The Road to Hell - eARC

by David Weber

  “But it’s not true!”

  “I know,” Gadrial bit out. “That’s why Jasak and his father are so furious. They don’t even know where the Times Herald got its information. There are more facts in those articles—distorted, twisted, and perverted, but still with a kernel of fact—than anyone in the Union government’s officially heard even now! The Times Herald’s always been one of the journals which feels out-universe exploration should be managed by civilian agencies rather than the military. If the Duke—or anyone else in the current Government—tries to lean on them for their sources, they’ll clam up and refuse to say a word. And if the Duke insists they reveal those sources, they’ll positively welcome the chance to be sent to jail until they give up the names. Which they won’t do, of course. The Union’s freedom of the press laws would protect them in the end, and they’d gain a huge amount of prestige for their ‘principled stand.’

  “The fact that someone obviously fed the Times Herald all this distortion is bad enough, but even if Jasak and the Duke manage to get the truth out, it may not help. Worse, without some official news from mul Gurthak or someone out-universe from Mahritha, they can’t even tell anyone what the truth is because they don’t know what’s happening themselves. Not really. And other journals and news outlets have already pounced on the Time Herald’s reportage. It’s spreading like wildfire, all over New Arcana—and probably Arcana Prime and all the rest of the multiverse by now, as well! So in a lot of ways, it doesn’t even matter what the truth is. The damage is done, and the Duke doesn’t think it can be undone.”

  She paused, her expression miserable, while the stunned Sharonians stared at her. Then she squared her shoulder and bit her lip.

  “And I’m afraid there’s more, as well,” she told them in an utterly miserable tone. “Please get dressed, both of you. There’s something else you have to see.”

  “What?” Jathmar bit out.

  “It’s—” Gadrial sighed and shook her head. “The Duchess saw this coming, I’m afraid. Saw the potential for it. That’s why she put you here, in rooms whose windows overlook the garden, rather than the street.”

  Those words sent a shudder of fright through Shaylar. What was out there, in the street they couldn’t see? She looked at Jathmar for a moment, and then the two of them returned to their bedroom and dressed in silence.

  Gadrial led them through the house, until Jasak and his father met them in a corridor near the front of the vast townhouse. The duke spoke briskly.

  “I don’t want you to be too alarmed, when you look out there. The security system is on and armed. Nobody can actually reach the house, not physically and not with a malicious spell. You’re under my protection,” he added, “and I’m serious about that duty.”

  He looked back and forth between them for several seconds, his expression hard and determined. Then he motioned courteously for them to follow him, and Shaylar groped for Jathmar’s hand as he led them into a large and beautifully appointed drawing room or parlor. The duchess was already there, standing beside a tall, curved window that overlooked the street at the front of the house. They were a full story above that street, looking down into it, and a mutter of sound reached them, rising and falling like a distant sea. It was too indistinct for Shaylar to determine what it was, but it set her teeth on edge. The sense of danger—and her throbbing headache—worsened drastically, and the duchess turned toward them, her expression grave. She held out one hand.

  “Come, stand beside me,” she said gently.

  Shaylar and her husband crossed the room. The closer they came to the windows, the louder that sound grew, until they reached it and Shaylar blanched. The street was jammed with people. Thousands of people. Angry people. Waving signs and shouting. The low roar was the sound of fury and hatred. She could read some of the signs, while others had been written in languages other than Andaran. The ones she could read chilled her to the bone.

  These people wanted to kill her.

  “They can’t see us,” the duchess murmured when Shaylar flinched back from the tall window. “We’ve set the defensive spells to block the view of the windows. All the windows. The people out there see the windows as they ordinarily look. They can’t see us standing here.”

  “Why did that newspaper tell such horrible lies?” Shaylar demanded. Why does someone want them,” she pointed at the screaming mob, “to kill us? We’re helpless!”

  “They’re being manipulated.” Jasak Olderhan’s jaw muscles were bunched and fury crackled in his eyes. “The Herald Times is bad enough on its own—I don’t doubt for one minute they’d love to embarrass the Government and Father any way they could—but they wouldn’t go this far from the truth unless someone had fed them carefully doctored information. Unfortunately, we don’t know who’s doing it…but we intend to find out.”

  “But why? From everything you’ve said we would have frightened them, anyway! Why paint us as such monsters?”

  “I don’t know,” the duke answered in a voice ribbed with iron, “but as Jasak says, I damned well mean to find out! I started digging into this the moment I saw that journal. It arrived shortly after dinner, which means that collection of crap hit the streets three hours ago. And that,” he nodded toward the mob outside in the street, bathed in the double glow of arcane streetlamps and moonlight, “is too big and too organized to be entirely spontaneous. Someone organized the kernel of it; then started spreading the word. Three hours later, we end up with a riot on my doorstep.

  “My people have dug out a few facts, already. This so-called story was leaked by someone in the civil government, not the Commandery. Someone very highly placed wants the story told this way, and I suspect whoever that someone is, he’s been sitting on dispatches from the front that have not been shared—officially, at least—with anyone in the Army or with the Cabinet. I intend to find out who that person is, but I already know—or suspect—his reasons.”

  “For lying?” Jathmar demanded. “For deliberately misleading the public? Inciting them to murderous demonstrations? When my wife rang for a servant to ask for something for her headache, the damned maid who answered was on a hair-trigger edge of killing her!”

  The duchess blanched, and the duke scowled even more furiously than before.

  “That will be dealt with at once,” he said in a growl that Shaylar trusted implicitly. Then he sighed. “As for the rest…As Jasak says, the Herald Times is anti-Government and anti-Army at the best of times. This was exactly the sort of raw meat anyone could predict its editorial staff would pounce on. And once their version of the ‘truth’ hit the street, every other news outlet picked up on it. Some started reporting it and—of course—speculating wildly in the process, but even the more restrained papers had to at least acknowledge it. Partly, it’s just the news industry’s tendency to exaggerate things, to whip up interest amongst their readers and capture new readers. The more details they can offer—even when they don’t have details—the more likely people are to buy their newspaper, not their competitor’s.”

  “You said the story came from someone in government,” Jathmar bit out.

  “Yes. It did. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it came from someone engaged in politics at the highest level. Someone with contacts and allies—tools—in the government, whether or not he’s actually in government service himself. And that, I’m afraid, leads to several possible scenarios. What better way to unite public opinion than to paint the other side as entirely evil? And the fact that Halathyn vos Dulainah was killed offered a perfect mechanism for implementing that strategy. He is dead, after all; none of us can dispute that. If whoever this is can convince the public he was murdered out of hand, it’ll be like applying a flame spell to a haystack! My question is one of motive. Was this done purely to unite factions that will be jockeying for control? Or for some more sinister reason?”

  “What sort of reason could justify this?” Jathmar demanded. The duke’s jaw tightened, but when he responded, his reply seemed c
uriously oblique…at first.

  “Andara’s controlled the Union of Arcana’s military for two centuries,” he said. “That’s not because we’ve snatched the reins of power, either. Primarily it’s because nobody else wanted the job.” He shrugged. “We Andarans enjoy the military lifestyle. Neither the Mythlans nor the Ransarans do. In fact, most of them despise and disdain it. Some individuals from Mythal and Ransar enlist, whether from patriotic commitment or—more commonly—as a way to better their stations in life. But nobody else has wanted control of the military.

  “The fact that you exist, however, and that we’ve met violently, has changed everything, rather abruptly. Quite suddenly, Mythal and Ransar must face the reality that their survival lies in someone else’s hands. Andaran hands. I know Mythlans and Ransarans,” he glanced apologetically at Gadrial, “well enough to know certain factions of those societies will suddenly discover, despite lifetimes of disdain for the military, that they want control over the means of defense. Some of that’s inevitable—when someone feels threatened, of course he wants to be sure he and the ones he cares for are protected the way he wants them protected, and Shartahk take anyone who gets in his way.

  “But I suspect what’s really driving this—what the manipulators want—goes far beyond that natural reaction. Some people have never been comfortable with the extent of Andaran influence on the military, not because they wanted to control it, but because the military’s been a huge factor in stabilizing the Union from the very beginning. Some of them want to rock that stability because the collapse of existing power relationships may let them build new ones more…beneficial to their own interests. Others see the military as the primary support for Andara’s influence within the Union—its power base—and want to break that power base in order to improve their own. And now those manipulators finally see a chance to accomplish their goals.

  “There’s just one problem. How does someone take charge of a military whose control is so entrenched in Andaran hands? The easiest—and the one I fear most—is by discrediting Andara. By making Andaran officers appear incompetent. By vilifying the enemy in the worst possible terms, exaggerating the threat, and then howling that the Andarans can’t protect Arcana from that kind of threat. Not when they bungled the first contact so badly that they allowed themselves to be wiped out virtually to the last soldier and couldn’t even protect an inter-universal hero like Magister Halathyn!”

  “But that isn’t what happened,” Jathmar protested. “Your son lost only a third of his men and that included the wounded, not just the dead. The rest of his men weren’t taken prisoner until the second confrontation. And they certainly didn’t mention that we were civilians—that we were the ones brutally slaughtered! They didn’t mention the little detail that your own soldiers killed Magister Halathyn or that Jasak’s replacement tried to kill an unarmed man asking for civilian survivors, either. What kind of government do you have, that would lie so hideously to its own people?”

  “This isn’t the Government,” the duke said firmly. “As Governor of New Arcana, I’m a member of Speaker Skyntaru’s Cabinet, and I will guarantee you that neither he nor any other member of the Cabinet’s received any of that news about what happened to Skirvon and Dastiri—not through any official channel, anyway. Some information, like how Magister Halathyn actually died, we’ve known about ever since Jasak’s initial report arrived, and I’ve argued in favor of releasing it in full from the beginning. I can’t argue too strenuously, though, because someone will claim I’m only trying to hand out sketchy, incomplete information in the best possible light to protect Jasak from the consequences of this disaster. So the decision was made to withhold some of the more potentially inflammatory information until we knew more.

  “And now we have this.” He jerked his head at the mob beyond the windows, his expression one of disgust. “I’m not saying that someone in the Government—inside the Cabinet—isn’t involved in what’s happening, Jathmar. I’m only saying that it sure as Shartahk isn’t anyone who’s a loyal member of that Cabinet. This is directly opposed to the Speaker’s policy! I’ve known Misarthi Skyntaru for thirty years, and believe me, the last thing he wants is for this situation to get any worse. He and I have argued for years over how big a chunk of the Union budget the military ‘sucks up,’ as he likes to put it, but he knows how thin we’re really stretched. Even if he didn’t hate the very thought of how many people are likely to get killed, he knows how costly it’s likely to be and how ill-prepared we are for it. He’s been trying to keep a handle on emotions—that’s the real reason he decided to sit one the news of Magister Halathyn’s death—until he could find out what in Mithanan’s name is going on out there!”

  The fire in Thankhar Olderhan’s eyes could have reduced the entire city of Portalis to ash…without magic.

  “Who’s behind this—and why—will come out,” he said coldly. “We’ll make damned certain of that. Whether or not the truth will do any good at that point remains to be seen.” He gestured at the crowd and said, “I felt it was important to show you this, so you’d understand what you—and therefore we—are up against, here.”

  “Political in-fighting and power grabs are never pretty,” Jathmar muttered. “Innocent people tend to get hurt during them. Or killed.”

  “Then Sharona has the same difficulties in that area that we do,” the duke rumbled.

  Jathmar’s laugh was humorless. “We may be from a different civilization, sir, but we are human. Wherever humans live, that problem will always rear its ugly head. We’re far more alike than they,” he nodded toward the window, “would care to admit.”

  The duke’s glance was piercing. “Well phrased and well thought-out. And that’s also the reason why war between us is now an absolute certainty. We,” he nodded toward his son, his wife, and Gadrial, “will do our best to shout the truth of what happened from the rooftops. But…” He didn’t have to elaborate. “The Mythlans were dead-certain to fear and hate you sufficiently to demand war no matter what, and whoever was behind that garbage in the newspapers this evening knew full well how to manipulate the masses. Ransar will never forgive Sharona for Halathyn vos Dulainah’s death.”

  “But we didn’t kill him!” Shaylar protested.

  “That won’t matter,” Jasak growled with an angry glance at the crowd.

  “But won’t they be angry and upset when they discover they were lied to, about the way he died?” she demanded, and Jasak rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Some will. Most won’t. Even if we get the truth out, the anger will’ve set too deep for most of them to be willing to give it up. Thinking about something this emotional is harder work than they’ll be willing to undertake! So instead of thinking about that, they’ll just point out that if it hadn’t been for you,” he nodded toward her and Jathmar, “your soldiers would never have attacked his camp and he’d still be alive. So, of course, even if he was accidentally killed by an Arcanan weapon, it’s Sharona’s fault there was any fighting for him to be killed in. We’ll do our best, but you have no idea how popular Magister Halathyn was in Ransar.”

  Shaylar and Jathmar stared at one another, shocked by the notion of a society that not only could lie to its people on this kind of scale, but whose people wouldn’t care they’d been lied to, or why. It was more alien than anything else they’d yet encountered, including the existence of dragons and gryphons.

  The anger that blazed in Jathmar’s eyes licked like flame through Shaylar, as well. She would not spend the rest of her life cowering in terror of these people. If they killed her, so be it. But she would not live in fear. As she stared, narrow-eyed with fury, at the mob screaming for Sharonian blood, she realized her headache had vanished, and she bared her teeth in something which definitely wasn’t a smile.

  She’d always heard that a headache was one of the hallmarks of the Calirath Talent. That many of the Caliraths who’d manifested their family’s Talent experienced pre-Glimpse headaches…and that the stronger th
e glimpse, the worse the headache. She’d never demonstrated even a normal Clairvoyant Talent, much less the Calirath Talent, but in that moment she wished, bitterly, she could Glimpse their future. It would be useful to know how to sabotage Arcana’s preparations for war.

  If a way existed, she’d find it.

  And use it.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  January 10

  Horvon Fosdark, Earl of Brith Darma, sat back in his chair as Chief Sword Otwal Threbuch saluted, executed a perfect about face, and strode briskly from the room. The other Arcanan officers empanelled to conduct this board of inquiry sat back, as well. The man with iron grey hair and the rigidly starched crimson uniform to his left was Fleet Third Kordos, who held the third-highest rank a naval officer could attain. On his right sat the white-haired Commander of Legions Shorbok Githrak of the Arcanan Army. He wasn’t the highest-ranked officer in that army, but he had headed the Intelligence Corps for a staggering twenty-three years.

  “What a damnable mess,” Kordos muttered.

  Brith Darma agreed. Profoundly. He’d sat on dozens of boards of inquiry during his career. None of them came even remotely close to matching this.

  “Our job,” he said, “is to sort out this damnable mess, and the two toughest witnesses are still waiting for us. Does anyone want a brief recess before we tackle the Sharonians?”

  They’d already taken the statements of Hundred Olderhan and Magister Gadrial, in addition to Chief Sword Threbuch’s. His brother officers shook their heads.

  “No,” Githrak replied, “let’s get this over with. I want to hear their testimony before we break for lunch. We can call them back this afternoon for closer questioning if we need to, but I’d just as soon have a complete preliminary picture to mull over while we eat.”

  “Agreed.” Brith Darma nodded. “Very well, gentlemen, which shall we question first? The Voice or the Mapper?”