The Road to Hell - eARC

by David Weber

  Passivity wasn’t usually a desired setting among any of the families that chose to buy seadrake young, but vos Sidus enjoyed having the beasts entirely calm and nearly puppy like for transport. The best money to be had was for the pit fighters, to be sure, and for those, all three heads needed to be as vicious as possible. Other drakes, with shepherd training and control spellware, were used to corral the pure fighters and move them from training pits into arena-bound slidercages.

  A clear sky with brilliant sunlight pouring over the ocean surf marked this morning as a very good one for the day’s fight, and float-bespelled spectator palanquins were just beginning to jostle for position around the distant island.

  The Sidus VI breed was being tested against a new Vacus line. They’d captured and bred a kind of shark creature that breathed through gills instead of lungs. Vos Sidus thought it might have some small use as a guard fish around prisons and the like, but the gladiatorial sales would be miserable. The beasties were smaller and tended to clutter the view of carnage with blood and entrails. If it were only the entrails, many shakira would enjoy watching, but put too much blood in the water and even the clearest pools suddenly showed nothing but boring red.

  Breeding a special kind of prey fish that didn’t cloud up the waters had been tried, but the interesting fights were always the ones that involved humans in some way. Vos Sidus’s aunt had tried bringing in the great whales for fights, but those fights were too dull. Some pleasure boats still went whale hunting—which was to say they followed behind a pair or a small nest of seadrakes and watched as they found and devoured the larger cetaceans—and vos Sidus had been on a few of those pleasure cruises as a child. Aunt Kellbok had pointed out the garthan ship captains’ maneuvers to set the drakes against only the very largest and toughest of the whales, but he’d agreed with his aunt: cetacean prey wasn’t tough enough for a drake. Whales lacked sufficient intelligence and cunning for a decent fight.

  Sometimes, when Aunt Kellbok had used just one drake and set up an ocean arena around a full pod of masked whales—the ones with the black and white coloring that hid so well in the water—she’d entice cetacean combatants to perform a show worthy of a shakira audience. But even then, she’d had to send in a drake youngling bloodied from an earlier fight. When it got dull—because it would get dull—she’d signal the show master to release the mother drake to empty the seas as a grand finale.

  The best argument vos Sidus had seen for cetaceans having some modicum of intelligence—more than, say, that of a barnyard cat—was that the larger whales all avoided the Mythlan coasts. That the masked whales still came said something else, but Aunt Kellbok insisted insanity had entertainment value.

  Universes beyond Arcana Prime allowed for more varied open ocean shows. In New Mythal, there were still oceans where native creatures didn’t know to swim for their lives the moment they tasted drake blood in the water or heard the bellows of a hunting drake reverberate across the ocean bottom.

  Of course Union law forbade the release of drakes into the wild, but a breeder couldn’t truly know his training held until it was tested. The Seadrake Owners’ Association understood that, so from time to time vos Sidus could fill his slidercages and transport a nest of seadrakes to a preserve on New Mythal owned by a cousin of Aunt Kellbok’s.

  Sometimes training failed. In those cases, he’d make a discreet report to the Seadrake Owners’ Association and send in a troop of garthan for cleanup. If the team was too slow, a few ships would be crushed or a crew might be eaten, but the accidental fodder were generally garthan of low value, with few years of service left, and the SDO paid well for the use of the land. Every shakira with property near by knew when tests were scheduled to be run and would remove their persons and garthantri well in advance. But there was no point trying tell that to an Andaran or a Ransaran! They didn’t understand that acquiring true wisdom required a certain amount of…breakage along the way.

  Every monument worth building killed a few garthan in its construction. That might be unfortunate for the garthan involved, but better a dozen garthan lost than a single shakira maimed, and even the Ransarans understood the value of experience. “A burned hand is the best teacher.” That was one of their own proverbs, although they turned their noses up at the Mythlan equivalent, of course. “Blood buys true value,” as the great vos Hardyna had observed thousands of years ago, and it was true. It was always true, and if the barbarians thought it applied solely to garthan, that only showed how stupid they truly were. Vos Sidus had memorized every proverb in the Book of the Shakira at Aunt Kellbok’s knee before his tenth birthday—most non-Mythlans were still playing at learning their sums at that age—and he knew that proverb applied to all Mythlans. Even the blood of a thousand shakira was nothing to the honor due a Line Lord.

  Non-Mythlans didn’t understand context. The SOA used only drake males for arena events outside Arcana Prime for that precise reason. An escaped drake gone feral in Delkor had devastated a fishing community for several decades before a passing magister put the beast down as a favor to a shakira cousin. But when a breeding pair had escaped on New Mythal, it had taken a full company of magisters over a month to hunt down the creatures and all their offspring. If it happened again, the Union of Arcana would expect exactly that second level of effort, even if it were just to clean out the oceans of a wilderness world hardly worth preserving. These annoyances were the cost of working with the uninitiated, but one day every Arcanan would bow to a Line Lord and hold the teachings of the Book of Secrets more valuable than their own hearts.

  That would be a lifework worthy of Line Lords. Emm vos Sidus had his own small part to play in the great glory of Mythal, and in the between times he had the drakes. All too often, he found himself wishing he could uncage a nest of seadrakes in the Garth Showma Falls Basin and remake the Union in a bloody baptism, but that, sadly, was not his assignment.

  The sand-in-silk frustration that annoyed him the most was that the Andarans had never recognized the military power inherent in the proper use of seadrakes. He blamed their focus on land. Sure people lived on land, but any fool could see over a third of the Arcanan-discovered frontier universe transits required ocean passage to reach the next portal—not to mention that two of the five newly taken portals were on those universe’s equivalents to the North Mythal River and the Evanos Ocean. Now that war with these Sharonian barbarians was afoot, perhaps it was time to finally put together a multiverse nautical power with more teeth than the Union of Arcana Navy. Let the Andaran Army struggle with the arcane logistics of a cross portal war with “gun”-carrying Sharonians. The Mythlan Navy could save them all with a simple seadrake barricade.

  And slipping drake mating pairs into hostile universes’ oceans could do wonderful things for the destruction of their economies, vos Sidus reflected dreamily while he petted Seasprite’s long neck.

  The great benefit of the seadrake’s amphibious nature was that these beautiful creatures didn’t just hunt the oceans. They claimed the beaches and seaside cities as well…and if Sharonians were anything like Arcanans, more than eighty percent of their population lived on ocean coasts and riverways.

  Any trained Arcanan with the right spells could control a drake, but Sharonians didn’t use magic. Every single one was garthan, and their ignorance made them nothing more than walking meat for the seadrakes’ triple rows of teeth.

  Vos Sidus scratched the underside of Seasprite’s vestigial wing and she lifted all three heads to hiss in pleasure. Then the dexter side head suddenly snapped to the right, the whole drake launched across the pool, and the delicate plantings screening the handler station broke instantly.

  Vos Sidus shook his head in resignation and waited for the gurgling scream to stop before he keyed the spell to force the docile head to resume control. The new servant hadn’t worked out. Seasprite went through handlers faster than his other drakes, but then she also cost less to feed. Unless one started counting the cost of a garthan against her food bil
l, which he was beginning to seriously consider. These weren’t his valued servants, of course. He used only pit drake handlers on Seasprite. That kind of garthan one bought by the dozen from the prison system, with special care taken to ensure no past members of one’s own estate were included in the lot.

  He held Seasprite bespelled with no backup handler for three full minutes, patting her noses, and using her scrub brush to get the worst of the carnage off her faces. Then he stepped back through the bars of her enclosure and retreated across the white sand circle that marked the far edge of her bite reach. Just beyond the line, he released her. The timbre of her hiss changed, but not one of the three heads made a lunge for him. Seasprite knew her range.

  A pair of garthantri with long tongs worked from the opposite side to withdraw the remains of the body. Seasprite watched their progress coldly with her sinister head while the other two quite reasonably remained fixed on the magister who’d most recently held control of her minds.

  When the garthantri finished retrieving the corpse, one made the sign of Mithanan and spat on the body. Emm couldn’t hear what the other said, but neither showed any care when they dumped the parts into a wheelbarrow and trundled it off to a convict’s pit. Funeral pyres were reserved for honorable servants.

  He shrugged mentally, dismissed the garthantri from his attention, and turned back to his original train of thought.

  Anyone could operate the pre-charged spells to control a seadrake, he reflected, although few demonstrated the persistent, careful attention required to become a veteran handler. Yet if the Sharonians lacked not only magisters but also even the most rudimentary understanding of the principles of magic, nests of drakes could be sent in entirely handlerless. The Mythlan Navy could never do that in a war against a civilized nation, because the opponent’s magisters or even ground troops armed with spellware would simply take control of the drakes. But Sharonians might not even realize it was possible. This kind of opportunity had never existed before.

  There were potential difficulties as well, of course. For example, uncaged drakes in Mythal found without a handler would be re-enchanted by a neighboring house and claimed as feral foundlings under the old estray laws. That sort of carelessness could lead to a century or more of careful breeding going to enrich a rival drake line without even a sum of coin or lot of chattel in exchange. The Siduses had taken a few such opportunities in the past, as had every other member of the Seadrake Owners’ Association when granted the chance, but he certainly didn’t care to give away his stock easily, and he considered the legal difficulties of free roaming drakes in the frontier universes. Some type of branding could work, he decided. And he would have to insist marked drakes be reclaimed only by the respective breeder houses after the end of the war, with offspring to be divided on a pro rata basis determined by share contributions of the possible parent drakes released in each universe.

  And the Union of Arcana would need to pay rental fees to the breeders for the use of the animals for the duration of the conflict. It wouldn’t do to have the Union’s other members just assuming that Mythal would pay the heavy blood price of war simply because they were best suited to it and were the only ones who had prepared to fight properly at sea.

  * * *

  Ullery the Fool patted each long neck of his drake and paced around the beast examining every inch of her armor. The sand of the small, created island off the coast of the Sidus estate burned Ullery’s bare feet, but he did his best not to limp. The shakira would be watching, and Ullery kept all his attention on Silverstreak’s hide as he scratched the base of her dexter neck carefully. The scales were thinner here at the very back of the animal in the indentation where a drake’s garthan driver latched in. The spiny ridges on either side had small, carefully drilled holes which gave the purchase needed to attach his ropes and body netting.

  The crystal implants in Silverstreak’s center head were giving her trouble again. Ullery could tell from the way her neck ticked that head in an uncontrolled spasm every few minutes. If they were still back serving the House Belftus, he would have known which of the shakira lords to go to and could have gotten it fixed. But since their sale to House Vacus a fortnight ago, he hadn’t been able to figure out which, if any, of the shakira masters actually cared about maintaining their drake property.

  He’d been born a garthan servant, and from certain of his features, he was fairly sure his father had been a member of the Belftus family. But since no Gift had manifested, his bastardry was an embarrassment to be hidden from other shakira. A lord was supposed to only breed true.

  Ullery himself had continued to expect to be taken into the family proper long after he should have realized it was never going to happen. Still, his unusually advanced early education had granted him a few advantages. Those had kept him alive when no Gift manifested and his early mistakes earned him a place as a drake rider on the animals used to host spectator fights for shakira amusements. Ullery did at least understand magic theory, even if he utterly lacked the spark necessary to cast spells. He knew how the drake’s spellware worked, and he had the sense to be very, very careful with the control crystal belted across his waist.

  The other garthans of the Belftus House had been careful not to offend Ullery lest his possible shakira father choose to take offense. And since Ullery didn’t complain and managed his drakes so cleverly that they never quite caught anyone who tried to swim the straits to leave shakira service, he’d been treated well by his fellows.

  But that had been in the last household. In House Vacus, Ullery knew far too few people to really know what his place was. He was beginning to suspect that the reason for the chill distance was that none of the other servants really wanted to get to know him. They’d prefer not to know the man-like-object who’d end up mangled by their House-bred drakes during the next exhibition event.

  It was a fair assumption. Except that the last two weekends had passed without a drake-on-drake fight. And just recently orders had come down to begin seeing if any of the drakes could be trained to work together. He’d overheard one of the Vacus handlers muttering worriedly about it. They didn’t seem to think it could be done. And maybe with Vacus drakes it couldn’t. But House Belftus had done it any number of times. The trick was to keep the calm driving head dominant during all the close maneuvers.

  Ullery could show them all how to do it…if he survived the next few hours.

  The fins in the water around the island were moving in ways he didn’t think were natural. A shark’s head came up with far too wide a mouth for the body and snapped at empty air.

  The glare on the surface of the ocean blinded him for a moment, and then Ullery saw the creature clearly in the passing foam. Not natural at all. There were sarkolis crystals on the monsters’ flanks imbedded just before the dorsal fins. Idiotic placement for water flow, but no one asked a garthan’s opinion.

  Just behind the fin was the vortex null where natural water magics amplified sarkolis enchantment, but some imbecile had implanted the shark’s control crystals higher up the spine at almost at the spellbreak point. Which meant the ocean would polish imperative-strength spell commands down to mere nudges with every passing wave.

  Squeals above from young shakira voices revealed that the controllers had discovered that exact error.

  Ullery marked the width of the island. It was all soft sand that felt steady underfoot but the edge dropped off sharply just beyond the waterline. Only about twice the diameter of Silverstreak’s length from bite to tail, it was a created island, probably on a float spell that could drop to the bottom of the sea on a word.

  He ran soothing hands down each of Silverstreak’s necks rubbing out tension and encouraging her to stretch and flex. She was going to need to shark hunt for him today. Bludgeoning tail strikes and rapid sarkolis cracking bites should work if he could keep Silverstreak’s delicate inter-talon webbing protected from the razor teeth.

  Dark trails followed the sharkbeasts already. The kids had enchan
ted the teeth to enlarge and sharpen them without considering the damage to gums and jaws.

  The mouths were too large for the gullets too. These sharkbeasts wouldn’t be able to feed themselves. Some out of favor garthan would have to do it.

  He shivered and Silverstreak vibrated in response. He forced himself to still and calm her anxiety. No good panicking about what might happen at the feed pits this evening when he hadn’t yet survived the afternoon.

  A child, announcing himself as master of ceremonies, blew a great horn. The poorly tuned blat earned an eruption of laughter from his fellows.

  A teacher of some sort confiscated the horn and restored order.

  “Shakira, Multhari, and guests—welcome! The fosterlings and young ones of the House of Sidus present for you this afternoon’s entertainment. Monsters of the deep patrol a classic drake deathmatch!

  “Step right up to the red palanquin if you’d like to take your turn handling a sharkbeast. We’ve colorized the sarkolis and the controllers for you so it’s easy to see which beast is yours, but if you have any doubt at all, we have a spotter next to each control.”

  Rousing cheers and a flurry of nursemaided small ones hopped onto small platforms and converged on the red palanquin.

  “Ask any of our garthantri servants if you need anything at all. Remember your sharkbeasts can’t breath air, so just snap at the drakes when one throws the other into the water.”

  A slidercage was beginning the slow float from Sidus Proper to Arena Island. Ullery had heard of Sidus. Every handler had heard of the nightmare Sidus V line. But this cage was big even for a Sidus V, and Ullery had the sinking feeling that the long awaited Sidus VI line might be coming out for first blood.

  Silverstreak’s center head let out a low moan and jerked again. She’d seen the cage coming too.