\par Hell Hath No Fury-ARC
\par by
David Weber & Linda Evans

Table of Contents
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HELL HATH NO FURY
David Weber
& Linda Evans

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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
 
Copyright © 2007 by David Weber & Linda Evans
 
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
 
A Baen Books Original
 
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
 
ISBN 10: 1-4165-2101-1
ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-2101-3
 
Cover art by Kurt Miller
 
First printing, March 2007
 
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 
t/k
 
Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America
 

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For Megan, Morgan, and Mikey Paul,
who put up with their Dad.
See? I really was working on something!
Baen Books by David Weber

Honor Harrington:
On Basilisk Station
The Honor of the Queen
The Short Victorious War
Field of Dishonor
Flag in Exile
Honor Among Enemies
In Enemy Hands
Echoes of Honor
Ashes of Victory
War of Honor
At All Costs

Honorverse:
Crown of Slaves (with Eric Flint)
The Shadow of Saganami

edited by David Weber:
More than Honor
Worlds of Honor
Changer of Worlds
The Service of the Sword

Mutineers' Moon
The Armageddon Inheritance
Heirs of Empire
Empire from the Ashes

In Fury Born

The Apocalypse Troll

The Excalibur Alternative

Bolos!
Old Soldiers

Oath of Swords
The War God's Own
Wind Rider's Oath

with Steve White:
Crusade
In Death Ground
The Stars At War
The Shiva Option
Insurrection
The Stars At War II

with Eric Flint:
1633

with John Ringo:
March Upcountry
March to the Sea
March to the Stars
We Few

with Linda Evans:
Hell's Gate
Hell Hath No Fury (forthcoming)

Baen Books by Linda Evans

Far Edge of Darkness
Time Scout (with Robert Asprin)
For King and Country (with Robert Asprin) 

Preface

The vertical cut in the cliff face only looked razor-thin. Even the broadest railway cut looked like a narrow crack when it was cut into the face of a sheer precipice over three thousand feet tall.

Darcel Kinlafia knew that. He'd already passed through what the guidebooks had taken to calling the Traisum Cut once before, outbound, but it was the sort of sight not even the most jaded trans-universal traveler could ever tire of.

That was why he'd climbed out of his seat in the rattling, banging so-called "passenger car" and stepped out onto the front platform so that he could see it better as the train started up the four-mile approach ramp to the cut. Now he stood there, hands on the guard rail, staring out and up at one of the most spectacular pieces of scenery imaginable.

The portal between the universes of Traisum and Karys was one of the smaller ones Sharona had explored. Or, rather, it was effectively one of the smaller ones. The theorists believed it was actually much larger, but that most of it was buried underground in both universes. Only the uppermost arc of the circular portal was exposed, and the terrain in the two universes it connected was . . . dissimilar, to say the least. The Karys side of the portal was located near what would have been the Arpathian city of Zaithag in Darcel Kinlafia's birth universe; the Traisum side was located in the Ithal Mountains west of the city of Narshalla in Shurkhal.

That was what created the spectacular scenery. Zaithag was barely seven hundred feet above sea level; the mountains west of Narshalla reached heights of over forty-six hundred feet . . . and the portal's Traisum nexus was located smack in the middle of one of those mountains.

Most people who saw it from the Karys side for the first time felt a peculiar sense of disorientation. It was something the human eye and the human mind weren't trained to expect: an absolutely vertical, glassy-smooth cliff over a half-mile high at its shortest point and four and a half miles wide.

The good news was that Karys was outbound from Sharona. That had allowed the Trans-Temporal Express' construction crews to come at it from the slopes of Mount Karek rather than straight out of the mountain's heart. The portal was actually located east of the mountain's crest, which made the impossible cliff several hundred feet shorter from the Karys side and the approach slope perhaps three or four miles shorter from the Traisum side. TTE's engineers were accustomed to stupendous construction projects fit to dwarf the Grand Ternathian Canal or New Farnal Canal, but this one had been a stretch even for them. It had taken them years (and more tons of dynamite than Kinlafia cared to contemplate) to complete, and all meaningful exploration down-chain from Traisum had been bottlenecked until they'd finally finished it. The cut was five miles long, eighteen hundred feet deep where its Karys terminus met the top of the approach ramp, and wide enough for a four-track right-of-way and a double-wide road for wheeled traffic. The grade, needless to say, was steep.

Now the locomotive chuffed more nosily than ever, laboring as it started into that deep, shadowed gulf of stone. Its smoke plume fumed up, adding its own fresh coat of grime and soot to the stains already marking the cut's rocky sides, and he heard the haunting beauty of the whistle singing its warning.

He stayed on the platform a little longer, looking up past the edge of the passenger car's roof overhang at the narrow strip of scorching blue sky so far overhead. Then he drew a deep breath, went back inside, and settled himself into his seat once more.

Not much longer now, he told himself. Not much longer . . . for this stage, at least.

Less than two hours later, Kinlafia gazed out the passenger car window as the train clattered and banged to a halt in a vibrating screech of brakes and a long, drawnout hiss of steam.

It was hot, and despite the welcome interlude of relative coolness in the Traisum Cut, the car's open windows had done little more than help turn its interior into an even more efficient oven by letting the hot, dry wind evaporate any moisture it might have contained. Still, it had been a substantial improvement over the wearisome horseback journey through Failcham, across the desert between what should have been the cities of Yarahk and Judaih.

As a Portal Authority Voice—and a certified Portal Hound—Kinlafia had seen far more of the multiverse than the vast majority of Sharonians could begin to imagine. Yet even for someone like him, it took a journey like this one to truly drive home the immensity involved in expanding through so many duplicates of humanity's home world. Under normal circumstances, it tended to put the silliness of most human squabbling into stark perspective. With such incredible vastness, such an inexhaustible supply of space and resources available, surely anyone ought to be able to find the space and prosperity to live his life in the way he chose without infringing upon the interests or liberties—or prejudices—of anyone else!

Except that it doesn't seem to work that way, he thought, as he collected his valise from the overhead rack. Part of that's simply ingrained human cussedness, I suppose. Most people figure somebody else ought to move away, rather than that they ought to go off looking for the life they choose. And then there's the godsdamned Arcanans.

His jaw tightened for a moment, and his brown eyes turned bleak and hard. Then he shook himself, forcing his shoulders to relax, and drew a deep breath. His weeks of grueling travel had given him enough separation from Shaylar's murder for him to at least concede that Crown Prince Janaki had had a point. There was no way Darcel Kinlafia was ever going to forgive the butchers of Arcana for the massacre of his civilian survey crew and—especially—Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr. For that matter, he still saw no reason why he should. But there was a difference between refusing to forgive and building an entire life on a platform of hatred, for hatred was a corrosive drug. Nourished too deeply, cherished too closely, it would destroy a man as surely as any rifle or pistol bullet.

And it can do exactly the same thing to an entire civilization, he thought grimly. "Call-me-Janaki" was right about that, too. Besides I've known plenty of Sharonians I wouldn't exactly want marrying into the family. No, be honest, Darcel. You've known plenty of Sharonians who ought to've been put on someone's "needs killing" list. So, logically, there have to be at least some Arcanans who are going to be just as horrified as any Sharonia by the prospect of an inter-universal warn. Of course, finding them may be just a little difficult.

He snorted in wry humor, which he was half-surprised to discover was only slightly tinged with bitterness. Well, maybe a little more than "slightly." Still, the tearing, savage spasms of fury which had wracked him whenever he thought about the massacre at Fallen Timbers truly had lost much of their virulence.

Petty-Captain Yar told me they would. I suppose I should have listened to him.

Kinlafia made a mental note to drop Delokahn Yar a Voice message. It was the least he could do for Company-Captain chan Tesh's senior Healer, he thought just a bit ashamedly, given how hard Yar had worked to force him to admit to himself that life truly did go on. Wounds like Shaylar's death might never go away, but at least they could scar over, turn into something a grownup learned to cope with rather than retreating into an endless morass of depression and petulantly refusing to have anything more to do with the world about him. And in his own case—

"Welcome to Fort Salby."

Kinlafia turned as the sound of the train master's voice interrupted his thoughts. Despite his Arpathian surname, Irnay Tarka was a Uromathian, from the independent Kingdom of Eniath. He was also an employee of the Trans-Temporal Express, one of the hundreds of workers pushing the railhead steadily down-chain towards Hell's Gate now that they could finally get their heavy equipment forward through the Traisum Cut. They'd driven the line to within less than four hundred miles of Fort Mosanik in Karys, which had been an enormous relief. No one was going to be sending any of the TTE's luxury passenger coaches out here to the edge of the frontier anytime soon, but even this spartanly furnished, bare-bones, pack-'em-in-cheek-by-jowl people-hauler was an enormous improvement over a saddle.

Tarka grinned, almost as if he could read Kinlafia's mind.

"Saddle sores feeling any better?" he asked, and Kinlafia snorted.

"It's going to take more than one miserable day for that," the Voice said. "Mind you, I'm not complaining. Just having the opportunity to sit down on something reasonably flat is a gift from the gods!"

"We aim to please," Tarka said. Then his grin faded slightly. "On a more serious note, Voice Kinlafia, it's been an honor."

Kinlafia half-waved one hand in a dismissing gesture that was more than a little uncomfortable. That was another thing Janaki had been right about. As the sole survivor of the massacred Chalgyn Consortium survey crew—and the Voice who had relayed Shaylar's final, courageous message—he'd acquired a degree of fame (or notoriety, perhaps) which he'd never wanted. It wasn't as if he'd done anything that wonderful. In fact, he would never forgive himself, however illogical he knew it was, for not having somehow managed to save his friends' lives.

Tarka seemed about to say something more, then stopped himself and simply gave a small headshake. Kinlafia smiled crookedly at him and held out his right hand, and Tarka clasped forearms with him.

"Good luck, Voice Kinlafia," the train master said. "And a safe journey home. A lot of people are going to want to hear from you directly."

"I know," Kinlafia managed not to sigh.

He nodded to the Eniathian, walked down the aisle, and then climbed down the carriage's steep steps onto the sunbaked, weathered-looking planks of the station under a sky of scorching, cloudless blue. It was only late morning, but the platform's heat struck up through the soles of his boots as if he were walking across a stovetop, and he was acutely grateful when he reached the cover of the shed-like roof built to throw a band of shade across the rearmost third of the boardwalk.

The locomotive lay panting quietly as the station's water tower topped off its tender and its fireman and his grease gun worked their way down its side. It wasn't one of the behemoths which pulled TTE's massive freight and passenger trains closer to the home universe, nor was it as beautifully painted and maintained. In fact, it was a shabby, scruffy work engine, with an old-fashioned half-diamond smokestack, grimy, banged-up, dust-covered paint, and no pretension to the grandeur of its more aristocratic brethren. No doubt it was out here in the first place because newer and more powerful engines had replaced it closer to home. The TTE could spare it from passenger and normal freight service, and the construction planners and operations people had probably figured they might as well get the last of their money's worth out of it before it finally went to the boneyard. Yet even though it couldn't come remotely close to matching the speed and effortless power of something like one of the new Paladins, Kinlafia had never been happier to see one of those more splendiferous lords of the rails.

His mind ran back over the wearisome journey since he'd separated from Janaki's platoon and its little column of Arcanan POWs. The ride to Fort Ghartoun had been hard enough, but the journey across Failcham had been worse. Much worse.

Normal Portal Authority policy called for the forts which housed the Authority's garrisons and administrative centers to be located, like Fort Salby, on the Sharonian side of the portal they covered. The planners had made an exception in Fort Ghartoun's case, however, for a couple of reasons. One was that the Failcham side of the Failcham-Thermyn portal was located very close to the spot occupied by the city of Yarahk in Sharona. Unfortunately, "very close," especially in multiversal terms, wasn't the same thing as "in exactly the same spot." Yarahk had grown on the banks of the mighty, north-flowing Sarlayn River, just below the Sarlayn's first cataract and almost six hundred miles south of the Mbisi. The Sarlayn Valley was fertile enough, and Yarahk was fairly popular as a winter resort, but the portal was thirty miles outside the valley, in the barren desert to the west. It sat on a thoroughly unpleasant piece of dry, sun-blasted dirt and rock, with very little to recommend it aside from the portal itself. Just providing a garrison with water would have been hard enough.

Admittedly, Fort Ghartoun (only, of course, it had been Fort Raylthar when it was built) was also located in a remarkably arid spot, but at least water was closer to hand. And so were Snow Sapphire Lake and the Sky Blood Lode. It had made sense to put the local Authority administrative center on the Sky Blood Mountains' side of the portal, given the availability of water and the fact that keeping a watchful eye on the development of that massive silver lode was eventually going to become the local authorities' primary concern.

But locating Fort Ghartoun on the Thermyn side of the portal hadn't made the journey across Failcham any more pleasant. The Karys-Failcham portal was located in the North Ricathian Desert, close to what would have been the city of Judaih, better than fourteen hundred miles west of Yarahk. Fourteen hundred miles of desert, in point of fact, in which the water a traveler could carry was altogether too often the margin between survival and something else.

The letter of priority Crown Prince Janaki had gotten Regiment-Captain Velvelig to endorse for Kinlafia had helped enormously. Among other things, it had allowed him to requisition Portal Authority horses—and, for the desert-crossing aspects of his journey, experienced local guides. His homeward journey had been far more rapid (and strenuous) than his survey crew's outward journey, and his letter had provided him with dune-treaders, as well as horses, for the trip to Fort Mosanik, on the Karys side of the Karys-Failcham portal.

From Fort Mosanik, located in the general area of the Sharonian city of Queriz, the terrain had been at least a little friendlier than that between Mousanik and Ghartoun. Of course, only the North Ricathian Desert could have made the Queriz Depression seem particularly hospitable. At its deepest point, Kinlafia knew, the Depression was almost a hundred feet below sea level, dotted with salt lakes and covered with feather grass, tamarisk, and wormwood, where it wasn't outright desert in its own right. Still, oases were more frequent, and the much flatter terrain, once one got south of the highlands around Fort Mosanik itself, was much easier going. Not to mention the fact that he'd only had to cover around three hundred and fifty miles of it before he met up with the advancing railhead.

Which meant, he thought, hoisting his valise and starting along the platform towards the rudimentary station building, that he only had another three or four weeks to go to get home.

"Voice Kinlafia?"

Kinlafia stopped and turned around as someone called his name in accented Ternathian. The man who'd called to him wore PAAF uniform with the single gold rifle of a company-captain. He was also a sturdy-looking fellow, perhaps a couple of inches taller than Kinlafia himself, with the swarthy complexion and dark brown eyes of a Shurkhali. His nose was strongly hooked, and the eyes under his bushy eyebrows were very direct and intense.

"Yes, Company-Captain?"

"Orkam Vargan," the Shurkhali said, reaching out to clasp Kinlafia's forearm. "I'm Regiment-Captain Skrithik's XO here at Fort Salby. They sent word up the line that you'd be arriving today, and the Regiment-Captain asked me to keep an eye out for the train."

"Oh?"

"We understand your hurry to get back home again," Vargan said almost apologetically. "But you're the first person to come back up the line since it happened, and you're also . . . well—"

He shrugged slightly, and Kinlafia suppressed a sigh. It was hardly the first time someone had said that to him.

"I don't suppose there's another train headed up-chain this afternoon, anyway, is there?" he said instead.

"Not really." Vargan's slightly crooked grin suggested to Kinlafia that the company-captain had heard the sigh he hadn't uttered. "That's why the Regiment-Captain wanted me to ask you if you'd have supper with him tonight. Obviously, we'll all understand if you're too tired. Gods know I'd be! But we'd really appreciate the opportunity to offer you the closest Fort Salby has to hospitality. And, of course, to pick your brain ourselves."

"Actually, if I can extort a long, hot shower out of you, and maybe a couple of hours worth of nap, I think I'd enjoy a sitdown supper."

"No problem." Vargan smiled. "We've put you up in the BOQ. If you'll come with me, we'll get your bag dropped off, and then I'll personally escort you to the longest, hottest shower in at least two universes."

"It's a deal," Kinlafia chuckled.

Somewhat to Kinlafia's surprise, supper at Fort Salby turned out to be not only extremely tasty, but actually enjoyable.

Salby, unlike the other portal forts Kinlafia had passed through on his way back from Hell's Gate, had been established for quite some time. At one point, Salbyton, the settlement outside the fort, had been a construction boomtown as the Trans-Temporal Express labored on the Traisum Cut. Its peak population had been as high as seven or eight thousand, although it had declined from that quickly once the cut was completed. By the time the Chalgyn Consortium had set out on its productive, ill-fated survey expedition, Salbyton had been down to perhaps two thousand, and TTE, as was its wont, had collected and hauled off the temporary, portable housing in which most of its labor force had lived. Despite that, the remaining buildings of Salbyton had a look of permanency and solidity which was rare this far from Sharona, and the local railroad station had quite literally miles of heavy-duty sidings left from its days as the end of the TTE's line.

Neither the fort nor the town had changed a great deal—yet—despite all that had happened since, but that was about to change. All of that temporary housing TTE had pulled out was undoubtedly on its way back, although it might not be stopping at Salbyton this time. The new construction priorities closer to Hell's Gate were going to dwarf the importance of making the Traisum Cut.

There was a two-hour time difference between the two sides of the portal, which, fortunately was also one of the older portals which had so far been discovered. It must have been . . . lively around Fort Salby's present location for the first century or so after the portal formed, Kinlafia reflected. The altitude differential was less than that of some other portals, but it had still been sufficient to channel a standing, unending, twenty-four-hour-a-day, three-mile-wide hurricane through from Karys until the pressures finally equalized. There was ample evidence of the sort of sandblasting erosion portals at disparate heights tended to produce, although none of it was very recent. And there was still a permanent, moderately stiff breeze blowing through the portal, even now, which made it unfortunate that Zaithag was about as dry (and hot) as Narshalla. Fort Salby could have used a little rain, if Karys had had any to spare.

Now, as the Voice sat with his hosts on the covered veranda built across the back of the Skrithiks' house just outside Fort Salby's gate, the portal had already darkened to star-shot night. It was a striking vista, even for an experienced inter-universal traveler, as the midnight-blue half-disk of night loomed up against the coals and ashes of the local sunset. The veranda had been carefully placed to take advantage of the permanent breeze, and the air moving across it was distinctly cooler than the local air temperature.

"That was delicious, Madame Skrithik," Kinlafia said, sitting back with a pleasant sense of repletion. "I've been eating off of campfires for months now."

"I suppose that makes your approval just a bit two-edged," Chalendra Skrithik said. "I've eaten campfire cooking myself a time or two, you know."

"I didn't mean—" Kinlafia began quickly, then stopped as he recognized his hostess' slight smile. She saw his expression, and the smile turned into a chuckle.

"My wife, you may have observed, Voice Kinlafia," chan Skrithik said wryly, "has what she fondly imagines is a sense of humor."

"Actually, I have a very good sense of humor," the wife in question said, elevating her nose with an audible sniff. "All women do. It's simply unfortunate that so many males of the species fail to appreciate its innate superiority."

"Personally, I've always recognized its superiority," Kinlafia told her gravely. "Or, at least, I've always been smart enough to pretend I did."

"A wise man, I see," Company-Captain Vargan observed, then shook his head with a sigh. "I fear my own cultural baggage betrayed me when Madame Skrithik and I first crossed swords. Er, met, I mean. Met."

"But I had to draw so little blood before you recognized the error of your ways, Orkam," Chalendra said sweetly, and this time Kinlafia laughed.

He really hadn't looked forward to dinner when the invitation was extended, but now he was more than glad he'd accepted it. Chan Skrithik reminded him in many ways of an older Janaki chan Calirath. He wasn't as tall—few people were, after all—and he was considerably older than the crown prince, with much fairer hair, but he had the same, steady gray eyes, and there was something of Janaki's sense of . . . solidity about him. He and his wife had worked hard, with the smoothness of a well-established team, to make their guest feel welcome, and they'd succeeded in ample measure. They'd treated him as if they'd known him for years, and he found himself wondering if perhaps Chalendra had one of those traces of rogue Talent that turned up so often. She'd seemed to know exactly what to say and do to make him feel at ease, and he was guiltily aware that his personality had been . . . thorny, to say the very least, since Shaylar's murder.

Like her husband, Chalendra Skrithik was at least ten years older than Kinlafia himself, and she had that tough, capable air he'd seen among so many of the women who'd followed their husbands—or made their own independent ways—out to the frontier. Her dark hair was just beginning to show threads of silver, and there were crows-feet at the corners of her brown eyes, but she remained a remarkably handsome woman.

"At any rate, Madame Skrithik," the Voice said now, "I intended my comment as the most sincere possible approval. This was delicious, and the opportunity to sit in a proper chair and use honest-to-gods silverware, only made me appreciate it even more."

"I'm glad," she said, this time with simple sincerity of her own. "I've spent enough time following Rof around to realize just how hard you must have been pushing yourself to reach Fort Salby this soon. And I know why you're doing it, too. If we can make you feel welcome, then I think that's the very least we can do after all you've already done."

"Don't make me out to be some sort of hero," Kinlafia said quietly. "I happened to be the one to Hear Shaylar and relay the message. The real heroes were the ones at Fallen Timbers, or the people like Company-Captain chan Tesh."

"I have enough Talent to have Seen the SUNN rebroadcast of Voice Nargra-Kolmayr's last message," Vargan put in. "I won't embarrass you by running on about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if those of us who've Seen it don't have a better appreciation than you do for just how much you do qualify as a 'hero.'<thinspace>"

Kinlafia made an uncomfortable little gesture, and the company-captain left whatever more he'd been about to add unsaid.

"At any rate," chan Skrithik said, stepping into the brief hiatus in the conversation, "we appreciate what you've been able to tell us about what's happened since. I've been getting the intelligence synopses and copies of most of the official reports, but it's not the same thing as talking to someone who's actually seen it. You've really helped me put a lot of it into context."

"I'm glad I could help," Kinlafia said, and he was. And I'm also just a little surprised by how little it hurt, he thought. Either the scab's getting even thicker, or else I really am learning to deal with it. Or both, maybe.

"I could wish you hadn't left before the negotiations began," Vargan said.

"Oh?" Kinlafia looked at him, and the company-captain shrugged.

"You were there at the beginning," the Shurkhali pointed out. "You might say—" Vargan's smile was grim "—that you Saw the way our first effort to negotiate worked out. I'd like to have gotten your firsthand impression of whether or not they're serious . . . and whether or not anything's likely to come of it."

"I wouldn't be the right person to ask." It came out a bit more flatly than Kinlafia had intended, and he gave himself a small mental shake. "I'm afraid I'm a bit too emotionally involved in what happened to Shaylar and the rest of our crew to stand back and think about anything those people might come up with."

"I can understand why that might be," Chalendra said quietly. She reached out and touched the back of Kinlafia's hand. "I don't think anyone who Saw the SUNN broadcast of Shaylar's final message could expect you to feel any other way, Darcel."

"Maybe." He managed not to sigh and gave her a small, grateful smile. "Having said that, though, I really do hope that something comes of the talks. But for that to happen, they're going to have to agree to punish whoever was responsible for that massacre. I don't see how Sharona could settle for anything less than full accountability for that."

"From what I've been seeing in the Voicenet transmissions, that's probably the absolute minimum any Sharonian government is going to be able to settle for," chan Skrithik agreed. "On the other hand—"

The regiment-captain paused as his batman stepped back onto the veranda with a bottle of slightly chilled wine, which he proceeded to pour.

"I'm afraid that finding good wine out here at the bleeding edge is all but impossible," chan Skrithik said, "but this vintage is at least decent."

"Wine snob!" his wife snorted.

"I take my pleasures where I can find them," the regiment-captain replied with an air of dignity as the orderly withdrew with an admirably impassive expression.

Chalendra's lively eye gleamed, but she declined to take up that particular challenge, Kinlafia noted. For now, at least.

"I noticed what looked like a Uromathian cavalry regiment's standard," the Voice said, changing the subject before she changed her mind. "Does that mean Emperor Chava is sending forward reinforcements?"

"Not as many as he might like," Vargan muttered, and chan Skrithik gave his executive officer a slight frown, more imagined than seen.

"Actually, Uromathia was the first to get any of its national units moved up to support us," the fort's CO replied to Kinlafia's question. "And I'll admit I had my own doubts when I heard they were coming. For that matter, and just between the four of us, I still don't trust Chava's motives one little bit. But Sunlord Markan, their senior officer, has done nothing but dig in and do everything he possibly can to integrate his troopers into our force structure here. In fact, he's out on maneuvers this evening, or I'd have invited him to supper, too. I don't think anyone could fault his efforts or how energetically he goes about them. And to be brutally honest, he's come very close to doubling our available troop strength."

"But you're not sending any of them further forward?"

"No, I'm not. Or, rather, the PAAF isn't. For several reasons, I feel certain. Logistics would be a problem, for one thing. The Uromathians don't use standard PAAF equipment, so just keeping them supplied with ammunition would be a pain. And until the railhead reaches Fort Ghartoun, Salby is the natural 'stopper' for the Karys Chain. In fact, we've turned into a collecting point for a really odd collection of odds and ends that've been emptied out of various arsenals and armories up-chain from us. Some genius in Reyshar actually sent us an even dozen Yerthak pedestal guns." Chan Skrithik snorted. "They were intended for the Authority revenue cutters in Reyshar—they've been having some smuggling problems—and apparently the panic immediately after word of Fallen Timbers hit got them rushed ahead to us here. And until they get the rail lines laid at least to Ghartoun, I'm keeping them here, too. The damned things weight a good half-ton each, and at the rate they eat up ammo, just keeping them supplied with shells would be a genuine pain in the posterior. Exactly what chan Tesh needs in his field fortifications, aren't they?"

The regiment-captain's expression was so disgusted Kinlafia had to chuckle. For a moment, he was afraid his laughter had given offense, but then chan Skirithik grinned wryly and shook his head.

"Better to have people sending us stuff we'll never use than not get sent the stuff we will need, I suppose. But that's just one more example of the logistics headaches we'd be looking at if we deployed the Uromathians forward."

Kinlafia nodded gravely, but he also heard all of the things chan Skrithik wasn't saying. The Voice didn't doubt for a moment that Balkar chan Tesh would have done almost anything to get another couple of thousand men forward to help hold Hell's Gate. But the "almost anything" undoubtedly didn't include effectively putting Uromathia in command of future contact with Arcana. No matter how conscientiously this Sunlord Markan was working to cooperate with chan Skrithik, letting him supersede chan Tesh—which, given his combined military rank and aristocratic precedence, he would most certainly have done—wasn't going to be something any non-Uromathian in Sharona wanted to see happen.

Politics, he thought almost despairingly. Always politics. And Janaki thinks I can do something about it?

A vision of his parents' faces floated before him. His father was a professor of languages at Resiam University in New Farnalia, while his mother was a Talented Healer, and both of them had . . . pronounced views on politics. Which, though he hadn't explained it to Janaki, was one reason he'd hesitated before jumping at the Prince's offer. Both of them were staunch opponents of the "outmoded, class-based" system of "paternalistically justified aristocratic denial of the basic right of decision-making." Given that the two of them lived in one of the more militant of Sharona's republics, they had little personal experience with that "aristocratic denial" of the right to make political decisions, but he very much doubted that they were going to be performing any Arpathian drum dances of joy when they found out about their baby boy's career-move decision.

"Has there been any word on the Act of Unification?" he asked after a moment. "There seemed to be a few . . . difficulties that still needed ironing out according to the last Voice message I Heard."

"My, you are tactful, aren't you?" chan Skrithik murmured with a crooked smile.

"Well, I'm neither Ternathian nor Uromathian," Kinlafia pointed out. "I hope you won't take this wrongly, but most of us New Farnalians have always been at least a little amused watching the two of you. Don't get me wrong. Of the two, I've always been a lot more comfortable with Ternathia. After all, that's where most of the New Farnal colonists came from in the first place. Still, I have to admit that with the entire multiverse out there, all of this 'great power rivalry' has always struck me as just a little silly."

"If it weren't for the constant potential for it to turn into something very unfunny indeed, I'd probably agree with you," chan Skrithik said. "Orkam, on the other hand, lives a little closer to Uromathia than you do, and I don't think he finds it quite as amusing. In fact, I've noticed that the humor quotient seems to decline in direct proportion to one's proximity to Chava Busar's frontiers."

"I know." Kinlafia felt just a little abashed. "If it sounded like I don't think there's any difference between Emperor Zindel and Emperor Chava, I apologize. For that matter, I spent quite a while with Crown Prince Janaki, and I discovered that he's a . . . very impressive fellow, in a lot of ways. I guess it's just that I grew up far enough away that I never really felt threatened by either side, and I've seen just how big the multiverse is. I've wondered, sometimes, if it wouldn't have made sense to just hand an entire universe over to Uromathia, and another one to Ternathia, and tell them to behave themselves."

"I doubt very much you could've gotten anyone else to go along with the notion of giving Chava Busar an entire world to play around with," Company-Captain Vargan said dryly. "The problem is what he'd do with all those resources. I'm afraid Chava is one of those people who can never be satisfied, never feel he has quite enough power. The only thing he could see that sort of resource base as would be a springboard from which to conquer the rest of the multiverse."

"I'm afraid Orkam's probably right, about Chava, at least," chan Skrithik said with a sigh.

"And he's not exactly alone in that, either, Sir," Vargan pointed out. His voice was diffidently stubborn. Obviously, this was a topic he and his superior had discussed before, Kinlafia thought. "Markan's been a lot more . . . proddy ever since he found out about the Act of Unification and who'd been proposed as everyone's Emperor, and you know it."

"Yes, he has," chan Skrithik agreed. "But you'd be 'proddy' if Chava had been elected as your Emperor, too, Orkam. And Markan's a sunlord. Whether he wants to be or not, he's got to be deeply involved in Uromathia's internal politics. Bearing all of that in mind, how could you expect him to feel any other way?"

"I don't imagine anyone could," Darcel said, stepping diplomatically into the fray. "But has Sunlord Markan's attitude become a problem?"

"No, not really," chan Skrithik said. "Markan is as dedicated and professional an officer as I've ever met, and he hasn't let his unhappiness—his natural unhappiness—get in the way of cooperating with us here. In a way, though, that only emphasizes the nature of our problem. Most Uromathians are going to be at least . . . strongly influenced, let's say, by the attitude of their ruler. And if most Uromathians are no more power-crazed or power-hungry than anyone else, Chava, unfortunately, is."

"And he's Emperor of Uromathia," Chalendra pointed out, shaking her head. "For that matter, those sons of his are no great prizes, either."

"So thank the gods the Conclave had the good sense to pick Emperor Zindel over Chava," Vargan said with the sort of fervor Kinlafia seldom heard outside temple.

"I can't disagree with that," Kinlafia acknowledged. "But should I understand from what you've just said that the Act has actually been approved?"

"Not yet," chan Skrithik said, then snorted. "Well, what I actually meant, I suppose, is that it hadn't been as of a week and a half ago."

Kinlafia nodded in understanding of the qualification. It was hard to remember sometimes just how far places like Fort Salby were from Sharona. The thought that it could take over a week for a Voice message to reach Traisum was sobering proof of just how great the distances involved truly were.

Of course, it wouldn't take that long if it weren't for the water barriers, he reminded himself. It was the need to transport Voices physically across the water gaps too wide for them to span—most of which were up-chain from Traisum—that accounted for the vast majority of the delay, after all.

"So we still don't know if Uromathia is going to sign on," he said, after moment.

"Oh, I think Chava will sign on the dotted line eventually," chan Skrithik replied. "It's not like he has a lot of choice, after all. Even he has to recognize how the appearance of these 'Arcanans' has changed everything."

"You think so?" Vargan said sourly. Chan Skrithik looked at him, and the company-captain shrugged. "Logically, I can't argue with you," he said. "But I'm telling you, Rof—that man is never going to sign off on the creation of a world Empire, especially under the Caliraths, unless he figures there's some way for him to park his fundament on the throne eventually."

"You may be right," chan Skrithik conceded with the air of a man who'd had this discussion more than once already. "In fact, from what I've seen of Chava, you probably are. But even if you are, what he thinks he's going to get away with, and what he is going to get away with are two different things. I don't care how tough, how sneaky, Chava Busar may think he is, he does not want to piss off Zindel chan Calirath. Believe me."

"If he's anything like his son, I'm inclined to agree with you," Kinlafia said.

"Which doesn't mean Chava isn't going to try something, anyway," Vargan pointed out. "And if he does, it could get spectacularly messy."

"Yes, it could." Chan Skrithik nodded. "But what Voice Kinlafia was asking was whether or not Chava's going to accept unification at all. And my feeling, from the regular Voicenet messages and the dispatches I've received, is that he's going to. I'm sure he is going to have some . . . mental reservations, let's say, if he does, but if Emperor Zindel is willing to accept the demand that Janaki marry a Uromathian, I don't think Chava will have any choice but to agree to the unification."

"Janaki marry a Uromathian?" Kinlafia couldn't quite keep his repugnance out of his voice and expression, and Chalendra Skrithik snorted. It wasn't, Kinlafia noted, a particularly happy snort.

"That's what Chava's been holding out for," she said. "And, like Rof says, he may already have gotten it. According to the last report I heard, the Conclave was supposed to vote on the marriage amendment to the Act of Unification three days ago. So, we ought to be hearing about the outcome in another week or so."

"I see."

Kinlafia sat back and took a sip of chan Skrithik's "decent vintage" while he pondered what Chalendra had just said. It was odd to sit here and realize the outcome of the vote was probably speeding its way down the chain of universes to Fort Salby at this very moment. And it was even odder to realize just how ambivalent Kinlafia himself was about that possible outcome. Despite the optimism everyone else had felt when the Arcanan diplomats turned up, Darcel Kinlafia's belief that Sharona had to reorganize itself into something capable of meeting the Arcanans toe-to-toe had never wavered. Sharona had to unify its competing, squabbling nations. And yet, the thought of the towering young Crown Prince of Ternathia being forced to marry one of Chava Busar's daughters or nieces revolted him. Perhaps it was the sort of dynastic, political calculation kings and emperors routinely had to face, but he liked Janaki. Liked him a lot.

And I don't much like what Vargan was saying, either, the Voice reflected. Because if Chava really does think there's a way to put his arse on the throne, then there has to be at least a line or two in his plans for getting rid of Janaki, first.

Darcel Kinlafia wouldn't like that. He wouldn't like it at all.

So it looks like there's another good reason to go into politics, where I might actually be able to do something about it, he thought, drinking his wine and gazing up at the twinkling stars of Karys.

Chapter One

Commander of One Thousand Klayrman Toralk sat upright in the personnel carrier strapped to his circling command dragon's back, despite the buffeting wind of the beast's passage, so that he could see clearly over the edge of the windshield. The sight was impressive, he admitted, watching critically while the final few transport dragons, scales glittering with gem-like intensity in the last light of day, settled like huge, multi-hued insects onto the handful of islets clustered in the middle of so many endless miles of swamp. Unfortunately, "impressive" wasn't exactly the same thing as "well organized." In fact, the words which came most forcibly to mind were "awkward as hell."

And the reason the maneuver looked awkward was because it was awkward, he thought sourly. Despite his deep respect for his immediate superior, this entire operational concept could only have been put together by a ground-pounder. Any Air Force officer would have taken one look at the topographical maps and informed his superior roundly that he was out of his mind. Crowding this many transport and—especially—touchy, often ill-natured battle dragons into such a constricted space violated every precept of peacetime training regulations and exercise guidelines.

Too bad Ekros never heard about all those regs and guidelines, Toralk thought. Or maybe he did. After all, how could even a demon make sure that whatever could go wrong did go wrong if he didn't know exactly what he was screwing up?

The thousand chuckled with a certain bare minimum of genuine humor. Yet even as he did, he knew that if Commander of Two Thousand Harshu hadn't pushed him—hard—on this, he would have told the two thousand it was impossible. Fortunately for Arcana (if not, perhaps, for the tender sensibilities of one Thousand Toralk), Harshu wasn't particularly interested in the artificial safety constraints of peacetime. He wasn't overly hampered by excess tactfulness, either. But he was completely willing to absorb a few casualties, among his dragons as well as his troops, to get Toralk's attack force into position with its beasts sufficiently well rested to maximize their combat radius.

And it looks like that poisonous little prick Neshok was right—barely—about whether or not I could fit them all in, Toralk conceded.

The last of the transports landed a bit short of its intended island, and a towering, mud-streaked fountain erupted as the huge dragon hit the water. Fortunately, it was shallow enough that the beast wasn't in any danger of drowning or miring itself in the muck, and the levitation spell kept its towed cargo pod out of the water while it floundered ashore. Of course, Toralk had no doubt that if he'd been a little closer, he would have heard an interesting chorus of yells and curses coming from the infantry inside that pod. It might have stayed out of the water, but that hadn't kept it from bouncing around on the end of its tether like some sort of insane ball. And all of that water and mud the dragon's impact had thrown up had had to go somewhere.

Toralk grinned behind his goggles, despite his tension, then shook his head and leaned forward to tap his pilot on the top of his flight helmet.

"Yes, Sir?" The pilot had to raise his voice to be heard, but not by very much at this ridiculously low speed.

"Let's set it down, Fifty Larshal," Toralk said, and pointed at the larger island at the center of the half-dozen congested, swampy hummocks which had been chosen for his forward staging points.

"Yes, Sir!" Larshal said, and the command dragon lifted onto its left wing tip, banking more steeply as it circled down towards the indicated perch.

Toralk gazed into the west, where the embers of sunset still glowed on the horizon. This particular bivouac wasn't going to be much fun for anyone, he reflected. Maybe that would be for the good, though. Men who were thoroughly pissed off after spending a wet, muddy, bug-infested night not sleeping were likely to show a little more . . . enthusiasm when it came to shooting at the people responsible for them being out here in the first place.

Hulmok Arthag was an unhappy man.

Someone who didn't know the platoon-captain well might have been excused for not realizing that. Or, rather, someone who didn't know Arpathian septmen well might have been excused for not realizing Arthag was any unhappier than usual, given how little an Arpathian's expression normally gave away.

He stood under the forest canopy—thinner than it had been when the Chalgyn Consortium survey crew had been slaughtered, just over two months ago—and gazed into the predawn darkness, longing for the empty plains of home. Life had been harder there, but it had also been much less . . . complicated.

"Copper for your thoughts, Hulmok."

The platoon-captain turned at the sound of Platoon-Captain Dorzon chan Baskay's voice. The Ternathian cavalry officer looked improbably neat and clean—not to mention well-dressed and freshly shaved—for someone who spent his nights sleeping in a tent in the middle of the woods with winter coming on. Arthag had sometimes wondered if there were a special Talent for that, one that was linked by blood to the families which routinely produced the Ternathian Empire's diplomats. Not that chan Baskay had ever wanted to be a diplomat, whatever the rest of his family might have had in mind for him.

Which just goes to show the shamans were right. No man can outrun his fate, Arthag reflected with the faintest lip twitch of amusement.

"I don't know if they're worth that much," he told the Ternathian after a moment.

"I'm pretty sure they are," chan Baskay responded. Hulmok raised one eyebrow a fraction of an inch, and chan Baskay shrugged. "I've heard all about your 'instinct' when it comes to picking people for your command. And while I'll admit you've got a remarkably good gambler's face to go with it, it's pretty clear to me that something's jabbing that 'instinct' of yours as hard as it's jabbing every single one of mine."

"Really?"

"Hulmok, they've been talking to us for a month now," chan Baskay said. "In all that time, they haven't said one damned thing except that they want to talk, instead of shoot. And they've been throwing grit into the machinery with both hands for the last week and a half. Which, you may have noticed, exactly corresponds to the point at which I finally got formal instructions from the Emperor. You think, maybe, it's pure coincidence that they got even more obstructionist as soon as I stopped sparring for time?"

"No." Arthag shook his head. "No, I don't think that—not any more than you do."

The two men looked at one another. Chan Baskay's expression showed all the frustration and anger he couldn't allow himself to display across the floating conference table from the Arcanan diplomats, and Arthag's very lack of expression showed the same emotions as both of them contemplated the Arcanans' last week or so of posturing. Rithmar Skirvon, the senior of the two Arcanans, had hardened his negotiating posture noticeably. His initial, conciliatory attitude had all but completely evaporated, and he seemed determined to fix responsibility for the initial violence of the clash between his people's troops and the civilian survey crew on the dead civilians.

That was a pretty significant shift from his original attitude, all by itself, but it was obvious to chan Baskay that Skirvon's instructions were exactly similar to his own in at least one regard. Neither side was prepared to give up possession of the Hell's Gate portal cluster to the other under any circumstances. Chan Baskay hadn't found it necessary to be quite as . . . confrontational as Skirvon, since Sharona currently had possession of the cluster, but he could at least sympathize with the Arcanan on that point.

What he couldn't understand was why Skirvon seemed actively intent on forcing a breakdown in the talks. He wasn't simply stonewalling, simply withdrawing into an inflexible position which he could always have blamed on instructions from his superiors. Instead, there'd been a whole series of insults, "misunderstandings," and "lost tempers" coming from the Arcanan side. And by now, chan Baskay no longer needed Trekar chan Rothag's Sifting Talent to tell when Skirvon was lying. All he had to do was check to see whether or not the Arcanan's mouth was moving.

"Hulmok," he said after a moment, his eyes unwontedly somber, "I've got a really bad feeling about what's going on. But that's all I've got. I don't have a single concrete thing to hang my worry on. So, if you've got something specific, I damned well need to hear it before I sit back down across from those bastards in a couple of hours."

Arthag considered the Ternathian for several moments, then shrugged very slightly.

"I do have a Talent," he acknowledged. He wasn't entirely pleased about making that admission to anyone, for several reasons, but chan Baskay was right. "It's not one of the mainstream Talents," he continued, "but it's run in my bloodline for generations. We've produced a lot of shamans because of it."

"And?" chan Baskay prompted when he paused.

"I can't read minds, and I can't always tell when someone's telling the truth, the way Rothag can. But I can read what's . . . inside a man. Tell whether he's trustworthy, honest. Recognize the ones who'll cave in when the going gets tough, and which ones will die on their feet, trying. And—" he looked directly into chan Baskay's eyes "—the ones who think they're about to slip a knife into someone's back without getting caught."

"Which pretty much describes these people's school of diplomacy right down to the ground, assuming Skirvon and Dastiri are representative samples," chan Baskay snorted.

"I'm not talking about double-dealing or cheating at cards, Dorzon," Arthag said somberly. "I'm talking about real knives."

"What?" Chan Baskay stiffened. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that little bit of 'lost temper' yesterday afternoon was carefully orchestrated. I mean that when Skirvon demanded that our people apologize for provoking it, he'd rehearsed his lines well ahead of time. I mean that the lot of them are pushing towards some specific moment. They're not only working to a plan, Dorzon—they're working to a schedule. And the thing that's driving me mad, is that I don't have any idea why they're doing it!"

Chan Baskay frowned. Commander of Fifty Tharian Narshu, the senior officer of Skirvon and Dastiri's "honor guard," had exploded in a furious tirade over a trivial incident between one of his soldiers and one of Arthag's PAAF cavalry troopers the day before. The Arcanan officer had actually "allowed himself" to place one hand on the hilt of his short sword, which chan Baskay was positive had to be deliberate posturing on his part, rather than a serious threat. After all, Narshu had to know what would happen if his outnumbered men wound up matching short swords against H&W revolvers.

But by the same token, an officer in Narshu's position had to be equally well aware of his responsibilities as part of the diplomatic mission . . . and if he wasn't, then certainly the diplomats he was there to "guard" were. Yet Skirvon had reprimanded Narshu in only the most perfunctory manner, even though both Arcanan negotiators must have been conscious of the example their escort's CO was setting for the rest of his men.

"How confident are you of that, Hulmok?" he asked after a moment. "The schedule part, I mean?"

"I'm not as totally confident of it as I'd like to be," Arthag admitted. "If these were Sharonians, I'd be a hundred percent certain. But they aren't." He shrugged ever so slightly. "I keep reminding myself that it's remotely possible I'm misinterpreting something. After all, it's only been two months since we even knew they existed. But still . . ."

Chan Baskay nodded again, wishing his stomach muscles weren't tightening the way they were.

"One thing I'm certain of," he said slowly, "is that they don't have any intention of actually negotiating any sort of real resolution. For one thing, they're still lying their asses off about a lot of things."

"For example?" Arthag raised his eyebrows again.

"Exactly how Shaylar died, for one thing," chan Baskay said grimly. "And these repeated assurances about their eagerness to reach some sort of 'mutually acceptable' disposition of the portal junction, for another."

"And about who shot first?" Arthag asked.

"No." Chan Baskay grimaced. "On that point, they're actually telling the truth, according to Rothag. They don't have any better idea of who shot first than we do. And oddly enough, they also seem to be telling the truth when they insist that the officer in command at the time tried to avoid massacring our survey crew."

"I think maybe Rothag better have his Talent checked," Arthag said bitingly.

"I know, I know!" Chan Baskay had the air of a man who wanted to rip out handfuls of hair in frustration. "I've Seen Shaylar's message myself. I know chan Hagrahyl stood up with his hands empty and got shot down like a dog for his pains. But they insist that wasn't what their officer wanted, and Rothag's Talent insists they're telling the truth when they say it."

"They may believe they are," Arthag snorted. "But if they do, it's because the bastard lied to them about what happened out here."

"Maybe." Chan Baskay shook his head, his expression half-exasperated and half-hopeful. "I keep wishing Shaylar had managed to contact Kinlafia sooner." He grimaced. "That sounds stupid, I know. The fact that she managed to reach him at all under those circumstances, much less sustain the link through what happened to her and all of her friends . . . Gods, it was nothing short of miraculous! I can't even imagine the kind of guts it took to hold that link. But we didn't actually See or Hear anything until after chan Hagrahyl went down."

"But we know what happened, anyway," Arthag pointed out. "Darcel—Voice Kinlafia—was linked deeply enough to know that from the side traces. Besides, she told him so."

"Granted. But she Told him, and she Showed him her memory of chan Hagrahyl' going down with his hands empty and the crossbow bolt in his throat. That's not the same as Seeing it happen for ourselves. We have what she told Kinlafia, but we don't have anything before the actual event, don't know if there was something Shaylar didn't see herself, or saw but didn't recognize, or didn't realize it had happened at all, in those few seconds we didn't actually See."

"I'm sorry, Dorzon," Arthag said after a moment, "but I can't think of anything which could possibly change what happened or why. And even if I could think of anything now, it's too late for it to have any effect."

"I know. I know." Chan Baskay gazed off into the depths of the forest. "But they're still insistent that they didn't want any of this, that what happened was against their standing orders to establish peaceful contact with any new human civilization they encountered, and Rothag's Talent insists they're telling the truth about that. Which presumably means it accurately represents their government's long-term policy, no matter how badly things have gone wrong on the ground. To be honest, that's the only hopeful thing I've heard out of their mouths yet! Unfortunately, it's outweighed by everything else . . . especially what your Talent is telling you."

"Well," the Arpathian said slowly, "what do you plan to do about it?"

"Gee, thanks," chan Baskay said. "Drop it on my plate, why don't you?"

"Well, you are senior to me," Arthag pointed out reasonably. "My promotion was only confirmed last week. And you're the official diplomat around here, too."

"I know." Chan Baskay drummed the fingers of his right hand on his thigh for several seconds, then shrugged.

"The first thing is to have Chief chan Treskin Flick a dispatch to Company-Captain chan Tesh. I'll tell him what we're worried about, and ask him for instructions. And the next thing is probably to have Rokam pass the same message back to Company-Captain Halifu for relay up the line to Regiment-Captain Velvelig."

Arthag nodded. Chief-Armsman Virak chan Treskin was the Flicker who'd been assigned to relay messages to chan Tesh's senior Flicker, Junior-Armsman Tairsal chan Synarch. Petty-Captain Rokam Traygan was chan Tesh's Voice, but despite everything, they were still desperately underequipped with the long-range telepathic communicating Talents out here. Traygan had originally been slated to hold the Voice's position at Halifu's portal fort in New Uromath. In light of the situation here at the Hell's Gate portal, he'd come forward to replace Darcel Kinlafia when the civilian Voice headed back to Sharona with Crown Prince Janaki. Fortunately, the Portal Authority had managed to scare up a third Voice—Petty-Captain Shansair Baulwan, a fellow Arpathian—to hold down Halifu's fort, and they were working hard to get still more Voices forward. But for right now, at least, there was absolutely no one else to spare in Hell's Gate or New Uromath, and it was critical that chan Baskay have the shortest possible message turnaround time . . . and the greatest accuracy and flexibility when it came to relaying diplomatic correspondence. So they'd ended up assigning Traygan to him and Baulwan to Halifu, at the critical inter-universal relay point, while chan Tesh (who was in the potentially stickiest position of all) made do with written messages relayed through the Flickers. It was clumsy, but until they could get more Voices deployed forward, it was the best they could do.

"And in the meantime?" the cavalry officer said after a moment.

"And in the meantime," chan Baskay replied with a grim smile, "we do the best we can. I'm inclined to trust your Talent, even if these aren't Sharonians. So, pass the word to your people. I don't want them going off half-cocked, but I don't want them taken by surprise if these people are working to a schedule and they decide to push further than they have."

"Swords and crossbows against pistols and rifles?"

"If that's all they have, that's one thing." Chan Baskay shook his head. "On the other hand, it's been a month now, and we need to be careful about letting familiarity breed contempt. So far, they haven't produced anything man-portable that looks like some sort of personal super weapon, but for all we know, they've just been waiting for us to get accustomed enough to them to let our guard down."

"Point taken," Arthag agreed. "I'll talk to my people."

"Good. And when they get here this morning, I want you handy. Close to Skirvon, as well as Narshu."

As he climbed down from the back of the completely unaugmented horse the Sharonians had "loaned" him for the trip from the swamp portal, Rithmar Skirvon found himself wishing he'd been in the habit of spending more time in the saddle. Whatever the rest of him thought of his current assignment, his backside didn't like it at all. And the miserable nag his "hosts" had provided didn't make it any better. He suspected they'd deliberately chosen one with a particularly unpleasant gait just for him.

He pushed that thought aside as he handed his reins to one of Fifty Narshu's troopers and started across the now-familiar clearing towards the Sharonian negotiating party. Deeply drifted leaves rustled about his boots like bone-dry dragon scales, and the air was cool and bracing, particularly compared to the hot humidity from which Skirvon had come.

Despite that, his "hosts" didn't look particularly happy to see him as they waited under the towering forest giants' multi-colored canopy, and, as he contemplated what was about to happen, Skirvon had never been more grateful for all his years of experience across the bargaining table. For that matter, his taste for high-stakes card games had served him in particularly good stead over the last two or three weeks, as well. His face was in the habit of telling other people exactly what he wanted it to tell them, and while he'd developed a certain wary respect for Viscount Simrath, he was confident the Sharonian diplomat didn't have a clue what was coming.

Of course, he reminded himself as he reached the floating conference table and his waiting chair, there's always the possibility that I'm wrong about that.

But, no, that was only opening-day nerves talking. If the Sharonians had suspected the truth, they would certainly have reinforced their "honor guard" here at the conference site. For that matter, they wouldn't have passed Skirvon and his diplomatic party through the swamp portal at the crack of dawn this morning, either.

Face it, Rithmar, he told himself as he settled down in the chair across the table from Simrath yet again, your real problem is that you're scared shitless.

His lips quirked ever so slightly at the thought as he waited for Uthik Dastiri, his assistant, to sit beside him. That, however, didn't make it untrue, and he reminded himself once again that this entire ploy had been as much his idea as Hundred Neshok's. In fact, Skirvon had probably done even more than Neshok to sell the concept to Two Thousand Harshu. Somehow, though, he hadn't quite envisioned his own direct participation in sufficient detail when it had sounded like a good idea.

Mul Gurthak is so going to owe me for this one, he thought. He may be in the Army, but I'm damned well not drawing combat pay!

He watched Viscount Simrath and Lord Trekar Rothag sitting down opposite him and suppressed a sudden urge to pull out his chronometer and check the time.

"Good morning, Master Skirvon," Viscount Simrath said, as courteously as if he didn't realize Skirvon had been deliberately stalling for at least the last two weeks.

"Good morning, Viscount," Skirvon replied, as courteously as if he really thought Simrath didn't realize it.

"I trust we may be able to move forward, at least a little bit, today," the Sharonian diplomat continued. Under the formal rules and schedule they'd agreed to, it was his turn to control the agenda for the day.

"Progress is always welcome, My Lord," Skirvon conceded graciously.

"I'm pleased to hear that. However, the fact remains that I'm still awaiting your response to the points I made to you following the receipt of my last message from Emperor Zindel," Simrath said pleasantly. "In particular, I note that you continue to insist that the Union of Arcana must receive title to at least half the portals contained in this cluster. A cluster, I remind you, which is in Sharona's possession and which was first surveyed by the civilian survey crew which your troops massacred."

"I'm afraid I must disagree with you, Viscount," Skirvon said in his most respectful tones. "You appear to be implying that Arcana has taken no cognizance of Sharona's insistence on retaining total possession of this cluster—despite the fact that it's still to be established who actually fired the first shot, and the fact that our total casualties have been much higher than your own. In fact, we have taken cognizance of that insistence. Our position may not have changed," he smiled the empty, pleasant smile of a professional diplomat, "but rejection of your Emperor's . . . proposals is scarcely the same thing as not responding to them."

The Ternathian noble leaned back in his chair—the floating chair, provided by Skirvon—and folded his arms across his chest. The leaves whispering wind-songs overhead were growing thinner by the day, Skirvon noticed as a shaft of sunlight fell through them and illuminated the tabletop's rich, polished grain and glittered brilliantly on the translating personal crystal lying between him and Simrath. Those leaves remained unfortunately thick, however, and a part of him wished Two Thousand Harshu had decided he could wait just a little longer.

Which is pretty stupid of you, Rithmar, when you've been pushing him just as hard as you dared from the beginning.

"Master Skirvon," Simrath said, "I'm at something of a loss to understand Arcana's motives in sending you to this conference table."

"I beg your pardon, My Lord?"

"Officially, you're here because 'talking is better than shooting,' I believe you said," Simrath observed. "While I can't disagree with that particular statement, ultimately, the shooting is going to resume unless we manage to resolve the issues between us here, at this table. So it strikes me as rather foolish for the two of us to sit here, day after day, exchanging empty pleasantries, when it's quite obvious you're under instructions not to agree to anything."

Despite himself, Skirvon blinked. He was ill-accustomed to that degree of . . . frankness from an opponent in any negotiation. After all, two-thirds of the art of diplomacy consisted of wearing down the other side by saying as little as possible in the maximum possible number of words. The last thing any professional diplomat truly wanted was some sort of "major breakthrough" whose potential outcome lay outside the objectives covered by his instructions.

More to the point, however, Simrath had observed the rules of the game up to this stage and taken no official notice of Skirvon's delaying tactics. So why had he chosen today, of all days, to stop playing along?

"In addition," the viscount continued calmly, "I must tell you that the distressing number of . . . unpleasant scenes between members of your party and my own do not strike me as being completely, um, spontaneous, let's say. So I have to ask myself why, if you're so eager to negotiate with us, you're simultaneously offering absolutely nothing new, while either encouraging—or, at the very least, tolerating—extraordinarily disruptive behavior on the part of your uniformed subordinates. Would you, perhaps, care to enlighten my ignorance on these matters?"

Skirvon felt a most unpleasant sinking sensation in the vicinity of his midsection.

Stop that! he told himself sternly. Even if they've finally started waking up, it's too late to do them much good.

At least, he damned well hoped it was.

"Viscount Simrath," he said in his firmest voice, "I must protest your apparent charge that the 'unpleasant scenes' to which you refer were somehow deliberately contrived by myself or any other member of my negotiating party. What motive could we possibly have for such behavior?"

"That is an interesting question, isn't it?" Simrath smiled thinly. It was a smile which never touched his gray eyes—eyes, Skirvon realized, that were remarkably cold and clear. He'd never realized just how icy they could be, and it suddenly struck the Arcanan that Simrath was not only extraordinarily tall, like most of the Ternathians he'd already seen, but oddly fit for a diplomat. In fact, he looked in that moment like a very tough customer, indeed, and remarkably little like someone who spent his days carrying around nothing heavier—or more deadly—than a briefcase.

"What, precisely, do you wish to imply, My Lord?" Skirvon asked with the air of a man grasping a dilemma firmly by the horns.

"I wish to imply, sir," Simrath said coolly, "that it's never actually been your intention to negotiate any sort of permanent settlement or mutually acceptable terms. For reasons of your own, you've seen fit to initiate these negotiations and to keep Sharona talking. To this point, I've been willing to play your game, to see precisely what it was you truly had in mind. However, neither my patience, nor Emperor Zindel's tolerance, is inexhaustible. So, either the two of us will make significant progress over the next twenty-four hours, or else Sharona will withdraw from the talks. We'll see," if his smile had been thin before, it was a razor this time, "how you prefer shooting once again, rather than talking."

Skirvon felt Dastiri stiffen at his side. Despite the Manisthuan's espousal of garsulthan, or "real politics," Dastiri's skin had always been thinner than Skirvon's. Fortunately, the younger man appeared to have himself under control, at least for the moment. Which was actually about as much as Skirvon could say about himself, if he wanted to be honest. He managed to keep himself from looking over his shoulder at Commander of Fifty Narshu, but it wasn't the easiest thing he'd ever done.

"That sounds remarkably like an ultimatum, My Lord," he said.

"Does it?" Simrath cocked his head to one side, as if carefully considering what Skirvon had said, then shrugged. "Good," he said in an even cooler tone. "After all, that's what it is."

"The Union of Arcana is not accustomed to bending to ultimatums, My Lord!" Skirvon's response came out harder and more clipped than he'd intended.

"The perhaps you should seek to profit from the novel experience, Master Skirvon," Simrath suggested. "Or, of course, if my plain speaking has sufficiently affronted you, you can always withdraw yet again to . . . how was it you put it the other day? Ah, yes! Withdraw to 'allow tempers to cool,' I believe you said."

Skirvon was astounded by the sharpness of the anger Simrath's words—and scornful attitude—sent jabbing through him. He felt his expression congeal, his nostrils pinched in ever so slightly, and the slight flicker in Simrath's eyes as the Sharonian obviously observed the physical signs of his anger only made that anger even sharper.

At that moment, Skirvon would have like nothing better than to stand up and storm away from that table. Or to snatch an infantry-dragon out of some outsized pocket and blast the smiling aristocratic bastard across from him into a smoldering corpse. Unfortunately, he could do neither of those things . . . yet.

"My Lord," he said through gritted teeth, instead, "I must protest the entire tone of your comments and your apparent attitude. As I say, the Union of Arcana is unaccustomed to bending to ultimatums. However," he made himself inhale deeply and sat back in his own chair, "whatever your own attitude, or that of your government, may be, my instructions remain unchanged." Which, he reflected, is actually the truth. "As such, I have no option but to continue my efforts to achieve at least some progress in resolving the matters which bring us here before anyone else is killed. I will continue to pursue my duty, but not without telling you that I most strongly protest the insulting nature of this exchange."

"If the insult is too great," Simrath said, almost indifferently, "please feel free to withdraw. Otherwise, I trust, you'll at least stop insulting my intelligence by simply repeating the same, worn out, and completely pointless positions again and again and again."

Dorzon chan Baskay watched the Arcanan diplomats' faces darken with anger. The younger of them, Dastiri, had never been particularly hard to read, and his anger at chan Baskay's confrontational language sparkled in his dark eyes. Skirvon was obviously older and more experienced than his assistant, but despite that, he was nowhere near as good at concealing his emotions as he clearly thought he was. And the fact that even though Skirvon was as furious as he obviously was, he'd swallowed not just the content of chan Baskay's words, but the deliberately insulting tone in which they'd been delivered, as well, told the cavalry officer quite a lot.

Unfortunately, chan Baskay wasn't certain exactly what that "lot" was. The fact that Skirvon hadn't stormed away from the table in yet another of his patented temper tantrums was interesting, though. Whatever these bastards were up to, Skirvon clearly needed to be here this morning.

Which, coupled with Hulmok's observations, doesn't precisely fill me with joy.

He didn't so much as glance in the Arpathian officer's direction, but he did withdraw his gold fountain pen from his breast pocket and toy with it. He turned it end for end, watching it gleam richly in the morning sunlight. He had no doubt that the Arcanans would interpret it as another insolently dismissive gesture on his part. That didn't bother him particularly, but it wasn't the real reason for it, and the corner of his eye saw Arthag's tiny nod as the Arpathian acknowledged his warning signal.

"I deeply regret that you've apparently so completely misconstrued and misunderstood my efforts, My Lord," Skirvon told him through stiff lips. "Since, however, you seem to have done so, by all means explain to me precisely what sort of response to your Emperor's terms you would deem a sign of 'progress.'<thinspace>"

"For a start," chan Baskay told Skirvon in an only slightly less indifferent tone, "you might begin by at least acknowledging the fact that our current possession of this junction—paid for, I might add, with the blood of our slaughtered civilians—means we are not, in fact, negotiating from positions of equal strength. We need not even discuss sharing sovereignty over this junction with you. We already have it. As Sharona sees it, Master Skirvon, it's your job to convince us first, that there's any logical or equitable reason for us even to consider giving up any aspect of the sovereignty we've secured by force of arms, and, second, that there's any reason we should trust your government to abide by any agreement you manage to negotiate."

Skirvon ordered himself not to glower at the arrogant Sharonian. That sort of blunt, hard-edged attitude was far more confrontational than anything he'd seen out of Simrath to this point, and he wondered what had prompted the change.

But it's too little, too late, you prick, he told Simrath from behind the mask of his eyes. All I have to do is keep you talking for another hour or so, and then . . .

"Very well, My Lord," he said after a moment. "If you insist upon rejecting my government's efforts to reach some arrangement based on something other than brute force, I suppose I have no choice but to meet your proposal on your own terms.

"As you say, Sharona is currently in possession of this junction. I would submit to you, however, that it would be a grave error to assume that that happy state of affairs—from your perspective, at least—will continue indefinitely without some indication of reasonableness from your side. My government has stated repeatedly, through me, that talking is better than shooting. That doesn't mean shooting couldn't resume if our legitimate claims are rejected on the basis of your current military advantage."

Skirvon sat forward in his chair once more, hands folded on the rock-steady table floating between him and Simrath, and looked the Sharonian straight in the eye.

"In all honesty, My Lord," he said with total candor, "given the fashion in which you've just spoken to me, and spoken about my government, a resort to military force isn't totally unattractive to me. I suspect, however, that your masters would be no more pleased than my own if that should happen. So—"

Rithmar Skirvon went on talking, making himself pay no attention to the steadily ticking seconds and minutes flowing away into eternity.

Chapter Two

Company-Captain Balkar chan Tesh pushed back his canvas chair and stood. The morning officers' conference had run later than usual, thanks to the message chan Baskay and Arthag had Flicked to him, and that, in turn, had both delayed his breakfast and reduced his appetite. Now he left his mess kit on the folding field table for his orderly to deal with and stepped back out of his tent into the morning light.

It was an hour earlier in the day on this side of the portal, and he squinted his eyes as he gazed through it at the mist hanging above the hot, humid swamp on the other side. The autumn weather was growing steadily cooler on this side, especially under the towering trees, but the far side of the portal was much nearer to the equator. At the moment, chan Tesh was grateful to be spared the swamp's miserable climate, but if his people were still living under canvas once winter got here, that was going to change, he thought wryly.

Of course, by then we should have someone senior to me in here to take over, he told himself. And we may have enough manpower to let me divert enough working parties to actually finish those winter quarters Frai's working on.

He snorted at the thought, although his amusement was less than total. Master-Armsman Frai chan Kormai had been making pretty good progress on throwing together split-log barracks which would at least be weathertight, if not precisely luxurious. Until, of course, the Arcanan "diplomats" had arrived on the scene. Up to that point, it had appeared the mysterious enemy was intent on avoiding any further contact, which had suited chan Tesh just fine. The longer Sharona had to get its own reinforcements forward before they were needed, the better.

But the Arcanans' reappearance, and the transportation capabilities their magic-powered boats had revealed, had forcibly reminded chan Tesh of just how vulnerable his position out here really was. He had been dividing his efforts between improving his troops' fighting positions and trying to provide them with at least rudimentary housing . . . until the arrival of Rithmar Skirvon and Uthik Dastiri refocused his priorities. Followingtheir appearance, he'dpulled his work parties off the barracks-building details to concentrate on strengthening his troop emplacements . . . and reduced his work parties'size to make certain those emplacementswere adequately manned at all times.

Of course, "adequately" was an often slippery word, and chan Tesh wished he could be more confident that it applied in this instance. Unfortunately, while it was decidedly on the small side as the inter-universal gates went, the swamp portal was still four miles wide, and there'd never been much point in pretending the forces under his command could hold its entire frontage against a determined attack—especially not given that the actual frontage to be covered amounted to eight miles, not just four. Although the rest of chan Tesh's command had finally caught up with the three platoons he'd taken ahead in response to the Arcanans' original attack on the Chalgyn Consortium survey party, that still left him with less than eight hundred men. Instead of spreading them out and dissipating his combat power, he'd chosen to divide the command in two. Platoon-Captain chan Dersal, the senior of his two Marine platoon COs, was in command of the positions covering the southern face of the portal, while chan Tesh commanded the ones to the north.

In the face of such a broad frontage, he'd had to settle for attempting to dominate it by fire. Luckily, the rest of his mortars and half a dozen three-point-four-inch field guns had come up with the remainder of the relief column. He'd dug the mortars in in central positions on both Hell's Gate sides of the portal, with the field guns positioned on their flanks, prepared to sweep the approaches to the mortar pits with canister. Also luckily, the ground sloped generally upward on this side of the portal, in both directions. That gave him pretty fair lines of fire into, across, and along the portal's Hell's Gate aspects. He'd taken advantage of that and located the rest of his firepower to protect and support the mortars, because only they had the reach to cover the full width of the portal's faces from their gun pits. He'd positioned his machine guns with the best supporting fields of fire he could arrange, and his men had spent a great deal of time clearing fire zones of scrub saplings, which had further improved upon his basic elevation advantage.

The fact that the water table was further from the surface on this side of the portal—although the ground immediately surrounding the portal was heavily saturated with swamp water—was another factor in his decision to defend it from Hell's Gate. He'd been able to go down more than two feet on this side without striking water, and he'd taken advantage of that to dig his men and weapons in as deeply as he could. And after he'd gotten them dug in, he'd gone right on digging. The mortar pits had to be open if he was going to fire the weapons at all, and the field guns' were equally open in order to give the quick-firing guns the best command possible. Despite their lack of overhead cover, the artillery should be relatively safe, given the Arcanans' apparent lack of any sort of indirect-fire artillery.

His other positions, however, were as heavily bunkered as he could contrive. They were the protective barrier between the portal and his gunners, and he'd ordered them dug in below ground level. The aboveground bunker walls were over four feet thick, with log retaining walls filled with tamped-down earth, while the roofs consisted of at least four layers of crisscrossed logs covered by multiple layers of sandbags, as well. He was confident that they would have stood up well even against Sharonian-style field or medium artillery, and judging from the Arcanan fireball spells' apparent lack of penetration, they ought to resist even direct hits almost indefinitely.

He'd also arranged a few other things he hoped would come as nasty surprises to any potential attackers, but he'd always been aware that he'd be hard-pressed to stop any attack in force.

Many of his men (and at least some of his junior officers), on the other hand, thought he was being alarmist. He knew that. Despite his best efforts, they remained supremely confident—even overconfident—of their ability to deal with anything the other side might produce. Yet as chan Tesh had pointed out at this morning's conference, people always learned more from failure than from success, and what Sharona actually knew about Arcana's military capabilities remained pitifully inadequate. At least some of the Arcanan troops his command had defeated two months ago had managed to escape, however—that had been obvious from the moment Skirvon mentioned the confirmed death of that Arcanan civilian, Halathyn, in the attack—which meant the other side had probably learned more than he would have liked about Sharonian capabilities. But even if that weren't true, the natural response would be for Arcana to be bringing up the equivalent of its big guns (whatever the hells that might be) just as quickly as it could, and that could turn very ugly very quickly. Especially if those damned boats of theirs were any indication of their general mobility.

Chan Tesh himself was painfully well aware that much of his earlier victory owed its success to the Arcanans' complete lack of familiarity with modern firearms and mortars. The peerless stupidity of their commanding officer hadn't hurt, either, and that advantage, in particular, was something he couldn't count on the second time around. Just as—as he'd reminded his subordinates this morning—they couldn't afford to assume for a single instant that what they'd seen so far out of Arcana was, in fact, the best Arcana had.

There's a hell of a lot of difference between a four-and-a-half-inch mortar and an eleven-inch howitzer, he thought, and the other side hasn't seen that yet, either, has it?

At least chan Baskay's dispatch had helped him ginger up his platoon commanders. Which was remarkably little comfort compared to the way it had underscored chan Tesh's existing concerns.

He snorted again, this time without any humor at all. Chan Baskay's message had at least seen to it that chan Tesh's entire command was at a higher state of readiness. He hoped to all the gods that those among his subordinates whothought he was jumping at shadows turned out to be right. He was confident he and his men were as ready as they could be, but he was also more aware than ever of just how exposed, vulnerable, and—above all—unsupported they actually were.

Commander of Fifty Tharian Narshu had been carefully chosen for his present duty.

Despite his junior rank, Narshu had seen more than his fair share of combat against everything from brigands to cattle rustlers to claim-jumpers to landowners using "guest workers" as virtual slave labor. More to the point, perhaps, he wasn't the Regular Army officer he appeared to be. He'd been trained in the far harder, tougher school of the Union of Arcana's Special Operations Force, as had half of the men under his command. Two Thousand mul Gurthak had grabbed Narshu and the single squad of his platoon he'd had with him, snatched them (and the transport dragon which had been moving them to join the rest of his platoon in Jylaros) out of the regular transport queue, and hurried them forward to Two Thousand Harshu. Harshu had been delighted to see them . . . and he'd used them to provide the core of Master Skirvon's "honor guard."

The honor guard's other twelve men were primarily windowdressing, along solely to make up the numbers, who had no idea their commanding officer and fellow troopers weren't, in fact, Regular Army at all. Narshu wished fervently that all of them could have been Special Operations, but there were never enough SpecOps available. Two Thousand mul Gurthak had been unreasonably fortunate to to have even one of Narshu's squads available this far out into the boondocks when it had all hit the fan. Besides, a dozen SpecOps troopers ought to be more than sufficient, especially with Sword Seltym Laresk to run the squad. Narshu and Laresk had served together for almost two years now, and the fifty had total confidence in the noncom.

He was glad he did, too, because Tharian Narshu, unlike the late, unlamented Hadrign Thalmayr, wasn't about to underestimate his opposition. This Platoon-Captain Arthag, for example, was as tough and competent as anyone Narshu had ever seen. But competence didn't matter, he reminded himself, when it was offset by complete ignorance and total surprise, and these people knew nothing about even the simplest magic.

If there'd been any doubt about that, it had been dispelled several days ago when Narshu and his men first started bringing their daggerstones with them.

Narshu had been in two minds about the wisdom of issuing the daggerstones that soon. He'd been afraid that, despite Five Hundred Neshok's and Master Skirvon's assurances to the contrary, the other side might have some way of detecting them. It wasn't as if they were particularly hard to spot, after all—that was why they were so seldom used by the Spec Ops teams, despite their firepower—and their maximum effective range was barely ten yards. The possibility of getting the ridculously short-ranged weapons close enough to do any good was minimal in the face of even the most rudimentary security spells.

Two Thousand Harshu had insisted, however, and Narshu couldn't really fault the two thousand for it. Unlike these Sharonians and their "Voices," there was no way for Narshu to report the success or failure of his current mission in time for the two thousand to modify his own plans. That was the entire reason Narshu was out here—to level the communications playing field, as it were—and if his mission had been likely to fail simply because the Sharonians could, indeed, recognize a daggerstone for what it was, finding out at the very last moment would be disastrous.

No one on the other side had noticed a thing, though. Nor did any of them seem aware of the real reason for all of the last few weeks' "incidents."

And, he thought, glancing idly at his chronometer, it's about time the game began.

Rithmar Skirvon kept his attention focused on Viscount Simrath, and not on Fifty Narshu, just as he'd been very careful to avoid any casual glance at his own chronometer. Despite that, he was almost agonizingly aware of Narshu's presence behind him, and despite the coolness of the dry northern air, he felt sweat gathering along his scalp as the tension coiled tighter and tighter inside him.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain his air of concentration, to respond to Simrath's statements with the proper degree of normality. He'd expected some of that, but he hadn't anticipated just how difficult it might prove, and he found himself unexpectedly grateful for Simrath's earlier abrasiveness. The Sharonian diplomat had introduced a confrontational atmosphere which, in turn, offered an acceptable pretext for any sharpness on Skirvon's part, especially in the wake of all of the unfortunate outbursts of temper over the past couple of weeks. As a matter of fact, those "outbursts" had been carefully designed for the specific purpose of covering any last-minute tension on the Arcanans' part if the Sharonians happened to notice it.

None of which made the diplomat feel one bit calmer as the last few moments trickled past.

Tharian Narshu's right thumb hooked into his broad, stiff sword belt.

It was a completely natural-looking mannerism, if not precisely the most militarily correct posture in the world. In fact, he'd taken considerable pains to display that particular"sloppy habit" to the Sharonians for the last couple of weeks. It was about as unthreatening as it could be—his hand was on the opposite side from his sword's hilt, after all—but he'd wanted that sharp-eyed bastard Arthag to be accustomed to it. The last thing Narshu needed was for the Sharonian officer to notice anything out of the ordinary on the day when it finally mattered.

The fifty's own eyes never strayed from their slightly bored, incurious focus on Viscount Simrath, but his carefully trained peripheral vision made one last sweep to confirm that the rest of his men were in position. Only his SpecOps squad had a clue about what was going to happen. The rest of his "honor guard" detachment were all tough, capable vets, but they weren't SpecOps. They lacked the specialized training and experience of Narshu's own squad, and he'd decided against briefing them in ahead of time on the theory that what they didn't know was coming they couldn't inadvertently give away.

I'm going to have to apologize to them when this is all over, he thought. They're good troops, and they're going to have a right to be pissed off when they find out what's really been going on.

But he'd take care of that later; at the moment, he had other things to think about.

He completed his methodical check of his troopers' positions. Everyone was exactly where he was supposed to be. That was good. In fact, the only flaw in Narshu's satisfaction was that Arthag was outside his field of view.

It was just like the bastard to be uncooperative, the fifty thought sourly. He knew where Arthag was, of course, but he wasn't about to turn his head and look for the man—not at a moment like this. Besides, Arthag wasn't Narshu's target. Seltym Laresk was responsible for dealing with him, and the sword was perfectly positioned to Narshu's left rear.

Yes, he is, the fifty told himself. So why don't you stop worrying about Seltym, and get on with it?

It was, he decided, an excellent question, and his right hand flexed.

Hulmok Arthag's expression never even twitched—he was an Arpathian septman, after all—but he'd felt the tension coiling tighter inside his Arcanan counterpart for the last twenty minutes. The man was good; Arthag had to give him that. Looking at Narshu from the outside, there was absolutely nothing to indicate his spring-steel tension. But Hulmok Arthag was watching the Arcanan from the inside.

He wished, not for the first time, that his Talent had been more amenable to direction. He knew, beyond any doubt, that Narshu was totally focused on some action, some mission, but he had no way of knowing precisely what that mission was until the Arcanan actually acted. Which meant Arthag couldn't act until then, either. Whatever the Arpathian might "know," there was absolutely no supporting evidence. The other man's hands weren't even close to his sword, and his body language was relaxed, almost casual. Whatever Arthag wanted to do, he had to wait. Wait until Narshu gave him something more concrete than the warning of his Talent. Despite his and chan Baskay's suspicions, Narshu—like Skirvon and Dastiri—was part of a diplomatic mission. As such, their persons were inviolable, protected by their diplomat status until and unless their actions, not their intentions, changed that status.

Which hadn't prevented Arthag from briefing his own people about his suspicions. Or from leaving the retaining strap of his holster unbuttoned this morning.

The daggerstone slid cleanly out of the concealing compartment in Narshu's belt.

It didn't look particularly threatening to the naked eye. Aside from the peculiar, glassy sheen of sarkolis, it could have been a quarter-inch thick oval of natural quartz just under two inches across at its widest point. Only someone with at least a trace of a Gift could have used it, and anyone else with a trace of a Gift would have seen something quite different from a hunk of stone. Those were, of course, two of the reasons at least some Gift was required for anyone to qualify for SpecOp duty in the first place. Any Gifted observerwould have seen exactly what Narshu saw—the nimbus of energy glowing around it, reaching out to envelop his hand and forearm—and, if his Gift had been properly trained (like Narshu's), he would have been able to sense the lethality of that energy, as well.

But no Sharonian had that Gift, or that training.

Narshu's hand rose smoothly, without haste, as his thumb nestled into the slight hollow in the daggerstone's upper surface. It rose just high enough to bear on Petty-Captain Rokam Traygan, and Narshu released the first spell charge.

Brilliant, stunning light flashed across the conference table in a solid bar of lightning. The lightning spell was almost silent, compared to the thunderclap a fireball spell would have produced, but it hammered into Traygan with brutal force, and the Voice flew backward, outlined in a dazzling corona of energy, until he slammed into the trunk of a tree ten feet behind him. He hit with bone-shattering force, but it scarcely mattered; he was dead before he smashed into it.

Two more of Arthag's troopers were caught in the fringes of the spell, and both of them were just as dead as Traygan before they hit the ground. Chan Baskay was just far enough away to be unharmed, but the near-silent concussion of arcane energy sweeping out from the spell's impact point was like being hit with a club.

Rithmar Skirvon was almost as stunned as chan Baskay. Unlike the Ternathian, he'd known what was coming, but the actual moment had managed to surprise him, as well. He jerked back from the conference table as the spell's violence hit him in the face like fist. Although the plan had been at least partly his own, it was the first time he'd ever even seen a combat spell used, far less been this close to its point of impact. He'd tried to prepare himself ahead of time for what it would be like, but he'd failed.

Had his brain been up to the task, he would have been astounded by how quiet it was. Surely nothing that violent, that powerful, could make so little noise! "Quiet" wasn't the same thing as "gentle," however—not by a long shot—and his ears rang, his eyes watered, and he felt as if the breath had been knocked out of him. Yet even so, he knew the most critical part of the mission had succeeded perfectly. They'd managed to identify Simrath's "Voice," and Neshok's eavesdropping recon crystals had overheard enough conversations at the swamp portal to know that the dark-skinned Traygan was the only Voice Simrath and chan Tesh had between them. Which meant there was no way now for chan Tesh—or Simrath—to warn anyone else of what was about to happen.

Tharian Narshu felt an intense satisfaction as his target went down. Later, he knew, it might be different. The only difference between this and an act of murder, after all, was that he'd been ordered to do it by his superiors. But any regrets were going to have to wait unti—

Hulmok Arthag's right hand had started to move one thin fraction of a second after Narshu's. The H&W single-action revolver came out of its holster while the daggerstone was rising into position. The hammer came back as the muzzle rose, and the pistol's bellow was the thunderclap of the daggerstone's lightning.

Tharian Narshu's head exploded under the sledgehammer impact of the hollow-nosed .46 caliber bullet, and pulverized bone, blood, and tissue sprayed over Rithmar Skirvon as a stunning cascade of violence swept the clearing.

Narshu's Special Operations troopers had been fully briefed. They were primed, waiting only for their commander's attack on the Sharonians' Voice as the signal for their own attacks. Like Narshu himself, they had recognized the tough professionalism of their Sharonian counterparts. But, also like Narshu, they'd known the Sharonians had no way of detecting a daggerstone, no way of guessing what was coming.

Unfortunately, they'd had no way of recognizing Hulmok Arthag's Talent.

Sword Laresk and his men had been focused on Narshu, watching him, waiting for his attack, but Hulmok Arthag's men had been watching him. The instant his gunhand began to move, theirs did the same.

Skirvon was just beginning to realize Narshu had succeeded in his primary mission when the entire world went mad about him. The sibilant hiss of daggerstone bolts was abruptly punctuated by the thunder of Sharonian revolvers. Men shouted in terrified surprise, others screamed in sudden agony, and Skirvon's head snapped around just in time to see the undischarged daggerstone fly from Sword Seltym Laresk's hand as Chief-Armsman Rayl chan Hathas' revolver bullet struck him just below the left armpit from a range of fifty-two inches. The heavy lead projectile, as big around as chan Hathas' little finger even before expansion, disintegrated a two-inch section of rib, drove straight through the Arcanan sword's heart and lungs, and blew a fist-sized hole out of his right side.

Three of Narshu's twelve Special Operations troopers managed to activate their daggerstones, but none of them got off more than a single spell. They'd ordered themselves to take their time, to avoid rushing those first, critical shots in order to make sure of their initial targets, because they'd expected to be the ones with the advantage of surprise, only to discover that their intended victims had been waiting for them all along. Thanks to Arthag's warning, his men were actually quicker off the mark, and the sudden, stunning reversal of advantage knocked even the highly trained and motivated SpecOp troopers back on their heels. Thirteen more Sharonians died in the short, cataclysmic exchange, but then every man of Laresk's squad was down and dead . . . along with nine of the other twelve Arcanan troopers who'd never had a hint of what was coming.

Skirvon started to lurch up from the conference table as he realized just how terribly wrong the plan had gone. He didn't know where he thought he was going to go, and it didn't matter. Even as he gripped the edge of the table to lever himself out of his chair, a pistol materialized in "Viscount Simrath's" hand from the shoulder holster Skirvon had never suspected was hidden under his civilian jacket. It was a much smaller weapon than the ones every single one of Hulmok Arthag's men had drawn, but the hollow eye of its muzzle gaped like a cavern as Skirvon abruptly found himself staring straight down it.

The Arcanan froze, mouth gaping open, and the gray eyes watching him over the revolver's sights were colder than sea ice.

"Sit back down."

Dorzon chan Baskay's voice was even icier than his eyes, and the .35 caliber Polshana in his hand was rock-steady. Skirvon stared at him for just an instant, then half-fell back into his seat.

The senior Arcanan diplomat's face was the color of cold, congealed gravy. His eyes were sick, stunned—not by the carnage, but by who the victims had turned out to be. At that, he looked better than Uthik Dastiri. The younger diplomat simply sat there, jaw hanging, as if his brain flatly refused to accept what his eyes were reporting to him.

"If you move so much as an eyelash without my permission," chan Baskay continued in that same icicle of a voice, "I will shoot you squarely in the head. Is that understood?"

Skirvon only stared at him, and chan Baskay's thumb cocked the revolver's hammer. It wasn't necessary—the Polshana was a double-action weapon—but it had the desired punctuating effect.

"I asked if that was understood," he said in a very soft voice that sounded bizarrely quiet and calm even to him in the wake of the unexpected thunder. He had no idea where that self-control—if that was what it was—was coming from, but whatever his voice sounded like, something in his expression had Skirvon nodding with sudden, spastic speed.

Chan Baskay gave him one more glance, then looked up as Chief-Armsman chan Hathas stepped up beside him.

"I've got these bastards, Platoon-Captain," the chief-armsman grated, covering the Arcanans with his heavier, longer-barreled H&W.

"Thank you, Chief."

Chan Baskay slid his pistol back into its holster and stood. He turned his back on the two Arcanan diplomats . . . and on the almost overwhelming temptation to simply shoot them out of hand. Everything around him was absolutely crystal-clear, yet all of it also seemed to be much further away than he knew it actually was. He glanced down at his hands and discovered that they were completely steady, despite the quivering tingles running through them. Then he drew a deep, cleansing breath before he looked at Arthag.

"How bad?" he asked.

"About as bad as it could have been," Arthag replied, sounding preposterously matter-of-fact to chan Baskay. Then the Arpathian gave his head a little twitch. "Actually, that's not really true. We could all be dead. Short of that, however, I don't see how it could be much worse."

Chan Baskay looked past him to Rokam Traygan's contorted, broken body. The dead Voice's face was twisted in a final grimace of agony, and chan Baskay swallowed the foulest curse he could think of as he saw Chief-Armsman chan Treskin's body ten yards from Traygan's.

"How did they know?" the Ternathian officer demanded in a crushed-gravel voice. "How could they know to kill both of them?"

"I don't know. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure they did know," Arthag said.

"They must have. They went for Rokam first. That means he was their primary target all along. And that means they must have realized not only that he was a Voice, but what a Voice could do, in the first place."

"Maybe. No," Arthag shook his head, "not 'maybe.' You're right about him, at least. But chan Treskin wasn't even the intended target of the . . . whatever the hells it was they used. He just caught the very fringe of one of those blasts, and the bastard who killed him was already going down when he fired. I think it was simply a wild shot that just happened to take him out."

Chan Baskay gazed at the Arpathian for a moment, then shook his own head. Not in disagreement, but to clear it. They still didn't know how long Shaylar had lived after she was wounded, but obviously it had been long enough for the Arcanans to have learned at least a little about Talents and how they worked. It was the only way they could have realized just how vital the Voices were, and they obviously had. On the other hand, if Arthag was right about what had happened to chan Treskin, then the Arcanans hadn't realized how important the Flicker was. It was only sheer, incredibly bad luck that they'd gotten him, too.

Not that it mattered.

"We can't tell Company-Captain chan Tesh or Company-Captain Halifu about this." Chan Baskay knew he was stating the obvious. "So, the question is, what do we do?"

"They didn't just do this on the spur of the moment," Arthag replied. "And you're right, they obviously hit us first because we were the communications link between Company-Captain chan Tesh and New Uromath. I'm guessing they were pretty confident they could get us all, but I doubt they would have bet everything they had on that, however confident they felt."

"Which means they're going to be hitting chan Tesh anytime now, assuming they haven't already," chan Baskay agreed harshly. He closed his eyes, rubbing his forehead as if to clear away the last lingering cobwebs of shock while he thought furiously. Then he looked at Arthag once more.

"If they've planned this as carefully as I think they have, they probably allowed for the possibility that at least some of us might get away. From where I stand, that means they probably figure they can get here before any of us could reach Halifu."

"How?" Arthag's question was genuine, not a challenge, and chan Baskay shrugged.

"I don't have the least damned idea," he admitted. "Given what we've seen of their boats, and what they just did here, though," he waved one arm at the carnage sprawled about them, "I'm not going to assume they can't do it. Gods, man! If they can make conference tables float, maybe they can conjure up flying carpets for their people, too! Until I know different, I'm certainly not going to say they can't, at any rate."

"Me neither." Arthag tapped two fingers on his chin for a moment. Then it was his turn to shrug.

"I'll get the troops saddled up," he said.

"Good. And while you're doing that," chan Baskay's smile was razor-thin and cruel, "I'll just have a little chat with our guests."

Skirvon wrenched his eyes away from the revolver in Chief-Armsman chan Hathas' hand as Viscount Simrath waded back across the clearing through the deep leaves. The Ternathian's expression was no more comforting than the gaping bore of Hathas' revolver.

"So, Master Skirvon," he said in a voice fit to freeze the very air about him, "this is Arcana's idea of talking instead of shooting."

Skirvon kept his mouth shut. His belly was a frozen knot, and he swallowed convulsively, again and again. Somehow, despite everything, he'd never imagined anything like this. He'd been far too focused on what was going to happen to the Sharonians to consider what would happen if the carefully orchestrated plan failed.

"Not so talkative now, I see," Viscount Simrath observed. "I think, however, that you might want to reconsider that, Master Skirvon. In fact, I think what you really want to do is tell me exactly what's happening."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Skirvon managed to get out. "I had no idea Narshu was going to do anything like this!"

"Trekar?" Simrath glanced at the other apparent civilian standing beside him, and Trekar chan Rothag shook his head.

"That was a lie," the viscount said flatly, turning back to Skirvon. "Not that I really needed Trekar to confirm that. However, perhaps I should warn you that Trekar is what we call a 'Sifter'. You obviously know more than you wanted us to realize you do about our Talents. Well, Trekar's Talent is that he can always tell when someone is lying. I would strongly advise you not to lie again."

"Or what?" Uthik Dastiri asked. The Manisthuan had apparently recovered the ability to speak, although Skirvon wasn't at all certain that that was a good thing. He might be speaking again, but his eyes were still only half-focused and his expression was belligerent, and Skirvon recognized his associate's anger with a sudden, sinking sensation. Dastiri's temper had always been too close to the surface for a professional diplomat. Now his sense of shocked disbelief had transformed itself into unreasoning rage, and his hands twitched at his sides as he glared at Simrath.

The viscount seemed singularly impervious to his anger.

"You've systematically lied to us," the Ternathian said, and his eyes were far colder—and far more lethal—than Dastiri's. "You've violated the truce between us and killed our soldiers. No doubt, you intended to kill or capture Trekar and myself, as well. In short, you're guilty of premeditated murder, and the penalty for that is death."

"You wouldn't dare!" Dastiri shot back.

"I wouldn't?" Simrath repeated in a deadly calm voice.

"We're diplomats," Dastiri said. "Even barbarians like you ought to understand what that means! Besides, it's only a matter of time until our soldiers get here."

"Barbarians, are we?" Simrath's voice was very soft. "The sort of barbarians who massacre civilians, perhaps? Or who systematically lie when they claim to want a negotiated end to the violence? Or who commit murder under cover of their diplomatic status?"

"Uthik, shut up!" Skirvon said harshly.

"I won't!" Dastiri shot back. "This bastard thinks he can threaten us? Well, he's wrong!" He turned his glare on the Ternathian. "Go ahead," he sneered. "Tell us what you're going to do to us! Just remember, our soldiers are coming!"

"Really?" Something about the Ternathian's smile tightened Skirvon's belly muscles even further.

"I'm afraid you've been operating under a bit of a misapprehension, Master Dastiri," Simrath continued, reaching back into his jacket and withdrawing his revolver once more. "I really am Viscount Simrath, and I really am Emperor Zindel's accredited representative to these negotiations. But I'm also Platoon-Captain chan Baskay, Imperial Ternathian Army, on assignment to the Portal Authority Armed Forces. And I'm afraid that at the moment, I'm feeling much more like Platoon-Captain chan Baskay and very little like a diplomat."

Skirvon swallowed again, harder, and chan Baskay smiled icily.

"Under Ternathian military law, Master Dastiri, I have full authority to conduct summary courts-martial in the field and to carry out their verdicts."

"You can't bluff me," Dastiri sneered. "Not even you could be stupid enough to think you could get away with murdering an Arcanan diplomat!"

"Perhaps not," chan Baskay conceded. "On the other hand, I am 'stupid enough' to execute a murdering piece of scum."

He raised his pistol hand, and despite himself, Dastiri's eyes widened as the Polshana's muzzle aligned itself with the bridge of his nose. Chan Baskay's free hand waved two troopers standing behind Dastiri out of the line of fire, and the Manisthuan's nerve seemed to waver for a moment as the cavalrymen stepped aside. But then his mouth tightened once again, and he glared back at chan Baskay, as if his momentary weakness had only made him even angrier.

"I would most earnestly advise you to give me a reason not to kill you," chan Baskay said.

"Fuck you!" Dastiri spat.

"Wrong answer," chan Baskay said, and squeezed the trigger.

The black hole which appeared in Dastiri's forehead wasn't all that big, actually, a corner of Skirvon's brain reflected. But the entire back of the younger man's skull disintegrated in an explosion of red, gray, and splintered white bone. The body was flung backward. It thudded to the ground, quivering slightly, and chan Baskay brought that deadly muzzle to bear on Skirvon's forehead.

"You have five minutes to convince me not to kill you," chan Baskay told him. "I'm sure you know the sorts of things I'd be interested in hearing. And, just as a reminder, don't forget that Trekar will know the first time you lie to me. And if you ever lie to me again, Master Skirvon, I'll be very, very unhappy with you. Is that clear?"

Chapter Three

Commander of Five Hundred Cerlohs Myr, CO of the First Provisional Talon, Arcanan Expeditionary Force, settled himself even more deeply into the cockpit hollowed out of Razorwing's neck scales. He felt the deep, subterranean rumble vibrating through the accelerating battle dragon, felt the prodigious power of Razorwing's sweeping pinions, and a matching flood of eagerness poured through him, for t here was nothing—nothing in all the universes mankind had ever explored—which could equal the sheer thrill of piloting a battle dragon into combat.

Not that anyone's had all that much combat experience over the last couple of centuries.

The thought flickered through the back corners of his brain as the air stream began to scream just above his head. Battle dragon pilots didn't use the saddles transport pilots favored. They rode their mounts in a prone position, strapped into their cockpits—the depressions which centuries of careful breeding had formed in the backs of their dragons' huge, scaly necks. Carefully sculpted scutes in front of that depression acted as baffles, protecting it and fairing the airflow. At a battle dragon's maximum speed, that airflow could severely injure any limb which strayed into it, but the curved scales bent it up and around, leaving the pilot in a pocket of absolutely calm air, like the eye of a hurricane.

Of course, Myr could count the number of times he'd taken Razorwing to the dragon's true maximum speed on his fingers. That kind of flying was frowned upon during peacetime, even in the combat strikes, because of the potential for injuries. And not just injuries to pilots. In fact, replacing a dead or crippled pilot was the easy part; a fully seasoned and trained battle dragon like Razorwing took literally decades to hatch, raise, and train.

That was part of the reason the Air Force never had enough of them. They were expensive, they were irritable, they were dangerous, and—in peacetime—they were far less useful than the bigger, slower, more placid transports. There were those who'd argued for years that the combat strikes should be reduced even further. Aside from providing occasional support against unusually large and well-organized groups of brigands, they didn't really have a peacetime function which couldn't be filled just as well by the transports. After all, a properly trained transport dragon could fly aerial reconnaissance missions just as well as a battle dragon, and battle dragons were poorly suited to transport and SAR operations. Their function wasn't to carry or rescue things . . . it was to kill things.

The Air Force had fought off the pressure to completely dispense with battle dragons, but it hadn't been easy, especially after so many years in which no external threat to the Union of Arcana had ever been encountered. The decisive argument, in many ways, had been the time and incredible expense which would be required to reconstitute an aerial combat capability from scratch if the breeding and training programs were allowed to lapse. The fact that certain members of the Union Parliament had been determined to protect their constituencies' lucrative Air Force contracts hadn't hurt, either, of course.

But if the Air Force had managed to keep the breeding programs going, it had still been forced to accept severe reductions in total numbers. The slow, steady build-down of the combat forces had been going on for better than ninety years now, and the Air Force's ability to project fighting power and provide ground support was at an all-time low.

Which, of course, explains why Ekros dropped a godsdamned war into our laps now, Myr thought sourly. Or, at least, as sourly as it was possible for a man to feel as the incredible power of the dragon under him carried him through the endless heavens at better than two hundred miles per hour.

The lumbering transports were already out of sight, left far behind as the battle dragons sped ahead at two-thirds again their maximum speed. Not even a battle dragon could sustain that sort of sprint speed for long, but Two Thousand Harshu had stressed the vital necessity of hitting the enemy as quickly as possible.

Myr would have preferred to spearhead the attack in person, and his Razorwing could have flown the mission. Razorwing was a "black," after all—a lightning-breather. But a commander of five hundred had no business getting entangled in the opening stages of an attack like this one. Myr's job was to coordinate everyone else, and no one had commanded an attack on this scale since the unification wars.

He'd selected Commander of Fifty Delthyr Fahrlo for the most ticklish aspect of the operation. Fahrlo's Deathclaw was a "black" like Razorwing, and he was also well over eighty years old. Still in his prime, for a battle dragon, but with decades of experience behind him. It might be experience acquired in training missions, rather than on actual combat operations, but Deathclaw was still the most qualified beast for the mission, and Fahrlo had amassed an enviable record in his strike's exercises over the three years he'd piloted Deathclaw.

Now it remained to be seen just how good Myr's choice would turn out to be. As he gazed ahead, the five hundred saw the swamp portal looming up, growing rapidly closer and bigger, and wished his mouth didn't suddenly feel quite so dry.

Petty-Armsman Harth Loumas checked his watch.

It was just about time for another sweep, and he yawned and stretched deliberately, locking his fingers above his head and twisting his back to encourage the kinks to depart. Then he settled back on his haunches, closed his eyes, and once more reached out across the miles of water and mud with his Talent.

Loumas had always taken his duties and responsibilities seriously. Given the . . . energy with which Company-Captain chan Tesh had stressed Platoon-Captain chan Baskay's concerns over the Arcanan diplomats' attitude, he was more attentive even than usual today. And he also regretted the fact that they didn't have a decent Distance Viewer even more than usual.

But they didn't, and they couldn't get one, which meant Loumas' Plotting Talent was the best they could come up with, and he frowned in concentration as he "felt" for the presence of living creatures. As always, he was bombarded with thousands upon thousands of flickers of life essence—birds, mammals, lizards, crocodiles, jaguars . . . The list went on and on, but all of those essences, all of those glittering points of light in his Talent's field of view, were scattered randomly. They lacked the organization, the formation, which would have indicated a human presence.

Still no sign of the bastards, I guess, he reflected. Good. I know some of the other guys are awfully full of themselves. Well, they can be as eager for another round with these people as they want to be. I'd just as soon not see a sign of them until our reinforcements get here.

He opened his eyes and straightened, and Junior-Armsman Tairsal chan Synarch cocked an eyebrow at him.

"Nothing, huh?" the Flicker asked.

"Don't sound so disappointed," Loumas said dryly.

"Oh, I'm not, believe me!" Chan Synarch shook his head, hard.

"Good, because in that case, I don't have to throttle you for being an idiot."

Chan Synarch chuckled. He and Loumas had been teamed for lookout duty ever since Company-Captain chan Tesh had taken the swamp portal away from the Arcanans, and they got along quite well, despite very different backgrounds. Loumas was a New Farnalian who'd joined the PAAF almost fifteen years before, whereas chan Synarch was a Ternathian who'd been born less than fifteen miles outside Estafel, the imperial capital. He was an Imperial Marine on temporary assignment to the PAAF, and there was a lively tradition of rivalry between the Marines, who considered themselves a corps d'elite, and the Portal Authority Armed Forces' long-service regulars.

Upon occasion, that rivalry had spilled over into even more lively brawls, but not this time. Chan Tesh had pinched Loumas from Hulmok Arthag because he desperately needed a Plotter. Well, actually he'd needed a Distance Viewer, but he'd had to settle for the best he could get. Although chan Synarch was senior to Loumas, he'd confessed at the outset that he'd never worked with a Plotter before. He'd been refreshingly ready to ask questions in order to figure out how their Talents could mesh most effectively, and the two of them had quickly established a lively mutual respect.

"I wish we were on the other side of the portal," chan Synarch said now, swatting vainly at the insects whining about his head and ears.

"Well, if you can figure out away to make a Talent work through a portal, I'm sure we can get the Company-Captain to sign off on it. For that matter, you'll end up filthy rich, I imagine."

"Instead of just filthy, you mean?" chan Synarch said, grimacing at one muddy boot, and it was Loumas' turn to chuckle.

Commander of Fifty Fahrlo felt himself trying to curl even more tightly against Deathclaw's comforting solidity. He'd never before dared to take the dragon to his maximum speed, given the bloodcurdling penalties awaiting any Air Force officer foolish enough to lame or cripple one of the expensive, almost impossible to replace battle dragons in a mere training exercise.

I hope to all the gods that Neshok knows what he's talking about this time, Fahrlo thought. If he doesn't, if these people are maintaining any sort of a decent sky watch instead of concentrating solely on ground threats, things could be about to get pretty damned messy.

Fahrlo would have been more confident of the Intelligence officer's assessment if he hadn't decided that Neshok was one of the half-dozen biggest pricks he'd ever had the misfortune to meet.

You don't have to like him, as long as he manages to do his job, the Air Force officer reminded himself. Of course, if he were half as bright as he thinks he is, he'd probably be a Two Thousand himself by now, wouldn't he?

Fahrlo gave his head a mental shake. He had other things to be concentrating on at this particular moment, he reminded himself, and pressed the tips of his gloved left fingers into the control groove along the side of Deathclaw's mighty neck.

Transport pilots used reins and dragon prods to control their beasts, but the men who piloted battle dragons flew by the tips of their fingers—literally. Just as the dragon breeders had created the cockpit in which Fahrlo rode, they had formed two grooves, each just a shade over two feet long and conveniently placed for the pilot's hands. Those grooves were deep enough that Fahrlo's fingers touched Deathclaw's actual hide, not just the thick, protective scales which armored the mighty beast. That hide was acutely sensitive, and Deathclaw had been trained to respond to even the lightest touch. Fahrlo, like most battle dragon pilots, had long since developed the manual dexterity of a concert pianist, and after so long together, he and Deathclaw literally thought as one. The dragon knew exactly what each touch through one of the control grooves meant, and now he lowered his left wingtip, arcing into a steeply inclined bank, and lowered his head.

Fahrlo removed his right hand from the starboard control groove just long enough to press the sarkolis crystal embedded in his flight helmet, and a circular window-like image appeared on the helmet's faceplate. It didn't look quite like anything Fahrlo had ever seen with his own eyes, because dragon vision was different from human vision. The color balance was subtly skewed, and no human being had ever been able to pick out such minute details from so far away.

Delthyr Fahrlo's father had been a battle dragon pilot. So had two of his uncles, and his grandfather. And his great-grandfather, for that matter. It was a calling which tended to run in families, because it absolutely required a particular Gift. The image projected across Fahrlo's helmet faceplate wasn't quite like something a scrying spell might have produced, although there were similarities. But the crystal embedded in the helmet contained no scrying spellware. Instead, it reached out to another sarkolis chip, surgically embedded in his dragon some three months after its hatching, which linked the two of them directly when activated. A pilot literally saw what his dragon saw, and the linkage worked both ways. A crosshair floated in the window, moving as Fahrlo moved his eyes. By turning his own head, directing his own vision on a specific object or creature, and marking it with the crosshair, the pilot was able to designate targets for his dragon's attack.

Nor was that all the crystal did. No one in his right mind wanted a battle dragon's breath weapon to come online without direct human supervision. The weapon itself was an integral part of the dragon's structure, but the dragon couldn't use it without his pilot's consent. It was the pilot's job to select the target; it was the dragon's job to hit the target . . . but only when the pilot triggered the release code through the helmet crystal and allowed the dragon to attack.

Now Deathclaw's impossibly powerful vision focused on the pair of enemy soldiers so far below. The two men who had to be the first to die under Thousand Toralk's operations plan.

Something made Tairsal chan Synarch glance upward.

He didn't know what it was. Certainly, it wasn't because of any Talent, or because he'd heard anything. Perhaps it was some primitive instinct which cut deeper than any Talent, any Gift.

Whatever it was, it came too late.

The Marine's eyes went wide as he saw the incredible beast arrowing down out of the heavens above him. The thing's sheer size—and the fact that he'd never seen anything remotely like it—made it impossible to judge the range accurately. At first, for a few brief moments, he'd thought it was only some distant hawk, or possibly an eagle. But then he realized that it was far, far larger than that. And, as the sun caught it, it glittered with a peculiar, metallic sheen no feather had ever produced.

"What the—?"

He never finished the question.

In many ways, Deathclaw's selection for this particular mission cut against The Book on Air Force operations. Blacks were aerial-superiority dragons, not ground-attack beasts. That sort of attack was supposed to be the province of the fire-spitting reds and gas-spitting yellows. But Five Hundred Neshok and Thousand Toralk had made it clear that the lookout post they'd identified had to be taken out in the very first moments of the attack. One of those lookouts clearly had one of the Sharonian "talents" which allowed him to send messages back and forth almost instantly over at least short distances. According to Neshok, he didn't seem to be what the Sharonians called a "Voice," which meant he shouldn't be able to send messages over longer distances. But they couldn't be certain of that, and Arcana couldn't afford to let him relay a warning up the chain of universes behind him if it turned out Neshok was wrong.

That was why Five Hundred Myr had assigned a black. Reds and yellows were both shorter ranged than the blacks, and their weapons were appreciably slower in reaching their targets even across their lower effective ranges. That was especially true for the yellows, yet even the reds' fireballs traveled no more quickly than an arbalest bolt, which, combined with their short effective ranges, made both weapons relatively ineffectual in air-to-air combat.

But that was precisely the mission for which the blacks had been created. Their lightning weapon inflicted less damage than the reds' fireballs, but their attacks reached their targets at literally lightning speed. There was no time for evasive action, no time to dodge. If the bolt was accurately aimed, it would strike its target.

Fahrlo had fired Deathclaw's lightning more than once in training operations, at wood and canvas targets on carefully delineated training ranges. He'd never unleashed that weapon against a living, breathing target.

Until today.

Harth Loumas had just begun to turn his head to see what had so startled chan Synarch when a lightning bolt as thick as a man's arm came hissing down out of the cloudless sky. It struck directly between the two Sharonians, and its dreadful power dwarfed anything any Sharonian had seen out of the Arcanans' infantry weapons.

Their mouths opened in silent, agonized screams as the lightning enveloped them in a blinding corona of destruction. For an instant they writhed, their bodies convulsing in helpless reaction to the massive blast of electricity searing through them. The "CRACK!" as the lightning bolt struck was like a cannon shot, and heads turned towards the sound just in time to see Lomas and chan Synarch collapse like broken puppets of seared, smoking flesh, singed hair, and tattered clothing.

Five Hundred Myr saw the blinding streak of Deathclaw's bolt rip across the heavens. From Razorwing's present position, it looked perfect, and the five hundred triggered the spellware that released the brilliant red signal flare behind his dragon. It exploded in a spectacular burst of crimson light, and the 3012th Combat Strike obediently peeled off and dove into the attack at maximum speed.

Balkar chan Tesh was on his way back to his command bunker opposite the center of the portal's northern aspect when he heard the sharp, explosive sound. He spun toward it, and his eyes widened in sudden speculation. The sound wasn't quite like any explosion he'd ever heard, but it was too violent to call anything else.

He was too far from Loumas' and chan Synarch's position to see what had actually happened, but he knew. Somehow, he knew.

He stood for one more moment, and then some instinct made him look up.

Commander of One Hundred Horban Geyrsof watched the lead elements of his 3012th Strike separate and dive steeply.

The entire First Provisional Talon had approached the objective from the east. That had kept the portal itself between them and the enemy's lookouts, who'd been located at its western end. No one knew whether or not a portal would have the same effect on these "Sharonians'<thinspace>" so-called "talents" that it had on spells, but according to Five Hundred Neshok, it appeared to. Geyrsof wasn't particularly fond of phrases like "appeared to" when it came to planning operations, but given the description of the enemy's horrific weapons, he was more than willing to play for any possible potential advantage.

Now, as Five Hundred Myr's flare announced initial success, all eight of the 3012th's reds split into two separate four-dragon flights which broke left and right, then came slashing back in diving turns. They stooped upon both faces of the portal simultaneously, wings swept, approaching speeds of two hundred and fifty miles an hour as they used the advantage of their altitude ruthlessly.

Geyrsof would have preferred to lead the initial attack himself, and not just because he possessed an abundance of the aggressiveness and self-confidence which were the fundamental qualities of a successful battle dragon pilot. This was the first Air Force attack on a regular, organized military opponent in two hundred years, and Geyrsof's Graycloud was a yellow. His poisonous breath weapon had been expressly designed for missions just like this one, but he was one of only three yellows—all in Geyrsof's strike—which Thousand Toralk had been able to scare up.

That was the problem. This wasn't just the first attack in two hundred years; it was also the first Air Force attack ever on an enemy from an entirely different universe, and they had too few yellows to risk losing them in the very first attack. Especially when no one had the least idea how well Air Force doctrine was going to work against such an opponent, or how effective the other side's weapons were going to be against Geyrsof's dragons.

Those were two of several things they were about to find out.

The instant he saw the impossible beasts screaming down out of the very heavens, Balkar chan Tesh knew the sledgehammer about to come down on his positions would be far worse than any attack even he had imagined in his worst nightmares. The. . . the dragons, for want of any better word, would be horrendous opponents even if they simply landed among his men with talons and fangs. He'd never imagined anything outside a whale which could possibly have matched their size, and the mere fact that anything that big was actually capable of flight was enough to flood his mind with atavistic terror. But it wasn't just their size, for something gibbered in the back of his brain that if they looked like dragons, and if they flew like dragons, then they probably breathed fire like dragons.

Yet even as the primitive part of his mind recoiled from those horrifying images, the thinking part of his mind had already grasped a far more terrifying implication. If these people could fly, then every calculation and estimate of the relative mobility of the two sides had suddenly become meaningless.

And if that explosion-like sound had come from where he thought it had, then he had no way to get a message out to chan Baskay for Rothag to relay to Halifu's Voice. Which meant no one else could possibly know what he'd just discovered.

Those thoughts blazed through him like thunderbolts while he watched the trio of dragons coming straight at him.

And then they began to belch fire.

Chapter Four

Commander of Twenty-Five Tahlos Berhala led the attack.

"Commander of twenty-five" was a purely Air Force rank, one which Berhala was perfectly well aware the other branches of the Union of Arcana's military deeply resented. He didn't really blame them for their anger over the Air Force's "rank inflation," although he had no intention of giving up the privileges (and additional pay) which went with his commission. But the Air Force had decided long ago that anyone responsible for flying a battle dragon had to be an officer. Once upon a time, Berhala knew, there'd been quite a few noncommissioned combat pilots, but they'd been eliminated in the course of the Air Force's build-down of its combat strength. If there were only going to be a limited number of battle dragons to go around, then by all the gods, they were going to have officers in their cockpits!

Which explained how one Tahlos Berhala and his red dragon Skyfire found themselves flying point for the first inter-universal air strike in history.

He concentrated on the targeting display projected across the inside of his helmet's visor, trying to shut out all the other distractions, all the fear, all the excitement. He watched the incredibly clear image Skyfire's draconic vision produced, and the spellware built into his helmet's sarkolis crystal put a strobing amber crosshair directly in the center of his vision. He moved his eyes until the crosshair settled on one of the open-topped weapon pits and watched it flashing more and more quickly as the range dropped.

His fingers stroked gently, gently in the control grooves, and Skyfire swung slightly to port. Airspeed was still building when suddenly the crosshair stopped blinking. It settled into the steady, blood-red glare that indicated he was in range, instead, and he inhaled deeply.

"Sherkaya!" he snapped, and Skyfire's entire body seemed to buck indescribably beneath him as the one-word command—the ancient Mythalan word for "fire"—triggered the helmet spellware's release code.

Balkar chan Tesh watched in belly-knotted sickness as the first fireball impacted directly on top of the pit occupied by Morek chan Talmarha, his senior artillery officer. There was no overhead cover, nothing to impede the attack in any way. The fireball seemed to move impossibly slowly, yet at the same time, it flashed directly to its target, and it was obviously many times more powerful than anything the Arcanan infantry support weapons could produce. The mortar pit was almost a hundred yards from chan Tesh, but the searing flash of the fireball's ear-stunning detonation seemed to singe every hair on the company-captain's head.

For one bare fraction of a second, all he heard was that sharp, concussive almost-explosion. But then came the shrieks, the screams of men far enough from its center to have been spared instant death in favor of a far more terrible fate. He saw flaming torches, rolling on the ground, trying to beat out the flames consuming them, and then the ready ammunition stored in the pit began to cook off, as well.

Berhala saw his target go up in flames, although he had too little time for any sort of detailed evaluation. The maximum attack range for any red was under two thousand yards. At better than two hundred miles per hour, it took barely fourteen seconds to cross that distance, which gave him time for two shots, maximum. Under the circumstances, he decided to assume that the leaping pillar of fire meant he'd knocked out his primary target and turned his head. His eyes moved as well, tracking the crosshair onto one of the sandbag-covered emplacements to the west of his primary target, and then it settled into position.

"Sherkaya!" he barked again.

More fireballs came streaking down to explode on their targets. All of the mortar and gun pits covering the northern aspect of the portal were hit, reduced to flaming crematoria filled with exploding ammunition, and the galloping pattern of overlapping concussions threw chan Tesh from his feet. He landed hard on his belly, and even as he hit, the onrushing monsters turned their attention to his bunkers.

Still more fireballs erupted, but this time the results were different as the thickness of the fortifications upon which he had insisted proved their worth. For all their terrifying noise, all the incredible heat radiating from them, the fireballs simply lacked the penetration to punch through that much solid earth and logs.

Berhala swore in furious disgust even as he pulled Skyfire up and around into a climbing loop. The open weapons pits had been devastated, but those other fortifications—!

He shook his head, unable to believe that anything could have stood up to Skyfire's devastating attack. But those heaps of dirt and logs were still there, smoking furiously, yet still intact. He glanced across at Lairys Urkora, flying off Skyfire's starboard wingtip on his own Cloudtiger, and the other twenty-five looked up, as if he'd felt Berhala's eyes. It was impossible for either of them to see the other's expression through the reflective, spell-hardened glass of their helmet visors, but they'd flown together for almost a year. Berhala could see Urkora's own astonishment at the survival of their secondary targets in the way the other man cocked his head.

They broke eight thousand feet, converting the speed they'd gained in their original attack dive back into altitude, and Cloudtiger followed Skyfire around. The other two dragons of the flight—Daggerclaw and Deathstar—followed slightly below and to port as they leveled out at just over nine thousand feet, because, despite his junior rank and relative youth, Berhala was the flight's senior pilot.

Five Hundred Myr and Hundred Geyrsof had warned him that the effectiveness of their dragons' breath weapons was unproven. Berhala doubted that either of his superiors had truly imagined that they would prove totally ineffective against the other side's fortifications, though.

He glared down at the position a mile and a half below and twice that far behind him. The smoke and flame vomiting upward from his flight's initial targets made it hard to pick out details, even with the assistance of Skyfire's incredible vision, and the looming portal made it impossible for him to see what had happened with the strike on the fortifications guarding its southern aspect. But he could see enough to know the dug in positions on this side were still there, still waiting, undoubtedly protecting the devastating rapidfire weapons which had massacred Hundred Thalmayr's company.

Those weapons might not pose a significant threat to Berhala and Skyfire, but the cavalry and infantry coming in behind them would be another story entirely.

He glowered downward for another few heartbeats, then looked back across at Urkora once more and raised his right hand. He was careful to keep it out of the slipstream as he patted the top of his helmet, then pointed back downward. Urkora responded with a dragon pilot's exaggerated nod of understanding, and Berhala returned his hand to the control groove.

"All right, big boy," he said, although there was no way Skyfire could possibly hear him. "Let's try that again."

Company-Captain chan Tesh dragged himself back up off the ground. He felt physically stunned, as if someone had beaten him with clubs, but his many years of experience and training roused quickly, fighting his mental shock.

The destruction of his mortars and supporting field guns meant, ultimately, that his defense was doomed. To be fair, however, that had probably been true from the outset. If the Arcanans' transport capability was as great as the existence of these "dragons" implied, then they'd probably moved in enough troop strength to have come over his men eventually, no matter what. He simply didn't have enough ammunition to stop the manpower these people could have lifted in by air.

But that doesn't mean we can't bleed the bastards first, he thought harshly. I don't care how fucking good their logistics are, they can't possibly have an unlimited number of men available . . . and however many they have now, they're going to have a hell of a lot less by the time they take this position away from my boys!

He turned his head, craning his neck as he looked for the four dragons which had flown directly over him at an altitude of barely a hundred feet after belching their fire into chan Talmarha's gun pits. There! They were circling around, and his jaw clenched as he realized they were preparing for another pass.

Motion caught at the corner of his eye from closer at hand, and his head snapped back around in time to see six of his Ternathian Marines struggling to drag one of the Faraika II machine-guns out of a bunker. He started to shout at them to get back under cover, then stopped as he realized what they were doing, and why. They couldn't get enough elevation to reach aerial targets—even targets flying as low as these were—through the firing slits of their bunker.

Obviously, they intended to do something about that.

As he watched, they dragged the two hundred and fifty-pound weapon across to one of the piles of dirt from which the fatigue parties had been filling sandbags. They heaved the heavy tripod to the top of the pile and slammed its feet as deep into the soft earth as they could. The dirt pile tilted the entire weapon at an awkward, unnatural—and unstable—angle, but four of them threw their own weight onto the tripod, bracing it in place while the gunner and his assistant scrambled around to find some sort of firing position behind the gun.

They didn't have much time. The dragons were already sweeping back, sharpening their angle of approach as they dove back into the attack once more. Other Marines and PAAF troopers were pouring out of their bunkers, finding firing positions with their Model 10 rifles, and as he scrambled towards them, he saw at least a handful of troopers with grenade launchers clamped to their rifle muzzles. The rifle grenades were heavy, awkward, and short-ranged, but they were also specifically designed to take out bunkers and strongpoints, and he doubted anything that actually got hit with one of them would—

"Here they come!" someone shouted.

"Make it count, boys!" chan Tesh heard someone else shouting with his own voice, and then the dragons were upon them once more.

The amber crosshair in Berhala's visor began to steady down as Skyfire swept back into range once more. The commander of twenty-five watched with satisfaction as its rapid blinking slowed, but then he frowned.

Graholis! What were those frigging idiots doing down there?

He couldn't believe it. They were actually coming out of their fortifications! He hadn't noticed them quickly enough, either. By the time he could have retargeted and Skyfire's head could have followed the crosshair around to the exposed Sharonians, they would already be past them. But why—?

Then he realized. They couldn't have fired their own weapons against the attacking dragons from inside their prepared positions. So they'd come outside in order to be able to shoot back.

He felt himself tightening internally, some of the exuberance and wild adrenaline rush giving way to the sudden awareness that the same impossible weapons which had ravagedthe Andaran Scouts were about to be fired at him.

Ground fire was a part of any red dragon's life. The reds' breath weapon was short ranged enough that they almost had to come into even arbalest range in a firing pass, and infantry and artillery dragons—the support weapons, not the living creatures—had more than sufficient range to engage any strafer. But the good news was that dragons, as a whole, were relatively resistant to the lighter versions of their own breath attacks which the artillery and infantry support weapons could throw. And while arbalest bolts could penetrate and lacerate the relatively thin, translucent hide of their wings, the heavy scales protecting a dragon's undersides and throat were another matter entirely.

And anything they've got will have to get all the way through Skyfire before it does anything to me, he reminded himself.

They shouldn't have come straight in on us this way, chan Tesh thought. They should have come in at an angle—made us lead them with our fire.

The company-captain had been on enough quail and duck hunts to know just how difficult a deflection shot against a passing bird could be. Of course, he'd never fired at a "bird" the size of one of these things in his life! But it didn't really matter very much, either, with the monsters coming straight down his men's throats.

Model 10 rifles began to crack viciously, spitting .40 caliber cupro-nickel jacketed hate back at their attackers. It was impossible for chan Tesh to see what—if any—effect the rifle fire was having, but then the Marine machine-gunner he'd noticed earlier began to turn the crank on his weapon.

The Faraika II was a much heavier weapon than the Faraika I he'd had available for his own attack on the Arcanans' original infantry position. The Faraika I fired the same round as the Model 10 rifle; the Faraika II had been designed, among other things, as an anti-small boat weapon. It fired a .54 caliber round, which weighed better than three times as much as the lighter round, at an even higher muzzle velocity and with better than five times the muzzle energy. The Spitzer-pointed rounds had a range of close to four thousand yards, and the thunderous bellow as the weapon began to fire was stunning.

Even with four burly Marines heaving their full weight on the tripod, it was almost—almost—impossible to hold the machine-gun steady against the hammering recoil, but they managed. And every fifth round was tracer. They weren't as visible in the bright morning sunlight as they might have been in poorer lighting, but chan Tesh's eye followed them as they streaked towards the dragon flying just off the leader's right wing.

Twenty-Five Berhala heard—and felt—Skyfire's harsh scream of mingled fury and pain. The dragon shuddered under him, muscles bucking and jerking again and again, but Skyfire never hesitated, never even tried to swerve. He held his course, and the crosshair blinked suddenly crimson once again.

"Sherkaya!" Berhala shouted, and another fireball ripped away. Like its immediate predecessor, it impacted directly on one of the squat, thick fortifications . . . and achieved absolutely nothing.

Berhala's lips drew back in anger and frustration, but then he heard a sudden, ear-tearing shriek from his right. His head whipped up and around, rising dangerously close to the slipstream howling just above his cockpit, and his face went white as Cloudtiger's mighty wings seemed to crumple and the huge dragon slammed into the earth at almost three hundred miles per hour.

"Yes!"

Chan Tesh's fierce exclamation of satisfaction was lost in his men's baying shout of triumph. The stupendous creature hit headfirst, tumbling, rolling, broken wings flailing, and the man who'd been strapped to its back went flying like a discarded, broken doll. He hit with an impact which must literally have broken every bone in his body, and Balkar chan Tesh bared his teeth in ugly satisfaction.

It might be small enough recompense for what that dragon and its companions had already done to his command, but at least the treacherous bastards knew now that their victims still had a sting.

Berhala's mind refused to wrap itself around what had just happened. None of the training texts had ever suggested anything like what had claimed Urkora and Skyfire. Damage from ground fire, yes. Even the occasional loss of a battle dragon. But not this sudden, almost casual blotting away.

It wasn't possible—shouldn't have happened, his mind insisted. It was—

All thought of his wingman chopped off abruptly as Skyfire made a sound Berhala had never heard out of the dragon before. It was a plaintive, mournful, moaning sound, and the rhythm of the beast's wings seemed to falter suddenly as another blinking icon appeared on Berhala's visor. The image of a blood-red sword flashed before him, and his hands moved instantly, instinctively, in the control grooves.

Skyfire moaned again, but he answered to the familiar touch, banking with a suddenly frightening clumsiness he'd never before displayed. Berhala closed his eyes for a moment, lips moving in a silent prayer for his mount. Then he opened his eyes once more, looking ahead, and brought the wounded dragon in as quickly as he could.

Commander of One Hundred Horban Geyrsof watched Skyfire hit the swamp like a skipping stone in a long, ragged line of foam and mud. He stared downward, literally holding his breath, then exhaled in ragged relief as Skyfire struggled doggedly towards the nearest islet. At least the beast was still mobile. That was a good sign; dragons tended to recover—eventually—from anything that didn't kill them outright.

Which didn't change the fact that he'd just lost a quarter of his reds, the 3012th's commanding officer reflected grimly. He'd been one dragon understrength to begin with, with only three yellows—his own Graycloud, Commander of Twenty-Five Sherlahk Mankahr's Skykill, and Commander of Fifty Nairdag Yorhan's Windslasher—to make up what should have been his third four-dragon flight. Now he was down to a total strength of only nine, and the effectiveness of the enemy's fire was dismaying, to say the very least. Especially given the battle dragons' low numbers and the time required to replace one. It would never do to say so where any of the Union's ground troops could hear him, but each of his precious battle dragons was probably as valuable at least a couple of battalions of infantry, and now they'd lost one on only their second pass at the enemy.

He glared at the looming portal. There was plenty of smoke, and not a little fire, visible through it, yet it was painfully obvious that the reds' fireballs had proved singularly ineffective against the half-buried fortifications the Sharonians had erected.

He used Graycloud's vision to sweep the enemy's positions as well as he could through all of the smoke, and his mouth tightened. Some, at least, of the Sharonians had abandoned their bunkers, obviously in order to bring their weapons to bear on Twenty-Five Berhala's flight. He didn't know how many of them were still waiting under cover, and that didn't matter at the moment. What mattered was that the enemy who could hurt his dragons had to come out into the open to do it.

He thought about sending the two surviving reds of Berhala's flight back in. They'd have easier targets this time around, and the ground fire wouldn't take them by surprise a second time. But the Sharonians were more dispersed than he'd expected. He didn't know if they'd spread out on purpose, and it didn't matter. The way they'd opened their formation would make the reds' fireballs less effective. The remaining reds could still get the job done, especially if he concentrated all of them into one attack force—Geyrsof never doubted that—but it would take more passes, give the other side more opportunities to cost him dragons.

His eyes narrowed as he considered his options, and then he nodded in decision.

A yellow's breath weapon was the shortest ranged of all, but it also had the widest area of effectiveness. It would take at least four passes by all of his his remaining reds to clear the exposed Sharonian personnel he could see from here, and that didn't even consider any of the enemy who remained under cover inside their infernally tough fortifications. But his three yellows could cover the entire Sharonian position in only two passes, and the very fact that their weapon was so short ranged meant that they had been provided with the thickest, toughest ventral scales of any of the dragon breeds. It left them heavier, slower—more ponderous and less nimble—then any of the others, but it also made them much, much tougher targets. Geyrsof doubted that even a yellow could survive whatever it was which had literally blown Cloudtiger out of the sky, but the chances were good that Graycloud's natural armor could defeat whatever had wounded Skyfire.

He used his helmet spellware to fire the white flare which called off the surviving members of Twenty-Five Berhala's flight. Then he fired the yellow flare which announced the attack by his own flight.

For a few minutes, chan Tesh allowed himself to hope that the shock of having one of their dragons shot right out of the air would cause the Arcanans to reconsider their aerial attacks.

He spent those minutes dashing across to join the men who'd left their bunkers. He wanted to order them back into the fortifications' protection, but he dared not. Unless they could keep the dragons off their backs somehow, even the relatively ineffectual fireball attacks would be enough to keep his bunkers pinned down while the rest of the Arcanan forces maneuvered around them.

So instead of sending them back into a position of temporary safety, he spent his time rearranging them. Spreading them out even further to deny the enemy massed targets and allocating defensive sectors.

He wished fervently that he had more of the Faraikas. Unfortunately, he'd never had more than a single squad of the heavy-caliber IIs. That was only five weapons when it was at full strength, and he'd been one short to begin with. So he'd deployed two of them to cover each aspect of the portal.

One of the ones covering the northern aspect had been too close to the artillery pits. Its crew had died along with chan Talmarha and his gun crews, and he didn't know whether either of the other section's weapons remained intact. In fact, he didn't know anything about how the defense of the portal's other aspect was going, but he was afraid he could guess.

Whatever was happening over there, however, he had to worry about his own position, and his jaw tightened as someone shouted a warning. He turned back towards the portal, and his eyes were cold and bleak as he saw three more black dots plunging down out of the heavens.

Hundred Geyrsof led the attack personally.

By The Book, he should have let one of his two wingmen take the lead, but he was more experienced than either Mankahr or Yorhan, and the responsibility was his, anyway.

He pressed himself even closer to Graycloud's neck, hands gentle in the control grooves, fingertips moving with a slow, reassuring rhythm. He sensed Graycloud's determination, felt the dragon's own anger at what had happened to Cloudtiger and Skyfire. Dragons were far smarter than most non-pilots gave them credit for, and Geyrsof never doubted that Graycloud understood, at least in general terms, what had happened . . . and who was responsible for it.

And, like his pilot, the yellow wanted vengeance.

Geyrsof laid his strobing crosshair directly atop the tight little cluster of men whose weapon had downed Cloudtiger.

They're going to be shooting at me anyhow, he reflected. I might as well take my best shot at them, too.

Graycloud was still building speed. Geyrsof had never taken the big yellow to such a velocity, and he wondered if even Graycloud's mighty pinions were equal to the strain he was imposing upon them. But the dragon never complained, never resisted. He only put his head down and flew straight at the enemies who had killed his strike mate.

Chan Tesh was at the far end of his improvised line from the machine-gun crew as the fresh attack came streaking down upon them.

"Steady, boys!" he called almost gently. "Steady!"

The three huge beasts spread out slightly, coming in on a somewhat broader frontage than the original attackers, and he watched the Faraika tracking the leader. The shot wasn't going to be quite as easy this time. These dragons were coming in more obliquely, not attacking directly head-on, which was going to make deflection trickier.

Rifles began to crackle once more, but the dragons held their course. Then the gunner began to turn the Faraika's crank. The twin barrels spewed flame and tracers, and the gunner traversed, swinging his fire to intersect the oncoming dragon. The stream of heavy, deadly bullets streaked upward . . . and then one of the Marines helping to steady the tripod slipped.

It was a small enough thing . . . or would have been, under other conditions. And it was scarcely the Marine's fault. Standing up to the brutal recoil of that heavy caliber weapon was no picnic, and his boots slid in the soft soil of the dirt pile. His companions tried to compensate, but they couldn't stop the cascade effect, and the machine-gun toppled over on its side.

The gunner was forced to cease fire while his assistants flung themselves on the weapon, wrestling it back into position, but they weren't quite fast enough.

Hundred Geyrsof's belly muscles had tightened convulsively as the fiery stream of . . . whatever it was coming up from the ground reached for Graycloud. He saw it moving to intersect their course, knew that the heavily armored yellow would never be able to dodge it.

And then, suddenly, it simply disappeared.

His dragon's vision showed him the Sharonians struggling to hoist their heavy, awkward weapon back into firing position, and his lips skinned back from his teeth.

Not this time, you bastards, he thought harshly.

The range spun steadily downward. He felt Graycloud quivering as other projectiles hammered into his belly armor from below, but there was no indication that any of them were getting through his thick scales. Skykill and Windslasher held formation on Graycloud's flanks as if they'd been tied together by a single rope, and he felt a burning pride in their steadiness.

And then the crosshair stopped strobing.

"Larkima!" he barked, and the ancient Mythalan word for "strangle" released Graycloud's breath weapon.

Something came streaking downward from the dragons.

Chan Tesh's eyes narrowed as they tracked it. It was even slower than the first dragons' fireballs had been, but it was also bigger. And . . . different. The fireballs had been like tiny, incandescent seeds when they were first launched, growing steadily until they were perhaps twice the size of a man's head. That was as big as they'd gotten until they hit the ground and detonated.

But these "seeds" were bigger from the outset, without the fiery glare of the fireballs. They were darker, dingier, and they grew rapidly. They were three times the size of the fireballs, at least, by the time they reached the ground, and they didn't explode the way the fireballs had. Instead, they splashed. There was no concussion, no savage flare of heat. It was almost like watching a bucket of water hitting, spreading out, washing over everyone in its vicinity as it spread wider and wider like some green-yellow fog.

For a heartbeat or two, that was all that happened. Then the first of chan Tesh's men staggered. He went to his knees, clutching at his throat with both hands. One of his companions turned towards him, as if to offer assistance, then went down beside him, writhing, choking.

Balkar chan Tesh's eyes widened with a horror even the fireballs hadn't awakened. Perhaps that was because for all their unnatural origin, the fireballs weren't all that different from the artillery with which he was familiar. This, though—he'd never seen, or imagined, anything like this.

More and more of his men went down. Everyone trapped in the area covered by those obscene breath weapons collapsed, strangling, vomiting, coughing up blood from rupturing lungs while they writhed convulsively, twisting in agony.

The dragons which had spawned that horror streaked overhead, climbing once again, and despair closed upon Balkar chan Tesh's heart like a vise of frozen iron.

That single pass had covered over two-thirds of his exposed personnel, and at least a quarter of the bunkers. Even as he watched, strangling, dying men clawed their way out of two of the bunkers, only to collapse in their own vomit as they reached the "open air" outside their position.

No one—not even Imperial Ternathian Marines—could be expected to face something like that. Not when it came at them cold, with absolutely no warning. He looked at the handful of men—there were only five of them—clustered around him, upwind from the killing clouds of vapor. There was still time, he thought. Still time to run, to put distance between himself and the dying, spasming men behind him before the dragons came back. He saw the same thought, the same recognition, in the eyes around him.

And, like Balkar chan Tesh, not one of them ran.

"All right, boys," he said quietly, looking past them, tracking the dragons with his eyes as they swept back up into the heavens. "They'll be back in a few minutes. It doesn't look like rifle bullets bothered the bastards very much, either."

He turned his head, taking his eyes off the dragons, and looked at the men around him.

"Whatever those people are doing, and however they're doing it, they had to come in close before they fired or whatever," he said.

"Yes, Sir," one of the others agreed. "And they opened their mouths, too," he added.

"Good point." Chan Tesh patted him on the shoulder, then gestured at their Model 10s.

"You've all got grenade launchers," he said.

Hundred Geyrsof studied the ground below through Graycloud's eyes as Skykill and Windslasher formed up on them once more.

The initial strike had succeeded even more completely than he'd hoped. The vast majority of the enemy was already down, dead or dying, and aside from minor damage to Graycloud's and Windslasher's wing membranes, all three of his yellows were unwounded.

He should have felt nothing but satisfaction. He knew that—and he did feel satisfied. But that wasn't all he felt. Graycloud's vision brought it all too close, made it all too clear. He saw the men he'd just killed, even though they weren't all dead yet. He saw them twisting, convulsing in agony, jerking like landed fish drowning in poisonous oxygen, and for the first time, he truly understood why some people had fought for so long to have the yellows banned. It was ugly . . . unclean.

Oh, fuck "ugly!" he told himself fiercely. Dead is dead, Horban. There aren't any good ways to die, and better it should be them than us!

He knew that was all true . . . and it didn't make him feel any better.

However he might feel, it didn't change his responsibilities, though, and he watched the other two yellows settling into formation once again behind and to either side of Graycloud. He waited until they were both in place. Then his hands moved in the control grooves, and Graycloud slanted downward once more.

"Here they come," chan Tesh said quietly.

One of the Marines had found the company-captain a Model 10 whose owner would never need it again. Like the others, he'd mounted the grenade launcher and loaded the special blank ammunition that fired it. Now the six of them stood waiting, watching their executioners sweep towards them.

There were other Sharonians still standing, somewhere beyond the swirling haze of green-yellow vapor. Chan Tesh heard their rifles beginning to crack, and his heart swelled as he realized his men were still there, still fighting back, despite everything.

He took his own eyes from the oncoming dragons for just a moment, let them sweep across the Marines around him.

"Gentlemen," he said, "it's been an honor. Thank you."

No one replied. There was no need.

Chan Tesh looked back at the oncoming dragons. Only one of them—the one on the extreme left of the Arcanan formation—was going to come into the grenade launchers' range, he realized. Well, at least that guaranteed concentration of fire.

Onward, closer and closer. They weren't coming in as quickly this time, a detached corner of his brain observed. Was that overconfidence? Or were they just slowing down to improve their accuracy? Or was it simply that they'd started from a lower altitude, hadn't had the opportunity to build the same velocity?

It didn't matter.

Closer, and closer still.

Properly speaking, rifle grenades weren't launched from a normal firing position. Given their recoil, The Book called for them to be fired only with the rifle's butt firmly grounded. Chan Tesh knew that, but he didn't really care. Not this time.

He nestled the brass buttplate into his shoulder, tracking the incoming dragon steadily, waiting.

One of the Marines fired. The grenade missed, and the dragons swept closer. Another Marine fired and missed.

Chan Tesh and the other three waited. Waited.

"Larkima!" Hundred Geyrsof barked.

The dragon belched its dingy death seed.

All three of chan Tesh's remaining Marines launched their grenades. One of them missed completely. Of the other two, one struck a wing membrane and punched clear through without ever exploding. The third slammed into the dragon's left foreleg and exploded, blowing a huge, gaping wound into the limb.

But Balkar chan Tesh waited just a moment longer. Waited even as he watched the growing breath weapon streaking towards him. Waited for the dragon to come just that little bit closer. And then, as it opened its mouth in a bellow of pain, he launched his own grenade.

Chapter Five

Rithmar Skirvon sat slumped in his chair while Fifty Narshu's splattered brains and blood dried into a caked residue on the back of his neck and the back and shoulders of his elegantly tailored civilian coat. There were probably at least a few specks of Uthik Dastiri's brains mixed in among the rest of it, and his face seemed to have crumpled in on itself. There was no sign of the confident, masterful diplomat now, Dorzon chan Baskay thought grimly, and felt a fresh ripple of anger roiling about in his belly like slow magma as he glared at the Arcanan.

Skirvon had, indeed, worked hard to convince chan Baskay to let him live. In fact, he'd spilled his guts, more than half-babbling in his urgency to tell chan Baskay anything—anything at all—which might placate the Ternathian's frozen rage.

Which meant chan Baskay knew just how utterly and totally screwed he and all of Hulmok Arthag's surviving troopers actually were.

"We're ready," a voice said behind chan Baskay, and the platoon-captain turned to find Arthag standing behind him. The Arpathian stood beside his magnificent Shikowr-Daykassian-cross Palomino stallion with his Model 10 slung over his shoulder, and the rest of their surviving men stood saddled and ready to ride behind him. Every bit of movable, useful equipment had been loaded onto pack horses at truly Arpathian nomad speed. Two of them had packed up chan Baskay's and chan Rothag's gear and saddled their horses, as well . . . and the bodies of every dead Sharonian were lashed across their saddles.

"Is that really necessary?" chan Baskay asked very quietly, nodding at the dead men.

"As a matter of fact, I think it is," Arthag replied. Chan Baskay couldn't quite hide his surprise. Arpathians, as a rule, weren't particularly sentimental about the bodies of the dead. As far as they were concerned, once the soul had fled, the body in which that soul had once resided had no intrinsic importance, which made Arthag's apparent concern for these bodies unusual, to say the least.

"We don't have time to bury them," Arthag explained, responding to chan Baskay's perplexed expression, "and one thing all of us canny Arpathian nomadic warriors get taught at a very early age is that it's important to keep an enemy guessing about your losses. Let the bastards find their men's bodies lying around here without a single one of ours. You don't think that's going to make them more than a little anxious about just what happened here?" He shrugged. "The way I see it, anything that can convince them to be even a little hesitant about chasing after us is well worth the effort."

Chan Baskay gazed at him for a moment, then nodded.

"Good enough for me," he said. "Of course, there's still the little problem of exactly where we're going to go while they hesitate about chasing us, isn't there?"

"I take it there's no point trying to make it back to Company-Captain Halifu?"

"You take it correctly," chan Baskay said grimly. "I'm sure Master Skirvon still has quite a bit to tell us, but I think I've got the essentials for our immediate problem. Which includes the fact that these bastards have dragons, Hulmok."

"Dragons?" One of Arthag's eyebrows rose perhaps a sixteenth of an inch, and chan Baskay snorted.

"Yes. According to Skirvon, they come in two varieties—one that's basically for transporting cargo, and the other that breathes fire and lightning. And the buggers can fly at up to a couple of hundred miles an hour."

"Marvelous."

"Wait, it gets better. The transport version?" Chan Baskay paused, and Arthag nodded. "They can transport entire companies of cavalry by air, and they've been shipping in men, weapons, horses, and still more dragons the entire time they've been talking to us here. They've got what sounds like at least the equivalent of a light division or heavy brigade, and they're probably rolling right over Company-Captain chan Tesh while we're talking."

"I see."

Arthag cocked his head, his expression thoughtful, and chan Baskay felt an incredible temptation to punch him right on the nose. At this particular moment, the Arpathian's total imperturbability was almost as maddening as it was reassuring.

But only almost.

"They've got something Skirvon calls 'gryphons,' too," chan Baskay said, instead. "He says they're about the size of a good-sized pony but with wings, beaks, and great big claws, and they're even faster—and more maneuverable—than these dragons of theirs. They aren't as smart, though."

"Can they get at us through the tree cover?"

"That seems to be about the only good news I've gotten out of the bastard," chan Baskay said, shaking his head. He waved one hand at the overhead canopy of leaves and towering branches. "They can't get down through that, and Skirvon swears the dragons can't see through it very well, either."

"And he's telling the truth?"

"That's what Trekar's Talent says. Of course, the son-of-a-bitch is scared to death. Trekar says that sometimes someone who's piss-himself terrified convinces himself that whatever the other guy wants to hear is the truth, and his Talent can't tell the difference in a case like that."

"Um." Arthag scratched the tip of his nose thoughtfully. "I'm inclined to believe him on this one," he said after a moment. "At least as far as their being able to get at us directly." He smiled crookedly. "You know, this is the first time I've ever been grateful for the way these godsdamned trees get in the way!"

"Maybe. On the other hand, it's not going to be enough to get us back to New Uromath. According to Skirvon, their horses are a hell of a lot better than ours, too."

For the first time, Arthag bridled. He straightened, one hand reaching up to Bright Wind's ears, and his eyes narrowed.

"He says they've used more of this damned magic of theirs to 'augment' their horses," chan Baskay said. "They're faster than ours, according to him, and they've got a lot more endurance, and if they can breed dragons, I don't see any reason why they couldn't do that, as well."

Arthag nodded unwillingly, and chan Baskay shrugged.

"Assuming he's right about that, they'd almost certainly run us to ground long before we could get back to New Uromath. Besides, it turns out they've scouted the New Uromath portal, too. Apparently one of their people made it all the way to Halifu's fort and back again before we took out their base camp. They've known exactly where it is all along, and they're planning to attack it as soon as they've secured control of the swamp portal."

"I figured they must have something like that in mind," Arthag said. "I hadn't considered the possibility of these 'dragons' of theirs, of course. But none of this—" he waved one hand at the body-littered clearing "—would have made any sense at all if they hadn't planned on going all the way. I had expected to be able to outrun them back to Fort Shaylar, though."

"Agreed."

Chan Baskay turned to survey the area himself. The tangle of fallen trees where the Chalgyn Consortium survey crew had been massacred had seen far more than its fair share of bloodshed in the last couple of months, he reflected grimly.

Arthag's people had been busy doing more than just packing while he and Trekar chan Rothag interrogated Skirvon. The three surviving Arcanan cavalrymen sat on a fallen tree trunk, hands bound behind them and shoulders slumped. From their expressions, as well as their body language, chan Baskay was strongly tempted to believe Skirvon was right—those men hadn't had a clue what was going to happen here today. Nothing was likely to make chan Baskay feel particularly kindly towards Arcanans at the moment, but despite himself, he felt an unwilling sense of sympathy for those prisoners.

He felt none whatsoever for Rithmar Skirvon, however.

His mouth tightened at the thought as his eyes traversed the line of

Sharonian bodies tied across their horses. There were sixteen of them, in all, and the twenty-three Arcanan bodies scattered about under the trees were no comfort at all as he considered their losses.

"We'll have to jackrabbit," he said after a moment, and Arthag nodded, then cocked his head slightly.

"Which portal?" he asked.

"That's the question, isn't it?" Chan Baskay's eyes slitted as he thought hard, considering their meager menu of options.

"I think we'd better go for the New Farnal connection," he said finally. Arthag grimaced slightly—the equivalent of a shouted protest, coming from an Arpathian—and chan Baskay shrugged.

"I don't like it a lot better than you do," he said, "and I know the horses are going to hate it. But if they've got these dragons, and these 'gryphon' things, we're going to need all the terrain advantage we can get. And if they don't like flying through tree cover like this—" he waved at the leaves overhead again "—then they're going to hate triple-canopy jungle."

"There is that," Arthag agreed. "It's a little further to go, though. If they've really got better horses, they could probably overtake us."

"They'll probably figure we broke back for New Uromath," chan Baskay countered. "They know that's the only way home to Sharona, and, according to Skirvon, that's the only other portal they've actually located and scouted. Besides, they've been working extra hard to keep us from finding out about their dragons. If they think they've succeeded—and they did, after all—then they'll expect us to try to outrun them back to Company-Captain Halifu."

"But if they sweep through here on horseback, they're going to be able to tell which way we actually went."

It could have been a protest, but Arthag's tone was thoughtful, not argumentative.

"I know. But I still think it's our best option."

"So do I." Arthag nodded. "And I think I have an idea about how to . . . delay the pursuit just a bit, too."

"On your feet, you fucking son-of-a-bitch!" Sword Keraik Nourm barked.

The wounded Sharonian soldier just looked up at him. The Sharonian's expression was a mix of hatred, shock, disbelief, and pain as he crouched on his knees, cradling a savagely burned left arm against his chest.

"On your feet, godsdamn you!" Nourm snarled, and buried the reinforced toe of his combat boot in the Sharonian's ribs with a brutal kick.

The Sharonian went down, crying out in pain as his burned arm hit the ground, and Nourm raised his heavy arbalest to butt-stroke the wounded man's head.

"Belay that, Sword Nourm!"

The four-word command cracked like a whip, and Nourm's arbalest froze in midair. His head whipped around, and his face tightened as he saw the officer with the two silver collar pips of a commander of fifty striding angrily towards him.

"What the hells d'you think you're doing, Nourm?" the fifty demanded harshly.

"Securing the prisoners, Sir," Nourm replied half-sullenly.

"The hells you say!" the fifty snapped. "That man is severely wounded, Sword! Godsdamn it, you're the platoon sword—what kind of message do you think this is sending to the rest of the men?!"

Nourm opened his mouth, then shut it with an almost audible click. His face flushed darkly, more with anger than with shame, and he set his jaw stiffly.

Commander of Fifty Jaralt Sarma put his hands on his hips and glared at his platoon's senior noncom. What made Sarma's seething fury even worse was that Nourm was normally one of the best platoon swords Sarma had ever seen.

The fifty leaned closer, lowering his voice, and let his tone soften just a bit.

"I know you're pissed off with these people, Keraik, but that's no justification for violating the Accords. You know that's a court-martial offense."

"The Accords, Sir?" Nourm looked at him as if he couldn't quite believe what he'd heard.

"Yes, the Accords," Sarma said. "Do I need to remind you that they apply to everyone?"

The Kerellian Accords, drafted centuries ago by Commander of Armies Housip Kerellia, had set forth the Andaran military's official rules of war, including the standards for proper treatment of POWs. The Accords had been adopted by the Union Army following the Union's formation two hundred years ago, and officially incorporated into the Articles of War.

"Sir, these bastards aren't even from our universe!" Nourm protested.

"I don't recall anywhere in the Accords that specifies where the prisoners have to come from, Sword."

"But, Sir—"

"Don't make me tell you again, Sword Nourm," Sarma said very quietly, and the burly noncom closed his mouth again.

It was obvious he still couldn't quite believe what his fifty had just said, and Sarma shook his head.

"I understand you're mad as hells, Sword," he said in a more normal voice. "But that's no excuse for turning ourselves into something we'll be ashamed of later."

"Sir, I understand what you're saying, I guess," Nourm said after a moment. "I just don't see why we should waste the Accords on miserable fuckers like these."

"The Accords aren't as much for them as they are for us, Keraik. It doesn't matter what they do. What matters is how we go about being who we are."

"Sir, I just don't see it. These miserable bastards deserve anything they get. They should feel grateful we don't just shoot them in the back of the head!"

Sarma's lips thinned angrily, but that anger wasn't aimed at Nourm this time. Or, at least, most of it wasn't.

Neshok, you bastard, the fifty thought venomously. You and your fucking "briefings!"

"I'll remind you—once—Sword," the platoon commander said after a moment, "that the briefers specifically said those reports couldn't be confirmed."

Nourm's jaw set again, harder even than before. His shoulders hunched like a man preparing to dig in against a monsoon, and Sarma inhaled sharply. He started to launch into the sword again, then made himself stop. This wasn't the time or the place for him to turn his command relationships into a debating society.

"Listen to me," he said instead, his voice flat. "At this moment, Sword Nourm, I don't really care what you feel our think about these people. You will observe the letter of the Accords in your treatment of them, and you will see to it that every member of this platoon does the same. And don't think for one moment that I won't know whether or not you do. The recon crystals are activated and recording, and they'll stay that way. So you think about that, Sword. You think real hard before you abuse another prisoner, wherever the fuck he came from, while you're under my command. Do you read me on this, Sword Nourm?"

"Yes, Sir," Nourm grated.

"I don't believe I heard you, Sword."

"Yes, Sir!"

"That's better. Now, I believe this man needs medical attention."

"Yes, Sir."

Nourm's anger was obvious, but it was equally clear to Sarma that the sword was at least trying to control it, so he let it pass. Which didn't prevent him from keeping an eagle eye on the noncom as Nourm helped the wounded Sharonian back to his feet. He wasn't especially gentle about it, but he wasn't brutal, either, and for the moment, Sarma was willing to settle for what he could get.

He watched the sword half-dragging the prisoner towards the Healers and sighed.

Sarma knew his own attitude towards the Sharonians was atypical. Which was . . . unfortunate, since it was supposed to be the entire expeditionary force's attitude. Two Thousand Harshu's general orders had made it abundantly clear that the observation of the Accords was the official policy of the Union of Arcana in the present conflict. Unfortunately, unless Sarma was very much mistaken, it wasn't going to matter a great deal what general orders said.

It was Acting Commander of Five Hundred Neshok's fault, he thought bitterly. Sarma's platoon had been in the first wave of reinforcements to reach Fort Rycharn. That meant he'd had the opportunity to talk directly to Five Hundred Klian's men before the rest of Harshu's troopers and dragons had assembled. Perhaps more to the point, one of his uncles had served with Five Hundred Klian when they were both mere squires, and the five hundred had invited his old friend's nephew to join his own officers for dinner one night.

Which meant he'd heard Five Hundred Klian's version of what had happened when the Sharonians punched out the Andaran Scouts at this very portal.

Somehow, the five hundred's version was quite different from the official briefings Five Hundred Neshok and his staff had delivered. According to Five Hundred Klian, who'd spoken directly to the only Arcanan eyewitnesses, Magister Halathyn vos Dulainah had been killed accidentally by an Arcanan infantry-dragon after he'd been pulled out of his tent by a Sharonian cavalryman. But according to Neshok's briefers, although they'd been scrupulously careful to warn everyone they were still seeking confirmation, Magister Halathyn had been dragged out of the tent and shot dead by the Sharonians. And, those same briefers had said gravely, there were additional unconfirmed reports that the Sharonians had systematically executed all of the Scouts' wounded, as well, rather than providing medical care.

Nothing could have been better calculated to fill Arcanan soldiers with fury. Magister Halathyn had been quite possibly the most beloved single man in all the Arcanan-explored multiverse—outside his own native Mythal, at least—and the idea that he'd been murdered out of hand by the Sharonians had fanned the rage of men like Sword Nourm to an incandescent pitch. Adding the possibility that the Sharonians had murdered their own prisoners only made it worse . . . assuming that anything could have.

Sarma shook his head. He'd never seen troops in such an ugly mood. They were out for blood vengeance on the "Sharonian butchers," and the fifty felt a cold, icy shudder of fear when he considered where that might lead everyone.

But it's not too late, he told himself. Surely, it's not too late. Two Thousand Harshu can still turn this around, if he'll just make Neshok stick to the facts.

Only . . . the two thousand hadn't done that yet. Whether he agreed with what Neshok was doing or not was almost beside the point. Even the officers who might have questioned Neshok's briefings, or pointed out to their men that even the Intelligence briefers had stressed that the reports were unconfirmed, were going to take their lead from Harshu's apparent attitude. And until Harshu specifically addressed the issue, they were going to ignore his general orders' official position.

And when they do, what happens to the Union Army? Sarma asked himself almost despairingly. What happens when we wake up and realize what we've done? And what happens if the way we treat our prisoners leads them to really start shooting our people out of hand when they're captured?

Jaralt Sarma didn't know the answers to those questions . . . but he was afraid that was going to change.

Commander of One Thousand Klayrman Toralk was not a happy man.

In one sense, the operation had gone exactly as planned. They'd obviously taken the portal defenders completely by surprise, which meant Narshu must have succeeded in neutralizing the Voice at Fallen Timbers. And the force here at the portal had been almost totally eliminated. At the moment, they had exactly twelve prisoners, half of them wounded, and it didn't look as if there were going to be very many more.

But the attack had cost him. Graholis, but it had cost him! Bad enough to have had two of his reds killed outright, but he had three more which had suffered significant injuries. The odds were probably about even that they'd still lose Berhala's Skyfire, even with the Healers, and one of the other wounded reds was hurt almost as badly. That was a much higher loss rate than he'd anticipated, and it suggested that these Sharonians' "rifles" were going to be dangerously effective against his ground attack dragons.

Yet as bad as that was, there was worse. He had no idea what the Sharonians called the things they'd screwed onto the ends of their rifles, but one of them had gone straight into Nairdag Yorhan's Windslasher's open mouth. The explosion had killed the yellow, and Yorhan's neck had snapped like a twig when his dragon went in at two hundred miles an hour.

It was obvious to Toralk that the yellows had been his most effective weapon, and at least they'd demonstrated a relative immunity to rifle fire. Graycloud and Skykill both had wing damage, but punctured membranes were something the dragon-healers could repair quickly. Both of them had dozens of scarred and gouged belly scales, as well, but none of the fire they'd taken there had managed to penetrate, and he expected the healers to have both yellows back in the air within another half-hour, maximum.

Which made the fact that he'd lost a third of them even more painful. If taking a single portal had cost this much, then—

The sound of a sudden explosion snapped his head up, and his mouth tightened as he heard the fresh screams.

That bastard Neshok, the thousand thought viciously. Why the hells didn't he warn us about this crap, if he's so frgging good?

Even as the thought flashed through his brain, he knew it wasn't really fair. The truth was that most of the information Neshok had provided had proven amazingly accurate, but Toralk wasn't really in a mood to be fair to the arrogant Intelligence officer. Not when he'd already lost so many battle dragons. And not when one of the things Neshok hadn't warned him about had already cost Arcana at least twenty men.

He didn't know what the Sharonians called the devilish devices they'd buried around their defensive positions. He didn't even know—yet—how they worked, for that matter. But their effectiveness had already been made amply clear, and he expected them to have a significantly dampening effect on the ground troops' confidence.

Maybe not, he thought. I may be being overly pessimistic. It's not that much different from a combat trap spell, after all.

He watched the corpsmen making their quick yet cautious way towards the newest casualties and knew that there was, indeed, at least one very significant difference. The devices killing his men as they exploded were completely undetectable by any of the Army's trap-sweeping spells. They simply didn't register, since they didn't rely on any arcane technology at all, and that was the reason for the hesitancy he could already see in the gas-masked troops advancing cautiously through the Sharonian positions.

"Sir," one of his staffers said quietly. Toralk glanced at him, and the young man twitched one hand unobtrusively back over the swamp. Toralk followed the gesture with his eyes, and his lips tightened slightly as he saw Two Thousand Harshu's command dragon slicing down towards a landing.

He nodded his thanks to the young fifty and turned to walk back towards the safe zone on the swamp side of the portal where they were sure there were none of the whatever-the-hells-were-blowing-people-up to greet his superior officer.

The dragon landed in a spray of water and muck, and Harshu vaulted down from its back. He landed with a substantial splash, but he seemed completely unaware of it as he started for the shore, grinning fiercely around the stem of the pipe clenched between his teeth.

Somehow, Toralk wasn't surprised. The two thousand had always struck him as someone who was enamored of flamboyance for flamboyance's own sake. Someone who was constantly aware that he was "on stage" and played shamelessly to his audience. Over the past few weeks, though, Toralk had come to the conclusion that he'd been wronging Harshu, at least a little. The two thousand was constantly on stage, and constantly aware of it, but it was a sort of military theater which was part and parcel of his command style. And, somewhat to Toralk's surprise, it actually worked. Even with relatively senior officers—like one Thousand Klayrman Toralk, who damned well ought to know better.

Commander of One Thousand Tayrgal Carthos followed the two thousand down into the mud. The heavily-built, redhaired Carthos was Harshu's senior infantry commander, Toralk's counterpart amongst the expeditionary force's ground pounders. He was also older than either Harshu or Toralk, with streaks of startling white painting themselves into his thick, spade-shaped beard to bracket the corners of his mouth, and his expression seemed to hover on the precipice of a perpetual frown. Now he and Harshu waded through the thigh-deep swamp to the solid hillock upon which the portal stood, then stepped through onto the firmer ground on the other side.

"Sir!" Toralk saluted briskly, and Harshu touched his own fist to his left shoulder in response.

"Before you say anything, Klayrman," the two thousand said around his pipe, "you and your people did well—very well. I know we've lost more dragons than we'd anticipated. Well," he grimaced, "that's not totally unexpected, is it? We knew going in that the first battle would be a learning experience."

"Yes, Sir. But I still—"

"Don't kick yourself over it." Harshu's voice was just a bit harsher, and he shook his head. "I said you did well, and you did. I was watching over the scrying spell. I know exactly what happened, and I know Hundred Geyrsof made the right call. I don't know just what they used to knock that one yellow down, but whatever it was, it was short ranged. And whatever else happened, we've got the portal."

"Yes, Sir," Toralk acknowledged, then showed his own teeth in what very few people would have mistaken for a smile. "On the other hand, these people seem to have left us a few rather nasty little surprises." He shook his head. "I know I'm just an Air Force puke, but it looks to me like these trap-spell equivalents, or whatever they are, are going to be a major pain in the arse."

"At least until we get a handle on finding them, at any rate," Harshu agreed, gazing past Toralk to where his infantry pointmen continued to pick their way gingerly and cautiously forward.

"I don't suppose we can blame the men for being a little hesitant," Carthos put in,"even if it is putting us behind schedule."

Toralk nodded. The cavalry was already supposed to have been moving ahead, sweeping towards Fallen Timbers to relieve Narshu. The infernal devices the Sharonians had left behind, however, had put a significant kink into their timetable.

"I agree," he said. Under the Union of Arcana's joint forces doctrine, he and Carthos were currently in a sort of gray zone. Air-mobile operations technically came under Air Force control, but only until the ground forces were landed. At that point, control reverted to the senior Army officer present. Technically, that was Two Thousand Harshu as the expeditionary force's commanding officer, but Carthos was the designated tactical officer in command for the ground component. Which meant that Toralk was in a rather delicate position if he said anything that sounded like Air Force criticism of Army personnel.

"Part of it may be that we've . . . over impressed our junior officers with the need to conserve manpower," he observed.

"Maybe," Harshu said. "But it's a hells of a lot more likely that the fact that they can't detect the bloody things is giving them the willies!"

The two thousand stood for a moment, clearly thinking hard, then shrugged.

"Narshu obviously pulled off his primary mission," he said. "If he hadn't, these people would have been a lot readier for us. So, he most likely has control at Fallen Timbers. We still need to get someone up there to link up with him and confirm that he and Master Skirvon have the situation in hand, but it's more critical that we take the Class Eight and take out their portal fort. And any 'Voices' they have stationed there."

"Yes, Sir."

"All right, then." The two thousand turned to Carthos. "We'll leave one of your light cav companies and your engineer battalion here. As soon as the engineers manage to clear enough of these booby traps of theirs, we'll put the cavalry through and send it up the trail to Fallen Timbers. In the meantime," he glanced back at Toralk, "we'll push ahead to the Class Eight with the dragons and the rest of the air-mobile forces. We can't be positive they didn't have patrols or fatigue parties out somewhere, but if we close the Class Eight behind them, they aren't going anywhere, anyway."

"Yes, Sir," Toralk said, and Carthos nodded.

"Understood, Two Thousand," he said.

There wasn't much else he could have said, under the circumstances, but Toralk listened carefully to how he said. If this entire operation was going to succeed, it would be solely because of the mobility and reach his dragons afforded. Which meant it wouldn't happen if interservice rivalry got in the way. He wouldn't say that Carthos sounded happy about the reminder that the Air Force had to be the senior service for this particular mission, but he didn't detect any overt resentment in the other thousand's tone or expression.

"Then let's get your dragons back in the air as soon as you can, Thousand," Harshu said, and slapped Toralk on the shoulder. "And remember this, Klayrman. The lessons you've learned here this morning may have been painful, but they still give you the advantage, because whoever's in command of that portal fort hasn't had any lessons at all yet. Now go change that."

Chapter Six

"Excuse me, Sir."

Company-Captain Grafin Halifu, commanding officer of the portal fort which had been named in memory of the murdered Voice Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr, looked up from the paperwork on his desk with an undeniable expression of relief as Junior-Armsman Farzak Partha rapped on the frame of his office door. Halifu had never been one of those officers who was particularly good with paperwork. He was conscientious about it, but he managed to get through it only by sheer, dogged persistence. In fact, it was the one part of his chosen profession that he genuinely hated. And the situation had gotten significantly worse after those Arcanan lunatics massacred Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl's survey party. There was more of it, for one thing, and Halifu was prepared to swear it was getting increasingly trivial, as well. This morning's chore, for example, included trying to track down three cavalry mounts which appeared to have evaporated into thin air.

Not that the air's particularly thin around here, Halifu thought grumpily as he glanced out his office window. At least nothing was actively falling out of the sky at the moment. In fact, they'd had the better part of thirty-six hours without any ran at all, but from the look of the low, dark clouds, their record wasn't going to get a lot longer.

"What is it, Farzak?" he asked, resolutely turning his back on the charcoal sky.

"Petty-Captain Baulwan would like to see you for a moment if, of course—" Partha had been Halifu's senior clerk for almost a year now, and his eyes gleamed as he allowed them to drop for a moment to the sheafs of paper spread across the company-captain's desk "—you can spare the time away from your paperwork, Sir."

"Away from my paperwork, is it?" Halifu tipped back his chair and grinned at Partha. "I'll 'paperwork' you in a minute, Farzak! In fact," his eyes narrowed and his grin grew broader, "I've got a little chore for you. It seems that three of our horses have mysteriously disappeared. Why don't you go ahead and show Petty-Captain Baulwan in, and then take this report—" he picked up the offending sheets of paper and handed them over "—and trot right over to the stables and find out where these three miserable nags are."

"Of course, Sir," Partha replied, and somehow he managed to simultaneously maintain proper military decorum, radiate an air of martyrdom, and make it perfectly obvious that such a routine task was well within the limits of his capabilities, whatever might have been the case for his superior.

Halifu snorted in amusement and handed over the report, then watched Partha depart. The door opened again, a moment later, and Shansair Baulwan stepped through it.

"Good morning, Sir." The petty-captain came to attention and saluted.

"Good morning, Shansair," Halifu replied, returning the salute just a bit less crisply.

Baulwan had only been on-post for a bit over three weeks, and it was clear to Halifu that the Voice still didn't feel totally comfortable with him. In fact, he suspected Baulwan was taking refuge in military formalities precisely because he wasn't comfortable with Halifu. It was, unfortunately, an attitude to which Halifu had become unhappily accustomed when dealing with officers from Eastern Arpathia. Halifu himself was a Uromathian, and Uromathia—especially, Halifu was forced to admit, under its current Emperor—hadn't proved a particularly friendly neighbor for Arpathia in general.

Halifu didn't like it when he ran into an Arpathian who was prepared to dislike him simply because of where he'd been born. He couldn't really blame them, though, and he had to admit that when he finally got through to one of them and convinced them to separate him from the Uromathian stereotype, he felt an undeniable glow of pleasure.

It's too bad Hulmok is forward-deployed, the company-captain thought. He'd probably be a big help getting Baulwan over the hump.

"What can I do for you this morning, Shansair?" he asked aloud.

"I'm just a little concerned, Sir," the Arpathian Voice said. "I haven't heard anything from Petty-Captain Traygan this morning."

"Well, it's fairly early yet," Halifu pointed out. In fact, it wasn't quite ten a.m.

"Yes, Sir, it is. But it's not that early at Fallen Timbers," Baulwan pointed out in return, and Halifu nodded. In fact, Fallen Timbers was three hours east of Fort Shaylar (and, of course, in a totally different universe), which meant it was almost one in the afternoon there. "They should have broken for lunch by now, Sir," the Voice continued, "and that's when Rokam—I mean, Petty-Captain Traygan—usually sends me a synopsis of the morning's negotiations."

"Maybe they're just running a little later than usual," Halifu suggested.

"That certainly possible, Sir. But when that's happened before, he's at least dropped me a short Voice transmission to let me know about the delay. After all, he knows I'm camped out on the Hell's Gate side of the portal, waiting, whenever I expect to hear from him and he's usually careful about not leaving me hanging around when there's not going to be any Voice traffic to receive after all."

Halifu frowned. Put that way, Traygan's failure to check in with Baulwan did sound a bit peculiar. In fact, his frown deepened, when he put that failure together with the message chan Baskay had transmitted up-chain about Arthag's suspicions, it became more than just peculiar.

He looked back up at Baulwan and saw the same thought in the youthful Voice's eyes. Of course, Baulwan was the one who'd relayed that very message to Halifu. Not only that, but Arthag was also an Arpathian, and one with a steadily growing reputation among his fellow countrymen. Clearly, Baulwan, at least, had taken his and chan Baskay's warning to heart.

"I understand your concern, Shansair," the company-captain said after a moment. "In fact, now that I've had a chance to think about it, you're starting to make me a bit nervous, too." He smiled tightly at the Voice. "On the other hand, we're probably both a little extra jumpy just now."

"I thought about that, Sir." Baulwan seemed to relax a little at Halifu's reaction. "That's why I tried to contact him when he didn't come through on schedule. I didn't get any response, Sir."

"I see."

Halifu grimaced and climbed out of his chair.

"Come with me," he said, and led the way out of his office and across Fort Shaylar's muddy parade ground. He always thought better in the open, and he needed to carefully consider what Baulwan had told him.

"Have you ever had trouble getting through to him before when you initiated the contact?" he asked the Voice as Baulwan walked a respectful half-pace behind him and to his right.

"Honestly, Sir?" The Arpathian shrugged. "I did have trouble making contact a couple of times. Once, he was asleep, and it took me at least half a dozen contact attempts to wake him up. The other time, he was concentrating on something else and it took him a while to Hear me. But both of those were unscheduled contacts. This time around, he should have been expecting to Hear something from me, I'd think, since I hadn't Heard anything from him."

"I see," Halifu repeated.

They reached the foot of the tall, steep, ladder-like stair that zigzagged up to be top of the fort's observation tower, and the company-captain started up it, with Baulwan following. It was a stiff climb, which Halifu made it a point to make at least three times a day on the premise that whatever didn't kill him would help maintain his current belt size, and he was slightly amused, despite his growing concern, as the considerably younger Voice began to puff before they were two-thirds of the way up.

They topped out, and Halifu crossed to the sturdy, split-log railing around the observation platform and leaned forward, resting his elbows and forearms on it as he gazed out through the stupendous portal in front of him.

It'd take a dozen damned forts this size to really cover this portal, he thought, for far from the first time. No one had ever seen a portal this size before, and their wasn't any real point in pretending Fort Shaylar was anything more than an administrative center. Technically, he was supposed to have enough manpower to let him send out patrols to cover the entire face of the portal for which he was responsible. Actually, he wouldn't have had enough men for that even if none of his assigned strength had been sent forward to chan Tesh.

Hell's Gate was thirty-seven miles across, which meant the actual frontage to be patrolled would have been seventy-four miles. Seventy-four miles of rainsoaked, incredibly luxuriant, virgin woodland.

Under the circumstances, all he could realistically hope to do was keep an eye on things, relay messages back and forth between chan Tesh and chan Baskay and the home universe, and keep at least a few of his dragoons available for field service in some sort of emergency.

And I've stripped my own support weapons to the bone sending them forward to help chan Tesh, he reminded himself sourly. Not that he—or chan Tesh—had had a lot of choice about that.

"When are you scheduled for your next transmission up-chain?" he asked Baulwan.

"I'm not, really, Sir," the Voice replied. Halifu arched an eyebrow, and the young Arpathian shrugged slightly. "I'm sorry, Sir. I thought you knew that."

"Son," Halifu said with a crooked smile, "there's been so much crap going on out here ever since we met these people that I'm willing to bet there're at least a dozen things people think I know about that I don't."

"I should have seen to it that this wasn't one of them, Sir," Baulwan said a touch stiffly. "I apologize for failing to do that."

"Why don't you save the apologies for something that deserves them?" Halifu said.

"Thank you, Sir." Baulwan seemed to relax just a bit. In fact, he actually allowed himself a slight smile of his own. "To be honest, Sir, we haven't tried to keep a set schedule because Rokam and I are all alone out here. The rest of the Voices are spread almost as thin as we are, and most of us are trying to get as much rest as we can whenever we don't have to be actively transmitting."

Halifu nodded. Fatigue could become a real problem for anyone who pushed his or her particular Talent too hard. In extreme cases, it could lead to Talent burnout, or even death. And Talent fatigue could be insidious, creeping in without being noticed. Voices were particularly susceptible to it, especially if they worked in one of the major Voicenet transmission junctions.

Or, he thought dryly, if the poor luckless bastards happen to be the only two Voices available out here at the arse-end of nowhere and they're spending all their time transmitting diplomatic notes up and down the chain.

"Erthek Vardan's the next Voice in the chain," Baulwan went on. "He's got pretty good transmission range, but his reception range is a lot shorter, and he's young—younger than I am, I mean, Sir," the youthful Voice said, flushing slightly, despite his Arpathian rearing, as Halifu smothered a chuckle.

"I know, I know," the company-captain said after a moment. He patted the Voice on the shoulder apologetically. "I didn't mean to laugh at you, Shansair. It's just that I'm afraid that from where I stand, neither of you is what I'd call particularly ancient."

"I suppose not, Sir." Baulwan grinned a bit sheepishly. That was a good sign, Halifu thought. Maybe he was making some progress with the boy, after all.

"But what I was going to say, Sir," the Voice continued, "is that Erthek's sensitivity is a bit on the low side, and he tires quickly. Traygan and I are only about fifteen miles apart, and he's sensitive enough that he can usually Hear me if I 'shout' loud enough, even if he isn't actively Listening for me. Erthek's almost three hundred miles from here, and he has to settle into at least an upper-stage trance to receive from me, so I can only contact him at times when he's already expecting me to. And, like I said, he tires quickly, too. Early last week, when we had that long transmission from Platoon-Captain chan Baskay, he had to break it into two separate transmissions. So we usually try to conserve his strength. He mounts a Listening watch for me for ten minutes either side of the hour every two hours, and unless an incoming message for us is urgent, he holds it until the next time I contact him instead of his trying to initiate contact with me. Of course, the fact that I spend so much time on the other side of the portal maintaining contact with Traygan is another reason for him to wait for me to make contact. And since this entire leg of the Voicenet's been reserved solely for military traffic—well, military and diplomatic, I suppose—there isn't really all that much traffic, even if the amount we do have tends to cluster in fairly intensive bursts."

"But he's not going to be Listening for you right this minute?"

"No, Sir. Not for another—" Baulwan checked his watch "—ninety minutes or so."

"I see."

Halifu rubbed his chin, gazing thoughtfully through Hell's Gate at the autumn-struck trees on the other side. It was just like the gods, he thought sourly, to dump endless buckets of rain here in New Uromath while the universe on the other side of the portal hadn't seen a drop of rain in almost three weeks.

He really would have preferred for Vardan to be expecting a message from Baulwan at any moment. Unless a Voice's Talent was particularly strong, it was very difficult to attract his attention with an incoming Voice message he wasn't anticipating. It sounded as if it would have been even harder than usual in Vardan's case, and under the circumstances, Grafin Halifu really, really wished he could report Rokam Traygan's missed transmission to Baulwan to his superiors up the chain. There was almost certainly a completely innocent explanation for the Voice's silence, but Halifu would have felt much more comfortable if someone else knew about it.

We don't have enough redundancy in the Voicenet, he told himself sourly. On the other hand, we never designed it for a crisis like this one. And, of course, it doesn't help any that the gods were inconsiderate enough to let this happen clear out at the end of the multiverse, where all Talents are in such short supply.

He'd never truly realized just how fragile the Voicenet was until all hell had broken loose. Now, after Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr's murder and Darcel Kinlafia's departure for Sharona, he was acutely conscious of just how overstretched their communications capability truly was.

"All right, Shansair," he said finally. "We may both be worrying ourselves over nothing, but I'd rather do that than not worry about something I should've worried about. So, as soon as your friend Vardan is likely to be listening for you, I want you to send the word up-chain that we're having trouble contacting Traygan. Unless, of course, we hear from him in the meantime, that is."

"Yes, Sir. I'll see to it."

"Good, Shansair." Halifu patted the youngster on the shoulder again, then turned and started down the steep stairway to the parade ground—and his waiting paperwork—once again.

Thousand Toralk had discovered something else to worry about.

It was barely thirty air miles from the swamp portal to the huge portal which had been christened Hell's Gate and lent its name to this entire universe. Of course, that was thirty miles of solid, impenetrable treetops, and like most dragon pilots, Toralk was always at least a little uncomfortable about flying over terrain where he and his beast couldn't put down in a hurry, if they had to.

That wasn't what was bothering him at the moment, however. No, what was bothering him was the fact that he'd just spent the better part of fifteen minutes with his entire force circling directly above Fallen Timbers without getting a single response from Narshu or Skirvon.

And I've got better things to do than hang around up here all day admiring the scenery . . . however damned spectacular it may be, he thought sourly, looking north towards Hell's Gate.

That portal was so huge that it was clearly visible at his present altitude, even from here. In fact, it dominated the entire northern horizon. Nor was it alone. KlayrmanToralk and his pilots had a ringside seat for something no human being had ever seen before, for Hell's Gate was a cluster.

The portal detector Magister Halythan had invented had already told them precisely where each of the associated portals was, but at this moment, Toralk scarcely needed it. He could actually see no less than four of them simultaneously—four semi-circular windows, of widely differeing sizes, but all of them at least several miles across and high, opening into four totally separate universes. He saw a midnight-black night sky through one, a dark-green, fecund jungle through another, and an icy snowscape through yet a third. The incredible vistas dominated the horizons, making the incalculable value of this universe starkly plain, yet their very visibility only made the heavy tree cover even more frustrating. He could see all of them, even get dragons tghrough any of them he chose, but he couldn't get the beasts on the ground anywhere in this massively forested wilderness . . . just as he couldn't even see the ground directly below him here!

Still, the visibility looking up ought to be considerably better, and despite the tree cover, Skirvon and Narshu had to know there were dragons overhead. Or they should have, anyway. Even if the canopy was getting in their way, the tangled scar of wind-downed trees where the original clash with the Sharonians had occurred was right next to them. It would never do to land a dragon, and even if Toralk had been able to get one down, he'd never have gotten it back into the air again. But Narshu should have been bright enough to post a lookout out in the middle of it, where the hole torn through the canopy would have allowed him to make visual contact.

We should have brought the gryphons, Toralk told himself irritably. He knew why they hadn't, of course. In fact, it had been his own idea. After all, the total distance to be covered on this leg was only thirty damned miles. How the hells' much reconnaissance capability were they likely to need? And gryphons were . . . problematical, at best, as a strike weapon without very exact pre-attack planning and programming from their handlers. They certainly weren't something anyone wanted to interject into the middle of a possibly confused infantry action!

But if he'd thought about it, he would've realized that he could at least have put a recon gryphon down through the Fallen Timbers opening to confirm what was happening there.

Oh, stop, Klayrman! he told himself. You figured from the get-go that if anything went seriously wrong out here, the entire operation would turn into an utter fiasco. So, either you were going to find Narshu sitting here in control of the position, or else the shit was going to be so deep it really wasn't going to matter. So there actually wasn't much point worrying about sending gryphons in on recon missions, was there?

He glowered down at the treetops for a few more seconds, then shook his head. He couldn't afford to hang around here any longer. Carthos' unicorns would be here within another hour or so, max, and he had his own mission to complete.

"Take us on!" he ordered his pilot.

"Yes, Sir!"

The command dragon broke out of its holding pattern and headed due north, and hundreds of steadily beating dragon wings followed in its wake.

Chapter Seven

"Any time now," chan Baskay murmured.

The platoon-captain drew rein and turned in the saddle, gazing back the way they'd come. Not that he'd really expected to see anything.

One of the things Company-Captain chan Tesh had insisted upon was the necessity of finding at least the nearer of the secondary portals in the Hell's Gate cluster. Thanks to Darcel Kinlafia's ability to sense the compass bearings of other portals, he'd at least been able to tell them roughly where to look before he left, and they'd been astonished to discover that there were no less than three more portals within less than sixty miles of Fallen Timbers. Two of them, in fact, were less than fifteen miles from the site of the massacre which had started this entire confrontation. Of those, one connected to what was obviously New Farnal, while the other connected to an open, rolling expanse of grassland—currently covered in the first snow of winter—which could have been the heart of New Ternath or any of a score of other places.

At the moment, the thirty-odd men of what had become Dorzon chan Baskay's command were still about five miles from the New Farnal portal. They'd concentrated on speed, pushing their horses as hard as the terrain permitted, and their trail through the drifts of the forest's bone-dry leaves was painfully obvious.

For now.

Hulmok Arthag's suggestion about how to "conceal" that trail had horrified chan Baskay when he first heard it. Of course, chan Baskay had spent much of his youth on his family's estates in Reyshar. They were located in central Chairifon, in an area of endless forests where the primary local industries all relied on forestry products, and he'd spent most of his boyhood hunting, fishing, and hiking in woods very much like these. That youthful experience had left him with a deep reverence for trees . . . and a matching horror of forest fires.

Arthag, on the other hand, was a son of the steppes. Forests held no special attraction to him, which had undoubtedly made it much easier for him to hit upon the idea in the first place. Once he had, despite chan Baskay's own emotional response to it, the Ternathian had been unable to come up with a logical argument against it.

Except, of course, for insisting that we had to have enough of a head start before he started playing with matches, chan Baskay thought now.

But Arthag had had an answer for that, as well. He and Chief-Armsman chan Hathas had quickly rigged a crude timer using several gallons of kerosene and a candle, and if his estimate of the candle's burning rate was accurate, it should be reaching the kerosene any minute now.

So stop looking over your shoulder and get your attention back where it belongs, chan Baskay scolded himself. The last thing you need to do is hang around back here long enough for the fire to catch up with you!

He snorted, shook his head, and put his mount into a canter to catch up with the rest of the column.

Toralk's command dragon skimmed just above the treetops as it swept through into the next universe.

With such a huge portal to play with, there was no need for them to make the crossing where anyone in the Sharonian fort could possibly see them. And thanks to the successful scouting mission the Andaran Scouts' chief sword had carried out, they knew precisely where that fort was, and its exact coordinates had been entered into their navigation units.

That was the good news; the low cloudbase was the even better news.

While the cloud cover would make the coordination of his strikes—especially with the air-mobile infantry and cavalry—difficult, it also offered the possibility of additional concealment. He'd covered this possibility in his original mission planning, although the casualties they'd taken in the initial attack had led him to make some fairly substantial adjustments in light of the demonstrated efficacy of the Sharonians' weapons. He wished that he'd had more time to work on those adjustments, but the Air Force had always emphasized an officer's need to think on his feet, and he'd discussed his new attack variants with his strike COs in their hasty conference before leaving the swamp portal behind.

He'd been able to see how heavy the cloud cover was going to be well before he actually crossed the portal's threshold. In fact, the overcast was crowding through the portal into the Hell's Gate universe with the promise of at least some badly needed rain. He'd already fired the sequence of flares to indicate his chosen variant, and now he watched Hundred Geyrsof's strike disappear into the thick overcast ahead of his ponderous transports.

Shansair Baulwan was still on top of the Fort Shaylar observation tower.

It wasn't as if he had any other pressing duties he had to attend to, and one place was as good as another while he waited until Erthek would be Listening for him. In fact, this was a much better spot than most. He'd heard that Company-Captain Halifu liked to come up here to think about things, and leaning on the rail, looking out across the marvelous view, he could understand why. Like Hulmok Arthag, Baulwan was a child of the steppes, and all of the woods stretching out on either hand would have been bad enough even without the apparently inexhaustible and unending rain. Up here, he could get his head above the treetops, let his mind clear.

He was beginning to think he'd done Halifu a disservice by lumping him with other Uromathians he'd had the misfortune to meet. It was hard to remind himself that Uromathians could be just as different from one another as anyone else, but a Voice ought to be more aware of that than other people. He'd have to make a point of keeping his mind open where Halifu was concerned, he decided.

He straightened up, stretched, and checked his watch again. Fifteen more minutes before Erthek would start Listening.

Horban Geyrsof had never been more grateful for clouds in his entire life.

No dragon pilot really liked flying through soup this thick, especially in formation. Midair collisions between dragons were almost always ugly, particularly if battle dragons were involved. They were always touchy, and they seldom extended the benefit of the doubt to someone who ran into them in flight.

But, after his experiences at the swamp portal, Geyrsof was delighted to take the 3012th and its sister strike, the 4016th, into the clouds. The dragon-healers had patched up Graycloud's and Windslasher's wing membranes, but both of the remaining yellows were still proddy. They'd not only lost wingmates, but they'd found out that Sharonian weapons hurt. They were going to be much happier if they didn't get shot at again . . . which summed up Geyrsof's own attitude quite nicely, actually.

As for the reduced visibility, all of the 3012th's and 4016th's pilots were experienced formation flyers, and all of them understood the necessity of tightening their intervals and holding their positions relative to one another when visibility fell into the crapper this way. And they were all experienced instrument flyers, too, putting their trust in their navigation units' position and altitude figures rather than trying to rely upon their fallible human senses.

And, best of all, the bastards in that fort aren't going to have enough warning to get their damned heavy weapons into action, he told himself grimly.

He kept one eye on his own nav unit and the other on his single remaining wingman as both strikes crossed over the boundary between the universes well to the east of its objective. Then they turned west, following the preplotted waypoints programmed into their navigation units, until they were sweeping steadily towards the back side of the Sharonian fort.

Petty-Captain Baulwan took one more look at his watch, then nodded in satisfaction. Erthek would be starting to Listen for him sometime in the next couple of minutes, and Baulwan began preparing himself to contact the other Voice. He closed his eyes, concentrating on his Talent, letting it flow up from the depths of his mind like a crystal-clear water welling up from the throat of a mountain spring. At moments like this, he knew the shamans were right about the wondrous touch of the gods.

He felt himself relaxing, and breathed slowly and deeply, preparing, getting ready to reach out—

No one in Fort Shaylar saw them coming.

Hundred Geyrsof's pilots, guided by their navigation units, had arrived at precisely the right spot at precisely the correct momen and tipped over into their attack dives when all they could see was the wet, soaking interior of the clouds through which they were flying. It was risky—they didn't know exactly how low the cloudbase actually was, or what obstacles might be hiding in it if their navigation was even slightly off—but it also meant they had perfect cover all the way down. Even if anyone in the fort had suspected the existence of Arcana's dragons for a moment, it would have done them no good under those conditions.

In fact, the lumpy gray ceiling was at barely twelve hundred feet. At that low an altitude, the attack dragons were already starting to pull out when they broke clear of the clouds. They were going to have time for only a single attack each, and they had mere seconds to find their targets for it, but seconds were enough.

Sixteen fireballs exploded in the interior of Fort Shaylar almost as one.

Grafin Halifu had just signed the report about the triumphant relocation of those incredibly irritating cavalry mounts when the first explosions began.

He lunged up out of his chair, snatched up his pistol belt, and charged out his office door.

By the time he reached Farzak Partha's desk, the entire parade ground was a roaring holocaust.

There couldn't be that much to burn, a shocked, horrified corner of his mind insisted while the shrieks and screams ripped through his very soul. The shrieks and screams of his men—his men—burning like living torches in that impossible inferno. There'd been no warning, no preparation. One instant, everything was orderly, normal; the next instant, devastation was upon them all.

Partha leapt up from his own desk just in time to tackle Halifu. The outer surfaces of the fort's log structures were already smoking and charring under the incredible heat radiating from the red dragons' fireballs, but they still offered at least some protection to the people inside them, and Partha's quick thinking saved Halifu's life at least briefly.

The company-captain hit the rough floor hard. Hard enough to shake him back into a semblance of rationality. He squirmed free of Partha's grasp and climbed back to his feet as the initial wave of fireballs exhausted their power and dissipated.

He moved forward again, then, this time with Partha at his heels. The admin block's door was jammed, warped in its frame by the brutal heat, and he had to kick it open. Then he stepped out into a scene of nightmare.

The lucky ones were already dead.

Everywhere he looked, it seemed, there were bodies. Twisted, contorted, charred dead men, smoldering with an intolerable stench of burning flesh. Here and there among the corpses were the screaming, writhing bodies of hideously maimed troopers who were still alive. He knew those men, knew most of them by their first names, and he couldn't even recognize them.

He advanced onto the parade ground, and half the fort's buildings were on fire around him. The observation tower blazed like a huge torch, soaked in oil, and a seared scarecrow of a human figure hung over the platform rail like a shriveled, blazing mummy. His mind refused to absorb the reality, couldn't find a way to process the information. He needed time for that, and there wasn't any time.

Something made him look up at the sky just in time to see a final pair of huge, impossible creatures hurtling suddenly out of the clouds. They streaked down towards the flame-wracked abattoir which had once been Fort Shaylar, and Grafin Halifu found his H&W in his hand.

The heavy, long-barreled revolver rose, his thumb cocked the hammer, and he began to fire.

He was still firing when the gas cloud enveloped what was left of his command.

Commander of One Hundred Sylair Worka looked at his chronometer and grimaced in disgust.

It wasn't his fault, but that didn't make him any happier to be running well over two hours behind schedule. Those damned Sharonian booby traps had imposed a delay out of all proportion to their actual effectiveness, and he wished Fifty Narshu had at least been assigned a hummer handler.

But, no, Worka thought sourly. We couldn't risk the Sharonians finding out about the hummers, could we? Of course not! So what if it makes it impossible to communicate when it all hits the fan?

His expression grew briefly even more disgusted, then he shook his head. Part of the problem was that neither side knew what it ought to be concealing from the other, he reflected. So Arcana had wound up hiding just about everything . . . even when it was an operational pain in the arse.

He supposed it all made sense, but it would have been far more convenient—and, undoubtedly, more reassuring to Narshu—if Worka had been able to send him a message to explain the delay.

Well, we're only thirty minutes or so out now. In fact, the point ought to be—

"Sir!"

Worka looked up from his chronometer as one of his troopers came towards him at a stiff canter. A light cavalry unicorn could manage speeds of up to forty miles an hour and maintain a gallop for ninety minutes at a time in decent terrain . . . which, of course, this mass of trees most definitely was not. Still, Lance Ranlak was moving at a good clip.

The trooper drew up beside his company commander and saluted.

"What is it, Yurain?" Worka asked.

"Sir, Sword Kalcyr's respects, and he thinks we've got a problem."

"Problem?" Worka stiffened in the saddle. Senior Sword Barcan Kalcyr was the company's senior noncom. He'd been everywhere and done everything, and he didn't use the word "problem" lightly.

"Yes, Sir. He said to tell you he smells smoke. Lots of smoke."

Worka gazed at the trooper for a few moments, then pressed with his heels, and sent his mount galloping forward.

The constant coming and going of the diplomats who'd been negotiating with the Sharonians—not to mention all of the Sharonian traffic between the swamp portal and the Class Eight—had produced a well-worn, surprisingly broad trail, and Worka's troopers crowded aside to let him pass. He made good time, and well before he reached Kalcyr's position, he'd come to the conclusion that the senior sword had, if anything, understated the situation. The hundred's unicorn snorted uneasily, tossing its horned head, as the first sharp-smelling banners of smoke came flowing through the woods.

"What do we have, Barcan?" Worka asked as he drew up beside the noncom.

"According to my nav unit, we're only about five miles out, Sir," Kalcyr replied. "I don't think we're getting through that, though."

He pointed, and Worka's jaw tightened as he looked in the indicated direction. The stiff breeze was blowing across the trail at the next best thing to right angles. Now, as he gazed ahead, he realized that the smoke he'd smelled on his way forward had been only outriders, only the stray tendrils of the massive wall of smoke rolling steadily westward ahead of them.

"Where there's smoke, there's fire, Sir," Kalcyr observed in a tone which sounded as disgusted as Worka felt.

"Yes, there is, Senior Sword," Worka agreed. "In fact—"

He broke off, gesturing, and Kalcyr grunted as they both saw the first, abrupt crackle of flames coming towards them through the smoke. One of the towering forest giants went up like torch in a glare of crownfire, little more than two hundred yards further along the trail.

Worka's unicorn flattened its lynx-like ears, and he felt the sudden tension quivering in its augmented muscles.

"Time to go, Senior Sword," the hundred said.

"You've got that right, Sir," Kalcyr agreed feelingly as a second tree flared up, and he blew his whistle.

The point men responded instantly—after all, they were even closer to that oncoming inferno than Kalcyr or Worka. The hundred and the senior sword waited until they were sure everyone had heard the signal, then turned their own unicorns and headed back the way they'd come—rapidly.

Worka knew he'd made the right decision, but he didn't like the implications one bit. He supposed it was remotely possible a random lightning strike out of the cloudless sky might have just happened to start a forest fire in this particular place at this particular time. It wasn't very likely, though. Unfortunately, he couldn't think of any good reason for Fifty Narshu to have been starting any fires. Which meant that if it wasn't the result of some sort of accident—which Worka strongly doubted was the case—someone else must be responsible.

Which probably meant things hadn't gone quite as well as everyone had been assuming, after all.

Chapter Eight

Commander of Five Hundred Alivar Neshok looked up from the notes transcribed into his personal crystal as two of the troopers assigned to his Intelligence section hustled the latest prisoners into the large room Neshok had taken over for interrogation purposes. The room in question had originally been meant to serve as a secondary armory, as nearly as Neshok could tell. It was part of the same building as their main armory, at least, although it appeared that the fort's garrison must have been awaiting substantially more weapons and ammunition, since it had been empty when the Arcanans occupied it.

The five Sharonians' hands were manacled behind them, and most of them were white-faced, obviously shocked and not a little terrified.

Good, the Intelligence officer thought. Apparently even these barbarians are capable of absorbing object lessons . . . if the lesson's pointed enough, at any rate.

He returned his attention to his crystal, ignoring the prisoners as obviously as possible while the handpicked, carefully instructed guards kicked and cuffed them into position.

Very few of the Sharonian garrison had survived. In fact, only eleven of the Sharonians actually in the fort at the moment of the attack had lived long enough for the Healers to reach them. Two of those had died anyway, which was unfortunate. Prisoners represented intelligence, and intelligence was the most deadly weapon of all, especially in a war like this.

And it was Alivar Neshok's task to wring every single drop of information out of these Sharonian scum. It wasn't always a pretty job, but someone had to do it, and Neshok knew he did it well.

Too many of his colleagues seemed to forget the psychological aspect of interrogation techniques. Probably, Neshok often thought, because they'd basically been nothing but glorified policemen for the better part of two hundred years. There'd been no wars, no true "enemy" personnel to interrogate, since the founding of the Union, after all. For the most part, specialists in Neshok's particular area of expertise had been interrogating brigands, bandits, claim jumpers—the sort of scum who routinely preyed upon society out here in the frontier universes. In the process, they'd gotten lazy. That sort of criminal was hardly trained or motivated to resist questioning the way soldiers were, and the interrogator generally had a pretty detailed idea going in of what he expected to learn. A few basic verifier spells, and the prisoner's knowledge that those spells were in place (and of the consequences of adding perjury to the charge list), were usually enough to get them talking.

It was going to take a little more in a case like this, though, which was why Neshok had designed his prisoners' "preparation" so carefully.

The Healers wouldn't let him talk to their patients yet. That was also unfortunate. If he'd had his druthers, Neshok would have interrogated those "patients" before they were ever allowed to see the Healers in the first place. Pain and terror were great psychological motivators, after all. But Commander of Five Hundred Dayr Vaynair, Two Thousand Harshu's senior medical officer, had other ideas. He'd gotten up on his high Andaran horse and taken the position that the Kerellian Accords applied even to these people, which made him irritatingly representative of Healers in general, in Neshok's experience. Well, Neshok was Andaran, too, but he wasn't about to let the antiquated Andaran "honor code" get in the way of his responsibilities. All very well for Vaynair to stand upon his Healer's Oath without even bothering to hide his contempt for the people charged with securing the information the operational commanders simply had to have. This entire operation had gone so well so far solely because of the activities of people like Alivar Neshok, but did Vaynair recognize that? Did he realize he'd had so few Arcanan patients expressly because Neshok and his Intelligence team had done their jobs so well?

Of course he didn't! He was too occupied with his contempt for the despised Intelligence people's efforts to continue to do their jobs.

Well, we're just going to have to do something about Five Hundred Vaynair, aren't we? Neshok reflected. But not yet. Not until I've had time to build my case, at any rate.

But if Vaynair wasn't going to let him interrogate his precious patients just yet, then Neshok would have to make do with prisoners like these.

So far, the cavalry patrols Thousand Carthos had sent spreading out from the captured fort had swept up over thirty Sharonians who'd been outside the fort itself at the time of the attack. Most of them had been engaged on the sort of work details any military post had to provide. The tree cover on this side of Hell's Gate was just as bad, from the prospect of aerial operations, as on the other side, which explained why Carthos had been forced to rely on his unicorns to get out under the branches to secure the prisoners. Neshok suspected there were still at least one or two work parties who'd managed to evade the cavalry this far, although the odds of their continuing to do so much longer were slim.

All of the prisoners they'd so far taken had been close enough to see the attack on the fort itself, which meant they'd finally realized that Arcana had combat capabilities which tremendously outclassed their own. They'd seen the dragons, seen the explosions of searing heat as the reds belched their fireballs. They hadn't seen the yellows' gas clouds, but Neshok had made certain they'd seen the consequences of both dragon types' breath weapons. That was why he'd had them marched straight here, across the fort's still-smoldering parade ground into this log building. The Sharonians hadn't peeled the bark off the conifer logs from which all of the fort's buildings had been constructed, and the radiant heat from the fireballs had turned that bark into flaking ash on every wall which had faced the parade ground.

The bodies hadn't been policed up yet, either. They lay where they had fallen, twisted and contorted. Those who'd died of gas inhalation after the second pass of the attack wore expressions of horror and agony. Most of those who'd been killed by the fireballs in the first pass, on the other hand, showed no recognizable expression at all. There wasn't enough left of the shrunken, twisted chunks of charcoal which had once been humans for that.

Now Neshok entered a few notes into his PC. They didn't actually say anything particularly important, but it was one more bit of windowdressing, and he gave himself a curt nod of approval, then looked up.

The prisoners knelt in front of him. One of them—a short, wiry fellow kneeling at the left end of the line—reminded Neshok of Hulmok Arthag. That would have been more than enough to inspire the Intelligence officer with a lively sense of dislike, since there wasn't much doubt that whatever had gone wrong at Fallen Timbers, Arthag had almost certainly been at the bottom of it. Worse, though, this fellow wore the four red collar pips of a senior-armsman. That made him roughly the equivalent of a javelin, or possibly even a sword, according to the tentative table of organization Neshok had managed to work out for the Sharonians.

It also meant that he was the senior prisoner, which made his hard eyes and mask-like expression unpromising.

The other four were about as physically diverse as a similar sampling of Arcanan military personnel might have been. One of them—a towering, broad-shouldered, red-haired bear of a man with the two red pips of a petty-armsman, which made him the next senior prisoner—was bigger even than the Sharonian diplomat, Simrath. The other three ranged in height between the big petty-armsman and the Arthag-like senior-armsman.

"Well," Neshok said finally, relying upon a translating crystal to render his words in fluent, idiomatic Ternathian, "I do hope you . . . gentlemen are prepared to be reasonable."

None of the prisoners said anything, and Neshok allowed himself a slight frown as their faces hardened defiantly.

"Now, I suppose you may be feeling heroic," he continued. "Of course, that would be a particularly stupid thing for you to do, under the circumstances. I'm sure that what you saw on your way across what used to be your fort has already suggested as much." He smiled thinly. "It isn't going to be very long before we move on to your next fort—in Thermyn, I believe you call it? And after that, we'll be continuing on up-chain. We won't be getting all the way to Sharona this time, of course. But by the time your reinforcements can get here, we'll be in position to run right over them before they even know what's happening."

He smiled again, even more coldly.

"You've seen what we did to your precious fort," he said. "I assure you, your portal fortifications were even less effective. So just what do you people think is going to happen when our dragons catch your reinforcement columns in the open, without any protection at all?"

Two of the prisoners' faces had crumbled as Neshok spoke. They had no way of knowing how vastly the Intelligence officer had overstated the ease with which chan Tesh's positions had been taken. Nor could they possibly know he'd just expended almost his entire store of knowledge about what thousand Harshu's expeditionary force was likely to run into on its way up-chain. All they knew was that he seemed to be well informed, already. The big redhead, and the wiry little senior-armsman, on the other hand, appeared less impressed. The smaller man's expression showed no reaction at all—which, of course, was a reaction in its own right. But his taller companion seemed to be less adept at concealing his reactions. His eyes narrowed, his mouth tightened, and his shoulders squared.

Good, Neshok thought coldly. Always best to start with the biggest one, especially when he's one of the noncoms the others will be looking to for leadership. It makes the point so much more effectively for the others.

The acting five hundred looked at one of the two guards, and nodded very slightly.

Javelin Lisaro Porath stepped forward without a word in response to the silent command and raised his heavy infantry arbalest to chest level, then brought its butt down in a flashing, vertical stroke. It struck the top of the petty-armsman's left shoulder like a hammer. It also took the big man completely by surprise, and he grunted in hoarse agony, despite himself, as the vicious stroke landed. Privately, Neshok was impressed that the man had managed not to cry out, although he wasn't about to let any of that show in his own expression.

Pain and the physical impact drove the prisoner forward and down. With his hands behind him, he couldn't even try to catch himself, and he smashed face-first into the rough, split-log floor. Blood erupted from his flattened nose and pulped lips, and Porath reached down, caught him by his hair, yanked him back upright, and then drove a kneecap brutally into his spine. The impact hammered him forward again, his hair "slipping" from the Porath's fingers, and he thudded back onto the floor, where the guard proceeded to kick him repeatedly in the ribs.

The second guard watched the other prisoners alertly, his arbalest ready, but they seemed too shocked, too stunned, to pose any kind of threat, and Neshok watched them closely as he let the brutal, systematic beating go on and on. He wanted them to stay shocked, wanted them to reflect upon what could happen to anyone who failed to provide the answers he sought.

By the time the acting five hundred finally waved one index finger gently and Porath stepped back, panting with exertion, the big petty-armsman was unconscious. The arbalest butt had almost certainly broken his shoulder badly, and Neshok rather doubted that he had a single intact rib. His face was a mass of blood, bubbling on his lips as he breathed through his mouth rather than his flattened, broken nose, and his right cheek and lower jaw were a caved-in ruin of shattered bone. Neshok never doubted for a moment that the prisoner also had internal injuries, and a dark, vicious light of purring cruelty glowed in his eyes.

"Drag that garbage out and get rid of it, Javelin Porath," he told the guard. The translating crystal obediently rendered the order in Ternathian for the other prisoners' benefit, and the trooper gave a harsh half-grunting laugh, grabbed the unconscious petty-armsman by an ankle, and dragged him out of the interrogation room. The sliding, scraping body left a trail of blood as the brutalized face scrubbed across the splintery floor, undoubtedly taking still more damage in the process, and Porath paused long enough to administer a final, savage kick to his victim's side before he dragged him the rest of the way out the door.

That door closed behind him, and Neshok allowed his attention to return to the other four prisoners. Or, rather, he allowed them to see his attention return to them, as if he'd forgotten the crystal would translate his instructions to the guard into Ternathian. He smiled coldly at them, then looked up again as the door opened once more.

Javelin Porath stepped back through it. His arbalest was slung across his back, and he was just settling his short sword back into its sheath. He rebuttoned the retaining strap across the quillons as he walked back to stand behind the remaining prisoners without a word.

Very nice, Neshok thought approvingly.

Porath had taken the Intelligence officer's instructions to heart, and he clearly had a thespian bent. Neshok had been half-afraid the trooper would do something like ostentatiously wiping his blade, or something equally obvious. Instead, he'd opted for something understated enough to clearly imply the desired effect without overdoing it, and his satisfied expression was more effective than any theatrically homicidal leer.

As if I had any intention of wasting an intelligence asset that quickly, Neshok thought contemptuously as he watched the prisoners draw the desired conclusion. The wiry senior-armsman's face showed absolutely no change of expression. If anything, his eyes simply hardened even further, but his companions were quite another matter. There was still anger in them, Neshok decided. In fact, their anger burned hotter and fiercer than ever, yet its heat was at least matched by fresh, choking terror. Obviously, they believed exactly what he'd wanted them to believe.

Hard to blame them for that, really, even without that neat little bit of acting, he admitted. Just the beating probably would've killed the bastard in the end, and these fucking barbarians have never heard of proper Healers. Even if they had, it might not have occurred to them—yet—just what that implies when it comes to the application of . . . forceful arguments in favor of cooperation. Well, they're going to find out exactly what that means, aren't they? Eventually, of course.

He was going to have to deal with Vaynair first, no doubt. One of the things the Kerellian Accords specifically prohibited was the use of Healers in the interrogation of prisoners. Alivar Neshok had no intention of allowing his hands to be tied that way, however. Which was really the main reason Five Hundred Vaynair had to go. Vaynair would almost certainly go ahead and Heal the battered petty-armsman this time, but he'd never sign off on the use of torture or allow any of the Healers under his command to cooperate by healing the physical consequences of a . . . rigorous interrogation session only to let the questioners begin all over again without accidentally expending their intelligence assets.

In the meantime . . . .

"Perhaps the rest of you are feeling inclined to be a little more cooperative now?" he suggested, and one of the prisoners—a young under-armsman who couldn't have been much over twenty—swallowed visibly. Neshok noted the reaction with satisfaction.

"I'm sure, for example," he continued, "that one of you would like to help me out by telling me exactly which of the other portals Viscount Simrath and Platoon-Captain Arthag might have chosen to make for."

No one answered, and Neshok showed his teeth in something no one would ever have mistaken for a smile.

It had become abundantly and painfully evident that whatever else had happened at Fallen Timbers, Narshu's mission couldn't possibly have been a complete success. It was going to be a while before they could prove that conclusively, however. The forest fire which Neshok was personally certain Arthag had deliberately started to cover his tracks was rapidly turning into a demonic holocaust. The tinder-dry autumn forest, with its deep drifts of leaves, had proved the ideal target for the Sharonian's arson. A booming, crackling wavefront of flame was spreading out—it was actually moving upwind, as well as downwind—and there was no possibility of containing or controlling that raging fury. It had already completely blocked the overland route between the swamp portal and Hell's Gate, and unless some divine agency chose to intervene soon, it was going to burn all the way back to both of those portals. Not to mention burning the gods only knew how far in every other direction, as well.

From the Sharonians' perspective, simply blocking the trail would have been completely worthwhile in its own right, especially if they'd set the fire before they discovered the Air Force's existence. It was going to be a pain in the arse for Arcana even with the advantage of dragons and levitation spells; without that advantage, it would have delayed Two Thousand Harshu's offensive for days, probably even longer. The fact that it was going to completely destroy any possibility of tracking the Sharonian fugitives from Fallen Timbers was simply gravy from their viewpoint. But Neshok wasn't about to let them get away with that. If Rithmar Skirvon and Uthik Dastiri were still alive, Neshok wanted them back, and not just because they were accredited diplomats of the Union of Arcana. He wasn't supposed to know just how . . . friendly the diplomats were with Two Thousand mul Gurthak, but he was an Intelligence officer. As such, he had a pretty shrewd notion of how grateful mul Gurthak would be if Neshok could manage to retrieve them.

"Come now," he said almost gently as the silence stretched out. "I'm sure none of you want to be so . . . uncooperative that you make me angry. Believe me, you won't like me when I'm angry."

"We don't know where they'd go!" the young under-armsman blurted suddenly.

"That's enough, Sirda," the senior-armsman said quietly, almost gently.

The youngster darted a look at the older man, then clamped his jaws with a visible effort and stared at the floor directly in front of him, avoiding any possible eye contact with Neshok.

"No, Sirda," the Arcana said, his voice almost as quiet as the senior-armsman's, but far, far colder. "It isn't enough. It isn't nearly enough."

The under-armsman—Sirda—clenched his chained hands into fists behind him. His face was pale, and he bit his lip, hard, but he didn't speak.

Neshok nodded to the second of the two guards, and the Arcanan trooper bent over Sirda from behind, twisted his fingers in the young man's hair, and yanked his head back so hard the youngster couldn't quite smother his cry of pain. The pressure on his scalp forced him to look up, meet Neshok's eyes, and the Intelligence officer's smile was cruel and thin.

"Someone is going to tell me what I want to know," Neshok said softly. "Whoever it is, will probably get to live. As for whoever it isn't . . ."

He let his eyes drift to the trail of blood the big petty-armsman's face had left across the floor, then looked back at Sirda. The young man's throat worked, and sweat coated his face.

"In that case," the senior-armsman said levelly, "why don't you ask me?"

Neshok allowed his eyebrows to arch and gazed at the Sharonian noncom thoughtfully.

"I hadn't realized you were so eager to be reasonable, Senior-Armsman," he said. "Very well, which portal did Simrath and Arthag make for?"

The senior-armsman looked back up at him for a moment, then said something in a language the translating crystal didn't understand. The long sentence—or sentences—sounded guttural, yet flowing and edged with a sort of harsh music, but the language certainly wasn't Ternathian, and Neshok frowned.

"Speak Ternathian."

The Intelligence officer managed to bring the words out calmly, suppressing—barely in time—the urge to snap them out. Using anger to generate fear in someone else was a useful interrogation tool, but allowing a prisoner to successfully bait him would be a sign of weakness.

"Oh," the senior-armsman said. "Your rock doesn't speak Arpathian?"

"Speak Ternathian," Neshok repeated almost tonelessly, and the kneeling prisoner shrugged.

"If you want," he said. "I said, he already told you. We don't know the answer to your question."

"And what else did you say?" Neshok asked softly.

"Actually, what I said was, 'He already told you. We don't know the answer to your question, you syphilitic, camel-fucking son of a diseased sow and a hundred pig-fucking fathers,'<thinspace>" the senior-armsman replied . . . and smiled.

"It was, was it?"

Neshok tried to keep his voice calm, level, despite the sudden, savage bolt of white-hot fury which burst suddenly through him, but he knew he'd failed. He heard the anger crackling in his own words, heard the way they quivered about the edges, and saw the satisfaction in the senior-armsman's eyes.

Eyes, Neshok suddenly realized, which, like the cold smile below them, held not a single trace of fear. Which dared the acting five hundred to do his worst. And as he realized that, Neshok realized something else, as well. The senior-armsman had deliberately redirected Neshok's own attention—and anger—to himself, and away from the terrified young under-armsman.

The five hundred glared at the Sharonian in front of him. It would have been inaccurate to say that Neshok reached a decision. That would have implied a deliberate, at least semi-rational process. He told himself, later, that it had been exactly that. That the coldly calculated need to undermine any defiance the senior-armsman might have managed to inject into his subordinates was what inspired him. Certainly a trained, determined interrogator would never allow a prisoner's words—the only weapon the prisoner possessed—to fill him with such sudden, volcanic fury that he acted without truly thinking at all.

Alivar Neshok looked at the guard standing behind the Arpathian prisoner, clenched his fist at shoulder level, and jerked it downward.

The Arpathian must have understood what that gesture meant, but his eyes never flinched and his smile never faltered as the short sword hissed out of its sheath behind him and the guard's free hand gripped his hair and yanked his head back.

"Now . . . Sirda," Neshok heard his own voice say across the coppery stink of the huge fan of blood which had erupted from the senior-armsman's slashed throat to fill his nostrils, "I believe you had something you wanted to tell me."

Chapter Nine

"Well, isn't this charming," Hulmok Arthag remarked.

It was quite astounding, Dorzon chan Baskay reflected, just how much disgust his fellow platoon-captain could put into a simple four-word sentence.

Not that he could really fault the Arpathian at this particular moment.

The Ternathian officer turned and gazed back the way they'd come. The portal through which they'd passed was far smaller than Hell's Gate. In fact, it measured barely three miles from side to side, which made it even smaller than the swamp portal. And at the moment, it was like a picture window into the very heart of one of the Uromathians' fiery hells.

The fire Arthag had created had rolled right up to the portal's very brink. The furious, heat-driven stormfront of wind had whirled bits and pieces of flaming debris through the portal as the bone-dry northern forest they'd left behind consumed itself in a vortex of searing devastation.

But there'd never been much chance of that fire pouring itself through this portal, chan Baskay reflected. He could feel the fire's heat on his face even here, hundreds of yards away as he and Arthag stood side-by-side in the fork of a towering tree. Their chosen tree reared its impressive height—well over a hundred feet into the air, most of it far above their present perch—atop the same, sharp ridgeline over which Chief-Armsman chan Hathas was leading the other members of their tiny command. Other trees, thousands of trees, stretched away from this aspect of their arrival portal as far as they could see, and those trees were anything but "bone-dry."

As nearly as chan Baskay could estimate, they had to be deep inside the rainforest basin of the mighty Dalazan River, which drained the vast interior of the continent of New Farnal. That meant rain. Lots of rain, in daily, drenching doses. Rain measured not in inches, but in feet per year. In fact, it was raining right this moment, soaking the upper canopy of lush green foliage so completely that even entire flaming branches, borne through the portal in the grip of fire-born whirlwinds, simply hissed into extinction when they landed. When Arthag's holocaust had completed its work, this portal was going to thrust up out of a wasteland of ashes and soot like some surreal slice of verdant greenery.

A very visible surreal slice of verdant greenery.

"It may not be exactly 'charming,'<thinspace>" chan Baskay said now, in reply to Arthag's comment, "but in my own humble opinion, it beats the hells out of the alternative."

"There is that," Arthag acknowledged. "That doesn't mean I have to like it, though.And I don't—like it, I mean."

Chan Baskay snorted, but he had no trouble understanding Arthag's viewpoint. If the Arpathian hadn't liked the northern forest of hardwoods and conifers they'd left behind, their present triple canopy rainforest had to be even worse. On the other hand, the advantages for a small band of fugitives were enormous.

Although equatorial rainforests were undoubtedly home to the most diverse collection of plant and animal life on any world in the multiverse, they were quite different from the image which the word "jungle" evoked in most people's minds. They were composed primarily of trees, not vast, thick-growing thickets of fern-like vegetation. Instead, the surface of the ground tended to be marked by a layer of rapidly decomposing dead leaves, dominated by abundant tree seedlings and saplings. Most of those seedlings and saplings would never reach maturity, since only a minute fraction of the potential sunlight ever penetrated the upper tree canopies. The topmost layer of leaves reached heights of over a hundred and thirty feet, and additional, lower canopies intercepted any light that got past it. Visibility was still limited in a forest like that, of course, but not nearly so badly as the average Sharonian might have assumed.

But this particular portal sat in the middle of what the botanists would have called a "regeneration zone." Something—possibly even the formation of the portal itself—had killed back enough trees to open an enormous hole in the overhead canopies. The light streaming suddenly into the dim, dark recesses which those canopies had hidden had unleashed an explosion of growth of more light-demanding species. Herbaceous varieties had sprung up everywhere, creating something which truly was very much like the stereotypical idea of a "jungle." By now, the process was far enough along that the fastest-growing shrubs and trees were beginning to shade those varieties back out once more, but the transition was still far from complete. For the moment, the incredibly luxuriant masses of plant life made any line of sight much over ten or fifteen yards all but impossible to come by. The torrential equatorial rains were also able to get through, thanks to the thinner canopies overhead, and the combination of well over seventy inches a year of rain, plus the incredible rates of local plant growth, would quickly conceal any trail they might leave. Perhaps even more importantly, under the circumstances, the limitless possibilities for ambushes would force any pursuer to move with the utmost caution. And if anyone did manage to catch up with them, he would soon discover that not all of the Faraika I machine-guns had been sent forward to Company-Captain chan Tesh. Chan Baskay had only three of the weapons, but once they were dug in in properly concealed positions, they would wreak havoc on any opponent.

This sodden, mucky, overgrown, dimly lit jungle was going to be hard on their horses, which undoubtedly helped explain Arthag's aversion towards it. It was also going to literally rot the clothes off their backs and the boots off their feet, and what it would do to improperly maintained firearms scarcely bore thinking upon. But they'd managed to bring along quite a bit more ammunition than chan Baskay had realized Arthag had managed to squirrel away at Fallen Timbers, and they had almost twice as many rifles as they had troopers to fire them . . . not to mention half a squad's worth of slide-action shotguns.

"Do you think they're really likely to follow us in here?" Arthag asked after a moment.

"Hard to say." Chan Baskay shrugged. "If it were me, I'd probably forget about us, at least for a while. They know there can't be very many of us, and from what Skirvon's told us, their emphasis has to be on getting as far forward as they can before they run into Division-Captain chan Geraith. Of course, they'll probably figure out we have Skirvon with us, and they may decide to mount some sort of rescue attempt." Chan Baskay snorted harshly. "From what I've seen of him, I wouldn't want him back in their place! They may have different standards, but even so, Division-Captain chan Geraith has to be their number one worry right now."

"Do they really know the Division-Captain is coming?" Arthag asked. Chan Baskay looked at him, and it was the Arpathian's turn to shrug. "I was just a little busy while you were talking to him," he pointed out mildly.

"Fair enough," chan Baskay conceded. "And the answer is that they do, and they don't, assuming Skirvon really knows what he's talking about. Apparently, they'd managed to plant 'reconnaissance crystals' on us. I suppose if they can record sounds and images in the 'personal crystals' they let us see, there's no reason they couldn't use other crystals and their godsdamned magic to record tactical information, too.

"At any rate, Skirvon obviously knows we've been expecting a substantial reinforcement. I don't think he knows exactly how substantial, or exactly when it's about to arrive, though. And from some of the other things he's said, it's even more obvious to me that they've significantly underestimated the firepower chan Geraith is going to be bringing with him."

"Nice to know we're not the only ones who've fucked up completely," Arthag observed in a conversational tone, and chan Baskay grimaced.

"I take your point," the Ternathian said. "And I wish there were some way we could get what we know—or get Skirvon, at least—to the Division-Captain before he runs straight into these bastards."

"Maybe somebody else will manage to get the word out," Arthag suggested.

"I hope so, but they've thought about that, too." Chan Baskay's voice was heavier, and Arthag quirked an eyebrow at him.

"They know about the Voices, Hulmok," chan Baskay said. "And they've come up with a plan for dealing with them. It's the same one they used to deal with Rokam and chan Treskin. According to Skirvon, they intend to shoot every Voice they encounter out of hand."

Arthag's nostrils flared, and his eyes went so bleak and cold that for just an instant, chan Baskay was frightened of him. Then the Arpathian drew a deep breath.

"I suppose that's one way to deal with the problem." His voice was matter-of-fact, almost thoughtful, but the eyes which went with it were carved from the heart of an obsidian glacier. "Still, eventually they're going to miss one somewhere."

"No doubt they are. But remember, the one big weakness of the Voicenet—aside, of course, from the fact that we don't have nearly enough Voices out here in the first place—is the fact that no Voice can reach another one through a portal, and Skirvon says they know it. That's the weak spot in the chain, and these people plan to exploit it and get as far up-chain as they can before anyone manages to pass the word that they're coming."

"And at the same time, they're going to be looking for someplace they can dig in against counterattack," Arthag said. "Someplace with a small enough portal to make defending it practical."

"That's the idea," chan Baskay acknowledged, impressed not so much by Arthag's ability to figure that out as by the Arpathian's ability to figure it out so quickly. "If they can't find one, though, they're planning to use their godsdamned dragons to devastate our supply lines in a running campaign."

This time, Arthag only nodded, and chan Baskay chuckled grimly. If there was anyone in the multiverse who'd understand the niceties of cutting an over-extended opponent off from his logistics base, it would have to be an Arpathian.

"You know," Arthag said after a moment, "this really and truly sucks, doesn't it?"

Five Hundred Neshok watched in profound satisfaction as the remaining prisoners were dragged out of his presence. They had to be dragged; at least two of them wouldn't be doing any unassisted walking until he'd finally gotten the Healers to attend to them. Not that there was any particular rush about that.

He'd had a special holding area of jury-rigged but sturdy cells erected just off his chosen interrogation room. It allowed him to keep prisoners he'd already interrogated segregated from the general population of captured Sharonians. And it also just happened to keep them handy, close enough to hear the results of his troopers' efforts to . . . persuade the recalcitrant to tell him what he wanted to know.

And, he admitted to himself, hanging on to them here ought to keep any nosy idiots like Five Hundred Vaynair out of my hair.

Sooner or later, he knew, there were going to be questions about his methods. That prick Vaynair would see to that, if no one else did. But by the time that happened, Alivar Neshok would have amassed enough solid, reliable, useful information to make it obvious just how ridiculous Vaynair's potential protests were. They had to have that information, and Neshok knew superior officers remembered subordinates who'd had the balls to do what had to be done, even if the strict letter of the Articles of War had to be bent just a bit in the process.

Two Thousand mul Gurthak already owed him. And the two thousand recognized Neshok's capabilities, as well, as his present assignment clearly demonstrated. But valuable as mul Gurthak's patronage would undoubtedly prove, the fact remained that the Union Army was overwhelmingly dominated by the Andaran officer corps. Adding someone like Two Thousand Harshu to his list of . . . sponsors would be even more valuable, and Harshu wasn't likely to forget the Intelligence officer whose efforts were about to make him the victor in the opening campaign of the first inter-universal war in history.

His lips quirked in a slight, satisfied smile at the thought, and he nodded to the trooper who was sluicing buckets of water across the floor to get rid of the worst of the mess, then stepped outside to catch a breath of some fresh air which wasn't tainted by the stink of blood and vomit. He had at least five or ten minutes before the next batch of intelligence sources arrived, and he crossed the covered veranda built across the width of the armory and leaned on its railing, watching the activity swirling around him.

The armory buildings formed an island of calm in the midst of all that action for several reasons. One was the result of his own insistence on the need for privacy to let him isolate his interrogation subjects in order to instill the proper psychological attitude. And another, no doubt, was that Thousand Carthos didn't want any of his troopers fooling around with the unknown, alien weapons which had been gathered up from where the slaughtered garrison had dropped them. They'd been hauled back to the Sharonians' own armory and stacked there, where they could be kept under guard, if only to prevent potentially lethal accidents.

He heard a monstrous flapping sound and looked up to see a quartet of tactical transport dragons, towing a pair of cargo pods and escorted by a single, slightly understrength three-dragon flight of reds, heading almost directly north, away from Fort Shaylar and deeper into the universe the Sharonians had called New Uromath. The terrain wasn't especially promising for aerial operations out there, Neshok reflected. Thanks to their navigation units, Two Thousand Harshu's forces knew exactly where they were, on the upper west coast of Andara, and Magister Halathyn's portal detector told them where to find the next portal headed up-chain. With that information, it wasn't hard to predict that the nearly three hundred miles between Fort Shaylar and the universe the Sharonians had christened Thermyn consisted of exactly the same rainsoaked, heavily wooded terrain. There was no place dragons could set down in that sort of terrain, and the improvements (such as they were) the Sharonians had made to the hacked-out overland trail between Fort Shaylar and the portal were minimal.

None of that worried Neshok particularly, however. There might not be any handy landing zones between here and the New Uromath-Thermyn portal, but there was also no reason for the expeditionary force to need any. The next portal was smaller than Hell's Gate—Magister Halathyn's detector had already told them that much, not that they'd really needed the detectors for that; no one had ever seen a portal Hell's Gate's size, far less one bigger. But his prisoner interrogations had confirmed that it was still the next best thing to ten miles across . . . and that the so-called "fort" built to cover it was little more sophisticated—or manned—than Fort Shaylar had been. The advanced forces Two Thousand Harshu and Thousand Toralk were sending ahead should find it child's play to slip through a portal that size under cover of night without being spotted.

And the terrain on the far side of the portal was very different from that on this side. Fort Brithik lay in the midst of the vast, level plains of central Andara, which—unlike these miserable, dripping woods or the smoldering desert left by the forest fire still raging in the Hell's Gate universe—was ideal terrain for air-mobile operations. Those same prisoner interrogations had also told them which way to go in search of the next portal beyond Brithik . . . and where to find the next half-dozen Voice relay stations.

Magister Halathyn's detectors would undoubtedly have pointed them in the direction of the next portal, even without the information Neshok had wrung out of his prisoners. For that matter, the fact that the Sharonians had no dragons meant there were bound to be roads—or at least tracks—to point the way to their next destination. But it was thanks to Neshok' efforts that they knew how far they had to go (and where to look when they got there) to find those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Voices.

The Voice relay between New Uromath and Thermyn, for example, was on this side of the portal connecting them. The distance was short enough to require only a single relay, but whereas Fort Brithik was built in Thermyn, where there was at least less rain and better lines of sight, the Voice outpost was in New Uromath. As far as the Sharonians knew, there was no real security need to put it under the cover of Fort Brithik's palisades, and by putting the Voice on this side of the portal, he was more handily available for contact from Fort Shaylar or the Voice at Fallen Timbers. Clearly, the Sharonians had decided messages moving up-chain were more likely to the time-critical than messages moving down-chain, which explained the Voice's location. He was close enough to the portal that he could easily cross it to transmit messages up-chain or check for messages coming down-chain at regularly scheduled intervals, yet always available at any other time for any potentially critical message from the Sharonian negotiators.

Without the information Neshok had gotten out of his prisoners, it was likely the relay station would have been overlooked by people who expected the Voice they wanted to be inside Fort Brithik's protection. And if that had happened, the odds were entirely too good that the Voice might have evaded the Arcanans long enough to break back across the portal himself and pass a warning back to Sharona.

That wasn't going to happen now. Those same interrogations had informed Neshok that the relay station had been built on ground which, unlike most of the rest of the terrain between here and Thermyn, was not covered in dense woodland. It was hard to conceive of a forest fire in these environs, and Neshok suspected that the one which had made the clearing in which the relay station had been built had actually been set by a prairie grass fire coming through the portal from Thermyn long before the Sharonians discovered either universe. Where the fire had come from didn't matter, however. What mattered was that it was big enough to offer landing space for dragons relatively close to the relay station, yet far enough back to land unseen and invisible on a moonless, drizzling night.

And that the relay station itself was far enough away from the portal for the discharge of weapons less . . . showy than the Sharonians' to pass unnoticed by the fort's garrison.

And, he thought coldly, still watching the quartet of transports and their escorts fade into the early evening sky, even if something should happen to go wrong there, there's always the next Voice relay beyond Fort Brithik.

There Voices might offer the Sharonians all sorts of strategic advantages . . . but only as long as the long, vulnerable chain of relay posts remained unbroken. And it would remain unbroken only as long as Arcana didn't know where to find it.

Alivar Neshok smiled again, baring his teeth in a snarl of triumph, then straightened. It was time to get his professional interrogation face back in place to greet the next batch of prisoners, he thought, and turned around to walk back inside.

"You wanted to see me, Fifty?"

Commander of One Thousand Carthos sounded brusque, as well he might, given the thousand and one details he had to deal with at the moment. The captured fort was a bubbling cauldron of movement, orders, questions, answers, and curses as the thousand's infantry and cavalry got themselves sorted out for the next day and the leap forward to position themselves for the attack upon the universe the Sharonians called Thermyn.

"Yes, Sir. Thank you for finding time."

Fifty Jaralt Sarma made his own voice crisp and firm—the sort of voice a senior officer might expect out of a subordinate who was determined not to waste his time.

"Well?" Carthos said impatiently.

"Sir," Sarma drew a deep breath and braced himself, "I'm afraid we've had a serious violation of the Kerellian Accords."

"Really."

The single word came out flat, devoid of any emotional overtone at all, and Tayrgal Carthos sat back in the chair behind the desk which had once belonged to the fort's Sharonian commander. He interlaced his fingers across his flat midsection and cocked his head to one side.

"What sort of 'violation,' Fifty?" he asked after a moment.

"Sir," Sarma said, "it's Five Hundred Neshok. My platoon has the guard duty on the fort's armory. We saw one of the five hundred's troopers drag a Sharonian prisoner out of the side of the main building where the five hundred's set up for interrogation. He—the prisoner, I mean, Sir—had been beaten. Badly beaten."

"And?" Carthos prompted with a slight frown as Sarma paused.

"And a little later we heard screams, Sir," the commander of fifty said. "A lot of screams. None of the other prisoners came back out. Not until two of Five Hundred Neshok's men dragged out another prisoner. Sir," Sarma met the thousand's eyes levelly, "the man's throat had been cut. He'd been murdered."

The fifty used the verb deliberately, and watched Carthos's eyes harden. Silence hovered for a moment, then the thousand allowed his chair to come back upright.

"As it happens, Fifty Sarma," he said, "I've already received a report on the events you've described. According to Five Hundred Neshok—and the corroborating testimony of five of his men who were physically present at the time—the dead prisoner attacked the Five Hundred. Exactly what the lunatic thought he was going to accomplish eludes me, of course, but five reliable witnesses—six of them, counting the Five Hundred himself—all agree that the prisoner managed to get his hands on one of the guard's weapons and that Five Hundred Neshok killed him in self-defense."

Sarma's jaw dropped. He couldn't help it . . . but he managed, somehow, to stop himself before he actually said anything.

Carthos' expression hardened ever so slightly, but the thousand kept his own voice level.

"I commend you for your obvious desire to see to it that Two Thousand Harshu's standing orders extending the protection of the Kerellian Accords to any prisoners we take are adhered to, Fifty. And I assure you that any possible violations of the Accords will be investigated most carefully. In this case, however, given the existence of half a dozen witnesses, all of whose testimony corroborates one another's, I suspect that you've overreacted to a situation in which you weren't privy to all the facts."

Sarma got his mouth closed again, locking his teeth against the protests which hammered upon them from behind. Gotten his hands on another guard's weapon, had he? Then perhaps Thousand Carthos could explain Just how that had happened when the dead man's hands were still chained behind him as he was dragged out of the interrogation room like so much slaughtered meat. Or explain where those screams had come from, or the reason for the savage beating the first prisoner had obviously sustained.

But those, Jaralt Sarma knew now, were questions he dared not ask. Not now, not here. Perhaps never, but definitely not today.

"I see, Sir," he heard his own voice say levelly. "You're right, of course. Obviously, I wasn't aware of all the details. Nor was I aware that you were already so well informed about the incident. I . . . apologize for wasting your time at a moment like this."

"Nonsense, Fifty," Carthos replied. "No officer is ever guilty of 'wasting' his superiors' time when he believes that something as serious as you obviously thought had happened has occurred. A deliberate violation of the Kerellian Accords?" The thousand shook his head. "The Articles of War themselves are quite specific about the responsibility of any Union officer to report something like that, after all."

"Yes, Sir, they are. I still appreciate your being so understanding, though."

Sarma was distantly surprised that he could get the words out without gagging, but he managed.

"Don't worry about it, Fifty." Carthos' smile somehow failed to reach his eyes, Sarma noticed. The thousand paused for a moment, then arched one eyebrow.

"Was there anything else, Fifty Sarma?"

"No, Sir," Jaralt Sarma said. "Nothing else, Sir."

Chapter Ten

"Voice Kinlafia?"

Darcel Kinlafia's head snapped up, like a startled rabbit exploding out of cover, as he turned to face the assistant chamberlain. His movement wasn't quite sudden enough to count as "whipping around," he realized an instant later, but it was too sudden for any other description.

"Yes?" His response came out half-strangled, and he cleared his throat, blushing furiously.

"If you'll come this way, please," the assistant chamberlain said with a small smile. Kinlafia didn't have to touch the man to feel the sympathy—and understanding—behind that smile, and a trickle of comfort flowed through him. Obviously, he was far from the first visitor to the Great Palace to wonder if his blood pressure was going to survive the visit. He supposed that the fact that most of them appeared to have made it through the ordeal intact should have been comforting, but somehow it didn't actually make him feel all that much better as the chamberlain led the way down the broad, marble-floored passageways with the walls adorned with paintings and tapestries, any one of which was probably worth a prince's ransom.

Don't be silly! Kinlafia scolded himself. Most of them are only worth a duke's ransom, you twit, whatever the cliche says! And it isn't "the Great Palace," any more, either.

He'd been more than a little surprised by the name change. For the better part of three centuries, this enormous, glittering fairyland had been known as the Great Palace, or the Grand Palace, depending upon how one chose to translate the Shurkhali. Now, though, it had reverted to the name it had borne for over two thousand years: Calirath Palace, the ancient and future home of the Calirath Dynasty.

The change in names had not met with universal approval. The Palace had been renamed by one of the early seneschals who had been restored to rule after the Ternathian withdrawal from Othmaliz. It had been widely proclaimed as a gesture of Othmalizi pride in its restored independence, and Kinlafia had no doubt that at least some Othmalizis had seen it as a poke in the eye for the dynasty which had ruled over them for so long.

Of course, what none of them realized at the time was that the seneschal in question only got away with it because the Caliraths themselves agreed to it. It's amazing how few people knew the family never actually surrendered ownership. I suppose that's because it's been imperial policy for almost three hundred years to allow the Othmalizi government to use it as if it owned it. But given the most recent seneschal's track record, it's probably also the only reason it didn't get sold—or turned into a rescort hotel!

None of the seneschals had gone out of their way to make known the minor fact of who actually owned the place (or the fact that it sat on what was technically still Ternathian territory, under the terms of the Empire's withdrawal from the rest of Othamliz and Tajvana), and Kinlafia suspected that had the Great Palace belonged to anyone else, some seneschal would have seized title by force long-ago. No one was quite stupid enough to do that to the Caliraths, however, and Kinlafia wondered how badly it must have irked generations of Othmalizi rulers to realize that they were living in someone else's house on sufferance . . . and that they couldn't even collect property taxes on it.

Judging from the current Seneschal's reaction to "his" parliament's decision to revert to the ancient and original name for the most historic single edifice in Tajvana, it must have irked them badly, indeed. The Seneschal had put the best face he could on the decision, but his mouthpieces had inveighed furiously against the entire notion in his usually tame parliament. Their failure to vote down the proposal had constituted a major political defeat for the Seneschal, and his irritation had been obvious despite his flowery speech of approval when the change became official.

Now Kinlafia remembered some of Shaylar's pithy comments about the Seneschal and surprised himself with a quiet chuckle of genuine amusement as he reflected upon how inordinately pleased she would have been by his current discomfiture.

The chamberlain glanced back at him, and this time Kinlafia's smile felt far more natural and unforced. The chamberlain gave him a slight nod, as if approving the change. Then they reached a huge, ornately carved door with the ancient motto of the Caliraths—I Stand Between—etched into the stone lintel above it. An armed guard in the green-and-gold of the Calirath Dynasty's personal retainers stood outside it, and the Voice felt something as the guard looked him up and down.

Kinlafia wasn't certain what he'd felt—or, rather, Felt. He'd never experienced anything quite like it before, and he found himself abruptly wondering if the occasional whispered rumors about the Ternathian imperial family's bodyguards and their Talents might not hold at least a kernel of truth, after all. Certainly there was something going on as the guard's eyes swept over him. Kinlafia could Feel a peculiar sort of . . . probing. Or testing, perhaps. Whatever it was, he couldn't put his mental hands on exactly the right label, but he knew it was there . . . whatever it was.

It lasted for no more than one or two heartbeats. Then the guard came to attention and nodded respectfully.

"Voice Kinlafia," he said quietly. "You're expected."

Kinlafia wondered if he was supposed to say anything in response, but before he could, the guard reached back—with his offhand, not his gun hand, Kinlafia noticed—and opened the door behind him. The Voice hesitated. He knew who was waiting for him on the other side of that threshold, and he abruptly discovered that even "call-me-Janaki's" letter of introduction wasn't nearly enough to preventthe butterflies in his midsection from launching into a complicated Arpathian drum dance.

In that moment, Darcel Kinlafia, who had accompanied Company-Captain chan Tesh's troopers through the swamp portal with rifle in hand, who had faced down brigands and outlaws, fought off claim jumpers and raiders, and stood his ground against charging bison, Ricathian cape buffalo, and even an infuriated grizzly bear, decided that the only thing to do was run. He was a fleet-footed man. If he started now, he could be all the way back to the train station in no more than twenty or thirty minutes. And from there—

The chamberlain's cleared throat interrupted the Voice's brief fantasy of escape. Kinlafia looked at him, and the chamberlain twitched his head at the open doorway. For an instant, Kinlafia actually considered backing away, but he discovered that he lacked sufficient nerve to chicken out at the last minute. And so, he nodded back to the chamberlain, and followed the palace staffer through the doorway with a surprisingly steady tread.

The room on the other side was on the small side—indeed it was positively tiny—by the scale of Calirath Palace, which meant it was no more than twenty-five or thirty feet on a side. It was furnished with surprisingly worn, overstuffed armchairs and a long, comfortable looking couch. A coffee-table which appeared to have been made from driftwood stood in front of the couch, and an old leather-topped desk sat before the wide bay window which looked out over the sun-soaked palace gardens. Bookshelves lined the wall opposite the window, and the priceless artwork so much in evidence elsewhere in the palace had been replaced by what were very good but obviously amateur watercolors and oils of a land whose soft, misty greenery was far removed from the sunbaked heat of Tajvana.

All of that registered instantly, but almost peripherally. It couldn't have been any other way, when the man who'd been seated behind that desk stood and held out his right hand.

Kinlafia froze. No one had ever instructed him in formal court protocol and etiquette, but he had a shrewd notion that one didn't simply walk up to the Emperor of Ternathia, say "How the hell are you?" and shake hands with him. On the other hand, he had an equally shrewd notion that one didn't refuse to shake hands with him, either.

"Voice Kinlafia."

Zindel chan Calirath's voice was a shade deeper than his son's, but it sounded remarkably similar, and the physical resemblance between him and Janaki was positively uncanny. The crown prince stood eight inches over six feet, and he and his father were very much of a size. If anything, Zindel might have been a fraction of an inch the taller, and his shoulders were definitely broader. Aside from that and the strands of gray beginning to thread themselves through the dark, gold-shot hair of the Caliraths, the Emperor looked far more like Janaki's older brother than his father, the Voice thought. Then he gave himself a mental shake as he realized he was keeping the Emperor of Ternathia—no, the designated Emperor of Sharona—standing there with his hand held out.

"Your Majesty," Kinlafia got out. It sounded a little strangled to his own ears, and he drew a deep breath, then reached out and gripped the hand of the most powerful man in Sharonian history.

Darcel Kinlafia had come into this room determined not to intrude upon the Emperor's privacy in any way, only to discover that the stress of the moment was too great for him to shut down his Talent completely. He was far too well trained, and too experienced, to let things get fully out of hand, of course. He didn't even come close to tapping into Zindel's thoughts, but the Emperor's emotions were something else, entirely. Kinlafia couldn't help sensing those, and he felt a moment of something very like panic as he realized that was the case.

Yet that flare of almost-panic was brief. It vanished in a moment, blown away on the genuine welcome flowing out of Zindel like some warm, comforting tide, and something else swept over him in its wake. He remembered how Janaki's sheer presence had radiated that mysterious magnetism, that awareness that he was in the presence of the direct descendent of Erthain the Great. Yet whatever it was that Janaki had, it was far stronger, almost physically overpowering, as Kinlafia gripped Zindel's hand. It was like an electric charge, flowing through him, and he wondered if the Emperor was aware of it.

"My son has written me quite an epistle about you, Voice Kinlafia," Zindel said. "He appears to have been impressed by you."

"Ah, Prince Janaki is too kind, Your Majesty," Kinlafia got out.

"His mother will be glad to hear that." The Emperor released the Voice's hand with a smile. "I, on the other hand, know Janaki a bit better than that. He wouldn't have written me a letter like this one—" the Emperor gestured at the creased sheets of paper lying on his desk "—unless he truly felt it was justified. And I suppose I should add, Voice Kinlafia, that I have a very lively respect for his judgment."

"Your Majesty, I don't—"

Kinlafia broke off. The truth was, that he didn't have a clue what to say, and Zindel chuckled.

"I apologize, Voice Kinlafia. I'm sure this is all rather overwhelming after months out on the frontier. Tajvana traffic all by itself is probably enough to leave you longing to run for cover. And as if that weren't enough, here you are, dragged into the Palace for a face-to-face interview with that bogeyman, the Emperor."

There was so much genuine warmth and amusement in Zindel's expression that Kinlafia found himself chuckling as he nodded.

"I would never call you a bogeyman, Your Majesty," he said ruefully. "A little scary, now . . . that I might go for."

"I don't suppose I can blame you for that. On the other hand, at the moment what I most am is a father who hasn't seen his son in months. And you, Voice Kinlafia, are the man he picked to send his letters home with. That would be enough to make you welcome without any other recommendation from him. But you're also the Voice who relayed Voice Nargra-Kolmayr's last message to us, and from what Janaki's had to say in his letter about you, you're the sort of representative we're going to need in our new parliament, too. That's quite a combination of recommendations."

"Your Majesty, that was Prince Janaki's idea. Running for Parliament, I mean. It hadn't even crossed my mind until he raised the possibility."

"Which isn't a bad recommendation for office all by itself." Zindel's smile turned far less humorous. "Most people who start out wanting power for its own sake shouldn't be trusted with it in the first place. Which, I suppose, must sound a bit strange—if not hypocritical—coming from someone in my position."

Kinlafia made no response to that last statement, and the amusement returned to the Emperor's smile.

"I see Janaki was correct about your natural . . . diplomacy, Voice Kinlafia," he observed. "Don't worry. I won't put your native tact to any more tests. For now, at least."

Zindel chan Calirath watched the tanned, brown-haired Voice with careful attentiveness . . . and with more than just his eyes. He knew the fanciful rumors—legends, really—about the mysterious Talents which were somehow reserved as the exclusive property of the House of Calirath. Of course he did; everyone knew about those ridiculous tall tales. But what Zindel knew that most people didn't was that there was a solid core of truth behind them.

The Calirath bloodline extended far beyond the immediate imperial family. It could be no other way, after so many millennia, and the longstanding policy of the emperors of Ternathia to not simply permit but actively encourage periodic marriage outside the ranks of the aristocracy had only pushed that extension harder and farther. And yet there were the Talents which had been persistently associated with the imperial house for literally thousands of years but which scarcely ever manifested outside the immediate imperial family. And in addition to the Talents which everyone knew about, there were others, most of which were spoken of only in whispers, about which very few, indeed, knew a thing.

Zindel chan Calirath had always cherished his own doubts about the mythic, almost demigod stature of Erthain the Great as the sun source of all Talents. Yet he knew of no other explanation for the knowledge conserved within the Calirath archives. Ternathia had given the Talents to the entire human race . . . but the imperial dynasty had not shared all it knew. Only the Caliraths, their most trusted Healers, and the high priests of the Triad knew how to activate the potential to Glimpse the future, for example. And only the Caliraths and those same trusted Healers knew how to awaken the other Talents bound up with the Winged Crown.

There'd been times Zindel felt more than a little uncomfortable with the notion that such knowledge had been kept secret for so long. The fact that no one was ever informed of it without first voluntarily agreeing to have that information placed forever under seal by a Mind Healer had also bothered him upon occasion. Yet, in the end, he'd always come back to the inescapable fact that the knowledge which reserved those Talents as the Crown's monoploy constituted one of the Empire's most important state secrets—one which had literally saved the Empire on at least two occasions. That was the sort of advantage no ruler could justify casting away.

The imperial family and its spokesmen had always been careful to smile at the "absurd notion" that such "secret Talents" existed. But they'd always been careful never to expressly deny their existence, either, which meant most people had come to the conclusion that there was some substance to the rumors, but not a lot. Still, the ability of the Ternathian Emperor to judge the fidelity of ambassadors and councilors, to recognize those driven by personal ambition, to pick out those who might betray his trust, was legendary, and as Zindel gazed at Darcel Kinlafia, he knew Janaki's judgment had not been in error.

Of course, Janaki didn't tell him everything, the Emperor thought. And I'm not going to tell him, either. Not yet, at least. I don't have any clearer Glimpse of why it's so important to Andrin to have this man in Tajvana than Janaki does. But Janaki's right about that, too.

"I'm afraid my schedule for the day is on the full side, Voice Kinlafia. It always is, actually. However, I've read Janaki's letter, and my initial impression of you strongly suggests that he's right about both your character and your electability. And the importance of the service you could render not simply to this new world government we're seeking to establish but to Sharona as a whole. I also realize that having the Crown Prince of Ternathia—and the Emperor, as well—suggest that to you has to be overwhelming."

"<thinspace>'Overwhelming' is a grossly inadequate choice of words, Your Majesty," Kinlafia said with a grimace, and Zindel chuckled appreciatively. The fact that Kinlafia was able to make even that mild a joke in his very first private audience said truly amazing things about the Voice's resilience. Things, Zindel suspected, which Kinlafia himself had never even suspected.

"I hope we can get past that," the Emperor said now. "I'll be honest with you. For all of the power and indisputable prestige which clings to the Winged Crown and the Calirath Dynasty, we can never have too many allies in the political process. I hope you'll become one of those allies. Not out of any sort of blind loyalty to my House—the fact that you aren't Ternathian yourself will probably help there—but because we both have the best interests of Sharona at heart and recognize the need for those who share that commitment to work together."

"Your Majesty," Kinlafia said slowly, "I appreciate what you've just said. And I appreciate everything the Prince said when he urged me to seek office. More than that, I hope we will find ourselves in agreement if I should manage to win election to Parliament. But if I do win election, my decisions as a member of Parliament will have to be my decisions. I hope you realize I mean absolutely no disrespect when I say this, but if I should find myself in disagreement with you, I would have no choice but to say so openly."

"An ally who isn't willing to tell you when he thinks you're wrong isn't an ally worth having, Voice Kinlafia," Zindel said, and it was hard to conceal his satisfaction. It took a huge amount of intestinal fortitude—not to mention a spring-steel spine—to stand up to the Emperor of Ternathia in a face-to-face audience. People who could do that were far too valuable to let slip away.

"I'm glad you think so, Your Majesty." Kinlafia's tone and expression were still somewhat guarded, and Zindel shrugged.

"I'm sure if you do disagree with me, and if I think you're wrong to disagree, we'll have the occasional . . . energetic debate, let's say. I've been told by my physicians and Healers that occasional bouts of elevated pulse rate and respiration are good for my circulatory system, though, so I don't think it will be a problem. Not," Zindel smiled charmingly, "from my perspective, at any rate."

"I hope you won't take this wrongly, Your Majesty," the Voice said wryly, "but you're really quite a bit like your son. Or possibly the other way around, I suppose."

"I've been told—especially by his mother—that it runs in the family." Zindel chuckled, and Kinlafia smiled. Then the Emperor allowed his expression to turn more sober.

"Seriously, Voice Kinlafia, I believe Janaki was correct about the political asset you represent. And I also share his judgment that it would be in the best interests of Sharona and of the House of Calirath for me to assist you in launching your political career. Mind you, it could be fatal for me to give you too much assistance. I have no intention of offering you any sort of quid pro quo, any sort of 'understanding' or obligation to become 'my man' in Parliament. First, because I don't believe you would accept my aid if I attached that sort of string to it. Second, because people who allow themselves to be bought by promises of power from one man are generally susceptible to being bought by bigger promises from someone else later on. And third, because people who share your beliefs and support your policies because they think they're the correct policies are far more effective as allies than people whose uncritical allegiance, as everyone knows, has been effectively bought and paid for.

"If, however, I campaign too energetically for your election, there would be those who simply refused to believe I wasn't buying your eventual support. I trust you understand that?"

"Of course I do, Your Majesty."

"Good. Having said all of that, though, I think we can contrive to get you off to a rousing start. And in the process, you can probably give the public's morale a fairly substantial poke."

"Your Majesty?"

"As I'm sure you're aware, the next week is going to be exhaustingly full of festivities to celebrate the formal ratification of the Act of Unification, culminating with the Coronation Ball and Coronation the week after that. In fact, you've gotten home in the nick of time. The actual signing ceremony is scheduled for this evening, in the Great Throne Room. It's going to be one of those unbearably formal affairs, with full regalia and the kind of shoes that have you limping inside five minutes. Fortunately, given how recently you've arrived and the fact that no one could possibly expect you to have proper formal attire, you can probably dodge that particular bullet."

Kinlafia's expression reminded Zindel forcibly of a cornered rabbit, and the Emperor smiled crookedly.

"What you won't be able to dodge," he told the Voice, "is the parade scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. I understand they're pulling out all the stops. It's going to be incredibly gaudy, with floats, marching bands, mimes, tumblers, military units from at least two dozen countries, and everything else you can imagine. And you, Voice Kinlafia, are going to be one of the prime exhibits."

"I beg your pardon?" Kinlafia's voice was curiously stifled sounding, Zindel observed.

"Of course you are, and for a lot of reasons. Probably the most important, and I'm deadly serious about this, is that you represent a living link with Shaylar." Zindel's eyes and tone alike were both level as he gazed into Kinlafia's eyes. "You may find that uncomfortable, but it's true, and the people of Tajvana—and of all of Sharona, for that matter—need to see you. The SUNN Voicecasts have made you a symbol, one inextricably linked with what happened to your survey crew out there. And at this moment, when everything is in such a state of flux and there's so much uncertainty, symbols are hugely important."

Kinlafia obviously wanted to reject Zindel's analysis. For a moment, the Emperor thought that was exactly what he was going to do. But then, manifestly against his will, the Voice nodded slowly, instead.

"At the same time, however," Zindel continued after a moment, "politics is perhaps the most pragmatic of all human endeavors. To put it bluntly, one always tries to kill as many birds as possible with a single stone in the political arena. And make no mistake about it, Voice Kinlafia—even the most high-minded of statesmen must be an effective practitioner of politics if he hopes to accomplish anything.

"In this case, the visibility of the Unification Parade will provide you with an invaluable platform from which to launch your political career. And, if you have no objection, I intend to see to it that the platform it offers is used as effectively as possible."

"I beg your pardon, Your Majesty?"

"In just a few moments, the chamberlain will escort you to Alazon Yanamar's office." Kinlafia looked blank, and Zindel shrugged. "Alazon is my Privy Voice. She's not simply one of my most valuable Councilors, either; she's also my political chief of staff and probably my most trusted political adviser after First Councilor Taje himself. She'll see to it that you're slotted neatly into the parade in an appropriately visible niche. She'll also see to it that you're properly accoutered for the ordeal."

The Calirath smile flashed again, and Kinlafia returned it, although the Voice's smile seemed rather more nervous.

"Trust me, Voice Kinlafia. Alazon will make sure it doesn't hurt a bit. Besides, I think you'll like her."

"I'm sure I will, Your Majesty," Kinlafia said politely.

"At any rate, in addition to getting you launched properly in the parade, Alazon will also be the most suitable member of my staff to serve as a neophyte politician's adviser. And she'll understand how the Crown can most effectively support your candidacy without being too obvious about it."

"I see, Your Majesty."

Kinlafia, Zindel observed, continued to nurse a few reservations about accepting too much of the imperial favor, which spoke well of the man's fundamental integrity. It would be up to Alazon to show him that Zindel truly intended to attach no strings to his support.

Well, not any political strings, at any rate, the Emperor told himself. Personal loyalty, now. That's something else, entirely.

Not that Zindel intended to tie that personal loyalty to himself.

"After you've had an opportunity to meet with Alazon and get your immediate schedule squared away," he continued, "I trust you'll be able to join us for supper. I'm afraid it will be a little late this evening, what with the signing."

"Supper?"

The panicky look was back in Kinlafia's eyes, Zindel noticed.

"Don't worry," the Emperor said soothingly. "It's not going to be a formal state occasion. In fact, you'll be the only guest. And, before you object, let me remind you of what I said at the very beginning of this interview. None of us have seen Janaki in months. You have. His mother is going to be just as anxious as I to hear anything you can tell us about him. She'll want to meet you, and the opportunity for you to begin experiencing this sort of affair will be extremely useful and valuable. If you'll pardon my saying so, the chance to dip your toes into these waters in an intimate, friendly sort of way is nothing to sneeze at."

"Of course not, Your Majesty!" Kinlafia said quickly. "I understand. And thank you."

"Don't mention it. As I said, the Empress is looking forward to the opportunity to talk to you. And, of course, you'll also have the opportunity to meet my daughters."

Chapter Eleven

The door to Alazon Yanamar's office was less ornately carved than the private audience chamber's. It was more ornately carved, on the other hand, than any other door Kinlafia had ever seen outside a Temple, he observed sourly, remembering his activist parents' views on "imperial trappings." And, for that matter, on "professional political operatives," which, from what the Emperor had said, undoubtedly included the woman behind that door, Voice or no Voice.

Great, he thought. Just great. My political keeper's going to be another Voice, with all the opportunities for "subtle coaching" that provides! Won't that be fun?

His guiding chamberlain rapped discreetly on the gleaming portal. The sound he produced was so soft Kinlafia doubted anyone could possibly have heard it, but he was clearly wrong, since the door was quickly opened by a young, golden-haired woman with bright blue eyes.

"Yes?" she said.

"Voice Kinlafia to meet with Privy Voice Yanamar," the chamberlain said, and those bright blue eyes moved to Kinlafia.

"Voice Kinlafia!" The welcome in the young woman's voice was genuine, Kinlafia realized. "It's an honor to meet you, sir! Privy Voice Yanamar is expecting you. Please, come in!"

"Thank you," Kinlafia replied, just a bit taken aback by her enthusiasm. Then he glanced at the chamberlain who had been his lifeline—so far, at least. "And thank you," he said, with utmost sincerity.

"You're welcome, sir," the chamberlain said. "It's been my honor." He bowed to Kinlafia, then bestowed a somewhat less profound yet still deeply respectful bow upon the young woman in the doorway, and headed off down the endless hallway.

Of course, Kinlafia thought, they're all endless in this place, aren't they?

The young woman opened the door wider and stood back, and he accepted her silent invitation to step across the threshold into a pleasantly furnished office.

"I'm Ulantha Jastyr, Privy Voice Yanamar's assistant," the young woman said. As he concentrated on her, Kinlafia realized she was a very strongly Talented Voice herself. "As I say, the Privy Voice has been expecting you. If you'll follow me, please."

He followed Jastyr across the outer office to an inner doorway. Unlike the chamberlain, she didn't knock; she simply alerted Yanamar via Voice, then smiled over her shoulder at Kinlafia, opened the door, and stood aside.

"Thank you," he said once more, and stepped past her into yet another of Calirath Palace's obviously infinite number of rooms and chambers.

This one was smaller than the Emperor's private audience chamber, although it was still spacious and high-ceilinged. It also had windows overlooking the same garden, and it was decorated with horses. Lots and lots of horses. There were paintings, two tapestries, and half a dozen large, framed photographic prints on the walls, and a long display shelf across the entire width of the office's bookshelves held literally dozens of ceramic, crystal, and bronze horses. Kinlafia was no art connoisseur, but he didn't have to be one to recognize that many of them were exquisite (and undoubtedly expensive) art pieces in their own right.

The plethora of equines distracted his immediate attention from the new office's occupant. Only for a moment, though. Then he turned towards her—and froze.

Alazon Yanamar, he realized, was about his own age. She was slender, high-bosomed, delicately boned and of little more than moderate height for a Ternathian woman, which meant she was perhaps an inch and a half shorter than he was. And she was obviously a very powerful Voice; he could feel the strength of her Talent from ten feet away.

All of that was true, he realized, yet it wasn't what registered upon him so immediately and powerfully. No, what registered upon him were the huge, incredibly deep, clear gray eyes and the mass of midnight-black hair framing an oval face which the gods had clearly designed for laughter, humor, and intelligence.

They trapped him, those eyes. He remembered the ancient saying, the description of eyes as the "window of the soul." Between Voices, that could be literally true, and as Darcel Kinlafia looked into these eyes' crystalline depths, he Saw the glowing power deep in the heart of her.

It wasn't until much, much later that he finally realized Alazon Yanamar, despite an exquisite figure, was not a beautiful woman in any classical sense of the word. Her cheekbones were too high, her nose was too pert, her chin too determined. And none of it mattered at all. Not then, and not ever.

"Voice Kinlafia." Her speaking voice was deep, for a woman. It was also rich and musical, shimmering with subtle undertones that rippled like clear water over beds of golden sand. It went through him like harp notes of sunlight, and he drew a deep, lung-filling breath.

"Voice Yanamar," he replied, and saw those gray eyes widen slightly even as he heard the edge of hoarseness in his own voice.

She started to say something more, then paused. He could Feel her looking into his own eyes, and then her nostrils flared.

"Oh, dear," she said softly, and Kinlafia reached out to touch her cheek with birdwing fingers.

He'd never done such a thing in his life. Certainly not with a woman he'd never even met before! This time, it was the most natural possible gesture in the multiverse.

I never really believed anyone when they told me about things like this, he thought. Which just proves the gods do have a sense of humor, I suppose.

"This is an unexpected complication," she said after a moment, and Kinlafia smiled as that magnificent voice sang through him.

"I suppose it is," he agreed. "I never expected it, anyway."

She laughed. It was a delightful sound, and Kinlafia found himself smiling hugely at her.

Under any other circumstances, a corner of his mind recognized, he would have felt like an utter idiot standing here, touching a strange woman's face, grinning like a fool, and floating with his feet ten inches off her office floor. Under these circumstances, it was inconceivable that he could have done anything else.

Occasionally—very occasionally—Voice met Voice and, in that first instant of awareness, recognized one another. Felt the interlocking of Talent and heart. Other people might speak about "love at first sight," but for Voices, it could be literally true . . . and the bright glory of that moment of recognition could be the greatest tragedy in their lives. There was no guarantee that two Voices "meant for one another" would find each other at all, much less before one of them had met and loved someone else. When that happened, when one or both of them weren't free, this soul-deep fusion could cause incredible pain for everyone involved.

I just thought I loved Shaylar, Kinlafia thought. Then he gave himself a mental shake. No, that's not true. I did love Shaylar, and I always will. But this—

"What to do we do now?" she said, as the laughter left her voice but not her eyes.

"You're asking me?" Kinlafia shook his head. "I didn't even know your name until ten minutes ago!"

"Does that matter?" she asked simply.

"Not at all," he told her softly, fingertips caressing her cheek.

"Good." She closed her eyes for a moment, leaning her cheek against his touch, then inhaled deeply, opened her eyes, and straightened her spine.

"Good," she repeated. "I'll remind you of that quite often in the future, I'm sure. But I'm very much afraid we don't have time to explore us at this moment."

"No, we don't," he agreed, yet even as he did, his Voice continued. <But we will find time for it, My Lady. Soon.>

<Oh, that we will, love,> she promised him in a Voice every bit as deep and musical as her speaking voice.

Most people, Kinlafia knew, would never have understood. Even another Voice would find it difficult—as Kinlafia himself always had, when he'd seen it between other Voices—to truly realize, or to believe, perhaps, that two total strangers could meet and know instantly that the gods themselves had crafted them to be the two halves of a single whole. That they could share such a serene, unshakable confidence that they were meant to be together. That, in fact, they already were together.

I never understood it, at any rate, even when Mayla and Hilas tried to explain it to me. He shook his head mentally at the memory of his friends trying to tell him how it worked. But maybe it's different for everyone. Maybe it hits all of us in a different way. Or maybe it's just something no one can explain, even to another Voice, unless it's happened to them?

He didn't know the answer to his own question, but he knew that he would never be able to explain it. Not how it had happened, or how potent it was, or how magical. Or how something so deep, so powerful, could be simultaneously so calm, so patient and ready to wait upon the future. It was like standing in the eye of a hurricane. All the incredible power and passion, the wonder of having met one another, the promise that so much more was still to come, roared about them with strength to shake the multiverse by the scruff of its neck until its teeth rattled, and yet they stood in a place of crystal clarity that was poised and peaceful, like gold fish drifting effortless as dreams over golden gravel in a deep, clear pool.

"Please," she said, stepping back and waving one graceful hand at the comfortable chairs placed to flank the coffee-table and form an intimate little conversational nook. "Sit down. We've got a lot to discuss. Officially, I mean."

"Of course," he agreed, and obeyed the invitation.

She let him settle into his chair before she picked up the folder on her blotter, walked around the desk, and seated herself in her own chair, facing him. She looked into his eyes for a moment longer, then took a fountain pen from her pocket, uncapped it, and opened the folder in her lap. It was, he recognized, her way of announcing that it was time for business.

"Now," she said briskly, "about this parade . . ."

Zindel chan Calirath's eyebrows arched as Yanamar Alazon and Darcel Kinlafia were ushered into the private dining room.

That dining room lay in the Emperor's Wing, the most recently modernized portion of the palace (for Calirath Palace, "modernization" was an unending process which had begun literally thousands of years ago), and the gas-jets and oil lamps of the less modern areas had been augmented with the relatively new incandescent lights. Personally, Zindel didn't much care for them, esthetically speaking. Their light was much harder edged, in his opinion. But it was also undeniably brighter and a huge boon for people (like certain emperors he could have named) who found themselves forced to deal with ream after ream of paperwork and reports. And unlike him,Vareena much preferred the new lighting—probably because of her interest in needlepoint—while even he had to admit that it made it easier to see people's faces and read their expressions.

Like now, for instance. For two people who had never met before that very afternoon, the two Voices were indisputably together, and the Emperor forcibly suppressed an all but irresistible temptation to grin like a triumphant urchin. The human being in him was simultaneously touched by and envious of the all but visible glow radiating from them. Like most Caliraths with the Calirath Talent, Zindel had often resented the fact that Glimpses were so often things of tragic portent and never of things like this. But he needed no Glimpse to realize what had happened, and that was the reason for his sense of triumph. He'd never expected, never dreamed, that anything like this might occur, but the Emperor in him recognized instantly how valuable it could prove.

Stop that, Zindel! he scolded himself. Just this once stand here and be glad for someone without thinking about how what's happened to them can help you do your damned job! Besides, you've never seen Alazon look happier in her life.

"Voice Kinlafia," he said, walking towards the Voice with his hand once more extended. The footman who had ushered Kinlafia into the chamber looked moderately shocked, but it was important to Zindel that this evening be placed firmly on a non-state-occasion basis as quickly as possible.

"Your Majesty," Kinlafia responded, and gripped the extended hand with rather more aplomb than he'd shown the first time Zindel had held it out to him. "I'm honored by the invitation," the Voice continued. "And I'd be even more honored if you could see your way to using my first name."

"Oh, I think I can see my way clear to doing that," Zindel assured him, then turned and extended his free hand to the tallish, early-middle-aged woman standing beside him. She was an extraordinarily handsome woman, with the very first frosting of silver just beginning to touch her hair, and despite her height, she looked petite and delicate as she stood beside the Emperor in a simple little gown which even Kinlafia recognized had probably cost thousands of marks.

"Darcel Kinlafia," the Emperor said, "my wife, Varena. Varena, my love, this is Voice Kinlafia."

The footman who'd looked moderately shocked at Zindel's informal greeting to Kinlafia looked as if he'd dislocated his plunging jaw this time, the Emperor noted with a fair degree of pleasure. The Hawkwing Palace staff were accustomed to his often deplorably casual private manners. Many of them even recognized that his deliberate informality on private occasions was one of the ways he maintained his sanity during the endless nonprivate occasions to which he and his family were subjected. The expanded staff here in Calirath Palace were still figuring that out, and some of them were clearly scandalized by it all.

Well, it's just as well if they start getting used to it early, he thought. I'm too old and set in my ways to change now. Besides, maintaining my sanity probably just got a lot harder.

"Voice Kinlafia."

Janaki had obviously gotten his physique from his father's side of the family, Kinlafia decided, yet as he looked into the prince's mother's eyes, he saw an echo of Janaki's enduring patience. He could readily envision Janaki matching Zindel's famous Conclave outburst about the "godsdamned fish," but the patience which had taken the Crown Prince through Kinlafia's debriefing again and again . . . that had come from his mother. Darcel Kinlafia never doubted for a moment that Zindel chan Calirath would have been just as thorough, have taken just as much time, just as many pains, had that task fallen to him instead of his son. But Janaki's gently supportive sympathy, even as he forced Kinlafia to relive every horrible moment of Shaylar's last Voice message, had owed as much to his mother's compassion as to his father's iron sense of duty.

"Your Majesty," he replied now, and bent over the hand she extended. New Farnalians didn't spend as much time kissing ladies' hands as some, but Kinlafia's training—both as a Voice, and from the Portal Authority—had included the rudiments of courtesy from virtually all of Sharona's major civilizations. His instructors might never have anticipated that he would someday find himself kissing a hand quite as exalted as this one, and they might not have included the proper modalities for being privately introduced to the Emperor of Sharona, but they had covered this, at least, he reflected with profound gratitude.

<She's really a very nice person who wouldn't dream of having your head cut off just because you didn't kiss her hand properly,> Alazon's deep, rich Voice murmured in the back of his brain.

<Really? What a relief!> he replied as he straightened and met the Empress' eyes.

"I'm very pleased to meet you . . . Darcel," Varena said. "I wish that the events which have turned all of our lives on end over the last few months had never happened, of course. But everything I've read and heard tells me how very fortunate we were to have you out there at Hell's Gate. I only regret," her voice and eyes alike softened, "that you were forced to endure so much sorrow and pain for the rest of us."

"Your Majesty," he told her, "what happened to my friends—and to me, I suppose—had nothing to do with anyone except the people who killed them."

"Perhaps not," she acknowledged. "Yet the fact remains that you were the one who got Voice Nargra-Kolmayr's message to all of us. And so, however it was that that duty fell to you, the fact remains that all of us are deeply, deeply in your debt."

"And about to become more deeply so," Zindel put in briskly. Kinlafia and the Empress both turned their heads to look at him, and he chuckled. "Darcel is a Voice, my dear. I think you're about to find that he's brought you more than just letters from Janaki."

"But I—" Varena began, only to pause as Kinlafia gently squeezed the hand he was still holding.

"Your Majesty, I realize you aren't a telepath yourself. That's one reason I asked if Privy Voice Yanamar might join us this evening, as well, when I discovered that she was a Projective, as well as a Voice."

<"One reason?"> a musical Voice rippled through his thoughts. <I like that!>

<Hush woman!> he replied. <It's not only diplomatic, it's even true.>

"I hadn't realized you were aware of that," Zindel told him dryly. "It isn't exactly something we've announced to the world in general."

"Oh, I've become aware of quite a few things about the Privy Voice, Your Majesty," Kinlafia assured him.

"Good. And, if I may be permitted to touch upon just a bit of official business after all, have you and Alazon gotten your schedule squared away for that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned parade we're all going to have to endure tomorrow afternoon?"

"We have, Your Majesty," Alazon replied for Kinlafia. "Mind you, I think the tailors left Darcel in a state of shock."

"Really?" Zindel's eyes twinkled, and Kinlafia shrugged.

"Your Majesty, I hope you won't mind my saying that I've never seen such a ridiculous looking outfit in my entire life. I couldn't believe they were serious when they showed me the pattern sketches!"

"After five thousand years, court fashion has tried out pretty much all the variations," Zindel said. "There's not much new they can do to us, so they have these periodic spasms of 'historical inspiration' when they go back and reinterpret famous periods of the past. If I remember correctly, the inspiration for our current . . . costumes was the period of Wailyana the Great. Which, if you're familiar with your Ternathian history, was just over nine hundred years ago. Of course, according to my own research, Wailyana's tailors were inspired by the Time of Conquest, which technically ended about six hundred years before her time."

Kinlafia looked into the Emperor's eyes. For a moment, he was certain Zindel had to be putting him on, but—

<Oh, no, he isn't,> Alazon Told him. <There are some disadvantages to being the descendents of the oldest imperial dynasty in Sharonian history, you know.>

"I hadn't realized their . . . lineage was quite so distinguished, Your Majesty," he told Zindel. "And I hope I'm not going to poke anyone's eye out with that ridiculous rapier Privy Voice Yanamar insists that I really do have to wear. But, to be totally honest, what truly astounded me was their promise to have the entire outfit ready for final fitting before lunch tomorrow."

"Our staff, unfortunately, has had entirely too much experience meeting impossible deadlines, I'm afraid," Empress Varena said with a slight smile. "Mind you, we take shameless advantage of that experience!"

"Yes, we do," her husband agreed. "In fact, I—"

Zindel broke off as a side door opened to admit the imperial daughters. Kinlafia turned towards the new arrivals, one eyebrow rising, then, for the second time in a single day, froze as if he'd just been punched squarely between the eyes.

He recognized all of them. He would have been able to put names with faces just on the basis of all of the recent newspaper coverage. Gods knew their photographs and sketches had been everywhere in the papers he'd been devouring ever since he'd reached civilized universes once more! But this wasn't simply a matter of identifying them from their pictures. He recognized them.

Anbessa, the youngest. The willful, eleven-year-old, golden-haired whirlwind of energy. A little terror, with all of her family's determination but without the rough edges-smoothing experience of maturity. Who, if she'd only realized, held her father's heart in her often grubby little hands.

Razial, the middle daughter. Dark-haired, like her father, but without the golden highlights. Taller than Anbessa, at fifteen, with the awkward coltishness of adolescence and all the tempestuous passion of her raging hormones, all undergirt with an astounding sensitivity and gifted ear for the beauty of language. The painter whose landscapes decorated her father's study wall, and the daughter whose desk drawer was stuffed with poetry which could have made a statue laugh or a boulder weep.