by David Weber
Still, the sound was almost like a reminder, he thought, glancing at the clock once more. Then he slipped a bookmark between the pages of his novel, closed the book, and laid it in his lap as he closed his eyes and settled into the upper stages of a trained Voice's trance. It increased his sensitivity and extended his reception range considerably, and he reached out, Listening for all he was worth for any hint of transmission from Petty-Captain Baulwan. There was nothing, and he frowned slightly as he started to—
* * *
Commander of Fifty Iftar Halesak, CO, Second Platoon, Able Company, Second Andaran Temporal Scouts, moved through the wet, rainy dark with a serpent's silence. He hadn't asked for this assignment, but that was only because he hadn't known it would exist. And if he had known, he would have assumed it was the sort of thing Special Operations would have handled. Unfortunately, it would appear that Two Thousand Harshu was a bit short in the SpecOps department. No doubt the expeditionary force commander found that highly irritating, but Halesak didn't. He was too busy being fiercely glad that he'd gotten it to spare much sympathy for his commanding officer's dilemmas.
As an officer of the Second Andaran Scouts, Halesak would have wanted vengeance for what had happened to the Second Andarans' Charlie Company when the Sharonians massacred them, no matter what else might have happened. He'd known some of those men for upwards of ten years, and all of them had been his brothers in arms, his family. Indeed, one of those massacred men had been his brother-in-law. Yet there was a part of him that was almost ashamed by how little Charlie Company's complete destruction actually meant to him . . . compared to what else had happened. As one of the very few garthan officers in the Union Army, Iftar Halesak's heart filled with a white, blinding fury whenever he thought of the way the Sharonian butchers had shot down Magister Halathyn vos Dulainah as if he'd been no more than a stray dog.
Halesak hated the shakira and the entire perverted, vicious caste system they called a society with a pure and burning passion. He'd been luckier than many, because his father had possessed the determination and the courage to break free of Mythal before Iftar had ever been born. It was as well he had, too, for Iftar had been born with the Gift his father had not. It wasn't an especially powerful Gift, but it would have been enough, back in Mythal, for the shakira to have taken Iftar away from his parents and placed him with a shakira family to be raised.
But if Fifty Halesak and his two sisters had never personally lived under the crushing weight of shakira oppression, all too many other members of his family had, and so had his wife, when she'd been a child. And because those others who meant so much to him had, he'd understood on a deep, emotional level what all too many of his fellow Andaran citizens grasped only intellectually. He'd understood that Mythal's chosen society wasn't simply wrong, it was evil. Which meant he'd understood just how special Halathyn vos Dulainah had truly been. What it had taken for the man whose Gift and intellect had made him the crowning jewel of the shakira's magic-wielding establishment to turn his back on all of the power, prestige, privilege, and family prominence which had been his simply because his own fierce sense of right and wrong had left him no choice.
In his entire life, Iftar Halesak had never personally known a single shakira worth the effort to snuff out his miserable life. But every garthan had known of Halathyn vos Dulainah and the way he had made their cause his own. And now that man had been slaughtered. There was not a garthan in any Arcanan-claimed universe who would ever forgive these "Sharonians" for that, and Fifty Halesak knew he carried all of those other garthan's hopes, desires, and anger with him as he made his careful, quiet way through the darkness.
He and his men had spent the last twenty-one hours hidden in the sopping wet trees around the Voice's cabin's clearing. They'd had to be cautious, of course, but it really hadn't been that great a challenge for someone with the Andaran Scouts' training. Now, if everything went according to plan, Able Company first platoon was about to hit the next Voice relay after Fort Brithik at this same, exact moment.
He eased to a halt, raising his left arm to signal the other men of his platoon, as a chicken clucked loudly from the coop beside the relay station. He stood waiting patiently in the breezy rain, despite the fire blazing within him, until the noisy fowl had settled back again. It didn't take very long, and he used the time comparing what he'd seen with his own eyes so far to the briefing Five Hundred Neshok had provided. It was amazing how accurate the five hundred's information had turned out to be, he thought, and then, as the chicken quieted, he started forward once more.
The daggerstone in his hand seemed absurdly light in comparison to the dragoon arbalest he normally carried. Many Gifted Arcanan soldiers carried daggerstones as personal, backup weapons, but they were seldom used offensively. They were too short-ranged for normal battlefield use, and if they were loaded with fireballs—the most common spell loading—they weren't exactly precision weapons. Most troopers considered getting caught in the fringe of their own fireballs to be a Bad Thing, after all. Besides, they were too readily detected, too likely to betray a man's position to any Gifted adversary, to be carried on most scouting or covert operations. But he'd already determined that the log-built relay station had no windows to let out any betraying flashes of light, and worries about detectability didn't loom so large against murderous barbarians who hadn't even known magic existed three months before, he told himself with a thin smile.
He and his point squad reached the front of the relay building. He really should have delegated this particular task to his platoon sword, he knew, and perhaps he would the next time. But not tonight. Oh, no, not tonight.
He took time for one more quick, sweeping glance around. Then he laid his left hand on the door latch and drew a deep breath. The door was unlocked, the latch turned easily under his hand, and he slammed forward, driving his shoulder into the heavy wooden panel. It exploded open, and he erupted into the room beyond it.
According to Five Hundred Neshok's information, there were only three men permanently housed in this relay station, and only one of them was a Voice. Halesak had expected that information to prove as accurate as everything else Neshok had told him, but he hadn't expected to come face-to-face with the Voice so quickly. For a moment, he refused to believe he had, that things could possibly have gone that well. But then he saw the bronze falcon badge on the other man's civilian tunic.
* * *
Erthek Vardan's head jerked up, and his eyes snapped open. He had no idea what was happening. He didn't even know the origin of the sound which had yanked him so brutally up out of his light trance.
Nor did he ever find out.
His eyes might have opened, but they still hadn't focused when Iftar Halesak raised his daggerstone and triggered the first of its stored spells. The spell ripped across the relay station's main room in a bar of quasi-solid lightning. It struck Erthek square in the chest, and his heart and lungs literally exploded inside the ribs which had been no protection at all against that spell.
He was dead before he ever truly saw the man killing him.
* * *
Acrid, throat-catching smoke still poured up into the early morning sky from the smoldering ruins of the Sharonian fort which had once guarded the portal between New Uromath and Thermyn as the first Sharonian prisoners were hustled back across into New Uromath.
Alivar Neshok stood outside the captured Voice relay station, watching critically, and hoped his strategy for crippling the Sharonian Voices' ability to warn their superiors had continued to work as effectively as he'd assured Two Thousand Harshu it would. So far, at least, things seemed to be going well, and he intended to keep it that way.
He wasn't positive, but he strongly suspected that someone had probably complained to Thousand Carthos or Thousand Toralk about his methods by now. Five Hundred Vaynair, for example, had made his own feelings about those methods abundantly
clear to Neshok. But if the medical officer had taken his protests higher, as Neshok was v
irtually certain he had, they'd clearly fallen upon deaf ears.
More likely, someone told the asshole to take a hike, Neshok told himself with a certain undeniable smugness.
But his satisfaction faded back into concentration as his assigned troopers kicked and prodded the newest batch of captured Sharonians back through the portal. There were more prisoners this time. Fort Brithik had boasted a larger garrison, and more of them had been indoors, under cover, when the attack came in. For that matter, Two Thousand Harshu had decided to take a chance on Neshok's success to date. The expeditionary force had taken the defenders totally by surprise, thanks to Fifty Halesak's successful neutralization of the Voice on the New Uromath side of the portal.
In theory, the next relay station beyond Brithik had also been reached and neutralized. That was a little more problematical, though, because Neshok's interrogations hadn't been able to fix that station's position with the same degree of accuracy. Still, they'd known approximately where to look, and under the circumstances, Neshok had felt justified in urging Thousand Toralk to forgo the yellows' attack in this instance. As Neshok had pointed out, there wasn't supposed to be a Voice inside the fort at all, and they needed still more prisoners. And even if it turned out that there was a Voice inside Fort Brithik after all, the next link in the Voice chain had almost certainly been successfully severed. The thousand obviously didn't much like Neshok, but he'd had to admit that this was probably their best chance to secure a sizable number of prisoners for future interrogation.
So the battle dragons had come sweeping down out of the darkness and filled the night with fury. Even without the yellows' poisonous vapors, the reds had killed well over two-thirds of Fort Brithik's garrison. That still left the next best thing to a hundred and sixty fresh prisoners, however, and Neshok was determined to get them back to the other side of the portal before any Voices among them could contact anyone else if it should turn out that he was wrong about whether or not the Voice network had already been severed up-chain from them.
If that arrogant little bitch had been telling the truth about portals cutting off Voice transmissions the same way they affected spells, then any Voice they got back to New Uromath should—theoretically, at least—be effectively silenced.
As if the little slut would've told the truth about anything if she'd had a choice! Hells, I wouldn't believe her if she told me the sun was going to rise in the east tomorrow morning! That frigging idiot Olderhan can believe whatever he wants about his precious "shardonai," but I'm not going to risk the security of this entire expeditionary force on his fucking stupidity!
His lip curled contemptuously at the thought of the commander of one hundred whose utter and complete incompetence had created this entire war. Then he shook himself and started grimly forward to where his subordinates were sorting out the prisoners on this side of the portal.
"Five Hundred!" Javelin Porath barked, snapping to attention as Neshok appeared out of the predawn dimness, and the Intelligence officer smiled.
Porath had continued to demonstrate a consistent enthusiasm, as well as ability, ever since that first session at Fort Shaylar. Several of the men who'd been assigned to Neshok had turned out quite well, actually, although there'd been a few disappointments. But Porath was the very best of the lot, and the acting five hundred already had the javelin earmarked for a formal transfer to Intelligence, where his talents could be most effectively utilized.
"As you were, Lisaro," he said now.
"Yes, Sir!" the javelin acknowledged.
"And what do we have here?" Neshok continued, folding his hands behind him as he turned to survey the fresh clutch of shocked, bewildered prisoners. Most of them were only partially dressed, since they'd been in bed when the attack hammered over them, but a few wore more or less complete uniforms. No doubt they'd had the duty . . . or been about to go on duty, he thought. Now all of them looked back at him, with the mixture of defiance and fear with which he'd become increasingly familiar.
"Well, Sir," Porath said, "I'm afraid I did find this."
He held out his hand, and Neshok frowned as he took the small, bronze falcon pin. For just a moment, his belly tightened as he realized the information from his previous interrogations hadn't been completely accurate, after all. He looked down at it, weighing it in his palm for a moment or two, then snorted. He'd already known the Sharonians were scrambling to push the necessary personnel forward as quickly as possible. Apparently, they'd managed to get at least some of those personnel almost into position in time.
"I don't suppose you found someone actually wearing it, did you, Javelin?" he asked, smiling thinly.
"No, Sir. But I did find it—or, rather, one of my troopers found it—on the trail between here and the fort."
"Which would tend to suggest that someone took it off and tried to lose it, is that what you're saying, Javelin?" Neshok inquired genially.
"Yes, Sir. That's exactly what I think happened."
"Well, I'm inclined to agree with you." Neshok tossed the pin into the air and caught it two or three times, then turned to face the prisoners directly.
"I'm perfectly well aware of what this means," he said through the translation spellware, holding up the pin. "At least one of you is what your people call a 'Voice.' I want to know how many of you are, and who you are."
No one responded, and Neshok bared his teeth. Whoever the Voice—or Voices—might be, he was clearly a quicker thinker than most. He couldn't have known what technique Neshok had developed for dealing with his kind, but he'd obviously recognized at least the possibility that the Arcanans might have figured out what that little bronze pin meant.
"I've asked pleasantly once," the acting five hundred said. "I'm not going to ask politely again."
Still no one responded, and Neshok's smile grew a bit broader. On the one hand, assuming Shaylar had been anything remotely like truthful, the hidden Voice had been neutralized by the simple act of bringing him to this side of the portal. On the other hand, Shaylar had probably been lying about anything she thought she could get away with. Which, given Olderhan's stupidity, had probably been just about everything. And even if she hadn't been lying about that, Neshok wasn't exactly brokenhearted by the opportunity to begin creating the proper psychological impact.
Besides, his encounter with her hadn't exactly left him feeling very well inclined towards other Voices.
"Javelin Porath?" he said, and held out his hand.
Porath handed him one of the hand weapons—the "revolvers"—which had been captured from the enemy. Neshok didn't much like the thing. The recoil was painful (and, little though he liked admitting it, frightening), and he'd found it very difficult to adjust to the incredible noisiness and brilliant flash when it was fired. Still, he'd forced himself to acquire at least some proficiency with it—although, in his more honest moments, he rather doubted that he could have expected to hit anything at much more than arm's length—because he'd wanted a weapon his prisoners were going to recognize as such. Now he nodded to Porath, and the javelin reached out and grabbed a randomly selected prisoner by the front of his tunic. With his hands manacled behind him, the Sharonian had no choice but to stumble forward, and Porath hauled him over to Neshok.
"Would the Voice care to identify himself now?" the Intelligence officer inquired, pressing the muzzle of the captured weapon against the prisoner's temple and cocking it.
Still no one spoke, and Neshok shrugged.
"Suit yourself," he said softly, and squeezed the trigger.
It was the first time he'd actually used a "revolver" for its designed function. The recoil was as unpleasant as ever, but he'd allowed for that. What he hadn't quite allowed for was the way the prisoner's head splashed as the heavy bullet blew it apart. Blood and bits of tissue erupted across Neshok, but he managed not to flinch as the corpse flipped backwards and thudded to the ground.
The other Sharonians stared at him. Clearly, they hadn't believe he'd actually shoot one of them in cold b
lood.
Well, he thought, at least we've established now that I will. That's worthwhile in its own right.
"Would the Voice care to reconsider his position?" he asked, watching Porath choose yet another prisoner, once more at random.
The second Sharonian stumbled forward, his face white and strained. He tried to dig his heels in, but without the use of his hands, resistance was ultimately futile. Porath dragged him over to stand where the first prisoner had died, and Neshok pressed the muzzle against his head, in turn.
"Wait!" a Sharonian voice called.
Neshok turned his head, quirking one eyebrow, and gazed interrogatively at the speaker. The Sharonian looked to be a bit older than most of the prisoners, and he wore only a sleeveless undershirt of some sort above the waist, which meant he wasn't displaying any rank insignia. But there was something about his eyes—a hard, challenging something, like the eyes of that wiry little senior-armsman back at Fort Shaylar.
"I'm the Voice," the Sharonian said.
"Are you?" Neshok considered the other man for a moment, then shrugged and beckoned the one Porath had chosen back in among the others. "Come here."
The man who'd identified himself walked across to face Neshok.
"So, you're the Voice?"
"Yes," the Sharonian said, but Neshok shook his head and held up his personal crystal. A bright red light strobed down inside it, and the Intelligence officer sighed.
"I'm afraid you're not," he said. "This is a truth spell. And according to it, you've just lied to me."
"I don't care what your rock says," the prisoner replied. "You wanted the Voice. You've got me."