The Road to Hell - eARC

by David Weber

  “Yes, Sir.” Chan Gairwyn saluted, and chan Derkail gave his shoulder another thump before he climbed back onto his own horse and started across the stream.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  February 16

  “Well,” Namir Velvelig sighed, dismounting to lean against the side of his unicorn, “there it is.”

  The trees around him rattled mournful, leafless branches that did absolutely nothing to cut the frigid wind. He’d been far colder than this upon occasion back in Arpathia, but that made the current weather no less unpleasant. Getting wagons through the broad belt of woodland hadn’t been a happy experience either, even with the Arcanan levitation spells, and it had slowed them considerably. The trees had also provided welcome cover for the last several miles, however, and he’d been careful to halt well back within their concealment before he dismounted.

  “You sound surprised, Regiment-Captain,” Therman Ulthar said, looking down from his own saddle with a tired, crooked smile. “Someone might almost think you hadn’t expected to get here.”

  “They might, might they?” Velvelig cocked his head to give the young Arcanan a moderate glare. “Can’t imagine why they should’ve.”

  “Neither can I,” Ulthar assured him, and swung down from his unicorn.

  A growl rumbled deep in the beast’s muscular throat, and the fifty swatted its nose with a casual assurance Velvelig still found disturbing. He wasn’t accustomed to “horses” with five-inch fangs capable of effortlessly removing a man’s hand…or his head, for that matter. That wicked ivory horn was equally daunting; he’d seen spears that were less sharply pointed, and the thing was over two feet long. It would never have done for an Arpathian septman to admit fear of anything that went on four feet, but he knew damned well he wasn’t the only Sharonian in the column who hadn’t entirely come to grips with the notion of riding a seven or eight hundred-pound carnivore. Nor had any of them developed the degree of comfort—or the confidence to smack them to remind them who was in charge—Ulthar and the other Arcanans demonstrated.

  Yet whatever reservations he might retain, he’d become devoutly thankful for their presence. Without them, the mutineers and escaped prisoners would never have made it this far, and certainly not this quickly. The unicorns were just as fast and just as hardy as Ulthar and Jaralt Sarma had assured him they were. Keeping them fed was a greater challenge than simply grazing a horse or a mule normally presented, but given the season and the speed with which they’d been moving, the chore wasn’t that much worse than hauling along fodder would have been. And little though the horse lover in him cared to admit it, he suspected that something with a predator’s instincts probably made a better combat mount than a creature whose best natural defense to a threat was to run away from it. Of course, there were downsides, and one thing he’d observed was that unicorn dung had the reek of carnivore excrement, rather than the homier scent of horse manure. Fortunately, that hadn’t been much of a factor on their open air jaunt, but he really didn’t like to think about mucking out a stable full of unicorns.

  He smiled wearily at the thought and uncased his binoculars as he gazed at the portal between Thermyn and New Uromath.

  And however…unpleasant that might be, the critters really are tough as hill demons, he reflected. They aren’t as sensitive to sudden climate changes as horses are, either. More of that damned magic, I’ll bet. They sure as hell didn’t grow any sudden furry coats along the way!

  And that was one more thing to be profoundly grateful for, he acknowledged. For that matter, although their gait took some getting used to—a man who’d learned to post on a horse had required quite a bit of minor adjustment before his mount had stopped complaining and his own arse and thighs had acclimated—it was actually smoother than any he’d ever before experienced. And those clawed feet made them incredibly surefooted and nimble in rough terrain. The Arpathian in him resisted being seduced away from the horses he’d always loved, but he couldn’t deny there were profound advantages to these unnatural beasts.

  He raised the binoculars and suppressed a desire to wince as the skin around his eyes made contact with the rubber eye shields and his gloved fingers adjusted the focusing knob. At this time of year, the average temperatures here on what should have been the location of Wyrmach ought to have averaged well above freezing, but that was an average temperature. Daily highs and lows peaked twenty or thirty degrees outside that range, and the town was subject to occasional bouts of bitter cold…one of which they—of course—had arrived in the middle of. And just to make the situation even better, the Thermyn side of the portal was a thousand feet higher than the New Uromath side. Although this portal was old enough for the portal wind to have stabilized quite a lot, the current of air pouring through from New Uromath remained far too powerful to call a “breeze,” and while that would normally have been a good thing, the weather on the far side of the portal had decided to drop well below its normal range, as well. It was marginally warmer than the Thermyn side, but not enough to evoke any handsprings of delight.

  He gazed through the binoculars, sweeping his gaze steadily across as much of the fourteen-mile wide portal as he could see from his present location. The combination of the way the woods straggled off and the nice, flat terrain around Wyrmach meant he could see most of it, which didn’t make him especially happy as he contemplated the small cluster of chinked-log structures parked on a low rise almost squarely in the center of the portal’s arc.

  Miserable as it might have been to cross, the rugged terrain between Bitter Lake and Fort Ghartoun had given a lot of cover. The fact that the best land route—indeed, the only truly practicable land route, especially this time of year—had wandered far afield from the straight-line route available to dragons had helped even more. Despite which, Valnar Rohsahk, Ulthar’s “recon crystal specialist,” had detected six separate overflights by dragons. Rohsahk was what the Arcanans called a “javelin,” according to the literal translation their talking crystals provided. That was roughly the equivalent of a junior-armsman, and despite his youthfulness, the Arcanan—who was from what ought to have been the Republic of Syskhara in New Ternath—had the solid, unflappable competence Velvelig normally associated with strongly Talented noncoms. The regiment-captain had no idea how the Arcanans’ “spellware” worked, but he was willing to take their word that it did. They had as much to lose as the Sharonians did if they were overtaken, after all, so they had no vested interest in pretending it could accomplish things it couldn’t. And it didn’t hurt his confidence in their abilities any that Under-Armsman Haryl chan Byral, his own junior headquarters clerk-specialist (who was even younger than Rohsahk), had been assigned as Fort Ghartoun’s Distance Viewer. Despite his youth, chan Byral was powerfully Talented, and twice he’d Seen the passing dragon Rohsahk had detected.

  Fortunately, none of them had flown directly overhead, and apparently none of them had been actively seeking the fugitives at the time they passed. All of those near escapes had occurred in the first few days of their flight, however. By Ulthar and Sarma’s most optimistic estimates, Thalmayr must have gotten his story into someone senior’s hands by now, which meant any additional overflights were unlikely to be benignly negligent. And the terrain had been depressingly open for the last four or five hundred miles. In fact, here in the approaches to Wyrmach, it reminded Velvelig of a pocket-ball table, and he felt remarkably like the strike-ball as he stood surveying the portal. He’d done his best to keep clear of that straight-line flight path between here and Fort Ghartoun, but trying to balance the extra time to circle wide of crossing dragon traffic against the threat that orders to find them might come racing down-chain from Two Thousand Harshu at any moment had been a nerve-racking business.

  Now, unfortunately, they had no choice but to move squarely back onto the flight path. The portal was the critical bottleneck, the funnel through which they had to pass to reach New Uromath…and through which any Arcanan traffic, whether specifically searching for t
hem or not, must also pass.

  “What do you see?” Ulthar asked, and Velvelig’s lips gave the slightest of twitches…which would have been a broad grin in anyone who wasn’t Arpathian.

  He and his Sharonians found the Arcanans’ casual use of magic fascinating, yet the Arcanans seemed at least equally fascinated by routine, everyday bits and pieces of Sharonian technology. They’d never seen anything like a pair of binoculars, for example. Instead of learning to grind and polish lenses, they’d learned how to polish and enchant “sarkolis” crystals to let them see distant objects. And as nearly as Golvar Silkash and Tobis Makree had been able to figure it out, their “magistrons” could Heal nearsightedness, farsightedness, and even cataracts, so no one needed spectacles. The thought of being able to duplicate a Distance Viewer’s Talent with a shiny piece of rock was certainly impressive—and seductive—but Velvelig was well content with his binoculars, and Ulthar and his people appeared to be just as deeply impressed by the notion of a distance viewing apparatus that required no Gift to produce or use.

  “Nothing in the air, right now,” he replied, answering the fifty’s question. “What about your Rohsahk?”

  “Nothing,” Ulthar said. “Unfortunately, there could be fifty dragons hovering on the other side of that portal and Valnar wouldn’t be able to detect them from here.”

  Velvelig grunted in combined understanding, unhappiness, and worry. It was interesting that the Arcanans’ Gifts and spells were no more capable of crossing a portal threshold than a Sharonian’s Talent. Learning that minor fact had made it abruptly clear how Balkar chan Tesh had managed to ream what were clearly elite troops so easily when he’d attacked the Swamp Portal. Of course, it had helped that the idiot in command of those elite troops had been Hadrign Thalmayr. Velvelig remembered a conversation with Silkash in which he’d tried to explain his suspicion about the quality of the prisoners chan Tesh had sent up-chain from Hell’s Gate. Now he knew he’d been right, although he supposed he ought to cut Thalmayr at least a little slack. The man was an idiot, and his defensive deployment and tactics (such as they were and what there’d been of them) had reflected that, but they’d been based on his understanding of his own weapons. None of the Arcanans at the Swamp Portal had ever imagined that anything more lethal than an arbalest bolt or a grenade could be thrown through a portal. Velvelig liked to think a Sharonian commander wouldn’t have made any comfortable assumptions about that, but the fact that the Arcanans had taken five entire universes with such absurd ease suggested he might have been wrong about who had a monopoly on overconfidence.

  What mattered at the moment, however, was that the handful of Arcanans who were now his allies couldn’t tell him anything more about the far side of that portal than he could see with his own two eyes and the assistance of his binoculars, and that was limited enough to make anyone unhappy.

  What he could see from here was that the Arcanans appeared to have placed their picket on the Thermyn side of the portal rather than the New Uromathian side. Given the normal weather in New Uromath, Velvelig completely agreed with their decision. The rainfall and seasonal temperature variation in Malbar, the Sharonian city nearest to the New Uromathan portal’s site, was less pronounced than in Wyrmach, but Malbar also got around four times the annual precipitation, and he preferred surroundings which were a bit less damp. It did leave him with a bit of a problem, though.

  “You were right about where they put their fort,” he said, studying the offending structures through the binoculars. “It’s right damned in the middle of this side of the portal.” He lowered the glasses and showed the Arcanan his teeth. “I suppose there’s only one way to be sure they haven’t switched things around on you on the far aspect, though.”

  “Part of me hopes they have,” Ulthar admitted. “Not the smart part of me, of course. It just offends me to think that the Union Army could be sloppy enough to’ve left things this way.”

  “Peacetime thinking dies hard,” Velvelig replied. “Here on the frontiers, it’s always been our policy to locate our forts on the down-chain side of each portal as we explored it, so it’s probably not too surprising your people operate the same way in what they think are their rear areas.”

  Ulthar nodded, although his expression remained an odd mixture of hopefulness and disgust.

  The New Uromath Portal was fourteen miles across—what Ulthar had described as a Class Six portal. Sharonians didn’t bother about classification systems; they simply measured a portal’s diameter and got on with exploring it. This one happened to be quite a bit wider than most and aligned roughly on a north-south axis…on this side. On the far side, it was aligned almost exactly on an east-to-west line, however, and that was where the “counterintuitive” nature of portals came into play. Standing west of the Thermyn aspect of the portal and gazing through it, one looked due south into New Uromath; if one circled around to the eastern aspect of the portal, however, one looked due north into New Uromath. It was impossible to look across or through a portal within a single universe—all you could see was the other universe, as if you were peering through a picture window, and in this instance, vision was as useless as spells or Talent. The only way for an observer in one universe to find out what was happening on the far side of a portal in the same universe was to move around the perimeter of the portal until he had a direct, unobstructed line-of-sight.

  Which meant that unless the Arcanans had gone ahead and constructed a second position—a lookout post, at least—on the far side of this portal, they’d left a fourteen-mile wide blind spot. The blind spot in question happened to be fourteen miles high at its tallest point, as well…which didn’t do Velvelig any good since he didn’t have any handy dragons of his own.

  Personally, he damned well would have put at least an outpost on the far side of that portal if he’d been going to war against another multi-universal civilization, no matter how far in his rear it might happen to be. But he’d known dozens of Portal Authority officers who probably wouldn’t have, too.

  “I suppose it all comes down to how crazy your Two Thousand Harshu—or whoever the hells is behind this frigging cover-up of yours—thinks we are,” he said finally. “If anyone who’s looking for us thinks we might be big enough lunatics to head even deeper behind your lines instead of hiding out in the mountains west of Fort Ghartoun and Snow Sapphire Lake, he’ll damned well have put somebody on the other side of this portal to watch its eastern aspect. If he doesn’t think we’re crazy enough to try sneaking into New Uromath in the first place, he won’t be worrying about watching for us here.”

  “Especially not if they’re trying to keep what happened at Fort Ghartoun from leaking out,” Ulthar agreed. “They wouldn’t want to issue any orders that might make people wonder what the hells is going on, I suppose. I wish I had a better feel for whether or not they will try to keep the news from getting out, though. In a way, I’d feel a lot better if I knew they’d decided to go as public as possible about it. It’d make sneaking past them harder, but at least then I’d assume they weren’t thinking in terms of making as quietly disappear before Duke Garth Showma starts asking awkward questions.”

  “Does make it a little harder to catch someone when you’re trying to keep the truth about why you’re hunting them from your own troops,” Velvelig acknowledged. “You can probably come up with plausible orders to cover a lot of contingencies, but if the man on the spot doesn’t know what you’re really trying to do, he won’t do a very good job of adapting or modifying those orders to cover a contingency you didn’t think of when you gave them.”

  “Agreed. On the other hand, if Jaralt and I are right and mul Gurthak is the one who set all of this in motion, he at least managed to find someone like Alivar Neshok when he needed him. I don’t like to think he could have found a lot of other officers who were…equally apt, let’s say, to his purposes. But he might not need many of them if the ones he does have are in the right positions. Or, from our perspective, the wrong positions.”<
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  “Like on the other side of this portal?” Velvelig arched his eyebrows, and Ulthar nodded. “Well,” the regiment-captain said more briskly, sliding his binoculars back into their case, “there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

  He swung back up into the unicorn’s saddle and squinted up at the sky through the branches. Like many Arpathians, he wasn’t especially fond of trees, but under the circumstances, he was willing to make an exception to his usual attitude.

  “Gets dark early, this time of year,” he observed. “Light’ll be gone in another couple of hours, and there’s no moon tonight—on either side of the portal. The troops in that fort of yours are going to be showing at least some lights, which should help us keep wide of them while we creep around to the other side, but it’ll be slow going without lights of our own. Still, I figure we should get chan Byral far enough around the western end of the portal to get a good Look for any outposts covering the southern aspect in, say, three hours. And if he doesn’t see anything, we may just be justified in thinking this mul Gurthak of yours doesn’t realize how crazy we really are. And if he doesn’t”—the Arpathian grinned suddenly and broadly as Fifty Ulthar climbed into his own saddle—“we may just have a straight dash from here to Hell’s Gate after all!”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  March 8

  “Well, Sir, can’t say I’m looking forward to this next bit,” Tersak chan Golar said.

  “Whyever not?” Grithair chan Mahsdyr asked with a smile. Chan Golar, Gold Company’s company senior-armsman, was from southern Jerekhas, accustomed to the Mbisi’s mild summers, and the company-captain had a pretty shrewd notion of the reasons for his discontent.

  “Might say nobody but a pure and simple lunatic would go anywhere near Lake Wernisk in th’ winter if he had any choice about it, Sir,” chan Golar replied glumly. “If I was inclined t’ complain, that is, which gods know I’m not. And according t’ my cousin Rhodair, not even bison’re stupid enough t’ spend the winter at Ulthamyr. Migrate south into Benteria, he says, like anything else with a brain. But us?” The lean, grizzled noncom shook his head in disgust. “We’re not only goin’ to Lake Wernisk, we’re goin’ the next best thing t’ six hundred miles cross-country to Ulthamyr. Gods bless the poor sodding cavalry!”