The Road to Hell - eARC

by David Weber

  The hundred’s journey—flight, more accurately—from Thermyn to Karys had begun over a month earlier. True, he’d spent much of that time on unicornback, covering the vast distance between Fort Ghartoun and the first of the AEF’s airheads in Failcham, but he’d still had ample opportunity to send word ahead if he’d wanted to. For that matter, he could have gotten higher priority for air transport if he’d been willing to tell Toralk’s AATC station commander what had happened in Thermyn. The dispatch he’d finally written could say whatever it liked about maintaining security to prevent rumor mongering, but the truth was obvious.

  He hadn’t wanted anyone else to know about it before Harshu because he hoped the two thousand would protect his worthless arse the way he had Neshok’s. That he’d wink at Thalmayr’s barbarities because he’d allowed so many others. And the hundred was so concerned with covering up his own actions—and their consequences—that he didn’t give a single solitary damn how much additional damage the time he’d wasted might have caused.

  Well, Mayrkos, you always knew the gryphon would get loose in the henhouse sooner or later, didn’t you? Not that you ever expected it to happen this way. His iron expression never wavered, but internally he winced. On the other hand, you knew no plan survives contact with the enemy, too, and you ought to’ve borne that in mind while you were deciding what kind of shit you were willing to let people like Neshok get away, he reminded himself. Thought you could keep it from getting out of hand, did you? Sure, you knew that stinking shakira bastard would’ve just shuffled you out of the way and given the job to that arsehole Carthos, and only the gods know how much worse it would’ve been with him in command. No way you could’ve gotten anyone back home to override the son-of-a-bitch in the available time, either. So you went all Andaran-noble and decided to jump down the dragon’s throat to keep as much control as you could. And the fact that you really needed that info—that keeping your own men alive required it—made it easier, didn’t it? Besides, you were so damned sure you could keep it from splashing on anyone else when the time came, weren’t you? Well, guess what? If what you think happened really did…

  He let the silence linger, watching the tall, broad shouldered commander of one hundred’s face as that silence worked on his nerves. For all his powerful build, the dark-haired, dark-eyed Thalmayr’s body language was stiff, defensive, as if he were bracing for a blow. His eyes were nervous and a muscle in his cheek quivered as his stiffly squared shoulders seemed to hunch under the weight of the two thousand’s silent gaze. The hundred was obviously exhausted, as well he should be, given the journey he’d undertaken to reach this office, but the sweat smell which hung about him carried a stronger stink of fear than of exertion.

  “Very well, Hundred,” Harshu said at last. “I suppose we’d better hear your report, hadn’t we?”

  “Yes, Sir.” Thalmayr swallowed visibly and his nostrils flared. “Last month,” he began, his voice harsh with fatigue and something else, “two of the officers under my command at Fort Ghartoun—”

  * * *

  “—until I arrived here this morning, Sir,” the hundred finished. He’d spoken for little better than a half hour, interrupted by only a handful of questions, but perspiration gleamed on his face.

  Silence fell, coiling in the corners like a serpent, and he swallowed again, harder than before, as Harshu gazed at him with the hooded eyes of a hunting dragon.

  “And you had no intimation that such an obviously well organized mutiny was being prepared in your command?” the two thousand asked finally.

  “No, Sir.” Thalmayr’s remaining hand clenched tighter on his right wrist behind him as he stood in a position of parade arrest.

  “And how do you think that happened, Hundred?” Harshu’s voice was icy.

  “I don’t know, Sir. In retrospect, I should have known, of course. Fifty Ulthar always resented my authority, and I believe he blamed me, rather than Hundred Olderhan, for what happened to Charlie Company. And Five Hundred Isrian did remark when he left me in command of the fort that Fifty Sarma had a reputation as a complainer. But I never anticipated something like this, and if there were any warning signs, I missed them. I shouldn’t have.”

  “You should have known,” Harshu repeated softly, and Thalmayr seemed to wilt a little further. The hundred’s cheeks, chapped and reddened from his winter dragonback journey from Failcham, turned paler, and Harshu smiled thinly. “Yes, I think we can all agree about that.”

  Thalmayr said nothing. There was very little he could have said.

  Harshu let him stand there for several more heartbeats, then exhaled harshly.

  “Is there anything you’d care to add to your report?” he asked. “Any additions or…clarifications?”

  “No, Sir.” The muscle in Thalmayr’s cheek twitched harder, but there was an almost defiant glitter in his eyes, something composed of far too many emotions for easy analysis. “Not at this time.”

  “I’ll expect a formal report in my PC by tomorrow morning,” Harshu told him.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  The hundred didn’t look happy to hear that, Harshu reflected with a certain satisfaction. And he was going to look one hell of a lot less happy before the two thousand was done with him.

  “Very well, Hundred Thalmayr. That will be all for now. My clerk will see to your billeting.”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  Thalmayr saluted again, turned on his heel, and marched out of the office, and Harshu sat back wearily in his comfortable chair as the door closed.

  It was very quiet—quiet enough the voice of a distant sword could be heard through the closed office window, counting cadence on one of the drill fields—and the two thousand pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Perfect,” he said into the silence. “Just perfect.”

  “Not the word I’d choose, Sir,” Toralk said, and Harshu snorted. Trust the Air Force officer to get right to it, he thought.

  “I suppose that’s fair enough,” he replied. “And,” he confessed, lowering his hand and turning his head to look Toralk straight in the eye, “it’s nothing you haven’t been trying to warn me was coming, either, Klayrman.”

  Toralk nodded, and to his credit there was barely a trace of I-told-you-so about that nod, despite his own obvious dismay.

  Harshu pinched his nose again. The only good news, such as it was and what there was of it, was that Thalmayr had not only kept his mouth shut on his way from Fort Ghartoun to Karys but also failed to send word back to Two Thousand mul Gurthak’s headquarters in Erthos. He’d done it for all the wrong reasons—in fact, from Thalmayr’s viewpoint, it almost certainly would have worked out better if he had reported it to mul Gurthak—but that didn’t mean Harshu wasn’t grateful.

  “How do we want to handle this, Sir?” Mahrkrai asked.

  The chief of staff’s tone made little effort to hide his own unhappiness. He’d never criticized Harshu’s decisions in the run-up to the AEF’s advance—not openly, at least; he was far too loyal for that—but private conversations with his superior had been another matter. Under those circumstances, he’d never tried to hide his reservations about where those decisions might ultimately lead. The consequences and wreckage they might leave in their wake. Even his worst fears, however, had fallen short of the situation Thalmayr’s report suggested.

  If one read between the lines of what the hundred had actually said, of course.

  “The first thing is to find out how much that piece of dragon shit’s lying to cover his arse,” Harshu said grimly. He gripped the arms of his chair and shoved himself to his feet so he could pace properly about the office’s tight confines. “I know godsdamned well he is lying; resentment and malingering are piss-poor reasons for a pair of fifties to mutiny against their CO in time of war, and I don’t believe for a minute that’s why they did it. And it was obvious from every word he said how he feels about Sharonians. He wouldn’t have spent so much time on how they’d used ‘their sinister mind powers’ t
o influence Ulthar and Sarma’s men into following their ‘treasonous’ lead if he wasn’t trying to set up some sort of defense for any reports that might come out about how he treated the POWs he was responsible for. So the only questions in my mind are how big his lies are and how much worse than we already know this clusterfuck really is. And before you say it, Klayrman, I know whose fault it ultimately is.”

  Toralk’s jaw tightened slightly, and Harshu shook his head.

  “Sorry. I don’t imagine you really were going to say it, but I know damned well you were thinking it, because I’m thinking exactly the same thing. And I can’t—and won’t—pretend you didn’t warn me about it every step of the way. I can honestly say I never wanted anything like I’m pretty godsdamned certain happened in Thermyn, but I damned well set up the conditions to let it happen. There’s an old Chalaran proverb that says a fish rots from the head, and there’s no point trying to deny that’s what’s happened here.”

  He stood still for a moment, meeting the Air Force officer’s eyes unflinchingly, then gripped his hands together behind him and resumed his pacing in silent, frowning thought.

  “How bad do you think it really is, Sir?” Toralk asked after a handful of minutes, and Harshu grunted.

  “Bad,” he said flatly. “The way Thalmayr was dancing around the edges of ‘prisoner discipline’ and the way he kept watching my expression when he did it is enough to tell me that much. The arse-kissing bastard’s hoping I’ll clean up his mess to keep it from splashing on me when the IG starts investigating. He’s wrong about that, as it happens, but I’m not going to start issuing any orders about how to deal with this until I’ve had the chance to have him questioned under a verifier spell—and not Neshok’s verifier, either.” The two thousand showed his teeth in a tight, feral grim. “We can’t afford to allow any gryphons of a feather to flock together on this one, and Neshok’s been busy trying to bury his own bodies for weeks now. We need someone who’s not likely to help him shovel more dirt back into the holes.”

  “I think young Tamdaran might be the man for that job, Sir,” Mahrkrai said, and Harshu grimaced. Not because he disagreed but because he knew exactly how the youthful Ransaran was likely to react to what he, Mahrkrai, and Toralk all knew a close interrogation of Thalmayr would reveal. Nonetheless…

  “You’re right, Herak,” the two thousand sighed. “And it makes sense to get him involved early on. He’s almost as pissed with me over this as Toralk here, so he’ll go after Thalmayr like a dragon after a bison. And given his position on the intelligence staff, he’s likely to be a critical witness at the court-martial, after all.”

  “At whose court-martial, Sir?” Toralk asked. Harshu glanced at him again, and the Air Force thousand shrugged. “You and I both know Thalmayr deserves a court,” he pointed out grimly. “I could fly an entire strike of dragons through the holes in that cover-your-arse story, and any serious interrogation’s going to nail him right to the wall. When it does, you’ve got more than enough officers of sufficient rank to impanel a summary court under the Articles, and frankly, I think you ought to seat one as quickly as possible.” Harshu raised one eyebrow, and Toralk shrugged again, a bit more sharply. “Morale’s already sagging, Sir, and word of this is bound to leak. When it does, we’re going to have to deal with it, and this is probably a time to cauterize the wound as quickly as possible.”

  Harshu grunted. He couldn’t argue with anything Toralk had just said, although he might have chosen a stronger verb than “sagging” to describe the AEF’s current confidence. That was probably inevitable, given decisively the Sharonians had rebuffed their attack on Fort Salby, and the bloody repulse had hurt even more after how rapidly—and with such light casualties—they’d advanced up to that point. The further proof of the efficacy of Sharonian weapons and the extent to which their air power had been whittled away with a machete weren’t calculated to make the men feel any better, but underlying all of that was the sense that they were out at the shaky end of a very long limb. They were well aware of how tight the logistics situation was—the number of cavalry mounts, gryphons, and dragons who’d been pulled back from Karys to graze or hunt was proof enough of that—and there was no sign that situation was going to improve anytime soon.

  Personally, Harshu didn’t blame his men for wondering what had become of the reinforcements Two Thousand mul Gurthak had promised to send after them, and his own worry about that question had hardened steadily into conviction rather than simple suspicion. It wasn’t surprising, perhaps, that no additional manpower or dragons had actually reached them yet, given how far from home they were and how scattered the Union’s armed forces were along this distant frontier. But by now, mul Gurthak had had plenty of time to at least determine what reinforcements were available and how soon they might arrive, and Harshu hadn’t heard a peep out of him. That would have been worrisome under any circumstances, but coupled with the tone of the official dispatches from mul Gurthak which had made their way to Harshu’s HQ it became downright ominous.

  If there’d ever been any doubt in Mayrkos Harshu’s mind that mul Gurthak had deliberately maneuvered him into the position of the officially out-of-control field commander in order to make him the scapegoat when the official lightning bolt came down from on high, it had long since disappeared. And as Toralk and his single exhausted, overworked Army Air Transport Command aerie struggled to keep the existing Expeditionary Force fed and supplied with essential matériel, the men under his command had clearly started to sense that all was not well. When word got out that the Union Army had just experienced its very first mutiny on top of everything else…

  “I understand your point, Klayrman,” he said, after a moment. “But if what you and I both think happened actually did, I can’t do that. I can’t do it for a lot of reasons, but especially not given the fact that it’s Thalmayr’s senior surviving subordinate when he was in command in Mahritha and the Sharonians overran the portal in Mahritha who’s apparently mutinied against him. You think anyone’s going to believe Fifty Ulthar would’ve done that if he thought Thalmayr had done a good job defending the portal? Or that he and his men—men who were there—agree with the intelligence analysis Neshok produced…and I used?” He shook his head. “That’s going to point a big, ugly finger at what happened at the Swamp Portal in the first place…and shine a big, bright spotlight not just on Neshok and me but on Thalmayr’s treatment of the prisoners under his charge. The Andaran Scouts aren’t exactly a low-profile outfit, and given the present situation, any questions about Thalmayr’s conduct would turn into a political nightmare, with senators and delegates crawling all over them, even without my own ineffable contribution.” He shook his head again, harder, his expression grim. “At the very least, that’s going to get Duke Garth Showma and the Commandery involved, and the Army can’t afford any hint that anything’s being swept under the rug at this point.”

  He held Toralk’s gaze again, and the office’s silence seemed to buzz about his ears with the weight of the dozens of things which weren’t being said. Enough ugly things had been strewn about in the AEF’s wake to destroy a score of senior officers’ careers, after all, and Mahrkrai and Toralk knew it as well as Harshu did. How much additional damage could one more…irregularity do?

  But that wasn’t really the point, and Harshu knew Toralk understood that, as well.

  “All right,” the two thousand said, turning his attention back to Mahrkrai. “Before we do anything else, we definitely need to wring Thalmayr dry and find out what the hells really happened in Thermyn. Let’s get Brychar in here so I can give him the bad news and discuss Thalmayr’s interrogation with him personally. Once we’ve done that, I’ll have a better idea of what to do next.”

  * * *

  “Good morning, Hundred Thalmayr,” the smartly uniformed Ransaran said, laying his briefcase on the table and opening it to withdraw a PC. “My name is Tamdaran, Brychar Tamdaran. I’m on Two Thousand Harshu’s intelligence staff, and I have a f
ew questions to ask you.”

  “Questions?” Hadrign Thalmayr shifted uneasily from the other side of the table. “What sort of questions?”

  “There are a few points which Two Thousand Harshu would like clarified,” Tamdaran replied, and brushed his fingers across the PC’s surface. “And, for your information, and pursuant to the requirements of the Articles of War, I’m notifying you that I’ve just activated verifier and recording spellware.”

  Thalmayr stopped shifting and froze. His remaining hand locked on his wrist stump in his lap under the concealing tabletop, and his eyes narrowed.

  “Verifier spells? Why?”

  “Hundred Thalmayr,” Tamdaran said patiently, “you’ve just reported that troops under your command have mutinied when we’re in a de facto state of war. That’s a capital offense, as I’m sure you’re aware. Obviously, the Two Thousand doesn’t want there to be any ambiguity when he convenes the court-martial himself or sends his recommendation for one further up the chain of command.”

  The Ransaran watched Thalmayr relax ever so slightly and kept his own expression bland and thoughtful. Tamdaran intended to be as objective as possible in his questioning, but he’d read Thalmayr’s written report carefully. Carefully enough that he was already confident of where his questions were going to lead. That confidence sharpened the edge of his own bitter disappointment in Mayrkos Harshu, yet the two thousand had ordered him to get to the truth, whatever that truth might be. If Tamdaran was right—if Two Thousand Harshu was right—about what had really happened at Fort Ghartoun, the consequences for Harshu would be devastating, but he’d instructed Tamdaran to write up his own independent report of this interrogation for the Inspector General and the Judge Advocate’s Corps. And that, in a strange way, proved that despite the way the two thousand had sacrificed the Kerellian Accords and Articles of War in the name of expediency, he was ultimately true to them in the end.