The Road to Hell - eARC

by David Weber

  “Of course. An officer does the best he can in a horrible situation, and his supervisors have to dissect his every decision the instant he returns home.” Gadrial laughed with an edge of bitterness. “Welcome to Portalis.”

  Sathmin grabbed the magister’s hand. “He has us. We’ll get him through. And his father will ensure he’s treated fairly. Portalis is an odd mix of Mythal, Ransar, and Andara, but there’s honor here. And the Union has to learn why it was horrible out there. You were there and I wasn’t, but it doesn’t sound like everyone else was trying to do their best.”

  “No.” Gadrial agreed. “They certainly were not. And I’ll be testifying to that if I have to enchant the doors of court myself to gain an entry.”

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” Sathmin assured her as she walked the magister out.

  Chapter Nineteen

  January 9

  Emm vos Sidus hated Portalis. He hated the crowds of people, the racket, the disgusting mélange of Gifted and non-Gifted, and the need to pretend he didn’t hate all that. Even the pristine magic source of the falls emitted a frost-coating mist instead of proper humidity.

  The high-climbing city structures were filled with offices and manufactories, with not a palace in the lot. Portalis, on either side of the portal, hardly deserved the name of city. Even the Duke of Garth Showma’s own family had little apartments in the city. A shakira with that demesne would level the mess of trees, build a proper villa with orderly plantings and garden the grounds. Emm would add a few dragon breeding fields and set garthan to working fields and livestock across the larger duchy to support the elite in the city, but Thankhar Olderhan did nothing so useful.

  Instead the duke had his sizable living quarters in a corner of the Garth Showma demesne quite a ways distant from Portalis, leased property to merchants and army clerks, and allowed the masses to harvest deadfall timber from his private woods. The Olderhans didn’t even stock the forests with predator game animals.

  The Duchy of Garth Showma could be bearable in the summer months, when the wet of the falls cooled the skin instead of freezing to it. Not so in midwinter. Pretending to like Garth Showma’s Snowfall Night festivities was yet another thing Emm hated about Portalis.

  As a member of the shakira sent to treat with the upper crust of Andara, he had to lodge in what passed for elegance in a hotel near Garth Showma Institute. The lobby’s wide windows proudly showed the falls choked by ice and snow with only a few of the base station chargers online to repower accumulators. Winter always affected the falls…yet another reason the flawed diamond of Andara could never compare to the brilliance of Mythal.

  The Andarans grouped their hotel rooms in squads, small cramped rooms all of a size circled a common room. The clerks assumed a senior officer would share the same quarters and provisions as his men, and that any business traveller with his staff would likewise imitate Andaran military customs.

  Andarans were idiots.

  Emm vos Sidus took a full grouping. His staff were garthantri, drawn from the subclass who’d demonstrated personal loyalty to their betters for at least three generations. They were as magicless as all garthans but the very the best of their kind and they would adjust the place to better suit his needs while he took a leisurely lunch with an old friend. The common area would be his main chamber with most of the quartering spaces to become holding areas for his clothing, personal necessities, and bathing room. The lot of them would take turns sleeping in the remaining pair of rooms and use the bath down the hall.

  They wouldn’t bother him with the details, so vos Sidus put it from his mind. He was shakira. His task was the work of magic and those small duties assigned to him by his seniors., and his job today was a lunch, so a lunch he would have.

  The “old friend” in question was a contact and not actually a companion in any true sense, but Emm vos Sidus did what his superiors asked, even if that meant taking up a friendship with an only barely gifted Andaran. And Nosak Urrihan had risen to the highest ranks of the Andarans now. It was only appropriate, vos Sidus agreed, for a person with some magic ability to be placed over so many with absolutely none, but if the man had been Mythalan he would have been carefully ringed all round by a cohort of many-generations-loyal garthantri. And probably with an equally carefully selected tutor. Someone needed to turn Nosak Urrihan’s dabblings into something approximating competence, anyway.

  The thought wasn’t entirely fair. Back in his youth, when his duties had been limited to riding dragons, Urrihan might even have been a capable officer, but now the man was retired from military service and held a political appointment in the Andaran Air Force: Undersecretary, Office of Dragon Warfare. Urrihan could be relied on to fly his favorite old dragon breeds every chance he had. For everything else—policy making, the organization of branches and forces—he wasn’t just uninformed, he was actively disinterested in ever becoming more knowledgeable or remotely capable. That made him an exceptionally useful idiot.

  Emm vos Sidus made it a point to visit Urrihan at least once a quarter to maintain the fiction of their long-time friendship. Mostly they spoke of dragons. Emm’s family bred the seadrakes, which Urrihan disdained as not true dragons, but since Urrihan didn’t really consider transport dragons worthy of being called true dragons either, it was a friendly old argument.

  And the shared luncheons and dinners weren’t that terrible, either, since Andarans made a point of serving their troops good hearty meals whenever possible. Urrihan always made that observation, and Emm vos Sidus always agreed. And he actually meant it. Some truly excellent cuisine was available at this heart of Andaran power. They didn’t serve the exquisite delicacies of Mythal, but there was something to be said for being able to dispense with a taster and enjoy the pantomime play that came with a trip outside his family estates.

  In Garth Showma, vos Sidus pretended all people were equal and that he didn’t even notice the poor quality of the spellware hanging about or that those who would have been trained up as garthan in a proper household were to be found here and there begging on street corners. In Portalis, some of the magicless pretended to be artists and played off-key music for coins in a hat and Urrihan seemed to enjoy hearing military marches butchered by street players, so vos Sidus even tossed the savages coins himself now and then.

  Mostly he made charitable little gestures in Urrihan’s company, but just in case someone in the Andaran’s extended family ever smartened up enough to run some kind of inquiry, he did it while on his own as well. His duties outside the home estate were clear: make contacts, keep them at a distance, and plant servants in their households.

  The girl he’d placed overtly with Urrihan was doing well. No complaints at all. In fact Urrihan was effusive in his praise and a little concerned that her period of study might end too soon, calling her back to Mythalan Falls Academy and leaving a hole in his staffing.

  There was no notice at all of the others placed in the man’s employ or the handful vos Sidus recruited among the garthan Mythlan immigrants living in the town. Those were utterly unreliable, since they’d abandoned their original lords and selfishly destroyed the trust their families had spent generations building, but a few words here and there via his own staff would always get them to feed him what he wanted to know.

  Combine enough independent semi-reliable sources and a reasonably accurate piece of general intelligence could emerge. Currently he was interested in the mood of the city, and it was leaning strongly against the war.

  The common people were horrified by the reports they were hearing. But they were still Andarans at heart, so they supported the soldiers: their brothers, sons, and grandsons in the forward universes. That meant the discontent had to go somewhere else, and it was beginning to focus on the Andaran Army’s senior officers. That was too soon for the plan, but there’d always been a certain flexibility to the schedule, and no one could have anticipated the boon of the encounter with the Sharonian barbarians. Indeed, it seemed likely a good do
se of fury towards the Sharonans would help spice everything up…and the Duke of Garth Showma’s own son had brought back two Sharonan prisoners under the odd Andaran honor code.

  Emm vos Sidus considered. Yes. Yes. That should do nicely…and I won’t even actually have to do a single thing!

  That was good. It would require no extension of his assets or risk exposing anything. The natural fury of an untrained mob of garthan was about to hit the lords of Garth Showma.

  The High Lords would be very pleased. Vos Sidus would make the suggestion in his report and then ensure he was nowhere near Portalis in the next few months, when all this came to a head. He’d seen a rough report of the events at the front—as an Andaran handler he was entitled to that information—and the news that currently riled the Andaran people wasn’t going to get any better. Oh no, not by a long shot.

  Emm vos Sidus boarded the transport dragon for home content with the multiverse…and pleased with the hell about to rain down on his Line Lord’s enemies.

  * * *

  The salt and foam of the Strait of Tears lifted her easily while the porpoises played about her. Whale song ran out at a distance, and Cetacean Ambassador Shalassar Brintal-Kolmayr floated with an ease that belied her inner turmoil.

  Her ocean guardians didn’t notice the distress. A pod of porpoises crested and dove with the waves around her. The peaceable, friendly creatures were clearly taking turns swimming beside her in case she grew tired and needed a tow back to shore. They were mostly younger ones who hadn’t yet decided who they were with enough conviction to select adult names, and Shalassar floated with the waves, reaching out and listening to the many others speaking and singing in the oceans today.

  The cetaceans were discussing things she thought had been decided absolutely a long time ago. The topic at hand was whether or not to consider Arcanans sentient. It was clear that all of the speakers knew beyond any doubt that Arcanans could think, but a more fundamental question was at stake.

  The orca wanted it formally agreed that the Arcanans could be eaten freely. Most of the dolphins agreed quite readily with the idea of the Arcanans being eaten, but given their digestive preferences did not intend to actually bite the bad human flesh themselves. Most of the various whale types were somewhat less accepting of the idea.

  The discussion hinged on the interpretation of how a finned creature would know if a particular stranded human flailing about at sea was of the Sharonan pod or of the Arcanan pod.

  Shalassar listened with growing horror as some of the orca, who had multiple representatives instead of just a single primary, provided detailed descriptions of the taste, crunchiness, and texture of human meat that could be compared with any samples of Arcanan meat if it were ever tasted. Teeth Cleaver, newly elevated to hunter-scout within the pod for his week in the aquarium car, swam a careful distance from these toughest of orca.

  One of the porpoises nudged Shalassar gently and informed her that humans hadn’t been intentionally killed or eaten even by the orca in a very long time. Shalassar reminded herself of the cetaceans’ long memories and oral tradition of passing down all knowledge without screening out distasteful bits of history in the way human cultures tended to do. The cetaceans had no paper records to hold the details of things that had happened but which the current generation preferred not to think on too much. For a cetacean everything was either remembered in living minds and passed on via song to the young ones or else it was entirely forgotten.

  The cetacean Remember Talent made it possible for those mammalian histories to keep their vivid accuracy over centuries. They had none of the telepathic component of a human Voice Talent, but the ocean’s transmission of sound carried their songs through the deeps just as well as Voice transmission might and no psionic Talent was needed to hear the Rememberer’s song.

  And so Shalassar heard in detail about the taste of humans and how the orca used to hunt fishing vessels and overturn them to get at the meat of the large floating clams. The details about breaking the boats and only taking the ones that had drifted out of sight of the others suggested a full understanding that the creatures they’d been eating were thinking beings who could retaliate if allowed to know just what had been hunting them. The orcas weren’t the ocean’s finest hunters by accident. The ease with which they’d once hunted man without humanity managing to notice gave her a chill.

  It was also highly informative, however, and Shalassar couldn’t help filing the information away as an explanation for why the orca in particular had never taken offense at the human history—ancient records from before the emergence of Talents—when humans had blithely slaughtered intelligent cetaceans. And the larger whales whose ancestors had been the primary targets of those genocides had also not complained so very much either. The singing thunder-fluke reached an interlude about using a strong tail to destroy boats too tough in construction for an orca pod to take apart, and it occurred to her—not for the first time—how lucky humans were to have developed Talents and to have chosen to stop preying on the cetaceans. There’d been a war, and the humans hadn’t even known they were losing it.

  The old history made the water feel colder than the sun’s warmth should have made it. Enough so that for a long moment she even felt uncomfortable floating in the deep waters with these cetaceans she’d been talking with and listening to for years.

  The deeper side of this discussion was the absolute certainty the cetaceans had that they would be involved in the portal wars. These weren’t idle plans. The cetaceans fully expected to meet Arcanans one day, to fight alongside Sharonan warships and feast on the flesh of their enemies. The dolphins and porpoises planned to pull away the Sharonans and leave the Arcanans for the orca. The great whales wanted the details of Arcanan ship design so they could break open the hulls more efficiently. They even suggested the Sharonans might build mock-ups for them to practice with. The cetaceans were preparing for war.

  Shalassar hoped by the Double Triad that war would never come so far as the Sharonan home universe. The cetaceans hummed their throaty agreement…and sang of portals, great tanks, and traveling out universe.

  * * *

  Emm vos Sidus had always loved the sea. High waves crashed against the good Mythlan rock as the two natural powers of stone and sea warred against each other, and the native magic soothed his very blood. At home everything felt right. The sea salt flavored each breath, and in the distance his youngest sister could be heard squealing with glee over the frolicking of the newborn hydra seadrakes. It was good to be back on the family estate.

  The garthan manufactories and boarding houses hugged the earth out of sight of their betters. A garthantri carrying a filleted pigfish destined for dinner paused for an obeisance before continuing on his run from the butchery to the roasting house. Vos Sidus favored the servant with a nod and the man immediately deepened his bow at the honor of being so noticed. Had he not been carrying food meant for a shakira’s table, the garthantri would have fully abased himself from the first, but one made allowances to ensure an unpoisoned meal.

  The Book of Secrets taught that remnants of old curses seethed invisible in the very soil, so the pure ate only of clean food prepared by the hands of the washed. The Book told of many other things besides, but that one was permitted to be known by garthan and was spoken of so widely that even children in Andara and Ransar practiced the ablutions of health before preparing and consuming their meals.

  The garthantri held the pigfish high so not even the tail touched the ground as he stopped again for another obeisance at the drake nursery pool. This time the man bowed only once, vos Sidus noted with pleasure. His youngest sister had outgrown her habit of speaking with every garthantri she saw, an unfortunate legacy of a brief fosterage with an Andaran family now corrected.

  The raising of a shakira was a complex art with far more challenges than arose in educating garthan children. Vos Sidus was proud to have had a youth of his immediate family selected by the Line Lord as precocious enough to
build lines of false obligation with outsiders before even her Mythal Falls novitiate induction. Already little Bre received letters from Andaran girls signed “sister.”

  Vos Sidus himself had passed through novice, journeyman and magister training at Mythal Falls Academy with fine marks several years past and then been assigned his lifework by the Line Lord. But as a trained Mythlan magister of good family, it was only natural he would also take up a hobby.

  He had. His passion was for the biggest and strongest drakes, known for their stunning ocean gladiatorial contests. It was quite incidental that Andarans mistook that hobby for his true work.

  Seasprite, his current favorite, lifted a long gray-green head and nuzzled at his cheekbones with the exquisite delicacy required of a creature nearly ten times human size. Her other two heads remained submerged in the pool snapping and gulping the farmed fishes his family’s garthan servants raised for her feed. These animals had less financial use than their more lucrative flying cousins, but the Sidus family had always enjoyed expanding the scope of the possible with their breeding programs. The hobbies had been mistaken for a family business for quite some time now.

  They’d proved with one of Seasprite’s great grand dames that all three heads could be made fully functional. Certain Ransaran magisters had argued it could never be done. And they were undoubtedly right about their own abilities, but no Mythlan shakira had so little faith in the power of magic.

  The practical issues of a three-headed beast had presented some formidable challenges, however.

  For example, when the originally vestigial secondary heads became equally capable of controlling the body after the prime head was loped off it did create certain control issues. Then there was also the difficulty of controlling the bleeding. But any drake put into the arena these days wore specialized spellware tourniquet collars, so very few of the powerful beasts were lost to head amputation injuries, and crystals embedded in the center of each of the three foreheads controlled which mind dominated. Training varied by beast of course, but Sidus drakes usually had two fighting styles and a third mind trained for docile transport and feeding.