Hell Hath No Fury (23 page)

Vothon, Toralk thought. You've been planning this all along. You're using Neshok, and you're making sure that when he finally goes down, he can't take anyone else-except maybe you-with him.

"Sir-"

"No, Klayrman. We're not going to discuss this any more. Not tonight, at any rate. Tonight, we're going to have supper together, and we're going to discuss the latest intelligence data from Five Hundred Neshok and how it affects our future planning.

"I've decided we're going to have to split our forces. We can't afford to leave this other sub-chain just sitting there, waiting to serve as a conduit into our own rear areas, especially if we don't manage to punch out Traisum cleanly, after all. So, I'm going to send Carthos up the other branch first thing in the morning. He'll have four universes to cross before he gets to Traisum, whereas we'll only have two more, but according to the Five Hundred's reports-" the two thousand showed his teeth in a cold, humorless smile "-those are very recently discovered universes, compared to the ones along the other route, and they're covered only by very light forces. I'm not that worried about the opposition he might hit, but it's also a lot longer route, almost twice as long as the shorter, better-explored one. Even with dragons, it's going to be a long, bitter haul, and it will be even worse for the other side if they hold us short of Traisum and try to exploit the other sub-chain to get at our rear. That means it's going to be a secondary theater for both sides, and that we're a lot more likely to hit serious resistance in Failcham and Karys than he is on his axis of advance.

"And that, in turn, means I'm going to need my best Air Force Commander here, so I'm keeping you on this side. I'm afraid you'll be acting under my direct orders, while Carthos gets a more independent command." The two thousand met Toralk's gaze levelly. "I'm sorry about that. It means he'll get more credit for making the decisions about everything, ranging from tactics to supply considerations … even methods of intelligence-gathering. I'm afraid no one's going to give you a lot of credit for any decisions like that which have to be made during our own advance."

Toralk looked back at his commanding officer and realized what Harshu was truly saying.

I shouldn't, he thought. I shouldn't let him do this. I should either support his decisions, his policies, openly, or else ask to be relieved, not let him cover me while he throws Carthos and Neshok to the dragons … along with himself.

For a long, quivering instant, he hung on the brink of saying that out loud. But then-

"That's all right, Sir. I won't pretend I'm happy about everything you've just said, but you're right about at least one thing. We do have a job to do out here, and I suppose it's time we rolled up our sleeves and got on with it."

Division-Captain Arlos chan Geraith stepped out of the comfortably heated car onto the rear platform.

The noise of steel wheels drumming along steel rails, the hammer of wind, the vibrating rattle of fittings and glass windows, filled his ears, and it was bitterly cold (although not nearly so cold as it would get in a few more weeks) as the enormous train rushed through the night.

The vast breadth of the Grocyran Plain stretched away to the north and east, an endless land of swamps, birch forests, and conifers in the center of the vast continent of Chairifon. The double strand of rails stretched thirty-nine hundred miles, as a bird might fly, from this universe's Lake Arau in the eastern foothills of the Arau Mountains to the southwestern mountains of Harkala, close to the ancient city of Aeravas. But this massive train, loaded with the men, horses, vehicles, and artillery of the First Brigade of his Third Dragoon Division of the imperial Ternathian Army was no bird. The compromises forced upon the Trans-Temporal Express' construction engineers by uncooperative terrain had added at least seven hundred miles to that theoretical straight-line distance.

They were less than halfway across the universe of Faryika, pounding furiously down-chain towards Traisum, with almost nine thousand miles still to go. The good news was that there was only one more water gap to be crossed; the bad news was that the gap was over a thousand miles wide and that shipping would be agonizingly hard to come by in the thinly inhabited universe of Salym. It was going to take time to get his men and equipment across that stretch of saltwater.

Time, he thought. Please, Vothan give me the time! It's not supposed to take months just to get my troops into the likely theatre of operations! The War College never prepared any of us for a move like this one.

Or, his thought turned grimmer, a war like this one could turn into.

He unbuttoned the top button of his coat and took the flat, thin case from an inside pocket. He opened it and extracted one of the long, slender, handrolled New Ternath cigars, then returned the case to his pocket. He took a moment to savor the rich smell of the tobacco, passing it slowly under his nose, then clipped the end, put it in his mouth, and struck a match. He shielded the fragile flame in his cupped palms until it had burned away the last of the chemical taste, then lit the cigar slowly and carefully, turning the tip in the match flame until it was evenly alight. Then he tossed the match from the platform and watched it arc out into the carriage's slipstream like a short-lived comet, snuffed out the instant it left the wind-shadow of the platform.

He stepped to the right side of the platform and leaned on the rail as he gazed out westward across the plains. Thick stands of birch, trunks gleaming silver-white in the moonlight, stretched away on either side of the right-of-way, interspersed with equally thick stands of evergreens. The reflected light from the coach windows raced along the ground, keeping pace with the train, flickering hugely as it crossed boulders or the sides of the occasional rail cutting. Stars gleamed overhead, and a halo of ice crystals encircled the high, white moon as it floated in a sky of midnight blue. Far ahead, invisible from chan Geraith's position on the platform, three powerful engines thundered down a diamond cavern, carved through the darkness by the lead engine's powerful headlamp, and a thick streamer of funnel smoke trailed back from them like a twisted banner, shot silver and black with moonlight.

They were the only bubble of life and light-of human life, at least-for literally thousands of miles.

The permanent human population of this entire universe was less than twenty thousand, which meant First Brigade's three thousand men had increased it by over fifteen percent. And it also meant that those less than twenty thousand human souls were a tiny, tiny presence on this vast and empty world.

They'd had to leave the mighty Paladins of their original train behind. None of the immediately available heavylift freighters had boasted the capacity to carry those enormous locomotives across the water gap in Haysam. Besides, they'd been too badly needed for the Sharona to Haysam run. Hayrdar Sheltim, chan Geraith's train master, had needed three of the Norgamar Works' individually smaller and less powerful Windcleaver-J 2-8-4 locomotives to replace the pair of Paladins, but it was probably just as well. The Windcleavers were nimbler than their larger cousins, better suited to the mountainous terrain between them and Harkala.

He drew heavily on the cigar, watching its tip glow brightly, savoring the moment of privacy and the pristine beauty of the world racing past him at least as much as he savored the rich taste of the smoke.

He treasured moments like this. Moments when he could step away from his staff, his unit commanders.

When he could take off the persona of a division commander, allow himself to step off the stage where his performance must engender confidence and determination.

I suppose it's sort of sad that I have to stand out here freezing my posterior off to find what Misanya calls my "comfort zone."

He smiled at the thought of his wife. She was a soldier's daughter, as well as a soldier's wife, and she understood what that meant, how their joint lives must be subordinated to the sometimes harsh demands of his chosen profession. But it had also left her with a refreshing irreverence for the sort of posturing and grand tragedy that certain soldiers of their acquaintance liked to embrace. She was quick to exterminate any tendencies in that direction in her own husband, at least, for which chan Geraith was profoundly thankful.

Then his smile faded as he reflected upon how many weary thousands of miles behind him Misanya was.

Stop that! he scolded himself. You're not the only a soldier who's missing his wife tonight, Arlos!

Which was true enough. And it wasn't as if he didn't have enough other things to worry about. He particularly disliked what Company-Captain Lisar chan Korthal, his staff Voice, had been reporting from the negotiations at Hell's Gate. The obstructionism Platoon-Captain chan Baskay's messages described made no more sense to chan Geraith than it did to chan Baskay himself. Nor had the divisioncaptain much cared for the suspicions chan Baskay and Arthag had reported up the chain.

The bastards are up to something, he thought moodily. It's not just my ingrained paranoia, either. I just don't know what they're up to … but I'm afraid we may all be going to find out.

He took the cigar out of his mouth long enough to grimace properly, then put it back.

At least chan Tesh and chan Baskay haven't sent any more bad news our way in the last couple of days.

That's something. And the fact that these godsdamned Arcanans don't have a clue how much firepower an entire dragoon brigade represents is another something. Of course, I don't have a clue what else they may have available, now do I?

He snorted at the thought. It wasn't precisely the first time he'd had it, and he suspected it wouldn't be the last.

In fact, I'm going to go right on wondering about that until-and unless-I find out. And if I do find out, it's going to be because everything's fallen straight into the shitter. So I suppose it's actually one of those little mysteries of the multiverse I'd really rather not solve, if it's all the same to the Triad.

He shook his head and stood, gazing out at the untouched beauty of the moon and stars, and wondered how long he could last tonight before the chill finally drove him back inside.

Chapter Seventeen

Nith mul Gurthak closed his office door carefully, then crossed to his desk and seated himself behind it.

Outside his windows, a chill, moonless night wrapped itself about Fort Talon, and he smiled crookedly.

There was no reason he had to do this during the hours of darkness, yet it always felt curiously satisfying.

Conspiracies ought to be worked upon in darkness, however justified their objectives, he thought as he reached for the ornamental rankadi knife on his blotter.

He picked it up, closed his eyes, and reached out once more-not with his hands, this time, but with his Gift. His very powerful Gift, which no one outside the Council of Twelve and his own immediate line family suspected that he had.

It hadn't been easy, putting that Gift aside. Denying himself its use as he fitted himself into the narrow template of an officer in the Union of Arcana's Army. Nith mul Gurthak had been born Nith vos and mul Gurthak, of high shakira caste, as well as one of the traditional military families of Mythal. But he had systematically concealed the strength of his Gift, starting in early boyhood. Private tutors had trained him in its use with brutally, merciless rigor, beginning years earlier than even shakira youths normally began their schooling. There had been more times than he could count when young Nith had wept himself to sleep at night, but he had never complained, never even considered shirking his responsibilities. He had been selected for his role, his duty to the caste, even before he had been born, on the day when the marriage between his shakira father and multhari mother was first arranged, and that was an honor no shakira worthy of his caste could possibly have rejected. The strength of his Gift, and the skill with which he had learned not simply to use it, but to conceal it, as well, had only justified that choosing.

Now his shoulders relaxed, ever so slightly, as his questing Gift confirmed that the privacy spells about his office were all in place, up, and running. There was nothing particularly spectacular about those spells; they were standard, Army-issue spellware, supplied by the Union of Arcana to ensure its military officers' security in the execution of their duties. That was just fine with mul Gurthak. No one else in Fort Talon-or, for that matter, the entire universe of Erthos-could match the strength of the Gift no one knew he had, and it would have taken hours of preparation for him to penetrate those privacy spells.

No one else could have hoped to do that without alerting him to the security breach in ample time to deal with it.

Satisfied that no one could possibly observe him, he rolled up the left sleeve of his uniform blouse and drew the gleaming, razor-sharp rankadi blade. He held it under the light, before his eyes, clearing his mind of extraneous thoughts as he focused upon that glittering steel. The steel which had been used no less than eleven times to cleanse his bloodline of weakness and failure. The steel which was consecrated to the Great Task of the shakira by the blood it had shed, the honor it had preserved.

He felt his heart and mind fall into shared focus, settle into the perfect balance of thought and emotion appropriate to his sacred purpose, and a serene smile touched his mouth as he closed his eyes. He held the blade across his forehead with both hands while he murmured the words of the second verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Secrets, and then, without opening his eyes, pressed the blade's wickedly sharp edge against the inside of his left forearm. A line of blood sprang up against his dark skin, and he moved forearm and dagger carefully, with the smoothness of long practice, to gather that blood on the flat of the blade.

He opened his eyes once again and maneuvered the rankadi blade over the personal crystal sitting on the blotter of his desk. He spoke a single word in ancient Mythalan, then tilted his right wrist carefully and watched as a single drop of his blood fell from the dagger's tip to the fist-sized crystal. It glittered there, like a fallen ruby, for perhaps ten seconds. Then, without fuss, fanfare, or any spectacular glow and flash of arcane power, it simply disappeared … and the PC flickered alight.

Mul Gurthak inhaled deeply as he saw the brief menu of commands. He'd done this any number of times, especially once he'd begun rising in rank within the Union Army, and yet there was always that moment of tension, that anticipation, almost as if somewhere deep inside he truly believed the carefully crafted spellware might have somehow failed since its last use. Which was ridiculous, of course. Spells researched and developed at the Mythal Falls Academy simply didn't fail.

He picked up his stylus and tapped the menu entry he needed. Then he sat back in his seat, raised both hands to cover his eyes, and bent his head in ritual submission and greeting.

"Mightiest Lords," he said in a dialect so ancient that no more than a handful of people in the entire multiverse would have understood it, "the least of your servants begs you to receive his report and consider his actions, that they may redound to the glory of the shakira and the high holiness of their purpose and the completion of the Great Task."

He waited, head still bent, for a full ninety seconds before he allowed his hands to fall to the blotter and his spine to straighten. Then he cleared his throat and began to speak once more, this time in modern Mythalan.

"Mightiest Lords, I trust that by now you have received my earlier messages. I will endeavor to be as brief as possible in updating you upon my progress in the service of the Great Task. As always, I await any instructions from you."

Should anyone outside the most trusted servants of the Council of Twelve ever gain access to the messages he had recorded over the years and decades of reports to the Council and its members, the consequences would have been disastrous. The damage to the Great Task would have been incalculable, and the consequences to mul Gurthak himself would have been far worse than merely fatal, but the commander of two thousand had never worried about the security of his messages.

The spellware which supported and protected them was the very finest in the entire multiverse … and no one outside the Council even suspected that it existed. Without mentioning it to anyone else, the researchers at Mythal Falls Academy had perfected a technique which archived material at a compression rate of over five hundred thousand-to-one. A single second of crystal recording could contain the equivalent of no less than a hundred and forty hours of normally recorded data or imagery.

The messages which mul Gurthak routinely sent in would be less than a flicker in the stream of a normal crystal recording, imperceptible to anyone who lacked the special spellware required to strain them back out of the flow once more, and Mul Gurthak's reports had all been carefully hidden away in the long, chatty letters he routinely recorded and sent to his brother-in-law. His third sister's husband had no idea of mul Gurthak's actual duties, much less of the power of the two thousand's Gift. Nor did he have any idea that mul Gurthak's letters to him were routinely intercepted by the Mythalan postal service and routed very quietly to agents of the Council of Twelve to be scanned for messages from the two thousand before they were passed on to him.

The transmission pipeline itself was as close to perfectly secure as fallible mortal beings could hope to come, yet the Council hadn't stopped there. Even if the message could have been detected and recovered by anyone else, it could not have been read. The encryption program, like the compression spellware itself, was the product of secret research at the Academy. It was unique in that there was no encryption key anyone could enter. The encryption was embedded in the sarkolis of the originating PC itself, and only two other PCs in the multiverse could decrypt it. All three of them had been enspelled simultaneously, and then one of them had then been issued to mul Gurthak, while the others had been placed in the care of two separate members of the Council of Twelve. Those three PCs, and only those three PCs, could read material generated from the secret spellware concealed behind the activating cantrip mul Gurthak had just used, and no one could activate-or even detect-that spellware without both the blood of the PC's proper owner and the proper ritual to control its shedding.

Should the existence of that elaborate encryption program ever come to the attention of mul Gurthak's non-Mythalan superiors, questions would undoubtedly be asked. Unfortunately for those superiors'

curiosity, mul Gurthak would have been under no legal obligation to answer their possible questions.

The two thousand found that deliciously ironic, since it was the Ransaran insistence on a citizen's right to privacy which had deprived military and law enforcement agencies of the police power to legally demand access to private encryption spellware or the personal messages it protected.

"As I've already reported," he continued, refocusing his thoughts and attention on the task in hand, "the sudden appearance of these 'Sharonians' and Olderhan's involvement in the first contact, not to mention the incredible ineptitude of Bok vos Hoven, left me with no option but to improvise."

He might, he reflected, be taking a not-insignificant risk in his characterization of vos Hoven. The incompetent idiot's family connections were just as exalted as he'd claimed, and making enemies that highly placed could be … prejudicial to a man's life expectancy. By the same token, though, mul Gurthak had amply demonstrated his own competence, judgment, and value in the Council's service over the past twenty-plus years. He had patrons of his own, at least as highly placed as vos Hoven's relatives, and even if he hadn't had them, the recognition, identification, and repair of flaws in the Great Task's execution was a critical component of the mission he'd been assigned. Any attempt to sugarcoat vos Hoven's shortcomings would have been a betrayal of his duty to the caste.

"I believe that, so far at least, events are transpiring much as I had hoped they might. It was fortunate the members of the Council had seen fit to arrange to provide me with significant assets in my area of responsibility, despite its distance from Arcana. This gave me far more influence at critical points than would have been the case without them. By the same token, however, I've been required to commit all of them, and I fear that few of them will survive. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that their continued survival beyond the end of their immediate usefulness would, in itself, pose a considerable threat to the Great Task.

"According to my most recent dispatches from Two Thousand Harshu, Rithmar Skirvon has disappeared. Either he was killed in the otherwise successful Special Operations mission which clearly managed to kill the Sharonians' Voice at Fallen Timbers, or else he was captured and is currently the prisoner of the handful of Sharonians who appear to have so far evaded capture themselves. I have little doubt that he will have told them anything he knows by now. Fortunately, his actual knowledge is strictly limited, and the possibility that his captors will be in any position to utilize what he may have told them is slight. Nonetheless, it would be prudent, in my judgment, to make arrangements for his elimination as soon as possible after his recovery by our own forces. Indeed, the best resolution would be for him to be killed in the crossfire when our troops attempt to rescue him, and I am cautiously exploring possible avenues for arranging that outcome.

"Thousand Carthos, on the other hand, has now been placed in command of an independent advance up a second line of universes. While this deprives him of further opportunity to shape the main thrust to our liking, it also means he no longer has Harshu or Toralk looking over his shoulder, and his natural attitude towards these Sharonians is much closer to our own than either Harshu's or Toralk's. I feel confident that we could have relied upon him to generate a significant number of 'atrocities' in his own command area even without my … instructions to him.

"Thousand Harshu is proving rather more … problematical than I'd originally hoped," mul Gurthak admitted. "Unfortunately, his seniority made him the only choice, other than myself, to command the expeditionary force. The good news is that he's reacted very much as I anticipated to the 'discretionary instructions' I sent him. I believe you will have discovered by now, from the copy of my instructions to him which I appended to my last report, that it must be crystal clear to any impartial reading that I never ordered him to launch this attack. Indeed, I intend in the next few days to send him dispatches admonishing him for having taken too much upon himself in launching any offensive beyond the Hell's Gate universe itself. I will also be sending copies of those dispatches up the official communications pipeline to the High Commandery. Of course, now that he's committed us to actual operations, I have no option but to support him to the very best of my ability in order to ensure that those operations succeed."

Mul Gurthak paused the recording and leaned back in his chair, interlacing his fingers across his chest while he considered what he'd already recorded. He thought about it for several seconds, then straightened and resumed.

"The bad news is that Harshu is clearly up to something. At this time, I'm not certain exactly what, but I suspect he's more of a throwback to the old Andaran honor code than I'd believed. If my suspicions are accurate, he's deliberately engineering a situation in which any blame for atrocities and excesses committed in the course of this expedition will be seen as his, and only his, personal responsibility.

Should he succeed in doing so, it will almost certainly result in at least some mitigation of the consequences of those excesses upon public opinion.

"Despite that, I believe the basic objectives will still be attained. Five Hundred Neshok, in particular, is working out very well. His personality is just as sociopathic as our evaluating spellware suggested, and his violations of the Kerellian Accords continue to mount steadily. No matter what Harshu may want, Neshok's actions are going to have a huge impact on public opinion in the home universe. The Ransarans' repugnance will be impossible to overstate, and the more traditional elements of Andara will be equally horrified. The fact that Neshok, Carthos, and Harshu are all Andarans themselves will, of course, fasten responsibility for this entire fiasco upon Andara and the Andaran officer corps. It was an Andaran-Harshu-who launched the attack in an excess of militarism and personal ambition which far exceeded my instructions to him. And it was two other Andarans-Neshok and Carthos-who proved themselves to be merciless butchers and sadists.