The Road to Hell # Hell's Gate 3
Page 23
Ransarans and Mythalans would never understand, but as an Andaran of course he’d had to do it. Family deferment or not, a well brought up Andaran boy would fight dragons barehanded if that’s what it took to do his basic service tour. And here was Tellemay, his proud cousin, delighting in the chance of her family member returning with a combat service badge on his shoulder. But—
“Are you sure about the truce?” Sathmin clutched at the hope Tellemay had misheard something.
“Absolutely sure. Everyone’s been getting hummer messages all at once. They don’t say what their orders are or where they’re headed, of course. But the war’s back on. I’m amazed you didn’t hear first. I suppose His Grace was at the Commandery by the time the first hummers arrived.” Tellemay paused a moment to adjust and repin a gather on Sathmin’s left shoulder. “Everyone’s been saying how taken by surprise they were and how the Commandery kept the secret perfectly.”
“I don’t understand,” Sathmin said. “Are you saying we broke off the truce talks?”
Tellemay sniffed. “When you say it like that, Your Grace, it just doesn’t sound right. I’m sure that couldn’t be it. The troop letters just say we won a battle and that they’re excited about the next one. The news’ll say more in the morning, won’t it?”
* * *
“They want what?” Shalassar Brintal-Kolmayr snapped up from her seat.
Intern Pelgra tried to melt into the Cetacean embassy floor and only managed to look more puppyish instead. Not the kid’s fault, Shalassar reminded herself, and brushed past the young Cetacean Speaker to confront the orca at the pier herself.
Shalassar considered the orca’s great bulk. Teeth Cleaver was significantly larger than the dolphins and porpoises who sometimes expressed interest in entering the aquarium cars to take tours of the insides of the shorelines.
The orca snorted a cetacean laugh with his blowhole.
This did not reassure Shalassar.
A pod of dolphins played a half mile or so distant, and Teeth Cleaver examined them for a long moment. The orca didn’t eat sentients. They were always quite clear on that. But from time to time some of the cetaceans would add in a proviso.
The orca didn’t eat sentients, now.
The dolphins had been at the pier themselves just an hour or so previously enjoying some of the fish treats provided by the Cetacean Institute. But just this minute, they found reason to play farther away. Teeth Cleaver’s presence had nothing to do with it. Of course.
And why are the thunder-flukes interested? Shalassar added, only to herself.
Shalassar stopped unable to refute this unassailable argument.
Teeth Cleaver blew a fine mist and settled deeper in the water, all but vanishing. He spun beneath the water displaying the clean milky belly that would camouflage him from below. He burst out of the water for a high twisting leap. The splash sent ripples racing in all directions.
Shalassar wiped the spray off her face. Cetacean Speaker Talent granted the ability to hear, but not always to understand.
Shalassar did her own mental calculation of the approximate cost to feed a full-grown orca for days on end.
Teeth Cleaver agreed with a smile.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Inkara 27, 205 YU
[December 18, 1928 CE]
It was snowing.
The flakes came sweeping in on the teeth of a biting wind that was unusually cold, even for Fort Ghartoun. The weather was going to get worse—a lot worse—before they reached the New Uromath portal, but somehow that failed to make Namir Velvelig feel any warmer just now as the snowflakes touched his wind-chilled face like frozen kisses. Nor did the fact that he’d endured the icy snow and knife-edged winds of northern Arpathia throughout his childhood make him any happier about his current prospects. There was a reason he’d spent so few winters at home since joining the PAAF, after all. This season would not have been his choice for this little jaunt if he’d been given an option. Unfortunately, options were in short supply.
He turned in the saddle, looking behind him and down the length of the small column, and wondered if they were going to get beyond range of the Arcanans’ casualty locating spells before someone who could use those spells came looking for them. He was more than a little afraid the answer would be no, but there was only one way to find out.
Of course, he pointed out to himself as he turned back to the blowing snow in front of him and resettled himself in the saddle, you could always avoid the possibility entirely by simply cutting the bastards loose. Let them evade their own damned army on their own damned terms while you and the rest of your boys skedaddle on your own. Their locator spells wouldn’t help them find you that way, at least!
No, they wouldn’t. And despite everything, a hard, hating part of him hunkered down, hunched its shoulders, and wanted to do exactly that. But he couldn’t, and not simply because Ulthar and Sarma and all of their men had put their necks on the chopping block to rescue what was left of his own command. He might find it difficult to disassociate them in his own mind from the Arcanan sneak attack, yet that attack hadn’t been their idea. They’d simply been carrying out the orders they’d given by their lawful superiors, and the Arpathian in him recognized the enormous risk they’d taken by mutinying against those superiors because they believed honor required it of them. And however much he might hate Arcanans like Hadrign Thalmayr and whatever motherless bastards had launched the entire attack, he couldn’t deny that the mutineers had acted with decency at enormous risk to themselves.
And that was one reason he needed to get them out of this just as badly as he n
eeded to get his own men out of it. Whether, when, and where he might be able to regain contact with higher authority, it was important for that higher authority to have the window into the Union of Arcana and its military represented by Ulthar Therman and Jaralt Sarma. If the young officers were correct that they’d been deliberately lied to and manipulated by their superiors—and if the “Kerellian Accords” and the standing military law of the Union of Arcana Army truly did prohibit the sort of systematic torture which had been inflicted by the “Arcanan Expeditionary Force”—then it was entirely possible the actual government of Arcana genuinely didn’t have one godsdamned idea what was happening out here.
That was a staggering concept, one any Sharonian could be excused for finding difficult to grasp. Yet if the hints he’d gotten about just how far it was to Arcana from Hell’s Gate turned out to be accurate, and given that this was an entire civilization which had never heard of Voices, it was actually possible. It was almost—almost, but not quite—impossible for Velvelig to imagine a civilization which didn’t have the ability to pass messages at Voice speeds. It wasn’t a lot harder than accepting that magic really existed, however, and if that was what had happened, if this entire invasion was essentially a rogue operation launched without the authorization, consent, or even knowledge of the Arcanan government, it put a completely different face on what had already happened…and suggested a completely different list of options for dealing with it.
Maybe.
On the other hand, it might turn out that the Arcanan government would decide to stand by the actions of its commanders on the spot. And it might also turn out that things had gone so far by now that there was no way back for either side, much less both of them. But if there was the remotest chance this rolling catastrophe could be…turned off—stopped somehow—then Namir Velvelig was entirely prepared to die trying to bring that about.
Not that he had any intention of dying if an alternative offered, which was the reason they were heading out across the mountains of West New Ternath into the teeth of winter.
There were, however, some unforeseen advantages to having magic on his side for a change. Some of the Arcanans’ crystals seemed to contain a bewildering array of spells, almost like a magical version of the famous Ternathian Army pocketknife, with its blade or folding tool for every conceivable purpose. Others contained only a single type of much more powerful spell, or perhaps two of them, but with multiple uses of each stored spell. He’d been astonished—and deeply envious—when Fifty Ulthar demonstrated one of the levitation spells. It wasn’t that Velvelig had never seen an object invisibly lifted before; one of his own cousins was a Lifter, with a powerful Talent that allowed her to Lift more than twenty times her own body weight unassisted. It required focused concentration, however, and she could only sustain the Lift for about thirty minutes before she was required to rest and recuperate. But the crystal Ulthar had fitted under the center of one of the PAAF wagons left behind at Fort Ghartoun had lifted the entire vehicle effortlessly into the air and held it there until the spell was deactivated.
The standard PAAF wagons were of all-steel construction, which made them much lighter than wooden-framed vehicles would have been, and fitted with heavy-duty axle bearings, leaf springs, and forty-three-inch wheels with tubular steel spokes and wide pneumatic tires, which allowed them to tackle even extremely difficult terrain. They were sized to allow a standard four-mule team to haul fourteen thousand pounds of cargo on a hard-surfaced road and up to half of that across soft terrain, but they were still wagons, and rough going could slow them to a crawl, even with the best draft teams imaginable. The possibility of boosting them almost effortlessly over the worst obstacles was enough to turn any PAAF quartermaster green with envy, and according to Ulthar, a single spell crystal could support up to fifteen tons of deadweight for up to forty-eight hours on a single charge. Not only that, each crystal could contain up to thirty charges. Apparently, when the Arcanans used dragons for transportation, they relied on even more powerful levitation spells, which probably explained a lot about how flying beasts could support the logistic needs of an army capable of advancing across even the roughest terrain with preposterous speed. The levitation spells available to the garrison of Fort Ghartoun offered nowhere near that sort of capacity, but they were going to make an enormous difference to the more pedestrian, ground-based transport of the unlikely allies, especially given the topography they were about to face.
Other specialized crystals offered advantages of their own. One of them, for example, provided the warmth (although not the light) of a roaring bonfire from a piece of rock no larger than a child’s fist. The amount of heat it could produce when what Velvelig thought of as “the wick” was turned all the way up was astounding, and at lower temperatures it could produce that warmth for hour after hour. Given the weather and the travel conditions awaiting them, that might well prove the difference between life and death.
Still, marvelous though the Arcanans’ magic was, it had its limits. Many of their army’s crystals, like the ones he thought of as the Ternathian Army knife, appeared to be designed (if that was the right verb) to be used by anyone who knew the activating sequence. The more powerful, more specialized spells, however, required a Gifted user, which resulted in a basic “technology” with a far narrower…base, for want of a better term, than Sharona enjoyed.
Velvelig suspected that figuring out the parallels and differences between the Arcanan Gifts and Sharonian Talents was going to take a long time, but some of them had already become evident. A particularly strongly Talented Sharonian might have a single primary Talent and as many as two or even three secondary ones which were usually (but not always) in associated areas. Apparently, a Gifted Arcanan might also have more than one Gift or “arcana,” as they were labeled, but such powerfully Gifted Arcanans appeared to be less common than powerfully Talented Sharonians. At the same time, the sophisticated technology of their crystals allowed them to distribute stored spells to a larger percentage of their total population, yet not as broadly or as freely as one might have expected. The bottleneck was apparently the fact that only Gifted Arcanans could charge those crystals. Without a Gifted technician to recharge a crystal, it became useless once its stored spells were exhausted.
The fact that Arcanans who were not themselves Gifted could make use of the crystals was obviously a huge advantage, but Velvelig had found himself wondering if the Arcanan reliance on the marvels stored in those glittering pieces of rock wasn’t its own potentially crippling weakness. Gods knew most Sharonians would have loved to be able to bottle Talents to be decanted at need, and an Arcanan spell might be able to accomplish things even the most strongly Talented Sharonian could only dream of doing. But Sharona’s industrial technology had been developed alongside its people’s Talents, specifically to be used—and supported—by people who were not Talented. He strongly suspected that dynamite was as effective as any Arcanan blasting spell might be, and even though a sufficient quantity of it was undoubtedly bulkier and heavier than a single crystal, workers in the factory which produced it required no special Talent or Gift. Anyone could learn to operate almost any Sharonian device, whether on the production floor or in the field, unlike the Arcanan spells whose use was limited to someone with at least a minimal Gift, and no one needed a Gift to charge a cartridge for a Model 10 rifle.
Sure, he thought now, no doubt there are all sorts of advantages to good, old-fashioned Sharonian technology, but don’t pretend you aren’t glad to have Arcanan “technology” backing you up this time around, Namir!
Well, of course he was, since he wasn’t an idiot. At the same time, he’d been at least equally delighted when he got a look inside Fort Ghartoun’s armory and discovered the Arcanans had neither removed nor destroyed the weapons which had been stored there. Some of those weapons had disappeared, presumably collected for study and analysis, but most were right where Velvelig had left them. The expeditionary force’s commanders had probably planned o
n disposing of them one way or another whenever they got around to it, but for the moment they’d settled for locking them up securely.
He’d been a bit surprised, despite the fact that Ulthar and Sarma had agreed that the Arcanan mutineers and the erstwhile Sharonian prisoners had no option but to cooperate fully, when neither of them had objected to the PAAF personnel’s re-arming themselves. It had been something of an acid test of the Arcanans’ sincerity, really, since for all their crystals’ capabilities, an individual Arcanan was considerably less lethal than an individual Sharonian equipped with a Model 10 and an H&W revolver. To their credit, the mutineers had passed the test with remarkably calm expressions. In fact, they were clearly as relieved to have that Sharonian lethality on their side for a change as Velvelig was to have their magic on his.
They were short on horses and mules—apparently, most of the Fort Ghartoun stud had been used to feed dragons and unicorns—but one of Fifty Cothar’s responsibilities had included looking after a sizeable pool of reserve unicorns for the main expeditionary force. They’d been left at Fort Ghartoun in no small part to take advantage of the opportunity to “graze” on the more mundane draft animals which had been captured with the fort, which left Velvelig and his men with rather mixed feelings where the creatures were concerned. The fact that unicorns appeared to have fractious personalities didn’t make them any happier about it, either. But if the mutineers were to be believed (and Armsman chan Dersain’s Sifting Talent insisted they were telling the truth) the carnivorous unicorns were capable of incredible feats of speed and endurance. Cothar insisted that they were routinely capable of covering a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles per day even cross country. They weren’t as efficient as the PAAFs powerful, big-boned mules as draft animals—not surprisingly, when those mules went to a thousand pounds each and a unicorn was little more than seven or eight hundred—but they could handle that job when they needed to. And because Fort Ghartoun had been turned into a remount depot, they had enough of them to provide teams for all seventeen of the wagons available to them and still mount all thirty-seven of Cothar’s dragoons and half of Velvelig’s surviving troopers.