The Road to Hell - eARC

by David Weber

  She sent that healing flood through her arms, out through her hands, and her life force merged with his. She absorbed some of his shock, reeled under the wave of agony that crashed through her, and her hands shook as it threatened to suck her under. But she refused to yield. She fought the darkness aside, sent more of her life force into him. Her training told her to stop—screamed that she must stop! She was pouring too much of herself into him, spending her own life force like fire, emptying herself into a cold, dark void of death. She knew that…and she didn’t care. He was the Emperor, her Emperor. She would die before she let him go, and she turned her back on her teachers’ warnings. She emptied herself against his pain and the savage injuries of his broken body.

  And it wasn’t enough.

  She could feel him slipping away, under her fingers.

  “NO!” She screamed at him, but her voice emerged as little more than a hoarse, rasping whisper. Tears blinded her. “Don’t you dare go!”

  She moved by raw instinct now and lunged for his feet. She jerked off his shoes, jammed both hands hard against the balls of his feet, locked what her instructors had called the “wellsprings of life” in the soles of his feet. Energy centers there drew energy in and let energy flow out. When death came, her instructors had said, a person’s energy bled away to nothing through those wellsprings.

  “You may not leave!” she screamed at him, her voice stronger, and his soul hesitated, trapped by her hands and her will. “We need you,” she cried. “We need you too desperately to let you go! Oh, goddess…Shalana, give me strength, we need him. Please, Your Majesty, stay with us…”

  A terrible spasm went through him. Then he started to shudder, violently. The shuddering lasted for several terrifying seconds. Then he relaxed with such suddenness, such totality, she thought for a moment he’d died, after all. She drew breath to howl in anguish, when a low, deep groan tore from him. He tried to move under her hands, and pain flared, cruelly. He cried out in agony.

  “Don’t move!” she cried. “You have broken bones!” She didn’t dare release her grip on the wellspring points, but he was trying to move, trying to thrash around.

  “Anbessa…” The name tore from him, raw with anguish.

  She searched the terrace with a frantic gaze, trying to find someone—anyone—in an Imperial Security uniform. There were so many people running in panic-stricken horror, she could see nothing but total confusion. But then a face she recognized resolved itself from the wild melee and she screamed out a name.

  “DARCEL!”

  * * *

  Darcel Kinlafia jerked around, yanked out of his efforts to help the dozens of injured, sort out the panic, by the sound of his name. The scream cut through the chaos and the confusion with an impossible clarity. He knew he couldn’t possibly have heard it through the chaos and the bedlam, but he didn’t need to hear it with his ears, for he Heard it with every fiber of his Talent and he wheeled, eyes searching for its source.

  “Down here, Master Kinlafia!” Relatha Kindare shrieked. “Help me!”

  His gaze dropped to the flowerbed. It focused on her—then on the shape she crouched over, in that flowerbed—and his face turned paper-white in the ghastly light of the burning palace. He charged forward, tossing aside tables, chairs, and people with equal abandon, and Alazon was right behind him.

  “Find a healer!” Relatha gasped, as he slid to his knees beside her. “Please! I can barely keep him stable, I’m just a student, oh, Goddess, I’m so scared…”

  Both Voices went glassy-eyed. It took her gibbering mind a long, horrified moment to realize they were sending out a broadband distress call. She tried to feel grateful, tried to hope someone would Hear in time, but the battle to force the emperor to live consumed her and despair tore at her as she felt him slipping away once more.

  The Privy Voice came out of “send mode” first and her eyes focused on Relatha once more, huge and dark in her ashen face, glittering reflections of savage firelight.

  “What can I do?!”

  “Don’t let him move, don’t let him thrash around. He’s got broken bones. If he moves, he’ll tear things open, inside. And he’s asking for Anbessa.”

  “Alazon,” Kinlafia said.

  “Got it,” she replied immediately, and set a light hand on Relatha’s shoulder. “I’ll find out how the Grand Princess is. Darcel will stay with you.”

  She disappeared into the wild confusion, but her husband stayed close by Relatha’s side, searching, for injuries. The emperor’s arm had a ghastly break, a compound fracture pumping blood, and Kinlafia’s face blanched even whiter. He ripped off the capelets of his formal court dress and used a strip torn from them to tie a tourniquet around the Emperor’s right arm. A jagged splinter of bone had torn through flesh and skin and sleeve. There was blood everywhere, so much blood…

  “More cloth strips,” Relatha said, her hands still clamped like death on the soles of the emperor’s feet. “And something for splints.”

  Kinlafia tore more strips from his capelets. His explorer’s good sense kept his nerves steady and the emergency medical training which went with it told his hands what to do, and Relatha held tight to Zindel’s life force, trusting him to staunch the wounds while she refused to let her emperor slip away.

  Kinlafia bound Zindel’s right arm to his chest so he couldn’t move it, then smashed a tumbled chair to bits for splints to secure the shattered arm more securely. Then another chair went to pieces as he splinted the emperor’s right thigh and left calf.

  He’d just finished that when several uniformed armsmen came running from another part of the terrace, and Relatha heard fire alarm bells clanging as fire wagons fought their way through the victory celebration crowds, trying to reach the burning Grand Palace. A ponderous crash marked the collapse of the Grand Imperial Salon, and she flinched as a fresh shockwave of heat, flame, and smoke belched across them. Cinders rained down like hailstones.

  Every one of the armsmen had a gun in his hand.

  “Get away from His Majesty!” one of them barked, and another reached down to snatch the emperor’s shoulders, but—

  “NO!” Relatha screamed.

  “Don’t move him!” Kinlafia snarled. “You’ll kill him if you move him!”

  “The fire—”

  “He’s got broken bones!” Relatha shouted over the roar of the fire. “They’ll slice open arteries if you snatch him up like that. I’m training as a Healer; I can sense the damage in there. He’s barely holding onto life, just from the physical shock. If I move my focus off the wellspring points, he’ll die! He needs pain medication, emergency surgery. God’s mercy, where’s the Imperial Surgeon? Any surgeon, any healer?”

  Alazon Yanamar-Kinlafia shoved her way through the guards with kicks and curses.

  “Let me through!” When she finally broke through the cordon they’d thrown around His Majesty, she dropped to her knees beside Relatha. “Dr. Sathron’s on his way from the palace clinic. He’s nearly here. I’ve called for a whole trauma team and an ambulance. Is he conscious?”

  “Barely.”

  The Privy Voice leaned across to speak directly into her ear. “Will it help him or hurt him to let him know Anbessa is alive?”

  Relatha bit her lip and blinked helpless tears. He might be holding onto life just long enough to know his child was safe and would let go of the struggle and die if they told him. Or he might be reassured enough to ease the strain of terror and guilt, easing the stress on his laboring body, now that he no longer needed to fear for her life. She didn’t know, wasn’t trained, didn’t have enough experience.

  “I don’t know!”

  When she tried to explain, someone—Security Minister chan Garatz himself, she realized suddenly—spoke decisively.

  “Tell him!”

  “Yes,” Kinlafia agreed. “It’s sheer hell, never to know.”

  He wasn’t talking about the emperor and Anbessa. He was talking about Shaylar, Relatha realized with a sudden surge
of pity and compassion, even through the chaos and the fight to save the emperor’s life. When she saw the pain etched into his face, burning in his eyes, she nodded.

  “Yes. Tell him.”

  She braced herself for the worst.

  “Zindel!” Alazon crouched low over him, speaking directly into his ear. “Zindel, it’s Alazon. Anbessa is safe. I’ve seen her, talked to her. She’s alive. She’ll be all right. Can you hear me? You saved her, Zindel, she’s going to be fine. Please, Your Majesty, don’t give up, ’Bessa needs her father, she needs you. We all need you. Dr. Sathron’s on the way. He’s nearly here. He’ll give you something to take away the pain. Just hold on a little longer, please.”

  Tears ran down her lovely face, and a moan escaped the emperor. Then the heavy head moved, in the tiniest of nods, and Relatha felt the surge in his life force as he gathered reserves of strength from his massive, powerful body. He dug in, hung grimly onto life, defying the pain of torn tissue, shattered bone, and burns.

  Relatha sobbed aloud in relief, and then someone else was shouting and shoving the guards aside. Dr. Sathron had arrived and other healers rushed across the flagstones behind him. The ambulance had arrived. Stretcher-bearers came running behind the Emergency Medicine Talents rushing toward the emperor.

  “Move back, please,” Dr. Sathron said crisply, “give us room to work.” He glanced at Relatha, saw where her hands were, and blanched. “Shalana’s mercy, child,” he whispered.

  Then the others were there and a trained medic slipped her hands under Relatha’s, taking over for her. Relatha gabbled out, “There’s a break in his right femur, a bad one, right beside the big artery. I can Feel it. We didn’t dare move him. Master Kinlafia splinted it and his arm…”

  The medic met and held her gaze.

  “It’s all right, girl,” the EMT said. “It’s all right. Back out now, child, and let me take it. Your quick thinking saved his life—not many students remember the wellspring points—but move back now. Let us work, love. You can rest. We’ve got him.”

  Relatha sighed, relaxing her concentration, felt the other woman’s fully trained Talent take up the load she’d supported for an eternity. She sagged back, sitting on her heels, head reeling, and then tried to stand and move out of the medical team’s way.

  She couldn’t. She tried again and made it half way, then staggered and went down, her head swimming and her muscles water. But Kinlafia caught her. He murmured something—something she couldn’t hear through the tumult around her—and then he was helping her totter unsteadily out of the way. He supported her on one side and his wife took her arm on the other while they guided her faltering footsteps across the wide terrace.

  The firefighters arrived, at last, bells clanging and horses snorting. Men were scrambling down, connecting hoses to the Palace’s water supply, yanking open the valves and racing with long hoses toward the blaze. Water shot upward in massive jets as the hoses filled and sprayed it into the raging inferno.

  Men with ladders scrambled up to reach windows on the rooms not yet burning, trying to contain the blaze before it spread to the rest of the immense structure, and streams of people were evacuating, carrying out art treasures, government records, anything they could salvage.

  Watching the destruction of such a beautiful place made Relatha sick inside, and she wondered, numb with agony, how many people had been killed in the explosion. Servants she knew, maybe even her own mother and cousins, and all those Guardsmen who’d been on the balcony and in the Grand Imperial Salon. And there must have been many others in the corridors surrounding the Salon. How many of them had been injured? Perhaps crippled for life? Heavy chunks of the balcony had smashed down into the crowd out here, as well. People could have been badly injured by that falling debris.

  By the time they reached the stairs leading down the hillside toward the street she was shaking so badly she could barely stand. She didn’t know where the two Voices were leading her and she didn’t much care, so long as it was away from the horror behind them.

  “Who could have done such a thing?” Kinlafia asked in a voice harsh with horror. “Surely not even Chava Busar would have conceived of something this foul!”

  “You think not?” Alazon snarled. “You don’t know him the way I do, Darcel. He’s evil! Chava Busar is interested in just one thing—Chava Busar! He’ll stop at nothing, he’ll—”

  Her voice chopped off. She stopped dead in her tracks. Stared out across the dark waters of the Ylani Straits. Horror twisted across her face. Relatha followed her gaze…

  A ship was ablaze, out there. Pieces of a ship. Fuel burned in a sheet of flame that danced insanely across the waves. Two hulking destroyers flanked the sinking wreckage.

  “Oh, dear God…” Alazon whispered. “That’s Peregrine.”

  A whimper broke from Relatha’s throat.

  It couldn’t be real. She couldn’t bear for it to be real. But how could anyone have lived through that? The yacht had been blown to pieces. Kinlafia was cursing. Endlessly. Brutally. With words so foul, Relatha blanched. Some of them, she’d never even heard, before. Relatha turned stunned eyes toward him, saw the wreckage of grief and agony in his face, and wanted to comfort him. But she couldn’t. Her throat was locked tight. She couldn’t breathe past it.

  Then she was falling. Collapsing like a house of cards. Sobs ripped through her. The burning ship and the dark water and Darcel Kinlafia’s voice gyred insanely around her, slid and whirled in crazed circles like a cork caught in a whirlpool. She couldn’t bear it. She found herself sitting on the cold stone steps, huddled in Alazon’s arms, and both of them were crying.

  Kinlafia crouched beside them, one arm around each. Relatha heard another massive crash inside the burning palace. Firefighters were shouting. More fire bells were clanging as additional fire wagons and crews arrived. It was all dim and distant and strange. When a fire crew hauling hoses charged up the steps toward them, Kinlafia lifted Relatha in his arms and simply carried her out of the way while Alazon hurried after them.

  They stepped out into the garden that sloped its way down the hillside, and Kinlafia set her down carefully. He actually went to one knee so that she was sitting down when he let go, rather than standing. She clutched his hand tightly.

  “Thank you,” she choked out.

  “For carrying you?”

  She shook her head. “I’m just a servant…”

  “Just a servant?” he echoed sharply. His hands tightened on hers, painfully. “Don’t you dare say that!”

  She gaped up at him, stunned.

  “By the Triads, you saved the Emperor’s life! You’re a Talented Healer, girl, powerfully Talented. Even if you’re only a student, you knew exactly what to do. And you did it. Most of us were running in blind panic. But you kept your wits. Shalana’s mercy, girl, if you hadn’t…”

  He shuddered. Then he brushed wet hair back from her face, pulled loose long strands caught in her mouth.

  “People call me a hero,” he whispered hoarsely. “All I really did was sit in perfect safety at the portal and receive a message. But you…” He touched her cheek. “You ran forward, right toward the explosion, with debris falling all around you.” He tipped up her chin, made her meet his eyes. “There’s only one real hero on this hillside and I’m looking at her.”

  “But—”

  Alazon hushed her. “He’s right, Relatha. It is Relatha, isn’t it? Your name?”

  She nodded, astonished a member of the Privy Council knew her name.

  “Relatha,” Alazon laid one hand against her cheek, “all of Sharona owes you a tremendous debt. One we can’t possibly repay—”

  And then she broke off suddenly and whipped around to stare at the blazing debris in the dark waters of the Straits.

  “Andrin!” The shriek tore loose, high and wild and…exultant?

  “She’s alive! Andrin’s alive!” The Voice was laughing, weeping, gabbling in wild excitement. “That was the captain’s Voice. The Cap
tain of the HMS Striker. The ship’s Voice just contacted me. The Striker’s crew pulled her out of the water. It was the Prince Consort! He saved them both! Howan Fai threw her overboard. Dragged her overboard, just minutes before the Peregrine blew up. Vothan’s mercy, he jumped off the ship with her!”

  Kinlafia let out a crowing, triumphant whoop and grabbed Alazon and kissed her. Grabbed Relatha and hugged her. He was all but dancing in place, nearly jumping out of his skin in his own wild relief.

  “My Gods,” he gasped, “how in Vothan’s holy name did he know?”

  “Andrin had a Glimpse!” Alazon’s eyes blazed with incandescent joy. “She knew the ship was going to blow up. She was choking it out to him when a boarding party rushed at them, trying to snatch her.”

  Relatha gasped.

  “The Prince jumped overboard with her in the middle of a gun battle. Oh, Darcel, they’re alive, both of them!”

  “But—” Relatha said in confusion, “but Her Grand Highness should have drowned! Her gown must have weighed close to sixty pounds! I know it did! I’ve helped her dress, before.”

  Alazon grinned hugely. “It’s sixty pounds at the bottom of the Strait now! Howan Fai cut it off her back, in the water. With his sheath knife. He’s carried it everywhere since the wedding. They were pulled from the water by a search party in a lifeboat. They’re safely aboard the Striker. That one,” she pointed to the destroyer on their left, bathed in the lurid red flames from the burning fuel and the wreckage of Peregrine. The destroyer on the right was mostly obscured by the thick black smoke boiling up from the fire.

  Numb shock vanished. Relatha started to cry again. But this time, oh, gods, this time, her heart was wild with joy, not grief.

  “We have to find Empress Varena,” Alazon said, dragging Relatha to her feet. “We can’t tell the Emperor yet, not till his life’s out of danger, but we have to tell the Empress and Razial and Anbessa. We have to tell all of Sharona. The Crown Princess is alive!”

  They were the sweetest words ever spoken.