
Her voice had dropped to a terrible whisper, and his blood ran cold. Yes, his memories were brutal enough to believe that. He didn't need the inexplicably broken marriage bond to sense her deep anguish, the horror of her belief that he was already dead still burning in her memory, and his mind flinched like a frightened animal from the vision of her all alone among their enemies.
"It's all right," he whispered raggedly, pulling her close again. "It's all right, I'm still with you."
But even as he cradled his shaken wife, his gaze sought and found the girl?Gadrial?who stood a few feet from the officer. She wasn't Uromathian, no matter what she looked like. It took a real effort to dismiss his preconceived notions, to remind himself that she wouldn't think like a Uromathian or hold the same opinions, attitudes, biases, or customs. And he owed her his life. For a Faltharian, life-debt was a serious business, entailing obligations, formal courtesies, reciprocal bonds of protection, none of which she would understand.
And none of which he particularly relished.
He would owe the other, stronger Healer, as well, he realized, wherever he or she might be. That didn't make him any happier, he admitted. And meanwhile, Gadrial was watching him, her expression uncertain. When he met her gaze, she gave him a tentative smile. Very sweet, very human. Very … normal.
Another shiver touched his impossibly healed back, which, he realized for the first time, was bare. Startled, he glanced down and discovered that his entire shirt was missing. Momentary disorientation swept over him as he found himself kneeling on the ground beside his wife, shirtless, just beginning to realize that he had absolutely no idea where he was, or how far he and Shaylar were from the site of that hideous battle, or how much time had passed. The totality of his ignorance appalled him, and he looked back into Shaylar's worried eyes and frowned as something important nibbled at the edges of his scattered thoughts. Then he had it.
"Shaylar? Where are the others?"
Her composure crumbled. She began to cry again?helplessly, this time, softly and hopelessly, shaking her head in mute grief?and horror sent ice crystals through Jathmar's blood.
"No one?" he whispered. "Nobody else? Just us?"
She nodded, still unable to speak. Her struggle to hold herself together, to stop herself from falling to pieces, broke Jathmar's heart again. He drew her close, held her while she trembled, and he realized their bond wasn't gone, so much as wounded. Too badly wounded to function properly, but not so badly he couldn't feel her grief, her sorrow and despair.
"I'm sorry," he groaned. "I'm sorry I dragged you out here, into this?"
"No!" She looked up swiftly and shook her head with startling violence. "Don't say that! It isn't true!"
She was right, but at the moment, that was a frail defense against his own crushing sense of responsibility and guilt. His awareness of his complete inability to protect her.
It was painfully evident they were prisoner
s, but how did their captors treat prisoners of war? They must have some sort of procedures to deal with captured enemy personnel, and a further thought chilled him. Would these people think he and Shaylar were soldiers? Even he knew soldiers and civilians received different treatment from the military during armed conflicts. It had been a long time since any major Sharonian nation had gone to war, but even on Sharona there was the occasional border dispute, the "incident" when a patrol from one side wandered across the other side's frontier, the "brushfire" conflict between ancient and implacable enemies. And there'd been more than enough violent conflict in Sharona's pre-portal history to make such procedures necessary.
But how in the multiverse could he convince these people he and his wife were only civilians, when they'd killed so many genuine soldiers and wounded so many others? If Company-Captain Halifu sent real troops after them, these people would get a taste of what Sharonian soldiers could do, but would that help him and Shaylar? If the crossbows he'd seen were the best individual weapons their soldiers had, if they'd never before even seen what rifles and pistols could do, would they believe that ordinary civilians carried such weapons, even in the wilderness?
The memory of that frantic, dreadful fight replayed itself once more in jagged, terrifying flashes, but one thing was clear to him. It was only their artillery?that terrifying, unexplainable artillery?which had turned the tide against Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl's survey crew. As severely outnumbered as they'd been, they'd still been more than holding their own until the fireballs erupted among them.
No wonder those crossbowmen were so twitchy.
He'd already seen evidence that the regular troopers were poised on a hairtrigger where he was concerned, but how would their commanding officer behave toward him and Shaylar? If anyone hurt Shaylar, he'd …