The Road to Hell - eARC

by David Weber

  He was afraid to even suggest his parents travel to Ransar and speak with hers, for what could Sathmin Olderhan say in his defense? “He didn’t mean to” was such a paltry apology for the man who’d begun a war that had already claimed the life of Gadrial’s mentor. Not the kind of troth gift that convinced a family to permit an engagement. But the thought of her going out of his life—the thought of one of those men on the streets of New Ransar standing beside her, instead—left him feeling like the ashes of last week’s campfire: cold and gray and utterly desolate.

  Perhaps it was the intensity of his inner turmoil or perhaps it was just the helpless stare that he couldn’t help, unable to pull his eyes away from her face, but she lifted her head, abandoning the display on her personal crystal to meet his eyes. The instant their gazes touched, a jolt like lightning blasted through him. Blessed Torkash, how he wanted this woman to stay in his life!

  Gadrial, too, jolted when their gazes met and she saw the look—the longing, the hunger…and the fear—in his eyes. She knew in that moment, as clearly as if she’d had Shaylar’s Talent as a Voice—exactly what he was thinking, exactly what he feared…and why. She knew it, yet for a long, wrenching moment, she didn’t know what to do about it. Anything she said or did—or didn’t say or do—was likely to push him in a direction she didn’t want him to go. Then she thought about what a future without Jasak Olderhan in it would do to her.

  She put away her personal crystal with brusque movements, quite suddenly angry clear through. Angry over the massive injustice of the whole situation, angry that he would back away without ever giving her the chance to say yes or no to whatever it was he wanted to say or ask her. So she stuffed her PC into its carrying case, jerked to her feet, and strode over to his seat. She felt Shaylar’s startled gaze follow her, with Jathmar’s joining it an instant later.

  “Jasak,” she said in a low voice, “would you walk with me for a moment?”

  Surprise flared in his eyes and a frown of uncertainty drove between his brows, but he stood up without a word. Once she was sure he’d follow, Gadrial turned and marched toward the door that led into the enclosed space between their private car and the one behind it. The instant Jasak had joined her there, closing the door behind him, she turned to glare up at him.

  “Gadrial?” he asked warily, reacting to the anger surging through her.

  Anger at the enormous, insufferable, idiotic weight of Andaran pride and Andaran stupidity stacked against her, against Jasak. Against them.

  “You look like a man about to make a decision, Jasak Olderhan,” she said in a low, hard voice. “An irrevocable decision.”

  His eyes widened. She read alarm and the beginning of genuine panic in his expression. She didn’t give those reactions time to solidify.

  “I just want to make one thing perfectly clear, before you start making decisions your insufferable pride won’t let you back away from or reconsider.”

  She grabbed his uniform lapels and jerked hard. He might be well over a foot taller than she was, but Gadrial was in superb physical condition and he wasn’t expecting her to jerk him forward, off balance. The instant his head was in range, she let go of his uniform, plunged her fingers through his hair, and kissed him with every ounce of creativity and passion she could summon from her admittedly limited repertoire.

  Apparently his repertoire was even more limited than hers, because he simply stood there in utter shock for long seconds while she did everything she could think of, short of ripping his clothes off and seducing him right where he stood. She did things with her lips and tongue she hadn’t realized the human mouth was physically capable of doing.

  A long, deep shudder ran through his whole body…

  Then a groan tore loose, like a tree in the dead of winter, splitting down the center with a thunderous snap. Quite suddenly her feet were no longer touching the floor and Gadrial discovered that his repertoire was considerably more inventive than hers, after all. Her senses swam as he crushed her close, nearly breaking bones as he pulled her against a chest that was hard as granite.

  She didn’t care.

  Every inventive touch of his lips, his tongue, and his hands on her body wreathed Gadrial in wildfire and smoke. When they finally came up for air, she was shaking violently. And so, she realized with a sense of marvelous satisfaction, was he. They stared into one another’s eyes. His were wide and shocked.

  “Does that clarify things a little, Jas Olderhan?” Her voice was soft and husky, and he swallowed once. Then—

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, I do believe that does, Magister Gadrial.”

  “Good. Now if you’d be so kind as to put me down, we can both get on with what we were doing when you started to make a decision without all the facts.”

  “What?” He blinked, then realized he still held her nestled tight against him with both feet off the floor. A sheepish look stole across his face. “Ah…” Then he muttered, “Oh, what the hell…”

  By the time he broke the second devastating kiss, Gadrial’s knees were such jelly that if he had put her down, she would very probably have collapsed. One corner of his mouth crooked into a satisfied little smile as he set her down at last. To her amazement, she didn’t collapse…probably because he still had one arm firm around her.

  “Does that clarify things a little more?” he asked, and brushed one fingertip across her cheek as the sense of his words finally sank in. Her breath stuttered under that exquisitely gentle touch. Then she breathed out.

  “Oh, yes…that clarifies things very nicely,” she allowed.

  “Good.”

  He held her a long, long moment longer, then took his arm back with manifest reluctance, led her back into their slidercar, and guided her back to her seat. She couldn’t have made it there unaided. And when he settled her solicitously into her seat and handed her the carrying case with her PC, she simply held it in limp hands, still reeling from the aftershock of that second fusion of lips and thundering heartbeats.

  Jasak opened the case for her and put her PC back into her hands, then resumed his own seat.

  Jathmar was staring in bafflement, but when Shaylar caught Gadrial’s stunned gaze, she grinned and winked. Gadrial found herself answering that grin with a sheepish smile.

  She also spent the next quarter of an hour staring at the same line of Ternathian script, without once taking in the shape of the letters, let alone what the words meant.

  She was too busy being deliriously delighted with the outcome of that little experiment in cross-cultural communications. Whatever happened when they reached Portalis and Garth Showma, Gadrial had made sure Sir Jasak Olderhan understood exactly how she felt. She wasn’t going to let anybody—neither the Commandery of Arcana nor Jasak Olderhan, himself—wreck what they could build, together.

  Not without a down-and-dirty fight!

  Chapter Eighteen

  January 9

  Shaylar sat beside the slider window and peered out with rising excitement. They were very near the end of their journey, at last, and she was eager to see the Union of Arcana’s capital city. The universe explorer in her had longed to stop and do surveys all along the way here, but as prisoners of war, even honored shardonai, they didn’t control the itinerary. And despite the length of their journey, they’d seen very little of Arcana’s cities.

  They’d spent most of the journey through the outer universes flying on military dragons, which landed on military bases, not in civilian cities. Once they’d reached the inner universes, they’d boarded sliders, which passed through every crystal-controlled traffic junction at high speed. Some truly enormous towns for frontier universes had hung tantalizingly on the other side of the slider windows, but they’d been so busy passing through that there’d been no time to really study anything.

  The only real Arcanan city they’d even spent an hour in was Theskair. While Shaylar had been amazed by that city—it had a population of almost two million—it was little more than a sleepy, backwater to
wn compared with Portalis, according to Gadrial. Now that they were close enough to actually see Portalis in the distance, she knew the other woman had been right. The capital of New Arcana stunned the senses.

  Tajvana was a large city, the largest Shaylar had ever visited. During the years she’d spent at the Portal Authority’s academy, she’d marveled at the city built on both sides of the Ylani Straits. But Portalis made Tajvana seem small.

  Their final approach wasn’t made at ground level. The slider’s crystal control network lifted into the sky, running alongside a wide pedestrian bridge which floated nearly eighty feet above the earth, skimming well clear of the magnificent winter forest below. The vast expanse of trees was the estate where Jasak had grown up, and he hadn’t exaggerated his description of the lands. She could tell at a glance that she was looking at pristine, old-growth forest, truly untouched despite two centuries of settlement. Even with only winter-bare branches, it was breathtakingly lovely.

  That soaring bridge should have been impossible. On Sharona, it would have been. The crystals that guided the sliders were embedded only now and again in the bridge rail, and the towers connected to the bridgeway from below were very nearly gossamer structures, like spider’s trailing lines that must surely sway to the touch of any breeze. Those slender couldn’t possibly be structural supports for the bridge, let alone the sliders floating past on either side.

  “Why is the sliderway so high, here?” Jathmar asked as they hurtled silently over the treetops, and Jasak’s mouth crooked in a half smile that was part embarrassment.

  “When the Union wanted to put in a slider path, several decades ago, my grandfather—who, just coincidentally, also happened to be named Sherstan—refused to allow the construction battalion to cut down any trees. He said that forest had been held in a pristine state for a century and a half and no transport clerk was going to cut the heart out of it with a slider right of way.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Grandfather was fond of colorful exaggeration. All they wanted to do was cut down enough trees to entrench a control lattice, something on the order of fifty feet wide. But Sherstan was a stubborn old…gentleman,” he said carefully, causing Shaylar and Gadrial to glance at one another in amusement. “He told them,” Jasak continued, determinedly ignoring their suppressed laughter, “that if they were so set on building sliderways to hook Portalis to the rest of the multiverse, they could by Torkash run the sliders over the forest. Which is exactly what they did.

  “So many people stopped their sliders along the route to take in the scenery that they ended up building the pedestrian bridge too and modding the guidance crystal spellware to ensure all the sliders keep moving. My family added the lifts later—” he pointed to the towers “—to allow people to walk around in the forest itself.”

  “But weren’t there already roads cut through it?” Jathmar asked. “If this is the main portal out of Arcana, there must be roads leading out of the city, through your family’s land?”

  “There are,” Jasak nodded. “Those roads were built at the same time the Union formalized the treaty conferring property rights on my family. The city and the Union can maintain and widen those roads as necessary, which they’ve done many times. For all practical purposes, there’s only one portion of the original land grant still in forest cover.” He pulled over the map again and zoomed in to show them. “This section, surrounding the falls, across to here, is still in forest. The rest of it’s been leased out to the city and to the Union—for the military bases, primarily, but also for access corridors to the suburbs that extend for many miles beyond the leased land.

  “That’s why Portalis is lopsided, like this.” He zoomed back out and pointed to the irregular blob of the city, which bulged and fanned out across the map on the sides away from the forested estate. “What the Transportation Corps wanted to do was run a line through the inviolate section left in old-growth forest. Grandfather refused to cut down even one more tree of what was left.”

  “That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me,” Shaylar said, studying the map and glancing out the window. “When one has a legacy to protect, one has to be adamant about such things. Otherwise, there’d eventually be nothing left to conserve.”

  Jasak smiled. “That’s precisely how he felt and frankly, I agree with him. For one thing, it would’ve robbed the citizens of Portalis, since the section they wanted to cut the line through runs through a section of the forest that’s open to the city as a public park.”

  Shaylar broke into a delighted smile. “That’s a wonderful thing to do for your neighbors!”

  Then the slider rounded a curve on its approach to Portalis and Shaylar got her first close look through the wide train windows.

  “Oh…”

  The single word was a soft exhalation of wonder.

  Portalis was a magical city…literally. The dominant feature was, naturally, the portal. It wasn’t the largest she’d ever seen, but it was a whopping big one, nonetheless, and every single mile of that immense hole in reality was jammed with roads, control towers for sliders, floating highways, and what looked like flocks of migrating birds, except these “birds” were dragons of so many bewildering sizes and hues the air seemed to shimmer from all their wings. They flew in what seemed at first to be total chaos, but as she stared, entranced, she began to discern patterns.

  Beasts of a certain size flew in one line, on what was clearly a well-established flight path. There were dozens of such lines, each with dragons of a different size, going at different speeds. Some of the small beasts were falcon-fast, making impossible maneuvers as they shot over and around other flight paths.

  There were smaller winged creatures, as well. The gryphons they’d seen again and again at military bases whipped through Portalis’ skies at phenomenal speeds, intent on errands Shaylar couldn’t even guess at. Other flying things registered as she gazed in wonder at the astonishing panorama ahead, and what looked like small lozenges floated well above the ground, although still far below the sliderway, moving at a surprisingly rapid pace.

  “What are those?” she pointed.

  Gadrial answered. “The very latest in transportation. They’re automated carriages, powered by the latest motive spells. The official name is ‘automoticars,’ but that’s too big a mouthful. The advertisers are calling them ‘motics,’ although I’m not sure the name’s going to catch on. At this point, they’re still new enough, the public really hasn’t decided, yet, what to call them.”

  “Why so new?” Jathmar frowned. “Those motic things are much smaller than a slider. Why weren’t they developed first?”

  “Ah,” she smiled. “The problem was one of steerage. Sliders are guided by the control net and even dragons are guided by pilots. Gryphons are small enough and smart enough to avoid mid-air collisions, but the idea of hundreds of ungoverned vehicles—even thousands of them—flying anywhere people chose, straight through established flight paths, flown by anybody with enough cash, not by responsible, licensed pilots, buzzing across roads, whipping around people’s houses and through city streets…” She shuddered. “The very idea horrified city councils. Most cities passed laws prohibiting ungoverned flying vehicles piloted by non-licensed pilots.

  “Things stayed that way for a long time, until a very bright spellcaster—a Ransaran, of course,” she added, eyes sparkling with mischief and challenge, “figured out how to cast a motive spell that follows pre-determined flight paths, responding to a series of permanent traffic pods put up in a grid all over the city. Once he did that, the door opened and the djinn was out of the bottle, so to speak.

  “Although I’ve never understood why any rational person would actually want to let a djinn out of its bottle,” she added in a surprisingly grim tone. “They’re bad-tempered, incurable liars who invariably cheat any fool stupid enough to fall for their promises. Of course, they do provide a decent living for spell-casters who specialize in personal disaster and curse reversal, not to mention attorneys representing pe
ople damaged when some idiot wished for the most beautiful women in the world, which caused a djinn to yank a thousand or so perfectly innocent girls out of their houses, offices, or schools with no warning at all and no way to get home again, without suing the irresponsible worm responsible for djinn-napping them.”

  Shaylar and her husband gaped at Gadrial.

  “You…are joking, aren’t you?” Shaylar gulped.

  “I never joke about women wronged through no fault of their own,” Gadrial said, grim as any soldier on the way to combat.

  “It’s a recurrent problem,” Jas said quietly. “The military’s returned victims home many times, as a public service. There are djinn-victim aid societies, too, and it’s illegal—profoundly so—to traffic with a djinn. But idiots and reckless, irresponsible jackasses keep risking it, convinced they’ll come out ahead. They never do, but the challenge and the lure is just too irresistible for some.

  “It doesn’t help that djinn are almost impossible to control, once released. There’s a whole branch of the UBI—the Union Bureau of Investigation—devoted to tracking the magic trails left by renegade djinn some fool’s let loose, but it takes a powerful spell-caster to re-bottle a djinn. It usually requires a team of them, acting in concert. More than one team’s subsequently encased a djinn bottle in concrete, to keep anyone from releasing it again, but the black market thrives on stealing bottled djinn out of holding facilities and selling them at huge prices to gullible fools. We can’t just dump them into deep ocean water, because some black marketer would use lifting spells to bring the bottle back up to the surface. And you can’t drop a djinn’s bottle into a volcano, either. That just melts the bottle and lets it out, again. That was tried, once, with genuinely horrifying results. You can’t kill a djinn by roasting it in lava, but you can make it furious enough to level a city.”